Writing, Threesomes, Screaming Children, Gardening, Picnics

[elfs]

It's gonna be a long post. Read at your discretion.

This always happens. I tell myself I'm gonna take a week off from writing and instead I end up writing a lot. I like writing. It feels good to write, even if what I write isn't anything that I'm planning on showing to people. I managed to get about 9000 words into the latest attempt Fragility and I think I've got a much better picture of how it's going. It's been a terrible trial to get this done; this is the fourth draft and I've finally got an outline that I like. It's being done for Misuko and Linia's benefit, but I like Belle after all. And she's about to become something rather disturbing in the day and age into which she emerges: a financial planner who remembers when managing your money was a matter of life and death.

Oh, and I finally opened up a file for Bridges of Stone, which has become a sort of metaphor for the kinds of relationships Ken has with P'nyssa and Aaden. The fact that he's been away from them for two years, and that he's been spending those years with Wish, makes for some interesting introspections. Wish, of course, plays catalyst.

Someone on alt.sex.stories.d ('d' for discussion, traditionally) aske the question, "How much of your stories is drawn from real life?" I have to admit that quite a bit is. I do warn anyone who invites me into his or her bedroom that he or she may end up as a Journal Entries character-- with fur, and tails, and quite possibly of the other gender, and probably renamed, and hopefully unrecognizeable. But it's all grist for the mental millworks.

Haven't opened a file for Madships yet, which is bad-- it needs to get out of my head and onto paper. The critical scenes would be best, since it's still fresh in my head.

I feel a little unfair writing about these things because the real fact is that these stories aren't going to surface for years. That's life. I have five or six episodes of The Ritacha War to post, and then I have some decisions to make about what's salvageable from my previous writing era that I want to turn into material again. I have a few stories set on llerkin, but I'm a little uncomfortable with some of the material after that. It doesn't read well. It doesn't read like me.

I managed to write over 2000 words on Friday alone. I finished the next draft of Fragility and, like I said, worked a little on Bridges ....

As Of Now, These Links Do Not Yet Work. But I will be posting these two stories tomorrow (April 1st):

• Confusion
• Coffee

When I got home, I quickly took a shower and sat around for a while. I was supposed to go with some friends to Erotic City but, well, we never made it there. A lovely couple, her shoulder was out, so we coupled on the floor right there in the living room rather than risk riding in the car and aggravating it. Perhaps the most striking thing about it is that it was wonderful, but what happened is best preserved in a story, not an LJ. So to the people who were expecting us at EC, I can only say sorry, but I got distracted by much better offers.

One thing I did realize about the encounter is that I seriously need to start looking for a boyfriend. Oh, yeah, and a cloning outfit so that I have that extra life for dating!

Saturday was the flip side of Friday: seven screaming children (blissfully, at someone else's house) celebrating a birthday party. Seven screaming children.

The sad part is that we went and picked up Yamaarashi-chan for the event. She's spent a little time with the twins whe were celebrating their natal day, so we figured that one way or another she'd have some fun there. But the family we were visiting had two cats locked up in the household office, and all she wanted to do was stand next to the office door (which is glassed) and wave at the cats. We had to pry her away from there to sing "Happy Birthday." And when we were done she went back.

She's not anti-social. When we go to Kidopolis or the park, she's the first one to make contact with other kids. She tells them her name and asks for their name in return. I can't figure out what the heck happened yesterday to make her turn inwards like that. Omaha thinks it might be genetic, since I loathe parties and, if I don't have someone to have sex with or talk geek with, I'll pull out the book in my pocket and start reading. (Don't think I'm kidding about that. Ask my friends who've seen me at Confurence or Sakura Con.)

So, Sunday omahas drags me out of bed and we're off to a zillion different places, the last of which is the gardening center.

Now, I'm going to make a confession. I'm red/blue colorblind at about sixty percent saturation. Which means that as the richness of anything with red or blue in it drops, I cannot tell what color it is. My physician tells me it's neurological-- with enough priming I can tell the difference between near-green and near-blue, but I seem to be unable to remember that difference. Ask me again in an hour and I'll have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it wrong. This wreaks all kinds of havoc-- I can't tell the difference between yellow and orange and yellow in low light where most other people seem to have no problem, and green and blue are often confounding to me.

So why Omaha asks me what colors I want out front is mystifying. I have no idea what would look aesthetically pleasing in our front yard other than a sense of continuity and care-- the lawn is patchy and there's this huge, grassless scar where we dug last year to replace the entire water line. If I have time this afternoon I must rake the front yard and pour some boiling water on all the moss in the driveway. But I also have to drive Omaha to work-- a round trip that typically takes an hour and half, so I don't think I'll have time tonight.

After the trip to the gardening shop we went home where I cooked up lunch for us. Nothing special, just a BLT for me and egg salad for Kouryou-chan, and then we went off to the park to eat lunch and let the sprog run herself ragged.

Every time I've been to this park I've come across an object lesson in disaster. Last time it was a pair of girls running around while their father, visibly drunk and still taking drags on a paper-bag wrapped can of Miller, watched from the picnic tables. This time it was a family where the eldest was a grossly obese woman in her early forties, her daughter was in her very early 20s, smoked, and had three kids of her own. Yeah, I'm a little judgemental about these things.

I don't know that that's a "bad thing." I mean, after all, we are all trying to make the world a better place for our children. How can we not do that without judging what's "better" in the first place?

Comments

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

Yamaarashi-chan has just been through the breakup of her mother's primary relationship twice in the last year. That would freak me out. I understand that some, if not all, of her mother's partner's cats are also being moved back out, and Yamaarashi-chan loves cats. I can understand why she might be a bit withdrawn.

Boiling water on the driveway? Perhaps that's what I should try on the front porch (which is pressure-treated wood), to kill the moss there.

[jenk]

One of these days we should get you to a house concert at Betsy Tinney's. Last summer Yamaarashi-chan and one of her older sisters came with their mom. Betsy introduced them to some of her Maine Coons...love at first sight. I don't think the girls left the cattery until it was time to leave. (Neither did damiana_swan's daughters, now that I think of it... :)

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

They didn't. *grin* In fact, I've had to pry them away with a crowbar every time we've been to Betsy's. This last time they spent quite a long time in one of the cat rooms (yes, the cats have entire rooms to themselves) laying on the floor, making a game out of seeing just how many cats they could get to come lie on top of them. (5 out of the 7, as it turned out.)

Last summer, although Yamaarashi-chan spent a fair amount of the evening sticking close by her mother, the 5 girls--it was actually 2 of her 3 older sisters there, as well as my two--all had a wonderful time together.

[jenk]

Thanks, I forgot how many teens there were ;)

[kyriani.livejournal.com]

I do the exact same thing at parties, which drives Matt absolutely up the wall. ;) Only for me its a tie between a book and doodling in a sketchpad. The sketching actually does get me to interact occasionally with people however, as if you are drawing I have found it inevitable that people hang curiously over your shoulder to see what you are doing. Thats how I met William (Haunted Wm) actually, though in a cafe instead of a party. ^_^

Hrm, so much to do on my own writing/art front... -_-;; Your sheer writing output amazes me. :)

I'm hoping to eventually (probably 10 years down the line) get a condo with Matt, so that we will actually own our living space, but not have to take care of the extraneous stuff around the physical building it is in. We have a hard enough time keeping the inside of our apartment clean, much less a house and yard and etc... I bow in awe to those of you with actual real *Houses* that actually work to keep them up. ^_^

Btw, thanks for all the encouragement lately, it matters a lot to me.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The "sheer output" is a matter of having a laptop and a bus ride to work everyday. That's how I get away with it. It lets me write some thousand words a day, here and there, and edit when I'm not in the mood to feel creative. I'd love to get a Wacom pad so I could draw on the machine, since my main problem with art is that I spend so much time fiddling with the roughs I never get around to actually learning how to do inking or coloration.

[nitoda]

Hey, what with the ants and the moss and all, Seattle sounds a lot like Doncaster! Does pouring boiling water over the moss on the driveway actually work to remove and/or kill it? I'd really like to find a solution that didn't involve spraying it with chemicals! We've had a terrible time this winter with moss, there's so much of it, and the bottom foot or so of the white rendered walls of the house are going green too ... grrrrr. I generally prefer green over black, particularly grass over tarmac, but it gets slippery and dangerous having moss on the actual driveway, so I have to fight it off, much as I would prefer to encourage it.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Actually, boiling water does work, but you might have to do it several times, scraping off the dead moss that's really embedded into the tarmac when you're done. And it's so much more labor-intensive than just using RoundUp or some other salt-based weed killer, lugging the water out and pouring it on. If you have a lot of moss, it might not be worth the effort to scald the moss to death.

Your writing and what it prompts.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

This is sort of an apology and a request for permission six months too late.

I chose "Convers[at]ions" as the title of my fanzine when I pubbed my ish for the first time last November. It's linked to as the "website" on my userinfo page. I'm bringing issue two out on Friday week, and it'll include the following very brief article:

A Word of Explanation
A fanzine has to have a title. I wanted a title which encapsulated what I wanted this little exercise to achieve: to relay to a wider audience some of the things which I’d said or written, some of the things that I’d seen others say or write – and, by passing these conversations on, to make people think about things which they might otherwise have left unexamined. To provoke changes in the minds of my readers.
I stole the title. "Convers[at]ions" by Elf Matheiu Sternberg was published ten years ago, on the 11th April 1993. In this story, people talked to each other, and changes were wrought in more than one of them.
I’m grateful for the story. I’m grateful to Elf for writing it. I’m grateful for the title. But I’m more grateful for the way in which reading what people write can effect these changes in us.
Happy tenth birthday, Story-whose-title-I-stole.

I read that story a long long time ago. And I wrote the lines I've quoted here before I read what you wrote on Monday. I hope you don't mind.