happy birthday, natasha!

* * *The happiest of birthdays to darlingest brightest_blue!!!* * *

May the snow sparkle on the mountain tops! May the kung fu movies increase in synchronisation badness! May the dogs keep licking and the parks keep walking! May Chopin keep frolicking! And all of this for you, and much more for the next 365/365!

*throws blossoms over snow*

weather warm surprise

England does this: it's cool or indifferent for weeks, and all of a sudden, warmth springs out! Yesterday especially was very surprising. I had to come home and change into something more summery!

Today, too, I could have lunch outside in the garden. It was a languishing warmth. I sat in the shade with my feet propped into the sunshine. The soul expands when the outside temperature moves closer to the inside body temperature. The birds tweeter, a garbage truck clatters in the mid-distance, music irritatingly blares from a neighbour's window, children shriek two doors down, and at night, a frog hopped through the tall grass.

The sky is hazy, with blotches of cloud.

I opened windows in the house. The outside permeates into the inside.

There is a dead bee in the guinea pigs' winter cage.

fic pride

I have discovered another antidote to the feedback trap. It is to love the fic so much yourself that fb is icing and not essential.

I have finished Cadman fic! And it's with the betas, and although often I am very impatient to post, this time I'm quite happy to sit on it a little and wait for comments to come back. This is because I don't mind tinkering with it some more. I finished it in a frenzy of typing last night, after two full-on afternoons and evenings, and then I printed it out and just couldn't stop reading it! I love it!!

I remembered another reason to write (remember I mentioned myself, others and words? Hm, wasn't there a fourth reason? ETA: thematic concepts). Anyway, this other reason is me at age 80. Do I look forward to taking this particular fic out of the ringbinder in 40 years' time, dusting it off and settling down to a lovely read? With many of my fics, I do look forward to that! They will still warm my cockles when I am zimmered out! Not all of my fics, some are more fly-by-night but with the Cadman fic I truly think that I will actually enjoy forgetting the detail of it so that I can discover it again in the future. *g*

So, if I feel like that about the fic, the feedback starts to have a different role. It is more that the fb isn't ego-stroking for myself but that the fb is recognition for the fic. This fic feels already a bit uncoupled from me, although it's not posted; a bit like a child sent out into the world. And now I wish for that child to have recognition and would feel a bit sorry if it didn't get its share.

Anyway, I am normally such a diffident person that it feels almost strange for a change to be proud of something and just to enjoy it. :-) And, as others have said before me, authors tend to like the ones they struggled over best, and this one did take much longer than expected, had to be reshuffled, had to force key scenes on me that I felt reluctant even scared to write; it's not experimental as such but I still learned quite a bit, especially about revision and painstaking going-through after the first rush of gushing it all onto the screen has passed.

I am also quite proud for having pulled myself out of my non-posting slump, literally by the skin of my teeth, forcing indifferent!fic and experimental!prose onto the world but somehow or other that method worked and I seem to have struggled through and come out the other side. It took about six weeks; that's not even that long, considering.

I also bought Jane Smiley's 13 Ways to Read and Write a Novel and will keep you posted on its interesting bits.

Also: thamiris and phineasjones: I haven't forgotten the snippets I promised you!! They're just taking a little longer than anticipated. :-)

Off to a BBQ tonight round at neighbours'. I made a potato salad for it. Ah, spring!