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Oh god, I just noticed that my layover on the way home from Wiscon is only one hour long oh jesus fuck.
Oops.
The one on the way in is only two and a half hours, and I'll have to go through immigration+customs during that one, but I can help that partially by not checking in luggage (taking a bigger bag, empty and folded, inside my small carry-on bag). And I intend to plead with the nice people on the airline to help me queue jump at i+c.
On the way back, though, if I want to buy any books, I'm certain I'll need to check in my luggage.
And somehow make a one-hour layover.
Ooooops.
*chews of fingernails hands in a fit of panic*
*moves onto arms*
So, I should find out size restrictions on size of US -> UK carry-on bags. They may be less strict than UK -> US. Anecdata regarding US -> UK, specifically departing Chicago O'Hare and with United Airlines, please? I'm a pretty awesome suitcase packer, and other than books will not be carrying much stuff, and I can wear all my clothes if need be, so I ~can~ cram quite a lot of stuff in. And, I guess, it may be better to buy fewer books than to check in luggage. *woe*
And, obviously, I will be taking out travel insurance to cover costs incurred should any flights be delayed. Ahh, if only travel insurance were useful and gave good cover for this. I'll still get some (medical costs cover!), but it looks like it'll be pretty useless if my connections go awry.
ETA: I've settled on just taking a carry-on bag. The increased likelihood of making my connections kind of outweighs the woe at having to buy fewer books.
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Frustratingly the tickets I wanted must have been sold in the last few days, so I wound up paying more in order to get decent times*, but I now have flights booked for Wiscon!
I'll be landing just before 7pm on the Thursday night, attending the writing workshop on the Friday morning, spending the weekend soaking up panels, keeping the company of many people, and buying a large quantity of books, before flying away at about 3pm on the Monday.
I think, in order to maximise socialising time, and thus justify the money spent on flights and hotel, I will not be sleeping very much. >.>
*Which is, of course, my fault for booking two and a half weeks before I depart. An expert in procrastination am I.
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Bank holidays always mess with my brain. I keep thinking it's Sunday, but of course it's not. Belatedly, last week's output: 28/04 - 1,331 words on ch15, 86 words on ch17 of TBQ 29/04 - 537 words on ch15 + working on critique 30/04 - 292 words on ch15, 301 words on ch17 of TBQ 01/04 - working on critique 02/04 - 2,969 words on ch17 of TBQ 03/04 - 540 words on ch17 of TBQ, 410 words on “in its velvety chambers” 04/04 - social life Half of the 2nd's output was copy-pasted from what I wrote last year, but I'm still counting it because they're words towards the final word count. Tags: mush mush mush
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I come again in praise of the internet: yesterday I spent the whole day in London with the visiting ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) stephcampisi, taking her on a small tour of the city. The parts that I particularly enjoy, that is, which meant that we went first to the British Museum and wandered through the Assyrian and Ancient Egyptian exhibits (discussing, among other things, the origin of the cuneiform languages and hieroglyphics), and then went upstairs to an exhibit on bird, flowers and insects in Chinese art (ceramic, scrolls, fans), where we learnt how Chinese artists used images such as the preying of insects on other insects to indicate the political turmoil of their times. I imagined a room full of people holding fans, each fan making a subtle political statement. I bought two books in the bookshop, for potential research purposes: a small book on Persian myths, which will be useful for this novel, and a very small book about ancient calendars. Afterwards we walked to Forbidden Planet, where I managed to only buy two books ( Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, the first of hers I'll have read, and Undertow by Elizabeth Bear) and Steph lamented the extraordinarily high prices of Australian books in comparison even to ours. We ate sandwiches in a church garden, where children ran around screeching but the blossoming trees and greenery made up for it. We then walked along to Piccadilly, stopping briefly in Fortnum & Mason, and continued along to Harrod's and, via its candy hall, went up the Egyptian escalator well to the chocolate bar, at which almost everything on the menu is made of delicious chocolate. A chocolate that melts so finely, it can be drunk through a straw-spoon; I did just that, and we dipped strawberries in another small bowl of it. We walked more afterwards, through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Steph admired the squirrels from a bench in the Princess Diana memorial walk bit in Ken Gardens: a strip of pathway, planted on either side with brightly flowering plants. (She also admired the many old buildings in the city.) We ate dinner at Wagamama, ambled a bit more through the hazy, dusky Kensington Gardens and admired the swans from a safe distance (Steph has an anecdote about Australia's black swans, involving cheese and wine and a mango and fleeing from the birds), before I had to get the train back home. The weather was perfect for all this: warm but lightly overcast, so it was not too hot, but somehow not humid either. A full day, and now I'm home for the Bank Holiday with some sunshine -- and according to my parents our swimming pool has reached a survivable temperature so later I may have my first swim in it of the year.
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Most of the time when I write, I don't feel that I'm channelling a character in the truest sense of the notion. I know what they're likely to do, to think, how they're likely to react, and so on. But it's still me, Alex, picking over the best way to structure the sentences, even as a sense of the character guides what I do. Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like Alex is left to one side. I had this with the 1,500 or so words of viewpoint that the Bone Queen has in the current novel-in-progress. (Yes, it's named after her, but she's not a viewpoint character. She's the catalyst.) Her words ran out of me onto post-it notes one afternoon at work, then on the train home; I couldn't stop until they were done. And there's another character who's been in my head for some months now, ever since I had this dream about a conquering emperor and a rebellion -- and the thing that stuck in my head was the pinch of emotion felt by the young man at this one point. I couldn't shake it when I woke up, and I still can't. Normally I get zero inspiration from dreams -- they're too muddled, too vague, no arc or character depth -- but this one character has stuck and I may soon be ready to write a short story for him, I may be approaching good enough not to write something I'll find terrible, not felt I've done him a complete injustice. I managed, just before dinner today, to write down a few lines in my notebook, to capture what I felt in the dream. I'll see where I can go from there. I'm kneeling on the side of a dusty road, head pressed to the small, beige stones. Hiding my face. The Emperor's assemblage of cars comes past and of course he does not see the dusty, scrawny teenager in the stirred-up dust and identify him as his enemy's son.
I am surprised -- every hour today, this moment of not understanding -- that I have reached this birthday.
My father at the table, thirty-seven years old, saying, "My father went at eighteen, my brother at nineteen, my uncle at twenty-one, my other uncle at nineteen. We are not a family well suited to life." Even though this is not my story, not my story at all, writing just this little bit of it feels like laying a small part of myself bare. I can't figure why. If I write the whole story, I wonder if this will be the first one that makes me truly upset when it's rejected.
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21/04 - daily cabal story + working on critique 22/04 - working on critique 23/04 - 350 words on ch14 of TBQ 24/04 - 720 words on ch14 of TBQ 25/04 - 486 words on ch14, 301 words on ch16 of TBQ 26/04 - 1,534 words on ch16 of TBQ 27/04 - working on critique + 761 words on ch16 of TBQ It wound up being a pretty productive week! I'll not be writing a short story this month either, unfortunately, but maybe I can do a brief short story splurge immediately after finishing The Bone Queen (which will be by the end of June, if it goes according to plan). Completing draft 2 of the novel is the most important thing to me right now. Tags: mush mush mush
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I’m getting very excited about a novel I want to start writing this summer, once draft 2 of The Bone Queen is done. Originally I planned to work on The Ephrebet Bed, the novel I wrote 50,000 words of during Nanowrimo last November, but for various reasons I no longer want to. A driving reason is that TBQ is a fairly straightforward novel, albeit a bit weird in places, and the idea of writing a novel that's even more straightforward after completing TBQ doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Writing a more unconventional novel, however, has the opposite effect. The novel is currently dubbed [novel told by various texts]. As the temporary name suggests, it will be told via a collection of various documents. I know what three of them will be: 1. A report for the king, written by a minister or someone in another important position, detailing what's happened so far in the war with the river-women and algae-men. The facts of what happened will be tainted by at least two agendas: his own, and his government's. 2. A woman is translating some documents (however they're written/presented - not on paper, not expressed in the same way as human language) written by someone(s) from the water/algae-peoples society. There is both the viewpoint of the water/algae-person who wrote the original material, as well as notes revealing what's going on with the translator. (NB: 'river-women and algae-men' are only the terms the humans use to describe these 'people'. There will be some gender playaround in here.)3. As chapter titles/quotes, there will be excerpts from the river diaries -- daily records kept by various administrative bodies throughout the kingdom, detailing the height of the rivers and making other observations.* There will be two or three more threads. One thing I find interesting about this idea is that, on the surface, it has potential to be a pretty dry, character-less novel. But it actually won’t be. Each text (excluding the river diaries) will be highly driven by the person writing them -- their motives, ambitions, desires, and so on. What is included and excluded will be completely decided by the characters. I’m hoping to get a balance of slightly drier, fact-emphasised content, such as the report for the king, and more personal content where more personal dramas can get through to the reader. Not everyone will find the human element compelling and deep enough, I’m sure, but hopefully I can make it interesting and enjoyable for a lot of people. I’m certainly looking forward to it. =D Of course, first I need to finish The Bone Queen. My revised self-deadline for draft 2 is the end of June. That may or may not be possible; if necessary, I’ll consider turning June into a Nanowrimo-style push to get it done. In the meantime, I have my eye on a "short" history of Thailand that I plan to buy, as the world of [novel told by various texts] is a secondary world loosely based on Thailand. Later in the year, when I've finished TBQ and am planning this one more thoroughly, I'll need to get a reader's pass for the British Library so that I can look at some more specific books. The necessity of going to the British Library fills me with glee; I love that place. (If the zombie apocalypse comes, I'm setting up fortress in one of their storage-buildings.) I'm hopeful that looking forward to writing this book will help spur me to finishing The Bone Queen.
*The idea for these came from the Babylonian(?) astronomical diaries, which kept records of each day’s weather, as well as occurrences such as eclipses. This is how we know that it was raining the day Alexander died. Tags: [novel told by various texts]
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