November 18, 2003

Six months and a week exactly. I must be one of the least prolific bloggers in the world. I did try to write something in the summer holidays, but it was Too Darn Hot.

I should have a heading "Cats". Or open the door for the one who has been whining at me intermittently for the past hour...

Writing

Terms of Service spent a few weeks at <first choice publisher> and came back without comment; now it's been languishing in <second choice publisher>'s slush pile since August. Kudos to Mary for sending it on.

I've pushed Raneth aside (though she makes a guest appearance) in favour of the Frozen North. This is a much more first-drafty first draft than I've ever done before: whole swatches that I know how to move around but haven't moved around yet, just sketched it out with the flowchart program as a simulation of a stack of loose pieces of paper that wind or cats can't disturb. It helps to have pledged 300 words a day for IWriSloMo.

I'm now so far ahead of my own schedule that I could go two or three days without writing without dropping below 300 average, which makes me write because I don't have to, go figure. 1254 words today; that's four days' worth in one go.

Reading

Rereading Mairelon the Magician. I'd forgotten how muddled the middle part is, but it's worth pushing through to get to the very nineteenth-century comedy ending (minor spoiler: not everyone gets married, but the bad guys do get their due). This is the edition with the stupid typo - when a housemaid sees that someone has a gun she says "Cool!"

Still not finished The Tower at Stony Wood, one or two pages every time I feel like it. People on rec.arts.sf.composition disagree whether McKillip's writing is in fact dense, though most agree that it's heady.

The World

Here is an unknown language guesser that thought Ilaini was Romanian. Probably because of tate, which indeed means "father", though there was no way for the AI to know that as it didn't ask for a translation. It was only about a 0.02% match, though. Other language guessers have variously identified it as Finnish, Welsh and even Friesian. I guess I should be flattered...

Looking for technical windmill terms I found Windmill World, which has everything. Even a link to the mill at Zeerijp.

Real Life

A miller in the village of Zeerijp, Groningen, prevented a fire in a pub next to his 19th-century grain mill De Leeuw ("the Lion", now restored and operational again) from spreading to the mill by setting the sails to turn in time. He'd learned in his miller's training that if there was a fire close by, this would keep flying sparks away. And it did. A spokesman of the fire brigade said that "the training fees were well-spent".

Kids

Sinterklaas is in the country and this is the first year that we're all giving each other presents, instead of maintaining the myth. They're all very shaky about it, saying things like "that'll save Saint Nicholas a lot of money", when I thought they'd understood the explanation. Part of it is perhaps my reluctance to tell them that Sinterklaas doesn't exist - he does exist, though impersonated (in the "assume the character of" sense, not "fraudulently pretend to be") by different people. When you put on a Sinterklaas suit with the right intentions, you are Sinterklaas.

Shopping for presents was great fun; so was wrapping the presents trying not to let the recipient see what you're wrapping. We took a picture of the stack in its current state; it will probably be half again as large when the grandparents show up for the celebration.

Necessary Luxuries

Kaashandel De Brink has won the Golden Cheese Knife (disclaimer: I don't know how long this link will last). Well-deserved. When our friendly cheese merchant retired we were at a loss, because we remembered this shop as unfriendly and unhelpful, but it's been taken over by better people since.

O Tempora

Our local public library is "upgrading" its service. Not only are they going to install machines where you can register what you borrow and return - a good thing, because it keeps one from interacting with the staff, who are altogether rude and unhelpful - but they also keep track of what you have taken out in the past so they can alert you when you take out a book you've had before. Unnecessary meddling (if I want to take out the same book again, so what? and if I want to keep track of what I've read, I can make my own list) but it's scary; I don't want people to be able to look up everything I've read. Who knows what they're going to do with it?

On a lighter note, a news item on nu.nl about red hair dying out in the foreseeable future attributed that to the fact that "it needs six different genes, one from each parent".

Before they fly away

Dreamed that we had our already small tortoiseshell cat shrunk for some reason; she came out half her normal size, and grey tabby, but with the same recognizable face.