Travel... in time!

To 1978, or thereabouts, when Marsh was starting to mix a few Daleks in with the daisies.

I know what I want

listeme (9:08:05 PM): ok, so here is a farfetched and ridiculous question
SISTER (9:08:11 PM): k
listeme (9:08:24 PM): is the meatball recipe by any chance handwritten?
SISTER (9:08:41 PM): party meatball recipe?
listeme (9:08:43 PM): yeah
SISTER (9:09:07 PM): frozen meatballs, jar of grape jelly, jar of heinz 57 chili sauce, jar of banana peppers
listeme (9:09:10 PM): no, no
SISTER (9:09:10 PM): heat
listeme (9:09:12 PM): HANDWRITTEN
SISTER (9:09:19 PM): that is handtyped!
SISTER (9:09:21 PM): :-D
listeme (9:09:22 PM): i need a handwritten version
listeme (9:09:27 PM): you are NO HELP
SISTER (9:09:30 PM): whut
SISTER (9:09:46 PM): you want me to email it to you...?
listeme (9:10:45 PM): gah

(I was looking for a specific physical/graphical thing. I'm really not a maniac.)

Upcoming titles

1. On being the mother of children who also have a stepmother: Turning small blobs of biology into good human grownups

2. My neighbor puts his trash out a day early: Sharing an ecological niche

3. Apocalypse Tomorrow!

4. What should we do with the newspapers? The ones stacked by the fire and the ones perching precariously on the edge of yesterday's technology

5. "Does this one have gentoo?" What bogglers could teach the NSA about dictionary compartmentalization


AND MORE!

You know, it's about the tangibility right now. If I were in the scarf business, for example, I would be feeling more valuable as a scarf maker than as a scarf designer. I would have proof in my hands, warm fuzzy proof.

This turns my normal priorities upside-down, but I don't think this is a bad thing. On Monday at some point I proclaimed that I just needed to "make something, anything. Clay pots!"

There are very good clay pots in this world, and I am not a pot maker. So it was just rhetoric.

Which is the whole POINT.

Maybe some pieces are fitting together

Synopsis progress: I have no idea.

What I will say is that I have been working on jigsaw puzzles in the evenings here and there because it has been actually cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace and a jigsaw puzzle is a nice thing to work on for a few minutes while my toes warm up. When I was little, my sister and I would do jigsaw puzzles on the floor of the sanctuary after services while our parents yakked with parishioners. When we finished, we would flip them over and do them again only looking at the gray sides. Peeking at the pictures was forbidden. We were very quick and good at them. So I am fond of puzzles, although I usually don't like the pictures on them.

Now, puzzles are really not a hobby that I will ever "pursue". They are great for fireside tables and for rainy stretches during vacations, but they are not a goal themselves. However, because I'm a competitive person, I do like to do whatever I do as well as I can, and hopefully better than the next guy. Over the years, my process has evolved into a very unlinear process that is more like clumping algae than anything else. Eventually I end up with large chunks of together pieces -- pieces themselves, you could argue -- that must be fit together. It is a much faster method (for me) than working from the outside in.

Besides puzzles, I think of myself as a linear person. I don't really have a map in my head, for instance; I have a lot of routes. I make the bed with a particular order of motions. Every time. I do things in routes, recipes of tasks.

So now, with this synopsis problem, I'm discovering that my novel is really more algae aggregation than a series of events, and figuring that out is a major big deal.

Favorites and more favorites

The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis. If formula romances are analogous to ditties, Connie Willis books are symphonies. (Formula books are fine -- ditties are fine. It's just an analogy.) I just finished Doomsday for the nth time, and it is more rewarding on every reread. I mean, it really does hit a lot of hot spots for me -- plagues and british humor and medievality and time travel and competence...

P.S. I will never understand why people don't read books or watch movies over again. If the point were to find out what happens, a synopsis would do.

P.P.S. Plagues! Come on! You can't go wrong!

Mannequins are creepy. They're like clowns and puppets, and they are used to sell things.

Many of them are headless.