Still working on that Dedd thing

Just for a while there, I thought I'd slept it off.

Unhappily, that was while I was still in Bedd. Then I stood up. Ooh, ouchie. Bad Hedd.

Also, if I mean to continue to read research books over breakfast (which I don't, really, only the fiction that I need next is, um, somewhere in that pile over there - that one, where the books are stacked three deep and three feet high...), then I really do need to make notes. The subtitle of my Livejournal is no accident, you know. (Notes, though? Over breakfast? *burrows for fiction*)

The book in question is only a popular history of the spice trade, but even so.

Also, it probably didn't help that I misread "papal" for "Paypal". Just the once, but the effect kinda lingered. Oh, my badd Hedd...

Sometimes it doesn't even give you lemons*

I am a shopper by instinct and by training. Even as a little boy, among my best times was always the walk into town on a Saturday morning with two bob pocketmoney in my hand. As a teen skiving school, I was entirely happy to spend half a day just prowling the department stores and bookshops.

Where I live, where I've lived all my adult life is almost ideally designed to suit this habit. As a young man, a young novelist looking for displacement opportunities, I could and would shop three times a day: once into town, once to the supermarket, once again to the local stores. I'm a little more disciplined these days, but these days half my work is done actually in town, at the Lit & Phil; of course my walk home takes me through the shops. I really shouldn't have been surprised t'other day to leave the library at one o'clock and not make it home till three.

These days, I do - usually - try not to go out shopping again, once I'm home from town. But, thing is, that walk home is bizarre, by Newcastle standards: once I've left the town centre, I literally pass no shops at all until I reach my own front door. No corner grocery stores, no supermarkets, no garage forecourts, nothing. Twenty minutes' walk, utterly devoid of retail opportunity.

Which wouldn't matter if I were an organised shopper, if I made lists and remembered to take them and then to buy whatever I had listed. I do none of these things, in the reverse order: if I make a list and take it, I forget to refer to it; more often, if I make a list I forget to take it; mostly, I don't make lists.

So, frequently, I realise halfway home that I've forgotten to buy something. Sometimes it's crucial. I can go back into town again, but I hate retracing my steps; or I can go out shopping again later, with all that that implies for loss of writing-time etc.

As today. I remembered mushrooms, I bought three pounds of mushrooms; I remembered to go to the bank; I forgot to buy any lemons.

Eek. I forgot lemons yesterday, also. Hence yesterday no lemon for the cod roes, no lemon for the gin, no lemon for the chicken. Can I bear such another day, or shall I lose an hour and go shopping...?


*And then suddenly it does.

In mid-uncertainty, I remember: the last time I ran out of lemons, some smart person advised cutting up a handful and freezing them. I have lemons!

Getting nowhere, slowly

Is funny thing: I swear when I quit work at the Lit & Phil this morning, my wordcounter said 8250 words or thereabouts. I came home, I had lunch, I worked on and off this afternoon; I have written another page, that much at least. And what does my wordcounter say? 8250 words, or thereabouts.

Different instances of the same WP, running on different OSs: is it possible that they would miscount the same text, to a 300 word disagreement?

[Also, on a regular calculator, how do you find out what percentage of 8250 300 would be? What buttons would you press, in what order? I used to be able to do this on a slide rule - hell, I can still do it in my head, which is how I know I'm not getting the right answers here - but I never learned to use a calculator, we didn't have 'em when I was a kid and I've never really had need of one since...]

Also also, "getting nowhere slowly" feels like a dreadful summary of my whole damn career to date. Maybe it's just because I have this pulsing headache, such that I'm walking around with a permanent flinch, only waiting for the next pulse to strike; maybe it's just because I will keep googling for responses to Jade Man's Skin, despite knowing ever so much better; but today it really does feel like the struggle naught availeth. I suppose I ought not to care about sales figures or critical attention; I really ought not to count Amazon numbers or other people's ubiquity of notice as against my own; but the internets bring all this stuff into my house and make it all too easy to review. Especially when I really should be working.

*depresses self unbearably*