Adventures du jour!
I’m making crystalized ginger for some lemon bar mischief later. Today’s mischief: leftover ginger liquid, sugar, gin, and tonic. It’s spicy enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll regret this later. I could just BUY the crystalized ginger, but a) that means Trader Joe’s during the holiday season, and, more importantly, b) I’ve never successfully made crystalized ginger BUT I have also never used an Alton Brown recipe to do it. We shall see.
Writing: WHEW. The characters decided they needed to switch POVs more frequently than usual (about 1500 words instead of 2.5K), so I ended up finishing Mr. Assassin and running Goth Girl next, without hitting the big plot twist.
Found out that Goth Girl was in gymnastics as a kid (as was I, not that I got much past the cartwheel stage). I need to go back through her scene and work on the actions of the civilians. I missed a couple of types of reactions, and I need to make it clear that the “flight” people have at least tried to get out.
But the Big Players are all in place. And the words came out all of a purr.
Slept well but woke up ornery and full of attitude problems. Yoga helped settle me.
I did the things the friend recommended:
While standing (in mountain pose, but I’m also doing it with my attempt at half-moon), tighten the calves, release them; tighten the quads, release them; tighten the glutes, release them. Do each for 5 seconds or so, isolating the different muscles as you go.
Result: temperature spike and covered in sweat, but knee felt more stable.
In between poses, I read a little of the Yoga Anatomy book (and got to some terms I still need to look up) and a little of the LaVerle Spencer novel where I’m jealous of the writing (Bitter Sweet).–I was able to read more than a couple of paragraphs and wasn’t cursing myself out the whole time. Getting over the extreme jealousy I’d been feeling was NICE.
On on my morning walk, I hoofed it out to the park I like, then had to turn around so I could be back in time for a meeting…that got put off. Again. BAH. Then I had a client call for a couple of hours, talking about synopses and query letters and hooks and opening pages. She *wants* to be able to write a synopsis in one go. Her *first* synopsis. But, as brilliant as she is at many things, this is taking just sliiightly longer.
Writing fiction is weird, and usually works best when the conscious mind steps out of the way. Writing synopses involves being conscious of the story on a cohesive level–while still channeling the tone of the story that you can only get while letting the conscious mind step out of the way. It’s a bit of a dance.
Today also had various other alarums and excursions, including laundry, hanging out with Ray, finishing up a fun dinosaur prompt, and working on the ginger.
The idea that I kept chewing on today was carryover from yesterday’s meltdown/attack on self and its recovery. I had hit a point of extreme insecurity yesterdat (it was stupid) and had to isolate myself so I didn’t start yelling at people that they were supposed to “fix” me, or that they should hate me, think me a monster, etc. It was surreal.
This morning, that is, afterwards, a phrase from the short story (not the big work in progress) that I just finished keeps coming back to me:
“Addicted to being right.”
The main character recognizes that he used to be that way when he was younger, and that the two people he has to stop from becoming violent, although on opposite ends of the political spectrum, are both addicted to being right.
The rush of confidence, the feeling of cleanness and clarity, the sense of superiority…”being right” is a nice feeling. But scratch a terrorist, and underneath a superficial layer of whatever it is they’re supposed to believe–religious, political–is a craving for being right.
Don’t get me wrong. I *like* being right. But I don’t need it the way some people do. It’s not what makes me get stupid. (I get stupid, obviously, but it’s from other things, like jealousy and feeling incompetent.)
This has benefits; I’m a good person to have around in messy situations. I don’t need to “be right”; I need to get the job done. And if you tell me horrible things that have you wrecked, I’ll be like, “Well, THAT isn’t even the worst thing I’ve heard this month.”
But it does make me vulnerable to people with a good sob story (like my ex).
I have better tools for weeding out malicious actors now. Before I trust people, I look for instances where they gave of themselves when they didn’t want to, where they made sacrifices that made them look bad or stupid, where they realized a mistake and were appalled rather than defensive. Where they went for the messy solution, rather than the one that let them “be right.”
I used to beat myself up about not “being right” all the time.
The be-righters honed in on it:
“Don’t you care about X issue? Don’t you want to do the right thing?”
Honestly, yes. But I want to *do* the right thing. Not “be right.” And I hope that it’ll be harder to get to me that way from here on out, now that I’ve been able to think it through.
…
Link to ten seconds of fat ducks waddling around, from this morning at the park.
This made me think “swamp monster”!
And here’s one of the dinosaur AI images: baaaaasket!