Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
|
Posted by zoom! on November 13, 2009, at 10:06 am |
My Nanowrimo novel continues to limp along. It’s up to 38,547 words now, or 101 paperback pages. If I were to choose one word to describe it, it would be “flaccid.” Lacking vigor or energy. Weak. Soft.
When you know your book is irredeemably bad, it’s hard to keep putting in the time and energy each day to make it longer.
It’s not that every single thing in it is awful. Some of the language is okay. Some of the characters have potential, especially the ones based on real people. (By the way, Robin – you have 14 cats now.) But I’m not just being modest when I say the book is bad. It really is.
But I take comfort from the fact that I did not decide to write it online where everybody could see it. Because then I’d have to maintain some minimal standards of quality control, and that would seriously impede my word count.
And I take comfort from the fact that I only have 11,453 words to go, which means I should be done on Monday or Tuesday.
And I take comfort from the knowledge that my next book – which is already waiting in the wings, full of energy and potential – will be So Much Better.
My plan is to hit 50,000 words with this one, wrap it up badly, write The End, and then immediately start the next one. With a little luck, I’ll have two books by the end of November: A bad one, and a not-bad one. Wish me luck.
Posted by zoom! on November 12, 2009, at 10:30 am |
 I'm smart, affectionate and homeless. My friend Karen is trying to find a good home for a homeless cat she’s befriended. She writes: “This cat has been hanging around our office here at the corner of Bank and Gilmour for over a month now. He’s smart, affectionate and homeless. I’ve taken to feeding him and he is ravenous and cold….I am appealing to the animal lovers I know for help. I’ll deliver him to his new home along with a couple of weeks of food. Please help me find a home for this lovable guy!”
I know there are lots of cat lovers who read this blog, and I’m hoping one of you can find room in your home and your heart for Karen’s homeless friend before the cold weather comes. He sounds awfully sweet.
You can get in touch with Karen by emailing karen.batsch@ccochousing.org, or calling 613-234-4065 ext. 241. (Evenings and weekends email karen.batsch@sympatico.ca.)
Remember last year GC and I went to the TimeRaisers event, which was a volunteer job fair combined with a silent art auction in which you bid volunteer hours instead of money? When I blogged about it later, some of you said you wished you’d known about it sooner, so you could have gone.
Well, the second annual Ottawa TimeRaisers event is taking place this Saturday night at the National Gallery. We’ll be there because GC is collecting his piece of art, which he paid for with 150 volunteer hours at the Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen. I’m hoping to add to both my art collection and my volunteer experience this year, so I’ll be bidding up a storm. I hope some of you can make it too.
Posted by zoom! on November 11, 2009, at 8:34 am |
 Green Bins being delivered I got my Green Bin yesterday and I like it. A lot. The program sounds good too – from what I understand, the high temperatures achievable by the huge volume of our collective organic waste is going to make this a very efficient way of breaking down garbage. All kinds of stuff can be composted under these circumstances, including, for example, used kitty litter. Yay.
But, like many people, my enthusiasm for my green bin is being contaminated by all the controversy about how this program should be funded. The City’s Planning and Environment Committee has endorsed a proposal that the entire cost be paid by homeowners in the form of an annual user fee of $195 for garbage collection and recycling (up from $86).
First and foremost, I don’t like this stealthy approach to taxation. If you want to increase my taxes, then look me in the eye and tell me about it. Don’t start filching money out of my pocket for various extra fees and special levies and so on. A flat fee for a compulsory municipal service is just a sneaky form of taxation.
This all started a couple of years ago when Mayor Larry came up with the ridiculous idea of charging us all a $50 snow tax because it snowed a lot that year. Never mind that he’d squandered the budget surplus on his self-serving and short-sighted election promise of no tax hikes, leaving no contingency money for something as improbable as a snowy winter in Ottawa. Everything was all about ‘zero means zero’ that year, so in order to hold the ‘official’ tax increase at zero, he tried to sneak a special one-time snow levy per household past us.
I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. If Council is going to approve new programs, it should be incumbent upon them to figure out how to pay for them when they’re approving them, not months or years later when they’re implementing them. If that means higher property taxes, so be it. I am willing to pay higher taxes for worthwhile public programs. But I am absolutely opposed to being hit up for an extra $50 here and $68 a year there while politicians pretend they’re not hiking my taxes.
 Another thing. Why is the cost of the program being absorbed only by people with green bins? As I understand it, businesses, along with people who live in the country or in apartment buildings, would be exempted, on the grounds that they wouldn’t be using the program, and therefore not benefiting from it.
Huh? Aren’t they benefiting from the fact that the rest of us are using it? We need the Green Bin Program in order to divert more waste and extend the life of the landfill, which will save us all money in the long run.
I don’t see what special benefit I personally will derive from putting my organic waste in a bin on the curb. It’s a public benefit, not a personal one, therefore it should be a public expense.
Final point. I live alone. Why is this proposed fee being assessed on a per-household basis rather than a per-citizen basis? I generate about half as much waste as a two-person household…maybe a little more. The proposal will see me paying $195 per year for garbage collection and recycling. Yet someone who is married will pay half as much as me. Is it fair that I, a single person, should be subsidizing couples and families? No. It is not.
I don’t mind paying for the Green Bin Program, but the issues of paying for it should have been resolved long before the bins were distributed. To do both things simultaneously just pisses people off and makes them hostile towards the program itself, at exactly the time we’re being asked to embrace and commit to it. Personally, I’m going to separate the two issues and embrace the program. But lots of people aren’t and that’s a shame.
Posted by zoom! on November 10, 2009, at 8:48 am |
1. Nanowrimo is sucking all the words right out of me, and the blog is paying the price. I’m up to 31,000 words now. The novel is atrocious.
2. I walked to Wellington Street to have lunch with my friend Richard yesterday, AND! For the first time in about eight or nine months, I logged 10,000 steps on my pedometer. There were many, many days this year when I logged fewer than 200 steps because of my back. Hitting 10,000 is a milestone.
3. In 2002 I read a book called Waiting for My Cats to Die: A morbid memoir. It was brilliant and funny. It was by Stacy Horn, a single 42-year-old woman in New York City with two diabetic cats and a mid-life crisis. She loved her cats like crazy but she used them as an excuse for staying stuck in a rut. She had all kinds of big life plans for after her cats died. I just checked out her blog and it looks like maybe her two cats died and she got three more.
4. GC and I met up with Felonius Bunk and his girlfriend K last night for a joint Nanowrimo writing session. Felonius’s novel has a phenomenal table of contents.
5. I wonder why Aggie hasn’t been blogging lately. I miss reading Aggie’s blog.
6. If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty trippy: Worldometers. It’s only 8:38 in the morning, and already there have been more than five billion cigarettes smoked in the world today.
7. That’s all for today.
Posted by zoom! on November 9, 2009, at 10:10 am |
Our poorly kept but thrilling secret has been revealed here!
Posted by zoom! on November 8, 2009, at 9:09 am |
 A sunbeam for Duncan My house is full of sunshine today! Even the rooms that don’t usually get sunshine are sunny. Duncan’s in his bliss – sunbeams everywhere. Nothing he likes more than a snooze in a ‘beam.
The novel continues to surprise me. Duncan has found a spot for himself in it, and he kept his real name, too. My friend Robin Kelsey has become my main character’s next-door-neighbour. The Son of the Traveling Shovel of Death has claimed another victim (fortunately neither Duncan nor Robin, whose name, by the way, is now Dominic).
I’m up to 23,290 words, or 62 paperbook pages. It stinks, and it stinks bad. But I am learning a great deal from it. How not to write a book. Pitfalls to avoid, like having the bulk of the story set inside one character’s head, especially when that one character spends most of her time thinking. The importance of good bones in a story. The importance of momentum. The importance of consistency. The unimportance of accounting for every moment.
What else is new? Something very, very exciting happened yesterday. It’s still a secret. But I’ll give you a hint: It involved a trip to the Ottawa Humane Society.
Posted by zoom! on November 7, 2009, at 10:12 am |
 Wristband: Passport to the Clinic Yesterday GC and I went for our flu shots* at Tom Brown Arena. I’d never had a flu shot before, but this year I figure I’m more vulnerable and more exposed to sick people. GC has had a couple of flu shots over the years, but he had unpleasant reactions to them (flu symptoms, fainting, etc.). He decided to do it this year, but he was nervous.
We got our wristbands when they opened at 9:00 in the morning. That didn’t take long. We were No. 269 and 270. They told us to come back at 4:00 for the shots.
 Under the Big Top At 4:00 we returned and waited in one of two outdoor tents with a bunch of other people. Every now and then someone would come in and announce a range of wristband numbers, and those people would go indoors. Eventually it was our turn and we shuffled into the Arena.
My friend John was in there (and, oddly, this was the third time we’d bumped into him in less than 24 hours). He was in the time slot ahead of us, so he was thoroughly familiar with the routine by now. He was like our personal tour guide of the immunization clinic.
The waiting area is an observation room overlooking a skating rink, so some of the little kids were thrilled to sit on their fathers’ shoulders and watch what they thought were the Senators. One of the fathers took all the fun out of it by telling his kid it wasn’t the Senators, it wasn’t anybody important, and get your damned fingers out of my ears, you know I hate that.
We waited. We made sure all our paperwork was in order (you can download the forms from the net or pick them up on site.) Every now and then a female security guard with a booming voice bellowed “CAN I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION. IF YOUR WRISTBAND IS BETWEEN THESE TWO NUMBERS, LINE UP OVER HERE.”
When it was our turn, the security guard snipped off our bracelets and we went upstairs. We were in a huge noisy room where everything was happening: People crying, people getting injections, people waiting, people getting registered, people recovering. We saw John in the recovery area. He was still alive and smiling, and GC, who was getting more and more nervous by the minute, seemed heartened by this.
 Pandemonious pandemic room We lined up to get registered, and then we were seated in a chair lineup, and finally we were directed to one of many nurses seated at long tables. Our nurse did GC first, since he was nervous. There was a girl about 10 on the other side of the table who was much more nervous than GC, and I was fascinated by her hysteria. Her younger brother and sister were absolutely placid, but this girl was freaking out. And she was mad, too. She yelled at her father not to hold her, because “you’re just making it worse!”
I was supposed to be keeping GC calm, but I was so distracted by this kid, just three feet away from us, and how determined she was not to get the shot, and how determined her parents were to make sure she got the shot, and how locked into the whole thing they all were. I watched the nurses trying to calm her, and her father talking to her through gritted teeth, and throughout it all the kid just kept crying and screaming and fighting.
GC was awfully good in comparison. After his shot the nurse had him sit by himself over by the wall. She didn’t want him to watch me getting my shot, in case he fainted in sympathy. After my shot, we waited our mandatory 15 minutes in recovery, lined up for our immunization records, and left.
 Chandler Swain's table at 260 Fingers Total time there, not counting the trip to pick up our wristbands in the morning: exactly two hours. Then we went to the 260 Fingers Pottery Show in the Glebe where GC bought himself a nice big oatmeal bowl as a reward for surviving the Great Pandemic of 2009.
*The whole flu shot thing is generating a fair amount of controversy. Nik, from Kill Everything, has an interesting piece about it: The Flu Shot That Ate Your Brain.
Posted by zoom! on November 6, 2009, at 8:31 am |
Yesterday afternoon I got a call from my breast cancer surgeon. That MRI I had last Friday night? It found something.
I’ve got a new lump in my right breast. It’s very small, it might not be cancer, it might just be scar tissue, but it’s in a completely different area of my breast than the cancer and surgery was. It’s where the MRI last Spring found an “area of suspicious enhancement.” I never did find out exactly what an area of suspicious enhancement was, exactly, but after another ultrasound last Spring I was told that it was probably a false positive on the part of the MRI. Now, six months later, there’s a lump there. The surgeon wants to wait and see. She’ll MRI it again in six months and see if it’s changed.
I feel like I just got off the cancer merry-go-round, and I don’t want to jump back on again just yet – especially if there’s nothing I can do about it. I had to get used to having cancer in the first place, and then I had to get used to not having cancer, and now I have to get used to not knowing if I have cancer. And doing nothing. Just waiting.
It’s not that I’m worried. I’m not. One of the benefits of having had cancer is that it stripped the word ‘cancer’ of its power to terrify me. I’m not scared of it anymore. Or maybe I’m just not scared of breast cancer. Or my breast cancer. I don’t know. But I’m not worried or scared.
It’s just that I’m weary. I moved through this past six months on the strength of positive thinking and tons of support from other people. I borrowed positive momentum from everybody I know, including all of you. But a week ago today, when I finished my last radiation treatment, I finally exhaled. I let it all go, all that momentum, because I thought I didn’t need it anymore…I’d made it to the finish line and now I could just let go. I never imagined I’d need to muster it all back up less than a week later. I’m trying, but so far I’m mostly just feeling kind of lackluster and drained.
In the good news department, my back incision has finally healed. The home care nurse pronounced it sealed yesterday, and for the first time since mid-September, I’m dressing-free. (By the way, in case you think I haven’t had a shower for two months, I have to set the record straight. Shortly after Home Care started coming in, they switched to waterproof dressings just so I could shower.)
In other news I’m going to try to get my flu shot today. It should be good for a blog post if nothing else.
And finally, my nanowrimo novel is up to 17,378 words. The last couple thousand words have been kind of smutty, which surprised me even more than the boyfriend who hanged himself in the closet on Page 1.
Posted by zoom! on November 5, 2009, at 11:23 am |
After teetering on the edge of sickness yesterday morning, I rallied and carried on with my day’s plans, which included lunch with my favourite sock monkey lady, and coffee and banana-butterscotch cake at Raw Sugar with Grace. (I confess I whined to Grace that the cake didn’t taste very butterscotchy, which might have been due to my taste buds being stifled by an impending cold. But I think someone forgot to put the butterscotch in the butterscotch icing.)
At any rate, I was very glad I summoned up the energy to socialize, because I had a lovely time, impending illness notwithstanding.
It’s not the swine flu. My temperature was well below normal. I had a whole litany of complaints, ranging from mundane stuff like headache to more exotic things like all the ligaments and nerves and tendons in my legs felt like they were too short. My breast was sore because the radiation continues to cook it for two weeks after treatment. Also, I’m in the process of weaning myself off my addictive painkillers, so various pains are starting to break through the painkiller barrier. And I think I’m coming down with perimenopause, and a touch of hypochondria too.
On top of everything else, I just started taking tamoxifen yesterday, and will be taking it every day until 2014. It’s the final part of my breast cancer treatment plan. It will likely produce symptoms that mimic perimenopause, so I expect to be completely confused in that department for the next five years. I won’t know what’s real perimenopause and what’s fake perimenopause. And what happens if menopause occurs during the next five years, as I sincerely hope it will? Will I have real menopause and fake perimenopause simultaneously?
You know what else? I hate my pharmacy. Earlier this year I switched from the world’s best pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart at Bank & Laurier) to the world’s worst pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart at Westgate). In the past I wouldn’t have complained because I hardly ever had to go to the pharmacy. But now? I average about one prescription a week, which generally means two visits and a phone call.
Here are some of the things I hate about my new pharmacy:
1. They hire staff with insufficient command of the English language. (I don’t expect English to be their first language, but a rudimentary command of English would be good too.)
2. They’re rude. They rush me away, refusing to answer my questions, saying “You go now. Okay? You go.”
3. They’re cold and unfriendly. They seem to resent customers.
4. They always leave me standing at the counter for several minutes before serving me. There can be six of them working back there, no other customers in sight, and they take turns glancing up at me and then ignoring me, waiting for someone else to serve me. My last pharmacy sometimes got busy and kept me waiting too, but it was always because they were busy with people. These guys do it because they’re busy with stuff.
5. They usually can’t find my prescription. They look through a big bin of prescriptions, declare it missing, check computers, ask one another, glare at me like it’s my fault, make me re-spell my name, and finally recheck the bin, where it was all along.
Yesterday I picked up my first Tamoxifen prescription, and was served by an incompetent new pharmacy assistant who couldn’t speak English and who had to ask her supervisor for direction on every single little thing.
The woman in front of me accidentally dropped her coffee and handed the pharmacy assistant her empty cup. She had to ask her supervisor where the garbage was. But she didn’t actually ask. She took the cup to her supervisor, held it up, and looked helpless. Her supervisor showed her the garbage pail.
Then it was my turn. I mentioned to her that there was a puddle of coffee on the floor, right in front of the wicket. She came out and looked and went to tell her supervisor.
“Split,” she said. “Split.”
Her supervisor didn’t understand. She fished the coffee cup out of the garbage, held it up, said “split” again, and pointed to where I was standing. The supervisor came out, looked, got some paper towels and cleaned it up.
Then I told the pharmacy assistant that I was here to pick up my prescription, and I spelled my name. She wrote it down, looked it up, and eventually found my prescription.
“You have before?” she asked. I shook my head no and she pointed at the pharmacist, indicating that I needed to speak to him.
I stood at the consult wicket and a few minutes later he came over and told me about my prescription and possible side effects.
“It’s like when a woman gets a period.” he said, “Things like bloating and cramps. Hot flashes. Bleeding. Moods. You know like your cycle, you get symptoms but then you get used to it?”
He paused. I waited.
“It’s hard for a guy to explain this,” he said, looking flustered and apologetic.
I felt sorry for him, and decided to let him off the hook. After all, I’ve got books with whole chapters about Tamoxifen. I’ve got the Internet. I don’t really need a flustered pharmacist to tell me the side effects.
Even though it wasn’t a very helpful conversation, it was the most human exchange I’ve ever had at that pharmacy so far, and left me feeling slightly better about the place.
Posted by zoom! on November 3, 2009, at 9:03 am |
Okay, things on the Nanowrimo front aren’t going quite as I planned. In terms of word count, I’m ahead of schedule. I’ve written 8,442 words in the first two days. And since Nanowrimo is all about quantity rather than quality, I’m happy with that.
But the thing is, I had an outline. And my book is totally ignoring my outline. It was supposed to start with Rosemary getting dumped by her boyfriend and subsequently meeting a man with Narcissistic Personality Disorder on one of the online dating sites. But what happened? Right there on page one, while I watched in horror, her boyfriend went and hanged himself in the bedroom closet. Nobody was more surprised than me.
Here’s the excerpt – you can see for yourself how it snuck up on me:
But being left is different. You have no control. No illusions. No omniscient glimpse into the real reasons for the breakup. You’re completely dependent on the other person to tell you, and you’re familiar with all the old lies and the reasons for telling them.
They don’t want to hurt you. Nevertheless, you’re left bereft and confused and hurt. You might know what the lies are, but you still don’t know what the truth is. You don’t know why he really left.
And he’s not talking. He’s still hanging in the bedroom closet, his face bulging and purple, the front of his pants stained wet, his skin swollen from accumulated fluids, a neatly typewritten and hand-signed note folded on the bedside table.
Now Rosemary’s got all this extra emotional shit to process before she can even begin to think of writing an online dating profile. She’s spent the past 8,442 words organizing and getting through a funeral, obsessively cleaning the closet, exchanging barbs with his mother, reading and re-reading the suicide note, and wondering why he really did it. On top of everything else, he informed her in the note that he’s got a 14-year old daughter out there somewhere, and he’d like her to track the kid down and give her something from him. This was not in the outline, and it’s a fairly onerous responsibility for someone who was just supposed to be eating potato chips, reading online profiles and composing flirty emails.
Because you have to churn out 50,000 words in a month, there’s no time to go back and change your mind. You have to keep going. Somehow I have to find a way for Rosemary to finish grieving, track down the kid, AND start online dating. (GC suggested I just say “A few months later….” and take it from there.)
|
|
Popular Posts