C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 123

In spite of gruesome allergies, a bit of progress…

Remarkable how you can write underwater and with the sound of fans loud enough to homogenize your brain.

OTOH, the koi all came out today, the house temp reached 74 degrees, hence finally necessitating the ac, because we cannot function or sleep at 75 and we daren't open the windows while the hemlocks and cedars are fornicating in the breeze.

The koi have all waked, we have done a head count and all are there. I circled the pool with black pepper to discourage raccoons, and the water temperature has reached 54, what with the rise in daytime temperatures and the heat of the pump and actual sunlight. So we should feed the koi for the first time real-soon-now, if not tomorrow, when their little exothermic fishy guts have plenty of time to digest the food before the cooldown at night.

Jane has battled demons and gargoyles trying to get Chernevog to display properly in the Adobe E-pub reader, and finally thinks she has done it. We are very close. It's amazing: these companies keep 'upgrading'—meaning screwing things up immeasurably with NO regard to those of us actively trying to do this for real, and no upgrade notes, no help, no advisement, and increasingly hostile mutterings from the gurus of the internet who accuse certain companies of trying to de-rail e-books—and not the publishers, either. I mean, just give us some breadcrumbs in the wilderness, some trail that tells us where to look for the latest idiot change in these programs….But we think we've got it.

 

 

Writing comes to a screeching halt—with tax time and allergies…

Hadda get the tax stuff organized.

And something's bloomed that has my name and Jane's on it. We're dumber than dirt and can't wake up. Being indoors with the air filters going full tilt while taking Theraflu night and day versions seems to be the only way to cope, but I'm not that smart today. I just want to go back to bed and lie there. My money is on the evergreens pollinating…we've had this weird weather, and for the first time and suddenly the temperature's flirting with 70 degrees instead of 35 to 40, and it's staying above freezing at night.

Glug. My eyes are watering so its hard to see what I'm doing. I tried Zyrtac yesterday and it gave me a very upset stomach. Benedryl and Sudafed in combo helped after that somewhat wore off, but today I'm trying Theraflu.

This too shall pass. Usually it's a few days. If I weren't on an antihistamine, I couldn't breathe, I'd be coughing, and my ears would be so swollen I'd be half-deaf. As well as stupid. I hates allergies, I hatessss 'em.

 

 

 

 

Writing comes to a screeching half—with tax time and allergies…

Hadda get the tax stuff organized.

And something's bloomed that has my name and Jane's on it. We're dumber than dirt and can't wake up. Being indoors with the air filters going full tilt while taking Theraflu night and day versions seems to be the only way to cope, but I'm not that smart today. I just want to go back to bed and lie there. My money is on the evergreens pollinating…we've had this weird weather, and for the first time and suddenly the temperature's flirting with 70 degrees instead of 35 to 40, and it's staying above freezing at night.

Glug. My eyes are watering so its hard to see what I'm doing. I tried Zyrtac yesterday and it gave me a very upset stomach. Benedryl and Sudafed in combo helped after that somewhat wore off, but today I'm trying Theraflu.

This too shall pass. Usually it's a few days. If I weren't on an antihistamine, I couldn't breathe, I'd be coughing, and my ears would be so swollen I'd be half-deaf. As well as stupid. I hates allergies, I hatessss 'em.

 

 

 

 

Laurel and Hardy service the koi pond…

or…CJ installs the uv lights.

These are two delicate, spendy glass wands with a VERY delicate fixture at the top, heavy cord, and two very heavy ballasts. They fit into the skimmer to kill algae spores.

I go out there with 2 boxes (the lights) —and a Y connector for the electric. I climb the slight berm to the skimmer and lay stuff out. I take out one—and turned to straighten out the stiff cord, which has tangled. I mis-stepped on a larger than average rock, stepped back and put my foot down on the budget-killing OTHER bulb in its box—recoiled, lost my balance, dropped the bulb  I was holding, and at this point knew I was going down. In skating, you learn to turn a bit as you fall—arms in front and stiff-elbowed, shoulders tensed, protecting arms, hip-bone, neck—keep your head up: chin, skull, etc,  I dinged one knee somewhat sideways—never land on the kneecap, either—kept turning as I was going down, landed on the poor little hinoki cypress and kept going with the momentum, this time landing correctly on the side of my butt, thus saving the hip and the tailbone—except I landed on a pointed skull-sized rock, before rolling to a stop at the bottom. I got up, went back up, and found the first light apparently intact in its box, and the second, landing in the hinoki, was unbroken. I rejoiced, put it all together, shoved the ballasts into the Chinese garden seat, righted it, plugged it all in (not being a fool, I did not plug it in first and then go work with water and lightbulbs) and both bulbs lit. Hurrah!

I took three Advil, an equal number of glasses of Chardonnay, and am very happy to report that I am not even that sore this morning, except a little soreness in the butt when stepping sideways.

Mack Sennett should've filmed that one. Or I should try to sell the routine to Cirque du Soleil.

 

 

Sorry—I've been writing nonstop…

…as you can tell by the word count.

Something odd has happened. Before the book's story really starts,  Bren has gotten into his computer and started reading some notes Geigi gave him and this looks as if it is going to be a prologue. I haven't done a prologue since book i. But this is kind of an interesting take—the whole train of events recapped from the Landing upward, in Geigi's words, with Geigi's behind-the-scenes knowledge of  events from the atevi point of view, interspersed with Bren's as he adds commentary of things he knows that Geigi might not. Sort of the Cliff's Notes version of Foreigner with the things you didn't know tucked into it. Talk about your book starting to talk to you…

 

Getting very close to adding Chernevog and Yvgenie…

We only have to get the files copyrighted, and up.

For those who'd like to know. there's been a little change in Rusalka, a greater change in Chernevog, and a massive change in Yvgenie—in the latter, I've rewritten it line by line: nothing's left untouched.

This is because, well, between multiple parental illnesses, publisher deaths–2–and things too sad to mention—I wasn't with it.  And then my publishers went into meltdown.

I had a vision of these books—I loved these books. But—at the end, I turned them in as less than they could be because I had to survive. And my publishers at the time—don't ask. I was very glad just to survive, but then the distributors started into warfare with my books as the centerpiece of their accusations.

Don't ask. But these are what I wanted them to be.  'Nuff said.

If you've ever wondered what I meant, if you've ever wondered about the ancient world, if you've never walked in a forest alone, if you've never wished for the impossible, or wondered if it was a good wish—skip these books; otherwise, read these, and think better of me than what you read the last time.

And spread the word among your friends.

 

Had a chance for a private reading of Jane's newest…

…and it's beyond good. It's really, really, really good. She's taken a long hiatus from writing, with all the work that landed on her, and the health crisis (now solved) but she not only hasn't dropped a stitch, she's pent up a head of steam, assembled her skills and written a beginning that's so smooth any writer has to envy it.

She's happy with this one and she ought to be…she's about one third of the way through, and if she goes at this pace, she should be through by summer. Happy, happy!

In the spirit of recovering lost books…what are your favorites in that category?

I'll vote for EC Tubb and Alan Burt Akers (a pen name)—Prince of Scorpio: I really enjoyed these.

Worth checking out…

…a move apparently to rescue endangered sf, sort of a Project Gutenberg sort of thing. I approach such things with caution, but note that Project Gutenberg is far less likely to pick up something like Prince of Scorpio or many of the oddments of our field.

 

More good news…

The other thing that is going really well is the Chernevog imminent release and the Yvgenie edit—I may finish that before Monday.

These are the Russian novels. And they had so much baggage—back in the day. I'm not going to describe the wretched details—we'd all get depressed, but suffice it to say it involved a several year stretch of writing uphill both ways in a blizzard of catastrophe for, oh, much more than one year. The result was that—these books, while successful, had flaws.

Well, the beauty of e-books—is you get a re-do. I did a fairly light rewrite on Rusalka. Jane chipped in and helped me on the Chernevog rewrite, which was in 2012—she was, by then, in far better shape than I was. And then there's Yvgenie, which I am about to finish up. Oh, my. Chernevog has major, major fixes. And I just flat rewrote Yvgenie. There's hardly a line in the book untouched, new bits, some erasures, and it is finally a work I'm really happy with and that I'm proud of, the way I'd wanted to be when I first wrote the set.

These books are, for those who don't know, set in long-ago Russia, draw pretty heavily on Russian myth and folklore, but are definitely not about Russian elves and fairies, or wizards in long black robes. They're about two young men who land in deep trouble in their town and end up in worse trouble in a lonely woods. The way wizards work in this story is a deliberate departure from the modern method of magecraft…it's effortless, it's 'free', it's dangerous, and the more you try to wish yourself out of trouble, the deeper you can dig the pit. A rusalka, for those of you who've not run into that word before, is the ghost of a maiden who died for love, specifically by drowning, and they're quite, quite dangerous. And lest you think these books are cover-to-cover dark and grim, our two troublemakers have a very lively sense of humor. I mean, if you're in love with a dead girl, what worse can go wrong with your week?