Titles are not my friends

The detailed stats that Blogger gives about viewership are, perhaps not a double-edged sword, but possibly a triple- or quadruple-edged sword.  The point is that one can easily cut oneself, in addition to other things.  So it may be because I saw my readership drop off to almost nothing that I was not so quick about updating lately.  But of course I have nobody else to blame--how much readership did I expect if I let my writership lapse?

I'm back from jujitsu (again) and sore.  Lately I've been wishing I had more time--time to be tired and to go to work and to do things of consequence and of little consequence, and to write.  It's a trap, I know, to imagine that I would write like a demon if only I had lots of free time.  But sometimes I wish I could rearrange things, at least.  When I'm at work I'm having ideas; when I get home my brain starts shutting down.

I want to talk at length about several books, but it's 11:00 already so I think I will talk about them briefly instead, and at length later.

First, I realized that I never wrote about Machine of Death after I finished it, two books ago now.  I will call it the only fiction anthology which I have read in its entirety, without feeling like any story had wasted my time.  Did some stories have less to say?  Yes, but they said it that much faster.  This is the first time I've been impressed with the sequence of stories in an anthology, too.  There's an emotional arc, and an ebb and flow, which make the book a complete experience.  I'm reminded of World War Z, another highly episodic look at a world gone mad.  But MoD has the advantage of multiple authors; the variety of perspectives, voices, and tones is richer.

And now I find that a sequel is in the works.  Part of me really wants to submit something--okay, all of me wants to submit something, but only part of me thinks I can do it.  I need an idea, and I need nerve, and time, and I really need to not get distracted and finish Hengist and Undine.

Today I finished reading American Gods, and Neil Gaiman is still the cat's pajamas.  That's a book that needs longer than I have tonight.  I'm tempted to write an honest-to-goodness paper on it, which is another thing I shouldn't pretend I have time for.  I want to talk about the book and Christianity, which is nominally absent but actually present everywhere in parallels and sharp contrasts (perpendiculars?).

Finally, today I started reading The Name of the Wind, which I mentioned in my last post has been presented to me as mandatory.  Yet I'd been a little reluctant to start it.  Part of this was hype aversion.  Part of it was that what I had actually heard about it didn't sound so great--it sounded like an endless parade of Kvothe's superawesome awesome awesomeness.  And I'm not very far in yet, but I'm beginning to understand.  Everything may be true.  But it is well-written, and that counts for a lot.  It may count for everything.

With regard to the possible Mary-Sueism, I should remind myself that it's not wrong if it works.

There are things that I should do

Feeling a bit down at the moment.  Girlfriend is back east right now, for one thing, and while that's not the proximate cause, odds are good that if she were here I would be in a significantly better mood, perhaps even a good one.

I didn't come here to complain.  There have been some logistical frustrations.  I was feeling quite off my game at jujitsu practice tonight, for a number of reasons.  The most interesting of those reasons, I think, goes back to the instructor mentioning a handful of times that a particular throw had killed people in living memory.  That rattled me a bit, to be honest.  I'm aware that jujitsu is a martial art, and so using it is definitionally an act of violence, but one aspect of it that has appealed to me is it's array of nonlethal techniques.  Rightly or wrongly, I had filed its throws in that category, and I certainly have thrown a good number of people over my shoulder, and not given so much as a large bruise.  So it's jarring, morbid, and ethically trenchant to be reminded of how differently things play out when the person being thrown doesn't know how to take the fall.

So the image of necks snapping put me off my game for the night.  If anyone else there felt that they had abruptly been asked whether they were utilitarians or deontologists, or to make a call about the limits of the just use of force, they didn't show it.

Is prolonged exposure to pacifists turning me into one, or am I simply possessed of a healthy distaste for actual violence?

That wasn't actually what I came here to talk about.  I guess another thing that made today suboptimal was that I did my taxes instead of writing--this post excepted.  I am aware that this is the very, very last minute.  I am aware.

So the real eponymous thing that I should do is, apparently, read The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.  I have been advised in strong, almost coercive terms to do so.  One trusted beta reader has implied that I could not honorably pursue fantasy writing without reading this book.  Tycho Brahe has called me a villain--and he doesn't even know who I am.  But the challenge has been issued, and it will be met.  I just need to finish American Gods first.  (Halfway through that, by the way, and liking it.)

To some degree a person could spend his entire life simply reading the books that he must needs read to understand--to sufficiently grok--his chosen genre.  Very recently I got around to reading Ender's Game (short review: holy crap), which incidentally means that now I've read fiction by Orson Scott Card, and I'm not just acting on blind faith when I take his writing advice...

...I set this post aside and never finished it.  I may have had more to say, but I don't remember offhand. I guess it can wait until the next post.

In which the blogger returns and makes excuses

Wow.  If nothing else this past month may serve as a cautionary tale about letting yourself get out of habits.  Not that I was cranking out posts like clockwork before, but it's very hard to start something like this up again when inertia has turned against you.

I could make my entire blog about the experience and pitfalls of procrastination.  I'd have so much material.

But there are some reasons I got out of the habit in the first place.  At least, there were some interruptions in my life which serve as excuses for breaking my pattern.

Maybe this all starts with the ER visit.  Maybe not, though, because the ER visit really starts with the headache, and the accompanying numb feeling on the side of my face.  I, who have a superpower when it comes to worrying about things, was plenty worried about that, as it came and went over the course of three days or so.  The (presumably) unpowered nurse with whom I discussed these symptoms over the phone was also able to become very concerned.  So it came to pass that I was advised to go to the ER. 

And I did.

It's worth pointing out that when Girlfriend comes with me to the ER it is not a wholly unpleasant experience, as I learned through an OCD-related scare in 2009, just before we were dating.  True, I would rather be at Oasis sipping bubble tea.  (Oasis is the only place on the Ave to get bubble tea, by the way, if you can tell the difference.)  But there is something wonderfully clarifying about realizing that in a bad situation, there's really only one person who you want to be with you, and hey she's right there.

Medical professionals looked at me, and they administered the various symmetrical aptitude tests they use to look for strokes several times.  My blood pressure was high, but not abnormal for a neurotic trying to fight down the idea that he might be dying.  Actually, consciously, I was pretty relaxed through the whole process.  I knew better than my amygdala and wasn't afraid to tell it.

They did a CT scan of my head.  When the pictures were developed (around 10pm that night, some six hours after I had come in) I was told my brain looked perfectly fine.  Certainly no sign of a stroke or any other abnormality.  The people with medical degrees stopped worrying about me.  I got a piece of paper which containing the text, "Diagnosis: Headache."  All was fine, except...

There was a dot.  A brain dot.  The doctor who ordered the CT scan told me he was fairly certain it was a dot and not a tumor, which was the other thing it might be.  But you don't just let someone walk around with brain dot.  So he told me to get an MRI because the cure for brain dot is to take more pictures with a device that is less likely to put dots on your brain.

So I got the MRI a week or so later.  If I learned one thing, it's that MRI machines are loud.  It's like dwarven smiths are beating the images of your brain into iron plates just behind you.  Maybe that's what it was--they wouldn't let me move my head to look.  Anything could have been happening back there.  Maybe the magnetic resonance stuff is just to make everything sound scientific.  Because how can you convince a patient that dwarven craft will get better results than irradiating your head?  Irradiating your head just sounds like a good idea.

However it worked, it cured my brain dot.  My brain has been shown to be dotless.

So that's where some of my time went.  Another place my time has gone has been jujitsu.

I trained in jujitsu back in high school, and on-and-off through college, but fell out of it when I moved to Seattle.  But I missed it.  In fact I periodically had dreams about getting back to it.  So it's really a bit silly that it took me this long to find a place and join up.  But I did, finally, not without some urging from my doctor to do something with my body besides drape it on furniture, and use it to hold up my laptop.

So that's two nights a week gone.  The sudden loss of that time creates the sensation of having no time at all, even if my other evenings are free.  It takes some acclimatizing.

I am not proud to say that I have also been playing some Dwarf Fortress.

This week I have to file my taxes.  I guess it's a good thing that there's nothing particularly interesting going on there.

Here's hoping for more regular updates now.