Thirteen

So it was 7.30 this morning and I was revising my Mars story for submission because I had read all the newses and all of LJ and people if you don't post more I'll just have to work more and then where will we all be? - and m'wife was off to work, but she remembered what I had of course forgotten, that this was Tuesday which is meet-up-for-coffee-before-work day in downtown Sunnyvale. So I had a quick shower and pulled on some, y'know, clothes - and got on the whee!ls and biked it.

It's quicker, by bike. I'm just sayin'.

And this was the second time I have locked the bike up with my fancy locks and cables, and had to leave it out of my sight for a while; and I am of course just like a boy with a new toy, fretful and anxious and not quite able to bear myself because did I do it right? And will anyone steal my saddle? And, and, and. Always wanting to sneak up to the window to take a peek, to check; and not doing that because I'm not actually thirteen, I'm fifty-three tho' no one seems to believe it.

Actually, I have a theory that various bits of myself got stuck at various ages, and bike-riding me was clearly stuck at thirteen*. Which I think is a pity, looking back. I hated PE at school so very much that as soon as I got out I dropped any notion of exercise, apart from the walking everywhere. Even now, forty years on: Karen was trying to inveigle me into yoga, and there's just no way I will willingly walk into a gym. But I am liking the biking, and I do find myself wishing I'd done this earlier. A lot earlier, maybe. If I'd got myself a bike again, late teens or early twenties - well, I dunno, but it would've been a different life. I would probably have been fitter, at least. And I might have enjoyed it. (Or of course I might have been flattened by a truck, but hey.)


*(ps i'm thirteen and i'm married and i want a motorbike and my wife won't let me i'm just sayin'.)

Keeping track

In the cafe this morning, watching virtuous souls busy with their laptops, it occurred to me that I should have taken mine. When Jeannie and Rick had to go to work, I could have done the same thing: whipped out the LHP and worked there on the Steampunk!Mars story, not come home till it was ready to go.

Instead of which, I rode home and have done the work here, more slowly and with distractions. Still: it is done. And because I am now Efficient, I have created a Submissions folder and saved the standard-manuscript-format version there* to be handy when it comes back and has to go out again; and I have a spreadsheet, good lord, to keep track of where it's been. I never do this.

And now - for those of you keeping track of where I've been - I am going to mount my bike again and go whizzing off for this and that, down at El Camino. Or actually, maybe I'll have lunch first. *is peckish*


*NB: for the avoidance of doubt, I hate Standard Manuscript Format, and decline to work in it. It's like a business suit: uncomfortable, constricting and ugly, and only to be donned at the last minute before leaving the house.

A question! of history!

So I know Dorothy Dunnett had a bit of a Homer's-nodding-again approach to her historical research - today's faux pas is her reference to a thousand metres when first she means a thousand square metres, second I think it's a fairly unlikely figure for the sail of a galley, and third she's a hundred and fifty years too early for the metric system - but even so, I do not think she is confusing a historical figure with a recent Regency romance: so please, somebody tell me, who or what was meant by the Grand Sophy, pre-Heyer? The internet I find very reluctant to disclose this information...

Aargh, oops

So there I was, writing stuffs; and there were my feet, kicking apart the cable to the monitor. Sudden black screen, whoops. So I dived under the desk and plugged the bits back together again - and came up to ongoing black screen, not going to resume its proper labour, no. Nothing I could do, apparently, it wasn't going to listen to the computer, not going to do what that said, uh-uh. In the end I had to reboot.

And the document I'd been working on, when I went to restore it? Was blank. Had wiped itself entirely, do not ask me how or why. So I had to restore from a back-up, which didn't include any of the work I'd done today. (This may be the only argument I have with TextMaker, that their autosave feature ... isn't what I think an autosave feature is. It only saves to a temp file, to restore in case of a crash, rather than to the regular directory; and if for some reason the restore function doesn't work, then you're fucked. Sorry 'bout that.)

So I had to rewrite all of today's work. Which was a grump and a grind, and never mind if it actually came out better the second time; that's traditional. T E Lawrence, I believe, left the first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a bus or a railway platform or whatever, and always insisted that it was a much better book after he'd entirely rewritten it from scratch*. And it is clear evidence that my industrious friends are right, who treat the first draft merely as a guide and rewrite their second drafts almost entirely. Nevertheless. This is not for me, because I hate it. Also, it runs counter to my nature. I can do writing-again if the first draft is lost; but if I have a draft, words I have actually committed to screen and disk and cloud, then that's a concrete thing and only to be abandoned if it is demonstrably wrong. If the plot changed beneath it, or a character dangerously uprooted themselves, or whatever. I like to claim this as an artefact of my origin-story, back when words were typed hard onto paper and had to be typed again if they were changed. One made every effort then to get them right the first time. It's a much more liquid process now - like writing in pencil instead of ink, which is a very different art and I had to relearn it and I never really did that very well. Somewhere deep inside, I think I still think that a word typed is a commitment made. The first half-dozen drafts happen in my head, sentence by sentence. I suspect you young things do all that with pixels.


*This may of course be a literary myth, but please don't disillusion me. I believe it; I want to believe it; I like to believe it.