Report

Good news: We had a great dinner last night with minnehaha B and K at Fhima's in St. Paul. Good food, good company.

The dumpster is now about 2/3 full. Wow. And I was feeling stupid, thinking I'd gotten one too big, but we're really probably going to fill it.

I was kicking myself for not fitting a workout in today, but then I thought of all those boxes I've lifted, and my pedometer says 16752 steps (close to 9 miles now), so then I realized: no guilt.

Bad news: kijjohnson woke up this morning with vertigo, and it got so bad that I've taken her to the ER. She's still there, and the vertigo has worsened to the point that nausea set in; she lost her lunch. It seems to be an inner ear disturbance, but they're going to be giving her a CAT scan, just to rule out, you know, even ickier things. I'm about to head back to the ER now.

P.

Kij is checked out of the ER again

after eight hours. Oy. The CAT scan was normal, and the neurologist who examined her has ruled out stroke or tumor, which was, of course, all good news. So the diagnosis is, as snippy suggested, benign positional vertigo, caused maybe by a virus. She's been given some medication and is going to bed early tonight. We hope she'll be able to drive again well enough to return home to Kansas as scheduled. Keep your fingers crossed.

Novels that never were--or at least not yet

Today's discovery in the basement:

I found notes and opening scenes sketched for a novel idea, that I had forgotten entirely. It was a science fiction novel, where the main character could manipulate her internal atomic structure so that she could walk through walls (of course, she had to take her clothes off, first). But the astonishing thing is, I realized, reading the notes over, that although I have no memory of this book idea whatsoever, I eventually lifted some stuff from it and stuck it in Emerald House Rising, like the name of the character Kett, and the idea of the revolving heirship. But this earlier work had dropped entirely out of my memory. Weird.

Kij and I talked some about ideas for novels that we've had that we'd sketched notes for, but they never quite got the activation energy to get going. There was another one I'd worked on for several months that also went nowhere: I had an idea about a world after major climate change, that the Great Lakes would become deserts, and the main character was one of the desert scavengers, moving across a barren landscape studded with the wrecks of sunken ore ships. Imagine a string of camels walking slowly across the horizon, with the Edmund Fitzgerald in the background.

And I had the prequel to Emerald House Rising that I wrote about sixty or seventy pages on, before it ground to a halt. I had established in EHR that wizards worked in male-female pairs. In this book, the idea was to set up a wizard quartet, where a man and a male castrati had bonded with two women who were identical twins (so, if you looked at it sort of obliquely, they kinda have the various parts for One Man and One Woman between them. Um, sort of.)

Maybe I'll get back to it someday.

Hmm. Maybe. But I doubt it.