(no subject)

Yesterday was frustrating. Scott had planned to take Cordelia at about three to meet cherydactyl, her family and a couple of other friends for a picnic followed by watching fireworks. Unfortunately, he started showing signs of food poisoning about noon. He kept hoping he'd be better real soon now, but it was six before he started to recover and probably way to late for heading out to join the group (the metroparks tend to fill early in the day and turn people away after they've reached capacity. Making a forty-five minute drive with a small child just to find out seemed unwise at best).

We still have no idea what set him off. He says it wasn't an allergic reaction, but everything that he ate, I also ate, and I didn't get sick. The symptoms weren't severe enough to be beef contamination, but they did remind me of how he used to respond to beef several years ago. I hope this doesn't mean a new allergy. Of course, he had taken an antihistamine already, and that eases the symptoms. Who knows?

He ended up calling his parents to see what they were doing. He and Cordelia drove up to sit in the grass next to a Target parking lot with his parents and his sister's family. From what I gather, everybody had fun. Cordelia apparently didn't find the fireworks anywhere near as interesting as the chance to play with her cousins and had to be distracted to keep her from running around after the show started.

Scott's sister had difficulty believing that Cordelia had never before seen fireworks. She kept trying to tell Cordelia that she'd just forgotten until Scott intervened to explain that, up until this year, we'd just skipped Fourth of July festivities. I guess the fact that I wasn't there hadn't quite added up in her mind to the realization that I don't enjoy such things.

I stayed home and checked a couple of points of canon for my remix fic. Then I did a little writing, just for fun stuff, watched a bit of The Patriotic Knights (still fun) and played a bit of Cradle of Rome. I also stuffed my backpack full of paperbacks for the trip to my grandmother's next weekend. If I'd had more time, I probably would have put some effort into starting a list of things that have to be done before the trip and of things that have to be packed next Sunday morning.

Making the list would have increased my anxiety levels last night even if having the list would help anxiety levels for the rest of the week. I desperately needed some time to decompress. I'd been getting increasingly cranky as last week wore on due to having so much of the normally shared chores dumped on my (and added to!) by Scott's illness. I wanted to get to the point where I could handle everyday stuff without snarling at Cordelia.

(no subject)

Yesterday was frustrating. Scott had planned to take Cordelia at about three to meet cherydactyl, her family and a couple of other friends for a picnic followed by watching fireworks. Unfortunately, he started showing signs of food poisoning about noon. He kept hoping he'd be better real soon now, but it was six before he started to recover and probably way to late for heading out to join the group (the metroparks tend to fill early in the day and turn people away after they've reached capacity. Making a forty-five minute drive with a small child just to find out seemed unwise at best).

We still have no idea what set him off. He says it wasn't an allergic reaction, but everything that he ate, I also ate, and I didn't get sick. The symptoms weren't severe enough to be beef contamination, but they did remind me of how he used to respond to beef several years ago. I hope this doesn't mean a new allergy. Of course, he had taken an antihistamine already, and that eases the symptoms. Who knows?

He ended up calling his parents to see what they were doing. He and Cordelia drove up to sit in the grass next to a Target parking lot with his parents and his sister's family. From what I gather, everybody had fun. Cordelia apparently didn't find the fireworks anywhere near as interesting as the chance to play with her cousins and had to be distracted to keep her from running around after the show started.

Scott's sister had difficulty believing that Cordelia had never before seen fireworks. She kept trying to tell Cordelia that she'd just forgotten until Scott intervened to explain that, up until this year, we'd just skipped Fourth of July festivities. I guess the fact that I wasn't there hadn't quite added up in her mind to the realization that I don't enjoy such things.

I stayed home and checked a couple of points of canon for my remix fic. Then I did a little writing, just for fun stuff, watched a bit of The Patriotic Knights (still fun) and played a bit of Cradle of Rome. I also stuffed my backpack full of paperbacks for the trip to my grandmother's next weekend. If I'd had more time, I probably would have put some effort into starting a list of things that have to be done before the trip and of things that have to be packed next Sunday morning.

Making the list would have increased my anxiety levels last night even if having the list would help anxiety levels for the rest of the week. I desperately needed some time to decompress. I'd been getting increasingly cranky as last week wore on due to having so much of the normally shared chores dumped on my (and added to!) by Scott's illness. I wanted to get to the point where I could handle everyday stuff without snarling at Cordelia.

Writing filter

I'm hoping to spend time this evening polishing the remix fic. I feel rather unmotivated to do that. Not even reminding myself that it will go up in public helps. I know it's competent writing now. A good polish would improve that. I just keep looking at it (and at other things I've written) and feeling that I have no idea where to start.

I'm bad at rewrites on some levels. In college, I never did more than one draft of a paper unless we were required to hand in multiple drafts. Some of that was because I had to use a typewriter. The barrier to editing when one has to retype the entire paper is huge. Some of it, though, was that I usually had no idea what needed changing.

This is also why I'm crap at beta reading for other people. If the prose is competent but not spectacular, I don't have suggestions beyond typo checking. I can take a piece like that and rewrite it so that it's stylistically better. I did that on a few occasions for a friend in college. ("I think you're trying to say x, y and z. Are you? If so, say it like this.") That's a different skill, one that overwrites the original author's own style, and I see it as hugely undesirable in fiction.

I think that, when I do a polish or a rewrite or whatever, there are two ways I can make it work. The first is with a lot of help from a beta reader (or readers) who have sprinkled lots of comments throughout the piece. Those comments can be notes about how a paragraph does or doesn't work, notes on grammatical errors, notes on characterization, notes on the reader's responses right then. It doesn't matter as long as there are a lot of them.

The second way I can rewrite is to print the piece out and retype it in an empty document. That forces me to look at every word and to decide whether or not it's the one I really want. It works less well than using comments if I have enough comments. It's also a grim and tedious process that tends to make me loathe what I'm writing.

I suspect that some of the problems I have with the second method come from feeling that nobody cares about what I'm writing. I stop caring early in the retyping process. I think it's related to the fact that I do better on first drafts when I have a cheerleader or am doing word wars. I don't actually have to think that somebody likes the story. I just need to think that somebody cares and that somebody exists beyond me and the story and my beloved distractions, Scott and Cordelia.

Feedback after I post a fic doesn't help this problem much. Partly because I've never gotten a vast amount (I get a respectable amount when I remember to publicize things), and partly because it comes after the work is done. I'm not motivated to write better by the expectation that future readers will like the story, but I can be motivated by the idea that someone who's seen it already might like it better if I put in more work.