It's entropy, and I helped!

To celebrate my 30s, the meatpuppet decided that what it really, really wanted was tendonitis. Yay! This isn't particularly surprising, considering that I type, climb, and every job I've had post-college has involved hauling and shelving books. Repetitive stress is my middle name. For the past couple of months my right wrist has been more and more often sore and sometimes swollen, with occasional accompaniment from my left wrist. I've finally accepted that this probably isn't going to stop, and that my life will now include wrist braces and buckets of NSAIDs. Okay, fine.

The side effect of this is that now I'm hyper-aware of my wrists and how I hold them. Which apparently looks a lot like:



Also, sleeping. How the hell do you keep your wrists straight when you sleep? Especially if you're a paw-curling mammal like me. Clearly I need to perfect Lost Boys-style upside down sleeping.

Now I just need to get some custom spiked black leather braces, preferably with attachable Wolverine claws.

Here comes the boat only half afloat

The magic of LJ is strong. After the rambly, what-should-I-do? post, certain problems clarified themselves for me. Most recently I've been having trouble with a couple of chapters wherein our heroes go to a new place, get shot at, and then travel again (whilst discussing the plot). With the exception of the shooting, all of this was slow and recalcitrant and generally driving me crazy. So I looked at some of the things I was doing (wrong).

* There are two cities Isyllt & co. might be sailing to, both equidistant according to my bad map. The port isn't important, since they can get shot as easily in either. One of these cities I already knew had cool stuff in it, the other one was just a dot on the map. So, for some reason, I sent them to the dot instead of the cool city. Because...I didn't want too much cool stuff in the book? I don't know. So I sent them to a boring place where all they did was sit in the hotel till the assassin showed up. Yawn.

I've now sent them to the fun city, and already I've got to describe an architectural marvel, which neatly brings in a little of some relevant culture & history. Next, instead of making them stay in the hotel for two days, I'll let them look at some more neat stuff before the man with the gun shows up.

* The next part, the travel-and-exposit part, was really giving me trouble. No one wanted to talk, or have anything like tension, and all I was getting were snips and scraps of dialogue. I couldn't describe the landscape. Then I asked myself, Gee, self, why are they wearing out their horses with carriage travel through the desert in summer when there is a RIVER RIGHT THERE? In other words, what this chapter really needed was a nightboat to Cairo.

I still need to sort out the tension, but putting everyone on a boat makes this scene a whole lot smarter. Also, this makes it much easier to describe the inundation season, and its effects on the plot.

As for characters, I have a guy with a cane and a white suit. I can probably get some mileage out of that. A pity they haven't invented aviator shades yet.