Yesterday!

Nothing exciting, but I forgot last night to post my words for the day. Which were 2039, which leaves room, nay a whole scad of rooms, nay houses for improvement (I am painfully aware of last week, when Monday turned out to be my best day and everything after was a progressive falling-off; can't afford that, as the book gets harder and time shorter); and the skyline looks like this:

 

28813 / 80000 words. 36.0% done!

Colin Harvey

It's not that you get complacent, exactly. You know that all your friends are mortal, and you have friends enough that every now and then, unpredictably, mortality will catch up with one or another of them. But outside special circumstances, you can't go through every day expecting it: coming home with that half-anticipation of the message, the letter, the phone-call to say that someone else has gone. I lived through a decade of special circumstances, and I know what damage it did, and I won't do it now. I won't choose anxiety and neurosis, that constant expectation.

Which means that every now and then, I get caught flat-footed, unready.

Colin Harvey was my friend, in that way that many of us are friends: we talked in blogs and e-mails, we met at cons and SF events, we drank in pubs or went for dinner when the chance arose.

Yesterday I heard that Colin had had a stroke - a major stroke, a massive stroke, those terms that people use to mean he's never going to be the same again - and I was worried, but even so. These days, you kind of expect people to recover. He was younger than me, for cryin' out loud. Get him to the hospital, he'll be okay. We'll sort it out. I'm not neurotic, and medicine is magic.

It's not that magic. Colin died. It's ... kind of brutal, actually. Even at this distance, this detached. For Kate and his family, it's a whole other world of hurt.

I actually don't have a neat ending for this one.

Metrics

Yeah, well. The day kind of ended, too soon and all wrong. Still, 2044 words, which puts us here:

 

30857 / 80000 words. 38.6% done!