day off OMG
Oct. 23rd, 2009 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7OK actually I'm sort of annoyed-- New Guy, who don't get me wrong, is a nice kid, has been given more hours than me next week, and they've started giving me evening shifts so he can have morning shifts. Now, OK, whatever, but I said before I really needed as many evenings off as they could give me, kind of all the time, and I've been willing to bend over backward to help out with the schedule since I started, so someone else's request superseding mine just because it's a more recent request kind of frosts my buttons a bit. I'm trying to balance feeling guilty for being a whiner with the fact that I seriously have derby commitments four or five, sometimes six, nights a week and having to miss them because NG just prefers getting going in the mornings, that's not really right.
Really working on not being bitter about all this.
In the Female TMI department, I finally got an app for my iPhone to track things. I'm using whatever the app is that Cycletracker.org put out, and in the description it sounded perfect (also free), and in practice it's great except that it is so focused on HAVE A BABY NOW because I guess, why else would a woman want to keep any data on her menstrual cycle? Urgh.
It's already confirmed for me that yes, I have a 32-day cycle. The last time I kept data, on paper, in the late 90s (and i lost the day planner after six months or so of using it as basically a diary, so I'm still really bitter) it had seemed to me that my cycle was definitely regular but long, so I'm glad it's still the same.
And it helpfully predicts for me when I'll ovulate. Which isn't something I've ever really paid attention to, but hey! That's why sometimes I suddenly have cramps in the middle of the month! And that explains why a couple times recently there's been spotting. The app doesn't explain it (even while it's giving me helpful hints about cervical mucous-- really? Every single hint is really technical stuff about How To Conceive and you know, that just takes the fun out of it-- even if I were trying to I'd find that so joyless... If I need a fertility app I want it to have a neon blinking "FUCK NOW!" sign on the Good Days... Or to be PC there should be a customizable option that also says "WHIP OUT THE TURKEY BASTER" for the artificial-insemination-slash-lesbian types. [Don't hate, my best friend successfully knocked herself up with a turkey baster and now has an awesome one-year-old. It totally works!!] But I digress.) but I read somewhere else about that, and am much less horrified and confused now.
Anyway, it thinks I'm ovulating on Sunday, but I'm going to have to look that up. Worth knowing-- the days of the month I feel naturally friskiest are my least fertile apart from the actual red blood days-- so obviously, Nature is telling me not to have babies. Which is good to know.
Sigh. I sat down to write a to-do list. I have a shit-ton of stuff to do today and really really really really really really really want to lie around, drink hot cocoa, look at the cold blustery rain outside through the window, pet the cat, and immerse myself good and deep in Barbarians_Novel and keep plugging. I am working in a very desultory fashion on two crucial sticking-point scenes, toggling back and forth between the two-- one is a big blank spot in the middle of the first half of the story, and the other is a big blank spot toward the end. I don't know how to manage the middle of the story, so I need to know what happens in that blank spot; I have no idea how the damn book ends, so I need to fill that other blank spot.
And then the next process that has to happen, which I have started, is that I need to reduce the overall length by a third to a half. I've begun with the opening scene and first chapter-- it is nearly forty thousand words long, and needs to be more like ten. (There's less padding later in the book.) I don't need every conversation, only the representative ones. I don't need every description, only the important ones. I know the whole thing, and now need to cut out the parts I don't need to share for it to be meaningful. This, sadly, seems to be the only way I can operate-- write out every single scene and sentence, and then cut out and summarize.
But, see, I don't have any time for any of that, so I really should put this down and walk away and get working on the eight gazillion things that need to be done by this evening...
Really working on not being bitter about all this.
In the Female TMI department, I finally got an app for my iPhone to track things. I'm using whatever the app is that Cycletracker.org put out, and in the description it sounded perfect (also free), and in practice it's great except that it is so focused on HAVE A BABY NOW because I guess, why else would a woman want to keep any data on her menstrual cycle? Urgh.
It's already confirmed for me that yes, I have a 32-day cycle. The last time I kept data, on paper, in the late 90s (and i lost the day planner after six months or so of using it as basically a diary, so I'm still really bitter) it had seemed to me that my cycle was definitely regular but long, so I'm glad it's still the same.
And it helpfully predicts for me when I'll ovulate. Which isn't something I've ever really paid attention to, but hey! That's why sometimes I suddenly have cramps in the middle of the month! And that explains why a couple times recently there's been spotting. The app doesn't explain it (even while it's giving me helpful hints about cervical mucous-- really? Every single hint is really technical stuff about How To Conceive and you know, that just takes the fun out of it-- even if I were trying to I'd find that so joyless... If I need a fertility app I want it to have a neon blinking "FUCK NOW!" sign on the Good Days... Or to be PC there should be a customizable option that also says "WHIP OUT THE TURKEY BASTER" for the artificial-insemination-slash-lesbian types. [Don't hate, my best friend successfully knocked herself up with a turkey baster and now has an awesome one-year-old. It totally works!!] But I digress.) but I read somewhere else about that, and am much less horrified and confused now.
Anyway, it thinks I'm ovulating on Sunday, but I'm going to have to look that up. Worth knowing-- the days of the month I feel naturally friskiest are my least fertile apart from the actual red blood days-- so obviously, Nature is telling me not to have babies. Which is good to know.
Sigh. I sat down to write a to-do list. I have a shit-ton of stuff to do today and really really really really really really really want to lie around, drink hot cocoa, look at the cold blustery rain outside through the window, pet the cat, and immerse myself good and deep in Barbarians_Novel and keep plugging. I am working in a very desultory fashion on two crucial sticking-point scenes, toggling back and forth between the two-- one is a big blank spot in the middle of the first half of the story, and the other is a big blank spot toward the end. I don't know how to manage the middle of the story, so I need to know what happens in that blank spot; I have no idea how the damn book ends, so I need to fill that other blank spot.
And then the next process that has to happen, which I have started, is that I need to reduce the overall length by a third to a half. I've begun with the opening scene and first chapter-- it is nearly forty thousand words long, and needs to be more like ten. (There's less padding later in the book.) I don't need every conversation, only the representative ones. I don't need every description, only the important ones. I know the whole thing, and now need to cut out the parts I don't need to share for it to be meaningful. This, sadly, seems to be the only way I can operate-- write out every single scene and sentence, and then cut out and summarize.
But, see, I don't have any time for any of that, so I really should put this down and walk away and get working on the eight gazillion things that need to be done by this evening...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-01 12:34 am (UTC)