kiya

And I keep failing to actually do so.

A summary of life:

I finished writing Cracked Pots, which is apparently now the first book in a storyworld I have dubbed The Mother of Invention. The second book, tentatively titled In The Seed, has not yet begun, but I keep accumulating bits for it. (And I may need to read up extensively on Bengali religious stuff, which is well outside the Shaivite stuff that I have mostly dabbled in in my own research.)

I did not place in the Escape Pod flashfic contest, though I made it further than some. I had an agent bite on my PitMad tweet, but she turned me down in part because of book length. (Cracked Pots is not a short book; it is a slow-paced exploration of a world, which includes adaptation to a complex social environment, social scheming, the POV coming to realize things about the effects of bigotry and have her own exposed, and semirealistic amount of time spent on scientific discovery, which would make for a lot of book even if it weren't heavily influenced linguistically by formative experiences with Dickens.) No bites during SFFPit, but jenett pointed out a plausible agent to me who wasn't participating, so I will query her at some point.

Working on short stories. I'm still not sure what made me capable of writing these as more than a fluke. I've been, in addition to the stuff I'm trying to write to sell, doing Chuck Wendig's mostly-weekly fiction challenges and posting the results at my writer website, on the principle that producing regular content is a goodness and I work well with challenges. At some point I will see if I can figure out if I can get the blogs to xpost here again, the upgrade to https all around seems to have busticated the plugin I was using.

KJ and I will be at Readercon on Sunday, knock wood, so anyone who will be at Readercon then, hi.

Constantly feeling that I ought to be doing more politically and being flattened by a combination of global warming, toddlers, and autism spectrum. Did make one protest. It was hot.

Identity issues are complicated and hard to talk about, so I'm not doing so. I would like it if I had a functioning executive function, but I've been useless lately. I wonder if that's something else that just fails when it's bright and hot. Though I don't know if I'd be doing better if the AC were not broken, it may just be the brainweather. But this is always the dry time. Just, hard to deal with the depression loop that kicks in when I'm not being Productive (and I wish I had any clue about what reasonable expectations for myself might look like anyway, because I'm perpetually not Productive according to the standards of capitalist bullshittery and that's just fantastic for my mental health).

Anyway. Been working on and off on building a proper herb spiral in the front. artan brought around another load of rocks so I can work on building up some more, esp. now that I've put in the bindrune on the core stone.

The children are often loud and frequently exhausting. Last week was super-busy (my mother visiting to do art camp with the girls meant a lot of Doing and I do not usually have a lot of Doing going on for spoon budget reasons). Tired.

Intend to try to write more often. We'll see if intentions carry through.

while my computer was broken. (By the way! My computer was broken! It is still broken but the actual problems this causes have been mostly solved.)

And, due to the way my crash-into-each-other fanthinging operates of late, this means I have been pondering what houses the sensates are in Harry Potter terms. Partly sparked by reading something on sortinghatchats.tumblr.com about the Hamilton characters and thus contemplating their model of primary House (nature) and secondary House (how one implements nature); I think there's a thing missing, there, but it's "the House that people get mistaken for in dim light", which is sort of partaking of both of these and neither.

Anyway. This results in my attempt to sort the sensates. This will be as spoiler-light as I can make it, but there will be some necessary references to the content of the show. :P Also contains commentary on some of the structure.

( Thus. )

Formerly thwarted Trekkie is no longer thwarted.


Whitney says, "I thik the GIP for that icon cannot be mooded anything other than 'geeky'."
Tesla [oneironaut] says, "We'd mock you if you tried."
Tesla says, "Granted, we're probably going to find a reason to mock you anyway."
Whitney says, "I just made a *Spock* icon. Anything you can say would be redundant."
Tesla says, "... true."

( Not especially spoilery comment cut out of an excessive sense of courtesy. )

So, arawen and I spent three days in an in-house vacation (two at my house, one at his). We've needed something of the sort to recover from some extensive strain induced by the last N months of careening madness and thus took the time to reconnect.

We did a whole lot of nothing.

We did a whole lot of other stuff too, mind, but there was a lot of nothing involved. Some talking. Some amiable companionship in each other's space. teinedreugan's cat was blissfully not obnoxious (this is not a given when teinedreugan is absent of an evening).

On Friday, we got together with teinedreugan and whispercricket for dinner and ice cream and then went on a walk which mostly stopped at an otherwise-unoccupied playground. With a swingset. And a variety of other fine things.

Saturday was spent laughing at the silly things gamers say and don't notice are funny until someone in the next room over cracks up, catching up on things, and starting with Tribal Wars. Heh.

But. Swings!

I impressed staralshain by informing her that my clothing puzzle for the day was to find something I could wear sensically first to her wedding and then to a heavy metal concert. She judged my efforts entirely successful.

I'm hoping to have time to think tomorrow, as I've felt pretty much going-non-stop for the past two days. Maybe get the thing written I said I'd try to write for sheta_kaey, only a day late even. :P

I found myself thinking of that argument on rasfc a while back (was it really a few months ago? I'm not sure), the whole what is identity and not, and the claim that changes to the body don't change the sense of identity, unlike changes to the mental process.

I spent this weekend far more dependent on my cane than is normal for me even when I am using it. (Usually I need it for a day or two and then I'm more or less okay. This weekend I needed it to climb up the steep slopes of curb cuts.)

And one of the things that drove me completely bats about that dependency, about the limitation of the pain, was this steady persistent awareness that this is not me. And I don't have the identity I had as a child, when I could do nothing, be nothing, that did not run, but damnit, I can walk. That hurt, sometimes, more than the pain.

My mother tells me that my brother could never have riding lessons like I did as a child because his hip went weird on him too easily. And muses about her need for a hip replacement.

Who am I, in the bone?

So I noticed that my previous post was utterly incoherent and did not include that the bluegrass cover was of Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky" despite my being sure I typed it, but that is probably about par for the course for that evening.

I wrote 268 words the other day, getting back to work and trying to pick up the threads of that and make progress. So I've started part 4 of the thing. Figured out the next bit, too, just need to write it down. Feeling a bit better about things; it's good to actually write. I need to figure out how to rewrite the early bits to get the cultural stuff in that I sorted out ages ago thanks to ritaxis.

I've been doing planning for the garden. Which is amusing, given how much snow/slush/sludge there is out there, but best to know what I'm doing well ahead of time. I'm planning on building two frames to start out with; we'll see if I can manage to maintain that properly and then see where to go in later years. Asked nex0s for some help on figuring out what local pests there are; need to go to UMass and see if they have the pamphlets she thought they ought.

Other miscellaneous stuff has included discussing reconstruction and crazed druids with arawen, miscellaneous states of emotional breakdown (I am tired of this, but seem to be getting better), persistent wrestling with depression, thinking about theology that I'm not actually getting written down, and playing Warcraft (hit 70 on Samh yesterday, along with honored with both Scryers and Lower City). I think I am slightly ill, but not enough that it's anything other than a distraction, another reason to sleep, and intermittent abdominal pain.

Depression may be breaking; I'm having impulses to do things. Though if I'm not careful it'll all fall apart in a morass of 'Augh, too much' and I'll fall down into the goddamn pit again.

- gotten learner's permit
- registered to vote at new address
- replaced my dying cellphone
- failed at lunch with autumnesquirrel
- gotten the henna block I need to treat my hair
- interviewed for a temp job at Harvard
- signed up at the relevant temp agency in the event of job offer
- gotten tea for keshwyn
- managed to go to Cardullo's without coming out with maple sugar candy
- gotten all the phone numbers from the old phone into the new one
- gotten autumnesquirrel's phone number into the new phone
- lost at hand and foot
- informed meranthi that we needed to play hand and foot sometime against each other so one of us would have to win (barring game called on account of earthquake)
- had a mildly embarassing meltdown at games
- prepared food with arawen, including protecting him from the onions and generating cheese dumplings that make whispercricket grin alarmingly
- done full Feri open-court circle cast, including invitation of Guardians
- ogled arawen cheerfully
- become twenty-nine
- done a seriously half-assed job of witnessing a dawn vigil
- failed to get the job
- existed in a state of moderate broken dissociation
- gotten better
- been taken out to lunch by arawen and whispercricket
- been to Pandemonium and ordered a book
- learned what the new phone ring sounds like when keshwyn called to wish me burning cities
- watched The Thirteenth Warrior again, this time pondering it as Discordian exegetic material
- gotten Majnun (human warlock) to neutral with the furbies
- gotten Majnun to level 59
- gotten Samhchair (NE hunter) to level 64
- gotten a happy birthday email from Peter "to within the usual epsilon", which tickles me mightily

I'm watching an argument, mostly.

It's an argument that ten years ago I would have come in on, vehemently, passionately, in the belief that cites and rhetoric could win. In the intervening decade, I've learned that that doesn't actually work so well. Or I've learned that arguing that way means investing too much of myself in a place where I risk losing a handle on it. Or something.

And there's a part of me that misses the ... optimism of the hotheadedness, I guess it is. The sense that I could, in fact, if I just pushed hard enough, cared hard enough, it would be a good enough place to stand to go with this here lever. I regret its passing, even while I recognise what remains is more effective.

And I'm reminded of the thing I posted to rasseff back an age ago, about the feeling that treating things as if they matter is one of those things that doesn't fit in well, that makes people wary and hard to get along with. So there's that sort of weird edgy space in which things matter, but expressing how much they matter ... doesn't help.

I don't have the words for why this all makes me oddly melancholy.

Argh, fortunately I hadn't gotten very far when this thing crashed messily, the bastard.

This is the Story Of The House Hunt Stuff.

( Cut for length. )

As pameladean said when we got the last one, "Houuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse!"