Waiting for Antlers

Title: "Redwing"

Words tonight: 110
Words total: 383
Darling: No windows, in her attic, but she did have sniper's ports.
Research: Firearms technology of 1770's New England. Though I ended up investigating everything from the 1600's to the 1850's, before deciding I wasn't nice enough to give the MC a rifled musket, much less Minié balls. Plain smoothbore musket and round balls for you, girl!

Most of tonight's writing time was sucked into research, but tomorrow all that research should translate into good solid wordcount as my narrator puts it to use. No wait. Tomorrow is my sister's bachelorette party, so I am probably not permitted to sit in the corner mumbling about black powder and magic-wielding Colonials. Hmph. Well, I shall try to avoid the whiskey and come home with sufficient sobriety and time to write.

Title: "Redwing"

Words tonight: 273
Words total: 273
Mean things: Something's out there in the dark, and it's unlikely to be good.
Darling: Her fingers and stockinged toes scrabbled on old wax, as she climbed, one-handed and her heartbeat kicking like a jackrabbit.

First new story of the year--up till now I was occupied editing and submitting--and it's definitely nice to be drafting again. Onward!

The big tank:



I had to rearrange the driftwood, since the diagonal piece across the tank's middle was interrupting the water current--I kept getting dead spots behind the log. I took that out and moved the pygmy chain sword to the back left corner. That patch of green in the left front is a rosette of wisteria, which is just there till the pygmy chain fills in that corner. Big upheavals, but we're making progress!

And here's the small tank:



The driftwood log from the big tank got moved over here, where it helps gives some definition to the layout. The glossostigma is starting to fill in the front, which I'm highly pleased at. I'm not sure about that purple-green plant in the back middle--I got it from a local fish store, and it's pretty but I think the plecostomus is chowing on it. We'll see. The fountain of green in the back right is water wisteria (the plant I cut the stray rosette from. I trim that thing all the time. I could probably take a chainsaw to it and it'd need to be trimmed within two weeks. I love it. It forgives all mistakes).


And now for some booklog!


#10. A Curse Dark As Gold, by Elizabeth C. Bunce

An interesting take on Rumpelstiltskin, set in a place something like a 1700s English wool mill. The setting is the strongest part--I really loved the details and sense of place, and how the characters interacted with it. I found the plot weaker, and some of the characterization a little flat. But definitely a peaceful read with a great setting.


#11. Kingdoms of Dust, by Amanda Downum

The third of the Necromancer Chronicles, and definitely not the place to start. Some bits I loved, especially with Asheris, but I think the plot suffered from too many pov characters--Melantha in particular robbed the other povs' plotlines of some tension. In counterbalance we have things like undead cobras, imperial politics, and a very opinionated manticore.


#12. Shadow Magic and #13. Daughter of Witches, by Patricia C. Wrede

My library failed to have any Lyra novel but The Raven Ring, when I was younger, and the older books were out of print. I pounced on them when they came out in ebook last year. I would have loved them at 12; at this age they are slim and entirely straightforward, but the characterization is handled with Wrede's usual refreshing style.


#14. Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear

An epic fantasy centering on complex, non-Western societies along a version of the Silk Road. It's full of great worldbuilding (the different skies! I love them), along with characters that have histories and motives and fully-formed personalities. Also, pretty prose. It's the beginning of a series, which reflects in some of the authorial decisions at the ending--it's not a cliffhanger, but it's fairly open to continuing events. I'm definitely interested to see where it goes next.


#15. The Game of Kings and #16. Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett

Somehow I never read any of the Lymond Chronicles, of which these are the first two. I think I heard "classic" and thought they'd be boring. Which they are not, happily! They instead involve interesting people doing interesting things, all across 1500s Scotland and France. The omniscient voice is brilliant (and, on occasion, hilarious). There's enough politics even for me, and Lymond spends a great deal of time being the sort of fascinating jerk that reminds me of Swordspoint. Thoroughly recommended.


And in conclusion, have a picture of turquoise merino.

2012 edition, now. (How can it possibly be a month into 2012 already?)


1. Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake

YA--well, it isn't really urban fantasy, considering it's set in a small Canadian town. That was a nice change, and it had some interestingly creepy ghosts. Also, a romantic interest that did not make me gnash my teeth. I like Guys Doing Violent Things for the Common Good, such as for instance killing murderous ghosts, so this was an enjoyable read.


2. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

This made an interesting contrast to Anna Dressed in Blood--both first-person present-tense narrative by teenage males, and yet utterly distinct in personality and path. It wasn't so much my thing, mostly because Secret Enclaves of People Hiding Special Powers is not one of my main interests. People with Special Powers Fighting Monsters And/Or Crime, now that is. I was a lot happier by the book's end.


3. The Monstrumologist, by Rick Yancey

I loved this book. It was full of carnage-perpetrating monsters, and also the sort of people who might dedicate their lives to hunting them. No one except the narrator is anyone you'd trust to babysit a hamster, but they're all fascinating and very human. The primary relationship is between the twelve-year-old narrator and the brilliant, erratic, extraordinarily self-absorbed doctor who took him in after his parents' deaths (the fault for those deaths could be easily laid at the doctor's door).

I picked this up after reading Maggie Stiefvater's recommendation, and she is absolutely right: there was an entirely logical twist partway through that made me gasp.


4. The Curse of the Wendigo, by Rick Yancey

Second monstrumologist book. Probably not the sort of book you should read until you're alone at 2 am in the dark. (It was hard to turn the light off after that.)


5. The Isle of Blood, by Rick Yancey

Third one. I'm glad there's going to be a fourth, because I am dying to read on. It's not a cliffhanger, but these characters keep you horrified and fascinated and with your face pressed to the glass to know what happens next. These books have just enough light to make the dark tragic rather than pointless.


6. The Folk Keeper, by Franny Billingsley

This is the author who wrote the gorgeous Chime, and a lot of the elements are present in this earlier book: unusual yet charming narrative voice, harsh and beautiful settings, dangerous magic with prices. Chime is much deeper and richer, but one can hardly complain about an author improving over time.


7. New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran

Several of these stories were stand-out--Caitlin Kiernan's "Pickman's Other Model (1929)", all the Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear shorts (which I had read previously), Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald." Otherwise it ranged from 'interesting' through 'tolerable" to 'downright annoying.' I don't know why so much Lovecraft-inspired material tends to have unpleasant narrators. One only enjoys reading their comeuppance the first couple times; after that it grows wearying.


8. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

I...am not certain how to describe this book. I've seen comparisons to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but it didn't strike me that way at all. It reminded me more of Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique, except where Valentine is carving your heart out with a diamond knife, Morgenstern shows you the knife and through the whole book you're wide-eyed wondering if she's going to use it, and if you hope she will or not.


9. The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton

A book without any speculative fiction or mystery element! I know: Sparky, you say, are you feeling well? But this book is quite worth it: an engaging narrator, an interesting criminal world, and a humane heart.

This story starts the November before last. I work in a pet store, and a shipment of female guppies came in. One gave birth to thirty offspring and promptly keeled over. There's nothing quite so pathetic as thirty itsy-bitsy transparent fish--they looked like puppy eyes attached to spines--so I took them home before they got eaten. I popped them in a three-gallon tank left over from childhood fishkeeping adventures.

The guppies grew, as guppies as wont to do, so I got a slightly larger (and better-looking) tank with air-pump based filtration. I also got a scarlet betta female to eat the now-mature guppies' own babies. I loved this betta; her name was Killer, and she was my first actual purchased fish.

Pretty much everything after this can be traced to that, my love of Killer.

Bettas don't like air pumps (the bubbles create too much motion in the water, and their aggression is motion-triggered), so I was on the look-out for a tank Killer would like better. A 14-gallon Biocube went on clearance at work. It was pricy even on clearance, but it was so nice. Fancy filtration in the back, powerful lights, a whole lot more room than my current tank. Lights powerful enough to grow plants. Enough room for schools of tetras, another group of fish I like.

Well. The guppies killed one another off (the females by breeding till they wore themselves out, the males mostly by ganging up and murdering one another--I have one proud, ragged-finned survivor left), and Killer in the stress of water-polluting guppy deaths contracted fin rot and died. (That was the first time I have ever cried over a fish.)

But the plants remained, and the tetras, and I had succumbed to the love of the hobby.

I tinkered with the tank. I added a carbon dioxide supply, for the plants. I put in a more powerful pump. I added new fish. Soon that demon thought entered my mind, as it does every aquarist's: I need another tank. A bigger tank.

This Christmas brought permission for that tank, and so I promptly went out and got the 29-gallon Biocube. This time, though, I had Plans. I had a hacksaw. And I had a camera.




We begin with the plain empty tank. It came with a full black hood, in which the lights and cooling fan are hidden, but I took that off. Next order of business: making the tank rimless.





I had to cut through the black plastic rim, then run a razor blade through the sealant and pry the rim off, then very carefully scrape the remains of the sealant off the glass. Behind the rear partition, where there are three compartments, I made a variety of small modifications to alter the filtration and flow to my taste.





Next comes the substrate (black EcoComplete, which my plants loved in the 14-gallon tank), along with driftwood and some decorative rocks. New driftwood tends to release tannins, which makes the water both tea-colored and a little more acidic. You can soak driftwood in a bucket for a couple weeks, changing the water out every day, to leach most of the tannins out; you can also boil it if you have a pot large enough, and don't care about the pot making anything else cooked in it taste like driftwood. I keep tetras, which like soft acidic water, so I stuck the driftwood in with only a single good rinse. (The most common tetras you see are from the blackwater streams and pools of South America--tannins taste like home.)





I decided to go real fancy and get LEDs for lighting, which are more expensive but longer-lasting than the high-powered fluorescents you need for most aquatic plants. Right now you mostly see high-quality LEDs in marine tanks, especially for people who keep corals. The LED tile I got is specially calibrated for freshwater plants, which use different wavelengths than coral.

I also hooked up a pressurized CO2 canister to inject the tank with an even supply, because if you hit a planted tank with lots of light and lots of nutrients, but no carbon dioxide, all you're going to grow is a whole bunch of algae. Planted tanks are a high-wire act: any change in nutrients, water quality, CO2, and possibly the socks you're wearing can trigger outbreaks of strange and terrifying new algae. It's a lot like keeping saltwater, except prettier.

(Sorry, those who like saltwater. Corals are nice, but for me they'll never beat a joyfully bubbling carpet of microsword.)





This is the tank a week ago, fully planted. The grassy bundles you see are microsword, which will expand into a little lawn across the bottom. The back left corner is Amazon sword plants, which will grow all the way to the top of the tank. In the back right, we have a mix of java ferns, dwarf sagittaria, pygmy chain sword, hygrophila, and (the biggest one) an unidentified variety of cryptocoryne. That should eventually expand into a huge leafy mass of green.

The tank right now:





With bonus blurs of Congo tetras (the greyish ones) and flame tetras (the yellow-orange). Still a baby tank, but in forty days it will be well on its way to lovely.

ME: What, are you telling me you never root for Darth Vader?
COWORKER: ...No! Why would you do that?
ME: Because he's awesome.
CW: Awesomely evil, maybe.
ME: Exactly.
CW: You have a dark soul.

Title: "In Glamourglass Court"
Words tonight: 517
Words total: 1505
Scenes left: Far too many. This thing was supposed to top out at 3.5k words. That's looking...unlikely.

_____

In reading news, Maggie Stiefvater's new book The Scorpio Races is excellent. Horses, bloodshed, aquatic mayhem, stylish characterization--every time I describe this book I find myself complimenting new things. It's very good. My elevator pitch is, "It's like The Black Stallion crossed with Shark Week." but it's quite a lot more than that.

Also good: Chime, by Franny Billingsley. The voice in this one is amazing. The blurbs and description don't do it justice; I'd say read the first few pages, and then see what you think.

Over the last several years, my allergies have gotten bad. As in 'sleep ten hours, wake up exhausted, zone out in the afternoon, have a persistent sense of disconnection and apathy' bad. It's hard to write in that state, since one lacks the emotional stamina to bear with a story. It's difficult even to read, since it requires the same sort of emotional stamina.

By last month, I was down to reading three or four short stories a month, and one or two novels. I hadn't written in near two months. I could barely imagine wanting to write.

I'd already tried one allergist, who diagnosed me with a moderate dust mite allergy. He told me to continue my current medications and get an air filter in my bedroom. Considering my house already has a super-powered air filter, plus I knew my allergies had some seasonal component (I sneeze March through June; I don't the rest of the year), I was deeply discouraged. I started wondering if I'd have to trudge through the rest of my life like this.

My sister got referred to a different allergist.* She said he was a very nice mad scientist, and so I was certain to like him. I was skeptical about a second doctor being better than the first, but managed to get the referral.

My new allergist, after more extensive testing, has diagnosed me with severe allergy to dust mites; moderate allergy to birch, mesquite, mulberry,** cockroaches, and two types of mold; mild allergy to cats and dogs; and sensitivity to weeds.

Basically, I'm not allergic to birds and grass. After that, I take my chances.

Furthermore, New Allergist said, air filters do nothing for dust mite allergies, because the particles are too heavy to get sucked up. Instead, I should put allergen-proof covers on my pillows and mattress and wash all bedding once a week in hot water. Any hard surfaces in my room should be wiped down once a week; any soft items should be washed. Anything that can't be wiped or washed weekly should be encased in plastic.

I did that, even the part that involved boxing up several hundred books from my shelves.*** He altered my med mix, doubling one med and dropping the others, and told me to start twice-daily sinus rinses.

It's been two weeks now. I didn't post before, because I was paranoid this state would go away, but it's starting to sink in. I am okay again. I can sleep eight hours and wake up, and actually feel awake. I can work a full shift and still be able to grocery shop, or go for a walk, or read a book. I can get interested in the intricacies of a scientific naming discussion. Living is no longer a chore.

Next I start allergy shots, to desensitize me to everything I react to. It means three shots once a week for the next six to eight months, with possibility of reaction especially at the dust mite site--soreness, swelling, arm pain--but that's worth it for what is as close to a cure as I can get. I am back to being happy I'm alive. I'm damn well going to keep it that way.



____________________

*She does not have allergies, it turns out; she has non-allergic rhinitis, which means she has the symptoms of allergies without the actual cause. We're a special, special family.

**Guess when those three trees put out pollen? March through June. Imagine that.

***Getting a Kindle turned out to be an even better decision than I thought.

Fish: all doing well. The guppies and red glass barb got moved to a bowl (technically it's a pitcher) because they were harassing my plants and, frankly, I have gotten fanatical about my plants.

Plantwise, I have anacharis and water wisteria growing so fast I've already had to prune them; a plot of microsword sending out runners; an Amazon sword plant that throws out oxygen bubbles like you wouldn't believe; and a new java fern.

The java fern is tied to my also-new driftwood with fishing line. It is really hard to tie knots in fishing line with wet hands while balancing a piece of wood between your elbow and a tank rim, and also trying not to squash the small plant in question that is getting tied down.

I plan to get glossostigma (a low carpety plant) on Friday from Neptune's Reef, which is an hour's drive away but super-awesome enough to make said drive worth it.

It's amazing how fast I've gone from 'local fish store? I guess there are some around' to having Opinions about pretty much every one within a twenty mile radius. (Neptune's Reef is more like forty miles, or something around there. I got distracted from the odometer by all the traffic on Crenshaw. It's like people go to the Del Amo Mall on Saturdays! So unreasonable, who does that. Oh yeah. I drove 40+ miles into LA on a Saturday morning when I had to work in the afternoon, and miraculously did not get stuck in deadlocked traffic on the way back, which would have resulted in the Call of Shame to work (it's like the Walk of Shame, except instead of sex partners your bad decisions are related to driving choices)).

Back to fish.

The remaining betta is doing well (this is Shroud, the arrogant white lad, for those playing along on G+). He was incredibly offended when I put the driftwood in and went to sulk in the far corner with his microsword. The microsword looks like a patch of grass to me, but I guess to bettas it's the Ultimate Bachelor Pad. Shroud lets the current plaster him against one side and just hangs out there for hours, because in addition to being persnickety Shroud is also incredibly lazy.

Alien Fish, aka the glowlight tetra, has four companions now. The whole school seems ridiculously happy. As in, they've developed shiny gold iridescence on their heads and gill covers, and I'm not sure glowlight tetras are even supposed to have coloring like that. Also their fins now shade from clear to red to bright white tips. Their orange stripes are really strong, too. I hope that means the Alien Fish are all happy. Maybe they're just developing Pre-Invasion Coloration.

New additions include a young fish who goes only by The Pleco. He's a plecostomus, but not just any--he's an albino longfin bushy-nose pleco who is about three inches long, which means he's white and lacy-looking and altogether adorable. He greeted the driftwood with the reverence of a worshipper entering a temple.

Also new: Oto I and Oto II, which are otocinclus (little grey-brown algae eaters who have amazing work ethic). They take care of algae on small bending leaves that the pleco can't get to, or has better things to do than get to (like meditating upon the Driftwood of God). Oto I is braver than its companion, and tries to school with the glowlight tetras sometimes. The glowlights ignore Oto I, because it is not part of the Extraterrestrial Club, and then Oto I has to go be sad and hang out in the corner and eat lots of algae to relieve its feelings.

Oto II never strays far from the plant understories. It does not socialize; it has better things to do, like massacre algae. I think it takes sharks as its role model. Sharks are unstoppable killing machines: Oto II is an unstoppable algae-killing machine.

The four ghost shrimp are also doing well. Three like the shadowy places and crevices, and mostly come out when hunting food. The fourth is the smallest, and likes to bound over to the microsword while Shroud is sulking. The shrimp skitters in place and hits Shroud around the head with its feelers, which Shroud will put up with for whole minutes before going to the other side of the microsword. I think they are best friends.

You know why I need writing projects to focus on?


So that I don't do things like, say...over a five day period buying a new larger fishtank; visiting six local fish stores for reconnaissance; changing out my tank lights to ones roughly as high-powered as the Saharan sun; getting plant-friendly substrate (aka Amazon-Chernobyl River Sludge of Doom) all over my floor; visiting four separate fish stores to buy aquatic plants; replacing the filter cartridges with a bag of carbon and foam pads cut by hand; spending hours planting, adjusting, and trimming my new plants; visiting (shockingly) one fish store for ghost shrimp; spending an hour doing nothing but watching my new ghost shrimp; and at last devising a carbon dioxide supplement system involving a soda bottle, yeast, sugar, tubing, rubber bands, and the pointy end of a wooden chopstick.


Maybe I should go outline that novel now.


(my fish population is now seven guppies, a glowlight tetra, a betta, and a red glass barb. Until six days ago, that list included two bettas and two red glass barbs. The reason it no longer does went something like this:


RED GLASS BARB: Hey, betta! I see you lookin' at my woman!
BETTA: I am half-blind and see few objects, unless they're the size of planetary bodies. Your female companion comes close, however.
RED GLASS BARB: Did you just insult my girl, you shiny white-eyed jerk? Ohhh, that's it. IT'S ON.
BETTA: Oh yeah? BRING IT, TUBBY.


Followed by a fight to death, while the rest of the tank looked on in terror, bewilderment, or in the case of the glowlight tetra, that calm detachment of the alien taking field notes until the mothership returns.



...I really should go outline that novel.)