Now that I'm feeling better (Sat and Sun we were too tired to think; Monday we felt like survivors.) I remembered a few things I forgot to mention in yesterday's scuba-related complaint-fest. For one thing, I forgot to mention another fun reminder of the weekend. Sunburn!
There's good news; I'm nearly as fish-belly white as I was before the weekend, since we spent 98% of or time in the pool in a full body wetsuit, including booties (they're needed for the fins we own) and usually gloves as well (to get used to fastening/opening staps and buckles with them on). My face was uncovered though, and since most of our time was on the surface, I got a pretty nice rosy red glow. This despite the fact that I had a scuba mask on most of the time. Drawback of the nice, high-visibility, transparent plastic it's made from, I suppose. I was a bit red Saturday evening, enough to smear on some aloe vera (just cut a spear of the plant on the back patio; fresh stuff is sorta smelly, but far better than any lotion made from its extract). I thought Sunday would be no problem though, since we were supposed to wear the extra hooded addition to the wetsuit. That and it had been cloudy and drizzling on and off all day Saturday.
So of course Sunday was clear and bright and sunny all day, and we didn't have to put on the hoods and such until the second session of the day, and even then most of us didn't wear them all the time, since they were so hot and constricting. Thus leaving me more time to sunburn.
I'm not really red anymore, but I'm peeling a bit, and the white dots all over my face are combining with my stubble to make me look quite rugose. It's not my best look.
Also, as you could probably have predicted, my hopes of spending a few hours a day working on the novel were dashed. Kinda hard to write when you spend 95% of your waking time either learning to scuba dive, eating before and after scuba diving, or driving to and from the scuba diving destination. I did get an hour's work done Saturday morning, when I woke up at 5 and had some time before our 7am wake up, but other than that I hardly even had time to surf a bit in the evening before crashing gratefully into the bed. Yesterday was pretty much a recovery day; Malaya had to run some errands and spend some time with her mom, while I mostly just laid around the house, doing a bit of work but mostly catching up on Internet news and blogs and such.
Today though, things can get back to normal. I went to bed with Malaya around midnight, we slept pretty well, and after I woke up at 7 I dozed in bed for 45 minutes until the alarm went off, thinking about the scenes I'm about to write in the novel. It's kinda fun; I'm very near the end when all the plot threads come together and the biggest scenes of the book are all about to take place, bang, bang, bang. I wrote the opening chapter to this novel (in a modified form) nearly 4 years ago, and I've always known how the story was going to end; it was the middle that needed work, to get characters from point A to point X, with numerous stops in between. Now that I'm finally to the end, with the big payoff scenes I've had in my head for years, it's strange. I'm reading notes on images and events I wrote and dated in 2002.
Not so long by some standards; Stephen King went what, 30 years between Dark Tower 1 and Dark Tower 7? But it's the longest I've ever gone between writing down story notes and then actually getting back to expand and finalize them. I'm just happy to see that I still like most of the ideas, and that I managed to write the novel without changing the characters so much that my initial ideas for the ending were ruined. I seldom make it through a chapter without that problem, when the last 1/4 of the plot outline becomes useless due to changes in details I made while fleshing it out.
And yes, I'd hoped to be finished with this novel in December 2005, but better late than never, and I'm actually sort of looking forward to being done and being able to go back to the start to rewrite the first few overlong, rambling chapters. I'm going to have to clip out literally 200-300k words from chapters 2-4, which would be oh, 600 pages or more in manuscript form. That's pretty much discarding an entire novel of minor plot events and digressions, if you can belive it. No wonder this thing has taken me so long to write, with at least a third of it basically dead space. Not that I'll admit that in a decade, when it comes time to publish some sort of cash cow of an unexpurgated trilogy-length version of the novel. *cough*
Labels: scuba, the fantasy novel
