Mindseas

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

The Wonderfully Creative Number Galp
Last night I dreamed I was looking at a math textbook. The preface of the book told about this number, describing it as "the wonderfully creative number galp," and gave the page where it could be found. The example demonstrating galp involved the surface area of Susie's divided cookie with all four pieces "turned away from God."

On the conscious front, the garden plans are moving along, though it's raining today and I am neither digging nor running. I plan to spend most of the day working on my program. (Although I did brave the rain for a walk to the library for a book by Jack Williamson. That will be tempting.)

Weeding
Today I went out for a run, then spent a couple hours weeding, saved Louise from a wasp nest, and helped her replace a broken hose fitting. Now I'm wanting to rest. I'll have a busy day gardening tomorrow too.

Turkeys were gobbling in the woods all day. Louise said they started at 5:20 in the morning. I also hear lots of woodpeckers and cardinals calling, and many others I don't recognize.

I made some small changes on my website, following

indigo_room's suggestions. Dread Drama is still needing work, but I'd really like to get my program Arcettes doing its thing. Perhaps I'll find room (temporally speaking) to concentrate on it for a while.

I've been very inactive on OWW recently. I should really do a review or two, but so many other things swallow my time.

Forgot to mention that we had our first morning glory a while back. It had reseeded itself in a hanging pot indoors.

Inspiration
Today Louise went to the Sakura festival at the Brooklyn Botannical Gardens, but Ben didn't go because Vikke was busy with an art project all day.

I didn't go either, but I had a nice run along the tow path. Saw one fuzzy gosling paddling in the canal with its parents, and a Baltimore Oriole. I've always thought black and orange made a beautiful combination.

The wild turkeys were in the wooded part of the backyard, the tom display on a fallen tree while the hen investigated the ground with the same two-steps-forward-scratch, two-steps-back-look routine as a chicken.

I worked on a new short story, "Book of Fire," which was inspired by my reading about Philip K. Dick in Wikipedia after someone mentioned "what happened to him" on OWW, along with the ideographic language in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi and my own childhood fantasy that my father had a special book with a flaming cover.

Ordinary Times
Today was breezy and cool. I went out for my run and made giant artichokes for dinner. Across the street, a wild turkey tom is displaying for a hen.

Most of the day I spent working on my website, having fun picking through a bunch of old drawings for things to include.

Finally have the tune for "Flight of the Silverlance" all worked out. Next, I'll concentrate on the lyrics, and then maybe I'll know what the story is about. I'm sure that everything is contained in the tune, I just don't understand it yet.

Pacing
Since I've been running every other day and gardening on the not running days, I've been feeling pretty good. This morning the maple trees lining the tow path had dusted it with tiny flowers, lending it a pale yellow-green glow.

Over the past few days I've been immersed in revamping my complex website. I want it to be done now, but there's still so much to do. Each evening I realize that even were I to work all night, I couldn't get it all done before tomorrow--especially as I'd be falling asleep over my webpages, my mind lost in the labyrinth of folders and files on three computers in three different rooms of the house. I must be patient.

The only story active in my mind at the moment is Dread Drama, but I've only just started to work the unifying thread through it.

My "Silverlance" song is developing, but I'm still not sure when the story will take place. Last night I dreamt about a character descended from Morning Glory, the MC of Timeweavers. Maybe the Silverlance is his story.

Mindwind Redux
I went through the Mindwind, Soulfire manuscript and tweaked the ending again. For some reason, the end is the most problematic part of that story, while Timeweavers had more of a midlife crisis.

I'm also trying to fix up Dread Drama, my 20k piece, and actually seeing some changes that would make it more like a story rather than a string of events. I may finally have learned to implement what I learned in Taos. Yay!

Soon, I sense that I'll want to plunge into a new project. Perhaps I'll pick up Playing the Goddess (the sequel to Mindwind) again.

Or maybe something new. I've composed a little piece on my viola, which I call "Flight of the Silverlance." I feel that it needs to become a story. Perhaps when I finish the rest of the lyrics I'll have an inkling what it's about...

CPAC and Dream
All day yesterday was spent at the Castle Point Anime Convention. In the morning Louise and I did a panel on traveling to Japan. The rest of the day I spent at my table with my horses. I didn't sell anything, but while I was at the panel, Vikke sold a Heaven and Hell pair.

Here's Vikke at my table:

I got home a bit before midnight very hungry (because I missed dinner) and tired (because I'd been up since 5 am). I woke up at my regular time this morning, but my cat Pif convinced me to get back into bed for a nap after breakfast, and I had an excellent dream:

Someone was telling me that I should use my strength for heroic action now, because I'd be all shriveled up by the time I was ninety. I replied that when I was ninety I'd be playing an online game and I'd have a game body to make myself young and strong again. I predicted that the game's virtual world would include all the senses, and that game real estate would cost real money.

Of course, I went on, this future would only hold true if the next thirty years like the last thirty went into computers. The thirty years before that, up until the sixties, had gone into war. (My dream self was a bit confused here, thinking that the sixties had been only thirty years ago.)

Solar Quest
This morning I dreamt I was going to play solar quest, a Monopoly-type board game that involves taking your spaceship around to different planets and moons and selling fuel from your properties to other spaceships that land on them. I had a new gameboard with all of the most recently discovered moons and asteroids. It was huge, about the size of a bedsheet, and made out of paper. My cat had chewed one corner, but nothing important had been lost. I tacked it up onto the wall, and told my daughter that we would have to stand on a ladder when we played.

In real life, a fox visited our backyard at about 7:30 am. I had been doing some digging because I hope to create a pool and fountain this year, and the cats have enjoyed all the nice dirt. When I first looked out, one of the neighborhood cats, not ours, was investigating the dirt; then along came the fox.

The cat fled...

and the fox had the dirt all to itself.

Poof-Jiggle
In my dream last night I was in Manhattan, visiting some people who had an aquarium built around their apartment with a big, fierce fish swimming round and round. (The kids assured me it wasn't as ferocious as it looked.) I had noticed something odd that indicated someone was trying to take advantage of the family, and my first ex-husband was investigating, but going about it in an inefficient way, buying up fantasy theme parks and the like.

The family nevertheless placed their trust in me, and they all toasted me with a non-alcoholic beverage. "Poof-jiggle!" said the matriarch. That was the traditional family toast.

In real life, I'm doing revisions on Timeweavers, but moving slowly. My car passed inspection, so I won't have to get rid of it yet. I took a celebratory run in the park, and my new running shoes didn't hurt my feet.

Then I found out that my housemate, Deb, got an Editor's Choice on OWW for the first chapter of her novel, but she hasn't read Karin Lowachee's review.

The Finish Line
I finished Timeweavers a little before midnight last night. Having tried NaNoWriMo sucessfully with Mindwind, I thought I'd try out the LJ community Novel_in_90 for encouragement and enthusiasm for this one, and it was a lot of fun. I probably wouldn't have stuck to Timeweavers without the fellowship.

I greatly enjoyed writing the end of the novel, as I went directly from the big four-part battle plus one last final battle straight into the final reveal/reverse and wrap up of all the threads which I fit neatly into 3-1/2 pages. Whoop! I've stuck the thing into a bucket of water to quench it, and will take a look at what I've wrought in a couple of days, and hopefully it won't dissolve like a dream.

Around noon today I took a victory run in the park through a light mist--but at least it's finally gotten warm around here. Saw only one of the Egyptian geese, and it was standing on one leg. Now I'm worried about its mate.