dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2019-09-13 01:49 am
dragonlady7) wrote2019-09-13 01:49 am
Entry tags:
slow progress
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One of those weeks where everything’s just sort of plodding along. After literally twelve years of being on the verge of getting a new cash register/inventory system at work (yes it has been broken to the point of near-unusability for the entire time I’ve worked there), we are slowly rolling it out across the five, er, now four locations of the chain (oh yes, the store where I worked for ten years is shut down now, bye, I didn’t go say goodbye, I’m not going to be sentimental about that horrible building and its styrofoam columns to nowhere). Our online department started using it last Friday, and we’re the only cog in the wheel fully transferred over. Fortunately, it’s easy to use, and I have learned my new workflow easily.
It’s the end of a particular kind of ADHD hell– I’ve written before about how my job is incredibly specifically poorly-suited to someone with my combination of poor attention span, terrible memory, and literal numbers dyslexia. The old system had a lag time of 45-70 seconds from basically any button you pressed, and you’d have to type in entire UPC codes without flubbing a number, and then wait 45-70 seconds to see if it came out right, and then press a button and wait 45-70 seconds for it to bring up a dialog box. And you couldn’t copy-paste, that wasn’t allowed in the program, so you had to type out the UPCs by hand. And so on and so forth.
The new system’s very easy to use, but since it’s not fully onboarded by the other bits of the chain we have to manually zero out all the negative inventory for the stuff we’ve sold, and so on– lots of redundant shit.
Also I went out to dinner on both Monday and Tuesday nights, and that’s lovely sure, but both times it was like, three hour dinners, and that’s fine but it meant I had to go home and go straight to bed afterward, no time to decompress or like, be alone, or whatever. It’s fine, but it means I’ve also made no progress on any personal projects this entire time.
I’ve also been writing, steadily, and it’s great that I’m doing it but I’m also aware that I’m being really inefficient. I’ve started from the beginning and I have like 30,000 words and it’s… all one scene, more or less. I will probably, in my next draft, reduce most of this to a summary. But I wrote it out, all of it, and I discovered things I would not have if I’d just summarized it to begin with. (For example, my protagonist has a seizure disorder. I have to research seizure disorders, now. I have not yet begun to do that, that’s also going to be a third-draft kind of deal, but if that happens to be something any of y’all have great insights into, I may be looking to pick someone’s brains! No, it’s not going to have to be perfectly medically accurate, this is SF and he’s partially a cyborg, and no I haven’t decided how serious it is, but I feel like that would be not just a useful plot thing but it would be a kind of neat character note to have, and I honestly haven’t read any (?) books featuring a main character with a seizure disorder, that I can think of, and anyway it seems like something I should work in there.)
Also I was having a discussion on Twitter withgaladhir by another name, and they mentioned how tiring it is that novels always have gender inequality in their worldbuilding, and so I explained that one of the components of this one I’m working on is reverse gender inequality and it’s been sort of tricky to build that out! But anyway, I thought I’d share my summary of the B plot of the story here:
My current WIP features the dying Queen’s son struggling to be taken seriously enough to inherit even though he’s a man, & a father no less; sure boys get baby-crazy but he’s been working with her advisors for years, can’t we be liberated about this?
So there’s that; I often forget to come up with an elevator pitch. (The guy in that Tweet is the protagonist’s half-brother, though, because there’s of course an A plot too and I’m not sure which is actually the central plot or where this is going, exactly. Shit there might be a C plot. How do people describe this stuff?)
I haven’t gotten up to the Big Muscle Girl female protagonist in the rewrite yet, so I dunno how she’s getting revised. I think she was the most successful part of the partial first draft, though, so she might not change much.
One of those weeks where everything’s just sort of plodding along. After literally twelve years of being on the verge of getting a new cash register/inventory system at work (yes it has been broken to the point of near-unusability for the entire time I’ve worked there), we are slowly rolling it out across the five, er, now four locations of the chain (oh yes, the store where I worked for ten years is shut down now, bye, I didn’t go say goodbye, I’m not going to be sentimental about that horrible building and its styrofoam columns to nowhere). Our online department started using it last Friday, and we’re the only cog in the wheel fully transferred over. Fortunately, it’s easy to use, and I have learned my new workflow easily.
It’s the end of a particular kind of ADHD hell– I’ve written before about how my job is incredibly specifically poorly-suited to someone with my combination of poor attention span, terrible memory, and literal numbers dyslexia. The old system had a lag time of 45-70 seconds from basically any button you pressed, and you’d have to type in entire UPC codes without flubbing a number, and then wait 45-70 seconds to see if it came out right, and then press a button and wait 45-70 seconds for it to bring up a dialog box. And you couldn’t copy-paste, that wasn’t allowed in the program, so you had to type out the UPCs by hand. And so on and so forth.
The new system’s very easy to use, but since it’s not fully onboarded by the other bits of the chain we have to manually zero out all the negative inventory for the stuff we’ve sold, and so on– lots of redundant shit.
Also I went out to dinner on both Monday and Tuesday nights, and that’s lovely sure, but both times it was like, three hour dinners, and that’s fine but it meant I had to go home and go straight to bed afterward, no time to decompress or like, be alone, or whatever. It’s fine, but it means I’ve also made no progress on any personal projects this entire time.
I’ve also been writing, steadily, and it’s great that I’m doing it but I’m also aware that I’m being really inefficient. I’ve started from the beginning and I have like 30,000 words and it’s… all one scene, more or less. I will probably, in my next draft, reduce most of this to a summary. But I wrote it out, all of it, and I discovered things I would not have if I’d just summarized it to begin with. (For example, my protagonist has a seizure disorder. I have to research seizure disorders, now. I have not yet begun to do that, that’s also going to be a third-draft kind of deal, but if that happens to be something any of y’all have great insights into, I may be looking to pick someone’s brains! No, it’s not going to have to be perfectly medically accurate, this is SF and he’s partially a cyborg, and no I haven’t decided how serious it is, but I feel like that would be not just a useful plot thing but it would be a kind of neat character note to have, and I honestly haven’t read any (?) books featuring a main character with a seizure disorder, that I can think of, and anyway it seems like something I should work in there.)
Also I was having a discussion on Twitter with
galadhir by another name, and they mentioned how tiring it is that novels always have gender inequality in their worldbuilding, and so I explained that one of the components of this one I’m working on is reverse gender inequality and it’s been sort of tricky to build that out! But anyway, I thought I’d share my summary of the B plot of the story here:My current WIP features the dying Queen’s son struggling to be taken seriously enough to inherit even though he’s a man, & a father no less; sure boys get baby-crazy but he’s been working with her advisors for years, can’t we be liberated about this?
So there’s that; I often forget to come up with an elevator pitch. (The guy in that Tweet is the protagonist’s half-brother, though, because there’s of course an A plot too and I’m not sure which is actually the central plot or where this is going, exactly. Shit there might be a C plot. How do people describe this stuff?)
I haven’t gotten up to the Big Muscle Girl female protagonist in the rewrite yet, so I dunno how she’s getting revised. I think she was the most successful part of the partial first draft, though, so she might not change much.
no subject
Congrats on being in the process of writing, and also on having a better system to work with at your job!
FYI, I do know of an SF book series in which the main protagonist develops a VERY inconvenient, permanent, and plot-relevant seizure disorder, several books into the series.
I'm happy to supply the name of the author, series, and/or character, if you like, but it's extremely spoilery info, so it's your call whether you want it or not.
The series falls approximately into the category of space opera, but with better than average characterization for the sub-genre. The author is a woman. The protagonist in question is a man.
no subject
I figure I'm going to have it be not particularly deeply plot-relevant, and it's been going on since a traumatic injury when the protagonist was a child, and I'm undecided on how severe it is but I do think I'm going to resist having him find a miracle-cure for it at any point-- I haven't nailed down the plot but I think it's going to be more that it's less bad when he's not under stress, and if he can trust the people around him then having a seizure is not as horrible.
character who seizes
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Series: The Vorkosigan Saga (The series has a long Wikipedia page, if you're curious, at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga )
Character in question: Miles Vorkosigan
The book that recounts the events that cause Miles' seizure disorder: Mirror Dance
This is at about the middle of Miles' character arc across multiple books and novellas.
Note that Miles has plenty of physical problems before the injury that leads to the seizures, primarily due to events that occurred when he was in utero.
Next book in series internal chronological order (rather than publication order), where Miles' seizure disorder is (very!) relevant to the plot: Memory
In the books, high stress does increase the frequency of Miles' seizures, and there is no cure for them, only a gadget that lets him induce them on purpose, at a time and place of his choosing, *IF* he does it often enough to keep certain neurochemical levels below the point where the seizures happen spontaneously.
In general, I like the books, including their audio productions. A bunch of them won awards, so there's a reasonable chance of finding them in library systems, including online e-book and e-audiobook places like Hoopla.
SPOILERS END HERE :)
Re: character who seizes
Oh, that's a good level of detail to know, because I'd considered giving my character some level of control, not over whether to have them, but over when, and I don't want to be derivative, LOL. I hadn't gone that far yet, so maybe not. I think it's more likely that he doesn't know enough about his peculiar biology to understand the cause, and may be able to get help if he can find his own people, but as an orphan, he's under a bit of a handicap there.
no subject
Thanks!