9 March 2005

I took Timprov to the ENT today. Timprov boiled down the ENT's message as "don't be HASTY," of course, but the associated doctors are being a little less hasty than one might wish, so we're hoping for perhaps a little more hastiness in that corner for him, and we're hoping to see indications of it soon.

Mark is still sick and lemur-eyed from the -Quils, but I think he's getting better. And while I have essentially no energy today, I don't actually have any symptoms of his illness. So woohoo for that.

Last night we watched some of David's favorite movies, "The Three Musketeers" and "The Four Musketeers." They were...Jackie Chan Does Musketeers. (Only with all white people, not actually Jackie Chan.) I like Jackie Chan. They were good fun.

The first time I went to a Jackie Chan movie (the real kind, with Jackie Chan actually in, not just the kind that remind me of him) was in college. Mark and I had not been dating for very long, and he announced, "We're going to 'First Strike' in Mankato with the crowd." I said, "We are?" He said, "Yes." I thought perhaps some of us might be staying home and doing our homework or perhaps getting a coffee with Michelle. I was wrong; we were going to "First Strike" in Mankato with the crowd. I said, cautiously, "Will we like it?" He assured me that we would. And in fact we did.

He can get away with stuff like that because he doesn't try to do it very often. It would get annoying if it happened more often.

I'm reading Martha Wells's City of Bones, and so far it's also good fun, interesting, gripping me faster than the previous Martha Wells books I've read, although that may be familiarity with her style rather than superiority of book. Hard to say.

Whenever someone says something is hard to say, my grandpa helpfully inquires, "Well, can you spell it?" I have acquired this habit from time to time, although I think I make more efforts to suppress it than Grandpa does. But he enjoys it so much that none of us gets upset about it.

I can really see an end to the edits on Thermionic Night. Not even just an end, but a close end. I've developed a new notation for my revision notecards, a little marking and section for the ones that can be included later if readers think they'd be a good idea. If, for example, someone says, "I'd like to see more of Vihtori," I have a scenelet featuring just that very man, but I don't want to add it in if it'll just slow things down and make a long book even longer. So there's a little red star in one of the corners to indicate, "use later if needed." If I do this for a couple more books, I should have an entirely baroque and undecipherable system. Especially if I use the current notation with the book's initials on the upper mid-right of the card, and then change book titles a few times. That would be particularly charming. "What does the S mean?" "It means this book two titles ago." "Oh...."

This is the problem with talking about the edits: talking about them reminds me to think about them, and thinking about them reminds me to do them, and then all of a sudden I've dealt with four different notecards and still not posted a journal entry. This is probably a good thing when it comes to the book. It means that after all this time and all this revising, the book is still interesting and engaging to me. And that's a good thing, right? Can't be a bad thing, can it? Of course not.