David Gillon

My sister sent up the Bat Signal last week, having run out of spoons for coping with my mother, whose medication side-effects at that point had reached essentially constant hallucinations (giving a drug known to cause vivid dreaming to someone desperately in need of sleep strikes me as a blatantly bad idea). So I'm headed up there to help/possibly cover for her so she can get a few days away from home before school starts again. And of course by the time I was able to get away the doctor had changed his mind and decided to stop everything, so Mam's actually almost back to normal, just worn out from two months of one side-effect after another.

I hope to keep this trip to a fortnight or three weeks at most, but I haven't booked a return ticket in case of further issues and even that will mean I've spent three full months in Durham since the New Year. I do usually go up about this time, but I'd almost rather skip it this time.

On the plus side, everything probate-wise is now in the hands of the Court of Probate, probably for eight weeks, so I don't actually have to work when I'm up there this time, which consumed my last trip. I also finally got all my PPI mis-selling claims done on Monday, including long-distance holding of my sister's hand while she did hers. With both of those finally out of the way, I'm hoping I can get some writing done while I'm away.

Dad was released from hospital tonight and is happily ensconced back in his room at the care home. They've actually been talking about releasing him since weekend before last, but the microbiology department kept arguing for more tests to be really, absolutely, totally sure he was rid of the infections - we're talking belt, braces, piece of string and half-a-dozen safety pins. Monday his doctors finally told them no, he wasn't having an MRI because it just isn't practical to try and give him one (he won't stay still) and they were going to release him, but then found his potassium was low, so it's taken two days to get that back to normal. On the one hand it means he had an extra week of IV antibiotics to be really sure the bugs are gone, on the other it's been exhausting for the family. Fingers crossed for things getting back to normal.

Writing progress on Disruptive Technology ground to a halt while this was going on. I picked it up again in the last couple of days and hit 25kwords last night. The break was sort of useful as it let me come at the opening chapters again after a slight break, and I decided to somewhat rejig how my protagonist handles things. I think either way works, but this one is slightly better paced for easing the reader into her life. It was quite a small change, but ended up needing a lot of rewriting. This is an example of how my writing process works, I do too much planning to be a pure pantser, but I loop back on myself to rewrite stuff time after time as the writing process reveals deeper character motivations or plot points that need addressing. I don't think it would be too different if I was plotting it out in detail, though I'm currently trying to decide whether I've written myself into a corner where the only sensible options require my protagonist to brief the attorney general, and possibly the president, which is much higher up the tree of government than I'd planned, but with the degree of disruption I just imposed, it's looking awfully like it's necessary and realistic. I'd planned that disruption, but when you delve into the details of how it would play out, the reality starts to dictate where your story can go.

Seriously, WTF is My Government Doing?

A Brexit no deal scenario was voted down last night, which almost certainly means Parliament voting to request an extension to Article 50 later today. But meantime, three senior Tories, including IDS, who is a one time leader of the party, apparently flew to Poland to lobby the Polish government to oppose extending Article 50. So that's lobbying a foreign power to oppose the expressed will of Parliament. I'm going to need someone to explain to me how that isn't treason. And while IDS was in Poland, Farage was telling the EU parliament to do the same, and the seriously shady Arron Banks was apparently lobbying the Italian fascists of the Northern League to do the same. The story.

Recent Reading:

Thunderbird Falls, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 2, or 3)

Newbie shaman and beat cop Joanne Walker (aka Siobhan Walkingstick) has been slacking off on learning the metaphysical side of her new powers, but then she discovers a body in the University of Washington showers after a fencing lesson, and the case turns out to involve her more intimately than she could ever have imagined. The dead woman was the Mother of a coven, and they want Jo to take her place, which given no one knows Jo was a teenage mother pretty much confirms they're the real deal. The weather is still badly out of whack after Jo's defeat of Cernunnos in book one and the coven claim to have a way to fix that, by teaming up with an ancient spirit warrior. Jo wants advice on how to proceed, but Coyote is MIA, and then her partner/father figure Gary the seventy-something taxi driver has a heart attack that puts him in the hospital, so it's just as well someone had answered her 'please teach me' on the metaphysical version of craigslist. Well, probably.

I was quite impressed by this, it's rare for someone to have their protagonist screw up quite so emphatically, but Jo pulls through in the end, though Lake Washington may never be the same again. What's irritating, and hinted at by the 'Book 2, or 3' above, is that the narrative keeps referencing a story that happens between book 1 and this one, and apparently it's not published in the main series, but in a multi-author collection of novellas, which isn't linked from Murphy's author page on Amazon as far as I can see. I only found out about it by going and looking in her Wikipedia entry.

Coyote Dreams, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 3, or 4)

It's a fortnight on from the events of Thunderbird Falls, the day after the Fourth of July, and large chunks of Seattle PD appear to be having a duvet day. Jo would be happier having a duvet day, having gotten thoroughly blitzed at the North Precinct picnic, but she just woke up to find a strange man in her bed, and neither of them quite remember what happened last night. To make matters worse, she's rapidly joined for breakfast by Gary, and then by a six-year-old and her mother she promised a tour of the precinct, and forgot, plus her fencing coach Phoebe (on the phone), who is so pissed that Jo forgot her lesson that she is insisting on taking her clubbing later. To make the morning perfect, she then finds her boss at the door. Captain Michael Morrison's mission is more serious, Jo's friend Detective Billy Holliday is comatose in the hospital for unknown reasons, and never mind his strict adherence to logic, if one of his people is down then he wants the only healer in the department to see what she can do. To make things worse, Morrison's appearance completes the circle on why Jo ended up in bed with a strange man, because she saw Morrison hanging out with a strange woman at the picnic, which drove her UST for him into overdrive and led to her drinking most of a quart of whiskey. And it turns out that her one night stand, Mark Bragg, is Morrison's new girlfriend's brother (twin brother, it eventually turns out). So hey, double date from hell.

Things escalate as more and more of the department falls under the influence of the sleeping sickness, and worse, when Jo tries to contact Coyote, she finds him trapped by the same power, and maybe dead. With her Coyote unavailable casting about for help drags ger into what is almost a retconning of her teenage years. Apparently Coyote isn't a new factor in her life, he first appeared to her when she had her first period, but kept that memory for her sleeping mind, because waking-Jo was a little shit who couldn't be trusted with that kind of power. As if that wasn't enough extra pressure, junior-Jo was a little shit because she's a newly created soul, and hasn't had aeons of reincarnation to learn how to handle that kind of power. And she needs that kind of power because the Great Spirit has a job for her at some point in the future. So no pressure then, negotiate the rapids of your UST with your boss wanting to rip the face off his new girlfriend, figure out where the relationship with hellbitch's brother is going, save all your friends from the sleeping sickness, and prep for it by facing off with your teenage self in a way you're fairly certain is going to ruin her life.

I'm not sure whether this is a retconning so much as a uniquely unreliable narrator, but it's pretty well handled and it does make Jo's backstory make more sense. And the ultimate stakes bigger. On the downside there are still multiple references to the missing story.

Other Reading

Amazon is having a sale of Kindle military history stuff, and the chance to pick up books that normally go for c£30 for £1:20 was too much to resist. I ended up buying 8 books (so far), I'm not certain how much I saved, but probably comfortably over a hundred, possibly two. A couple are duplicates of books I already have in hardback, but they're books I reference a lot, so £1:20 for searchable text and access when I'm up in Durham is well worth it. Of the others, five were on my 'buy when you get a chance' list, and only one was an impulse purchase. I think that was quite restrained of me ;)

I've been back home since a week last Thursday, and not really back into the routine of I live here yet. I know I do poorly with disrupted routines, but I seem to be having a harder time of it this year. Mostly I've been goofing off and playing computer games (Ark and Xcom II). And DW got caught up in my repeated pattern of "Oh, I didn't do that yesterday. I should have done that yesterday. Now I'm too stressed by that to do it today". Helpful that isn't.

I didn't actually see that much of Dad while I was up as times I can get a lift to get over to the home now tend to be times he's asleep, but we did have a good session with him on his birthday (82) and a solid couple of hours on my last day.

The train trip back from Durham was the usual adventure: 

PA: "Hi, this is is the train manager. If you're wondering why the train is currently stationary, we've just been told that the train ahead of us has hit a herd of cows just north of Doncaster station. We may be here for a while."

45 minutes later: "We've now been given permission to  proceed slowly. The train ahead apparently hit three cows and while the track has now been cleared, those who may find these things distressing may want to avoid looking out of the windows for the next few minutes."

Which of course meant half the people on the train promptly plastered themselves against the windows. "It was definitely cows," to quote the young mum opposite.

That meant we were about 55 minutes late into London, so I should be able to claim part of the fare back, and unfortunately pushed me into rush-hour traffic on the leg from London to Rochester. That's really not my idea of fun, but at least I'm guaranteed a seat. No problems with wheelchair assistance this time, but I do need to talk to LNER (the new train operating company for the East Coast Main Line) about problems with luggage around the wheelchair spaces making it impossible to access the accessible toilet.  I got a taxi for the final leg of the journey as usual and the taxi driver was able to prove that, contrary to my previous belief, it is possible to fit my chair in the boot of a Prius (which 90% of the local taxi drivers use). It's incredibly tight (because the Prius boot is very shallow given the batteries underneath it), but if you push the chair right up against the back seat, and take one wheel off, and very gingerly press down on the hatchback (given the glass is touching the chair) it will lock. Just. Seriously, Toyota, if the taxi role is a big part of the Prius' market, you may want to look at the boot design!

A productive phonecall (finally!) with the manager of the nurse-assessor from hell means I might make it home as early as Wednesday. She wants a first hand meeting with my sister to discuss the complaint, but I think the appalled silences when we discussed what had happened means our message has gotten across. My sister's availability for meetings given school means the assessment meeting I've been hanging around for has been pushed back to, probably, late May. If we can confirm that on Monday, then I'll try to book a ticket home on Tuesday, for travel on Wednesday or Thursday, then come back up at the end of May for a couple of weeks.

Reading achieved:

Alpha and Omega series, Patricia Briggs

On the Prowl (novella)
Cry Wolf
Hunting Ground (Amusingly I now have a much better understanding of the geography of the story from having written a novel and a half occuring over much the same ground since I read it last)
Fair Game (just started)

Mercy Thompson series, Patricia Briggs

Silver Borne
River Marked (probably my favourite of the series)
Frost Burned
Night Broken

(I'd have started with the four earlier Mercy Thompson books from preference, but they're old enough I have them in dead tree format, so  aren't to hand)

Writing-wise I've had a productive week, largely the potentially nightmarish re-write of Chapter 10, which was both changing PoV and having much of the dialogue shift from being Old PoV to sidekick to being new PoV to old PoV. I brought in a new batch of chapters, through to Chapter14, for rework on Friday, which takes the draft to c70Kwords. I'm not quite as happy with some of the writing here, so while I've incorporated the mark-ups, I think I need to take another line-editing pass.

In the (almost) four weeks I've been in Durham, we've gone from sleet and snow to sitting out in the garden all afternoon. I guess Spring is definitely here.
 

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.

So I'd no sooner gotten over Disabled People Destroy SF rejecting my fiction submission, than I got a rejection for my non-fiction submission - "didn't work for me". I suspect it may have been too confrontational for their liking. Turns out two rejections in relatively quick succession seems to double up on the effects. I was expecting the self-doubt and the depression, but the anger was new. Not quite sure how to deal with these other than to keep trying and seeing if I can build up a tolerance.

Damn, I really wanted to crack that market. Well, I want to crack any market, but that one particularly mattered to me.

The depression meant I was late getting back to my sister with my input for the next meeting re Dad's care funding, which meant she ran into various issues, and ended up with the two of us on the phone to each other at half past midnight last night, which is not an ideal time for discussing the technical minutiae of the CHC Decision Support Tool (though I suspect they'll be fairly freaked just by the fact we've looked it up and run through it ourselves). It turns out there is actually something more depressing than running through a benefit assessment form for yourself - running through it for a family member who can no longer handle it themselves.

One unexpected benefit of all of this was that when I went to open up the Word file for the DST, expecting to have to use Word Online, my desktop said "Hang on while I install Office" (or words to that effect). I'd worked out a couple of weeks ago that the desktop and laptop somehow had two different Microsoft accounts with the same email address, and when MS asked which one I was trying to use managed to get the desktop logged onto the laptop account, and that seems to have made the difference the next time I tried to open an Office file. I thought I was going to have to buy an additional license for the desktop to cover it (Word Online is too slow for anything but a backup), but clearly my Office subscription either covered the desktop under the main license or included a spare license - score!

When I should have been looking at the DST I was actually playing Ark. Which turns out to be very good as a distraction, but not so good for my wrists, which are stinging through overuse. I've had this before with other games, if I cut down on the amount I've been playing then they should settle down relatively quickly (but note the 'if'). I've also taken measures to cut down what I'm doing within the game by (quite literally) pitching two thirds of my dodos over the compound wall. OTOH I've now tamed two triceratops (Tyrone and Teri), which make good pack mules. Fortunately you can leave those tied to a hitching rail near a feeding trough and ignore them until you need them. I've also tamed six parasaurolophus (-opholi? Para, Ventura, Mara, Alpha and Omega and Lara) for riding. I only intended taming a couple of parasaurs, but Mara and Lara both spawned on my doorstep and it was easier to tame them than do anything else, while Alpha and Omega turned up as Mara and Ventura's egg.  What started out as a separate barn for the dodos (their squawking was driving me up the wall) has now become a dodo barn/general hatchery. Alpha and Omega worked fine (incidentally they have a particularly evil-looking colour scheme - black scales with orange highlights on their spinal ridges), but Tyrone and Teri's egg Treo dropped dead on me shortly after hatching. I'm now working my way through my stored fertile dodo eggs, but any hatchlings without interesting colour mutations get pitched over the wall - essentially I've turned into a breeder of overgrown budgies.

So my sister's been trying to handle what's going on with my dad's nursing care funding, and we decided she should put in a complaint, which I drafted for her to use as a template for either talking to or emailing the nurse-assessor's line manager.

A week later and we're still trying to figure out who her line manager is, and even who she works for has been a pain in the arse to pin down.

We finally got it figured out today that we needed to speak to the local CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group - one of the government's wizard schemes to try and undermine the NHS by moving funding control into the hands of people with a profit motive, in this case the local doctors). It shouldn't be difficult to get the details of your local CCG, but if you don't know what it's called (her GP's surgery wasn't answering the phone to ask them), then it gets a wee bit more difficult. Local organisations normally go by some variant of 'South West Durham', but it turns out the CCG is 'Durham Dales, Easington and Sedgefield', and I only found that out by accident when I remembered local mental healthcare comes under the 'Durham and Eskdale NHS Trust' and googled 'dale CCG'. And I was doubly wrong as it's actually the "Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust' (South West Durham = Wear Valley).

So she rang the CCG and actually got the receptionist, the first human she's managed to speak to in all of this. She explained what had happened and why she wants to make a complaint (by the argument the nurse-assessor is using, even dad's time in the regional acute stroke unit wouldn't count as requiring nursing care), and the receptionist said "Yes, that's definitely us you need to speak to, but I don't actually know who that should go to. I'll go find that out, and ring you back, and my name is X if you need to get back to us.'  Which was encouraging.

She rang back pretty much straight away. "Yes, the person I spoke to agrees that needs to come to us, but they don't know who should be handling it either. We've never had a complaint at this stage of the process before. Could you email it to us with a "To who it may concern" header and we promise we'll try and get it to the right people."

Seriously!? A medical organisation that knows it has a complaints procedure, but no one actually knows how to access it? (And the cherry on the cake is she did know they've contracted out the complaints process, and I'll bet it's not set up to handle medical malpractice complaints).
 

I didn't see quite as much of my dad as I'd have liked, my sister being away for the middle 10 days limited how often I could get over to see him (or her for that matter), and the one time we tried taxiing over he slept through the entire visit, but still good to see him, and he was on good form and clearly pleased to see me when he was awake, and of course I saw a lot of my mother. Other than that, a couple of Sunday lunches were the only time I stirred from the house.

I think I'm officially declaring today a holiday to recover from the holiday, I'll think about getting back into my normal routine tomorrow. Maybe.