Productivity. I haz it.

Just over par for NaNo word count for today and it's only 9:00 am. Par for day six is 10,000 words finished and I'm currently at 10,398. I'm taking a break. Still lots and lots of hours in the day to get ahead on count just in case.

I'm going to have a pumpkin doughnut and play Dragon Age for a bit.

My posse's on Xbox.
Dragon Age: Origins property of Bioware.

Wading in the shallows, swimming in the deeps.

My characters are changing. They are evolving, a little bit at a time, into people. It is strange to me, I invented them; I could feel them standing next to me, living and breathing. But now they are...faceting themselves? I guess? My characters characters and demeanor and outlook and personality are changing.

Let's go a bit deeper, shall we? Into the unspoken.

I believe their evolution bodes well for my novel. It's easier to overlook absurdities in plot when you're characters are real people, with real reactions and not each a paragon. If my protagonist characters live out my personal ideals in full they just aren't believable.

Good on you, characters! Way to be team players!!!!! Momma wants to severely cut back on her day job! If I can at least make what I am making now (which is not a great deal, I only work three days a week) I can afford to leave my main job, then I can concentrate even more of my energies on writing. Use up some of the eleven story ideas I have. Make a decent salary.

An atoll. I'm not sure what this lifeless atoll has to do with abundance.
But the ocean is significant. And pretty.

Lately I have had the feeling that the waves of chaos are carrying me towards certain change. There have been a few times in my life when I have had (what seem to be to me) very strong signals that a certain way is clear.

I've had a bit, lately. Okay, more than a bit.
I've also had that unsettled feeling that something bigger is coming.

Some days...most days, I feel so strongly that this is what I'm meant to do. I am a bet hedger; I rarely think in absolutes. I am a hesitater, a safety first girl. But I know I am meant to do this. Not I could do this. Not I should do this. Not even I can do this. I feel I am meant to do this. It is a certainty, that if I write and keep writing I will get published.

I am meant to be a writer of science fiction and fantasy, spanning several sub-genres. A published author, with an agent and everything.

Then...other days...I wonder if I'm just freaking delusional.

This...is a person standing in the mist. That is an odd silhouette.
Evocative, yes? Of what I'm not sure.
I need it to work on my subconscious a bit.

I need to go put pants on. I'm a secondary LMT at a chiro office, scheduled to work Fridays but if there's no one on my books I can just stay at home on-call. The office is only eight minutes from my house. But to be a conscientious on-call employee I should be wearing my work clothes while I work on my real work.

The chiro job I'm keeping. If I am able to leave my main job I'd still upkeep my CEs for my massage therapy license and my liability insurance. That's my bet hedge, staying nominally employed in my current field so that if I do need to look for another position I won't have a gap in my resume. 

BODY, SHOULDER, AND GROIN ARMOR: Because bruised ribs take weeks to heal.

Today's study in SCA heavy weapons combat gear is torso and groin protection. See page 13, section E. at the link.

I'm not doing too, too many pictures today because I need to finish this before my first client and after that client, if I have no other client, will be dedicated to my NaNo writing.

Body, Shoulder, and Groin Armor:
1. The kidney area and the floating ribs shall be covered with a minimum of heavy leather worn over .25 inch (6 mm) of closed-cell foam or equivalent padding.


Torso injuries will fuck you up. I've had a rib injury, a good knee blow to the left floating ribs dug up underneath and it took a week and a half at least to move without stabbing pain. I couldn't sneeze properly. It hurt to take a deep breath. Pleurisy, an infection of the lining of the lungs, can be a complication of broken ribs. My husband thinks I had a broken rib. I do not, I think it was only a bruised rib. It didn't hurt that much...well, as much as I surmise a truly broken rib would hurt...and it was mostly healed in three weeks. Okay, maybe four weeks. I was pissed I didn't get a visible bruise though, for as much as it did hurt.

Kidney belt: Windrose Armoury

Okay, enough about my bruised rib. There's also kidney damage to consider. Kidney injury can cause kidney failure. Left untreated you may have permanent kidney failure, which means life-long dialysis or kidney transplant.

All for want of a kidney belt. I think $200 is cheap when you consider the alternative of a lifetime of disability or possible death.

At this point I will I have read about the less expensive ways to make this protection. I like this one, so it's the one I'm talking about today.

There are also full torso protection items like combination steel back and breast plates, called a cuirass. There's a coat of plates or a brigandine, which are both leather garment with steel plates riveted on. They differ in the the size of the steel plates.

There's also lamellar armor, small leather plates laced together. I like this one particularly, just because I like the look but also because it's much closer the the period of my persona which is eighth or ninth century Norse, if you're just tuning in. I just now found this amazing resource for plastic lamellar plates and they have a suit builder, plug in your measurements and go and you can even set it for female measurements, WOW I AM NOW SUPER STOKED! I would prefer leather but this is a very nice alternative. A gambeson would be needed IMO, a sort of padded coat.

An example of lamellar body armour.
Skaldic.com

2. For men, the groin must be covered by a minimum of a rigid athletic cup (e.g., an ice hockey, soccer, karate, or baseball cup) worn in a supporter or fighting garment designed to hold the cup in place, or equivalent armor.

Haven't most of you gentleman worn a cup? Did they make you wear one in high school gym class? I'm sure you probably have your own resources for figuring that stuff out.

3. For women, groin protection of closed-cell foam or heavy leather or the equivalent is required to cover the pubic bone area. The wearing of a male athletic cup by female fighters is prohibited.

It was recommended to me by a young lady who knows what she's talking about to use the women's hockey shorts. I got the compression shorts which I find quite comfortable, but you can also get them in a loose boxer style.





4. Separate breast cups are prohibited unless connected by or mounted on an interconnecting rigid piece, for example, a heavy leather or metal breastplate.

It is my understanding that this rule is made because the separate breast cups can break apart, dig into your chest, and cause serious injury. That's just stupid. Don't do that.

Well, despite the inclusion of "shoulder" in the regulation heading, there was no explicit instruction for pauldrons or spaulders. As I have only six minutes left until my client gets here, we'll save that for another time.

I don't how to ride a horse.

Er, that is, the more advanced mechanics of the activity. I know the basics. And done them. I don't know if you can really call that riding though. That's more like, I'm sitting on the horse and the horse is following it's friend on a track it's been on a thousand, thousand times before.

But how it feels to really ride, that I don't know.

Stunt rider.
That...will probably never be me.
But you have to admit, that is badass.

This lack of knowledge is making my current scene difficult. It's very difficult to write a fantasy novel without having people ride horses, unless you want to have people walk everywhere...and really, is that realistic? I know they did it in LOTR, partly, but you can travel so much faster on a horse. It won't make any sense if my group wanders around on foot.

Horses require care though. Feeding. Shelter. I don't know how to write about any of those things, I suppose I could just leave them out, but it will make it less believable.

I find it highly amusing that I can write about fighting with some small authenticity, but not horse back riding. I know how it feels to get hit and to hit someone, what it's like to be shoved into the wall, kneed in the ribs, and picked up and body slammed. Now, I don't know the extremes of a real fight, the extent of the pain, but I know the feel of the actions.

But I don't know about a basic method of transportation used by humans for thousands of years.

The solution is obvious yet unobtainable.

Take riding lessons. But riding lessons cost money. I haz no extra money at all, at all. And not time. But mostly it's the no money thing.

This photo is NOT a stunt rider, just a crazy Spaniard.
This photo was taken at a Las Luminarias festival.
I would call out Ramirez on this, but he's actually Egyptian so....

Well, I'll just have to muddle through and make the rest of the book so awesome that it the lame bits about riding get ignored and I'll make enough to take riding lessons.

No fire, thanks. I'll be perfectly happy to ride an impure horse.

Where did all this rope come from?

PSA: Googling the simple two word phrase "holding back" WILL net you a goodly number of Rule 34. I'm just sayin'.

It's the second day of NaNoWriMo, herein to be called NANO, or NaNo, for the obvious reason that it's less clunky and good lord, I'm dealing with enough clunky of my own making right now.

Thirty days, 50,000 words. Average 1667 words a day, you're gold. You win. Winning being completing the first draft, or 50,000 words of your first draft. After my first day of writing 1804 words I'm wondering how people cram a whole book into fifty thousand words. I have just two scenes and they need extensive addition. My inspiration comes to me in dialogue mostly and that's how I'm going to plow through, so lots and lots and lots of scene setting will need to be added later.

Oh my gods, wanting to go back and edit. Getting the dialogue and emotional junk down is the "easy" part. Not going back to add scenery and tweak the dialogue to perfection is kill-ing me. But if I did that I'd have perhaps four scenes by months end. And four scenes ain't a book. Unless you're super skilled and I, as yet, am not.

Pictured: Not me, but it's definitely how I feel, holding myself back from editing.

The above is apparently Killian Jones playing Captain Hook in Once Upon A Time. I never saw Killian (whose name I am stealing for my lists) because I didn't watch past the second season. Not because it wasn't good (Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold is gloryful) but because I just can't seem to get the hang of television anymore, even on DVD.

My fictional writer declines to come out and play first thing in the morning, even with story notes to embellish. The caffeine must permeate the layers of my brain to the core to flip the fiction switch. But I have the need to hear the clickety-clack, so a blog entry does not go amiss. Stream-of-consciousness self-examinational bullshit is easy at six am. Fortunately I'm fortunate in the fact that today is Monday and I have plenty of free time, needing only to stop occasionally to switch over the laundry, My wonderful husband is all-the-way-May supportive of my dream to become a writer, but he does need work clothes to go to his job which pays the bills until I become slightly rich and a teensy bit famous. Really I'd settle for just earning what I earn now, but writing instead of being an licensed massage therapist.

Anyway, there's laundry and I should get some pell practice in at some point and dear god, the cat just laid a stink bomb in her pan and it's wafting over my desk as I type. I have to go clean that (literal) shit up stat.