witterings from a chilly house
Good morning world. It's been raining for a few days now, and occasionally the rain clouds seem to crash land into the landscape around me. When they do, the streets fill with very dense fog, which turns the street lights into hazy halos, and which seems to pool like a liquid in the lower places, ditches and ponds. The rest of the town, at the base of the hill I live on, is entirely invisible in the fog.
The funny thing about the fog is that usually it hangs around for a day or two, but last night and this morning it keeps just wandering and vanishing. Case in point, it didn't exist when I woke up, existed while I wrote the above paragraph and now, a bit later, doesn't exist as I write this bit. I really love our weird nebulous winter weather in Washington state.
I love less the bit where it interacts with my sleep problems and makes it feel a bit like I'm doing battle every night just to get some rest. But still, there's worse things.
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Slowly working on finishing this odd 1960s short story I've been working on. I read a history article about an event in the 60s, and the story popped up right then, and so I started writing it. It's been a lot of years since that happened, so it was like being visited by an old and beloved friend. Anyway, the story is lovely so far, the language is weird and melted together in a way that I hope is still readable (it works out loud so far; that's my litmus test, usually). Lord knows what I'll do with it or where I'll sell it when it's done, but that's a future problem. For now, I'm just enjoying working my way through it.
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Current books are
The Traitor Cormorant Baru by Seth Dickinson. I'm a big fan of fantasy books in theory but rarely in practice, so I was delighted when I started reading it and got sucked fully into the world, the clear and sharp writing that doesn't overload, and the excellent character work. It's got a very Chinese Dynasty government feel to it, with shades of Polynesia in there with the main character. I'm about halfway through, so I suppose it could all go to hell, but it doesn't seem to have done so thus far.
and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I was so terribly excited when I discovered she was publishing another book. It's been SO long since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, but I adore her writing and felt tremendous sympathy for her exhaustion and inability to work, and was delighted that this was coming out. I'm not terribly far into it, but it's deeply weird and surreal, but handled with a clarity of writing and her usual cleverness so that I don't feel I'm getting lost in the surreality of the premise. I really hope that the work-breakthroughs she's mentioned which led to this book being finished and released are things which carry over into more of her work and lets her keep producing. If nothing else, I assume that'll make her happy, but also it means i get more books.
Right, the kettle has just come to a boil. There's tea to make, children lunches to sort out, and then hopefully a bit of writing and reading to get on with.