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mid-week rambling at length
Jun. 30th, 2021 08:25 pmDaily life: For a change I like my haircut, what I now think of as a Qi Jin hairdo after watching LTR: just below chin-length, center part, kind of curving off the face.
My spicy plants are starting to fruit, habaneros and chili peppers, yay; the tomato is drooping, though. Looking up plant health online is just like the human version: you get five possible different answers for any kind of symptom, of which at least two are fatal (and in the case of plants, one is invariably “you watered it too much” and another “you didn’t water it enough”).
Music: Orchestra back again, knock wood. I like Tchaik 2 more and more as we do it—a weird mix of 20th-c. avant la lettre and pop music, which is surprisingly delightful. ( A silly Tchaikovsky story from Wikipedia )
Books: Rereading Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, which I can never decide how much I like. ( Read more... )
Chinese: On the topic of untranslatable family words: Lin Nansheng, mentioning his brother, says “my gege” to his new boss and “my xiongzhang” to his not-yet-girlfriend (the first time I’ve ever heard that one refer to someone other than Lan Xichen). I feel like it should be the other way around, based on relative formality; but he’s kind of playing a role in both contexts, and maybe “gege” seemed more, er, naive (less 天真 than 腼腆, I guess) and “xiongzhang” more serious and scholarly?
Writing: I had a couple of genuine inspirations about overarching themes and how they can be made to appear specifically, although mostly to be realized in book 2. I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
I’m trying to keep a balance between making the magic neither too painstakingly explicated (as Harriet Vane puts it, phantasies too careful to tuck their shrouds neatly about them and leave no loose ends) nor too wand-wavingly aerie-faerie (it’s a skilled art/science and the characters are experts in the field). Tricky.
Photos: So you know how the physicists (?) talk about spherical cows? I have found a spherical (or at least perfectly round) cat. Also some cherry tomatoes, grown by me, and some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
( Read more... )
Be safe and well.
My spicy plants are starting to fruit, habaneros and chili peppers, yay; the tomato is drooping, though. Looking up plant health online is just like the human version: you get five possible different answers for any kind of symptom, of which at least two are fatal (and in the case of plants, one is invariably “you watered it too much” and another “you didn’t water it enough”).
Music: Orchestra back again, knock wood. I like Tchaik 2 more and more as we do it—a weird mix of 20th-c. avant la lettre and pop music, which is surprisingly delightful. ( A silly Tchaikovsky story from Wikipedia )
Books: Rereading Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, which I can never decide how much I like. ( Read more... )
Chinese: On the topic of untranslatable family words: Lin Nansheng, mentioning his brother, says “my gege” to his new boss and “my xiongzhang” to his not-yet-girlfriend (the first time I’ve ever heard that one refer to someone other than Lan Xichen). I feel like it should be the other way around, based on relative formality; but he’s kind of playing a role in both contexts, and maybe “gege” seemed more, er, naive (less 天真 than 腼腆, I guess) and “xiongzhang” more serious and scholarly?
Writing: I had a couple of genuine inspirations about overarching themes and how they can be made to appear specifically, although mostly to be realized in book 2. I solved (or found the key to) the problem that one character spends literally all of book 1 struggling with (not least because until now I had no idea how to solve it either). I’m not sure he is going to like the solution, but that’s his problem.
I’m trying to keep a balance between making the magic neither too painstakingly explicated (as Harriet Vane puts it, phantasies too careful to tuck their shrouds neatly about them and leave no loose ends) nor too wand-wavingly aerie-faerie (it’s a skilled art/science and the characters are experts in the field). Tricky.
Photos: So you know how the physicists (?) talk about spherical cows? I have found a spherical (or at least perfectly round) cat. Also some cherry tomatoes, grown by me, and some pretty birdberries, grown by someone else.
( Read more... )
Be safe and well.
