David Gillon

I was getting ready to book my ticket home, the stuff regarding my father's care funding having ground to a halt with people on Easter holidays, and just starting to look forward to it, when they got back to us. Ironically at precisely the same time we were ringing their complaints people to say 'how do we move this forward/extend our complaint'.  The call was to offer a new assessment with new assessor, exactly what we've wanted from the outset, but not until the 26th. Which means I'm probably here until the start  of May - that's assuming my sister can make that date - she can't check her appointments diary until she's back in school on Monday

The weather here continues to take 'April Showers' to heart, so we haven't really been out anywhere apart from Sunday Lunch last weekend, which was a little disappointing vs the restaurant's usual standard (watery turnip and carrot mash), though still pleasantly filling.

After Yoon mentioned meeting S L Huang I've re-read the bits of her Russell's Attic series I have: Zero-Sum Game, Half-Life, and Root of Unity, plus the short stories Ladies Day Out and Rio Adopts a Puppy (which I hadn't previously read - deeply creepy, no actual animal harm. but it is contemplated). I would have liked to move on to Plastic Smile, the fourth book, but the series is apparently in the process of changing from self-published (and an example of how that can be done so well it looks completely professional) to being published by Tor, so not currently available.

Having read the latest three Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson (2)+Alpha and Omega (1) novels it looks like I may reread the parts of the series I have on Kindle next.

WRT non-fiction I read The Battleship Builders, a big history of the firms that built the Royal Navy's dreadnoughts, and I've finally finished Norman Friedman's Naval Firepower, which has taken me almost a year, and is that rare thing, a book that doesn't have nearly enough equations. It's basically a history of a very specific mathematical/engineering problem* - battleship fire control, aka bringing two objects together in time and space when one is manouvering to avoid that, and the other follows a ballistic trajectory over anything up to 15 nautical miles that takes several minutes of flight, while being fired from a platform that is itself manouvering and subject to wave motion causing it to pitch and roll, which affects the alignment of the firing barrel. I'd actually have found it much easier to follow with some of the equations ready to hand. I picked up Command at Sea, a set of notoriously detailed naval wargames rules, to see how it handled abstracting that, and inevitably am thinking "well, I wouldn't have done it that way". I may look for another heavyweight naval title to follow

*  probably the most complex successful computational solution prior to Ultra, and all mechanical.

I have managed some writing, line-edited about 110 pages of the first novel, to bring myself back up to where I was(and a bit beyond) when I set the rewrite aside before Christmas. I did consider doing something for Sherwood Smith's ballroom anthology, and came up with a plot for The Elf-Queen's Inaugral Ball, but I think I need to concentrate on the novel, so I'll set that aside as notes. That said I promptly took a couple of days out to experiment with an alternate opening to the second novel which decouples it from being so tight a sequel to the first one. That would let me market it independently if the first goes nowhere, but it's six and two threes, there are plot advantages to both approaches. The first version of the alternate didn't work, the second worked a lot better, but could be tweaked to be better still. Even if I don't want to go with it as an opening, I probably need to work it in somewhere. Meanwhile, back to book one.