inasmuch as it concerns Support Structures:
For friends and family, those we gush about on "Dedication and Acknowledgements" pages and gripe about on the phone to Mom, Great Gods and Goddesses we thank ye.
That which was given up for lost, still stands.
Wed 2005-08-31 20:56:48 (single post)
- 46,917 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 78.50 hrs. revised
Abundant good news today. My parents' house has been seen with real eyes; the good folks at NOLA.com's Jeff Parish Forum have posted that houses are standing, have sustained little wind damage, and have endured very little flooding, relatively speaking.
More good news: Mom's safe in Atlanta; Dad joined her there today; my brother's in Memphis looking for a job; John's sister weathered the storm in Hammond and repaired shortly after to Dallas; and the St. Tammany Parish Hospital contingent is both safe and still possessed of their Covington home.
Dad regaled me with the tale of two of his hunting buddies who blustered that they'd stick the storm out; this is home, if we leave they won't let us back in, and besides, when it's your time it's your time, that's all. Well, one of 'em got smart and left between the hurricane and the flood; the other's still there. Dad's been in touch with him every day, and he's been reporting on the state of the city. When we last heard from him, he was going to see if he could get to my parents' house, and, oh, while he was there, maybe borrow the generator Dad bought to keep the freezers going during blackouts. Heh.
As you might imagine, very little novel got done today. Scratch that: I did very little work on the novel today. (I prefer the active voice; passive makes me sound like I'm deferring responsibility.) Continued to tune in to WWL's live coverage, bop around the NOLA forums, and hit blogs.
But at least I did start rewriting the beginning of Chapter 10. Brian is headed up the channel towards the Sound, and he's beginning to think like an underwater person. Boats, for instance, are noisy, especially when the motors turn on. Things won't get quiet 'til he hits the salt water.
Huh. Boats. Wonder why I'd be thinking of boats.
Hey, look, a follow-up on yesterday's tirade about looters. After reading the racist ramblings of some of the (otherwise good-hearted) NOLA.com forum members (ain't namin' no names, go figure it out yourself), I realized that some things I thought were obvious aren't, and some things I didn't think needed saying, do. For instance, I sure as hell don't begrudge a NOLA refugee his grocery store spree. You gotta eat; shelter operations are woefully short on food, and what's in the flooded groceries will get thrown out anyway. Right? And to a certain extent I understand the grabbing of pawnable goods along with. Barter may well be a life-saver after the flood dries out but before NOLA's infrastructure is anywhere near back in place.
But. Shooting policeman? Shooting my NOPD? Trying to kill the very people who are helping to see you through the crisis? Bad! Bad! Bad! Terrorizing my unevacuated neighbors, who're hiding inside their homes for fear of the armed gangs roaming their streets? Bad! Bad! Bad! And you sure as hell don't need a plasma-screen TV and 50 pairs of Nikes. Put those BACK, you opportunistic asshole.
That said... don't trust the national media on this. The difference between opportunistic looting and survivalist scavenging is one of motive, not one of melanin.
And to the guy on NOLA.com who said of the looters, "Besides, look at them!" I say, look in your own mirror, chump.
Reminders, and what remains.
Tue 2005-08-30 21:22:23 (single post)
- 2,100 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 46,750 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 78.25 hrs. revised
Another word cut; got rid of some leftover Part 1 snippits that turned out not to have a place. Spent most of today reading the first half of Part 2 from the previous draft, reminding myself what I'd decided during the first read-through, deciding which decisions could still stand, and taking notes on how the chapters needed rearranging so that one thing leads to another.
Had a bit of a revelation about the Brian-Mike-Mrs. Windlow family dynamic. Revelations are good things. They make incidental supporting characters less villianous, and antagonists much, much more. Which is probably the way these things ought to be balanced.
Today was mostly an obsessive day. I spent pretty much my entire work session keeping WWL's live coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath floating next to my MS Access window, gluing one eye on the arial footage, trying to find out just how bad things were now that the levee was broken.
It was a day of ups and downs. John and I almost didn't go to work after getting the news from Mom. He sat there, numb over his fried eggs, thinking about his sister; I sat there reading three different packagings of the same AP news story, intermittently breaking into tears. My home, my home is gone. Then got to work, watched the news, read the Nola.com Jefferson Parish Forum, and learned that Bonnabel Place might not be all that submerged after all. One person even reported dry streets at Wisner and Poplar, and having walked all the way from there to Causeway without trouble. Then I got home, and read that the sandbagging of the levee breach would be abandoned untried, the pumps left to fail, Metairie left to submerge itself as the lake poured in and sought sea level. I don't understand why. Apparently Mayor Nagin doesn't either; WWL reported him as being "unhappy" that the helicopters never dropped the sandbags. But then I called Mom to tell her (she hasn't access to Internet in her hotel room), and she said she'd heard from the St. Tammany Hospital contingent and they were all OK, they were all alive, unhurt, they were not in any way part of the four-person death toll reported from St. Tammany Parish this afternoon. And John's sister isn't in Covington after all; she's in Dallas. And my brother's in Little Rock. Everyone's safe.
Now WWL is no longer reporting that sandbagging will be abandoned; they're just repeating the stuff about Jefferson Parish residents to be allowed back in on Monday to recover their essentials before evacuating once more for a month.
It was a day of slim silver linings. I learned that The Rock Boat has no plans to cancel; they may, however, ship from Galveston or Mobile. Final decision still pending. I learned that it is too late to acquire trip insurance, as Katrina's damage is now a preexisting condition. But I also learned that American will let us change our flight reservation once without charge. So maybe we're not out a bunch of money after all.
But I was so looking forward to sailing from the Port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. I'd never done it before. It's a petty grief, but sometimes we cheer ourselves up with petty grievances. We use them to distract ourselves from great griefs, like the mental image of one's hometown sinking forever under brackish waves.
Not forever. New Orleans is too ornery not to recover and rebuild. And I want to be there. As soon as they say they can use physical volunteers, I want to go. What use calling myself a New Orleanian if I won't go help rebuild her?
But for now, of course, we have to stay out, out of the way and out of danger. For now, we get to donate money (and only money) to the Red Cross. We get to pray--or hope--or dream--or believe--as best as our personal convictions and suspensions of disbeliefs will allow.
And curse the damn opportunistic looters. There's a picture on the front of WWLTV.com that shows a man sitting in his driveway, and on his half-opened garage door is the spray-painted slogan, "Looters Will Be Shot." I am not generally fond of guns, but the crime of victimizing a fellow victim rates really high on my "kill 'em all and burn 'em in the innermost circle of Hell" list. And, as a practically card-carrying Wiccan, I'm obliged to admit I don't even believe in Hell.
Oh! Speaking of Wicca and such! Crow! This is me crowing! PanGaia's ish #42 is out. I'm in there. Crow! I'm in there with the most inoffensive yet unusual mispelling of my last name ever. I have to admit, while there are variations--my Mom and Dad typically put a space, whereas I somehow learned to run the whole thing together (as above)--I had never before seen the "Le" hyphenated to the "Boeuf" before. That gave me a giggle.
And today's in sore need of giggles, wouldn't you say? Damn straight I would.
And now you may cease to hope.
Tue 2005-08-30 05:55:05 (single post)
The 17th Street Canal levee is gone. Lake Pontchartrain is swallowing the city.
Residents are warned not to return until at least Monday, and that just to retrieve possessions. New Orleans is uninhabitable, will be for at least six weeks. Or months. I forget which Mom said.
Goddess, haven't we all suffered enough? Haven't they?
Dad's still stranded at Touro Hospital, able to do nothing but watch the water rise. I can only pray he'll be all right. Him and all the many other New Orleanians still in the city for whatever reason.
(Writing-blogging will resume this evening, if I can get my mind off the impending apocalypse long enough to return to plot my main characters' personal armageddon.)
Something that probably isn't there anymore.
Mon 2005-08-29 18:05:54 (single post)
I'm breaking my promise. I wasn't going to do any blogging that didn't have something to do with actual progress on an actual manuscript. But life throws us for unexpected loops, and this makes no sense in the context of writing, not really.
The image featured here, courtesy of Google Maps, shows my home. My parents' home, actually, but I grew up there. Eighteen years I lived there. Every time I visit, I stay there; I sleep in the bed that I probably wet as a very young child, stare at the ceiling that sheltered me, listen to the same annual peeping of nesting purple martins in the eaves, start at the same creaks that once I believed were made by "baby bugs in the walls, calling to their mothers for dinner." That's it, right under the pink arrow with the dot. Home.
The bit in the white circle is the Bonnabel Canal Pumping Station. The Bonnabel Canal runs off into Lake Pontchartrain, a bit of whose south shore you can see here.
You've already heard about Katrina, right?
The good news: My Dad's OK. Mom, who evacuated to Hot Springs, has heard from him. He's been working hard all night at Touro Hospital, so he's tired, frustrated, and unhappy, but he's alive. And WDSU video shows UNO pretty dry, even if Robert E. Lee Blvd. and Paris Ave. is flooded up to the eaves. Dad's office, near Robert E. Lee and Franklin, is closer to the one than the other.
The unknown news: We're unsure about the status of family members last heard from at St. Tammany Hospital. We think they're OK.
The bad news: The pumping station circled here no longer has a top. I wasn't clear on whether it was the storm surge from the lake or the winds in excess of 150mph that blew its top off, but according to Dad, it's gone.
I imagine that if the pumping station succumbed, my childhood home fell like a house of cards. Either the wind took the gabled roof, or the water leaping the banks of the canal rushed into the back yard. In any case, the message I left on my parents' answering machine last night when I was still panicked with casuality predictions and cell phone silence, the one that just says, "Dad, I love you," I don't think anyone will ever listen to it. Thankfully, it's because the answering machine is gone, not because the people who own it are.
But still. Home. Is probably. Gone.
Somewhere in Metairie or maybe out in the middle of Lake Pontchartrain, a big Rubbermaid bin full of Dr. Seuss books and other childhood favorites is floating away. If anyone finds it, give it a good home.
The crayon scribbles in One White Crocodile Smile? I did those.
Fibercrafts: Inspiration, or Procrastination?
Wed 2005-08-17 22:04:30 (single post)
- 42,589 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 67.50 hrs. revised
So John's all GenConning right now, which means it's just me and the cats in the house. Boring. Quiet. A little lonely. But, you know, keeping busy. For instance, right after I got home from bringing him to the airport, I went back to the spinning wheel.
I got the wheel a few years ago when I finally succumbed to the temptation of Shuttles's store-wide 10% while-in-class discount. I was taking the Beginning Wheel-Spinning class at the time, which was super cool in that every student got to actually borrow a wheel for the whole week between classes. This gave me a chance to fall head over heels in love with the Schact double treadle. (My Gods, I'd forgotten how expensive it was. Damn good thing we were a two-income household at the time.) So I succumbed, and the wheel came home with me for good, along with a bottle of oil, a threading hook, and a Lazy Kate.
What also came home with me was a whole big mess of white wool, which it had been my homework to wash and card, and a smaller mess of variegated blue wool, which we'd all dyed together on the last day of class. And I am here to tell you that I still haven't spun it all. I started, and I also started in on some two-ply fingering weight yarn made from "The Beast" (that gray-brown-white wool of no particular lineage which Shuttles sells for something like $.49/lb) which I am proud to say has made it into two thirds of a lacy sock. But after a few months I kinda slacked off.
So now I'm trying to finish off these unfinished projects. Today I carded and spun a whole bunch of the blue stuff, and once it's all spun up I'll ply it together with the white stuff, which will look super goofy and'll probably make a nice pom-pom hat someday. After that, I'll have to figure out how to deal with the whole heel/toe reinforcement thread issue so I can finish the sock. Maybe I'll just skip it. Anyway, I have to finish knitting the darn thing so I can finally get The Beast off my fourth bobbin.
Right. So, lots of time spinning. And spinning is a mindless activity. Keep the treadles moving in a nice, even rhythm; keep the fiber coming in nice, consistent draws. Stop now and again to move the thread onto the next hook of the flyer. Mindless. You would think, with all that mind freed up, a writer could totally use that time to brainstorm her novel.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
I don't know, maybe it's like meditation. You have to practice that kind of thing. As it is, when I knit or crochet I think math, and when I spin, I think not at all. Well, maybe I think, "Ugh, this blue dye is getting all over my fingers," or, "Yuck, all this lanolin is starting to gross me out." Or, "Damn, this yarn is over-spun. Good thing I'm going to ply it."
But that's all. I try to start myself thinking things like, "OK, here it is--Amy and Todd having a bit of a heart-to-heart, and Russ comes in and starts being an ass. How's that dialogue going to go?" And then I stop thinking. It's like I'm trying to turn the ignition and get the car to go, but all I'm hearing is whirr-whirr-whirr and no vroom. I'm gonna have to push this sucker uphill, 'cause that engine just ain't starting.
And yet, I put off writing and hit the spinning wheel, or the knitting needles, telling myself I'll think about the story while I'm fibercrafting. I'm priming the engine, I'm brainstorming, I'm getting ready to write.
Really!
Maybe it just has to be learned.
Gadget: Secs - Desktop Timer
Tue 2005-08-16 21:15:05 (single post)
- 41,846 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 66.75 hrs. revised
Heycheckitoutgadgets!
The screenshot you are now looking at comes to you courtesy of Sinner Computing. The programs name sounds a lot like an intentional double entendre, considering the name of the company and all, but a glance at the other programs in their line-up seems to indicate that it's just a happy coincidence which does not represent their normal naming conventions. Too bad, really. But that's not the point!
The point is, it counts seconds. Then it stops counting seconds, if you've told it when to do so. Then, it makes noises.
Which, of course, is very, very useful. It means I can press "Start," ALT-TAB over to WordPerfect 5.1 (in its itty-bitty DOS window, cho kawaii), then write and write and write resisting the urge to look at the clock until an hour or two later when a pop-up window pops up saying "Finished!" and Gaelic Storm's version of "Nancy Whiskey" starts playing out of my laptop speakers.
Which is what I did today. And I only ALT-TABbed over to check where the count-down was at once.
OK, maybe twice.
(Oh. Yeah. About Sunday and Monday. I took Sunday off. That was on purpose. And Monday, I came home from the office with a headache but nevertheless got all interested in my spinning wheel, which I hadn't really touched for something like a year. Decided it was about time I finally plied together those two bobbins of dyed angora that had been languishing neglected all this time. Then went on to make a grossly overspun single ply out of our anime night host's puppy-doggy's combed-out undercoat (the collecting of which Saturday night we can blame for the sudden reawakening of interest in home-spun yarn). It knitted up a lot like mohair, oddly enough. I'd tell you what breed of doggy it is, if only I could remember. It's one of them husky-wolfie-looking things. Anyway, by the time I was done, my headache had gotten all worse-like and I went to bed early. Which only proves, once again, that writing has to come before other pursuits, just in case of migraine.)
Fushigi Yugi, Disc 1
Sat 2005-08-13 21:42:31 (single post)
- 41,026 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 64.75 hrs. revised
So... yeah. It's anime night. Anime night means that John and I and some of John's coworkers and gaming friends all get together for pot-luck and DVD viewing. It happens about once every other week, Saturday nights. We started the year with Gazuraki (if you're curious about Gazuraki, my advice is don't), we continued with Read Or Dream: The TV (to reward ourselves for suffering through Gazuraki), and last time we watched a couple of disks of Full Metal Panic (which was also much better than Gazuraki).
(Look, it really is that bad. You just wait until the "clearance from the U.N." scene. It's bad.)
Today: Fushigi Yugi ("The Mystery Play"), Disk 1.
(Yes, I know they translate it "Mysterious Play." They're wrong. I'm allowed to call them wrong. On the first episode, a teacher asked a student to translate "El libro está en el biblioteca," and the English subtitle on the Spanish phrase had nothing in it about libraries, books, or location.)
Fushigi Yugi is pretty darn classic, as anime goes. Lots of chibi stuff, lots of preadolescent crush drama, lots of sweat drops and gluttony, lots of scenes where everything freezes, the heroine is pictured against a starry sky, and internal monologue occurs in abundance.
I'm, er, not a fan.
The story is great! Don't get me wrong! But I've just never been fond of these weird motifs that anime fans feel entitled to get when they sit down for another feature. I mean, I was convinced I hated anime until I saw Lain: Serial Experiments. Lain represents adult-level anime with total lack of childish tropes. Love it love it. (It also involves classic adult anime themes, such as cyberpunk, characters who might have been made-not-born, and total brain-breaking upfuckédness.) Other non-juvenile anime features I like: Cowboy Bebop. Wolf's Rain. R.O.D., both the movie and the TV. Oh, and FLCL, which John will tell you he absolutely has not seen, nope, didn't see a thing, the abomination never happened. But, FLCL notwithstanding, if I never again see another cartoon character develop a feline split lip to indicate how pleased he or she is with him- or herself, you know, that's just fine with me.
Still, looking forward to next fortnight's installation.
Meanwhile, over at the WIP, the current spate of dialogue progressed another 400 words, and another character made an entrance. The pieces, slowly, are being put into place. Mwa-ha-ha-haaa.
Meh. Me without a camera.
Fri 2005-08-12 20:14:11 (single post)
- 40,625 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 63.75 hrs. revised
At Conor's again. The Indulgers are playing tonight. John just arrived. Wednesday I had a date with my writing; tonight I have a date with my husband. Woot! More later...
OK, it's later. The band have finally started. We probably won't stay for the full set, having been here for at least an hour already, but it's been fun thus far. They're sounding good, but unfortunately the balance isn't quite surviving the transition to the back room. We're mostly getting the bass and the fiddle.
Not much to say about the novel today, beyond that the current scene advanced some 400 words, technically, and by leaps and bounds, conceptually. Sometimes you just need to spend a few minutes with the cats, a lint brush, and an itty bitty spindle to spin the cats' nondescript tabby fur on, to make the next few pages of dialogue come clear in your mind.
Hey look! They just dimmed the lights. I'm bliiiiiind!
(Half the drunken forum posting on the Internet, I'm convinced, comes of installing wiFi in Irish pubs. I mean, what were they thinking? Oh, don't look at me--I've barely half-drunk my own pint. I'm just doing my best impression of drunken posting. I live to amuse.)
Back From Vacation (with more gumdrops)
Tue 2005-08-09 21:58:41 (single post)
- 2,100 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 39,739 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 61.75 hrs. revised
A suspiciously post-free weekend is easily explained by my having been in Santa Clara, California. I rather thought I'd actually write and blog all weekend long, but this was a jam-packed stuffed-with-fun weekend involving people that haven't been in my daily life for far too long to neglect on those so rare occasions when I actually get to see them. People like this person and that person, neither of whom I notice have updated their blogs in a while. Get with it, people! Bwah-ha-ha. Anyway, August 4th found me doing the day-before-flying Decapitated Chicken Dance, and for August 5th through the 8th I was on vacation. So there's my excuse.
For examples of the Fun with which the weekend was stuffed, see attached photos. (That will be "photos," plural, upon moving this blog entry to the new website. I restructured the database over there to allow multiple images to be associated with a given blog entry. Go me.) I, personally, was also stuffed with Fun, in the personage of candy Lego blocks. Bulk candy stores are teh bomb. They're like trick-or-treating and coming home with nothing but the good stuff. (They are unlike trick-or-treating in that the candy isn't free. The quarter-pounds add up pretty fast.)
I did try to hit the novel, but it seemed every time I had some time set aside, I managed only to get as far as my Morning Pages ritual. Found a wifi spot pretty close to the hotel, a lovely little joint called House of Bagels that sold three types of lox and piled it on a bagel for me with cream cheese and cucumbers, and ended up taking care of bits and pieces of email (mostly concerned with remote access to databases for efficient migration of blog posts from one domain to another) and running out the laptop's battery. There was only one free outlet in the cafe, and it had a blank plate screwed over it. I didn't think the management would think much of my whipping out a flat-head screwdriver and HAXX0Ring their electric bill.
Came home to some goody-goody-gumdrops in the mail. The contract from BBI Media had arrived. It's official--"Faith-Based Charity, Pagan Style" will be in Issue #42 of PanGaia. It will also be on the website, if the extra compensation for electronic rights is any indication. I did the happy dance, signed that puppy, and dropped it back into the mail before heading out into my day.
And yes, writing happened. Got Amy and Brian through their almost-encounter at Gasworks. Will probably finish Chapter 7 tomorrow. Chapter 7 is really, really long.
A Late Report On Yesterday's Productivity
Mon 2005-08-01 10:06:02 (single post)
- 37,428 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 58.50 hrs. revised
Yesterday: 300 words on the novel and no web design.
Day Before Yesterday: No novel work. Lots of web design.
Conclusion: My weekend was, on average, only one day long. Can I have a refund?
I have forgotten more about Seattle than I'm comfortable admitting. For instance, the walk down 7th Avenue to the bike path that leads to Gasworks Park. Does the bike path actually T-bar 7th, or is there some street negotiating between the two? How long does it take the bike path to get right down to the docks? How much concrete distance between the Wall Of Death and the water? Aaaargh!
And the sad thing is, I had a chance to refresh my memory back when John and I visited his sister. They went to a gaming session at a friend's house in Wallingford; I walked into the U District from there. I walked around the house on 7th Avenue. But did I go to Gasworks? No. I decided to visit campus instead. I puttered up and down Suzallo-Allen Library. Curse my studious streak! Curses!
(At some point, meanwhile, I'm going to start talking about the novel I plan to write come next National Novel Writing Month, and how it is not going to be a Jasper Fforde rip-off, I swear. But about that, more later.)
Hey, wow, this entry spans the gamut of Abstract Categories, don't it? Maybe I should stop pickin' em.