The Pleasure and the Pain

Two nights in a row of less that five hours sleep has me a little grimy behind the eyes. The past couple of nights I hadn't been sleeping well, and yesterday I woke up around four in the morning and crawled into the office by six or so. I had a surprisingly productive day, cranking out seven web pages with some infrastructure for a new component for our system before crashing hard around 3:00pm or so. I went home, picking up Omaha, Kouryou-chan, and a friend of Kouryou-chan's from the playground on the way home. I took a nap.

As I lay down, I heard Kouryou-chan's voice through the door say, "I want to play dress up, prince and princess." And her friend, a boy, said, "I want to play guns and armies!" I'm sorry, but nobody can tell me those differences aren't innate.

After my nap, Omaha and I decided to head out to a local fish joint for a quick bite, then I got ready to go out clubbing with some friends. It had been on my calendar for weeks and I finally got some time to exercise it. I had a good time and after a few quick phone calls we ended up at the Grind, where I'll just say this: Reality rocks.

But I'm too old to be up until 1:00am, then crawl into the office at seven.

In good news, I have been keeping up with my Japanese lessons. I just started lesson one of the third semester and have been abusing my brain with an unceasing torrent of jpop. I'm starting to pick out a lot of the words, but as always the vocabulary lags behind the grammar. Man, Ayumi Hamasaki uses the words "always" and "someday" a lot in her songs. *Grin*

For some reason I got into the "What's on your IPod?" conversation. Hmm. Fifteen hours of Japanese classes, fifteen hours of lectures on American Literature, three hours of children's music, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks' The Two Thousand Year Old Man, three Japanese radio plays based on Mai HiME, and about sixty hours of music, about ten of which is JPop.

And I picked up China Mieville's _Iron Council_ a few weeks ago, but finally read the first chapter last night. In the first three pages I was completely entranced with his language. Gods, I'll never be that good.

Truth is sexier than fiction

So, I was doing research for my characters, trying to come up with names. And I learned that toward the end of the 16th century there was a brief fad in Southern France for giving upper class children American Indian names.

It's right in my revised timeline too. I was struck, briefly, with the idea of giving my noblewoman the name "Marquise Cheyenne de Chamonix", but I don't think my audience would buy the Cheyenne part.

---

Sometimes, the old ways are best. The first fifty pages of the Journal Entries were written on paper, with a pencil. Well, I've graduated to a pen (Jetstream Uniball) and a notebook (Moleskin, of course), but I've written the opening scene down to Moon, Sun, Dragons, and I actually think I know where I'm going with this. Neal Stephenson is right-- the word processor lets you write faster than you think. A pen is humane speed.

I tried reading the scene aloud, and it works okay. My litmus test is this: if I can't imagine Steven Pacey, the actor who played Tarrant on Blake's Seven, reading it aloud, it's not a good scene. Why Pacey? Because he's been the reader for two audiobooks that I think were better read by him than when I read them myself: Dunnet's Niccolo Rising and Harris's Pompeii. Although for the love scenes I might imagine Jeremey Irons reading it.

Oddly enough, as far as I can tell, I have no love scenes planned for Moon, Sun, Dragons. I wonder if that could hurt sales?

I can't move my head!

I must have slept on something wrong, because last week sometime I pulled a muscle in my back and I thought it was healing well until this morning. Now it hurts so bad I can't move my neck. To look around a room I have to turn my entire torso, making me look and feel a bit like C-3PO. It's really annoying. Ibuprofen is helping.

Oh, and I fixed the <div#separator> definition to put more whitespace between articles in my pink stylesheet. That should help.