Sometime last night between 3:30 and 4 am, or maybe it was three….I woke up.\u00a0 There’s the usual “Do I have to get to the bathroom right now or can I have another bit of sleep first” but that issue didn’t seem urgent…what did was being wide awake.\u00a0 WIDE awake.\u00a0 I tried my usual “drift into sleep” visualizations and so on, but instead, quite suddenly, I had Ky Vatta in my head, about to enter a room with a prisoner and a guard.\u00a0 (WHAT???)\u00a0 Thinking she wished she knew more about the guard, reminding herself she wasn’t in uniform and thus didn’t look official.\u00a0 Holding a very quiet conversation with Rafe, who was there but waiting outside the door of the interview room, into which he had already inserted certain electronic devices…(WHAT? HOW? WHAT DID HE DO?) and then she went in, as someone not Rafe, and in uniform (kinda blurry) opened the door and waved her inside…she with a file folder of the kind that has cardboardy front and back, and metal strip down the side (not the top) holding things together.<\/p>\n
Ky seen simultaneously from inside her head, and from outside, is more scary than either one alone.\u00a0\u00a0 I was, briefly, mystified.\u00a0 The latest work section on the ms. had been untangling yet another time sequence issue, with the first encounter with X, the man in the striped jumpsuit sitting in the corner handcuffed to the desk, then some days behind her and no expectation of seeing him again.\u00a0 WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MEANTIME? I still don’t know, but I do know more about the man, and Ky.\u00a0\u00a0 I know the scene is essential, and if it doesn’t fit in this volume I will have to write yet another Vatta book.\u00a0 Or deepsix a large chunk of what I’ve already written, the thought of which makes me want to stamp my little (!) feet and cry.\u00a0 I watched\/experienced Ky’s side of the scene.\u00a0 But I was still tired and needed more sleep, so I told the book “OK, you’ve shown me; I’m going back to sleep.”\u00a0 “NO.”\u00a0\u00a0 “It’s OK, I’ve got it, I’ll remember it in the morning. ”\u00a0 “You say that but you almost never do, and you never remember the exact words and they matter.\u00a0 Look at it again.\u00a0 What’s the man’s first name?”<\/p>\n
Deep in my mind, I was muttering, “It’s FICTION, what difference does it make if I remember the name he has now?” and of course I couldn’t.\u00a0 I watched it again (mental re-run is a handy ability humans have–how many times have you replayed something that happened until you finally had down what you wished you’d said?)\u00a0 Alex.\u00a0 The man’s first name is Alex.\u00a0 Tired, worried, haunted looking eyes, dark hair, lighter than Ky, but not white.\u00a0 Posture said former military.\u00a0 “What’s the second word she says?”\u00a0 Couldn’t remember, then I could.\u00a0 “Disconcerting”.\u00a0 But that was internal speech, what she was thinking, not what she was saying.\u00a0 She wasn’t sure of the guard.\u00a0 Not being sure of the guard made her feel more alive, more alert.\u00a0 And the book kept prodding me until I finally rolled out of bed, felt around for my headlamp, turned it on, tucked in my hand, and snuck into the study to turn on the computer. With a side trip to the small tiled room because never start writing without.<\/p>\n
It was really dark at 4 am.\u00a0 I put this scene in a new file since I had no idea *whatever* where it fit in the current ms.\u00a0 And started with the first thought I found in her head.\u00a0 “It was disconcerting to be in a small room with a prisoner and a guard she was not sure was a guard.”\u00a0 And I was off on the ride.\u00a0 About seven pages later I fell off the ride, ejected from my seat on the merry-go-round,\u00a0 head empty of ideas but noticing the early light in the sky outside, and wishing I could go back to bed.\u00a0 Instead, I snuck into the kitchen (YES, snuck.\u00a0 It sounds sneakier than “sneaked”) and started the small bean\/vegetable soup I’d planned the day before.\u00a0 Because of certain symptoms, I have put myself on a very strict diet (already the swelling has gone down) and a clearly defined bean\/vegetable soup, whose per-cup calorie count I calculated myself, will be part of my meal plans.\u00a0 Today was Day 4.\u00a0 I’ve been spending way more time than I want doing calculations and figuring out how to get the right amounts of this and that, because I’m not eating any !**! broccoli. (for one example).\u00a0 So I’m also hungry (not too bad) and the brain, which is used to a steady supply of the glucose it wants at a moment’s notice, the required fuel up there for thinking, is insisting that even the wait for the liver to release stored glucogen is Too Long.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a certain amount of brain fog added to the existing cognitive foul-ups.<\/p>\n
The soup is good, though not as good as my soups with meat in them–I think I have a bit too much corn.\u00a0 R- and I each ate two cups of it; he liked it a lot but he got to put a gob of shredded cheese in his second helping.\u00a0 (Whine…I LOVE shredded cheese in soup!).\u00a0 So four quarts dwindled to three, and the three quarts are now stored in the fridge as if I were going to freeze them, but I’m not.\u00a0 I don’t think.\u00a0 In the meantime, thinking about the book.<\/p>\n
I’m not telling y’all the guy’s last name, because Ky meets a lot of new people in this book and I don’t want you to know which ends up in a prison\/official interview room with her yet.\u00a0 You should get to read the initial interaction ‘cold.’\u00a0\u00a0 But here’s a bit:<\/p>\n
Ky:\u00a0 Well, Alex, why don’t you tell me how you got into this situation?<\/p>\n
Alex, furious: Give me my rank!<\/p>\n
Ky: (gently but firmly)\u00a0 Alex, you know I can’t do that.\u00a0 You’ve been court-martialed; you aren’t in the military anymore.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And so, after lunch of three slices of deli ham wrapped in one slice of toast, I finally got some sleep.\u00a0 And when I’d done feeding the horses, the soup was done and we enjoyed it.\u00a0\u00a0 The horses were in a bit of a mood, but Rags did not run over me or try to push past when I made him wait at the gate rather than following Tigger in too closely (which triggers a kick in Rags’ direction.)<\/p>\n
Have a good evening, everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometime last night between 3:30 and 4 am, or maybe it was three….I woke up.\u00a0 There’s the usual “Do I have to get to the bathroom right now or can I have another bit of sleep first” but that issue didn’t seem urgent…what did was being wide awake.\u00a0 WIDE awake.\u00a0 I tried my usual “drift Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,16,32,10,5],"tags":[49,17,7,21],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horses","category-life-beyond-writing","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","category-vatta","tag-horses","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":794,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}