I saw two shooting stars tonight. There isn’t much about my day-to-day life that is quite as I could wish it to be right now, but I’m growing to enjoy as well as need my nighttime walks to catch a mobile signal. I love how dark the hills look against the paler sky, and how many more stars can be seen from out here than from anywhere else I’ve lived in years. I like the silence, which is only broken by the many tiny turbulent streams, and the wind fighting its way through the occasional line of trees that interrupt an otherwise empty slope. I’ve always loved wind. The rain doesn’t bother me much, which is as well; the wholly dry nights are rare. There is a little sheet lightning almost every night, usually not too close to us, but even the distant flashes are vivid.

I know most of the lanes I’ve explored better in the dark than I do in daylight. I keep meaning to retrace the same routes in the day and find out what the hills look like in colour, but there’s only so far one can get with a four year old in tow.

I reach the same point every night, a particularly chilly high stretch of road, when I make the choice to turn back or turn the walk into a real ramble, and each time I choose a longer walk I think about running away. I fantasize — next time, I’ll bring my purse out with me, just in case. And a map. And each time I only take my phone and torch and a pocketful of tissues, and after an hour or two I listen to the practical grumble inside that says I still have to walk home as well.

I don’t ever want to turn around.

I have shaved my head.

The custom of cutting off a lock of one’s hair as a mark of mourning came to me a few days after Fred died, and kept recurring in my bleakest moments until I realised that the thought wasn’t connected to Fred any longer; today I just acted on it.

It took an unbelievably long time; not so much for the first stage with scissors, but over two hours (and three disposable razors) to finish completely. Considering I did a lot of it by touch, then located the patches I’d missed with the aid of a compact and the mirrored door of a small wall cabinet, I’m surprised I only have a few small cuts, mostly behind my ears.

I don’t think I feel any better, but I don’t regret doing it, either.

I’m conscious of the absence of mass, the lack of movement flickering around my ears and neck. I wasn’t prepared for how sensitive the skin on my scalp is now that it’s bared; my head and neck are cold, but that’s the least of it. I put on a hat in what became slow-motion, because I was expecting it to possibly itch or irritate, and instead the touch of fabric tickled. Intensely. It’s a weirdly pleasant, though highly concentrated, sensation.

I've thought about it, and decided not to join NaNo, though I do intend to write throughout November to the expected word target.  I don't want to write a novel in that time, though.  I have so many unfinished short stories, and I want to put that time and effort into finishing some of those instead. 

So my 50k is going to be divided between various projects-in-progress.  It's going to make keeping count a little harder, but it's still perfectly possible, and if doing my own thing means I get to move even a small number of stories out of my Unfinished folder, I will be pleased with that.

It's not the one I would have expected to start with, but I think it may be Dragons-In-Waiting that I open tomorrow.  That's been fluttering vaguely in the back of my mind again, after all this time: that was the $&%&*! 2005 WorldCon thing that couldn't decide if it wanted to grow up to be a poem or a story.  I think the problem is that it really could be either, or both, in a way that most of my writing is not. 

A few times I've started something as prose and realised it should be a poem, or vice versa, but not often.  I usually know.  But Dragons-In-Waiting isn't obvious to me, because I have lines of it for both versions: the poem option is called Ivy Chrysalises and I think the plot would end differently, but I could never quite pick the threads apart from each other.  I think that may about to change.  I'm quite sure I need to write the short story first if I intend to do both versions, which I would like to, just to see how much they do differ. 

This issue has cropped up once before, and I made the mistake of writing the poem (or poems, actually: that was The Not Garden I and II) first, which killed the urgency in needing to write the story to find out what happened; I rather suspect the inverse would not have been true. 

I may put my daily updates for my Non-NaNo (50KNovember?) over on world_walking instead.  I rather like the idea of keeping this topic in a space of its own.

Oh, I'm sleepy.  Bedtime...

Tonight has been the best evening at home that I can remember in a very long time.  I've spent over two hours trying not to get tearful over photos of clocks.

Eric Freitas: I found his site while pursuing a chain of links from one of Tor's steampunk posts (not this one; I'd missed this altogether at the time), and now I'm wishing I had someone who would not be dismayed to be woken by an incoherent post-one a.m. phone call raving about clocks. 

They are exquisite. 

I am so hungry to see one in the round rather than on a screen.  I wish I could touch one, to feel the weight of it in my hands, to trace the shapes and textures.  The lines remind me of tree bark and branches, of rivers twisting to carve their paths of least resistance, of calligraphy. 

I want to be able to write the way his clocks look.  I want to be able to achieve with words what Eric Freitas can with bronze. 

This year has been hard, and I have lost heart to a degree that's almost made me ashamed of myself.  So little has seemed to matter - to me, or at all - in the last few months, and tonight I have found a little piece of myself again in seeing this images.  I want something again.  I care.

My brothers - are either of you up for a trip to Oxford, some time before February?  I need to see his clock in the steampunk exhibition. 

I am glad to live a world where people are passionate enough to create wonders like these timepieces.

A likely candidate for typo of the week, if one may consider URLs applicable: 

http://www.amazon.co.um

This pleases me too much.  I am easily amused. 

Via nineweaving, Wordle is ridiculous fun. 

There's something very satisfying about putting in one's LJ URL and setting it to haphazard word orientation, and watching the text show up as a randomly-coloured crazy-paving shuffle.  This is your brain: beware!

Dropped my mobile in the bath.  It's now drying, and I hope when I put it back together tomorrow, it'll be working. 

Clumsy idiot.

Oh, for the love of - I need some better alternatives to cursing.  'For the love of God'?  I am at most agnostic; I prefer to describe myself as an atheist because it feels less like fence-sitting, but should anyone somehow succeed in finding proof of a deity's existence, I wouldn't make refusing to believe it my own religion, so I guess I'm agnostic really. 

ursulav  has been known to write "For the love of bunnies", which makes me giggle, but bunnies don't float my boat enough for me to steal it. 

I suspect 'For the love of chocolate' has drawbacks.  Such as the people you are talking to laughing too much to actually listen to what you were really trying to tell them.  This needs thought...

I have no idea what topic I was about to launch into, before I distracted myself.  Never mind.  It'll come back to me later - and if it doesn't, it can't have mattered much.

Nature Shock "The Whale That Ate A Geat White": wow.  Seriously: this is how it should be done.  Factual film-making, that is, not eating sharks.

This fulfils pretty much everything I desire from a documentary.  No speculation presented as fact (or none that I could identify; shark biology is not a topic I've done much research into, but it all sounded reasonable to me), the interview sections they quoted were relevant and from genuine experts, and it was interesting and informative.  It did repeat the basic points several times (but, frankly, show me a tv documentary that doesn't), and it still held my attention throughout. 

(Aside from the parts when I was reading at the same time and started swearing at this and laughing over related commentary - found via cluegirl,- but I think that counts as due provocation for distraction, and should not be held against the programme.)

I got a rather frantic text from my mother on Friday afternoon, asking for backup babysitting for my niece; thus I am in Bournemouth.  My sister came home for as much of the weekend as she could manage, but has headed back off to Wales again until next weekend. 

Mother, the Storm Goddess and I spent some time this evening on the sofa together, watching YouTube snippets of Pingu on my laptop.  The pancake making one is a favourite, winning giggles from all three generations.  We also like Pingu stealing Pinga's stuffed rabbit, although the clip cuts off at an exciting point in the plot, and we really want to know what happens next.  (Is it a telling indication of the state of your life when it matters that you fail to discover the ending of an adventure featuring a plasticine penguin?) 
 
The better part of one of my teeth came out last night; it doesn't hurt at all, but the opposite side of my jaw aches - go figure that one.  I don't think I can avoid the dentist any longer.

I am still adrift.  I must make some decisions.   Soon...

Ooh.  The ice skating at Somerset House is going to be open until late January, unlike the other ones which all seem to stop at the start of the month.  I could go skating for my birthday!   Who can I take with me?  *plots*

This was intended to be a shorter and more factual post; I guess I'm angrier than I thought.  I decided it would defeat the object to LJ-cut the bulk of it, so apologies to those who get worked up about long posts swamping their f-list, but, um... tough luck! 
This entry feels a bit like nailing my colours to the mast.

There are at least five people on my f-list who blog about mental health topics; all of them have some direct personal knowledge of the issues involved.

I respect and admire their courage in making those posts public, because it really can't be easy to do that.

And, for what little my opinion is worth, I think they are right to make those posts visible, for several reasons.  I believe that those who must face such things need and deserve a voice; that there are so many people who feel they must suffer through fearing their own mind in silence, as if it were a mark of shame.  
It is not. 
Mental health problems are a illness, just like bodily health problems.  Our brains are physical objects that sometimes go wrong, just like our hearts and our lungs and our stomachs & whatever else do.  Any kind of mental health problem is a scary kind of illness, yes: both for the person who has it and for their loved ones, and even for bystanders, but, hell, so is cancer - and society does not treat cancer patients like outcasts.  Fear is not a good enough reason for persecution.  Nothing is a good enough reason for persecution.  We have moved on from stoning lepers; it would be an encouraging sign for our times if we could acknowledge it is is just as obviously an injustice and inhumane to respond to an individual with mental health problems as being in a situation that is self-inflicted/laziness/just feeling sorry for oneself/copping out of acting like a responsible adult.  We need to start developing better strategies for first acknowledging and then dealing with the fact that a considerable percentage of the population do either live with a mental health condition on a lifelong basis, or will at least go through a period in their life when they will have such a condition.

Human beings are social animals; it's the way our brains are wired.  Not feeling alone helps, whatever it is you are struggling with: anything from being a single parent to alcoholism to cancer to mental health issues.  We all want to know someone else understands, has been there too.  Anything that lets you find other people who can understand is a good idea, in my book.  Forgive me for pointing out the obvious here, but the power of the internet, of blogging, is that it puts you in touch with people on the other side of the planet who are willing to stand witness, people who want to know, who can and will provide mutual support.  It might also let you find people just down the road (er, river?  Mixed metaphors, sorry!) who are in the same boat as you, but you might never have known about otherwise. 

I also believe, very firmly, that it is useful and necessary for the people who are lucky enough not have to face mental health issues directly, in their own life or in the lives of their loved ones, to be exposed to the reports of those who cannot avoid having to deal with such things.  It's like the news, okay?  You can turn off the tv and stop reading the papers, but bad stuff is still happening out there, whether you inform yourself about it or not.  And if you don't inform yourself, you can't help others effectively, and you don't have the information to ready to help yourself if you ever come to need it.  Learning about mental health is, apart from anything else, enlightened self-interest. 

I have had occasion lately to consider these issues far more closely and urgently than I did before.  On the accounts of two people whom I care about, and on my own.

I doubt that I'll be making many overly political rants about mental health topics, but I will in future be making some posts about my own mental health.  All future entries will be LJ-cut and clearly labeled as to their subject matter.  If anyone wishes to discuss what I say or ask any questions, they may feel free to do so, but I warn you that this topic is not academic for me, so please be respectful.  If you're an anonymous commenter, please give me something to address you by! 
I will automatically ban anyone who acts like a troll.  This was your only warning.

It can help to read about experience that mirrors your own; it can also being extremely painful.( Anyone who might find the discussion of specifics triggery may want to avoid the rest of the post. )

Last night I was in the kind of mood that should not be allowed to sit at home alone and brood, lest you do something regrettable, and I went out in the rain and walked to Lakeside, to the late showing of Dorian Gray.

After an interlude where someone had forgotten to change over the film showing from the previous performance, thus forcing a baffled than giggly small audience to watch the beginning of the new Fame (and the awful soulless reworking of the theme song alone confirmed that I will not be watching it. I'll stick to the original, thanks.) before we all went out and got the staff to fix it, we finally got to see the film we'd paid for. Hurrah!

The film is creepy. Also, it diverges even further from Oscar Wilde than I was anticipating. I think I'll be rereading The Portrait of Dorian Gray before the end of the week, to remind myself of everything I could have wished for from the film that I did not get (although, realistically, some of it I never had a hope of getting). I like Ben Barnes, and I think he did a good job. I blame the script for the issues I had with the characterisation. ( Mild spoilers )  I appreciated the evident directorial belief that Dorian's actions were sometimes allowed to speak for themselves, and it was not deemed necessary to use the dialogue to hammer every shred of motivation home into the viewer's head; I just don't think the execution of that concept came together as well as it could have.  
I'd been in two minds about going to see the film at all, and not simply because I am fond of the book. I'd had my eye on it before it came out, and had formed vague hopes of maybe managing to meet up with my brother's girlfriend, who was rather keen on Ben Barnes, and see it with her. She died at the end of August. I didn't know Fred nearly as well as I wanted to; I have lost the chance to remedy that. I've been trying to write about her for two weeks, and I still can't even type this much without crying.

She was nineteen.  The autopsy revealed no reason for her death.  It's almost as scary as it as sad, that someone who matters in your life can just be gone and it cannot even be explained. 

It's that time of year again.  Gingerbread lattes have reappeared on the menu.  I have had gingerbread latte twice this week, in coffee shops in two different branches of Waterstone's.  (Romford and Lakeside.  The coffee was better at the Lakeside one.  It must be the same stuff: how is this possible?) 

My companion for both outings was a colleague - no: a former colleague.  I must remember that I no longer work there.  (You'd think a detail like being unemployed would be easier to recall!)  We talked about many things, including Star Trek Voyager, which we both enjoyed, despite its obvious flaws; we covered a few of the ills of modern society; complained about Facebook... I think I even managed to tell a couple of jokes, which is not far off unique in my experience of conversation with anyone not of my blood kin.  I am not so much about the ready wit.

We went on an impromptu walking tour of central Romford, due to the fact there is not very much to do there once you've had coffee.  The weather was damp and cool.  I particularly liked the bit where my companion pointed out a club that closed down some years ago and is still empty, and lamented the fact that that closure broke down an atmosphere of particular charm and camaraderie among the local alternative music group that has never been regained in any other venue.   His eloquence set off scraps of wistful autumnal-shaded feelings in me; I am considering entropy and loss, though nothing has yet cohered enough to reach paper. 

Now I've been playing with it, I have a far better understanding of why Facebook really pisses me off. 

1.  Any social site that specifically suggests on the profile information page that you put down your preference as to the preferred gender of your sexual partners (at least, one assumes that's what it means.  That isn't actually what it says.  See point 2 for more on this), and your religious and political views, is a site that fundamentally wants to be able to put its users into neatly labeled boxes.  I object to this.  I know I can just leave those blank, and I have, but that doesn't stop it from being the way the site is set up.  I thought the idea of Facebook was to keep you in touch with people you already know: what purpose does this personal statement in bullet-points serve, then?
Also, the parts that are text boxes do not permit you enough characters to put in a real answer; I know this because I tried.   My answer to Religious Views wouldn't fit, and I do not have an either/or mentality.  I'm not settling for 'Atheist' just because that's the style of response expected.

2a.  The phrasing of certain parts of the Facebook set text is rather strange.  I find it deeply odd that the prefix for your text comments is your full username.  Why am I required to open my remarks talking about myself in the third person?  Also, this leads to some bloody odd comments from people who have not considered this format. 

2b. I was tempted just to quote this bit from the Basic Information section and leave it at that, but I can't. I have too many different issues with it. 
"Interested in: [Men/Women]."  (And those are your only options, by the way.  You can't have 'Both'.  Or 'Neither'.  And it's a drop-down menu, so I can't even put "Mind your own damn business'.   
Interested in? Are all of the intended users of this site in their early teens? (Yes, okay, it's a common phrase and I'm not being altogether fair.  I don't particularly feel like being fair to Facebook.)  I'm interested in people.  I'm attracted to men, if it's anything to you, but there's quite a significant proportion of that half of the human species that don't do much for me personally, either.   
The first time I saw this was on someone else's profile, and for one stunned moment I thought this acquaintance of mine had been given a text box marked "Interested In:" and actually typed in "Women" and only that.  My instinctive reaction went: Ew, you creep!  (Followed by, Wow, that's honest...you creep.)  Now, I can't blame Facebook for my brain making a totally wrong assumption there, but still, I do find the way they have set up the profile information to be somewhat problematic.

3.  After everything else, this is almost an anticlimax as complaints go, but I find the site interface profoundly counter-intuitive to use.  Now, that could quite well be me being my usual technologically-incompetent self.  But the help pages... pretty much don't. 

I'm half tempted to delete the damned thing (..again!), except it apparently does work: three people I know have found me on it within six hours of it being set up.  Maybe if I just state on it that everyone should come talk to me over here instead?

A few people at work asked me if I'm on Facebook in the last couple of days before I left.  I still strongly dislike the the soundbitey nature of the site; I'm not comfortable with tiny frequent posts, but there are people I wnat to stay in touch with, and if this makes it easier...

I'm on Facebook.  If you are friended here, feel free to add me there.  Just don't expect many actual updates over there. LJ is still home.

ETA: The link should work now.  I confess, I am incompetent. 

I think maybe I'm going to go for NaNoWriMo this year. 

Over the last ten or eleven months, I have hoarded up a vast number of things I wanted to say to someone and, for reasons varying from cowardice to conscience, could not.  I think, am I able to hew any kind of structure from it, I have a novel in those things.   I need to get them out of my head, out of my heart: I'm brimming over with words I may not speak.  Poems are taking just enough of the pressure off that I don't break, but they cannot empty me.  So: NaNo.   I need some company on the way to make me stick to something novel-length, however badly I need to do it.

Well, that's embarrassing.  I have at last finished downloading all the files I had saved online at DropBoks (and I recommend the site heartily, even if you can't use it with Safari and I had to download Firefox to get my writings back), and imposed some sort of rough sortation on them so I can find things.

So I just glanced at the file with my submission tables in it.  And found out how long it appears to have been since I last sent anything out.  Yikes.

That's years, not months. 

And it isn't really much of an excuse that pretty much all of the small amount of stuff I've worked on in the last year unexpectedly turned mainstream, and I have no idea where to send poetry that isn't speculative in flavour.  All the poetry magazines that Borders stock seem to be venues that I am not at all in tune with, and a couple of others that I ordered sample copies of are no more likely to be sympathetic to my style.

*Is puzzled*  I don't quite know how to narrow the possibilities down, to identify non-SF zines that feel more like a possible home. 

But I've just sent a couple of somewhat less recent but never submitted SF things out to test the waters, so I guess that's some sort of progress. 

I can't believe I hadn't submitted anything since 2006!

ETA: I tested my new bio on my sister, and she agrees it's funny, so that's an improvement, anyway!

I will, soonish, remember to write a post on the other two live music things I have been to in the last two weeks: the fabulous June Tabor, and Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick. 

I am very much looking forward to not being tired all the time, and not having aching wrists from too much heavy lifting at work.  Only two more shifts left.

Why has no one ever done a cover of Bryan Adams' Do I Have To Say The Words? and reinterpreted it sexy instead of angsty?  You'd need to change so few of words to make it a song about getting it on, and it would be fun.  (...Anyone?  Please?)

*sigh*  I should be getting ready for work.

So, in two nights I have equalled my gig-going count for the last two years.  Er, and one of those was Amanda Palmer as well.  Are we sensing a pattern, perhaps?  (T'other was Vienna Teng, fyi, and if you get the chance to see her live, go.  She was pure magic.  I took my mother to that, and we would both go again in a heartbeat.)

Last night's venue was the Underworld in Camden, at the 'secret' Amanda Palmer gig.  And I'm sure now; Amanda's performances change dramatically acording to the venue.  The tone of the evening was so very different to the night before, and it isn't merely that a different Venn set of the song possibilities came into play.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to get home until the trains out started running again about 5.45, and was rather wary of being stuck on my own in central London for two or three hours, but I made an impulsive decision to go anyway, and I'm glad I did. 

Puppetry!  On-stage wardrobe changes!  (Not that I saw most of those, being stuck behind much taller people for the first hour and a half...)  Neil Gaiman read a short story to us!  (Awesome.) 

Oh, and musically... Half Jack introduced with an evocative instrumental passage with a guest musician on electric violin: I would dearly love to find a live version of Half Jack on a future album, because it works so well with that spine-chilling instrumental. 
(I think I would have paid the entry price just for that song, which is one of my favorite Dresden Dolls' tracks.  I was minus the internet at the time and didn't LJ it, but I saw her play at Koko last year, and that night the intro to this song had long aching notes almost like whale song threaded through it, and that was eerie and resonant and beautiful.) 

In the wrap-up to the evening: Hallelujah. I can never guess what she might choose to cover, and that was a rather nice surprise. 

Mrs. O, It Runs In The Family, Coin-Operated Boy, Oasis...  All good stuff.   It was a warm evening, full of the listeners requesting songs and joining in with the choruses, and Amanda periodically forgetting the words to what she was singing.

And it ended too soon.  Afterwards I chanced to end up walking back towards the city centre with the guest violinist, Una Palliser, who is awesome both as a musician and as a person, so that was a terrific way to wrap the whole thing up.