Better just now

Thanks for your anxieties; I have survived the night, and am being careful and practical this morning. Have made doctor's appointment, for when I get back (though am fairly sure - and others agree with me - that hurty chest is just infection and/or residual damage from too much breathing wheezing).

Meantime, I have to go to Peterborough and beyond; and this morning is all about reading, the books to take with me and the book I have to finish before I go (in order properly to enjoy the books I take with me, you understand).

I can't quite believe it's taken me this long to read Bujold's "The Curse of Chalion", but there you go; you can't keep up with everything. It's very good, and I'm enjoying it very much, and just have twenty pages to slip through to the end.

It's interesting, though; I was kind of worried earlier, because it just seemed to me to be a little too neat. Like a wonderful piece of clockwork: everything was in place, and everything worked, and this little cog over here turned that great shaft over there, by means of much clever gearing, and...

And it seemed to me there was no space for accident or random or happenstance, the stuff that just happens. Everything was worked out in advance, to a degree that I just felt ... confining, I think.

And then yesterday I had one of those moments of connection: because, of course, this is a book that believes in its own gods. matociquala has said of my work that it's like an experimental proof of the law of unintended consequences - but in a world overseen by gods there are no unintended consequences, everything is foreseen and accounted for and intended. Which is fine, it's just different; I just had to take that step into faith and everything fitted, all the pieces were so because they had to be so, not because the author had compelled them to be so. See, that's what I don't like, too obvious an authorial hand making everything fit. Gods' hands, now, that's a wholly other matter...