Writing

I'm definitely back into writing again, which is GREAT. During the brainless lull I've been reading Norse and Icelandic sagas, which is a great way to get the gears turning for writing fantasy. The only catch is that the sagas were written using an authorial voice that's little used in modern fantasy. So it's a great motivator and idea bucket filler, but there's the risk that your writing will come out sounding like a saga.

Unfortunately I'm finding it hard to concentrate on other things. For the first time I've really got a decent plot, and have a great vehicle for exploring the characters, the world, and the events driving it. And I don't want to stop! Every time I'm close to a keyboard I just want to plop down at it and get out a few more paragraphs. Just a few more!

It's almost like wanting to spend time with a friend over at their house. You sort of know them, you know about the place they live, but it's really up to them to show it to you. And in showing you their house you get to learn all sorts of new things about them. I don't want to go home yet! I want to stay in their house and keep visiting with them!

Oddly enough, this isn't interfering with things like dishes or laundry. Doing dishes is a great opportunity to work out finer points of dialogue (provided no one minds if you stand there and talk to yourself in different voices.) Doing laundry is a nice mindless activity during which you can work out plot kinks. That's fine.

But if I have to listen to my office-mate discuss their garden any more I'm going to lose my mind. Don't get me wrong. I like plants. I like to plant them and grow them. But for some reason the discussion takes place over hours with juuust enough of a break between statements to let me drift off into my own world again. Just when I get the whole milieu constructed and visualized, right when I've placed my characters and can feel their emotions as they move through it -- "Heeey! Hey do you grow any fruit trees at your place?" Skreeeeeeeetch! "Um, yeah, I've got some citrus trees." Ok, now where was that fjord? Ok, Tenga's down there to the west, the ice floes are a fair way off and not visible because of the range of -- "HEEY! Hey, did I tell you I planted an avocado tree last week? Think of it!" "Mmmmyeah. Sounds good." Now they left Tenga a good hour ag -- "You know, you ought to plant one." "One what?" "An avocado tree!" (Full-grown avocado trees are about the size of my yard.) "Ummm... Yeah, I'll have to think on that." OK, so they left Tenga an hour ago and are heading upland above the treeline. It should take them ano -- "Heey! Check this out! No, serious. Come check out this URL."

GAAAAAAAAAAAH!

It's funny, I can do machining and think about fiction. I can clean house and think about fiction. I can organize laboratory facilities and think about fiction. But I cannot TALK to someone and think about fiction!

Right now I'm doing my writing at night. It's not bad because I really do get the time to myself. Unfortunately with the schedule I've been keeping I'm dead-tired by the time I get home. After a day of mishmash thinking while my office-mate is talking about their garden, the prospect of trying to make sense of it all is almost too daunting to contemplate. I still do it, but I can tell it's not my best work.

I suppose I could get up earlier in the morning to write then. I'd be fresh and I could probably get at least an hour or two each morning that way. But dang. I already get up at five to get ready for work. Any earlier and I think my hair would fall out or something.

What the heck.

Oh, a quick aside: I was reading someone else's blog and ran across a reference to the cartoon here: http://www.illwillpress.com It's absolutely rude and irreverant, and it's funny as HELL! I'm hooked.

'Till next time.

Ah well.

Bone tired and Brainless

Not sure why I'm writing just now. For that matter I'm not sure why I haven't written in months. Distracted, I guess. It hapens.

I occasionally work at an altitude where there's about half as much air as you get at sea level. For the most part this doesn't pose a big problem for me, but there's nothing like repeat exposure to teach you just how much something can get to you.

I've been at altitude for most of the last month. This is excessive, even for me. In the evenings after work I like to write. Nothing published yet, but I'm having fun learing the craft, anyway. But I've been in a block for about the last month. Normal writing blocks don't bug me that much. You either write past them or you take a break from them. This one has been different. It's not that I can't frame what I want to say, I just can't say it. There's nothing there. "Blah blah blah" is about as much plot as I can drive forward.

So I did some looking. Turns out this is to be expected. The oxygen deprivation you get at 4000m is enough to cause temporary short term memory loss, fatigue, and general dingbattedness (not a dictionary term). Luckily none of it is permanent. Above 8000m, however, you get well into the dead zone where basically you've started killing your body. Sleeping gives no rest, eating does very little, and with every breath you're losing cells because there's just not enough there to keep them all going. Thank goodness I don't work at an altitude anywhere that nasty. I get the dingbattedness, but it's temporary.

I got a rest day from altitude today. Don't ask why, but I spent the day cleaning workspaces. One in particular was a wreck because an experiment we've had going on in there requires total darkness. It's hard to clean in total darkness. And unfortunately the people running the experiment have been coming in, flipping on the lights, making more mess, flipping them off, and insisting on total darkness from everyone else. So one can understand how things got a little out of hand. They lost a day of darkness, but won a lab that'll pass a safety inspection and has all the bits and pieces put back where they belong. It's a bargain.

Nothing like breathing thick air and whiffing cleanser fumes to get you back to the land of the living. Now if I can just get more than five hours of sleep tonight I'll be good to go and ready to write.