Construction
I think when a person gets to a certain age, there is a huge amount of joy to be had in knocking down bits of one’s house and making them better. I don’t own a house yet, but I’m already looking forward to being fifty or sixty years old and enjoying a parade of home improvements.
My friend bought a house only a few years ago, so she has a long way to go until that certain age – but, on the other hand, her husband (pictured below in non-OH&S-approved footwear) is a builder. So they bought a really cheap house and they’ve been doing marvellously messy things to it ever since.
I am heartily enjoying watching all of it. . . from a safe distance, of course! Renovation is a wonderful thing, but it can also be incredibly stressful for all involved.
By Christmas, this space will be a gorgeous North-facing multipurpose room. I can’t wait to see it done!
Do you look forward to renovations – or dread them?
What do you look forward to doing when you’ve reached fifty or sixty years of age (or, if you’re there already, when you’re another ten or twenty years older)?
Adoption in Australia
Every country has its areas of weakness, stupidity, or sheer badness. Australia has three that I know of that are fairly unique to us:
1. Our bizarre paranoia and lack of compassion regarding boat people – that is, refugees who arrive by boat (who are constantly the target of political rhetoric despite being incredibly rare compared to say, illegal immigrants who are rich enough to arrive by plane).
2. The life and death and health and crime statistics for Aboriginal Australians are drastically worse than those for the rest of Australia (although this is in part due to the city/country divide).
3. It is incredibly difficult, invasive, and time-consuming to adopt a child. Clearly, we want children to be protected from bad parents if possible, but this process in Australia is simply tragic. Good people who want to adopt children are put through so much lengthy red tape that even if they are eventually approved, they have passed the acceptable age range and are not allowed to adopt younger children.
If someday you get a chance to vote to change #3, please do so.
Kaja Foglio on Steampunk
Phil and Kaja Foglio – or their creation, the Girl Genius online comics and graphic novels – come up quickly in almost every steampunk discussion (at least, all of the discussions that run along the, “Ooh! Such-and-such is SO COOL!” lines). I have mentioned them myself many a time; they are one of very gew graphic novels I truly love.
Here is an article written by Kaja herself. I’ve always been careful to mention that they call their genre “gaslamp fantasy” rather than steampunk, but it turns out they’re perfectly happy for observers to call them steampunk as much as we like – so I shall do so in an unfettered manner from now on. Here’s what Kaja actually said on the matter:
(Officially, I still use the term “gaslamp fantasy” to describe Girl Genius. This saves me some time and grief, since, like any subculture or artistic movement, we have our share of people happily fighting about “what it all REALLY means.” Not slapping “steampunk!” all over my books keeps me from having to argue with them about whether or not we’re “doing it right.” They may be having fun arguing about what is and isn’t “proper steampunk,” I’ve got a story to tell. If it doesn’t fit into someone else’s box, well, so what? It’s mine.)
National Novel Writing Month (PG mild swearing)
National Novel Writing Month (generally called NaNoWriMo – and of course it’s international, not national) happens in November each year. It is a heady and caffeinated time when thousands of writers around the world attempt to write an entire novel (or at least the first 50,000 words) in one month. That requires an average rate of over 1600 words a day.
I’ve done it myself, more than once – successfully, I might add – and I don’t think the resulting novels were any worse than the rest of my books (make of that what you will). But it is important to note that the massive emotional high of the winners (if you complete your 50,000 words, you win) has led to many headaches for agents and publishers around the world.
Kids, do NaNoWriMo. It’s awesome. But for the love of all that is pure and good in the world, don’t send it anywhere in December. Or January. Or February. Maybe by March (especially if you do National Novel Editing Month – fifty hours of editing in the month of March each year) it will be okay. MAYBE.
Never forget: Your odds of publishing your finished book with a reputable publisher are about 1 in 10,000. Don’t be such a moron that you think finishing a first draft means you’re some kind of genius and can defy the odds without any more work. NaNoWriMo is mostly good for giving you a sense of how long 50,000 words is (NB: a lot shorter than most books, unless it’s for children) – so you have a better sense of what you’re doing next time. It happens to work well for me, because I already spend 90% of my writing time editing. THINK about how many hours that 90% is, and you’ll have an idea of how unfinished your “finished” book is on December 1st.
Here‘s an article by the M-rated Chuck Wendig (who has a wicked way with words). And here’s the bit that I think is the most important:
The one flaw in NaNoWriMo (and why it sometimes earns the ire of professional writers) is that it kind of floods the marketplace a little bit. November 30th rolls around and suddenly you have a world with thousands of new novels birthed screaming into an unkind world, and while that remains a truly sublime act of creation, it also means that you have a lot of writers who don’t have the sense of a tree grub, and these writers decide to abdicate their own sense of work and responsibility by throwing their unformed fetal drafts into the world. They choke the inboxes of agents and editors with their protoplasmic snot-waffle novels and they think, “Gee golly gosh, I’m a real writer now!” Except, they’re not. They’re rosy-cheeked, empty-eyed shitheads. Don’t be that shithead. Don’t just loose your garbage onto an unsuspecting world (which creates more work for agents and editors who already have a hard time finding diamonds in a sewage tank). Take time. Polish your work. Give it six months. Give it a year. Give the novel the air it needs to breathe. Give yourself, as a self-serious novelist, time to realize when this book is ready to roll or (a bigger and more mature revelation) that this book just isn’t “the one” — and that it’s time to write another better book, a book that doesn’t beg to be written only from November 1st to November 30th, a book that can be written whenever your fluttering wordmonkey heart so desires.
Narnia #3 of 7: “The Horse and His Boy” by CS Lewis
This is a truly interesting book, because it takes place entirely within the world of Narnia and the surrounding lands – in fact the whole book technically takes place within a sentence from “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” – and the children from our world barely appear.
Shasta is a boy who overhears his father arranging to sell him to a passing lord – which is when he finds out his “father” found him, the only survivor of some seafaring disaster, and took him in (not out of compassion; Shasta is essentially a slave and his facial features show he is of Narnian birth). He considers running away, and is more than slightly surprised when the lord’s horse advises that he do so. The horse was taken from Narnia as a colt, and brought to a much more “civilised” world where he has been pretending to be a normal horse for most of his life.
And so the horse (Bree) steals the boy, and their escape to Narnia begins. They soon fall in with a second talking horse and a local girl who is fleeing an arranged marriage. The horses get along rather better than the humans do, since the local girl is rather high-class and Shasta is anything but.
There are lion attacks, breathless flights, haunted tombs, and our heroes accidentally discover a plot to take Narnia by force. It’s all very exciting J
Free sample:
The cloud was bigger and thicker than it had looked at first and soon the night grew very dark. Just as Shasta was saying to himself, “We must be nearly at the sandhills by now,” his heart leapt into his mouth because an appalling noise had suddenly risen up out of the darkness ahead; a long snarling roar, melancholy and utterly savage. Instantly Bree swerved round and began galloping inland again as fast as he could gallop.
“What is it?” gasped Shasta.
“Lions!” said Bree, without checking his pace or turning his head.
Rating: PG. I’d call it absolutely G and safe for anyone, but one character is a close parallel to Jesus Christ (in one of the later books this character clearly states that he exists on Earth as well, is known by a different name there, and that the children have been brought into Narnia so that they can more easily recognise him on Earth), and some atheists have found that offensive. The books do focus on the adventures, rather than allegory about 95% of the time.
Baby Brain versus the Fuzz: Conclusion
As detailed here, here and then here, my general lack of practical life competence caused a police officer to pull me over in September and tell me that the registration I’d paid for our car had not gone through. It later became clear that, although the money had indeed left our account (just after we knew I was pregnant, and just before I became extremely sick – sick enough to fail to notice that the rego sticker never arrived), the customer reference number was incorrect.
Our bank automatically remembers customer reference numbers, which is super handy for every type of bill except car registrations, which require unique numbers each time a payment is made. (This is not something I’ll be forgetting in a hurry, but I’ve written it down most emphatically in a number of useful locations all the same.)
It was easily sorted with the Road Transport Authority, but the police were another matter. They’d given us fines totalling $1100 for driving around all unregistered for so many months. The RTA and I together explained the error via email, but the police chief’s representative said that the fine still applied. If I objected, I could appeal to the Magistrate’s Court.
I appealed, and was instructed to wait for a summons to court. Would we be given a court date while I was still sick, and so giantifically pregnant I could barely walk? Would it be in January, when I could go into labour at any moment? Would it be in February, when I’d just given birth and hadn’t slept since? Or would it be in March or April, when CJ and I would be in Beijing for a wedding?
Yesterday I received a letter from the police saying they’ve reviewed my case and cancelled the fine.
And voila! All is well once more.
Labour Part One
The class was. . . boring. Certainly not scary at all. The next class is also on labour, with more of a focus on pain relief options (which I already know fairly well). At present there are three things that concern me about labour:
1. It’s so far away (I actually came home and cried because of this).
2. I start labour from a position of weakness because of this stupid pregnancy. My cardiovascular health is rubbish, I’m unable to eat most vegetables, and I’ll be nauseous the whole time I’m in labour – bleaugh! It’s very likely that I’ll throw up at least once. Awesome.
3. It’s well established that fear/anxiety makes labour worse. This is not a nice thing to tell a person with an anxiety disorder.
But I did realise, with #3, that this is another place where seven years of anxiety is actually good training (much like my well-established ability to cope with the humiliation and boredom of not being able to work decent hours – it is much easier for me to deal with a reduction from 12 hours to 3 hours/week than a normal person who would have had to adjust to 3 hours/week after 35 hours/week).
There are very few people with as much practice at dealing with fear as yours truly. I may well have a labour experience that provokes the response of, “Was that it?” (at least in terms of fear/anxiety).
I tend to take a different emotional path than other people, so while grocery shopping is terrifying, labour is not – and it’s possible it never will be.
But, for the record, this is not a good time to find flaws in my logic. A mental placebo needs to remain sacred in order to work.
Here’s a shot of the calender from our bedroom. Each week is marked out, and the 18th (which marks the theoretical point at which I have two months to go).
Captain Cook Fountain
One of Canberra’s many lovable follies is the Captain Cook Water Jet. I wrote about it (for money) here.
Boy, I look pregnant 🙂
“One of our Thursdays is Missing” by Jasper Fforde
It’s ten at night and I haven’t blogged yet, so here’s a book review I happened to have standing at the ready:
This is the fifth “Thursday Next” novel (that’s the name of the main character, a woman). I’ve read them all, but I don’t like them enough to reread them so this is the only one I’ll be reviewing.
Jasper Fforde is unlike anyone else you’ve ever read. He is so, so much more portmodern. He’s ALL about the fourth wall. Most of this series takes place inside “Bookworld” where fictional characters reside, playing the parts in various novels like live stage actors. It’s very difficult to explain these books, because there’s so much zany self-referentiality going on. And intrigue, action, and humour.
From the beginning of the series, I found Fforde lacking in depth – both characters and setting feel as if they’re made from cardboard (it’s painted cardboard, but still not “real). Part of this is because the books aren’t meant to feel real – they’re an in-joke between author and reader. Part of it is a genuine weakness on Fforde’s part, which his fans find irrelevant. I’m a pretty mild fan – enough to be saddened by the way he clearly suffers from sudden popularity syndrome. Fforde, like most truly original people (and I’m actually not talking about myself here), took quite a while to get published. He had two or three books under his belt that he’d been working on for years. Then he became a huge hit and was required to produce more books – the more the better, and the faster the better too. And so his later books, while still showing his genius, are simply not as good.
This is a later book. It still shows his genius, but it’s simply not at good. This one is about whether or not the real Thursday Next is missing, and our hero here is the fictional version of her. (It gets more confusing from there, but it turns out the confusion is a plot point. Note to self: Don’t make confusion a plot point.) The stuff on self-publishing was right on the money.
Sample (from when a new book is arriving in the Fantasy section): The first setting to be completed was a semi-ruined castle, then a mountain range, then a forest – with each tree, rabbit, unicorn and elf carefully unpacked from crates. Other sections soon followed, and within forty minutes the entire novel had been hauled in piecemeal from overhead, riveted down and attached to the telemetry lines and throughput conduits.
“It’s a good idea to be neighbourly,” I said [she’s training a standin for her character], “you never know when you might need to borrow a cupful of irony. Besides, you might find this interesting.”
We walked up the drive and across the drawbridge into the courtyard. Notices were pinned up everywhere that contained useful directions such as: “This way to the denouement” or “No boots to be worn in the backstory” and even “Do not feed the Ambiguity”.
Victorian Inventions: New Domestic Motor
This is the opening of a real patent application advertising a real product (pictured) in 1873 (taken from the book “Victorian Inventions” by Leonard de Vries):
The inventor of the device which we present not only employs the hitherto wasted female power to oscillate a cradle, but at one and the same time to vibrate the dasher of a churn. By this means, it will be observed, the hands of the fair operator are left free for darning stockings, sewing, or other light work while the entire individual is completely utilized. Fathers of large families of girls, Mormons, and others blessed with a superabundance of the gentler sex, are thus afforded an effective method of diverting the latent female energy, usually manifested in the pursuit of novels, beaux, embroidery, opera-boxes, and bonnets, into channels of useful and profitable labour.
