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Katydid of Zenith
Jun. 29th, 2021 09:54 pmWhen I wake up in the night, I play a little game of "what time is it?" I try to guess, based on the quality of the darkness, etc. This morning, I guessed it was around five, based on the sourceless pearly light in the clouds and the fact that the birds were still quiet. Then I heard a few birds begin chirping, checked the time, and found it was 5:28. That's close enough for me to congratulate myself.
Yesterday, we had a break in the rain, and I planned to do a lot of weeding. However, it came to my attention that the Sparrowhawk planned to take the "drapes," curtains, or whatever one would call them, to be cleaned. This was in consideration of the impending visit of Queenie and the Fireman, who has a severe allergy to cats. We've cleaned the whole house since Shadow's departure, but we had not cleaned the curtains, and the Sparrowhawk was worried that some Shadow-hairs might cling to them. He planned to take the curtains down by standing on a chair. He didn't want to inconvenience me by asking for help, and I hate to interfere in his plans, but I felt that it would be a considerably greater inconvenience to me if he fell off the chair than if I got out the stepladder and assisted him. I did SOME weeding. Not as much as I wanted, but chair and Sparrowhawk remain unfractured, so I think the time was well spent. Normally, a person like me would not have these decorative items that I think people call "drapes." My parent had some curtains, which my mother sewed herself, but window treatments were just not a thing. However, these things came with our current house, and they're tasteful in their way, so I let them stay. I'm kind of liking the windows without them, though.
Today, I put away laundry and snapped a lot of green beans so I could fix them for dinner. I also kinda by accident read most of The Calculating Stars, which the Sparrowhawk got from the library because he wanted to read it before tackling The Relentless Moon. Unfortunately, I had the same problems with the first in the series that I had with the last. But at least I got to satisfy my curiosity about The Meteor, and when and where it hit. We went to the bookstore, where I found the Poet's latest book. I want her to sign it for me when we lunch on Thursday. I read parts of the script for "Brokeback Mountain" and reflected for the hundredth time on the difference between what I call expository writing vs. cinematic writing. Visual media spend SO much less time explaining things than we do in writing. I realized some time ago that I needed to write more concisely, more visually, and not explain anything. But I keep falling back into the expository style, out of habit. I admired again the image of the shirt inside the shirt in the movie. It's the objective correlative of the whole film, really a great image. I realized that there's a similar image in one of my unfinished epics, when Jake Kelly rolls up his t-shirt, stained with his blood and Thomas Becker's, and puts it in the freezer. Then I mused that if you're going to hang a bloody t-shirt in the freezer, you'll have to fire it off at some point. For sure, Thomas is going to look in that freezer one day. Also, I think the blood will probably be needed for analysis at some point. It may contain fragments of something important. And that's the difference between mainstream and SF. In a mainstream story, the bloody shirt just hangs on the wall to demonstrate feelings and the intractable nature of "reality." In science fiction, the bloody shirt can't be merely a mute witness to Jake's feelings. We have an alien invasion to fight. And so forth . . . I guess daydreaming is the first step toward writing something.
Yesterday, we had a break in the rain, and I planned to do a lot of weeding. However, it came to my attention that the Sparrowhawk planned to take the "drapes," curtains, or whatever one would call them, to be cleaned. This was in consideration of the impending visit of Queenie and the Fireman, who has a severe allergy to cats. We've cleaned the whole house since Shadow's departure, but we had not cleaned the curtains, and the Sparrowhawk was worried that some Shadow-hairs might cling to them. He planned to take the curtains down by standing on a chair. He didn't want to inconvenience me by asking for help, and I hate to interfere in his plans, but I felt that it would be a considerably greater inconvenience to me if he fell off the chair than if I got out the stepladder and assisted him. I did SOME weeding. Not as much as I wanted, but chair and Sparrowhawk remain unfractured, so I think the time was well spent. Normally, a person like me would not have these decorative items that I think people call "drapes." My parent had some curtains, which my mother sewed herself, but window treatments were just not a thing. However, these things came with our current house, and they're tasteful in their way, so I let them stay. I'm kind of liking the windows without them, though.
Today, I put away laundry and snapped a lot of green beans so I could fix them for dinner. I also kinda by accident read most of The Calculating Stars, which the Sparrowhawk got from the library because he wanted to read it before tackling The Relentless Moon. Unfortunately, I had the same problems with the first in the series that I had with the last. But at least I got to satisfy my curiosity about The Meteor, and when and where it hit. We went to the bookstore, where I found the Poet's latest book. I want her to sign it for me when we lunch on Thursday. I read parts of the script for "Brokeback Mountain" and reflected for the hundredth time on the difference between what I call expository writing vs. cinematic writing. Visual media spend SO much less time explaining things than we do in writing. I realized some time ago that I needed to write more concisely, more visually, and not explain anything. But I keep falling back into the expository style, out of habit. I admired again the image of the shirt inside the shirt in the movie. It's the objective correlative of the whole film, really a great image. I realized that there's a similar image in one of my unfinished epics, when Jake Kelly rolls up his t-shirt, stained with his blood and Thomas Becker's, and puts it in the freezer. Then I mused that if you're going to hang a bloody t-shirt in the freezer, you'll have to fire it off at some point. For sure, Thomas is going to look in that freezer one day. Also, I think the blood will probably be needed for analysis at some point. It may contain fragments of something important. And that's the difference between mainstream and SF. In a mainstream story, the bloody shirt just hangs on the wall to demonstrate feelings and the intractable nature of "reality." In science fiction, the bloody shirt can't be merely a mute witness to Jake's feelings. We have an alien invasion to fight. And so forth . . . I guess daydreaming is the first step toward writing something.
