Love in Dark Settings

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For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.

How I reply to comments at this blog.


*** 29 August 2009. Simplicity: Internet time this month.

Oh, man, look at this.

March: 81.25 hours online (28% of total time).
April: 64.5 hours online (24% of total time).
May: 63 online (24% of total time).
June: 73.5 hours online (27% of total time).
July: 61.5 hours online (25% of total time).
August: 26.5 hours online (11% of total time).

(*Pumps fist in air.*)

It'll be even lower in September, I'll bet you, because August just happened to be a month with five Saturdays.

*** 1 September 2009. Simplicity and Writing: Gathering and burying nuts for the winter; plus, Eastern Shore memories.

I sorted all of my fiction e-text files today. I still need to scan the books I got from the D.C. public library, as well as get a few more items by interlibrary loan, but I'm confident that I have enough Muse-friendly fiction to see me through the winter. ("Muse-friendly," as you may recall, means "heavy on description, in a well-written style that's at least vaguely similar to the one I write in, and unlikely to put me to sleep." I have the hardest time finding Muse-friendly fiction, but my Muse demands it as a condition for him producing stories for me.)

Would that I were ahead of the game in other areas. Here's my tasks list for September.

o--o--o

Publish:
--Braille editions.

Announce:
--Final Website update of the year.
--Annual round-up.

Research (Prison City):
--Download lighthouse e-texts.
--Download remaining online Chesapeake research.
--Read downloaded Chesapeake research texts.
--Borrow and finish reading library books (P.G. County and Marina).
--Maryland Room, Hyattsville Library.
--Maryland Room, University of Maryland.
--Maryland Room, Pratt Library.

Research trips (Prison City):
--Calvert County (with Doug).
--Hoopers Island (with Doug).
--Dorchester County (with spiralred)?

Other tasks and leisure activities:
--Scan D.C. library books.
--Labor Day Festival (September 4-7).
--Figure out glasses situation.
--Make general doctor's appointment.
--Make dental appointment.
--Order enough water filters and humidifier filters to see us through the winter.
--Renew Bookshare.org subscription.
--Clear out inbox.
--Put books back onto the shelf.
--Figure out what to do about academic books donation.
--Finish culling clothes.
--Donate clothes and other items.
--Unclutter and tidy bedroom.
--Tidy study and move extra desk out.
--Re-order Marina books.
--Finalize 2009 protocol.

Other trips:
--Return D.C. library books.
--Lunch with a friend.
--New Deal exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
--Dinner with Daddy and Sylvia.

o--o--o

Uh-huh.

The tasks I'm most worried about are the ones that depend on Doug driving me somewhere and (overlapping with this) the ones that depend on my eyes being in good condition. Usually, here in Maryland, we have hot weather through at least mid-September, which means that my reading eyes don't usually give out until late September. (There's a two-week gap between the time that the temperature dips below eighty degrees - with an accompanying dip in humidity - and the time that my reading eyes figure out, "Oh! No more high humidity! Well, I guess we'll stop functioning.") That's why I start the composing portion of my year on October 1. But for the last couple of days, we've been getting fall temperatures. If this keeps up, my reading eyes will give out around mid-September. So I need to hurry to get the library reference research done by then, because that's the one thing I can't do with my reading eyes nonfunctional.

As far as household tasks are concerned, I'm reasonably confident I'm going to get my planned tasks done in time. Correspondence, online research, and research trips I'm less certain about, and as for doctors' appointments . . . The online research and research trips are really key; if I don't finish those, I can't finish writing Master and Servant this winter. However, the research is proceeding steadily at the moment; after I read some passages yesterday in Tom Horton's An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake that were written in dialect, my Muse threw me a scene with characters speaking in something that at least vaguely resembles Eastern Shore dialect. Supposedly, Smith Island folk have their own dialect, but speaking as a layperson, I can't see any difference between their dialect and Eastern Shore dialect. Maybe it has to do with the accent.

And oh, by the way, do you know where I first encountered Eastern Shore dialect? From my freshman roommate's best friend, who became my boyfriend (after I realized that my roommate was not going to succumb to my seduction efforts). He was from Denton. I used to sit in his back yard, watching turtles sun themselves on logs while people rowed canoes along a winding river that was surrounded by what I now realize must have been marsh grass. Talk about throwing pearls in front of swine; my mind was all on how I could lure my boyfriend back from the local girl he'd become enamored with.

But I digress. I only mention this because all of my memories of the Eastern Shore until now have been exceedingly unhappy ones. Which makes it very easy for me to write angsty plotlines for "Master and Servant."

*** 1 September 2009. Home: Money.

I was going to write an entry about money - one of our four tenants moved out, and then a second tenant absconded without paying this month's rent, at a time when Doug and I were already concerned about the state of our finances - but fortunately I picked up my college alumni magazine tonight and read a feature entitled "Resilience in the Face of Recession." Here's what it told me:

A member of the class of '80 is working, through a government program, to help people save their homes.

A a member of the Graduate Institute's class of '85 - whose quilt-store sales have crawled practically to a stop - has busied herself by creating quilts for injured vets of the Iraqi war and for people in homeless shelters and rehab centers.

A member of the class of '89 - whom I remember - was forced to retire from her lifelong career as a clown, partly due to the recession. She has taken up a new career as a news videographer for UPI.

A member of the class of '75 went without a salary for a year in order to keep open his addiction treatment clinic.

Oh, man, do I feel self-centered and whiny now. It makes me glad that I'm currently culling my belongings and giving many of them to charities.

*** 5 September 2009. Mentoring: Lunch with a slave.

I had lunch today with a friend who's a leather slave, since he's in town for the M/s Conference. It's the first time I've seen him for two years, so it was a pleasure to get together with him again. We talked shop - he has new books out, so we compared sales figures. (My contribution: "Um . . . 14 copies sold so far." I like to think that I serve as a way to cheer up other authors about their sales figures.) We also talked about how the economy is affecting our lives, and about our DS / M/s lives.

Then I went home, called my apprentice, confessed to him that I'd drunk caffeine at lunch to keep myself awake (I'd had two hours of sleep the night before, but Noakes isn't supposed to drink caffeine solely to keep himself awake, so I'd broken my own rules), and told him how grateful I was that I can just be myself with him.

See, M/s and leather gatherings always do this to me, no matter how much I like the individuals I'm meeting with. I always end up feeling (whether justifiably or not) that my abilities as a sir are being put under the microscope, and that if I don't live up to whatever the other person's image is of The Ideal Sir, I'll flunk the test.

I never feel this way with my apprentice. "I think you're a fine Sir," he said soothingly to me after I told him this. "Even if you did drink caffeine at lunch."

*** 6 September 2009. Simplicity: My ideal wardrobe.

In preparation for another discussion with my apprentice about how he mustn't leave jobs till right before their deadline, I'm spending tomorrow scanning eight library books that I've had two months to scan. They're due back in two days.

Before I get started on that, here - after some thought - is my ideal wardrobe. I don't actually expect to get down to this number of clothes, because I have favorites I don't want to let go of. Plus, I need backups, especially for trousers, because I wear them out at a frightening rate. But I'm aiming for this general ballpark as I continue to cull my clothes.

The premise of my ideal wardrobe is this: I spend most of my time at home. On the average summer week, I leave home two times. On the average winter week, I don't leave home at all.

Also, I almost never go to formal events any more. I'm going to be really conservative and say that I need two formal outfits in the summer, because it's true that I usually haul along two formal outfits when I go to slash cons. And I need two formal outfits in the winter, one for when I want to look spiffy and one for when I want to be warm. But I only need one formal outfit for spring/fall.

So what I mainly need are house outfits ("habits," I'll call them), which in the winter means a pair of trousers, a thick shirt, a sweater, and a thick cloth jacket (yes, our house is cold in the winter), and in the summer means . . . well, minimal. Those are outfits that I can just keep wearing till they're dirty or till it's time to do the laundry, whichever comes first. So I don't need a new set of habits for every day. (In fact, that's why I wear habits: so that I don't need to think about what I'm going to wear that day. The outfit will already be ready for me.) But I do need more clothes in the summertime - habits and non-habits - because of the sweat factor.

What I'm not listing below: underwear, my black shirts for leather events (I have four of them, which is self-indulgent), and my two pairs of black jeans for leather events, neither of which really fit me, but I have reached the time of my life where I am never going to shop for jeans again. I dislike undergoing prolonged torture.

Here's what I think I need.

o--o--o

Summer

6 habits.
6 tops (short-sleeved).
3 pairs of shorts.
2 formal outfits.
1 pair of formal shoes.
1 pair of white sneakers.
1 light jacket.
1 gardening outfit (including old sneakers).
3 nightwear outfits.

Winter

3 habits.
2 formal outfits.
1 pair of formal shoes (also worn to leather events).
1 pair of black sneakers.
1 pair of slippers.
1 heavy coat.
3 nightwear outfits.

Spring/Fall

3 habits.
3 tops (long-sleeved, light).
3 pairs of slacks.
1 formal outfit.
1 denim vest (also worn to leather events).
1 leather jacket (also worn to leather events).
1 light coat.
3 nightwear outfits.

No special shoes are needed for spring/fall; I'll wear summer or winter shoes, depending on the weather. And I can use the same sweaters as I use for my winter habits.

o--o--o

Now, about hats. I am happy to report that I do not have a hat fetish, but I've accumulated a few hats over the years. Practically the only time I actually use them is in the winter, to keep from freezing at home. Those are cloth hats. On the rare occasions that I wear hats in the summer, I wear those same cloth hats, because I can easily stuff them in my pocket once I reach my destination.

After a bit of agonizing, I've decided to get rid of five hats. I'll keep the four cloth hats, as well as one formal hat that goes really well with one of my formal summer outfits.

Plus, my mother's broad-brimmed straw hat. You never know when you'll need a straw hat.

*** 10 September 2009. Simplicity: Scanning my winter reading.

Well, OmniPage got cranky on me, and I was only able to scan half of the eight library books I had out from the D.C. libraries. I'm rethinking the whole topic of scanning. My rationale for scanning my winter reading beforehand was that it would save me from having to leave the house during the fall and winter. But (1) I hate spending an hour to scan and OCR an entire book in one swoop, (2) so does OmniPage (it inevitably gets cranky with long documents), and (3) I spend twice as long on the OCR process because I have to be sure that I've got the text exactly right, since I won't have the book on hand to rescan if I find major errors when reading during the winter.

Whereas, if I scan a couple of chapters right before I read them, it only takes me ten minutes, and I don't need to fiddle with the OCR process; if anything comes through garbled, I'll simply correct it on the spot.

Also, I tend to read slower when I only have two chapters scanned. I want to encourage slow reading these days.

So what I think I'll do next year is go browsing for Muse-friendly novels through the Chevy Chase Library in D.C. and the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland (because they both have good collections of mid-twentieth-century novels) and then see whether I can obtain those novels via Marina, the State of Maryland's interlibrary loan system. Marina books get delivered straight to my local library, so I can either take the fifteen-minute walk to the library or beg Doug to pick up the book for me.

Since I can only order books when I go online once a month during the winter, this will encourage me to read more slowly. Hurrah.

(If you're coming in late to this story, I scan novels for reading in the fall and winter because I can't read standard-sized print during those times of the year. I try not to leave the house because that's my hermitage period, when I'm furiously writing as many stories as possible for publication in the spring and summer.)

*** 10 September 2009. Writing: Prison City research - countdown to the finish.

I went to D.C. yesterday to drop off my library books. Afterwards, since the Smithsonian's American Art Museum across the street wasn't open (I'd hoped to see its New Deal exhibit), I went down to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. I visited the maritime exhibit (which had a small section on oystermen in the Chesapeake) and the road transport exhibit (which proved not to have anything useful for my research - darn it, I'd hoped they'd own a steam automobile - but which was fun to visit). Then I went to the restroom, and as I was coming out, I saw the hand sanitizer, and it occurred to me that museum-hopping during a swine flu pandemic probably wasn't the wisest activity.

So I went to the bookstore at the Washington National Cathedral. I figured that if I died as a result of browsing through books on monasticism, I'd go straight to heaven.

I ended up going also to the bookstore at the National Shrine (which is the Catholic cathedral) and to the library at Catholic University, which is just a few yards away. I jotted down lots of titles for next summer's simplicity reading.

Then I went home and took a shower. Do you have any idea how many times one has to touch objects when travelling by public transport? Escalator rails, poles on the subway, seats on the subway and bus . . . It'll be a miracle if I don't come down with the flu.

At any rate, I decided that going to a university in the midst of a pandemic isn't a good idea either, so I've dropped the idea of doing research at the University of Maryland's Maryland Room, as well as the Maryland Room of the Pratt Library in Baltimore. I don't really need to, in any case; the only things I know I'd like to look at there is a book on the history of Hoopers Island (but I already have three other books on that subject) and Chesapeake Lights, a periodical on the Chesapeake lighthouses. I'm a bit worried about how little information I have on the latter topic, since I have an entire scene set in a lighthouse in Master and Servant. But I'm hoping that I'll be able to turn up more primary-source materials on turn-of-the-century lighthouses, as well as more turn-of-the-century nonfiction books on public schools, when I take another lick across Google Books and the Internet Archive. (Gosh, I'm beginning to pick up watermen's dialect.)

Today I visited Hyattsville Library's Maryland Room again (*picture of Doug saying, "Are you done yet?*) and took one last visit to Greenbelt Library. And that's it for my library research for the year, other than a title or two that I'll get through interlibrary loan.

That leaves me two weeks in which to actually read the books I've taken out. (Less, actually, what with online time and research trips.) Once my writing season begins - which it will do on September 27 - I'm banning myself from all nonfiction except turn-of-the-century writings. My Muse really hates me reading nonfiction; that interferes with his style.

Now, as to the research trips: I'm still doggedly prodding Doug about Southern Maryland, but this weekend we're definitely going to the Eastern Shore. I got sneaky and asked my father to invite Doug and me to visit him and my stepmother at their Delaware vacation home, since Doug had declared that he wasn't willing to visit the Eastern Shore except on the way to Delaware. Since this is likely to be my last opportunity to travel to the Eastern Shore before I write "Master and Servant" (unless spiralred asks me to come along to Dorchester County this fall), I'm cramming three trips into one: Hoopers Island, Deal Island, and Rock Hall.

Hoopers Island you've already heard me rant about. Deal Island has more watermen's communities. And Rock Hall has a watermen's museum. I'll say more about all that after my visit.

What I'm mainly worried about at this point is whether we'll have time enough to see anything. Visiting Deal Island and Hoopers Island on the same day is simply ridiculous; Deal Island is halfway down to the southwestern tip of the Eastern Shore - only about twenty miles from Hoopers Island by water, but we'll have to drive . . . oh, I think it's about ninety miles, and it's mainly by way of narrow little back roads surrounded by marsh. It'll take us forever.

But that's what Doug wants, so we're going to get up Really Early on the day we head home, and try to do it all. The trip to Rock Hall - which we'll do on the way to Delaware - should be more relaxing. [Later: I ended up deciding to do Deal Island on another trip.]

So basically, it's rush rush rush on the research till the end of the month. I've put aside pretty much everything else till then.

*** 14 September 2009. Writing: Prison City research - almost finished with the Chesapeake research.

I'll write a separate entry about my trip to the Eastern Shore over the weekend. Suffice it to say, I now have enough material with which to write the Eastern-Shore portions of the Prison City series, other than the scene in a lighthouse and a scene (added at the last minute) on a steamship. I'll try to see whether I can obtain relevant e-texts online.

I've nearly finished reading all of the Chesapeake material I borrowed or downloaded. I'm working to get the print reading done quickly, because, while the temperature bounced back up to the eighties this weekend, it's due to dip again, starting tomorrow.

The only thing left to do, other than the above reading, is take that trip to Southern Maryland. It's as important as the previous trip, because I need to see the Drum Point Lighthouse at the Calvert Marine Museum, as well as see the home setting of one of my protagonists.

As for the schoolboy portion of the series (which overlaps with the Chesapeake portion), I'm going to take a final look at the Internet Archive and Google Books to see whether I've missed any important turn-of-the-century nonfiction texts. Then it will just be a matter of reading them and the turn-of-the-century fiction, which I can do over the winter.

There are seven novellas/novelettes in the first two volumes of Prison City. One story ("The True Master") is already written, though I may revise it lightly to make it a little water-y. Four of the stories have Chesapeake/schoolboy settings; those are the ones I hope to finish this winter. One story has a Chesapeake/schoolgirl/1960s setting, while the remaining story has a 1960s/retrofuture setting. I'll probably wait till the 2010-11 winter to write those.

So, if all goes well, I'll write volume one ("Master and Servant") and half of volume two ("Sacrifice") this winter and will finish volume two the following winter - and possibly volume three as well, depending on whether I get that far. At this point, I'm predicting there to be six volumes in the series.

*** 15 September 2009. Mentoring: My apprentice's health.

Practically the first words I heard from my apprentice today were: "The doctor thinks I might have congestive heart failure."

This wasn't entirely unexpected news. My apprentice has severe asthma (to name just one of his many diseases). The asthma puts a strain on his heart, as does the asthma medicine he took as a teen. He was told back then that, in the unlikely event that he didn't die first of pneumonia or some other lung-related disease, he would probably acquire congestive heart failure in his fifties. So only the timing of this is a shock to him; he's 41.

I told him (speaking from experience), "Any health crisis is an opportunity for growth." Since I met him, my apprentice has been making attempts to improve his diet and the amount of exercise he gets; at times this has required some genuine sacrifices from him. Yet he hasn't gone nearly as far as he should.

But now it's clear that major changes have to be made in his lifestyle. "Even if I don't have congestive heart failure," he said, "I should act as though I do. That's the best way to stave it off."

My apprentice is being remarkably level-headed about all this, but as usual, his tendency to blame himself came into play. At one point, he began to list all the reasons why this might be his fault. I cut him off. "It seems to me that learning the causes for this is helpful insofar as it can help you to make better choices in the future. But if you're going to start beating yourself up for bad choices of the past, then I'm going to have to ask myself, 'Why didn't I put him on a stricter diet two years ago?'" He laughed, conceding me the point.

We talked about death too. Death is a topic that's been lurking in my mind, like a vulture, since I witnessed my mother's death last year. If you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said that death was a subject that terrified and befuddled me. Yet oddly enough, when the time came for me to say something about death to my apprentice, the words flowed easily from me: "I know that most of us feel that we have a right to life, but we don't. I live next to the number-one terrorist target in the world; I could die tomorrow from a nuclear bomb. Either of us might be run over when crossing a street. We can't determine how long we live, so all we can do is try to enjoy the time we're given."

My apprentice added some cogent comments about how deaths tend to be lingering and painful, so one shouldn't simply give up on health measures, under the delusion that death would be easier. Yet as he put it mournfully, "I keep trying to be upbeat about this, but all I can think is, 'This is just a way of saying that I can't have more cake.'"

*** 15 September 2009. Mentoring: An exchange between me and my apprentice.

Me (trying to offer healthy alternatives to the high-fat food my apprentice was craving): "Have you tried baked tortilla chips?

My apprentice: "Yes, and I've also tried circles of ceiling insulation - what are they called? Oh, right. Rice cakes."