Category Archives: Diary

Friday Morning

The boy bounced into my bed at about a quarter to seven this morning and announced that it was a Grandma day, as indeed it is. We cuddled a bit and then he said:

    SPARKY: What if someone took all the Star Wars movies in the whole world? Then we wouldn’t be able to watch them at Grandma’s and we would be very sad.

    A: We would be.

    SPARKY: And they would have taken them out of all the movie places and the schools and everything, and no one could watch them, and everyone would be very, very sad.

    A: But then you and BunBun could fly all over the world and fight them and get the Star Wars movies back, and you could give them back to everyone who was sad, and everyone would say, “Yay, Sparky and BunBun!”

    [PAUSE]

    SPARKY: Well, that would be impressive.

He was so totally humouring me. HRH and I nearly died of laughter.

I noticed last night that Nixie has become extremely thin. I know why this is: Gryffindor bolts his food and then moves to her bowl because she has a couple of mouthfuls then walks away, expecting it to be there half an hour later. We’ve begun feeding all three cats less and Gryff and Cricket have lost weight, which is a good thing, but so has Nixie, who really can’t afford it. So this morning I gave her an extra bowl of food in my office, behind a closed door, and she ploughed through it like she was starving (erm). Afterwards she came and found me to purr at me and rub against my legs and hands, then tried to entice me into my office ahead of schedule. It was like she was saying, And now we’re best friends! We’ll play, and cuddle, and later we can braid each other’s hair! When she was born she was the tiniest of the litter, and we gave her an extra feeding every day to make sure she survived; that extra bit of nurturing and bonding time was one of the reasons she evolved into being my cat. Starting that up again isn’t a hardship at all.

There is warm air outdoors, there is melting snow, there was sun for about five minutes till it got above the overcast line, work on the anthology continues apace, and I have a single two-part scene to write before the Orchestrated will officially be a complete first draft. That’s today’s goal, and then it’s out of the way for when the anthology kicks into high gear next month as more completed submissions pour in. That’s not the only reason it’s today’s goal, of course: I’m really excited about the idea of actually finishing the novel. Usually my books get stuffed into a metaphorical drawer because I can’t decide how they’re supposed to end. Actually that’s not entirely true; thinking back, over the past four years only two have done that, the Poppy book (or Creating the Muse or the GCN or whatever you might remember it being called in its vast variety of temporary names) and the Pandora book. And I think about the Pandora book a lot, trying different resolutions in my mind. Many Names got finished, Balsamic Moon was finished (albeit in a two-page summary of the final chapter), Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro is technically a complete first draft, although I think it needs an epilogue (I’ll confirm that if and when I ever revise it). Swan Sister is ongoing, as are the non-fic twins Harpsichord Dreams and the as-of-yet-untitled cello book, although all three are hibernating at the moment.

So yes: very exciting. I suspect starting with a brief synopsis, expanding it to a detailed synopsis, then writing from that synopsis is to be thanked for the actual execution of the project. (See how I cleverly avoided the word ‘outline’ there?) I usually prefer to write blind and discover what happens as I go, but I have to say, knowing the end helped a lot on this project. There are a half-dozen places where I would have stalled otherwise.

More tea! And I must see if those scones are still edible. And I should probably put a batch of bread on to rise.

Exercise In Frustration

Yesterday was, quite simply, an exercise in frustration. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but by the end of the day I’d had quite enough. And it seems to have seeped into this morning, too.

The momentum of the previous day’s writing didn’t quite carry over, so I spent a lot of time bashing my head against the end of the book. Hydro decided to play footsie with the neighbourhood, resulting in intermittent power through the afternoon followed by a solid hour of nothing. I finished knitting the boy’s lightsaber, and then everyone came home and the boy clicked into Irritating mode right around the time I was attacked by a nasty headache.

I got through dinner, packed up, and left for orchestra. I felt odder by the second but figured it was low blood sugar, which would be remedied any moment once dinner kicked in. Didn’t happen. I hung on through the first half of rehearsal, determined not to pass out, and left at break.

Here’s the thing: I remember telling my principal that I thought I should go home, and she told me to do it. I remember being dressed to go and saying goodbye to the second desk people. And then I don’t remember anything until I clicked back in halfway home, on the highway. It was not a good thing at all. Took me about five minutes to get out of the car and inside the house, too. Very shaky; very dizzy. Bad all round. It wasn’t blood sugar, it was fibro reminding me that although I have had months of good or only-slightly-off days, a couple of hours of Very Bad can still wholly and successfully screw me up.

Then this morning, when I was trying very hard to be in a good mood, I got an email that made me absolutely livid (I keep telling myself it’s not my problem, and it really isn’t, but it’s hard to let go when you put time and energy into something and people do things that indicate they don’t value that time and energy), and the boy pulled the whiny poky I-don’t-hear-you act when I was trying to get him going. I treated myself to an iced cappuccino while I was running errands; it’s warm enough, and it was exactly what I needed. (Also, I used a gift certificate to buy it, so I feel smug.)

While I was out I picked up the yarn and needles I need for the music-patterned wristwarmers knit-along I and a bunch of musicians on Ravelry are doing in March. The colours are really lovely: a warm peaty brown for the main colour, and an Irish cream colour for the contrast work. Kind of a reverse of what antiqued ink on old parchment paper would look like. The black and white is so stark; I wanted something warmer.

And now, to work. Once I go rescue the rest of that iced cappuccino from the car where I parked it across the street, that is, because there was a two-foot high and wide pile of snow across the end of the driveway when I got back with groceries. Yay for snow removal; boo for the time lapse between the steps.

Orchestrated Update

New words today: 869
Total word count, Orchestrated: 66,436

Kind of frustrating, as the power kept cutting out and my laptops were only at low battery charge and were therefore pretty much useless once they’d booted up. Also, deleted four hundred words before the end of the workday; if I’d left them in it would be more like 1,200. And I think I lost a hundred or so in the last power outage.

Still, more words than were there before. Inching closer to the end.

Orchestrated Update

Look! I wrote!

New words today: 1,558
Total word count, Orchestrated: 65,567

This may not seem like a big thing to you (I do it for a living, after all) but it is to me. You see, for the past month I’ve been making the anthology my priority: contacting people (both original contributors for clarifications and new potential contributors), working things out, discussing drafts, pinging people with reminders and sounding them out about ideas, and going through the existing material to make notes about it and fact-check and such. And I’m brain-dead by mid afternoon, and there isn’t enough energy to address my own work when my brain officially notifies me about overdosing on the anthology. (Remember the whole fibro-and-shutting-down thing? Yeah, that too.)

Well, today I decided to sit down and crank out at least a thousand words of Orchestrated. I’d been dragging my heels on it because I had written myself into a boring spot and didn’t have much of an idea how to work through it. The past couple of nights as I’ve been lying awake I’ve been thinking about it, and decided to end the chapter where it was and start a new one two days later in the story. It’s moderately ironic because I’m a huge advocate of ‘just go to the next scene that you know how to write and leave yourself a note in between’, but for some unfathomable reason I just kept trying to slog along to connect the scene that was over and the next major event when they didn’t need to connected at all.

My goal was a thousand words by noon, and here we are at noon, and I have over fifteen hundred, and thank gods I’m past that stupid swampy bit that I didn’t even need to be in. There’s a substantial amount of the last chapter that will end up on the cutting room floor, I suspect. And the official new target is 70K, which means I need to wrap it up in 4.5K. I might be able to do it, too. If not, I know it will be edited down to between 65 and 70K once it’s all finished and gets tightened up in revision.

Right! Lunch, then anthology wrangling.

Weekend Roundup

Lying awake during one of the long wakeful stretches I had last night, I finally realised something. I’m somewhat shutting down overall. It’s a temporary thing, but it’s what’s happening in order to maintain basic services. I also finally talked to HRH about something that I’d figured out earlier, namely that I’m being immensely stressed by a set of circumstances from which there doesn’t appear to be any alternative other than trashing the whole plan, which is stressful in a different way. (And I did it in casual fashion, too, while we were making dinner on Sunday, instead of actually sitting down and talking about it face to face, which would have been its own kind of stress.)

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, and it began beautifully. I did a smooth, beautiful tonalization sequence of arpeggios, and it was really even and balanced and in tune and soft and there are lots of other pretty words I could use to describe it because it was almost perfect. My teacher asked me how I felt about it and I kind of shrugged and said, “It was nice. I liked it.” (Which was an understatement, because I had been amazed at how smooth and effortless it had been, but it was a warm-up and I hadn’t been paying very close attention when I did it.) She said, “Well, I have goosebumps! That was beautiful!” And she was partly kidding, and partly not. But then everything started to go downhill, until it hit the usual point about two-thirds of the way through the lesson where it can’t get any worse and I start to freeze up because nothing I do works and I waver between abject misery and anger. I know what happens: my teacher starts pointing out things we need to fix and I try to keep it all in my mind, and the more I try to think about everything (bring the left elbow forward a degree more when shifting up and crossing a string, wrap the bow around the string by moving the right elbow forward or back, pronate hands, caterpillars, tunnels) the worse I play. Adding more things to the list of things I need to constantly check clogs up my brain and I start dropping basic things I’ve already internalized. It’s part of the learning process, but not a part I especially enjoy.

My teacher has an analogy for this: It’s like the drive shaft on a set of train wheels. At first it feels like you’re moving forward, but then the drive shaft starts going through the second half of the cycle and the illusion of going backward is created, even though the overall unit is still moving forward. And if I think about it I’m doing things now that I couldn’t do two months ago. But that doesn’t particularly comfort me at the two-thirds point of the lesson. My teacher told me as I was packing up to remember the tonalization, though, and to remind myself frequently that I have the wherewithal to make that beautiful sound.

It’s also rather frustrating because I’ve been spending so much practise time on the orchestra music and not paying attention to my lesson stuff, and as a result when I played the Lee that I’d played well a month ago it was awful and we had to spend time addressing the problems there. The plan for two spring/early summer concerts has been dropped (not directly related to how poorly I’m doing, but rather to people not all being available) and so I don’t need to worry about having it ready until a month after the original deadline, which after this past lesson is a good thing.

Saturday night we had dinner at Ceri and Scott’s house, where we met Scott’s brother and sister in law who are terrific people. After dinner a few more people showed up for a Rock Band party, although I spent most of my time upstairs by the fire knitting, which was delightful and relaxing and exactly what I needed.

Sunday morning the boy had his Pagan playgroup where they cut out a circle divided into sections to make up the Wheel of the Year, and drew pictures in each section to indicate what holiday or season it indicated. It took him longer to cut out his circle than any of the other kids, but I don’t think he’s ever used scissors for more than making random decorative cuts on scraps of paper. In some of the sections he scribbled random shapes, but in others he drew very specific and recognisable things: a tree for Beltaine, the sun for summer solstice, a loaf of bread and corn on the cob for Lughnassadh, autumn leaves for the autumn equinox, a pumpkin for Samhain. He drew a Christmas tree-shaped scribble for Yule (but in red instead of green), and he coloured the entire Imbolc wedge red and told me it was fire. Ostara was a blue scribble that is the Easter Bunny, apparently. The other topic of discussion was gods and goddesses, and when the facilitator asked who knew what a god or goddess was his hand shot up into the air along with his gods-sister’s, who fortunately was the one called on to explain. While she was talking he turned to me and said, “They’re statues!” Which is a logical answer from him because in our house we do have an inordinate amount of divine statuary, but would have by necessity initiated a discussion regarding representations versus the real thing that probably wouldn’t have been easily understandable for kids. We’ll work on that at home.

All in all, apart from the comfort of Saturday night, the weekend was… well, it’s over. Maybe my sleep patterns will settle into something better than three broken hours a night, and other things will improve as a result.

These Days

Headaches, fatigue, inability to concentrate. Oh, right; I have fibro.

*headdesk*

No, seriously; I tend to forget. Things got so much better and I became used to the new baseline that I have essentially forgotten.

So put my inability to remember what day it is, who to call back, how long something’s been sitting in my in-box, how to string words together to answer a simple e-mail, or how long ago I was supposed to hit ‘publish’ in the boy’s 44-month post (or anything not related to work, really) down to the fibro-fog and lack of available energy and memory. I’m somewhat relieved to realise that I have a genuine root cause of not begin able to focus on something properly, and for not being able to properly plan a month even when staring at a calendar. Work is the only thing I’m staying on top of, because, well, insane deadline.

I’m kind of listless, and I can see that reflected in the cello-heavy recent posts. I’ve just been marking down what’s going on, not really thinking or going beyond keeping basic track of what’s been happening. (Which isn’t much, because I’m not sure where the days are going, thank you, fibro.) I’ve been spending a lot of time just staring at things. Cello’s the only thing I’m keeping up with. Everything else is basically on hold or dropped along a wayside somewhere. I’m sure I’ll find them when the snow melts, a bit battered and worse for wear but essentially salvageable. No knitting; some reading, although I’m not retaining much of what I read so it’s basically light stuff only.

I scrubbed the bathtub this morning and was wiped. (No pun intended.) Thanks to the wonder of the stand mixer I was able to do bread, and a batch of cookies. The boy’s home with me today, so the cookies were a necessity, as were pancakes for lunch. I finally got him to nap; we’ll see how long that lasts.

And yes, the boy’s 44-month post is up. It sat there for a week, because all I had to do was upload the photos, but did I remember to do that? Not until today, I didn’t.

Not Dead

Bizet, why do you hate me so?

Actually, that exposed bit in the Overture? I sound surprisingly good. I suspect I am playing D sharps where I ought not to play D sharps, however, and am about to check with the CD. I am dragging my feet and muttering “don’t wanna” about practising that tenor/treble passage in the Carillon, though. Because Bizet and I, we don’t get along when we hit that particular point. I’m going to listen to the recording of that section till my ears bleed to internalize the theme, because I suspect that I am one tone off at that point.

I’m really enjoying this new guest conductor. You can tell she’s a cellist, because she’s chosen pieces with really juicy cello bits for us. Problem is, they’re exposed juicy cello bits, and I don’t particularly deserve to sit second chair, and these are only highlighting that fact. Also, she pays attention to us, for which I am grateful. Most of the time.

I went downtown for a lunch meeting today with someone I haven’t seen in sixish years, and it was great to catch up as well as talk about her research and her contribution to this anthology. It was wonderful to talk about paganism in an academic context; it’s something I miss. She’s sending me her Master’s thesis tonight and I’m really looking forward to reading it.

Work on the anthology proceeds apace. I’m almost done with the existing ms., and new contributions are starting to trickle in. It’s only going to get busier.

I’ve been dealing with nasty headaches over the past couple of days, too, the kind that are so bad they make your teeth hurt. No fun.

And aha, there are the flurries we were promised for today.