(no subject)

I’m debating whether or not to take my laptop with me to use while I wait for Scott’s colonoscopy to be done. There will be wifi, but the signal varies a lot and won’t let me do all of the things that I might want to do. I’m not sure if there will be a place to plug in, so running out the battery is a real possibility if the procedure takes more than two hours. Also, Scott’s sister will be with me, and I expect she’ll want to talk at least a bit. I’m not at all sure I want to work on darkfic when there’s a risk that she’ll ask me what I’m writing. I suppose I could take some books. I’ve got those graphic novels due tomorrow and some poetry due on Sunday, and none of those can be renewed.

Neither Scott nor I slept well last night. He was up and down fairly often, and I think I woke every time. I kept dreaming about needing to set alarms to wake up and then making mistakes so that they went off at the wrong times. I probably ought to try to sleep now. I could lie down for about two hours and still be ready to go when Scott’s sister arrives.

The friend who was going to walk Cordelia home after school today and carry her viola got sick, so I had to scramble a bit to find someone else to do it. There used to be a boy at the school who lived two blocks from here and passed our house coming home from school, but he’s moved. (And he and Cordelia didn’t get along particularly. His mother and I probably would have made them deal with it, but… moved away.) There are two other kids in Cordelia’s grade who walk. Neither comes our way, both have an after school event today (a pizza party for the volleyball game to celebrate completing the season). Fortunately, one of them has agreed to bring the viola home. Our original plan, cooked up by me and her mother last night, was for her to stay for the party and then detour on her way home to come by here. Her mother emailed me this morning to say that, since we live so close, her daughter has decided to walk home with Cordelia and then return to the school for the pizza party.

( Discussion of two fic exchanges I'm not going to sign up for. Really )

Last night, I tried to discover, through the UMHS website, whether or not the facility where Scott’s having his colonoscopy has a cafeteria. We’re due there at 11:45. I could, in theory, eat before going, and I absolutely could pack a lunch. I just want to know if I have the option of doing something else (the possibility of buying something caffeinated is also not to be sneezed at). We won’t be able to eat in the waiting area because they ban that in consideration of all the folks who are fasting, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a space indoors where we can sit and eat. I’m also not clear whether or not drinking water in the waiting area is okay. I intend to take a water bottle. That’s a lot easier to carry out into the hall for two minutes when I need to.

The UMHS website is moderately useful for the main medical campus, but it’s very, very hard to find any information about the satellite clinics. I had to do a text box search in order to find a building map of the East Ann Arbor facility which is not at all a small place, and the search function kept trying to tell me that I must mean 'last ann arbor' instead of 'east ann arbor.' I have no idea what 'last ann arbor' might be, but it seems to me that a website search function ought to recognize the name of one of the organization’s major facilities. It’s not even a new facility. I mean, I remember when it was built. It’s just that we took Cordelia there for blood testing when she was a newborn and had jaundice. That’s a month shy of thirteen years ago. Thirteen years is not a short time when it comes to updating a website.

I ended up having to take an Ativan yesterday. My head was starting to hurt, and my thoughts were getting fainter and fainter. I took one on getting up this morning. I didn’t see a point in waiting until I was already feeling terrible.

(no subject)

I poked at my writing filter last night and ended up deleting it entirely. I hadn’t posted to it since about 2009. I unlocked the entries that had been locked. Looking at the earliest of those, I was mainly worried that I’d get drive by trolls condemning me for what I write. I’ve only had one experience of that sort in the years I’ve been posting fic, and that was FFA last year, and I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been reading FFA a lot just then. Nobody actually came to the fic to be nasty.

Pretty much everyone who has responded to my query about it has said that cut tags are good enough for the job, so that’s what I will do.

Maybe, if I end up with time to work on my laptop this afternoon, I’ll try writing up some explanations of where I’m stuck with my current projects and of what I hope to do with them.

(no subject)

We’re home. Scott had four polyps, two in the sigmoid colon and two in the ascending colon. The latter two are not great news in terms of how often he’ll need future colonoscopies, but we won’t get pathology on any of them for at least a week and possibly as long as four weeks.

They took him back about half an hour after his appointment time, and then, according to Scott, took about forty five minutes getting him ready. The procedure started at 1:00, and they called me back to recovery at 1:30. We were out of the building a little after 2:00.

We stopped at Kroger to get distilled water. Well, Scott’s sister and I did. We dropped him off at Zoup so that he could get something not too challenging to eat.

Because of the timing, I could pick Cordelia up from school. I’m not going to I think. I’d need to leave in five minutes, and I kind of want to sit back and relax for a little bit.

Writing discussion (looking for advice)

Hm. Now that I’m starting to write down what I’m stuck on in terms of various WIP, a lot of it comes down to me needing to figure out world building, plot direction, likely lines of character development, and/or combat choreography. So, basically, it’s a problem with me being a pantser and hitting points where that just won’t work. I do my best writing when I have two or three characters in a confined space and talking with each other or otherwise interacting. I almost never do prolonged scenes with more than three actively involved characters.

These are only a few of my stalled WIP. I’ve mostly been writing about them because my brain is kind of mush due to recent anxiety issues.

( The problem here is fandom independent and doesn’t need warnings. The fic itself needs lots of warnings. )

( Fandom is Rurouni Kenshin. Problem is partly combat logistics and partly character development. )

( Fandom is Weiss Kreuz. Problem is world building in terms of the set up for the stories I’ve written not expanding well in the canon universe. )

( Fandom is Weiss Kreuz. Problem is logistics. Canon needs to change but not from the point of view of most of the characters. )

( Fandom is Narnia. Story involves child abuse and corruption. Problem is character development related )

( Problem is fandom independent and pretty much all combat related. )

I’m definitely looking for advice, brainstorming help, and discussion on all of these.