I'm moving my word-count posts to Bart's thing_in_150, so as not to spam everybody every day.

I want some book-recs from you guys.  The thing is, I love Ursula K. LeGuin.  Love love.  I read one of her books and it puts my head in a place that smells like rain and tastes like dark chocolate.  But after I've finished one of them, I go to pick up some other book, something I would have been perfectly happy to read before... and because it's not LeGuin, I can't enjoy it.  All I can see is how the characters aren't as real as LeGuin's, the writing isn't as deft as LeGuin's, the mood isn't as fresh and crisp and intimate.  So what I want is books that I can read after I read The Dispossessed or The Lathe of Heaven or Tehanu, and not feel like I'm reading a cheap imitation-- either because they're so different that I don't compare them, or because they're so wonderful that it doesn't matter if I compare them.  Any ideas?

506 words tonight.  Mostly a bunch of fifteen-year-olds standing behind a house playing with lumps of clay.

Meme time!

lauradise got it from garunya, who got it from jenwrites, who got it from morgan_dhu.  (I blame poor personal hygiene.)

1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, or your favorite kind of sandwich, maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.
5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.

Here are garunya's questions and my answers.

1) You are marooned on a deserted record. (It's Meaningless by Jon Brion, if you must know.) Which three islands do you bring with you, and why?

Cottaneva Needle.  It's a needle, so if I run around really fast in circles holding it, I can play the record.  So listening to Meaningless over and over ought to get me through the first two hours or so.

Denarau Island.  Has some beautiful spas.  After sprinting in circles for two hours, I'll need to relax.

Hong Kong.  I'll wander around until I find my friend Daisy-- which might take years, but what else do I have to do?  Listen to Meaningless again?-- and then enlist her aid in commandeering a bulldozer.  Then we'll drive the bulldozer into the foothills of Fung Wong Shan and start ripping up some serious earth.  Fung Wong Shan will wake right the heck up (Fung Wong Lung?), and, after we grovel and apologize for a while, consent to give us a lift off the deserted record and back to civilization.  Whereupon I'd delete Jon Brion's Wikipedia page.

2) The Ghost of Christmas Hack offers you two futures: writing one novel that becomes a classic and is still read and appreciated 100 years after your death, but never writing anything else, or writing one novel every year or two and consistently getting better. Which do you choose, and why?

The latter, no question about it.  There's very little I'd like more than to write a novel every year or two and consistently get better.  (Unless I'm scheduled to die next year.  Then I guess I'd prefer the former.)  The novels that are the occasional byproduct of writing are very nice, but it's the routine itself, all the work and tooth-grinding and discovery of it, that's what's most important to me.  If I never got better, it might not be enough on its own... but if I constantly got better, then I'd be golden.  Sign me up.

3) The VP lifeboat is overloaded, and we're running out of food. If you don't act to save us, none of us will survive. What do you do?

All I'll have to do is stay out of the way as Jim MacDonald improvises a full mast, sail, and rigging out of various articles of clothing and tacks us toward land.  He'll then calculate exactly how to shepherd our rations to hold out until we get to shore, supplemented by the hearty yet compact supplies he's stowed in the jump kit he's brought along.  By the time we sight land, no one will have heatstroke, dehydration, or scurvy, and Jim will be cooking us pancakes on an overturned barrel.  He will have brought New Hampshire maple syrup.

This answer applies to any VP-related emergency situation.

4) To serve, or to protect, and why?

I'm going to interpret this as offering me my choice of superpower.  I choose to protect.  My friends and my family can serve their own selves-- they're capable, accomplished people.  But if I can protect them from car accidents and lightning strikes and random ($%&$-ing lung cancers that pop up even though they've never smoked a cigarette in their whole lives, then yes, I'd like to do that.

5) York Peppermint Patties famously advertised a variety of activities that reminded actors of eating a York Peppermint Patty. When you are writing, which candy bar is it like, and why?

Ooh.  I have to bend the rules on this one, because I can't think of any particular candy bar, but I know just what candy it's like.  Writing is like eating a cream-soda-flavored Jones Carbonated Candy. 

All of these things are true.
* The first time I ate one, I was astonished.  It was like no other candy.  I immediately wanted another one; days after, I was still thinking about them.
* I obsessed.  I read about them on the internet.  I talked to friends about them.  I went to multiple stores searching for them.  (They're in Target, but only in the check-out lines, not in the candy aisle.)
* When I finally got my own supply, at first I binged on them.  Then I felt ill.  Eating them wasn't fun any more.  I gave them up.
* I couldn't stop thinking about them.
* I settled into a routine, eating several a day.  That worked out well.  I enjoyed them again.  Something about them-- the tingle, the froth, the sweet egginess-- gave me something I needed, something I couldn't get anywhere else.  And that made it all worth it, even though they're expensive and cut the roof of my mouth into ribbons and sometimes don't even taste that good.

Pretty much just like writing.

843 words tonight, without hardly trying.  I love it when it goes like that.  I'm finally out of the exposition, which will, i think, be as boring to read as it was to write.  I look forward to massacring it mercilessly.  But later!  For now, onward!

One thing I am worrying about is what's going to happen to my writing when Adam gets back.  I have such a nice schedule now: come home, make dinner, eat, sit down to write.  But I don't know how that's going to work when I'm not alone.  I'm not used to having him around yet, so it's hard for me to go off by myself when he's right there.  (We've been long distance for four years, and are only now starting to live together.  It's created a kind of starvation mentality.  Every time he's there, my lizard brain mutters constantly in my ear, "He'll be gone soon!  Hoard him now!") 

Maybe I'll make like you crazy people and get up at 4:30 in the morning to write.  Yeah, I can just imagine how that would go.

Strangers:  But we brought you here to hlep us.
Ravi:  How cna i help you i don't even know you.  What do you want?
Strangers:  To help you.  us.
Ravi:  Okay.
Strangers:  Okay thank you.

It would certainly make the novel shorter.  "And then everybody helped and evreything was good foever.  The end."  I'd probably slap it in an envelope and sleep-walk it to the mailbox without addressing it.  Or I'd send it to The New England Journal of Medicine.   This will be exciting.

583 words today.  Mainly more exposition, but I seem to have gotten to the end of it (and thank you for all your advice on that count!).  The next session should be exciting.  Unless I'm mistaken, there will be pottery involved.

I learned something surprising today, which is that nobody in the world can tell what this userpic is a picture of.  My coworker stared at it for a few minutes, tossing out a guess every couple of seconds, and all of them were wrong.  Can you guys tell what it is?  (No fair cheating and looking at the keywords.)

Edited to add: Good guesses all.  As you guessed, it is a kind of swarm, though not of bees or locusts-- it's actually a humongous flock of starlings, reacting to a falcon (the bigger speck).  I love those giant flocks, like big aerial amoebas.  I've seen them in person a couple times, usually streaming over the road, and there are some really good pictures out there, too:  here, and here, and here.

599 words tonight.  That's a bit more like it.  It was 599 words of exposition, though, which makes me a little twitchy.  Is there any way I can avoid this big chunk of exposition?  Do I need to?  This is the situation:

Two strangers pull Ravi through a door into their world.  There is some running about and excitement.  Once things settle down:
Ravi:  Ack!  Put me back!
Strangers:  But we brought you here to help us!
Ravi:  Why?  What is this place?  Who are you?
Strangers:  Let us explain!  For the next six hundred words!

(Yes, all of my characters end all their sentences in exclamation points.  It's just like Mark Trail!)  Hmp.  I don't know.  Any brilliant ideas?

We found a kingfisher lying on the grass outside my office today.  It must have flown into a window and broken its neck, but it looked unbroken, beautiful, clean.  I work at an ornithology lab, so someone could tell us that it was a male belted kingfisher, less than a year old.  Black eyes, white breast, blue wings, tremendous beak.  Like this one.  So sad and useless.

Tonight: 316 words, plus some outlining.  Um... okay.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back up to full speed.  And already I can see that my protagonist isn't going to fall in love with who I wanted him to.  Grmghrm.

Five days until my boyfriend comes back!  Living by myself in a strange town has lost its novelty, oddly enough.  I need human contact with people who aren't my coworkers.  I also need to not always be the one who has to trap the spiders and moths and ants and bees and fruit flies and strangely-articulated wasp-like creatures who take up residence with me.  (And right after I complained about living alone, too.  I'm just hard to please, I guess.)

Just back from the VPX reunion, and I wish it hadn't gone so quickly!  It was wonderful to see everyone (or some small subset of everyone) again.  So here's my shiny new journal, created in a fit of must-stay-in-touch.  This is my second LJ; the first is haunted by the ghost of my high-school self, who floats through years of archives moaning about boys who do and do not like her and college admissions and the Meaning of Life.  I'm fond of her, but she's not fit for public consumption.  (Do not search for this journal.  You won't find it.  ...Or you will, and I'll turn amusing colors.)

Maybe I can also use this as a writing-whip!  My routine of the past few weeks has been to work on the novel (working title: Clay) from 8pm to 9pm every night, which usually turns up around 600-700 words.  Tonight I have written 0 words.  This is the part where you whip me.