between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I have a confession to make.

I've been writing again. Re-writing, actually, since I got so stuck at 30K with the ongoing project way back in January, and have had neither time nor brain enough to examine why until the last month. This will be the third year of me working on the same book. Possibly the fourth: my records don't go back that far.

Each iteration of the first 20-30K words has gotten closer to the shape of the story I want to tell. I'm hopeful that this time, since I finally know who my antagonist is and what she's doing in the story, that this might be the iteration that ends up closer to a complete draft: I've spent the last two-three weeks patching old material in with new for the first 10K, and although it has far too many flaws, I'm still excited about it.

Three, four years on, I'm still excited about working on this. So I guess I'm stuck working on it until the excitement dies the final death, or I finish.

I'd really like to finish. But I have this thesis thing this year, so I'm not going to put myself under any pressure. What comes, comes.

Cataloguing the Arch Soc/Class Soc library: still not done. On the other hand, I brought biscuits, and there was conversation, and fun: the committee is stacked to the geek end of the student pool (case in point: we had Stargate jokes and Dune jokes and Princess Bride jokes, and only one person doesn't get the references).

Climbing: sent the blue 5 route, the orange 5 and the yellow 4 back-to-back; scrabbled my way up the red 6a feeling weak and failworthy, but improved the grey 6a. I like that dyno move: it's good fun, and I'm getting better at it. I am also figuring out how to do the last couple of moves of the black 6a with the undercling: I suspect the solution is to ignore the undercling, get my feet up higher, and go up with the left rather than the right hand. (The right hand grip is the first two fingers in a hole in the hold. It is not excellent, but far more stable than the undercling.)

Failed of the blue 6b, of course, without even getting as high as on Monday. But I kind of expected that. That Friday feeling, of course.

---

Everyone's afraid of something, right?

It occured to me today that my - not an obsession, precisely, but definitely a need - my need to be doing exercise, to be fit, strong, able to run at least a couple of miles... it's related to fear. (It also feels really good to be strong and fit - endorphins are made of win, as they ought to be - but bear with me, okay?) I've been living with the constant, albeit purely psychological, need to prove myself 'worthy' (do not, I implore you, ask what that means: I am beyond ever thinking I can define it) for years.

Physical stuff, unlike academic stuff or writing stuff or people stuff, gives me measurable, quantifiable improvement that relies in the final estimation on me, not on other people's judgement. It's like the biscuit I can give the nagging sense at the back of my mind: Shut up. See there? Better than last week. Look, we're doing okay here.

Which is why, I guess, if the choice is between spending my time climbing and running and falling over dead when I get home, or spending my time writing? (And that is where the choice is, these days, mostly. My time is sadly not infinite.) I'm going to do the physical stuff.

This is my Deep Realisation (tm) for the week.

I don't have to wonder why this time of year always makes me sad. I know.

It's no big thing. But I can't help remembering people I used to know, places I used to love. Things I used to look forward to, like Christmas, I dread for so many small, petty reasons I couldn't count them all. People I used to care for, who I've... misplaced, one way or another, due to time or distance or simple carelessness.

Lately I've been dreaming of a house in the country. Actually dreaming, not daydreaming: a small grey farmhouse in the old style with worn rooms comfortably arranged and a wooden stair, four-pointed stars carved into the risers of the steps, and a kitchen where a cat sleeps on a jumble of shoes in a corner by an Aga cooker. Outside there is a shed half-full of straw, a small paved yard, and beyond, fields green and damp and full of dying gorse under a grey sky sweeping down to the sea. And I know if I went down a narrow hall and opened the door to the living room, it would be full of friends. And I wake up full of regret.

It's happened more than twice now. The house in the dream is nowhere I've ever been. Or rather, it's bits and pieces of a number of places I've been, all mixed together, under a dream of west-of-Ireland scenery and sky. It's the house I wish I could belong to, in the middle of countryside that for all its foreigness to me (I really am more comfortable in towns) still smells like coming home.

I hate that dream only a little less than I hate the fact that I have had it. It seems a little implausible, not to mention impolite, for your own brain to be giving you tastes of things you can never have. Hell, I thought the recurring symbolic dream thingy was a literary invention. It's freaking ridiculous to find out it actually isn't.

And it's really not helping my winter mood of sorrow and old socks and fruitless regrets. Fruitful regrets would be a different thing, but I don't seem to quite do fruitful regrets.

It's the tail end of the (solar) year. Maybe some other year I'll get a sunlamp, mum won't be scheduled for too many shifts over the holidays, and the shops will play choral music instead of hive-inducing cheery jingles. That's the year I'll have a pony, too, and an antidote for some of this tired cynicism. Right?

Here's to the year to come. May it be more just, fairer, and more kind.

Because I am too sleepy to turn this into a post with actual paragraphs:

hawkwing_lb (23:04:19): Possibly this is a thought brought on by the last vestiges of cold medicine.
hawkwing_lb (23:04:57): but it occurs to me that there are many alien worlds or world-experiences very close at hand.
stillnotbored (23:05:30): there are indeed
hawkwing_lb (23:06:02): and for all the vaunted sensawunda of science fiction, most of it is very conservative when dealing with 'alienness,' and even more conservative in dealing with human people.
cristalia (23:07:38): That sounds like a thought worth chasing.
stillnotbored(23:07:50): it does
hawkwing_lb (23:08:02): I mean, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the recent science fiction novels I've read where people are less strange to me than the Nigerian immigrants who have church service in the local community centre of a Sunday.
tanaise (23:09:10): Liz, that's basically why I always think of my stuff as SF.
tanaise (23:09:36): because it's not this culture, so it is 'the other' and SF is about 'the other'
hawkwing_lb (23:10:18): (I mean, their experience of life is different to mine in ways I can hardly begin to imagine. For starters, they come from somewhere warm. And the congregation sings in church, all of them, every Sunday)
tanaise (23:11:09): Yeah. Sociological SF is part of the sf that gets most overlooked , I notice.
hawkwinglb (23:11:13): or to pick another example, I have read science fiction novels where the people were less strange to me than some of the people I went to school with
stillnotbored (23:11:51): you should chase that for sure
hawkwing_lb (23:12:04): (and certainly less strange to me than my good friend from Tallaght whose best friends all go to art school.)
hawkwing_lb (23:12:55): this is as far as my chasing goes, tonight.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Because I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining the lack of strangeness in SF, or at least, the SF I've read recently.

I go away to Crete on the twelfth. I'll be twenty-two two days before.

(Hello, adulthood. You really haven't been much like I expected so far.)

And I won't be back until September. This is going to be odd: the longest I've ever spent away before now was three weeks, and that was back when I was ten.

Apparently the average temperature for Crete at that time of year is daytime highs of 29-31 degrees, nighttime lows of 19-22 degrees. But they tell me it's not humid, at least.

I should be able to run in the mornings before the dig (I am capable of getting up at 0530, I just don't like it) and swim in the evenings afterwards, provided exhaustion doesn't set in too badly.

There will be diving. During the holiday portion of my stay, if not the dig one.

As for writing...

Right now, I have 23K of a novel. It's taken me since December to get this much, with all the other stuff I've been doing, and how slowly I've been writing. I want to have 30K before I go away, and at least 50-60K by the time I come back. (I can write 3K a week, I'm fairly sure. And frugality suggests that I should do that rather than attempt nightlife, at least mostly.)

Then back in September, pre-college reading prep, pick up a lead-climbing course, and try to get the damn b*&k done by the end of October. Because if I don't get it done by then, I really doubt I'll have time to think about it much until this time next year.

Plan? Plan.

You know, if I'd done that Asgard sail training thing when I was seventeen or eighteen? I might have ended up doing a nautical science course out of CIT after all. It was one of the courses I applied for, even then.

And now I find myself looking at the Certificate of Seamanship course and thinking, Well, that's another option if this Ph.D thing doesn't work out.

Along with finding out what I have to do to qualify as a climbing instructor (obviously, become a better climber first), see if I can get some diving qualifications without bankrupting myself, and find out if doing some basic courses in yachting and RIB-handling would be of benefit, or if they'd be an investment with no appreciable return. (Everything costs money, of which I have but a very limited supply.)

Because, really. If I can't get into some kind of decently-remunerated academic gig before I'm thirty, I am not taking my arts degree and getting an office job. And being honest with myself, I'm never going to make it as a full-time writer, not without an unholy amount of luck: just getting published will probably take me at least the next ten years. (And I'm okay with that: I write slow, and improve slow, and I can live with that.)

So I guess the thing to do is prioritise my interests and investments over the next three or four years in such a way that they give me the most enjoyment and the most useful possibilities with the least financial outlay.

Which means I should concentrate on climbing (pick up a lead-climbing course, go away with the club, get a couple of classes at outside venues), diving only if I'm in Crete again next year, and maybe a RIB-handling course (useful for diving, at least) over the next three years.

Also, driver's license. I should maybe get one.

I do go on, don't I? But it helps to write things down. :)

...You know, it strikes me that my life has closed down to essays, and complaining about them.

This strikes me as remarkably boring. And also inaccurate.

But I'm not talking about the good things. Just the essays. Possibly this is because they take up so much of my life, to the extent of invading my dreams (and trust me, this is a very weird phenomenon), but.

I may have to do something to change this, before people stop speaking to me at all, lest I suddenly segue into a discussion of the nature of the evidence of social organisation in Iron Age Greece, and so on and so forth.

My final exam takes place tomorrow. For this year, at least.

I am fascinated by knowledge, and eager in learning, but poor at studying: for the last few days - weeks, if I'm to be honest - I've taken rather to ignoring the world; watching Farscape and Stargate DVDs rather than hitting the books: retreating, if you will, from reality. I can do nothing productive, can barely even exercise, barely communicate, without feeling an excreble paralysis or a paralysising isolation. Of late, I've been entirely too afraid.

But tomorrow I do the final exam of the year, and then I'm free. Free to exercise, free to work, free to attempt to learn to write again. Free, I suppose, to learn to be again, instead of being continually in suspense.

Anticipation's a bitch.

It's summer. Tonight, for the first time, I've noticed the pale blue shading to yellow at the horizon after sunset, and felt real summer warmth. Which is nice, you know, but I imagine it's been around for awhile: I haven't exactly been paying attention.

The Dublin Maritime Festival took place at the weekend. The tall ships sailed into the Liffey on Friday, and out again on Monday. They're an amazing sight, all immensity and grace, and yet, at the same time, so fragile compared to the expanse across which they sail.

I've applied to do a sail training course aboard the Asgard II. I need to do more strange and interesting things while I still can. I can't do an Open Water Diving course this year, because I can't get anywhere where it would be affordable, but the Asgard sails out of Dublin and Cork on two of its voyages this September. Those I can get to, and four hundred euro isn't too much to pay to learn something about tall ships and how they're sailed. Unlike a sail training voyage on the impressive Stavros S. Niarchos or the Prince William, it won't quite bankrupt me.

But I'll only be able to go if I don't have to do repeats. So here's hoping I haven't failed any of my exams, and won't fail tomorrow's. Cross your fingers for me, would you?

I sometimes wonder if my old secondary school would have censored the books available in their tiny library, if they'd had the time and money for such pursuits. Being a Loreto school, with all that Catholic ethos seeping out of the walls, it's possible, but I like to think not: I found Clancy's The Hunt for the Red October there when I was thirteen, and if not one of Jean Auel's books, then one so similar that time has blurred the distinction in my memory.

But the library was only open at lunchtime, and in later years closed more lunchtimes than not, and the selection was always terribly constrained: the school always - what school doesn't? - suffered from a lack of funding for anything but absolute essentials.

I suppose I can't blame them for not considering the library as essential as other things, such as photocopying and sports equipment and fixing the leaks in the roof, not to mention building new buildings to cope with student numbers - when I was there, they had permanent facilities for 500, and a student body of 1000; now they have permanent facilities for about 700, and a student body of around 1200. Talk about running just to stay in place.

Anyway. When I was reorganising my bookshelves last summer, and starting to keep a running catalogue, I brought them down a couple of boxes' worth of stuff I wasn't going to read again. Not much: twenty or thirty or however many books it was is a drop in the bucket. And all of them were fiction, and none of them were really specifically YA. I mean, I'd read them as an adolescent, but this is me: I read without discrimination and way above my (supposed) age level, having been fortunate enough to have an indulgent parent who made me free with the adult section of the public library from about the age of nine.

I have another box I'm meaning to ask if they'd like. And at the same time I wish I could do more. I wish I could get them copies of decent YA fiction like Westerfeld's or Pierce's or Nix's or Larbalestier's stuff. I wish I could get them copies of science and history books appropriate to and exceeding the scope of the courses covered; I wish I could get them copies of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs (which I am convinced everyone should read, but I'm too selfish to give up my own copies).

But it's useless to wish. I may as well ask for the moon on a string, since I'm selfish enough to want to provide for my own entertainment first, and after that? Not going to be enough left in the budget to equip the old shithole.

(Okay, 'shithole' is uncharitable of me. They're just about in the top two hundred in the country for sending students to the colleges, they have brilliant, motivated teachers, a not insignificant number of whom are past pupils, and they facilitated my acquisition of a respectable education remarkably well, considering the sheer number of students they had to deal with. And I still feel indebted to them for that, because if I hadn't had good teachers... Well. Woman cannot live on books alone, is all I'm saying.)

And that is sufficient maundering upon inadequacy for one night.

*

Books 77-85: Fiction 74-81, Non-Fiction 4.

Fiction:

74. Justina Robson, Living Next-Door to the God of Love

I can has envy now?

This is one weird book. I liked it a lot, really, but I'm not at all sure what was going on there. I have a feeling that this might be because I was reading it in snatches, or because I'm not quite clever enough to follow everything that was going on. The worldbuilding was amazing. The prose, in places, likewise. The characters made me cry. It was all kind of shiny and scintillating and glittering and here a couple of weeks later I'm still thinking about it.

75. Robert Charles Wilson, Spin.

Heavy with the tech-shiny and stylistic-shiny. Light with the characterisation. It took me months to work up enough motivation to get to the end. Most because, I think, Tyler Dupree is a fairly boring guy. He's not engaged; he's an observer. And when he does engage, I find myself disbelieving him.

Also, when you're working up to the end of the world? The deus ex machina save really isn't my cup of tea.

76. Mercedes Lackey, Jinx High.

Engaging light entertainment, fortunately light on the preachiness that seems to have become so common in the more recent Lackey novels that I've read. Also fortunately from the time before Urban Fantasy was Sexy.

77. Rachel Caine, Firestorm.

The not-half-bad fifth book in the Weather Warden series. The constant ratcheting up of danger is starting to get just a little old - each book being higher-stakes than the last, or so it seems - but an enjoyable read, nonetheless. Though I'm also starting to find the non-human hot boy! love interest a little old, too.

78. Patricia Briggs, Blood Bound

Speaking of non-human hot boy! love interests...

Actually, that's not fair. Very little of the book or its plot - which is more than sufficiently plotty, involving vampire sorcerers and demons and other such things - has to do with the two werewolfy possible love interests. I'm just starting to get a little tired of the trope. Entertaining light reading.

79. C.E. Murphy, Coyote Dreams.

Thank heavens for one author who doesn't do non-human hot boy! love interests. And so far vampires and werewolves seem to be distinctly absent, for which I'm also grateful.

Coyote Dreams is the third book concerning Joanne Walker, reluctant shaman and police officer in Seattle. It's a much more polished book than its predecessors, a very smooth and compelling read, and interesting use of myth. Liked it lots.

80. Garth Nix, Mister Monday.

Strange and interesting. And compelling, if rough in spots. And I do want to find out what comes next.

81. Tanya Huff, Smoke and Mirrors.

Am I reduced to singing paeans of praise for urban fantasy that avoids the SexyNon-Human! route? It seems so, but Smoke and Mirrors deserves praise on its own merits. It is an extraordinarily compelling haunted house story, and I recommend it.

Non-fiction:

4. Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage.

The subtitle is slightly misleading: this isn't a book about the birth of modern espionage, per se. Or at least, it fails to connect its material to any such thesis. Rather, it seems that Budiansky is indulging the urge to geek shamelessly about Sir Francis and - in large part - about Mary Queen of Scots, and the various plots and strategems of the times.

It's interesting and a good, fast read, if not perhaps quite as rigourously academic as one might prefer. (Footnotes! Where are my footnotes?! I never trust a history book without them!) Nor does it give quite as much context as one might prefer. But that's okay: it was, at least, entertainingly informative.

*

I have been adopted by a catling. It seems the powers that be have decided I am now owned by two cats, not one.

I debated whether or not to post this at all. To friendslock it, or post it under a cut. On reflection, I decided to do none of these things. I warn you it contains ramblings on faith and religion, and the nature of mine own.

I've been wishing people Merry Christmas all week. Not unusual, you might say, considering the season. Except for one thing: I'm not a Christian, not anymore. Is it, then, hypocritical of me to wish people joy of something I don't myself believe in?

I don't usually talk much about why I'm no longer either Catholic or Christian, though I was brought up as both, or what I believe in now. It's not something I dwell on, but now, at the close of the year, displays of faith and religion in the Christian mode surround me. I find myself thinking more and more about my choices, and my own beliefs.

I stopped being a Catholic the year I turned fourteen. I had been a lapsed one for some time before, since my Confirmation - under protest - at the age of eleven, but it was that year I ceased to profess the tenets of a faith in which I could no longer honestly believe. Christianity, out of guilt and habit, lasted a little longer, but by the time I was fifteen I had decided that I could no longer honestly claim to believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, either*.

For the next year I vacillated, wavering between atheism and agnosticism. Then, the year I turned sixteen, the year of my Junior Cert exams, I had what one might describe as a personal religious experience. Although the unkind might choose to call it a delusional episode instead.

That year was a horrible one for me. I had what was later diagnosed as an underactive thyroid, complicated by the pressure of preparing for exams. At the time, all I knew was that I was exhausted all the time, and things which had once been simple for me were growing difficult. I started blanking in tests. I was getting more and more tired all the time, but with no obvious physical cause I put it down to my imagination. I started distrusting my own assessment of my mental and physical health - in short, I was sick, and depressed, and felt that I couldn't go on.

There are no atheists in foxholes. At the point where I was falling in the door and into bed immediately after school, if I made it in to school at all, I prayed.

Not to a Christian god. I didn't believe, after all. No, simply to any Being that might have been Out There. And I didn't pray for anything that I didn't believe I already possessed. I just wanted help finding that extra bit of wisdom, of strength, of will-to-go-on that I'd allowed fear and worry and distress to bury.

I believe I was answered. For in the moment when the voices of fear and worry, of the everyday, had fallen silent in my mind, I felt something that I don't believe was me. I was given grace, and for a moment my tiredness lifted. For a moment, I could look beyond my immediate future and see that I could go on.**

I believe that moment saved my sanity, if not my life.

In all other things than atheism, now, I suspect the word existentialist fits me best- though the better read may correct me. I believe in no absolute morality; 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' is the whole of my moral code. I believe in no hereafter, no heaven or hell, nor reincarnation neither. You find your salvation or damnation in this life, because it's the only one you have, and when we die we cease to be.

I remain, contradictively, an agnostic. The universe is vast, an infinity beyond human comprehension. So too the nature of the divine. It pleases me to think that perhaps the Universe is God, and that everything that exists is part of it, part of the body of divinity, growing and evolving in ways too complex for human consciousness to compass***. An immense energy, which can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy, of which matter is merely a denser form.**** We are merely denser bodies of energy, grown in some manner conscious of ourselves. And perhaps It is conscious, with the consciousness of aeons and of stars, vast and infinite; I do not claim to know.

I do not think It has much care for what we do or fail to do, we tiny specks of matter.

I do think that in the silence of our minds when our own selfish voices are made still, we can hear it, that vast, slow heartbeat of existence.

We are motes of dust in a sunbeam. Accountable, not to the Infinite, but to ourselves, with the double-edged razor of our own morality. To save ourselves, or to damn.

Today is the shortest day of the northern hemisphere's year. The shortest day, and the longest night. Whatever you believe, may it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out. [1]

Peace be with you.

-------------------------------
*I don't claim to disbelieve the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. I simply cannot suspend my disbelief in his divinity as attested to in the gospels. Yes, I'm a godless heretic/blasphemer/infidel. Whatever. A theological question for the faithful of whatever stripe: Do you believe your God answers unbelievers' prayers?

**You can always go on. I know that now. It took me a bit of time realising it.

*** It has always seemed to me to be the highest arrogance to believe that any human mind can compass the nature of the Ultimate. Yet so many people seem to think that words in a book can explain It, when those words, if they compass it at all, can only give us Its faintest, most diluted reflection. (I apologise to anyone this might offend, but this is what I believe)

****My physics is rather rusty, but I remember the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy.

[1]Yes, precious, we are a LOTR fan. How did the hobbitses guess?