a conspiracy of cartographers

Pandemic/oil crisis life
My car battery is flat again. *facepalm* I've bought a solar trickle charger, but I need to top up my battery before I install it, so I guess that's one task for this week. Sigh. I've considered ditching the car altogether, and relying on taxis and my bike, but there are certain circumstances (which hopefully won't recur *knock on wood*) under which I need to be able to drive. I chose my car for its exceptionally light power-steering (my arms), so unfortunately it's not interchangeable like snowmobile parts. /Due South reference

Previous poll review
In the Fanfic vs Profic poll, 20% of respondents said they're pretty relaxed about prose quality if other aspects of the story capture them, 40% said they're more picky about profic, and 38% said they're picky across the board.

In ticky-boxes, Bob Dylan/Hitchhiker's Guide otters came second to hugs, 58% to 66%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Still making my way through Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. It's good to dip into (I'm mostly reading it during my post-exercise stretches). I'll probably go through it again at some point and make notes.

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner. Miles is a great character; I'm enjoying his POV, even if details of the interplanetary politics don't quite stick in my memory.

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo, read by Natalie Naudus. I have 5 hours left in this, but I got distracted. It was a bit "in one ear, out the other", which likely says more about me than the book.

Good old-fashioned Korean spirit by Kim Hyun Sook. Graphic novel sequel to Banned Book Club, etc. A lovely read about a university students' traditional music club taking a field trip, set in 1980s Korea under the military regime. (I actually read this a couple of weeks ago when it was due back at the library.)

Kdramas
You're Beautiful - finished my rewatch! I love this show so much. It has a bunch of tropes that have fallen out of fashion, most for very good reason(!), and the leads are absurdly bad at self-awareness and communication, and I still ahhhhhhhhhhh! SO SWEET!! SO RIDICULOUS!!

Phantom Lawyer - yayayayayayay, [SPOILER]!! I'm so happy! :D Only two episodes to go now, and it's pretty obvious how it's going to turn out, but I'll enjoy the ride. The only thing that's up in the air is whether the villain's terrible son will double down on being terrible or make a bid for redemption.

Absolute Value of Romance - someone on tv_talk mentioned this, so I gave it a try, and it's ADORABLE. It's about a teenage BL web novelist desperate for success; four hot new male teachers arrive at her high school, and she starts using them as inspiration. Naturally, her stories are acted out in her imagination... I'm so curious to see how it's going to end. (I really hope at least one of the teachers is legit gay! No spoilers, please -- I've only seen the first two episodes!)

The Red Sleeve - I don't watch a lot of historical Kdramas, but this has Junho and Lee Se-young, and a friend watched it recently, so I thought why not? I've seen an episode and a half, and it's reminding me of Love in the Moonlight, which is by no means a bad thing, though this one doesn't have the cross-dressing. Oh hey, it's from the same director as Jeongnyeon -- nice!

Lovely Runner - I lost patience with this around the end of episode 6 on the grounds that if someone is going to time-travel back into their high school body, they should retain their adult emotional intelligence. Like, shouldn't the 15-year age gap be more of an issue? And also why is she giving the male lead obviously bad (but genre-typical) life advice like "only think about yourself so you'll be happy"?! The male lead is very teenage boy (hiding his feelings, pretending to be disaffected and cool), but I quite like him. He doesn't know about the time travel, or why the girl next door is suddenly acting so weird.

The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop - this is a 50-episode soap opera which I started in 2020. At the time, I wrote, "I finished episode 14 and mentally collapsed into a pile of HOW ARE THERE FORTY MORE EPISODES?!" But back then, I had no opinion about Choi Won-Young (Family by Choice, Mystic Pop-Up Bar). Now I'm skimming through the episodes (I never skim!) looking for the minor-subplot scenes of him being a ne-er-do-well, washed-up one-hit-wonder rockstar, with flowing locks and facial hair, reduced to demeaning-in-his-eyes jobs like wedding singing and supermarket promotions. His wounded dignity is my happy place.



Other TV
Finished The Pitt. The pacing of this season felt a little awkward, but I think it's just because we were watching it week by week, rather than in a continuous rush. We're going to rewatch at some point, so I'll see how I feel about it then.

The latest Trevor Noah Netflix stand-up special.

Still watching Rooster, Fringe, Bluey and Scrubs. With Ed, we've started Deadloch season 2 (no spoilers, please!) and a rewatch of People of Earth (starring Wyatt Cenac). And we've begun season 4 of Dark Winds, the cop (tribal police) show set on a Navajo reservation in the 1970s.

Audio entertainment
Deep Questions, Better Offline, Dreaming Against the Machine (the Trek episode kind of lost me), Cross Party Lines (local politics), You Can Learn Chinese (random episode), Bill and Frank's Guilt-free Pleasures, and an excellent episode of Writing Excuses about tension and release. (Several of the recent Writing Excuses have been great, actually. I love it when they get into tips and techniques.)

Writing/making things
My writing plan for last week was to finish my 520 Day fic by Friday, then go to the London Writers' Salon 24-hour sprint for most of Saturday to work on my abandoned Yuletide fic, write this update post, and write a comment for this week's Guardian rewatch post.

What actually happened was that I typed "The End" on my 520 Day fic on Friday, then spent 8 hours of the 24-hour sprint revising it. It took two and a half hours to fix the first 500 words alone! I AM SO SLOW RIGHT NOW!! But anyway, the fic is at beta. I'm happy with how the revision went and reserving judgement on the fic draft overall until I see what my beta says.

Revision techniques I experimented with:

1. Chopping the fic into small chunks/scenes (as per Refuse to Be Done).


2. Considering the scenes in terms of tension (types: anticipation, conflict, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, microtension) and release (as per Writing Excuses). (I would add 'UST' to the list of tension types.)

I don't know how thoroughly I did the latter, but identifying the tension in a scene did help me amp it up in a few places -- possibly I could have taken it further.

Another thing to consider from the latest Writing Excuses episode: in terms of "Character tries something: do they succeed? Yes, BUT (something goes wrong as a consequence) or No, AND (things get worse)" -- it's the yeses and nos that control momentum. For example, if your character is constantly coming up against insurmountable obstacles, the story might feel stuck and frustrating. (This made me think of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, in which Will kept failing to achieve and being sent on side-quests, and side-quests to side-quests, to the point where his plotline felt (to me) completely directionless.)

I'm really hoping this revision approach is going to work for the Yuletide fic, too. Overall, my writing is incredibly slow this year, but I'm learning a lot and experimenting with process, especially in rewriting, and that makes me happy.

I also spent a fair chunk of the week betaing an excellent exchange fic, which I'll rec after author reveals.

Life/health/mental state things
The first half of the week, we were in a state of emergency due to a pretty bad storm; I hunkered at home (I live on a hillside) and occasionally checked the news for dramatic flood photos. The bank above the path didn't fall down, woohoo! And now it's sunny and relatively still, though the temperatures have dropped an average of about five degrees, it feels like.

Grocery prices keep climbing. I am sleeping badly and failing so hard at my to-do list (and at making a to-do list, for that matter). Meanwhile, the gutpunch of Schrodinger's oil crisis approaches at speed (or not, depending on who you talk to; our government is bafflingly, alarmingly sanguine /o\).

House
Conveniently, the storm only came from the north for the first day -- just long enough to identify that the window still had a slow leak -- useful information! After that, the storm turned southerly, and the house proved weatherproof. The leak turns out to be an easy fix (so, of course, now I'm questioning whether my windows needed reputtying at all -- maybe I just needed this leak fixed? Hindsight!).

In the meantime, my house is partially packed up and pretty dusty. I'm expecting the builders back every day for the next few days.

Link dump
Fire and Emergency New Zealand's recipes to cook if you're drunk or high (my favourite is Forbidden Lasagne) | Nathan Surendran's substack, Energy and Resilience (Aotearoa NZ focus, panic-inducing) | Oil is easily substituted, and ultimately not important (Bountiful Energy blog, April 2023; no quick/short-term solutions, natch).

Good things
Sunshine, washing, clean sheets, Halle, Andrew, biking, arms surviving the writing sprint, fic at beta. A freezer full of chicken dumplings (thanks, yesterday!me!). My sister is into op-shopping (clothes, books, jigsaws), and she comes over once a week; I just realised I can get her to take things and drop them off for me: de-junking made easy!