Jules Jones's Blog, page 68

word count

There has been none tonight and last night, because I have been sorting out the mess that resulted when my attempt to renew my paid LJ account triggered the fraud protection on my bank account. Prior to that, I had over a week's worth to report. The running totals each day were

Saturday 21734, Sunday 21857, Monday 22178, Tuesday none, Wednesday 22504, Thursday 22763, Friday 23063, Saturday none, Sunday 23195, Monday 23516.

Not many words per day, but I've been writing regularly (as in at least 5 days a week) for a month now. This is the longest I've been able to keep it up (ooh er missus) in three years. Something to do with not being busy learning a new job, house-hunting, taking months to get over a vicious respiratory viral infection, moving, having a serious acute episode of one of my chronic medical problems, or having crippling [*] side-effects from the medication for the latter. I shall enjoy it while it lasts. It's been horribly frustrating having stories in my head but not being able to put them down on electrons.

[*literally crippling by the end. The replacement drug had new, even more exciting side-effects. The replacement replacement has not shown any tendency to bite so far.]

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Presbyopia has well and truly caught up with me

I got varifocals last year for when I'm wearing glasses rather than contacts, but up until three months ago I mostly only needed reading glasses with the contacts for 12 point print when I was tired or in poor light. Now I just need reading glasses, and for the computer as well as books. :-( Which meant that I spent a couple of hours and a chunk of change in the opticians' this evening, getting a current sight test and then measured up for occupational bifocals to wear with the contact lenses. This apparently is the term for bifocals with a monitor-distance prescription in the top and a book-distance prescription in the bottom. These are not cheap when compared with off the shelf reading glasses, even before the fancy coatings and lightweight plastic options. They do, however, come with proper prescription lenses which include the correction for my astigmatism and correct adjustment for my inter-pupil distance, which means I should have much better close vision than with off the shelf.

The optometrist confirmed that I'm getting this level of presbyopia about five years earlier than is normal, and suggested that it could possibly be a side-effect of one of the many medications I've had over the years causing some early weakening of the muscles. I would cheerfully blame the one that was giving me actual muscle problems recently, but I know I had a measurable requirement for reading glasses at least 5 years ago, when I was living in California.

Middle age sucks. It's better than the alternative, but it still sucks.

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wheat heat

My shoulder is bad again. Not bad enough to be a real problem, but enough for me to want a heat pack when I get into the office on a cold morning. Hot water bottles are good, and I have a hot water bottle in a furry cover in my desk as an Official Disability Adjustment, but the problem is that I have to *hold* it on my shoulder with the other hand, which does not do much for my ability to work in the meantime. So I finally went and got myself a wheat-filled microwave heat pack.

I'd never bothered with these, because they have a reputation for cooling down very quickly. This reputation appears to be well-deserved. It doesn't seem to hold usable heat for more than about twenty minutes before needing to be re-stoked, which is a bit of a faff. On the other hand, a floppy sausage shape stays draped in the correct place over my shoulder without having to be held there.

A slightly fuzzy, extremely purple fabric sausage. There were pink ones as well, but I did not think that an extremely pink fabric sausage would be a good idea as a shoulder decoration. Not given my colleagues' sense of humour. :-)

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Book Log: September 2011

I didn't post the book log for September as I logged each book, because I was too sore to do the cross-posting. So it's going up in one chunk. :-)

80) H.P. Lovecraft -- The Call of Cthulhu

This novelette permeates science fiction culture. It's there as part of the background, taken as given. I knew more or less what's in it, because it's nodded to by so many later writers, but I'd never actually read it, or anything else by Lovecraft as far as I can recall. Last month I decided that it was time to change that. There's not really a lot I can say, other than there is bad purple prose and there is good purple prose, and this piece is very fine purple prose indeed. Now I know why it has such a grip on the fannish imagination. And I need to download a few more Lovecraft pieces.

Feedbooks download
LibraryThing entry


81) EF Benson -- Mapp and Lucia [audiobook]

Abridged audiobook of the novel, read by Miriam Margoyles on 3 CDs. My first encounter with Benson's Mapp and Lucia characters, but assuredly not my last. Hysterically funny comedy of manners following the battle of wits and garden parties between two snobs, each intent on ruling local society in a small seaside town in the early 1930s. Margoyles does a superb job of reading, bringing the various characters to vivid life.
LibraryThing entry


82) Stephen Cole - Doctor Who: The Feast Of the Drowned

Book eight in the New Series Adventures. Competent tie-in with Ten and Rose, set in present-day London. When the wreck of a British Navy vessel is recovered and brought back to a secret dock off the Thames for study, there are more than corpses aboard. The ghosts of the sailors start visiting their friends and loved ones, talking about the feast of the drowned and asking for help from the living. And the living will do anything to reach their loved ones to help them, including throwing themselves into the Thames. Ten and Rose would investigate anyway, but it becomes all too personal for Rose when she discovers that one of the ghosts is someone she knows. Competently written, but not one of my favourites of the new series tie-ins.

LibraryThing entry


83) Alan Hunter -- Gently Through the Mill

Fifth in the George Gently police procedural series, set in the 1950s. A corpse is found in a flour hopper in a village bakery. Such accidents aren't unknown, but this one isn't an accident, and the corpse isn't local. Gently is sent to investigate what small time gambler and crook Steinie Taylor was doing out of his ususal haunts, and why someone killed him. The local police are only too willing to tag it as a crime just passing through, but as Gently's team starts digging, they find far too many locals with secrets to hide. Taylor and two friends had been splashing money around, but where did the money come from? Taylor's friends might know, but one of them turns up dead. The other might have the only evidence that could convict a killer -- if Gently can get to him before the killer does.

Enjoyable period police procedural with some nice observation of character. There's a particularly poignant passage in which Gently acknowledges the pathos inherent in a dead petty crook whose biggest dream was to have a legitimate bank account.

LibraryThing entry


84) Ruth Rendell -- From Doon with Death (Inspector Wexford 1)

First of the Inspector Wexford novels, first published in 1964, and very much of its time. Inspector Burden's neighbour asks for some unofficial help when he comes home to find his wife missing. Burden's more interested in escaping to his planned trip to the cinema, assuming that the woman has simply had an assignation and missed her bus or train home. But when Margaret Parsons is found murdered in nearby woods, Burden and Wexford have a mystery on their hands. Who would want to kill a quiet, nondescript housewife who seemed devoted to her husband? There are few clues, until they discover the dead woman had a collection of expensive books, inscribed from "Doon". An old lover, perhaps, one who hadn't accepted that she had moved on and married elsewhere. But finding the pseudonymous Doon is another matter.

It's fairly well constructed and written, and while the lead characters aren't that well developed, they do come across as distinct personalities even in this short novel. There's a strong focus on psychological study of the various suspects and witnesses, and Wexford is shown as a broad-minded man whose uncensorious attitude to human frailities can be an asset in his job. But I found the general shape of the solution far too obvious from the very beginning of the book, and was disappointed to find that I was right.

LibraryThing entry


85) Roger Bax -- Blueprint for Murder

Post-war crime novel, in which a wealthy man is found murdered shortly after his son and nephew have returned from service at the end of World War 2. The two young men are the obvious and only reasonable suspects, but one of them has the perfect alibi. So perfect that Inspector James is suspicious... This isn't a whodunnit, because the book opens with the nephew's flight from a German prison camp and his progress across Europe towards England -- and the psychological damage he's taken over the years of war. He's determined to live the good life when he finally gets home, and that means planning the perfect murder in order to get his share of his uncle's estate, and enough money to clear out to a new life in South America. The first few chapters cover how he perfects and practices his plans, with a very ingenious method of creating an unbreakable alibi. The plot then shifts to the police investigation of the murder, with the painstaking attention to detail needed to investigate the crime, and finally to the killer's discovery that someone could expose him after all, and his hasty attempts to cover up and then escape. Well-plotted and well-paced, with a rising thread of tension as it becomes apparent that Arthur will have to kill again to escape the hangman's noose. Bax has done a good job in creating a killer who has been hardened by his experiences and understands his own capacity for violence only too well.

http://www.librarything.com/work/11449785/


86) Ruth Rendell -- Wolf to the Slaughter (Inspector Wexford 2)

The second Inspector Wexford novel, and as with the first, very much a 1960s novel. It gave me even more of a sense of "the past is a foreign country" than the first one, because a major plot thread involves one of the characters renting out rooms in her house by the evening, for students to use for studying in private, nudge nudge, wink, wink, and this activity gets her threatened with being charged with the offence of keeping a disorderly house. Because in this time period, unmarried couples found it difficult to find somewhere to have sex, and renting rooms to them for such a purpose was conduct liable to outrage public decency, and thus could be a criminal offence...

An eccentric artist reports his sister Anita as missing. Since his problem appears to be largely that he's too away with the fairies to cope without her for even a night, Burden doesn't take it seriously, until Wexford connects it with an anonymous letter stating that a girl called Ann has been murdered. There's no concrete evidence of murder, but the artist is adamant that his sister would have left him a note if she'd gone away for a few days, and there are other odd things about her absence that lead Wexford to dig deeper. Anita was well known to have a large selection of men friends, and it's entirely possible that one of them has killed her out of jealousy. But even when he finds evidence that blood has indeed been shed, Wexford has trouble putting together the pieces to make a coherent picture. Too many alibis that may or may not be false, too many dangling loose ends, too many people holding clues who are frightened to tell the truth. And no corpse...

It's a good read, with a lot of twists packed into a short novel, and a good eye for character detail. But I thought it perhaps a little too choppy as a result. And I did find the period mores oddly jarring, more so than with period mysteries from some other writers.

LibraryThing entry


87) James Goss: Torchwood: First Born

First of the trilogy of Miracle Day prequel novels, and set between Children of Earth and Miracle Day. Gwen and Rhys have taken to the hills after the birth of baby Anwen, using a selection of Torchwood safe houses to hide from people who are much too interested in the last surviving piece of Torchwood. The latest one is a caravan park in a remote village -- and as they wryly note at one point, there had to be a reason why Ianto's keyring collection included the key for a caravan in the middle of nowhere.

It's just Gwen and Rhys in this one, but it's still a solid Torchwood story about the use and misuse of alien technology that has fallen into human hands. As usual Goss does an excellent job with writing Rhys, and I enjoyed this one a lot.

LibraryThing entry


88) Agatha Christie -- The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side [audiobook]

Audiobook abridged on 3 CDs, read by Frances Jeater. I read and reviewed the novel earlier this year, so was familiar with the plot, but I thought this abridgement would work well even for someone coming to the story afresh. It does lose some of the characterisation, particularly the minor characters, but retains all the detail needed to support whodunnit. I think where it might suffer a little is in the emotional impact when you first start to understand what the motive for the murder was.

Jeater does a reasonable job of reading, but I think I prefer other readers I've listened to in this series of audio abridgements.

http://www.librarything.com/work/15575/


89) Lois McMaster Bujold -- Cryoburn

Fifteenth book in the Vorkosigan series, and mostly, but not entirely, "Miles happens to people". I don't think this book would do much for people who aren't already familiar with the series, even though I think it's a wonderful book for existing fans. it's a competent enough caper novel, but if you come to it new to the series, it's going to feel as if it's not fleshed out. The richness comes from reader familiarity with the character of Miles, and what it's taken him to get to this point in his life -- he's 39, 8 years on from the previous novel, married with children and getting tired of of being called away from home on the Emperor's business for weeks at a time. While there's still some action, the ostensible focus of this book is on economic shenanigans, of a sort Miles is well fitted to investigate because he's a natural scam artist himself.

The real emotional punch comes in the last few pages. I knew what was coming, because I'd heard Bujold talking about it at a con a few years ago, before she'd started writing the book -- but it still got me. The final 100 words made me tear up, and probably always will do when I read them again. And that is something that simply will not have the same effect on a new reader. This is not the book to start reading the Vorkosiverse with, but the one to come to after you've watched Miles grow to this point.

LibraryThing entry


90) Michael Swanwick -- Stations of the Tide

Nicking the plot description from Wikipedia: the story of a bureaucrat with the Department of Technology Transfer who must descend to the surface of Miranda to hunt a magician who has smuggled proscribed technology past the orbital embargo, and bring him to justice before the world is transformed by the flood of the Jubilee Tides.

This won the Nebula in 1991, and I can see why. I'm sure if I'd read it in 1991 I would have thoroughly enjoyed it. But reading it for the first time in 2011, I find the psychedelic scene jumps merely irritating and tedious. I admire the world-building, which is painted in light strokes that don't succumb to the temptation to explain all, and I liked the characterisation. But reading it was more work than I really cared for, for the amount of payoff I got.

LibraryThing entry

91) Alan Hunter -- Gently in the Sun

Sixth in the Inspector George Gently series, and first published in 1959. An attractive young woman is found dead on the beach in the fishing village where she has being staying with her boss. The boss is one obvious suspect, particularly as he already has a criminal record. A young artist who had a crush on her is another. But Gently is disinclined to take the first obvious suspect without looking any further, even if both men are obviously lying. He needs to break both stories, not least to clear them if they're lying out of fear about something else. His instincts are proven right when another, much older, murder is unearthed. Are the two killings related, and if so, how?

A solid mid-list mystery with some interesting characters, although Gently himself seems thinly drawn in this one.

LibraryThing entry
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Psion battery life

I've barely used the new (to me) Psion a friend gave me three months ago, because not long after that I started getting some nasty medication side-effects which meant that I had to minimise my keyboard use, especially anything not on an ergonomic keyboard. But yesterday I pulled it out on the bus to type up last night's (f-locked) post about lunchtime silliness at work. The fresh alkaline batteries I'd put in exactly three months earlier had finally drained to the point where it wouldn't let me save any new work, although it hadn't quite switched to the back-up to preserve the settings in RAM. That's almost entirely standby use, as according to the battery log screen I'd only used it for 3 and a bit hours during that time. But getting 3 months of standby out of one set of alkaline AAs is one of the reasons I liked these little machines in the first place. They were extremely practical for travelling, because of the long battery life and ease of replacing batteries with off-the-shelf if you weren't anywhere near a suitable power point. (Indeed, I've never used one on a power supply other than to check the power port was still working.) And indeed, what I did was pull out the spare set and change the batteries before merrily typing away.

As for the typing on the bus -- slow but feasible now that I have one with a keyboard in good working order. It's not going to get used every day, but it is extremely useful to have it in my backpack if I think of something I want to make notes on. I need to pull off my notes on the production of Edward II which kalypso_v and I went to see last week.

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Report from the word mines

Slow but reasonably consistent progress so far this week. Running totals as follows: Sunday 20923, Monday 21005, Tuesday, 21104, Wednesday 21262, Thursday 21408, Friday 21511, which took it to the end of the sex scene. Which means that no, it's not a very long sex scene. I could try to expand it, but I fear that it would be padding. Probably better to leave it be and wait for the next one, which will probably be a somewhat more considered exercise from the characters' POV.

I also probably need to go back at some point and add a bit of descriptive wordage to the rest of the story, because once again I am demonstrating that I hear my fiction as a radio play, rather than seeing it as a film. It's not as bad as the first draft of Ship to Shore, but it's still too light on visual description for readers who are more visually orientated than I am.

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the writing life

Nowt on Thursday, probably because I'd spent from 3:15 to 5:15 the previous night wide awake, and while this didn't seem to make me particularly sleepy the next day, it did little for my creativity in the evening. However, on Friday evening I got the story up to 20,300 words before phoning predatrix and nattering to her for an hour. She now has a landline, making it feasible to natter for an hour without incurring a large phone bill. :-) I have reminded her that she *liked* the Moffat take on Sherlock Holmes, if she wants some inspiration to start writing again now that she has some privacy.

I seem to have done very little of anything today, but have nevertheless managed to get the total wordcount to 20,739, and the boys are about to take advantage of the large double bed they are standing next to. I think this counts as having finally reached sex scene. That will be it for today, as I need to go downstairs and do something about dinner, and after that will be watching Raffles with kalypso_v . Slashy seventies subtext for the win!

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RIP Steve Jobs

I awoke this morning to the news that Steve Jobs had died, far too young. It was no surprise -- the man had visibly been living on borrowed time for months if not years. It still made me sad.

I'm no Apple fangirl. The last time I used an Apple product was playing games on a friend's Apple IIe. There are plenty of criticisms I can and indeed have made of Apple and of Jobs. But even though I've never owned an Apple product, Steve Jobs made my life better. He saw useful technology around him, and how it could be used more widely, and found a way to enthuse other people. He didn't create the original Apple -- that was Steve Wozniak. He didn't invent the mouse, or the GUI -- that was the Xerox PARC team. But he sold those ideas to the public at large, and the machine I'm typing this on is a direct result of that, even if it's a Wintel machine. This was his gift, to see what ordinary people might do with information technology, and show them his vision.

Steve Jobs changed the world. We are the poorer for his passing.

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wordage report

The wordage continues this week, apart from last night, when I chose to spend the evening lying flat on the floor with a hot water bottle for a pillow, on account of ricked shoulder playing up.

Skipped Tuesday and Wednesday last week, but after that the running total has been Thursday 18791 (or 347 that night), Friday 18965, Saturday 19188, Sunday 19380, Monday 19695, and tonight 20125. Some 2000 words in the last 2 weeks is pleasing. Some of it will have to be cut as it is meandering wibble, but it's meandering wibble I need to do in order to work out some background stuff that hasn't quite gelled, so it's all useful stuff to be writing even if it does get cut.

I have still not got to the first sex scene. :-) However, I expect to start it tomorrow.

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mushroom and nut risotto

Kalypso_V came round to watch The Wedding of River Song, so I needed to cook something vegetarian (for her) but lowish fibre (for me). I had some pre-pack vegetable stock I needed to use, so risotto seemed a good idea. Alas, the chestnuts are not in season yet, so we went for cashews and pistachios instead. It was a good way of using up some nuts getting towards their Best Before, and the nuts blended well with the mushrooms.

The stock was a mix of a pack of Waitrose vegetable stock (which I wanted to try out), and a pack of organic miso cup-a-soup. The latter is not particularly cheap, but makes an excellent vegetable stock. I thought at first that the resulting stock blend was going to be too strongly flavoured, as it smelt very strong, but in fact it worked very well with the mushrooms and nuts.

Bring four metric cups (one litre) of stock to a gentle simmer in a saucepan. Chop a small onion and fry gently in a large frying pan for a few minutes in butter or oil. For this one I used a blend of butter, olive oil and sesame seed oil. Add 1 1/2 metric cups of white risotto rice (other rices can be used, but a proper risotto rice works best) and stir over a low heat for a couple of minutes. At this point you can add 1/3 cup wine and flash off the alcohol, but I didn't have any wine to hand and couldn't be bothered looking for something appropriate in the spirits cabinet. My normal recipe calls for adding 1/2 to 1 cup of simmering stock at a time to the frying pan and letting it all absorb before adding the next batch, but in this case I was going to steam some of the vegetables over the rice so was keeping it wetter than usual.

Started with 1 cup of stock, then added a punnet of mushrooms which my sous-chef had been quartering in the meantime. Stirred those in and let them heat through, adding more stock as necessary. Then stirred in a handful of cashews and shelled pistachios, and let them heat through. Added the rest of the stock, put some thinly sliced runner beans and carrots on top of the rice, then put the lid on and let the veg steam while the rice absorbed the stock. When the veg were almost done, I added a couple of knobs of butter, put the lid back on and turned off the heat, allowing the risotto to finish cooking and blending on its own heat for about five minutes.

This is fairly low in insoluble fibre as long as you use white rice. If you're cooking for someone with fibre tolerance problems, do not use brown rice. Other obvious potential problem ingredients:

-- the miso soup base is largely soya, which can be an IBS trigger and is an allergen for some people. It also has some brown rice, although not enough that it's likely to be problem just from the fibre point of view.
-- nuts are variable for people on a low fibre diet. Some people can handle them without problems, some can't. And of course some people have nut allergies.
-- butter is fairly low in lactose, but even so it can be a problem for very lactase-sensitive people. And there are people out there with milk solid allergies.
-- don't use flavoured oils such as sesame or walnut without checking for allergies.
-- if the alcohol isn't flashed off it can be an issue for people on medication. (And supertasters will not thank you for ruining the food with the taste of ethanol...)

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