no more sunday shifts ever
Nov. 6th, 2006 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Yesterday was just... Well, I left the house at 7:45 am, and I got home at 12 midnight, only to fail to open the kitchen door until Z got out of bed and came and unlocked the deadbolt. We don't usually lock the deadbolt, so I was completely baffled by the fact that the doorknob was turning but the door wasn't actually opening, and I thought I just wasn't turning the knob all the way, because I had so much crap in my hands and arms, so I had paused to put everything down and I flatter myself I would've figured out the door handle in a minute if Z hadn't rescued me.
So, practice first, which was fun-- I am pretty confident about my skating and control, but we were learning the technique for skating the track and that kind of sucked because it's a circle and I'm much better on the straightaways. Bah.
Then the league's monthly meeting: We're going to try to have our first bout by late January. And they're trying to make it easier to meet minimum attendance requirements-- I think I'm the only one who will really have to struggle to make two practices a week, but there's a speed skating class on Monday nights that counts towards attendance as well. So I should be able to keep up. I hope.
Then I had to leave the meeting and head straight for work. I clocked in while still wearing my knee-length workout pants and my black-and-white stripey knee socks. (But I changed before work.)
And man oh man. It was the most annoying shift ever. I will not be working any more Sundays for anybody for the foreseeable future, unless I lose my fucking mind. Forget it! Bah. Ugh.
I made a bunch of money, I think, but it was just so annoying, and you know what, I can make more in a decent Thursday shift, so really I'm not sorry to miss out on Sundays in future. Don't need that kind of stress. Also I didn't see Z at all and I sort of miss him.
So I haven't written a word on my NaNoWriMo novel in 2 days. I just now went back and while reading it over added about ten words, making me within 300 words of breaking the 20k mark. I have a tentative plan now that I should aim to finish an act a week, and if the thing's divided into 3 acts, that should mean I have a completeish novel by the end of Week 3, so I have a whole week to completely fuck things up.
It is very handy for me that the weeks end on a Monday, as I can pretty well predict that I won't be getting any writing done on weekends.
And now I am going to blather on about my novel, more about the form of it than the content, because I am interested, but I am putting it behind a cut because I am not assuming you are.
When I first started writing I freely alternated POVs. I flatter myself that I was better than the average Beginning Writer head-hopper, but I still had my moments. I just wasn't very aware of it. It wasn't until some discussions with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tehta, I believe, that I really became obsessed with it. I wouldn't hop freely from head to head, but I'd just have stray lines in there that weren't believably point-of-view. I think it was more that i was alternating from tight third to omniscient.
For Vikings_Novel, NaNo 2004, I wrote almost 3/4 of it in the female character's POV before I encountered a scene that had to be from the male character's POV, and I realized I'd better alternate. I had to go back and cobble in a bunch of stuff for him. That was messy.
So for NaNo 2005, I decided to take the novel I'd been working on before NaNo 2004, and redo it entirely, in a strict 1st per POV. That was challenging, as the character I chose to narrate had a problematically flawed perspective, in that he often spent stretches of time in a fugue state and so wasn't aware of his surroundings during plot-critical moments. But I seem to have gotten by that somehow.
This year I'm just coming off my Martha Wells bender (The Ships of Air is still beside my bed and I get to read little snippets of it now and then when I'm feeling down) and I noted that the way she alternates POVs made for a brisker-feeling pace and a more distinct development of the different strands of plot. I think a story that complex simply couldn't be told from one point of view; no one character knows enough for the entire thing to hang together.
My NaNo 2006 isn't that complex, but I like the idea. So I'm trying it, and I'm enjoying myself immensely. It's really refreshing, and the way I seem to just always know whose POV something should happen in is a really neat kick.
OK that wasn't as coherent as I wanted to be.
Oh, I had meant to talk about Saturday-- I got home from work, we decided we needed beer, and we decided to go out someplace that had beer. Where would one go for beer at 5 on a Saturday?
Why, Nietszche's, of course. They have their Irish seisuns from 4-7, and also they have beer.
So we went there and there were no musicians. The bartender said there was a big quarterly seisun in Batavia that probably everybody had gone to, so, oh well. But they still had beer, so we had beer.
Then a harpist showed up, who hadn't gotten the memo about Batavia. "Ugh," he said, "I'm not driving 45 minutes at this hour." So he sat and played a couple songs on his harp.
"Does anyone sing?" he asked.
"I do," I said.
We puzzled out for a bit that we didn't know any real obvious songs in common. So I sang them Dolores Keane's The Generous Lover only I forgot the last verse, not that it matters.
Everyone was impressed. More people came in halfway through and thought I was an act that had been booked. So I felt rather smug.
But I'd had two beers on an empty stomach by then, one of them a 20-ounce Guinness, and I also hadn't brushed up on any songs because I hadn't thought I'd be singing. So I couldn't remember any songs. I embarrassingly forgot the words mid-verse to The Wind That Shakes The Barley, so I promised the bartender I'd look it up and sing it for him next week.
But! The harper had said he wished he knew The Foggy Dew, and I volunteered to teach it to him, and successfully did so. So I felt smug about that.
It was fun. I haven't sung in public since high school, pretty much. I sing to Z all the time, but he's always embarrassed by it and makes fun of me. So it was nice that people liked it. I promised to come back the next week and sing them the rest of The Wind That Shakes The Barley, which I shouldn't have attempted in the first place but it's a lovely low alto song, for all it's a cheesy Clancy Brothers blood-and-vengeance rebellion tune with all kinds of cheesy nationalist sentiments I don't actually espouse now that I'm not 16 anymore. (Not that i ever really did.)
Then we went to dinner, and came back to see James Cotton with his blues band. James Cotton used to play with Muddy Waters. He's a Blues Hall of Fame inductee. He could hardly walk, and couldn't speak, but he got out his harmonicas and rocked the fuck out. He even got up at one point and danced, briefly.
His band was three young black men and one middle-aged white dude in a cowboy hat, and they also rocked the fuck out-- they warmed up for him both times, playing two or three songs to get us going. They did a supremely awesome cover of B.B. King's "How Blue Can You Get", and in the second set the bassist sang a great version of "Mustang Sally".
And then of course there was the lovely nature of Nietsche's itself-- the way it is set up, it's big enough to cram a lot of people into, but it's also very intimate, and you can cram yourselves up in such a way that there's actual eye contact between the performers and the audience. The lights are mostly overhead, not shining in the musicians' eyes. And so I flirted for hours with the bassist, which was great fun.
So Nietszche's is still just about my favorite place in the world. And the fact that the owner, Joe, is such a nice guy only makes it better. (He's a big advertiser with Z's magazine and comes in and hangs out in the back office making up his ad every week, so he and Z talk about the blues.)
So, practice first, which was fun-- I am pretty confident about my skating and control, but we were learning the technique for skating the track and that kind of sucked because it's a circle and I'm much better on the straightaways. Bah.
Then the league's monthly meeting: We're going to try to have our first bout by late January. And they're trying to make it easier to meet minimum attendance requirements-- I think I'm the only one who will really have to struggle to make two practices a week, but there's a speed skating class on Monday nights that counts towards attendance as well. So I should be able to keep up. I hope.
Then I had to leave the meeting and head straight for work. I clocked in while still wearing my knee-length workout pants and my black-and-white stripey knee socks. (But I changed before work.)
And man oh man. It was the most annoying shift ever. I will not be working any more Sundays for anybody for the foreseeable future, unless I lose my fucking mind. Forget it! Bah. Ugh.
I made a bunch of money, I think, but it was just so annoying, and you know what, I can make more in a decent Thursday shift, so really I'm not sorry to miss out on Sundays in future. Don't need that kind of stress. Also I didn't see Z at all and I sort of miss him.
So I haven't written a word on my NaNoWriMo novel in 2 days. I just now went back and while reading it over added about ten words, making me within 300 words of breaking the 20k mark. I have a tentative plan now that I should aim to finish an act a week, and if the thing's divided into 3 acts, that should mean I have a completeish novel by the end of Week 3, so I have a whole week to completely fuck things up.
It is very handy for me that the weeks end on a Monday, as I can pretty well predict that I won't be getting any writing done on weekends.
And now I am going to blather on about my novel, more about the form of it than the content, because I am interested, but I am putting it behind a cut because I am not assuming you are.
When I first started writing I freely alternated POVs. I flatter myself that I was better than the average Beginning Writer head-hopper, but I still had my moments. I just wasn't very aware of it. It wasn't until some discussions with
tehta, I believe, that I really became obsessed with it. I wouldn't hop freely from head to head, but I'd just have stray lines in there that weren't believably point-of-view. I think it was more that i was alternating from tight third to omniscient. For Vikings_Novel, NaNo 2004, I wrote almost 3/4 of it in the female character's POV before I encountered a scene that had to be from the male character's POV, and I realized I'd better alternate. I had to go back and cobble in a bunch of stuff for him. That was messy.
So for NaNo 2005, I decided to take the novel I'd been working on before NaNo 2004, and redo it entirely, in a strict 1st per POV. That was challenging, as the character I chose to narrate had a problematically flawed perspective, in that he often spent stretches of time in a fugue state and so wasn't aware of his surroundings during plot-critical moments. But I seem to have gotten by that somehow.
This year I'm just coming off my Martha Wells bender (The Ships of Air is still beside my bed and I get to read little snippets of it now and then when I'm feeling down) and I noted that the way she alternates POVs made for a brisker-feeling pace and a more distinct development of the different strands of plot. I think a story that complex simply couldn't be told from one point of view; no one character knows enough for the entire thing to hang together.
My NaNo 2006 isn't that complex, but I like the idea. So I'm trying it, and I'm enjoying myself immensely. It's really refreshing, and the way I seem to just always know whose POV something should happen in is a really neat kick.
OK that wasn't as coherent as I wanted to be.
Oh, I had meant to talk about Saturday-- I got home from work, we decided we needed beer, and we decided to go out someplace that had beer. Where would one go for beer at 5 on a Saturday?
Why, Nietszche's, of course. They have their Irish seisuns from 4-7, and also they have beer.
So we went there and there were no musicians. The bartender said there was a big quarterly seisun in Batavia that probably everybody had gone to, so, oh well. But they still had beer, so we had beer.
Then a harpist showed up, who hadn't gotten the memo about Batavia. "Ugh," he said, "I'm not driving 45 minutes at this hour." So he sat and played a couple songs on his harp.
"Does anyone sing?" he asked.
"I do," I said.
We puzzled out for a bit that we didn't know any real obvious songs in common. So I sang them Dolores Keane's The Generous Lover only I forgot the last verse, not that it matters.
Everyone was impressed. More people came in halfway through and thought I was an act that had been booked. So I felt rather smug.
But I'd had two beers on an empty stomach by then, one of them a 20-ounce Guinness, and I also hadn't brushed up on any songs because I hadn't thought I'd be singing. So I couldn't remember any songs. I embarrassingly forgot the words mid-verse to The Wind That Shakes The Barley, so I promised the bartender I'd look it up and sing it for him next week.
But! The harper had said he wished he knew The Foggy Dew, and I volunteered to teach it to him, and successfully did so. So I felt smug about that.
It was fun. I haven't sung in public since high school, pretty much. I sing to Z all the time, but he's always embarrassed by it and makes fun of me. So it was nice that people liked it. I promised to come back the next week and sing them the rest of The Wind That Shakes The Barley, which I shouldn't have attempted in the first place but it's a lovely low alto song, for all it's a cheesy Clancy Brothers blood-and-vengeance rebellion tune with all kinds of cheesy nationalist sentiments I don't actually espouse now that I'm not 16 anymore. (Not that i ever really did.)
Then we went to dinner, and came back to see James Cotton with his blues band. James Cotton used to play with Muddy Waters. He's a Blues Hall of Fame inductee. He could hardly walk, and couldn't speak, but he got out his harmonicas and rocked the fuck out. He even got up at one point and danced, briefly.
His band was three young black men and one middle-aged white dude in a cowboy hat, and they also rocked the fuck out-- they warmed up for him both times, playing two or three songs to get us going. They did a supremely awesome cover of B.B. King's "How Blue Can You Get", and in the second set the bassist sang a great version of "Mustang Sally".
And then of course there was the lovely nature of Nietsche's itself-- the way it is set up, it's big enough to cram a lot of people into, but it's also very intimate, and you can cram yourselves up in such a way that there's actual eye contact between the performers and the audience. The lights are mostly overhead, not shining in the musicians' eyes. And so I flirted for hours with the bassist, which was great fun.
So Nietszche's is still just about my favorite place in the world. And the fact that the owner, Joe, is such a nice guy only makes it better. (He's a big advertiser with Z's magazine and comes in and hangs out in the back office making up his ad every week, so he and Z talk about the blues.)
