We almost always have it on the third Saturday of December, since the third Saturday of every other month is the night we get together for our monthly Writers’ Night. For many years different members of the project took turns hosting the party. Then we went a number of years where the same household hosted it almost every year. Since the size of the party varies widely, it winds up being a major undertaking.
So this year we decided to try something different… Continue reading Holiday Party
A lot of other people have written about how stingy American employers are with paid time off. About how even at companies with policies which, on paper, appear very generous while the realities of work schedules require workers put in longer and longer hours. Despite studies showing the workers become less productive in those situations, we seem incapable of grappling with the problem in a meaningful way.
For me it manifests most strikingly at this time of year. I seldom took long stretches of time off at my previous place. I would take a week off in the summer, and I’d lake a few days off here and there to go to conventions, and I’d take a week off for Christmas.
And for several years I had gotten in the habit of taking off all the Fridays from Thanksgiving through New Year. And that’s the thing I really miss. I realize that part of the reason I seem to feel more tired all the time is that I don’t have as many of those little vacations throughout the year. And I’m getting older, which isn’t helping.
But it’s really noticeable right now, when I’m further behind on all the holiday stuff than usual. Each Monday that’s rolled around, the alarm clock goes off and I have this little argument with myself about how it can’t be Monday already.
And I feel like an ingrate for even feeling this way, as I know several people who are looking for work. Or have jobs that they don’t like (I love my job! I sometimes feel guilty for that, too!). Or just have much more complicated, busy, or unpleasant lives.
I would just like to stop feeling as if I need to sleep for a week.
So I totally understand why some of my long distance friends don’t understand just how much I despise snow. I hate snow. I have said many times that if I never have to walk in snow ever again—even if I live to be a million years old—I would be just fine.
I really don’t quite understand what he sees in me. Whenever I ask him why he puts up with me, he just counters with asking why I put up with him. Which makes no sense at all, because I can be annoying and exasperating.
This escalated over time, as one or the other of us would find other companies offering some kind of holiday or christmas blend of beans while we were shopping. Some years we would wind up with a half dozen or more bags of different holiday blends…
Today is World AIDS Day. Each year, I spend part of the day remembering people I have known who left this world too soon because of that disease.
So: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack. Some of you I didn’t know for very long. One of you was a relative. One of you was one of my best friends in high school.
I miss you all. It was a privilege to know you.
Michael Spectre has a piece at the New Yorker that everyone ought to read (not just gay people): WHAT YOUNG GAY MEN DON’T KNOW ABOUT AIDS.
Because of a comment by a friend on Twitter, I wound up in a discussion about my Christmas music, and because the person I was talking with is also a friend of my husband, he had to chime in with some comments about the size of my Christmas music collection. Which got more friends involved as we debated the timeless question: is there such a thing as too much Christmas music?
Because of my past experiences of trying to tie a personal story-finishing goal into the creative energy of the NaNoWriMo experience, I also set myself a goal of writing t least 1000 words a day, updating my word count regularly on the NaNoWriMo website (where I am Fontfolly—if you’re participating in and have an account, feel free to add me as a Writing Buddy). I have also tried to be racing with a few of my friends as an additional incentive.
This weekend was not very productive. I knew it would be a challenge, because we were hosting the monthly Writers’ Night at our house and I was scheduled to gamemaster a SteamPunk game on Sunday. Hosting Writers’ Night meant cleaning the house and cooking for a bunch of people, in addition to the time of the actual event. Running the game meant doing some research and cooking food to bring to the potluck in addition to the time of the actual event.
Plus, as if that wasn’t enough, on Friday afternoon, while I was working from home, and specifically when I was getting ready to run out for a doctor’s appointment, the toilet decided to overflow! That created an unexpected amount of work that day, as you can imagine.
I had about 75,000 words of the novel written before I started. Those words were arranged into 14 and a couple half-chapters, the chapters consisting generally of 3 to 5 scenes each. One of the reasons for the two half-chapters has been that for some months I’ve been mucking about trying to re-organize what was there. The reasons for the re-org were two-fold. About half the attendees of the monthly writer’s meeting had raised the issue a few times that the story either had two many characters for people to keep track of, or too many sub-plots to follow. The other half of the group seemed to think that the characters and subplots were okay (and they could see how subplots were converging), but admitted it was difficult for them to say how it held together with so much going on, and gaps of a month in-between reading what came next.
Thus, I’d been spinning my wheels engaged in a lot of re-considering and re-arranging as I tried to figure out which parts were truly vital to the main plot.
Since starting NaNoWriMo, I’ve written 37 complete new scenes. I have advanced several of the subplots fairly well. I’m more or less organizing the scenes into chapters, though at the moment some of those chapters are a lot longer than I had previously been letting them go. At the moment I have 21 chapters, I think (it’s a little weird because I have three chapter 13s and three chapter 17s for reasons that are a bit long to explain at this juncture; but cleaning all of that up is something to do after NaNoWriMo, right?).
As a consequence of taking the NaNoWriMo philosophy to heart—keep writing, just keep writing, don’t stop to edit and revise—one thing that has been different about the new chapters is that I’m sticking with one set of characters for several scenes in a row. Based on comments at the Writers’ meeting this last weekend, I think one of the main problems in the earlier chapters was that I was grouping scenes into chapters such that the reader was constantly jumping from one set of characters to another. There are some points in the plot where that really is necessary, but I think with the complicated plot I have (the word “entanglement” is in the title for more than one reason!), that allowing the reader to focus on few characters at a time will work out better in the end.
Wish me luck!
Sixteen years ago this week, several bad things happened.
It began in the wee small hours of the morning of the 12th. I was awakened by the sound of a crash. I stumbled into the computer room to see one bookcase knocked over, and my husband, Ray, on the floor having some kind of seizure.
He had been sick for a few years. There had been surgery and rounds of chemotherapy. Just two weeks before, the specialist overseeing his treatment had cautiously told us that instead of only having two years or less to live, Ray might be looking at five to ten years.
They had been telling us the “two years or less” line for more than three years, and I had kept refusing to believe it, so I’m not sure why I took the new prognosis as such good news. Other than the usual human tendency to reject news we don’t like, and accept news we do.
I remained surprisingly calm as I tried to hold him so he wouldn’t hurt himself further and call 9-1-1.
Until something happened. I still can’t describe it very well. He was still seizing, but something changed. The light in his eyes was different, or something. Until that moment, I believed this was something treatable. Something we could fix. But when that change happened, I suddenly stopped believing… So by the time the paramedics got there I was in more than a bit of a panic.
I could go on to list the other things that happened, the many stages of denial (for other people, denial was a single stage, for me it went through an incredible number of nuanced phases over the next couple of days). Then, while hugging and crying on my friend, Kristin’s, shoulder, I jumped over the other phases. I’d been crying off and on for hours—days, technically (though I’d only slept a couple hours out of the previous 48+, so it seemed like one really long, horrible day).
So on the 14th I signed some papers. Then a couple of nurses turned off the monitors, removed the respirator tubes, and turned off the rest of the machines.
I held Ray’s hand. I said “Good-bye.”
I don’t remember if I cried again. My last chronologically-in-order memory is taking hold of his hand that one last time. My memories for the next few months are like a collection of shattered glass pictures.
He promised me he would stay with me for the rest of his life. And he did.
Font Folly 