Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I tried to get some work done on the annotation project, but I only managed about half an hour before I stopped. And I got maybe 90 seconds annotated on a first pass.

In March or April, I requested Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments (2019), from the Athens library. I placed a hold on an e-copy, and I was 17th in line. As far as I know, that hold never came through. But the PG County library has about a dozen e-copies, and many were available, so I checked it out there.

It's a fitting sequel, told once again through found documentation. In 2020, reading about a secret plan to overthrow a terrible Christo-fascist government that succeeds is heartening, even if it seems woefully optimistic.

3 weeks to election day. Have you voted or made a plan to vote? Our lives depend on it.

I mentioned that I've been reading a lot this year, and I've been keeping track in the back of my planner, where I wanted to record the games I officiated this past season, but ... well, you know.

I've been interested in radical retellings of ancient stories since I read The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley last year, which is the story of Beowulf told from the perspective of Grendel's mother. Grendel, you may recall, is the monster who kills the Danes in their mead-hall, Heorot, and Beowulf is the one who comes to rescue them and slay the monster (and nails his arm above the door). Mom, who never gets a name in the text, gets revenge and kills Beowulf as he kills her.

The Mere Wife reimagines it in a modern-day setting. Heorot Hall is a gated suburban community in a forested area beside a mountain. Grendel's mother is an Iraq War vet with PTSD, and she takes Grendel up to the cave where her ancestors came from, which is linked to the town through history. Beowulf is a cop.

About a month ago, Headley published a new translation of Beowulf that uses modern idiom (which would make many purists cringe) but keeps a lot of the old Germanic elements: alliteration, kennings (whale-road for sea, for example), verse form. I bought it the day it came out and truly enjoyed it (and got a friend to buy the audiobook on the strength of my recommendation).

A week or so after the publication, Headley was on a discussion about radical translations with Emily Wilson, whose translation of the Odyssey made waves a few years ago, and Madeline Miller, a classicist who writes retellings of the classics from minor characters' perspective. In this discussion, several titles were recommended.

Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which is probably more a novella than a novel, tells the Odyssey from Odysseus' wife's perspective, with the 12 servant girls who were hanged serving as the Greek chorus. Odysseus is not the most reliable narrator, and Atwood includes rumors that he's off at a brothel, and other things, from the bards. The part that sticks out most strongly in my memory is in one of the Chorus sections that's set up as a trial (I think it was in this part, anyway) is Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter, rage-crying "They told me I was going to my wedding. I was fourteen."

Miller's Song of Achilles was something I'd heard of, probably via tumblr, but never really thought about, but she was so interesting on this panel, and the attendees raved about it, so I borrowed an ebook copy from my new local library. It's the legend of Achilles, as it says on the tin, told by Patroclus, his closest companion and best beloved. Patroclus doesn't appear much in the Iliad, himself, except at the end, when Hector kills him and Achilles makes the river run red with Trojan blood and then kills Hector and drags his body around the city repeatedly.

Scholars (mostly male, of course) have traditionally interpreted this as "friendship" and "very close friends." More recently, scholars (younger, female, queer) have raised a collective eyebrow at this "just bros being pals" interpretation, because, well, you don't get super-mega revenge for your ~friend~, but you will for your lover.

So, anyway, Miller's novel focuses on the special relationship between the two boys, who grow into men, and the way she writes Patroclus and his emotions about Achilles is achingly beautiful. And knowing, as we do, how their story ends makes so many things devastatingly heartbreaking. I highly recommend it!

Saturday I went to the UNC library to get a borrower's card (which I got for free with my Durham Tech student ID woo), use the computers for some research, and check out some books.

I got Feridun Zaimoglu's short story collection "Zwölf Gramm Glück," then I couldn't remember the name of the person who wrote "Mutterzunge," so I looked that up: Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Back to the opposite end of the 8th floor stacks, not quite as far as Zaimoglu.

I follow the Library of Congress numbers down to the bottom shelf, find Özdamar. Shelved beside her was Selim Özdogan, so I picked up a couple of his books and decided to go with "Ein Glas Blut," which is a collection of short stories and poetry.

I started with Mother Tongues, because it's in English (UNC doesn't have a single copy in German). It's very Literary. I've ordered a copy in German, and it shipped today, so I should get it sometime soon. I don't need to return the books until 2/18 (and I *think* I can renew them, not sure). But I spent a good bit of the first few pages wanting to know what the language was like before it was translated, then it got weird. (Literary weird.)

So I started reading Ein Glas Blut, since they're all short, a page or three. Some of the poems are confusing for me, though I'm not sure if that's because there's some reference or context I'm missing. Some of them are just fine. I liked the one called "Drei Fragen," where he asks three questions. I read that out loud to Ben, translated mostly on the fly.

There's another one, traueratem, that's I think supposed to be/was originally spoken word, because there's one section that has this distinct defined rhythm and rhyme scheme that sounds very much like rap. I read it out loud to Ben, in German, and he agreed.

I like this a lot better than Mother Tongues, though I'll withhold judgment until I get that in German to compare. Sometimes translations can be really weird. (Or it could just be, you know, Lit'ry.)

Then I looked him up on Wikipedia, and it turns out he wrote a fantasy novel. (Or a regular novel that was nominated for a science fiction prize. Whichever. It sounds kind of magical realism-ish. If I can find a cheap copy here, maybe I'll buy it.

The library also has Heimstr 52, which sounds from its Amazon blurb like the sort of thing I'm looking for. (Also, there are lots of papers written on the metaphor of travel and transit in Turkish German literature.)

I should start with the Zaimoglu soon.

I just wish I read as fast in German as I do in English. Then again, I read *really fast* in English. If I'm actually paying attention, I read a lot slower.

I'm looking for a novel published between, say, 2005 and 2010, by a Turkish German. A Bekanntin from Twitter gave me this, which kind of helps (though not if I can't find any of those books here for reasonable prices).

The reason I want this is so I can write a paper for my grad school application. (I need to give them a 10-20-page paper, theoretically written during my undergraduate German studies. We never wrote real academic papers, with journal references and stuff, in college. So I need to make one now.) I want to write about Turkish Germans, though I don't have a paper topic specifically.

My alternate idea was to write about reunification viz Friedrich Christian Delius' "Die Birnen von Ribbeck," which we read in one of the college classes, maybe "lit since 1945," and the current state of affairs. (The pears thing uses a lot of metaphors, like "you have to graft trees together carefully, otherwise it won't take.")

If I knew anything about film/media analysis, I'd write about Gegen die Wand (which I have a bunch of articles on) or Das Leben der Anderen. Or Türkisch für Anfänger.

ETA: Do you have recommendations? Have you read any of those books and liked them? Or books by other German Turkish writers? If I click, Amazon helpfully gives me similar books, but I don't know anything about them.

As a member of this year's WorldCon, I get to vote on the Hugos. This is extremely exciting. I'm making my way through the novelettes, then I'll get to the novellas. I'm not sure I'll have time to read all the novels, especially the GRRM one bc it's number 5 or 6 in a series, and yeah, fuck that.

I've got the pro artist, fan artist, editor long form, and short story categories ranked already. I may take a pass on the short form dramatic presentation (I don't watch Dr Who, and I don't feel like watching a single episode of Community). If we can find Hugo and Source Code to rent/dl and watch them, maybe I'll have more than 2 things to rank in that category. I don't much feel like watching ALL of Game of Thrones season 1, either.

I'll skip the fancast, since I'm not into podcasts.

That leaves related work, graphic story, semiprozine, fanzine, editor short form, and the Campbell (not-a-Hugo). I should be able to get through much of them before voting closes. I have all the text things on my kobo and am reading them & taking notes.

If any of you want to hear my thoughts & reasonings for ranking, I can post that here, locked, when I'm done. I may write up Thots on the short stories (brief reviews) on my blogger blog.

Here's how I did it for pro artist: I opened the files in the voter packet in Preview, in alphabetical order. The ones that made me go "WOW" or "DAMN" were at the top. Some were technically quite good, but lacking life and vibrancy. You get to rank them in order (Hugo voting is instant runoff), so the two I said "WOW" to, I had to decide which was 1 and which was 2. I ranked the one that was more vibrant first. (Since this is public, I won't tell you which that was.)

Does that interest people? (Even if it doesn't, I may do it anyway, neener neener, it's my journal, I can do what I want.)

(I kind of dig this Hugo-voting thing. I may buy supporting ($50) memberships in the future even if I can't make it to the actual con. Like London 2014. Also kind of meh on San Antonio, because it's Dragon*Con weekend again.)

I just realized that pretty much all I've been posting lately is word counts. But I've been spending most of my days either farting around on facebook games or writing and evenings reading while Ben plays video games.

I finally made it through my re-read of the Foreigner series and first read of the 4th trilogy in that (book 12 is finally out in paperback). That's 4500+ pages. Then I read Devil's Cub by Georgette Heyer, and I'm working on Among Others by Jo Walton, which was a birthday present. I've also read the Hunger Games trilogy (on my e-reader).

The Foreigner series is very dense politics, with aliens who resemble humans but have very different psychology. The fourth trilogy spends some POV time with young Cajeiri, not just Bren. That lets you get a little more insight into atevi psychology than Bren has. There's a fifth trilogy in the works; I wonder if that'll be the last. I also wonder if DAW will ever authorize ebook versions. Fifteen books take up a lot of shelf space!

Devil's Cub is a Heyer Regency. The male lead is a rake with a violent temper (but he adores his mother, who also has a bit of a temper). The female lead is a no-nonsense woman. I was disinclined to like the male lead from the beginning, but he got a little better. Even if the horrid gender norms of the early 1800s are horrid. It's apparently normal for men to discipline their wives with spankings as if they're children! Gag.

I think I'd enjoy Among Others better if I understood more than three or four of the references the narrator makes to books she's read. Of the books/authors name-dropped, I've read Tolkien and LeGuin. No Heinlein, Delany, etc. Example sentence (paraphrased): "Now I understand what Smith meant when he told Jones what he did." That means NOTHING to me. Aside from the gratuitous NERD CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA (which I don't have, not having had a Proper Nerd Childhood myself), it's a good story.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is sheer and utter nonsense. Like, completely illogical nonsense with a fresh coat of nonsense on top. It's very pretty, and the battle system is almost the same as in XIII, but good god DAMN the plot makes no sense. "If you change the future, you change the past." NO. That's not how time travel works.

I can't wait to see Legend of Korra. Holy shit. I am all over that show. I watched the preview of the first two episodes online yesterday, and I was impressed. It looks like there's going to be a good amount of depth again. A:TLA was a show for 11-year-olds about genocide and imperialism. Korra looks like it's going to be a show for 16-year-olds about classism and privilege. I'm looking forward to it!

Faced with the impending close date of the alternate history spy anthology I submitted "Something There Is" to (they extended it) and having heard that the magazine where "Valkyrie One" has been since October 3 is sending out notices (though according to Duotrope, I'm at the point in my submission where I should poke them), I started browsing for the next places to send them and managed to use all the time I'd allocated for writing today. I've got the next ones picked out, at least.

Not *quite* all; I usually write until 4:30 or so, but I'm not exactly sure what happens next. I've seen discussions of pre-writing, so you know what the scene looks like when you sit down to it, but I don't really have a way to do that. I could go for a walk through the neighborhood, which tends to help me jostle things up, and it's been ridiculously nice lately, so maybe I will, I don't know. Tomorrow I have Pilates class in the morning, and that throws off my whole day. Wednesday's clear during the day, then Thursday morning, I'm driving Ben to the airport. Sometimes when Ben's gone, I'm mad productive. Other times, I'm ... not. (Being an ESTJ with mostly I??? friends is frustrating. Often.) I'm not sure which way it'll go this time. Might depend on what my thyroid's up to.

Anyway. I'm also still re-reading the Foreigner series. I'm up to book 4. I was poking around Amazon, and I learned that book 12 will be out in paperback just in time for my birthday, so happy birthday to me. (I have the first trilogies in paperback, so even if they're out in hardback now, a) that costs more and b) it doesn't match the rest. And I hate having the books in a series not match and not fit on the same shelf. I'm annoyed at Miles Errant for that reason, actually.)

I also got the Hunger Games trilogy for my kobo (on sale, $13 for all 3), and I need to read that before the movie comes out (in March). That's the second thing I bought for it. The first was the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld, which was really awesome. I need to review it on my actual blog.

And I need to list those hundred or so books that I want to sell...

Yesterday involved sleeping in a bit, eating gingerbread cake with lemon curd whipped cream (and I had to make the lemon curd myself, because the store was apparently having trouble with the supplier and I didn't feel like going to Harris Teeter; it really says something about me when I'd rather make custard from scratch than drive 15 minutes each way to the store.), opening the one gift on the table (a framed picture from Ben's aunt), and generally lazing about until we went to see Sherlock Holmes with Laura & Paul then get Chinese food for dinner.

I read all of Dragon Bones (because I betaed a fic in that universe and had a very vague memory of enjoying the books when I read them; it's odd that the only part of the book I remembered was the subplot about the twins...). I started it after breakfast & present (around 11, I think?) and finished it around 2. Ben was astonished, as usual. I can read 100 pages an hour (in English, if it isn't dense). That's how I roll...

Sherlock Holmes was fun and fanservicey and actiony. Holmes' German (and Moriarty's) was atrocious. Mostly they were quoting Schubert's "Die Forelle." (Thematic!) Their accents were horrid and unintelligible. Also, Moriarty sang "Vorüber wie UN Pfeil." Nein, nyet, non. Un is French.

We got to Jade Palace later than we've gone on Christmas before, around 6:30, and it was packed. We got a table at 6:45, which wasn't awful, but we had to flag down a waitress to take our order, and she didn't bring our drinks for a while. But she was running around in circles, so we couldn't really blame her. Next year if we go out for a movie rather than watch one on video, we should time it better. If that means dinner at 5 for a 7 pm movie, so be it...

Gah.

I just finished reading a book to review for a magazine. It's cyberpunk, which isn't my usual subgenre. The last cyberpunk I read was Snow Crash, I think, though it's possible I read whichever William Gibson it was (I don't remember if I read Idoru, Neuromancer, or both) after that, but neither of them is particularly recent.

So when the book starts out on the first page using jargon and whatnot, I had NO idea what they were talking about (and the EPITHETS! Just use his/her freaking NAME, not "the blond pilot" or whatever) and felt like I was missing half the conversation. I have no idea if these are terms used generally in the current cyberpunk scene and I just don't know them, or if this book is entwined in an existing world of the writer's so people already know them, or if it's just something the writer made up for this book.

Leaving aside that the book wasn't generally my cup of tea, there were serious flaws in it. Like, 3/4 of the way through, there's something that looks like it's a remnant of a previous draft (actually, two somethings) that didn't get cut out or properly revised. The romance feels pastede on. The politics feel pastede on. It's about the singularity, I guess? And the evils of capitalism (which I generally approve of)?

I have to figure out how to write a review of this book without just waving my arms around and going "GAH!" a lot. Also without being scathing, because it wasn't as bad as Darkship Thieves (which was HORRIBLE OH GOD FUCK THAT BOOK), and the underlying idea was pretty cool, but the execution was lacking. I was frustrated SO much reading this book. I got a Kindle version, and my notes are "wasn't this copyedited???" and "WTF?" and also "come on, you can't use the singular Latin word for house to mean both house AND houses... it doesn't work that way!"

Because the internet lacks a sarcasm tag, and we haven't invented a punctuation mark to denote it, all the authors I listed yesterday as "not actually science fiction" was sarcasm.

I'm currently reading one of Drake's RCN novels, which are based on the same source material (a Napoleonic-era British sailor's diary) as O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin books (Master and Commander, ff). O'Brian set his in the Age of Sail; Drake set his in a distant future where people have colonized space.

Drake's Hammer's Slammers novels are not-very-loosely based on his time serving in Vietnam, and set in a future where people have colonized space (and hire mercenaries to fight their battles for them). (If you like gritty military SF and you haven't read these, the first collection is excellent.)

Bujold's Vor of Barrayar are based on the imperial Prussians (with some influence of Czarist Russia), with purposeful similarities to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories and the occasional reference to Georgette Heyer (especially A Civil Campaign).

Cherryh's Foreigner books aren't specifically based on real Earth history, as far as I know, but the parallel between clueless humans (presumably white people) stumbling into more complicated alien politics than they thought and colonialist Europeans drawing borders in Africa and central Asia that ignored the existing people's affiliations is there, even if you don't squint too hard.

Her Alliance-Union books are, like much space opera, the Age of Sail in space, with long journeys between various human establishments (be they colonies on stations or on planets), trade, pirates, a too-powerful Earth Company (a la the East India Company), politics, rabble, and the like.

LeGuin's books are generally anthropological in nature, especially the Hainish ones. The concept there is that the Hain seeded the universe with people, and they left them to develop/evolve under different conditions. Eventually, some group of them discovers space flight (or the Hain teach them? I'm not sure), and they go from planet to planet to observe the natives and eventually ask them to join their league of worlds (the Ekumen). They're quite brilliant.

And these are all science fiction, regardless of what some purist genre-snob thinks.

1. Saturday, a few friends and I went on the Big Boss Brewery's tour for my birthday. It was extremely popular, but the weather was nice - 70 degrees or so - so after it was over, there was a big open-air festival almost in their parking lot. There were two food trucks (OnlyBurger (the veggie burger was pretty good, but the fries were meh) and KoKyuBBQ (Ben enjoyed the duck bratwurst sandwich and tater tots fried in duck fat)).

I tried their new Dunkelweizen, D'Icer, and it was pretty good. It wasn't Weihenstephaner or anything, but it was drinkable. (Speaking of Dunkelweizen, I tried New Belgium's in their Lips of Faith series; it was black as Coke and about half as sweet.)

After digesting the beers and food, Ben and I went out to Sage for dinner, where I boringly got the fesen joon. The jokey waiter must have cut his hair since New Year's, because I didn't recognize him until he started talking.

2. I haven't gotten anything productive done on my writing in a while. I fixed the plot issue I think; I still need to propagate some of the changes, but I can do that while I'm doing the hardest part of the revision process: getting into the characters' heads and adding descriptions. What do they see/hear/smell/feel/etc? What can I say other than "he narrowed his eyes" (eg)?

3. SCHEISST EUCH IN DIE HOSEN, WIR STEHEN GANZ AM OBEN, UND WIR STEIGEN WIEDER AUF. HIER KOMMT HERTHA! Yesterday's match pitted the best offense (us) against the best defense (Fürth), and we got a 2:0 win out of it, extending our lead over our next competitor to 4 points. Unless we lose the rest of our matches (which is, of course, technically possible, but not terribly likely), we'll get promoted back to the first league. HA HO HE!

4. I got the results from my bloodwork last week. I'm currently overmedicated for my thyroid, so I get to take half the Cytomel for a while and see what happens. (My TSH was undetectable, and my T3 was above normal limits, but T4 was fine.) Hopefully this won't lead to a return of The Nausea. Inability to concentrate is one of the symptoms of hyperthyroidism, so that helps explain #2.

5. Reading one of the free books I got, Darkship Thieves. I'm not very far into it yet, but so far, our heroine has ripped her nightshirt in half to stop the men attempting to abduct her in their tracks and commented on how she knows the man whose spaceship she ends up in is a "real man" (I paraphrase) because he responds to the sight of her breasts. Said real man (who's got cat's eyes, which is actually kind of nifty tech) is from an anarcho-individualist culture (barf), and on p 87, there's this bit about "those wacky 21st century folks, thinking there aren't really gender differences in brains" which made me want to hurl the book across the room.

Frustratingly, Persecution of the Other (and the people the cat-guy is descended from are basically bioengineered to be smarter/faster/stronger/fit better in X situation and were, of course, persecuted and wiped out on Earth, except those who fled) is very frequently a liberal/progressive motif, where The Other stands in for queers or racial/ethnic minorities or other real-life disprivileged groups. I don't get the impression Ms Hoyt has any truck with that librul pansy nonsense.

At least I didn't pay money for it. (I did buy Mark Van Name's omnibus Jump Gate Twist, and I feel OK about that, because Mark admits to being Baen's token liberal. Also, it features a beefcake/emo shot of Jon on the cover.)

6. Still taking tai chi. I'm taking a break from weapons to go back to Dr Jay's 9th Street Dance Chen class for the current session. I can't take both, because they meet at the same time. I may go back to weapons over summer, because it doesn't look like he's teaching Chen over summer. (I could be wrong; it happens on occasion.) I'm also taking Nina's Tuesday evening class, which may ALSO be going on hiatus over summer.

So I'm going to have to self-motivate if I want to get my yellow sash this year. I'm awful at that.

7. Cats are evil.

So I volunteered to be on a panel on "where's the rest of the acronym?" at NASFIC. The panel assignments aren't out yet, but I thought I ought to prep anyway, just in case.

I can only think of a few off the top of my head, so I thought I'd turn to my frenz on teh intarwebs for help. (I googled "bisexual protagonist sf" and found Mary Anne Mohanraj's list, but paging through, the vast majority is gay or lesbian. I disagree with her classification of Swordspoint's protagonists.)

So, what I'm looking for primarily are speculative fiction novels (or novellas, or short stories, I guess) that have main characters, either leads or part of an ensemble cast, who are from the BTQ* part of the acronym. Preferably *positive* depictions, please.

Bisexual
Alec Campion (Swordspoint) [canonically has female lovers, a wife, and a son]
Richard St Vier (Swordspoint) [canonically has a female ex-lover (Jessamyn)]
Aral Vorkosigan (Barrayar)
Desire (Sandman)
Henry (Blood Price/Tanya Huff)
Anise (Sing the Four Quarters/Tanya Huff)
Bannon and Vree (Fifth Quarter/Tanya Huff)
Sarah Rainmaker (Gen13)
Eric and Cory (Bedlam's Bard/Mercedes Lackey)
the Elfquest series
the Anita Blake series

Trans/Genderqueer
Dono Vorrutyer (A Civil Campaign; debatable whether this represents an actual trans narrative; I've read arguments against but not for.)
Iain Banks' Culture novels (also debatable; people can alter their bodies with a thought and show no attachment to either gender, particularly. Perhaps more post-gender than trans?)
Desire (Sandman)
Mission Child (Maureen McHugh)
Glasshouse (Charles Stross; debatable - see comments)
The Left Hand of Darkness (LeGuin; not strictly trans, but influential look at gender)
Tobin/Tamir (the Tamir Triad, Lynn Flewelling; also not *strictly* trans, but a critical look at gender essentialism)
Weetzie Bat (Francesca Lia Block)
Xenogenesis (Octavia Butler; third gendered aliens)
Imajica (Clive Barker; third gendered character)
Wanda (Sandman; controversial character)
Okha Soyan (Bloodhound/Tamora Pierce)

suggested but unsure where to classify
Blackjack (Lee Singer)

So, my friends who may be more well-read than I, what do *you* suggest? PS: Feel free to link!

1. Characters whose life history is basically trauma after trauma after trauma.

2. Plots that exist mainly to further traumatize the characters.

These are not what I look for in my fiction. I do not enjoy reading about people's misery. Yet I also understand that sunshine and bunnies and kumbayah make for rather dull stories, so of course there should be problems and bad things happening. Balance. It's a good thing.

So, there are these up and coming fantasy authors who receive wide critical acclaim in the SFF community because of their amazing style and/or voice.

I can't stand them. It reads to me as overwritten and pretentious, which is everything I hate in fiction. For example, Catherynne Valente. I wanted to like Palimpsest, and I liked the idea behind it (a sexually-transmitted city? cool!), but when I read it, I kept wishing she hadn't spent so much effort on style.

I've read excerpts from a forthcoming novel (or very recently released?), and ... I have the same problem. I have no plans to read it entirely, so I won't mention the title here, though the author's initials are NJ. I've read gushing reviews, and, while the story might be good (fantasy has recently become very much Not My Cup of Tea), the writing hits me in that trying too hard spot.

(Then there's the dang (also horribly overwritten) Kushiel series, which I wanted to like but hated for a variety of reasons, including a) I wanted the narrator to die because she was such a self-absorbed twat and b) Carey made BDSM BORING. Also c) indentured sexual servitude of minors without their consent, aside from being born into it. WHICH ISN'T CONSENT, GUYS.)

So I must be defective, and a bad writer who likes bad writing, because I don't like these great New Fantasy™ writers and think they overwrite and are trying to become Literary. I like straightforward, unpretentious writing. And there's so much recently written that seems to be filled with Literary Allusions that Smart People should Get, though in reality Smart People means "former English majors."

I'll never be successful, I guess, if the market is all about attempting to write in a Literary style.

Because my journal is turning into a series of boring how many words I wrote today posts, I'll add something else to this one.

Yesterday I went to a law & ethics update. I learned that if you're a patient in North Carolina and file a malpractice suit, unless you can get an expert witness (which is hard to do, apparently), you'll lose. Even if it's something incredibly fucking obvious, like the surgeon operated on the wrong damn knee. The court threw out the case because they couldn't get an expert witness. Seriously, WTF.

I renewed my license, so I'll be able to work, legally, next year. Even if I have to *shudder* get a real job somewhere, since this per diem thing isn't working so well.

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Today's word count: 1803
Total word count: 32680

Today I went back in time a bit, after getting stuck in the tactics of this stupid space station battle. What I need is some visual/artistic talent so I can draw the layout of the station from a ground-level perspective. I dl'ed google SketchUp, though my skills are kinda ass.

Seriously, not being a visual person makes working out things like, oh, what a station looks like, what people look like, how a particular building looks, whatever, incredibly fucking difficult.

I have an email pending to my military buddy, about how to make this stupid battle scene work.

---
I read a couple Georgette Heyer novels recently. It's amazing how many things she got away with that you're told never to do -- the synonyms for "said," (including everyone's favorite, "ejaculated"), switching POV without a marker, giving people's life histories in the middle of a chapter as infodump. I like them; they're fun and silly, but they're not good examples for modeling my own writing.

So I finally started reading Consider Phlebas, which Phil gave me for my birthday. (My birthday is in March.) I'm not very far in; with Ben busy Assassinating (Assassin's Creed 2 is just as bizarre as the first game) and me writing all day, I'm finding that I don't have much time to read. (I still haven't finished All the Shah's Men. I've only got 2 or 3 chapters to go, I think.)

I can get through the current chapter in CP before Ben gets home if I get off the computer now.