Meow
The most exciting news that I'm talking about way too much is...I have a cat! More specifically, I have Audrey ("Fluffy," to Grandma Sybil). Mom and Dad drove me back into the city after Easter this week to drop her off. She's still adjusting--she's never been a loud cat, but her little squeak-meows have been about five times more frequent than usual. My apartment is the smallest space she's ever been in, and she doesn't have Ripley to annoy her...which is part of why Mom and I decided she'd be best to come to the city. She's always been a little underweight and recently a bit tender (we think she has a bit of arthritis--she is 14, after all), so we thought some peace and quiet and a chance to finish the food in the dish might do her some good.
Why this change?
Shipping Up to Boston
The Lawrence family is moving again. Dad recently got hired by SeQur (which I thought was "Sea Cure" until he showed me his product's video!) and, in a hilarious coincidence, the office he'll work out of is located in Northborough, Massachusetts--in fact, the building is on the very road that I used to take twice a day on my way to and from high school!
Mom and dad are excited to move back to Boston, and are even looking at a historic house closer to the city and with a nearby Trader Joe's--a long-time dream of theirs (okay, so Trader Joe's was a recent addition). It's too soon to know exactly where they'll end up. The biggest thing to factor in is that Kate still has two more years of high school yet before college. Poor Kate isn't too thrilled, since she has a lot of friends down in New Jersey, but we all know she's a tough nut and a good egg who'll make friends quickly wherever she ends up.
Most of what this means for me is that I finally have to make decisions about what items I want with me and which can be more difficult to access. It felt a bit like betraying my friends, but I finally decided to box up many of my favorite books from childhood and other favorites as well, leaving behind books I haven't read, haven't read in a long time, or might conceivably want to read again in the near future. We figure that these ones will be the most likely to end up on a shelf at a new house, where I can get to them when I come to visit my parents.
Anyway, we'd talked about having me take a cat before mom and dad decided to move the whole family, since it would take one pet off their hands (and their rent) if they had to live in an apartment for a while. Even after they'd organized their plans, though, mom still stuck with the idea of sending a cat with me--after all, I'd always said a cat would be my first luxury after I had a paying job. So I asked my landlord and my roommate, got the go-ahead, and brought her in.
The Job
As always, I don't want to go into too much detail about this. Suffice it to say: my manager, BF, has moved on. With my imprint's recent merger has come a lot of change, the most recent of which was a decision to move my imprint into the other imprint's building in advance of a bigger, final move later this year. The commute was already a pain for BF, who lives in Connecticut, but this move was going to tack on another 30 to 45 minutes to his commute.
We're down to four now: JV heading Business with ES to help her; CC on Economics with me to help her; and CC also on Finance, though ES is still the assistant for those books. One good thing to come out of this latest change? A promotion for CC! That's right, I'm back to working with a full editor. Strangely enough, there's very little change for me, at least as far as the day-to-day goes.
Enough news, time to gush about the good things in life.
On Writing...
I'm now on the third draft of the short story I've been working on since February. Okay, okay, so that's partly because I got impatient with the format I was using and decided to start fresh before I got the whole way to the end of the second draft. The first was a standard first-person piece of prose, with a space-age interplanetary trucker narrating the encounter that she and her copilot have with an alien life form--the first interaction between humans and a preexisting life form. The narrator is almost exactly a character I created for a short story in my senior year of college. Except for the whole space angle, of course.
Anyway, I decided the second draft should be an annotated transcript of the cockpit's "black box" recording--annotated because I had so many ideas about this space-going culture that I wanted to squeeze in. Typical of my enthusiasm for a new project! However, as I went on, I found the annotations to be distracting. I wanted to use a made-up code to indicate alarms going off...but then I realized that multiple alarms would be going off in these situations! I had a damage report, but didn't want to actually list the three dozen flare exit nozzles that were crushed, bent, or altogether removed. Boring! I tried just doing a straight transcript...but the alien encounter is very visual, and part of what attracts me to the transcript format is how sensually flat it is (this was a key frustration of mine when I was transcribing oral history interviews). My main character's main setting is, "generally amused," but in a transcript all her little chuckles, chortles, and other sounds of merriment get transcribed as "laughs" or "laughter."
As of this morning, the third draft is an incident report with commentary. It also has the transcript in it (and I'm not messing too much with the last draft's dialogue sections), but it's there as a transcript within a transcript. I figure, what's the best way to fill in the visual blanks in this audio file? Well, have the people involved in the accident listen to the recording and comment on it! I'm sticking with my main character--the other one plays by the rules--though in theory both pilots would comment on the recording. I figure having a single person responding to the transcript will let me keep some of the visual while expanding the view into this character's head...though I've already found a few downsides to this format as well. I'll keep going, but there's still the possibility the whole thing will end up back in prose form--definitely better for its trip across genres, but still back to the beginning.
And did I mention that I'm hand writing all of these drafts on the subway?
On Watching...
A couple weekends ago I went with Neline and one of her friends to see Only Lovers Left Alive. In spite of its saccharine, tongue-tying alliterative/assonancey title, I really enjoyed it. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton (the reasons I even gave this film a chance) play millennia-old vampires living in the modern day. They're both recluses, one in Detroit and one in Tangiers. Why? Well, why not? Both places are just as un-legit as the sticks of Washington State.
Why did I fall for this movie? As always, fantastic world building. There were so many hints of history and culture indicating a bigger story, references to larger issues both ancient and modern. I loved the references to scientists, writers, and musicians throughout history, even if they seemed much like a best-of checklist of only the most famous. True, the audience wouldn't recognize the dropped names of people who didn't become as famous as they deserved...but shouldn't there have been some of those between Einstein, Tesla, and Shelly? Oh, and the music was great. I'm holding out hope for a soundtrack.
The only two things that annoyed the heck out of me:
1. Adam and Eve. Seriously? If it wasn't Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, those character names would have driven me from the theater.
2. Christopher Marlowe. Not the fact that it's him, just yet another speculation that he wrote Shakespeare's plays. I just can't believe that--the styles and ethics of the plays I've read by each writer have been so wildly different that I just can't believe that Marlowe is the grand master. I like the idea of Marlowe as a vampire...I just can't see him settling for Shakespeare as his legacy!
Incidentally, I'm on the lookout for a collection of Marlowe's works that will, ideally, be a counterpart to my beloved Complete Pelican Shakespeare. If you're a Marlowe buff, drop me a line!
On Volunteering...
I'm still going to St. Francis Xavier on what's turned out to be just about every other week. I continue to enjoy it, but have finally decided to stop attending first Sundays. Back on the first Sunday in October I had a run-in with one of the volunteer coordinators, which I described in one of my blog posts. At that time, G. invaded my personal space and grabbed my arm. He'd done it twice since then, and both times I pulled away and asked him not to do that. Three weeks ago he came up behind me while I was working and grabbed me by the arms--and that did it. I told another coordinator what had happened and I left. Fortunately, G. only volunteers on the first Sunday of each month, so I'll take myself elsewhere on those days from now on.
The week after that more than made up for it. I had a great time manning the bread stations with other volunteers, chatting when we weren't busy. It's great how happy a buttered cinnamon bagel can make someone! After the day came to a close, we had a record number of people (at least since I'd started going) join us for lunch afterwards.
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