Peeking into the rock

Last night as easier because she was farther away from the trauma of surgery and the anesthia had had some time to go away, but I still had to give her vicodin... well, I expect that the next day after surgery I might need some vicodin on top of the basic pain meds to sleep also.

This morning she was ready to go but I was not taking her on any adventures at this point. She has an appetite: not a big one and she still won't eat anything but boiled chicken, but I don't particularly care right now. As long as she eats a little and drinks water, I'm satisfied.

She went in for her checkup and the ver said her sutures were lovely and she looked good, also that her kidney function had returned to normal right after surgery (which means her Addison's is under control again and was only off because of the stress of the hematoma on her spleen). She was terrified at the vet's office and really wanted to leave, but once we did leave she calmed right down. My experience from before is that the PTSD from the surgery lasts a few months.

On another front, I am now paying my friend Cassandra to do my pruning and other such work, and I spend the time she's doing that in working on other garden taks. So that's finally coming together. My plum tree is blooming, as is my almond tree. The Euro plum is not, yet, nor is the apple. Emma's Satsuma mandarin is also blooming. It needs to be moved into a sunnier spot. Everything needs to be fed.

Once we've got a handle on what we've got here, I will look into getting other fruit trees, maybe, though the space for them is smaller than it used to be, because of Zack's house.

On the writing front, I am still struggling with the story of how Elisabeth and Melissa, my lesbian mechanics from A and A Salvage, met up in the first place. It involves a vengeful ghost resident in a Subaru two-seater, but probably nothing else that you imagine with that. The story's kind of kicking me around, but I figure witrh persistence I will pin it.

I haven't changed my mind about not doing very much promotion here, but every so often I'll link to where I'm doing it. Today I have something a wee bit different. The wonderful Heather at the Rose Garden here at livejournal has graciously included a guest blog from me about why I do real-world research for secondary-world fantasy.

I think most of my friends already know her, but if you don't, you should head on over there and read her journal. Especially of interest is her substantial Lesbian Historical Motif Project, in which she examines the literature to tease out material for the goal of constructing reasonable lives for fictional lesbians. It's fascinating from every angle. Looking at the way the goals, methods and structures of prose (and poetry, sometimes) have changed over the years: teasing out the complicated worlds of women's lives: figuring out what maps to lesbian in different times and places: and even what the word "lesbian" has meant, is all just riveting. I'm in awe of Heather's vast reading and the work she's done in making sense of it.

Also you should read her posts about her series of secondary-world semi-historical lesbian-oriented fantasy novels (I wanted to throw in other categories, like mystery, etc., but decided that was unnecessary).

Back on the subject of promoting my work, I have another post up at the wordpress blog. By the way, I'm aware the banner is ugly. It's supposed to be!

There's this game. personhead Green Knight and personhead Autopope have done it, and while it's puzzling as all hell to me why people would invent such a thing and pass it on, I was interested enough to read their answers. What's puzzling to me is that the statements you're supposed to do a true-false on are so random that they're not revealing at all, so why? I suspect that if the statements werem't random they wouldn't be generic enough to apss around the whole of live journal or whatever artifically-defined community is the target. Anyway, one of them jogged a memory: somethign to the extent that "I often have no idea where I parked my car."

And I remembered that this morning I had the ultimate lost-parked-car dream. In the dream I had gone downtown (though it was actually downtown San Jose, except that being a dream it didn't look all that much like downtown San Jose, except for the light rail line and the trees in that particular youthful state) and I forget what I had done there, but I was there all day and wandered all around. Now, the place I thought I had parked my car in was a doughnut-shaped parking lot surrounding a park like St. James Park, with a line of buildings around it like downtown San Jose used to be -- late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century commercial architecture, three stories or so, dingy apartments above and skin-of-the-teeth shops below. Lots of stale tobacco smell and grungy walls, right? Shoe shine stands and vaguely sinister but not actually dangerous old guys hanging around.

So I looked for my car until pretty late at night and then I took the light rail home and confessed that I'd lost the car, telling the nice fellow some kind of comforting crap about how it wasn't really lost. You must know that in real life, downtown San Jose is more than thirty miles away and the light rail does not go over the mountain to Santa Cruz, though the Amtrak bus does.

And then I went back early the next day and searched until late at night and I was calling home nearly in tears asking for something I could do to page my car, so to speak. I was asking all around about the car -- I'm not sure whether I was using its license plate number or not.

I'm thinking this is an opening for a Stross-like adventure story in which the car turns out to have been appropriated by a mysterious entity either because it contains a mcguffin or because it is a mcguffin (secretly invested with advanced tech, or magic, or something). Oh. It's the beginning of a Route Zero story. Like "A and A Salvage" only probably with guns and crap.