something else
May. 24th, 2007 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Nothin' personal, just don't really want to think about either roller derby or air purifiers at the moment. So I'm trolling through the "recent" files in my various word-processing programs. Depressingly, Word is entirely roller-derby related-- there is not one file in that history that's not. Not even my resume, which I know I edited the week before last. (Hell, that was when I compose it in the first place. Had to go from scratch, too.)
I have terrible organizational skills, I might've mentioned, which means that my projects are never quite properly filed. Yeah. Anyway. So I often will go by what's in the "Open Recent" menus in my programs. Yeah, I'm serious, I really do.
I actually use TextWrangler a lot lately for composing. I don't know if I've mentioned, but I didn't actually own Word at the time that I wrote the first draft of Barbarians_Novel, so I used T_W's predecessor, BBEdit, which is mostly used for line-edit coding. TextWrangler is similar, and actually has no formatting. In my manuscripts I indicate italics by using HTML pointy brackets.
Don't know if y'all wanted that insight into my composition process, but it's true.
Don't actually compose HTML in TextWrangler, much. Anything complicated I do in GoLive. Which I haven't actually configured on this computer. Which I got a year ago. So, yeah, don't update the website much. Probably should. I might get Googled and that'd be ugly. Anyway.
So I had a little of my actual personal projects in the Recent Items for Textwrangler. Reread one. Feel like posting it. This is what I was going to work on this summer, except I got employed.
Follows on from the novel I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo, in that it consists of me scrapping that novel entirely and writing a sequel instead.
700 words, unfinished snippet, amuses me.
Haika liked fast cars. Fast cars with good stereos. There was no pleasure in the world-- and she had sampled many, by the way, of the pleasures available, and not just in this world-- quite like driving very fast down a well-engineered highway with the windows down, the sunroof open, and the stereo up very loud.
She was no music expert, but she had people to do that for her. She had a lot of people who were all to eager to find things for her, give her things and eagerly await her opinion on them. Which was part of the reason she was so fond of driving fast. Even if there were someone in the car with her, she couldn't hear them over the wind's rushing and the stereo's pumping, which meant that, for once, she was left in peace.
There was a lot of that in this world, she reflected, thumbing her sunglasses farther up her nose. A lot of noise and bustle and activity meant that the only way to approach her native silence and stillness was to go very fast and very loud, to drown out the incidental noise and clutter.
Her native world had no cars. No cars, and no stereos. A lot fewer people, a lot less noise, a lot less fuss and bustle and stuff. But it was unglamorous to be so close to nature, and she had never seen any point in pretending not to laugh out loud at those in this world who wistfully pined about humanity's lost intimacy with nature. Nature was neither mysterious nor particularly nurturing, and the weary agonizing grind of, say, high infant mortality, or chronic diarrhea, was really nothing like so uplifting as these people seemed to think.
But she did miss it, sometimes. Not the icky parts, or the grinding weariness of survival. But home, which is a natural human impulse: she missed home.
"Where did you say you were from?" The police officer looked up at her over the edge of the little plastic card she'd handed him. She set her sunglasses up on her forehead and gave him a small, polite smile.
"That's my current address," she said, indicating the little card. She had people who took care of paperwork for her. She really hadn't thought to examine the card very much. It was supposed to mean she was allowed to drive this car, wasn't it?
"Just wondering about the accent, ma'am," the policeman said. "I'll be right back with this." He ambled away.
A little town in Ireland, Haika thought of saying. She'd said it before. People invariably protested that she didn't have an Irish accent. Following up with, Oh, I lived there four thousand years ago never quite proved a satisfactory explanation. So she'd given up on explaining. She understood now why Betty, her first contact with this world, had worked so hard on developing a perfectly neutral false accent. But seeing as Haika had only learned this language through magic, she didn't yet really have the control over it to blur her accent properly. Thusfar she hadn't taken the time to spare it her attention.
"Another ticket?" Sarah picked up the piece of paper Haika had just dropped onto the desk, and her eyebrows climbed her forehead. "Ninety?"
"Do what you gotta," Haika said, walking into the next room. She leaned back through the doorway and tossed the keys onto the desk. "One of the dire-looking yellow lights keeps coming on, too," she added.
"Which one?" Sarah demanded.
Haika shrugged. "Dunno," she said. "Drive it ninety miles an hour for about twenty minutes, you'll see which one." She ignored Sarah's answer and went on into the kitchen.
A question, for anyone who read that: Do you like Haika?
I can't decide if I do. She was a minor, fill-in-a-gap character in the last one, and then suddenly took over and demanded a point of view.
I don't know what to do with her. Quite. But I kind of want to find out.
Sigh, I don't regret not being unemployed, I just wish there were thirty or forty hours in a day.
I have terrible organizational skills, I might've mentioned, which means that my projects are never quite properly filed. Yeah. Anyway. So I often will go by what's in the "Open Recent" menus in my programs. Yeah, I'm serious, I really do.
I actually use TextWrangler a lot lately for composing. I don't know if I've mentioned, but I didn't actually own Word at the time that I wrote the first draft of Barbarians_Novel, so I used T_W's predecessor, BBEdit, which is mostly used for line-edit coding. TextWrangler is similar, and actually has no formatting. In my manuscripts I indicate italics by using HTML pointy brackets.
Don't know if y'all wanted that insight into my composition process, but it's true.
Don't actually compose HTML in TextWrangler, much. Anything complicated I do in GoLive. Which I haven't actually configured on this computer. Which I got a year ago. So, yeah, don't update the website much. Probably should. I might get Googled and that'd be ugly. Anyway.
So I had a little of my actual personal projects in the Recent Items for Textwrangler. Reread one. Feel like posting it. This is what I was going to work on this summer, except I got employed.
Follows on from the novel I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo, in that it consists of me scrapping that novel entirely and writing a sequel instead.
700 words, unfinished snippet, amuses me.
Haika liked fast cars. Fast cars with good stereos. There was no pleasure in the world-- and she had sampled many, by the way, of the pleasures available, and not just in this world-- quite like driving very fast down a well-engineered highway with the windows down, the sunroof open, and the stereo up very loud.
She was no music expert, but she had people to do that for her. She had a lot of people who were all to eager to find things for her, give her things and eagerly await her opinion on them. Which was part of the reason she was so fond of driving fast. Even if there were someone in the car with her, she couldn't hear them over the wind's rushing and the stereo's pumping, which meant that, for once, she was left in peace.
There was a lot of that in this world, she reflected, thumbing her sunglasses farther up her nose. A lot of noise and bustle and activity meant that the only way to approach her native silence and stillness was to go very fast and very loud, to drown out the incidental noise and clutter.
Her native world had no cars. No cars, and no stereos. A lot fewer people, a lot less noise, a lot less fuss and bustle and stuff. But it was unglamorous to be so close to nature, and she had never seen any point in pretending not to laugh out loud at those in this world who wistfully pined about humanity's lost intimacy with nature. Nature was neither mysterious nor particularly nurturing, and the weary agonizing grind of, say, high infant mortality, or chronic diarrhea, was really nothing like so uplifting as these people seemed to think.
But she did miss it, sometimes. Not the icky parts, or the grinding weariness of survival. But home, which is a natural human impulse: she missed home.
"Where did you say you were from?" The police officer looked up at her over the edge of the little plastic card she'd handed him. She set her sunglasses up on her forehead and gave him a small, polite smile.
"That's my current address," she said, indicating the little card. She had people who took care of paperwork for her. She really hadn't thought to examine the card very much. It was supposed to mean she was allowed to drive this car, wasn't it?
"Just wondering about the accent, ma'am," the policeman said. "I'll be right back with this." He ambled away.
A little town in Ireland, Haika thought of saying. She'd said it before. People invariably protested that she didn't have an Irish accent. Following up with, Oh, I lived there four thousand years ago never quite proved a satisfactory explanation. So she'd given up on explaining. She understood now why Betty, her first contact with this world, had worked so hard on developing a perfectly neutral false accent. But seeing as Haika had only learned this language through magic, she didn't yet really have the control over it to blur her accent properly. Thusfar she hadn't taken the time to spare it her attention.
"Another ticket?" Sarah picked up the piece of paper Haika had just dropped onto the desk, and her eyebrows climbed her forehead. "Ninety?"
"Do what you gotta," Haika said, walking into the next room. She leaned back through the doorway and tossed the keys onto the desk. "One of the dire-looking yellow lights keeps coming on, too," she added.
"Which one?" Sarah demanded.
Haika shrugged. "Dunno," she said. "Drive it ninety miles an hour for about twenty minutes, you'll see which one." She ignored Sarah's answer and went on into the kitchen.
A question, for anyone who read that: Do you like Haika?
I can't decide if I do. She was a minor, fill-in-a-gap character in the last one, and then suddenly took over and demanded a point of view.
I don't know what to do with her. Quite. But I kind of want to find out.
Sigh, I don't regret not being unemployed, I just wish there were thirty or forty hours in a day.
