The Prequel's Progress: 20,874; still rather gummed up by the continued failure of my postal entity to cough up any sort of response from Agent #1, but having more or less decided that next Monday is the "to hell with #1, proceed further down the list" day, some words have obviously shaken themselves loose. Much heartened by the unexpected, if belated, arrival of a more suitable euphemism for underpants than the word I had been using, which will be grandfathered into the current Manuscript so long as nobody's clamoring to see it just yet anyway. (This euphemism arrived, I am amused to relate, while I was flipping back and forth between two slow-loading sites, which happened to be NeoPets: NeoQuest II and a technical manual on writing "slash", which is to say basically gay erotica -- oh, well, let's be honest, porn, are you happy now? -- which I forget exactly how I had ended up being referred there but it was quite educational, since I do have at least one gay male character to wrangle at the moment and I don't think he'd appreciate being asked to take a vow of chastity, so I'm probably going to need to know some of this stuff eventually. And no, I am not going to give you the URL, so there.)
I am also being stalked by a plotbunny involving fermented mare's milk, or "kumis". Damn, now I have to go to Outer Mongolia, I hate it when that happens.
Other writerly epiphanies to report include the realization, while perusing Cattle: an informal social history, that the plot-driving complication of Theoretical Prequel #2 is that having the motherless infant along means that the party will be limited to the travel speed of the cow... You are not expected to understand this yet, I'm just setting it down out of curiosity as to whether matters do work out when I look back later.
One of the fleshpets got into a scrape today: vaguely aware that Snip was prowling around on top of a bookcase where she's not supposed to be, still I paid it no heed until I heard,
scrabblescrabblescrabble
S
C
R
E
E
E
EEEEee
eee
ee
...mew?
Which I immediately deduced to be the sound of a cat falling down the back of a bookcase. This posed a problem, as both ends of said bookcase are blocked, deliberately, to cat-access from the outside, and so therefore Snip had no way back out.
I decided to leave her back there to think about matters for a good ten minutes while I considered my options. It didn't seem dire enough to worry the fire department over (and besides Mum would slaughter me if I had anyone in with the place looking like it does), but moving the bookcases themselves was a definite nonstarter. I briefly entertained, then rejected, the notion of cutting my way through the flimsyish back of one or other of the cases: no, without having any way of knowing precisely how far down Snip was wedged, that would risk injury to her, not to mention what would happen to me when Mum comes home...
So I turned my attention to the blocked sides of the bookcase. One side is against a wall, no help there, but the other end is only blocked by the stack of banker-boxes Snip climbed to get up onto where she could fall down from in the first place, so eventually, I was able to slide enough of the stack far enough out of the way so that the little maniac was able to pull herself out on her own, since there was still no possibility of reaching her from the outside. I hugged her, realized she was full of borax from her fall, set her on the floor to get a cloth to damp-mop her off with...
And damned if I didn't come back out into the main room to find her back up on the stack worrying at the hole!
"Dumb animals", indeed.
Today is going to be a day of earworms from hell, I can tell; I've already had "Achy Breaky Heart" and Elmer Fudd breaking out into "Oh Bwunhiwwda, youw'w so wuvvwy", and any minute now I fully expect this to segue into Elmer Fudd singing "Achy Breaky Heart" at which point I shall have to find something to jump off of.
I am also being stalked by a plotbunny involving fermented mare's milk, or "kumis". Damn, now I have to go to Outer Mongolia, I hate it when that happens.
Other writerly epiphanies to report include the realization, while perusing Cattle: an informal social history, that the plot-driving complication of Theoretical Prequel #2 is that having the motherless infant along means that the party will be limited to the travel speed of the cow... You are not expected to understand this yet, I'm just setting it down out of curiosity as to whether matters do work out when I look back later.
One of the fleshpets got into a scrape today: vaguely aware that Snip was prowling around on top of a bookcase where she's not supposed to be, still I paid it no heed until I heard,
scrabblescrabblescrabble
S
C
R
E
E
E
EEEEee
eee
ee
...mew?
Which I immediately deduced to be the sound of a cat falling down the back of a bookcase. This posed a problem, as both ends of said bookcase are blocked, deliberately, to cat-access from the outside, and so therefore Snip had no way back out.
I decided to leave her back there to think about matters for a good ten minutes while I considered my options. It didn't seem dire enough to worry the fire department over (and besides Mum would slaughter me if I had anyone in with the place looking like it does), but moving the bookcases themselves was a definite nonstarter. I briefly entertained, then rejected, the notion of cutting my way through the flimsyish back of one or other of the cases: no, without having any way of knowing precisely how far down Snip was wedged, that would risk injury to her, not to mention what would happen to me when Mum comes home...
So I turned my attention to the blocked sides of the bookcase. One side is against a wall, no help there, but the other end is only blocked by the stack of banker-boxes Snip climbed to get up onto where she could fall down from in the first place, so eventually, I was able to slide enough of the stack far enough out of the way so that the little maniac was able to pull herself out on her own, since there was still no possibility of reaching her from the outside. I hugged her, realized she was full of borax from her fall, set her on the floor to get a cloth to damp-mop her off with...
And damned if I didn't come back out into the main room to find her back up on the stack worrying at the hole!
"Dumb animals", indeed.
Today is going to be a day of earworms from hell, I can tell; I've already had "Achy Breaky Heart" and Elmer Fudd breaking out into "Oh Bwunhiwwda, youw'w so wuvvwy", and any minute now I fully expect this to segue into Elmer Fudd singing "Achy Breaky Heart" at which point I shall have to find something to jump off of.