Finished Damascus’ backstory last week. I really, really hate that my brain takes so much downtime between pushes. But . . . I’m on schedule, iffen that creek don’t rise: All done by the end of the month.

I’m pushing back the anxiety, the anticipated failure. There are SO many bad books out there.

I do just love my brain–I just realized at the end of this that my title is a pun: To make my life even specialler, we’re moving . . . some time. My new leasing manager is a Cambridge gal who thought it was OK to just drag her heels on the BHA inspection, so at this point I’m technically looking at a move-in date of August 1. My big plan was to do it next weekend; I struggled through my part in this; had serious hysterics at the part I bozoed and it got fixed. And now I’m screwed through somebody else’s naivete. It looks like I’ll have to whine on my belly to my BHA agent; collar the new manager and shake; apologize abjectly to my current housing manager, who put up with the hysterics engendered by the bozo above.

Just thinking about this makes me really angry. (Duh.) The new manager gets in to work at 10:30 or so; I’ll leave another message and get down to work myself (albeit changing my Pandora station to a less-distracting offering, i.e., one that does not feature the always-enthralling Mr. Robbie Fulks).

It should be noted that the oft-reviled BHA aren’t the bad guys here. The inspection unit is a bunch of really nice people. Too bad they can’t be scheduled on my say-so.

I went and got groceries today; too much, really–I came home exhausted and haven’t been good for much since. The store is about 3/4 of a mile away; I can usually manage a backpack full, but this added a couple of bags for a total of 30-40 pounds. Although, this time I remembered what the walk home had been like, and I took the bus home instead. Yay me and the good decision making.

Anyway, before I left, I made up a basic punch list for the book, and realized unhappily that I really do need to keep pumping out the original. (I’d be perkier about this, but see title, above.) I go through cycles of avoidance–I generally fall behind on the transcription, because the actual manuscript usually goes where I do (a major benefit of the old-fashioned longhand method). But sometimes the catch-up is a cover for dawdling on the rest of the story.

I think worrying about the more police-procedural part is getting in my way. I should once again go get a doughnut (heh) and just let Bun-Bun and Sandy go after Damascus in peace. They know what they’re doing; and if I catch them being stupid at it later, well, all right then. Besides, isn’t catching that sort of stuff what readers are for, anyway?

Moreover, most of the books I’ve selected aren’t all that informative–except to tell me that aside from the poetically fictive genius of the protagonists, the cop shows (and the other procedurals) have it pretty much dead on target (oh swifties just stop)–the real guys really do it more or less the way they do it on TV.

The noteworthy thing about them is largely the wide spread of the writing skill and style. I was miserably unhappy to find that the tantalizingly titled Postmortem is actually a sociologist blethering depressingly about cultural mumbawhutsis and avoidance hrmah-Kübler-Ross-yevm and objectification jurisdiction coughcoughgotta-kill-a-chihuahua-now so it can be vutzikeckkeck coronary artery disease. Just like most of us (and don’t ask the man; please; if you do, let me know so I can just leave) I absolutely refuse to envision the possibility of a time of no me, and have given myself permission to not think of it, other than taking my statin and blood pressure meds like a good girl.

On the other hand, Working Vice is the sort of the surely-I-can-get-published thing full of “first this happened; then this happened; then it got boring; and then this happened too,” with enough harshly unambiguous comma splices for a grammatical rope reaching halfway down the Eastern Seaboard.  (I’m not linking, because I don’t want to hurt the WV writers’ feelings, and refuse to propagate the intelle-dreck of the other.)

On the other hand, Hypnocop is engaging and useful. It’s written by a nice smart cop who tells me stuff I didn’t know, and I actually like him. But “he’s” on my shelf in Widener, not on my coffee table.

So I’m depressed-ish. But I’m tired, so I’ll just go to bed.

I fought once again with the seemingly-endless Chapter 47, and finally vanquished it. It’s actually coherent now, and so-o-o much better than the frantically annotated original manuscript. (What did I mean by some of that gibberish?)

One more brief transcription of the next (happily extant) chunk of serial-killer-bio frame . . . and then back to the blue-sky country of churning out new text from the confused and terrified curdling cream of my brain.

From the beginning, I had this sort-of idea of the story I was writing, or that I intended to write–and there’s very little of that story left. A lot of the basic elements are there; almost all of even the earliest actual writing still remains. But it’s all been re-contextualized.

Sometime in the last week of April, 2005, while I was supposed to be finishing up my dissertation, this weird thing happened to my universe, and it became infested with vampires; the Thena-se, as they first were called.

For the next month, the fictive IMs/e-mails I wrote between pieces of my fictive selves were set within the normal consensus universe, and then the Th’nashi Contract swallowed me whole, and I can’t get out; I have become Th’nashi myself.

It’s been one hell of a five years, and it’s almost over. I have the feeling that it’ll be wrapped with a bow by Chapter 60. I wonder if I’ll ever become humani again; I wonder which piece comes next.

My current sense is that, absent the holocaust of the prospective move, the entire first draft will be done by the end of June. Still refusing to do a page count; still refusing to even start the final process of keeping names straight and checking facts and vocabulary against each other.

I understand now the problem people have with actually finishing the fucking things: When that last word is written, so is a piece of your life and soul. That’s really what sequels are for–for us, not the readers. And again I wonder if I shall ever be humani again.

It’s been a hell of a five years. I think there was a period somewhere of several months when life just took it out of my hands. But it refused to die. I think it’s a good book; people reading the first scraps have all told me (convincingly) that it’s a good book. But it’s the only book I have right now.

And it’s almost done. At least by now I have some hope of how it’ll turn out. But I don’t know. There are so many bits and pieces that were planned to end one way, and now it really doesn’t need to happen that way.

Oh God in heaven, but I’m glad the text wrested itself away from my crude stupidity of five years ago. This was gonna be wicked dumb, but now it’s got a sense of being readable.

I’m finally at the endgame, where everything telescopes down onto poor Damascus, the serial killer. I have some vague ideas–but I have to let go and jump off the bridge that Terry Riverly and I climbed five years ago. When I got out of the way, Terry just told me the story, and the story survived my having to take half of it away from it and turn it into omniscient 3d person. (Terry survived too, but I was pretty traumatized.)

Let go again; watch what happens; listen to Meeze and Merlin and Lynn and Sandy and Pharaoh and Solveig and Damascus and Terry and Sasha and Eamon and Sean and Devon and Joel and Toria and Tris–and everybody else–and get out of their way so they can tell the story.

But the water looks so cold. And I’ll never be completely humani again.

Sometimes you just have to wonder what companies are thinking–and what they can get away with. Apparently, if your targeted market is Latino, virtually anything.

Yesterday, I got tired of the completely crappy generic dish liquid, so went after the Real Stuff. Ajax was on sale at Walgreen’s, and of course I went for the antibacterial. Something was a little off, though: Their claim on the label was to be able to remove bacteria from your hands–or something to that effect–and the lack of the actual claim that this product was in fact antibacterial in and of itself made me look closer.

And it wasn’t. No triclosan, which is what other actual antibacterials use.  Instead, this product protects your health and keeps the world safe for democracy by (in an understated note on the back) drumroll, please!!!! By decreeing that to make this so, you should thoroughly wash your hands! (Golly gee, Colgate! Thanks for clearing that up!)

Annoying, yes. Well, OK, I’ve clicked up a notch or so from that by now–and the Walgreen’s district manager was also puzzled by this. However, he brought up what I suspect to be a salient point: One of the unusual things about that label is that it is half in Spanish. And you gotta wonder about that . . .

. . . particularly as there’s an Ajax that is antibacterial–it states it unambiguously on its label, and includes triclosan in its list of ingredients. But I had to get that list from their website.

Oh yeah. List of ingredients. The fake stuff dutifully lists them on the label–obviously to cover their butts–but none of the other bilingual scents on sale had a list at all.

I find this despicable. Yeah, everybody from Mr. Obama down to the postal dachshund knows that you’re supposed to wash your hands–but the aforementioned group also “knows” that orange liquid + the word antibacterial somewhere on the label = triclosan, or some other specifically biocidal agent.

But not them dummies here in the barrio!! They’ll fall for anything! Aqui estamos, lavandose nos manos!!

So much for the 21st century.

Here’s the full letter I sent Colgate-Palmolive, and copied to the Soap and Detergent Association, which seems to understand what “antibacterial” means.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don’t have the barcode, because I didn’t buy this product.

At the Walgreen’s in my district, there’s an Ajax product that superficially looks like your antibacterial dish detergent. But . . . it’s not.

The front label is different from the one depicted on the product on your site and on Walgreen’s. The product on sale in the store doesn’t *quite* come out and say it’s antibacterial per se; instead it states that it’s capable of removing bacteria from your hands. There is an asterisk, and on the back it admits that in order to do this, you should wash your hands thoroughly for some minutes.

Well, yes. That’s how soap works; that’s the basic rule we learn in kindergarten. That’s what the APHA recommends–but (for good or ill) that’s not what the consumer expects in this product.

There isn’t any triclosan in this product, as there is in your other *actual* antibacterial product–which is, of course, clearly and unambiguously labeled as such.

There were several other scents of your dish detergent available–and none of the others had any ingredients labeled at all–but the clone of your antibacterial product DID have a list of ingredients. This seems to clearly be covering the possibility that you might legally be said to be  flat-out lying to the consumer: Hmm, we didn’t *say* it had an actual antibacterial agent–as does our similar product.

This liquid has the amber color consumers now automatically associate with products containing an antibacterial agent. It looks just like the “real” thing, and it bears the word “antibacterial” on the label. This is clearly an attempt to mislead the consumer into thinking she has bought a product with different properties.

This is particularly troubling given the concerns over the H1N1 virus, and the upsurge in hand sanitizing products–of course proper hand washing is vital for hygiene–but, again, that’s not what the consumer expects. She’s not getting an agent which kills microbes rapidly–in fact, the detergent industry standard is that an actual antibacterial should kill bacteria on contact–see the Soap and Detergent Association–she’s just getting good ol’ soap.

Incidentally, the Walgreen’s district manager and I both noticed that these labels–the amber product and the other scents in this sale, which, again, lack any ingredient list at all–are printed in both Spanish and English; I wonder if there’s a connection between this frank attempt at deception and that you are clearly trying to reach a market of people who lack fluency in English.

Shame on you. The manager is contacting their regional buyer; I’m sharing and posting my observations–and you’re not getting any more of my money.

(Um . . . way before my time too. It’s a cute little 1943 song that still slinks around. This is the Spike Jones version; the first pre-spikatized bit is the straight way.  Ah, c’mon. You know who Spike Jones is.)

As I write this, my right index finger is doing the owie thing that says Mr. Mouse is no longer my friend. And I’m still on the sheeping computer.

I worry about stuff like this, particularly as I have had what has now been diagnosed as a bad flare of chondromalacia for almost two months now. I saw the orthopod this morning, who was quite reassuring as to the underwhelmingness of my arthritis–for the last week or two, I was carefully avoiding words like “cane” and “crippled” and “lap band surgery to lose weight to keep it off the knees that I can’t exercise on.”

Being hyperactive and easily bored, I really need to find activities that use other things–i.e., I use my hands and my eyes for pretty much everything I do or find interesting–just as pretty much everybody else does. Good luck with that, eh?

This was a bad knitting night. ‘Nuff said. So me being me, I had to vent. The next thing I knew, I have a oh-dear-sweet-heaven-I-never-thought-I-would-have-a . . .

. . . knitting blog.

Stupid knitting. Doh!

Despite my self-congratulation re my bullets a bit ago, it is painfully clear that they went Horribly Wrong. But, having only popped on here to add the lunar calendar link, I am resisting tinkering. Yay me! Go slipshod editing go!

Mr. David Shute wrote this fascinating little time-suck called “Small Worlds.” This is me, getting back to work now. Thanks for hosting this on your site, rathergood. Mr. Veitch, some of us have Things To Do.

Also, please give a listen to the musician’s work. Mr. Kevin MacLeod has put up so much goodness and wonder that he is now a Minor Deity in Nova Terra. For free. Royalty free. Mr. MacLeod (who lives in Green Bay, ya hey) should be given large quantities of money through PayPal. I’m just saying.

Sometimes I wish I’d just done a children’s book. The kind with lots of pictures and is only 12 pages long. But sometimes a few things get a little bit easier:

• Gentle reader, I have for you two words: Google Documents. (I’d give you a link, but it insists that I mean my personal folders. So . . . um, go Google it.) Absolutely priceless if you work on two entirely different computers, as I do. Also peachy for backups. (Presumably the nice folks at Google are doing backups themselves.)

  One caveat: There is an option for editing stuff online, and it is apparently a nice little stripped down word processor. But if you’re like me, and just want to schlep your Office files from one place to another, you want to uncheck the box that pants helpfully that it will convert them to their own doc format–which as far as I’ve noticed tends to nuke my own formatting. 

  (And can I whinge here about a certain suite of office materials that only understands its own documents, although everybody else is able to understand bunchies? They have to, because they need an option to export the blasted things in the format the snotty little suite understands.)

And let’s not even talk about the fact that the horrible sunzabitches won’t let any other browser access its site than its own retard child. Nope, not going there. When my beloved Polycarp goes where ancient desktops have to go, I’m not bothering to keep the PC architecture. My next kiddo will be an admittedly horribly overpriced Mac. After all, our apps export to . . . Nope, nope, nope. Moving on:

• I have discovered that I know how to type. As in without looking at the keys. I’m not super good at it, but fixing the errors is faster than the old ways. Trouble is, I’m in the same positiion of the centipede who was asked how on earth he managed it. He stopped to think, and then couldn’t do it at all.I’m so bemused by the fact that I’ve picked up this skill after so many years, that when I pay attention the entire process just slows to a halt. I’m actually reasonably good when not really paying any attenti0n at all–but then in the back of my mind I go, “Whoa! How am I doing this? Am I doing it right?” And then it all falls apart with a crashing boom.

  There is one benefit to this, though–even when looking (presuming I’m staying out of my own way) I’ve gotten a lot faster, which is a Good Thing when transcribing page after page of text. I haven’t tried to figure out how long the damned thing is in quite some time–I’m just in denial. I comfort myself by having heard somewhere that big isn’t as bad as small in the realm of the genre novel. We shall see.

• I seem to spend a significant portion of my so-called “writing” time noodling about doing research. I already shared the funsies of Inuit grammar a month or so ago. Which started with a single “throwaway” reference.

  This afternoon’s task is also about names. I have a family with the last name of Avalon. After annoyingly clever comments for several generations, they decided to just roll with it, and now all born Avalons have names out of the Matter of Britain.  There are a lot of Avalons, and so I have finally had to break down and spelunk the crevasses of various places on the Interwebs to find a bunch. This guy’s list is the winner so far.

  Anyway, because there are a lot of them; and because they feature in a scandalous complication, which matters at least in my own wee fuzzy head, I’ve been trying for FIVE YEARS to find something that would handle family trees. Failed–unless I wanted to pay for something that apparently would sketch it all about in a twee little graphic.

  And even in the packages I demo’ed, it’s kind of complicated, when you figure out on page two-zillion-six that somebody is really related to such and who, to go in there and change it. Apparently there’s no perfect answer to this question, and the people who do it for realsies use good ol’ pen and paper–or, I should say, pencil. They then make lots of copies of sections and back up their work–er, photocopy it–undoubtedly while using a few choice words.

  I’m not that patient; I’m not that organized. The manuscript itself is in something like seven or eight notebooks at this point, all with notes scrawled randomly in them, and when the dust settles, I’m going to go in and mine it all for stuff that I was stupid about; or that answers some random-ass question after said research, etc.

  So, between me being me, and the task being what it is, anybody who knows me is now LTAO at the very thought of me with sticky notes, scissors, and several different folders of different colors. Moan.

  Then, just now, while messing with another sheet in the growing table of various data (necessary when putting together an entire society), I had the epiphany that you can do it with a worksheet.

  It’s not easy. At all. As of the moment, I have some hope that Pages will do a better job than Excel. Sigh. But that said, after a mere hour of tinkering, I have the nasty little buggers all worked out.

  The very best part of having done this is that, now that it’s all drawn out graphically–it’s actually not confusing at all. Much.

More as this exciting task progresses.

• Ironically, as I’ve been doing this blog, and having the usual (if you’re me) argument about bullets’n’paragraphs, I just popped into the HTML window, and could fix stuff. God, how I wish that you could similarly pop the hood on most things. (And no, I don’t want to hear anybody say anything about Unix based applications.)
• In other news, I’m having a kidney stone. Yay. At least now I’ll finally make the appointment with my urologist I’ve been waving my paws at for the last several months.

So how’s by you?

I’m having an panic attack here. I found out this weekend that I have somehow been signed up for Medicare Part D, which is their prescription program. I got hit with a co-pay that, although small, seems to contradict the info I have from MassHealth.

(Because our health care system is compassionate, MassHealth ensures that my co-pay should be what it always has been–it’s a state law.) Well, apparently not, at least in the computer.

So I have to get on the phone. I finally broke down and got a Bluetooth earpiece, which has reduced the hyperactivity-induced phone anxiety–but I’m not looking forward to this. 😦

Evil people (and you know who you are), don’t get in my face about health care reform until you end up with your life completely ruined as mine was–because my fall into an insurance lacuna wiped out my medication. And yes, I was, in fact, actually insured with a private company–they were excellent when we lived past 495 (a Bostonism meaning “getting to the boonies out there, ain’tcha?”) Unfortunately, they didn’t have a good network of providers here. The peachy irony is that the ensuing crash’n’burn ended up in being poor enough to get MassHealth itself. Heh.

My MCO, Network Health, did an excellent job of finishing up figuring out what My Deal was–and I’m getting better–but I’ll be on $1000 per month of medication for the rest of my life.

But even Part D would allow me to keep eating after their co-pay. (I’m guessing there, but I bet it would.)

Here’s the thing: Would America really be better off with me dead? I’m pretty harmless; both my excellent kids adore and highly value me. All three of us are in the arts; and, really, that’s important (especially as we’re good at it). I paid into my SSDI for my entire working life–and someday I hope to be able to have to cough up once more. But I’ll never do that if I stay sick–or die. And that’s what accessible health care means.