Goat Notes

Well, here we go, and here's hoping...

After long silence I think I'd like to make the occasional post again - partly in a spirit of "I aten't dead!", and partly just to thumb my nose at the sneak of weasels in my head who've been discouraging much social media activity on my part, these past few years. This is turning out surprisingly hard.

Otherwise I'm happy, moderately healthy, and I'm about exactly half-way through writing a secondary-world fantasy-of-manners trilogy which I'm really, really enjoying.

Good fortune and the best possible 2022 to you all!

First and foremost, thanks to everybody who has offered comments, encouragement, or simple patience with my constant progress-spamming to my journal over the past couple of years.  Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland is probably the hardest project I've ever completed, even in the limited first-drafty sense, and I don't think I could have done it without being able to talk about it a lot to people who were not me.  The blogging also made me think twice about everything I'd written, and forced me to understand its successes and failures at a much more conscious level as I went along.  This ought to stand me in good stead during the revision process.

Secondly, I'm already starting on the revision reading and planning, and about this I'm going to blog in a slightly different manner.  Even if I could do detail without killing spoilery, I can't imagine anybody's finding any entertainment in the tedious technical necessities of the Blue Pencil's Progress.  But because talking has proved so good for the work so far, and because this revision is such a big job, I'm going to be offering something a bit different.  Taking each layer of revision onion-wise as I hit it, I'm going to take as a point of departure the kind of stuff I need to be doing in it, and write a short essay to get my thoughts in order about what that aspect of revision means to me, and why that sort of change is important and/or dangerous or whatever, and how it relates to the sort of books I actually like to read.  Comments will, as ever, be more than welcome - this process is going to be much more about public subjects than most of what I've been posting up until now, and less about my unpublished MS in particular.

We'll see how that works out shortly.

The first question I need to answer, before any others, is the highest-level one possible: Now that the story is finished, what kind of a story is it?   Because I'm not the first story-teller, nor will be the last, to write something that has ended up a very different line of yarn to the one they began spinning in the first place.

After a pleasant week of Family Stuff, I returned to work to discover a defrosted freezer.  The contents, which were mostly liver and lights, had reached the stage of sending out miasmas and pseudopods.  The Offaly Civilization has now been destroyed, but long shall its memory be green.  Crimson, purple, billy-brown and black also.

My back is staging demonstrations for shorter weights and better pay.

My home access to LJ seems to have mostly gone away, hanging forever whilst contacting "userapi.com".  Some folk report solving a similar problem by forcing their router to grab them a new dynamic IP address.  Doesn't work for me.

In a more encouraging development, I've finally achieved my perfect sausage risotto - my previous standard being mediocre at best.  The secret, such as it is, involves more chilli and garlic, more carrot and coriander soup, and the introduction of small quantities of olives and tomato salsa.  This advance was achieved by one part instinct, three parts advice, and nine parts blind ridiculous luck.

Aaaand it's time to get writing again.

Every year, I look again at my blogging activity and decide where to go with it. As far as this journal is concerned, the answer is pretty much "straight on". As to the miscellany of politics, writing, and random caprice that is my main blog Goat in the Machine, I might be doing some new things with that. A first step in this direction is to come up with a short, user-friendly description that conveys its general flavour, so that people who encounter it on blog lists can gauge whether it's apt to be their kind of thing.

This is my first attempt:

Goat in the Machine

[Categories: Writing, Politics, Arts]

Fantasy as if common people counted. Freedom as a banquet not a diet. Life as a stream too strong for narrow channels. Humour, curiosity, creativity, pratfalls; the kindly and the sorrowful and the shiny. Playing the goat as the great antidote to sheepishness.

Any thoughts?

Returning to London last night, I found my phone/Internet connection dead, apparently from a fault at the BT exchange which may take up to 3 days to resolve.  So my communications may be kind of hit-and-run for a time.

A few hundred words of a side-project fairy-tale, attempting to do for Beauty and the Beast something vaguely akin to what Arthur Machen did for Mustardseed and Peaseblossom, only with happier ultimate  tendency.  This has been hanging around in stub form for most of a year, and has suddenly put forth several questing roots and a slightly kinky shoot.  More of this if I finish it. 

No Katherine words are coming, though I did have a dream last night in which I was working for C. the Great, Empress of All the Russias.  As something pretty much like one of Mercedes Lackey's Heralds, bizarrely enough.  Luckily for C. the G. and my brain bleach budget, some oneiric Health and Safety appears to have embargoed the presence of large white superhorsies.

I just replaced the wireless card in my desktop PC, after the old one gave up the goat.  Somewhat to my surprise, the installation was plain sailing, and my connection is now faster than on its best day ever before.

Also, a nice new flatscreen display that actually works right.  Additionally, a terabyte external backup drive, ditto.  (Terabyte!  Terabyte!)  Last in line is picking a good workhorse printer-scanner.  Soon.  Soon.  The electronic component of life is very good just now.

Back in town, back to work, and back on the wire again.

'Ello 'ello!

Although my main blog continues here, that's really for articles and think-pieces great and small.  Since I'm hanging out more here now, I've decided to dedicate my LJ account to short informal entries that don't really match the Goat in the Machine style.  Journal entries, like....

Also for posting wordcountery, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff like that about my writing that doesn't naturally turn into an essay all of its own.  The trouble with the essays is that whilst they often help with my writing, they also compete with it for time and Muse's fire.  So this is basically an attempt to supplement them with chit-chat, which is where LJ's connectivity wins out over Blogger.  We'll see how the experiment goes!

With my usual exquisite timing, I find myself going back to work five hours after I finally broke out of my week-long funk on Three Katherines of Allingdale.  Waking up before the dawn did at least give me time to think myself through all the siren voices, and push through a couple of hundred words in the direction I needed to go.  Unless that was the siren all along, but I really think not.  Eh well.

Now it's back to the paying grind for a bit.

Paperwork, paperwork - so good we did it twice!