stray ends and yuzu
Dec. 27th, 2020 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Daily life: Yuzu bath season! Lovely hot bath with lovely citrus-fragrant yuzu floating in it.
Also I got my hair cut--bangs in my eyes can be a headache factor--and enjoyed myself as usual grumbling with the salon lady about politics. She is maybe late fifties, with bright red-purple hair, the middle one in three generations of single mothers, very kind and fiercely liberal; I keep telling her she should run for office herself, and I wish she would.
Music: The Met streamed Götterdämmerung (if I have the umlauts right) and I've been illicitly keeping the tab open to listen to it a whole lot. As a Jew I have some guilt over liking Wagner; it's not fair that the music is so incredibly good.
Books: Well, reading. I've always had good fortune at Yuletide and this year was no exception, with two lovely fics, "Also in the Act of Reaching" (A Memory Called Empire), a post-canon moment with nuance and warmth and uncertainty and language feels, and "True Love's (Gen) Kiss" (Lost Tomb Reboot), a delightful scene in which the Iron Triangle are not in need of boundaries and Liu Sang is so done. Other than these two I've just been reading around the edges of the collection and haven't gotten very far into it yet.
Chinese: Duolingo made me write the English for 雨伞, and I read it out loud to myself for practice, first "usan," the Japanese reading, and then correcting myself to the Chinese "yusan"; so naturally when I started typing the answer, it came out "yumbrella."
Writing: With Yuletide out of the way I've been trying to make a start on the next volume of my novel thing (the first one is still in beta reading and getting on with the next will make me be more motivated...). I have about a dozen threads to juggle and only a very generalized idea indeed of what the plot wants to be, so this is going to take some outlining work before I can even start writing, but it's nice to be back at it. Do other people do it this way? I can't outline everything because there's a lot I only figure out by writing my way into it, but I can't just write without any outline at all because I only meander uselessly. One gets the impression that most people are one way or the other...
Be safe and well.
Also I got my hair cut--bangs in my eyes can be a headache factor--and enjoyed myself as usual grumbling with the salon lady about politics. She is maybe late fifties, with bright red-purple hair, the middle one in three generations of single mothers, very kind and fiercely liberal; I keep telling her she should run for office herself, and I wish she would.
Music: The Met streamed Götterdämmerung (if I have the umlauts right) and I've been illicitly keeping the tab open to listen to it a whole lot. As a Jew I have some guilt over liking Wagner; it's not fair that the music is so incredibly good.
Books: Well, reading. I've always had good fortune at Yuletide and this year was no exception, with two lovely fics, "Also in the Act of Reaching" (A Memory Called Empire), a post-canon moment with nuance and warmth and uncertainty and language feels, and "True Love's (Gen) Kiss" (Lost Tomb Reboot), a delightful scene in which the Iron Triangle are not in need of boundaries and Liu Sang is so done. Other than these two I've just been reading around the edges of the collection and haven't gotten very far into it yet.
Chinese: Duolingo made me write the English for 雨伞, and I read it out loud to myself for practice, first "usan," the Japanese reading, and then correcting myself to the Chinese "yusan"; so naturally when I started typing the answer, it came out "yumbrella."
Writing: With Yuletide out of the way I've been trying to make a start on the next volume of my novel thing (the first one is still in beta reading and getting on with the next will make me be more motivated...). I have about a dozen threads to juggle and only a very generalized idea indeed of what the plot wants to be, so this is going to take some outlining work before I can even start writing, but it's nice to be back at it. Do other people do it this way? I can't outline everything because there's a lot I only figure out by writing my way into it, but I can't just write without any outline at all because I only meander uselessly. One gets the impression that most people are one way or the other...
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-27 12:44 pm (UTC)My outlines tend to start as bullet point sentences that eventually evolve into short paragraphs before I can start actually writing. I have a bad memory all around (depression induced memory loss is a daily battle for me) so I like making sure I write down in advance as much as possible. The upside of taking so much time and energy just for the outline means that even if a story doesn't get written right away I can just go back to it years later and still know what I wanted to do with it.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-27 10:48 pm (UTC)even if a story doesn't get written right away I can just go back to it years later and still know what I wanted to do with it.
This is great! I should do this more; I know there are various possible story ideas that have slipped away from me because I either never wrote them down or just assumed that if I wrote down a couple of hints I'd remember the rest...
(Once I get into short paragraphs in outlining I tend to start arguing with myself, a good sign that I should just shut up and let the characters talk :) )