Drowning Nor Waving

February 16, 2010 Progress Notes:

The Enchanted Generation

Words today: 250.
Words total: 1850.
Reason for stopping: I was going to push for 400 tonight, but according to this memo I just received, I'm really tired.

Darling du Jour: Silly child's nicknames; Emily Ellis-Bell, secret lady authoress. Edgar Tom-O'Bedlam, whirling rag-clad dervish of the blasted Oxfordshire heath, who disarmed his worse brother with branches fallen from the old oak tree.

Mean Things: People got old while you were away. Ouch.
Research Roundup: Edgar's role in King Lear, a decent summary of Wuthering Heights, whether "dervish" was in the English language in 1919.
Books in progress: Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl.
The glamour: Dayjob, some errands after, dutiful knitting on Gift Socks.

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My base texts for this so far seem to be Testament of Youth, Sleeping Beauty, and King Lear. Make of that what you will. Also, my backbrain connects up the damnedest things in subtle-yet-blinding ways. It's nice when it lets me into the loop on that.

Other things!

douglascohen is still doing his ROF Retrospectives, and he's hit the issue with "Lost Wax" in it. Small commentary behind the link.

This gentleman is apparently literary-boxing me. This could explain why I am tired. *g*

Apparently I am one of 25 Authors Worth Watching in 2010 and Beyond. Huh. Cool. I will attempt to be worth watching so as to not disappoint. It's good company, too, and I'm looking forward to seeing how his spotlight series goes.

Finally, I figured out what that laptop cost me in SFWA pro-rates wordcount. I give you: the Great 2010 Laptop Debt Kill!

1150 / 17000 words. 7% done!

Yes, that is entirely for my own amusement.

Goodnight, internet. This concludes our broadcasting day. :)

February 12, 2010 Progress Notes:

The Enchanted Generation

Words today: 100.
Words total: 700.
Reason for stopping: I don't even want to discuss how long that took.

Darling du Jour: N/A.

Mean Things: The beginning of what will be a terrible little fascination.
Research Roundup: Bone china reference photos.
Books in progress: Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief.
The glamour: Minimal. I didn't properly wake up today, and I've been doing everything through a layer of smoke and cotton wool.

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This is not an especially auspcious start to my last long weekend before the Dayjob ramps back up. Or it is. Because despite my brain's seeming desire to go wandering through the marshes today, I did not go to bed until I had at least a pittance of words.

More tomorrow. I spent a lot of time sorting out the blocking and line of direction for the opening scene tonight. It'll all make more sense in the morning.

On and off, this year, I've been reading about WWI and the effects of it into the 1920s: memoirs, letters, social histories, more theoretical and thesis-driven histories, poetry. Photographs. Mostly memoirs, which tell me with a more limited amount of self-censorship what people saw and thought and felt. I paid a visit to the War Museum a few weeks ago and stood in the room they've done up like a trench, eyes half-closed, ignoring everyone else in there and trying to soak it in down to the bone.

This is for a book. It won't even be about the First World War as it happened, not really. I'm reading for the emotions, and to find what I need to change to make my idea work.

Thing is, wading sleeves-rolled into a topic does things to how you think.

I have caught myself unaccountably angry this year when someone uses lightly the phrase "in the trenches"; as in, "for those strikers in the trenches, that's not good enough." I want to shake that person: Really? They're in the trenches? Are they eighteen years old, sleeping with the rats in churned up mud, and under consistent artillery assault? No? So shut your face. Yes, it's a colloquialism of our language as spoken. I know. I have caught myself passing my first pair of hand-knit socks over and over through my hands, thinking about how they took me three months to knit up, how women must have done it better and faster and with so much more practice to be able to send socks for entire navy ships. What it was like when they thought about where their socks went. What it would feel like if what I do for a hobby was one of my only mechanisms of control over something terrifying.

This year, I read the articles and hear the speeches and see the photographs and I cry. Yeah, it's a trite thing to say. But there you go. I cry.

I'm not even halfway into the kind of research I'll need to do to get this right. Tip of the iceberg, kids. Tip of the iceberg.

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Today is strange. Today's a bit of a paradox for me right now. Sometimes you think you know what a thing means until you start doing your reading, and you realize the edges of what it means. We all know poppies. We all know In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row, mostly heard internally as the kind of singsong recitation kids do when they've been made to memorize. Remembrance Day is most definitely those things, and wreath-layings, and these kindly aging people, fewer and fewer of them each year, who come out in uniforms that seem so anachronistic on them. And I wonder what we're actually remembering. If those things haven't, in some ways, become not just the means but the ends of the whole affair.

The connections between symbols and referents inherently get loose, with time; it happens to words too. With words it's called semantic bleaching, when a thing stops meaning what it means and drifts toward a general good or bad. It's a human tendency: People's ideas of a thing, through repetition, start to spin and drift, and all symbols need to be redefined, be personalized, be ultimately co-opted in a million million little ways to stay at all socially relevant. It's the peril of traditions. After a while, you do a thing because you do, not because of whatever started it. Not because you don't care or are a bad person or something, but because that's the human tendency. That's semantic bleaching: that's what happens. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.

When I've started the research; when I've looked at the photographs and read the letters and tried to immerse myself in it, tried to think about what I'm not seeing and will never see, that upsets the hell out of me.

(And no, I am not expressing this right to get it clear across. I've rewritten in three times, and half the logic's still in my head and not on the page here. But I'm all dragged down in my own symbols and referents too, and it's unfortunately the best I can do.)

Greetings, Internets!

I am back in the confines of the cozy hotel business centre,* waiting for my dinner to arrive. It is wet and rainy and there's this wind that just went through me like whoa, so dinner will be inside the confines of my room tonight, where there's the nice big warm bed and the TV and my book.

Today I walked my feet off, but in that way that means you've been doing stuff rather than an unproductive and cruddy way. Got up early this morning after a night of not enough sleep** and had a really nice big breakfast downstairs, and then hied myself off to the War Museum for the part of this trip that actually counts as work: WWI research for The Enchanted Generation.

I have apparently reached the point where I've read and taken in enough stuff about WWI that I've...well, attached. There's some really fantastic stuff in there -- even if I didn't always agree with the treatment, and that's another discussion -- like a trench recreation, access to thousands of scanned-in enlistment papers, photographs. It all made me pretty much want to bawl until my eyes bled.

And then I went to a coffeeshop and took down three pages of notes for The Enchanted Generation, so.

Met up with kafkonia at said coffeeshop and went to lunch, which was awesome, since he's on the list of people I don't see too much/enough. After that I had a thought of going to the Parliament building for a tour, but apparently that ship had sailed for today (I forgot how everything in Ottawa closes three hours earlier than I am acculturated to find standard) so instead I just kept going to the National Gallery.

I struck out a bit at the National Gallery too: they were closing in an hour, the piece I had really, really, really wanted to see again (which is pictured in my icon here) wasn't out on display this month, and and and phooey. But I did get to see one of my favourite Lawren Harris paintings, and a whole chapel that they took down and reconstructed inside the gallery, and some modernist stuff which will also help with the book, and then thought thoughts about some of the general subtext of the modernist aesthetic when applied to painting (especially Cubism, actually. It's not what it looks like at first shake, I think) and just the...metatext of self-portraits; what it means, as an act, to paint self-portraits.

I may or may not have sprung for a Pretty Notebook (tm) at the gallery gift shop.

After that I had time to kill until 6:45, which is when my Haunted Walk tour started, so I went to the Rideau Centre and 1) had a coffee to warm myself back up and 2) searched in vain for cute tights, which could be found at one place but for horrendous price. And then, freezing and partially regretting that I'd paid for this on an evening where I was wearing a skirt and tights and it was raining and blowing cold like eeee, I went on the ghost tour.

The ghost tour is fun. It was worth it. We got cider at the end, and I got to (surreptitiously!) see the death cast they made of Thomas D'Arcy McGee's hand, since his face was all blown off and a death mask, as was standard, was kind of not on.

And now I am back ensconced in a warm place where my feet can be both dry and warm, at the same time! My Thai food is here too,**** so I am going to adjourn to my room and eat my pad thai and watch, perhaps, some more wholesome true crime TV.

More adventure will be reported tomorrow. *g*


*Just forget it. Next time I actually have to travel and want to have internet with me when I do? I am sucking it up and buying a laptop that works.

**I wanted to knit and decompress a bit before bed last night, so I thought Oh, there's a TV with cable here, I'll just watch something and knit a bit and then go to bed. Bad idea. There's this show matociquala watches sometimes called The First 48, about real-life police teams trying to solve crimes and all the procedural and investigative stuff involved in, well, the first 48 hours.*** It is completely, fascinatingly mindsucking. I got to sleep at *cough*-o'clock. >.>

***Confidential to said matociquala: I saw Detective Sergeant Justice!

****Even though they screwed up the order, and I am down one bowl of tom kha. Foiled again.

It's been quiet here because, well, it's been quiet here. For example, after work today I went to the drugstore for saline for my contact lenses, got two tomato plants and some light groceries around the corner, planted the tomato plants (pictures later), watched the CM season finale and made Chinese beef dumplings, which is a several-hour process what with all the leaving the dough to rise fifty times. After this, I expect to curl up with Bright Young People and my notepad and continue the deathless (!) TEG research reading.

(I did get my new research books in the mail. So I have Vile Bodies, Letters from a Lost Generation, which is probably next, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, and a memoir called Jellied Eels and Zeppelins that looks like it was dictated to a journalist by a woman of said generation and published at a very, very small press. It purports to be a window onto Edwardian working-class life, which I need. And even if it's junk, it was only three bucks.)

There is Other Stuff also going on, but it's either not for public consumption or I'm waiting on other people/events/decisions. So instead of all of us being twitchy about it, I'll just talk about all that when I have results to report.

Lucky for you, on Saturday El wistling has corralled a few of us into another scavenger hunt, this one mostly computer-based, and on Sunday some of the people from the Tenants' Association are cleaning out and replanting the concrete planter outside my building, so there will in fact be signs of life on this LJ.

Soon.

Sometime. *g*

February 19, 2009 Progress Notes:

"Fanmail"

Words today: 250.
Words total: 250.
Reason for stopping: That's the setup, and it's all I'm getting tonight, apparently.

Books in progress: Robert Graves, The Long Week-end; David Anthony Durham, Acacia.
The glamour: Dayjobbery, untangling a thing with my gym membership, magazine work, workshop work, work work work.

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For one! You guys are all very sweet with your one-word thing. Although it occurred to me that people who don't have anything nice to say probably skip that sort of thing, and so we are existing in a bubble of self-selection. But I'll take it. *g*

For two! I sought this song out on mirrorthaw's mention (the title made me curious), and now it shall go on my TEG playlist. Ignore the video. We care not about the video.

This is made of General Strike goodness and thematic and ironic goodness as well. It's totally a union song, but we'll ignore that bit and wring its little lyrics dry for my books instead, before casting it aside like the cheap hussy it is. Mwaha.

Ladies and gentlemen, the glamour. *g*

November 29, 2008 Progress Notes:

"Sugar"

Words today: 550.
Words total: 3500.
Reason for stopping: It's late. Again.

Books in progress: Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep; Robert Graves, The Long Week-end.
The glamour: Worked a signing at the bookstore, promptly introvert-fitted, and came home.

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Reading for The Enchanted Generation continues apace. I spent a good chunk of last night and some of tonight reading buckets of WWI poetry to pick out epigraphs for each section, and have, I think, more than I can actually use. There is a terrible embarrasment of riches there, which is just serving to further convince me that WWI was actually the Worst War Ever. In summary:

cristalia (11:56:07 PM): It is good for me that WWI veterans were all into poetry and not, say, peggle.
matociquala (11:56:59 PM): heee
matociquala (11:57:10 PM): I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by popcap.
cristalia (11:58:33 PM): (bloated hysterical naked, wedging themselves in their office chairs at dawn, looking for an angry fix)

I may actually make a filter on which to babble about my TEG research stuff. If that happens and you care to hear me natter on upon said filter, speak now.

And tomorrow is the annual trip to the craft show, so I am crawling off to bed.

November 8, 2008 Progress Notes:

The Enchanted Generation

Words today: 250.
Words total: 250.

250 / 100,000 (0.2%)

Reason for stopping: I need to do some serious reading before I go any farther.
Munchies: Spicy tuna roll and water.

Darling du Jour: It was whiter inside, where the roses-and-gold enamel never got. We had worn it yellowed with decades of tea and lips lightly touching, and never noticed a thing.

Mean Things: Breaking the last good teacup.
Research Roundup: Whether it was 'dinner' or 'supper' in 1919 England; history of Wedgwood china; musk roses; popular girls' names for 1900; some inquiry with katallen about Scottish-English relations in the early 1900s; history of the University of Edinburgh.
Books in progress: Richard Adams, Watership Down.
The glamour: Groceries, dishes. I was not half as virtupus as I should have been today. I remain a bit quiet and fried.

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This is the first time words on this project have been substantial enough to do a post. It throws me a bone here and there every few weeks -- a plot point, a central symbol (tonight), something -- and I'll take some notes and add a sentence or two. This time it was a couple paragraphs. So the log has been created. We start somewhere.

I know there are some historians and librarians along here, so I'm throwing it out for the crowd: can anyone recommend some good social histories of Britain in the 1918-1939 era, or any particular scholars to avoid (for example, Robert Graves Y/N?)? I'm looking for daily life over meta-political analysis. If anyone has suggestions, I will be much obliged and probably buy you a beer.

September 11, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Pages today: 10.
Pages total: 10/264.

10 / 264 (3.8%)

Reason for stopping: I'm about to fall over.

Munchies: Pizza and hot wings. Mmm, grease.
Books in progress: Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone.
The glamour: Mostly dayjobbery. And nerves over job things and wedding things. I am become distressingly mundane.

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This would be Draft Two (Official), wherein we put the paper changes into the document and do all the actual work where I went FIX THIS IT SUCKS up and down the side of a whole page. Only ten pages tonight, because I am an old woman who gets tired at ten at night and needs to crawl off to her bed and take her pills, lest she break her hip on the zero stairs contained in her apartment and have fallen and be unable to get up.

Also did some various plotting on The Enchanted Generation, which is starting to be less The Wrong Book and maybe The Right Book. Either way, it is The Book I'm Intimidated By. Write one book every day that scares you? I dunno. It has some more plot now, and another thematic discussion which might turn out interesting if I don't botch it.

And now I will put a battery in my mp3 player for tomorrow so I can have music at work, and go to bed.