This and that on a cold, rainy day

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing
  • Blood test this morning. The tech couldn’t find a vein. Ended up sticking both arms looking for blood. Might have been less painful if she’d bit my neck.
  • Congratulations to my Thomas-Jacob Publishing colleague Sharon Heath (The Fleur Trilogy) on the release of her new novel Chasing Eve, “a funny, sad, hair-raising adventure into the underbelly of the City of Angels, where society’s invisible people make a difference to themselves and to others, and where love sometimes actually saves the day.”
  • Bodkin Point Arrow – Wikipedia photo

    I usually write fiction in third person restricted. Among other things, that means that basically the entire novel is shown via the point of view of the protagonist. If you use that POV, you know there are dozens of ways of showing the protagonist’s attitude without saying “he thought” or “she thought.” Now that I’ve chosen to write the work in progress with an omniscient narrator POV without showing what anyone (mostly) is thinking, I keep having to delete things I’d normally write. Even something so mundane as Luckily the barking dog finally shut up is out of bounds because somebody has to be thinking that; I’m not going to be an old-fashioned author who intrudes into his stories by commenting on things as they happen. Tentatively, the book is called Dark Arrows.

  • Yes, we will be watching Star Trek: Picard starting tonight on CBS All Access. The next-generation series with Patrick Stewart was, I think, the best of the Star Trek programs, so it will be nice to see him again in this ten-episode series. I read that CBS has already ordered more episodes, so perhaps we’ll have at least two seasons to look forward to.
  • My blood test results show that the forty days of radiation therapy probably got rid of the prostate cancer. Even though the radiation oncology department thinks “that’s that,” the urology department thinks it’s safe for me to continue the hormone therapy for two years as long as I can dolerate the shots. I said, “Tolerate the shots? Does that mean they don’t kill me.” The answer was, “If you get bad hot flashes, we’ll stop them.” Oh.

—Malcolm

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2 thoughts on “This and that on a cold, rainy day”

  1. Poor you with the bloodtest. I had to ask one to stop prospecting for blood once. She got very sniffy when I maintained that nobody else had ever had trouble finding a perfectly plump vein in the arm I presented her with. These days that sort of thing goes on one’s record over here.

    Looking at your 3rd person omniscient sentence above it looks as though the difference between that and your usual 3rd person limited is adverbs. Probably adjectives as well. Qualifiers of all kinds, in fact, will be muted. I guess it will challenge you to find exactly the right verb and noun.

    Star Trek: Discovery has just started over here. It promises well. Although I am getting a bit bored with the Klingons shouting at each other in Klingon all the time, this being rendered for non-Klingon speakers IN CAPITALS. If it gets much worse I shall have to dig out my ‘Conversational Klingon’ CD. Yup. I was a real anorak back in the day. I envy you Picard. I am guessing that he will not be doing his own stunts, at his age.

    The first episode of ‘Yellowstone’ has just aired here too. I’m not sure what to make of that. Is Kevin Costner still in his ‘Dances with Wolves’ place, or having a reaction to it: discuss.

    And so to bed, as Pepys might say. It has been a long day of wrestling with my tax information and thinking up ways to avoid wrestling with my tax information, and implementing the ways I thought up of avoiding wrestling with my tax information. Tax is responsible for a lot of (wasted) creativity in this house. Grrr.

    Hope you aren’t too bruised tomorrow. 🙂

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