Spinning Silver

I read it Sunday night because my hold came through from the library and I downloaded it to be prepared for the power outage and then the power outage never came so I just... read it.
This is one that I think must be significantly different to read in an ebook than in hard copy, because I kept thinking surely it must nearly be over, and then I'd glance at the progress bar and it was like... 75%. The author kept introducing new POV characters, well into the book, and I feel somewhat vindicated because a beta reader for Home Out In The Wind told me they couldn't continue because it was too many different POVs and they weren't well-defined enough, and yet, here's a published novel on the nom list for Nebulas and Hugos and 45% of the way through the book we've got yet another first-person narrator whose name we don't find out for pages. (You figure out it's a new person because she begins with "my father" and mentions a character by name who we've never met as being a close person, and eventually we get that she's a whole new person we never knew about before.)

I don't want to give away any of it, of course-- it's typical Naomi Novik (if I can say that, having read only one other book under that name) in that the magic is much more practical and yet more mystical than one expects. The premise is the fairytale peasant girl who can spin silver into gold; ( if you're going to read it anyway then skip, it's best to read without any idea of what's going to happen! but if you're on the fence, click, they're not spoilers )

Anyway I have to return that library book soon, so I'm rereading but I don't think I'll write any fic. I have to get back to my own original work, which has bogged down again and I sort of know why but sort of don't, and I'm going to have to unravel another thirty thousand words, and that sucks, I've already deleted ten thousand and started over at the problem spot, but I clearly started over wrong. I'm sure I can salvage them-- it's not really like knitting, that stuff isn't really gone, it's more like sewing where you've got to seam-rip it and recut the pattern piece and put it back in, and you can probably reuse most of the fabric from the muslin for other stuff and it's no big deal, you had to do that work to get where you are and it's fine, just write it down for the love of God, mark your alterations on your pattern you idiot, and I never do, I just fix it and say I'll remember next time I cut this piece but then I don't.

longhairproblems

via https://ift.tt/2IzdfqP

I washed my hair yesterday evening and left it down to dry and went to bed with it half-dried and so this morning when I went to put it up it was too slippery to get to stay at all and so now it’s in a lumpy slidey braid that won’t stay where I put it.

All y’all with hair that has texture of any kind, I know you have a much harder row to hoe in general, and I feel you, but I’m just going to whine about my bodiless, flat, completely un-do-anything-with-able hair for a second.

whiiiiiiiiine

Also I realized I’ve had it in protective styles and have been giving it bare minimum maintenance trims for a decade now and it has never gone beyond high tailbone length so clearly that’s my terminal, and that’s a little depressingly short for terminal but whatever. It doesn’t matter; if it were any longer, I’d probably have to cut it, so I won’t really fuss over it.

Huh, I’ll be 40 this year, and haven’t changed my hairstyle since I was 15. Neat!
(Your picture was not posted)

endless winter

that was the other plot point thing of Spinning Silver that I should've mentioned, the bit where the Wicked Faery King Of Winter keeps making there be snowstorms and hard freezes well after winter should have stopped, and it's this ongoing feature of the setting that it's goddamned fucking freezing and spring won't come and won't come and won't come, and there are a lot of vivid descriptions of it being really goddamn cold, and it's a Big Mood for late February when we're supposed to get another 6" of snow tonight and it was eighteen goddamn degrees this morning.
I'm just so tired of the cold. I couldn't feel my hands on the walk home yesterday. I bundled up this morning, and was not overdressed, and walked fast to stay warmer. On the way home, another employee said "oh it's nice out now" and I stepped out the door and realized it was... 22 degrees. I was so tired, though, and listless, that I could not make myself walk fast, and so I was miserably cold by the time I got home, even bundled as I was. I'm just. Tired.
Yeah, it's lighter out now, and the sun was even out when I left work, but no warmth.
I know, soon enough it'll be spring, and then I'll be sorry that I work indoors in a place with no windows, but.

Yesterday I had a brutal headache all day and was actually rather glad for the lack of windows. It was weird; the headache would briefly ease whenever I ate something, but was back again within a quarter hour, even if I ate a lot. Other than that, nothing helped-- not water, not caffeine, not ibuprofen, not taking my glasses off. It was annoying. Fortunately, it did not recur today.

I feel like I've had little to say, and that little all whines, of late. I also am thoroughly stuck now on the Mammoths thing; I reread bits of it, and thought about where I want to go, and I think the real problem is that I'm so tired, currently, that I can't really imagine enjoying much of anything, and so it's impossible for me to think of writing as anything but a chore. So I'm not likely to make much good progress in this state, but I don't know how to get out of it. I want to keep going, I want badly to keep going, but I can't get excited about it, and don't know how to progress.
If only this was fanfiction, I could go look through the tag on Tumblr or something, or reread the canon book, or find someone else's fic to read to get inspired, or get in a long breathless instant messenger discussion about headcanons with someone else who's a fan. But it's an original book, and I'm the only one who has any canon, and the only one who's really got enough information to get excited about it, and I can't get excited about it on my own. Sigh.

Oh, one good thing, though, I did finish the rag quilt-- I added three whole blocks to it, and three half blocks, so that it's a little longer than it is wide, and I dipped into a different plaid for some of the new blocks because I'd used up the pajama pants of the one set, so it's got some darker blue squares along two edges. Now I just have to finish slashing the seam allowances, and then throw it through the wash a couple of times, and voila!
It could use a little more quilting but it won't die if I don't. I'm counting it as "done" anyway, and it's keeping me warm-ish on the couch along with some other things. I'm so cold, I'm so miserably cold. I don't remember what it's like to experience room temperatures. At least I live in an era of central heating.