July 2024

S M T W T F S
 12 3456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031   

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
ritaxis: (Default)
Friday, August 5th, 2005 10:34 pm
When your workday is twelve hours (including commuting commuting commuting on a most unreliable freeway) you don't get much done besides your work. And this is even taking into account that my "work" is hanging out with a friend, taking her to the hairdresser's, the bank, the movies (we saw "Must Love DOgs" today and "March of the Penguins" last week), restaurants, stores . . . notably the Capitola Book Cafe where the science magazines are all nestled in this one cozy corner (the magazine section at this bookstore has tripled in size over the years. And I thought magazines were dead, more or less?). Yes, although Gloria can't read beyond the single word level anymore, she still prefers science magazines and newspapers for her something-like-reading. So I don't have any new writing progress to mark for myself, but I have been working on a books of sorts.

Gloria's condition is not sequel to a stroke, after all, as she had been suffering from language loss before the stroke. They call it Primary Progressive Aphasia. If you ever see "primary" in a disease, it means "we don't have the slightest clue in the universe as to what causes this thing." "Progressive" means "it gets worse and worse until you die." It's different from Alzheimer's in rather significant ways. The most important one is that she has not lost her memory and she has not lost the capacity to form new memories -- that is, she can learn things. This has consequences. Good ones -- we can establish new routines to fit changing circumstances. She can learn names of new people (and I, for her purposes, had become a new person). Bad ones -- she can hold grudges. She can hold on to plans or ideas that you wish she wouldn't. SHe has this idea that everything would be much better if she could just withdraw all her money at once and have it in a little pile to give to her children and anybody else she fancies (including me, which is an icky thought, if you think about it). Money denominations are a vague concept to her now -- she knows that two twenties is more than ten ones, but when she buys something I have to tell her how much to hand over, and I have to reassure her all the time that, for example, sixty dollars is more than she needs to get her hair set and buy a sandwich at Erik's Deli.

The bookj of sorts that I am working on is the book of Gloria. Every day I take pictures of things she does, or people, places, or things that matter in some way or another. I've been printing them out and putting them into an album. Since the part of speech she has lost most of is nouns and some verbs -- the more specific ones, the more general ones seem to be stored in the same place as the adjectives and adverbs -- she's already having trouble expressing what she wants. You have to do a lot of detective work. That's actually a big part of my job. I hang in there with her as she tries to explain things or tries to understand things. After the hard ones, I always make sure to point out that she just did a tremendous amount of work, and peatience and perserverance paid off. I've told her a few times what I think is probably true, that if she wasn't basically very intelligent and if she didn't work hard, she wouldn't be able to talk at all now.

So the book. It has pictures so far of Gloria at the stove, Gloria watering her plants, Gloria at the compost heap, Gloria getting the newspaper from the top of the driveway, Gloria at the hairdresser's and at the bank and Super Taqueria: of the Advil bottle on top of the refrigerator (Advil is the only medicine she self-administers and we actually kind of try to get her to involve us in it because sometimes she forgets how many she's taken), Nappy the cute little rat terrier, the coyote at the compost heap, her son, myself, and the other caregiver. Taken but not yet in the book are pictures of her shopping at various stores, eating at other restaurants, making her bed, choosing a science magazine, playing the piano, going into a restroom at the Gottschalk's department store on Main Street, pictures of the neighbor dogs and other such livestock (there was a bug, like a tropical crane fly, I mean huge by California standards and I'd never seen anything quite like it, dazed on her kitchen floor this morning, so I took a picture of it before I ushered it out the door). I've planned pictures of the rest of her family, her neighbors, the goats at the bottom of the hill, the bunnies, the quails, and other places she might go, things she might want. A picture of her holding each of her canes so she can point to the picture of the one she wants. A picture of her holding her purse. A picture of her putting on her gloves, her jacket, her sweater. Doing the laundry. Pictures of her favorite foods. In the long run, I also plan to clearly and concisely label things in the pictures, because odds are she'll be able to sound out words for a lot longer than she'll be able to recall them.

Besides the book of Gloria, I want to use the pictures to illustrate a weekly schedule. Monday is money day: so the picture of her at the bank goes there. Friday is the hairdresser's: so the picture of her reading under the dryer hood goes there. A picture of her youngest son on Saturday when he comes to respite her middle son. A picture of her oldest son on Sunday when he comes to do respite and to do immense projects on the immense property.

On other fronts, Absolute Magnitude didn't want the self-aware self-healing minefield story. "Not for us." And I still haven't heard from the three-letter publisher. I don't mean they haven't accepted or rejected it, I don't expect that, but two followup contacts asking where I am in the process -- I expect at least a tiny acknowledgement that I have asked, and a response on the order of "the acceptance/rejection is on its way" or "it's in a pile to be read" or "honestly, we don't know, it's around here somewhere, we're pretty sure of that."

On still other fronts, I think I'm kind of ill -- sore throat and other obnoxious symptoms. I should be in bed.
ritaxis: (meadowlands)
Monday, March 28th, 2005 10:37 pm
Not a bad day, considering. I took Emma to the DMV, took the dog for two walks, washed the dishes, painted a cabinet, and wrote some stuff and mailed some stuff and helped Emma with scholarship applications.

She's doing a yeoman job on it, I think. She just wrote this essay on why Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act (not open shop, as I thought before, but quicker, more honest elections for certifying unions and more penalties for employer abuses in the election and contract negotiation process).

I read soime more in the immense farmworker book, too. There's something here about slavery. A while back, a participant in rasfc, Wildepad, was trying to argue that slavery wasn't all that bad. I was thinking about him as I was reading about the Indians in the missions -- it was both like and not like the system of slavery in the antebellum South. Not like, in that the padres' primary purpose for being there was to save souls, and all the brutal things they did to the Indians were in service of that. Which makes the whole brutality and cruelty thing bizarre. But like, in that the Indians' work was bought and sold by others than themselves and they had no right of free passage. And like in that they rarely rebelled but frequently ran away.

Some of it is grim reading. But there are parts which are merely fascinating -- the primitive agricultural technology, for example. Generally, the missions' grain was ground by hand, on metates, rather than by mill, and when it was a mill, it was a primitive burro-driven mill and not a water mill. Other things were done by hand which in other parts of the world were done by machine or animal, or by hand with more sophisticated tools. The Spanish even yoked their oxen wroing -- they lashed a pole to the poor things' heads! Soime of all this was due to the backwardness of Spanish agronomy and social organization at the time, and some of it was due to the expressed desire of the padres to fill the "neophytes'" lives with labor so that they didn't have time to get drunk and horny or wander off back to their pagan homes. And that was what the brutality was too. Partly it was the routine way to treat farmworkers in Spain and partly it was a purposeful strategy to drive the Indians to religion and away from behavior the padres thought would send them to Hell.

I've gotten to the break up of the missions, and how that transition was handled in the worst possible way, managing to land the Indians in even worse straits than they were in before.

The rest of the week, among the other things I'm doing, I will finish and mail this Washington story and the new query for Esperanza Highway. I also intend to get a third of what's left of this chapter in Afterwardone.

Another thing I have realized in the last week or so is that I can and ought to cut out the last vignette. This means that the book ends with the scene of the man without a country accepting the teenaged mother and her baby as his family. But it also means I don't have to spread the vignette material so thin.

For every discipline in writing, there is a counter discipline. Some time back I came to the conclusion that all other things being equal a longer book was better than a shorter book because it had more room for richness, complexity, and precise pacing. But now I'm working on more streamlined stuff. I think, for example, a story I have tried to write four or five times -- one about the men who turn into wolves at Advent and fight the forces of evil to preserve the fertility of the earth -- originally I was trying to write it night by night as one person uncovers the mystery of another person's participation in this. Now I think the pacing will work best if I write it as two nights: the second to the last night and the last night. Everything that could be accomplished with the series of nights could be accomplished in the one (second to the last) night, and the climactic scene won't have so much weight behind it, allowing it to be climactic instead of it being kind of a watershed after which the reader expects the real climax.

Which means, I think, that I may have figured out how to write shorter, sort of in general, or at least more than before.
ritaxis: (blue land)
Monday, March 28th, 2005 01:54 pm
I'm pretty messed up still from the teeth and other adventures, I guess. But I took another pass through the landmines story which got rejected this weekend, found some weird typoes that shouldn't have been there, tightened it a little, and printed it and got its envelopes ready for mailing to Absolute Magnitude. I don't know. I'm not a very adventurey writer, but the protagonist is risking life and limb here, and takes action, and what could be harder science fiction than a self-aware minefield?

And 538 words on the Washington future story which is giving me doubts though it's writing okay. The doubts -- does it address the theme, or is it just set in Washington?

And I did a little more market research.

I'm going to take a nap now, and later, clean the kitchen which is nasty because we keep dropping in long enough to mess it up but not long enough to clean it up.

In other news, it's cool and rainy again. (it will be rainy pretty much through April, based on past experience, and then in May it will dry up a lot and stay that way, with very minor exceptions, until December)
ritaxis: (golden city)
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 06:27 pm
So I made two deadlines in less than a week. I might be getting better at this.

By the way, nothing will bring tears to the eyes faster than standing beneath a blossoming plum tree,
while one's daughter plays piobaireachd inside.