my heart is a glorious machine;

Sigh. It's a bad week for my brain. Bad bad bad bad. I guess the minor panic attack level of Off My Meds wore off and gave way to the more subtle insidious low-level not-sane-ness*, and then there's this stupid cold, and for the last couple of days it's been this fun party game of Which Part Of My Body Is Going To Stop Working Right Next? Yesterday was miserable -- my sinuses hurt, I can't breathe, my own voice comes out wrong, my throat hurts, I'm cramping mysteriously and can't find the ibuprofen, my eyes hurt, there's an edge of nausea, and also my face hurts a lot, because apparently I am never going to stop breaking out like a thirteen-year-old and gorram it, acne can hurt like the dickens. Today and yesterday, of course, the skin on my lower face was so dry it was flaking off my face and I looked like I had milk crusted all over my mouth, and it hurt, and finally I just scrubbed my face raw with a pumice stone and slathered it in Eucerin about eighty times until most of the dead skin was gone, and hey, my face almost feels like a face again!

I am well aware of, er, the word insanity -- but there's a line between actual insanity and simply... not being very sane. Which is what I am when depressed. I find myself speaking and acting and reacting in ways that don't make any sense, even to me... and they're all ugly. Dear people who think my depression rehabilitation should consist of stabilising on drugs and then slowly weaning off them: shut up.

On the brighter side, my appointment with the free clinic is somehow tomorrow (I know the lady at the desk told me October, more than once, so I'm choosing to believe miraculous forces intervened to preserve my well-being), and today I picked up some sample other medication from my doctor's office, so we'll see how that goes. I also have two more job leads -- a new coffee shop (!!!) just opened up, and the newspaper's advertising for someone to write obituaries and police blotter stuff and possibly the occasional article, which sounds like a pretty excellent deal, actually, especially for resumes in the future, although as an application I have to write an essay letter to the managing editor on Why I Would Be Good For This Job and... I don't know what to write. Although considering that I am clever, eager to learn, and know my way around a semi-colon, I might actually qualify for this job more than quite a lot of applicants, living as I do in a very uneducated area. Not even bragging here, it's the most depressing thing about this corner of North-western Pennsylvania -- nobody's curious about anything. (Also they mention in their advertisement that they're looking for accuracy and attention to detail... except they mysteriously capitalise Accuracy all of the five or so times it appears. GAH. Here's attention to detail for you!)

And: we bought a new car. It's a bright blue Ford Focus and the first twenty-first century car we have ever owned. Um... and all that that implies? Anyway, it's a lovely car, feels as though it's rather fun to drive, has a CD player and a working cigarette lighter (look, this is a big deal, considering the technology levels of our previous cars) and the sound system is fantastic, omg. Seriously. I want to go on a road trip or learn to drive this very minute so I can soar down the highway blaring things. Irritatingly it is also a better sound system than anything we've got in the house... Ought to be running off to fetch my learner's permit in the near future, although schedules still have to be finangled to make room for that. (Could have gone today, but the DMV is closed on Mondays. Well... thanks.) 

While we're still on the subject of Things Which Do Not Suck (...it's been a bad, bad, awful week), a package from lady_moriel arrived for me this morning! Now, Kyra has a habit of sending ridiculously awesome packages, although these smorgasbords of win usually appear around Christmas and my birthday. She mentioned she'd picked me up a copy of Ender's Game at a yard sale, and also -- hello, this is an example of how Kyra is made of win -- she remembered me wistfully admiring some stunning but expensive silk scarves at Woolies (is Woolies an Alaska-only place? because I can't find them on Google -- just references to Woolworths, which does not sell lovely organic hippie folk festival clothes for sadly exorbitant prices -- and a few directory references to stores in Alaska) and had her sister pick one up for me when she was on a school trip to Turkey, because they are very cheap there. And it is so gorgeous I cannot even deal. Photographs do not do it justice, but they can try.


But Kyra, being also sneaky and awesome, did not mention that the package headed my way also contained an Iron & Wine postcard and pin and the Goblet of Fire DVD (in widescreen, even!). Sneaky sneaky.

And now I've nearly managed to make myself feel a mite better, although I still feel as though almost the entire day has been wasted, and my novel is still stalling on the sixty-fourth page, and my head doesn't quite belong to me, and there are an awful lot of failures and things left undone and things I can't do looming in my future... sigh. Fie upon thee.

Oh for heaven's sake. I am trying to write the Novel and have stuck on the most ridiculous of details, which has rather unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration. Why did I have to set my novel in 1912-1913? Ten years earlier and I'd have more information than I could ever hope to use, but apparently nobody cares about the Edwardians. And if they do, it's all about the hedonistic upper class and the aristocracy, or, because sordid is always fun to be shocked about, the most abject poverty of the London slums, all twenty people to a tenement and children losing their limbs in factories. I am quite sure that the middle class wasn't all pretending to be wealthy, because that's not how people work. Every time I try to find information on the homes people would have lived in, normal everyday ordinary people, in London, I get all of this nonsense about either manor houses or squalid tenements. NOT HELPFUL. I got a book out from the library, Domestic Life in England, and it devoted at least a chapter to the Victorians, with lots of very pertinent information -- but anything about the Edwardians was scant, mixed up with details from later years, solely about rationing and bomb scares (and zeppelins? is it callous that my first thought was OMG THERE WERE ZEPPELINS OVER LONDON THAT IS SO COOL?), or to the '20s, lots more fun, with the hair shingling and the make-up and the very short skirts. GAH. I want to know about houseguests, particularly in apartments, and if they come up to the door of the flat they want and knock there, or if they ring something down below, as one often does nowadays, and who answers the door, and I am Googling ridiculous things like "history of the doorbell" and "doorbells in edwardian england" and not getting anything remotely helpful.

I wonder how eccentric it is that the Noxes haven't got any servants, but they don't really need them, and would one still have servants if one lived in a flat, anyway? Am I completely wrong in thinking that a family of four would live in a flat? But London was huge and urban even then and it seems as though an actual by-itself house would be hideously expensive whether or not it was even very nice, and nobody would have one. Uh, kind of like Boston.

It's all of the weird little details that are tripping me up, like, how exactly does Mr Caruthers get himself to the Noxes for dinner and who lets him in and where does he go afterwards and are there doorbells involved at all? How large would a decent flat be, with how many rooms? What are the floors made of? What sorts of dances do people attend? Are there places where there's always some music thing going on and anyone can show up to dance if they have the desire? Which ones are respectable and which aren't? (Like today people go clubbing, or to bars or pubs, and all sorts of things.) If a man is trying to conceal Evidence of Vampire Attack, what sort of neck-covering things are at his disposal? Where does one park one's motorbike? 

Every few paragraphs I run into a new problem, and the more I read, the more it seems I don't know, especially since everyone is much more interested in talking about the aristocracy or the Victorians or the slums or the War, except that they'd actually rather talk about the Second World War, so seeing the domestic information one wants getting passed up for a war which is mostly passed up for a different war is enormously frustrating. Hasn't somebody written books specifically for historical fiction writers? "Everything You'd Never Think To Ask About The 1910s", say. How to use the toilet and what to feed your cat and what sorts of sweets one might have on hand. How to get to and from work. How to let your hosts know you've arrived for dinner after they've bleeding invited you. (How to greet a woman you've been secretly in love with for several years when you recently saved her from a mysteriously burning room with vampires in, she's been unconscious for the last several days, and you have probably done nothing but pace around your office and clean up vampire damage and fend off the government, and now you are at her house for dinner but it is 1912 and embracing is scandalous and you are deliberately repressed anyway for what you think are extremely good reasons. Okay, maybe that one I have to figure out myself...)

At this point, the vampire stuff and the underground city stuff and the scientific application of magic is the easiest part.

Of all the things I thought research might accomplish, forcing me to write a sequel to the ever-present Novel that isn't even half-finished yet was not really something that crossed my mind.

Ah well, I'm a young writer yet. Eventually I'll learn there are Things To Watch Out For.

So: I've been reading as much about the Edwardians and the Great War as I can manage to find in the house -- I'll start to go spare if I can't pay off my library fines before much longer -- and the deeper I go, the more the blasted sequel talks to me. Okay, so "in the house" means "my siblings' history books" and "the internet", because for some reason I don't seem to have anything much on the First World War myself. Or the Edwardian era. A brief glance through the Book Closet brings me... uh... well, Barbara Hambly's duo of awesome and political-situation-foreshadowing Edwardian vampire novels (starring James Asher, motorbiking philologist ex-spy professor! and Lydia, his doctor wife of much win), and... Nicholas and Alexandra, okay, and the Emily of New Moon trilogy (Emily's diary entries are always dated 19--, which leads me to a bit of private fanon in which Emily's Quest ends just before the war begins, and there's all this stuff about Dean Priest in, like, Cairo or Japan or somewhere doing espionage, I don't know), and Peter Pan, a couple of my Ibbotsons -- A Countess Below Stairs is, rather plot-pointedly, right after both the Great War and the Russian Revolution, and A Company of Swans is London and the Amazon in, oh hey, 1912! -- um, is that it? Seriously? Argh.

Novels are excellent for research, too, especially novels written either during the era, or afterwards by people who were alive then -- one reason I love Eva Ibbotson's historicals so much: she has this really fresh perspective on the World Wars and writes about them so naturally, because she was there, and she sees them from both an English and an Austrian perspective, which is also neat -- because that gives you a better idea of how and what people were thinking and reacting to everything around them, instead of being told by a history book what was on everyone's minds. History books are well-meaning, and immensely live-in-able and helpful in most areas, but understanding how people thought and felt and reacted... you need to be in there. I'd like to write a historical novel that feels more like Eva Ibbotson's, in which she's just writing about what happened in her childhood, knowledge that comes naturally to her, so she's not shoehorning in Historical Perspectives or This Event or painstakingly describing everything you might not be quite familiar with (hint: people pick up on stuff fast, writers). I want to understand what it was like to wear those clothes and eat that food and read those newspapers. And then I can put in the vampires...

Anyway, I'm just reading a pretty basic World Wars history book -- I don't want to say textbook, cos the curriculumn my mother used for me and is now teaching my siblings with doesn't tend to hurl textbooks at you unless it's maths and there's nothing else for it. It's a book about history, and it's got a lot of pictures and things, but it's really well-done and readable and interesting. I mean, readable until something hits you straight in the stomach and you kind of have to put the book down for a while. Today I read about the Christmas Truce of 1914, and I kept thinking, blimey, these men didn't even want to be killing each other. Ugh. Screw this war.

Which is probably what Mr Caruthers would be saying, honestly, only with some rather choicer words learnt on the streets of London... Which brings me back to the bleeding sequel for a novel that's only three-quarters plotted and doesn't even have a real name yet, but here I am, thinking about Briony growing up in the war and bobbing her hair, and Camilla as a battlefield nurse, and how Mr Caruthers would be a staunch conscientious objector, but as the war got more and more desperate and the government got more and more pushy, he'd get dragged into espionage or something, given his Special Areas of Knowledge, and some other Exciting Novelly Stuff I should talk about soon. (I bet if I were a professional novelist I'd have a Do Not Talk About Your Blasted Novel So Much On Your LiveJournal Clause, because there are noooo secrets here, are there? Only I need someone to bounce all of this off. Actually, there is one secret. Just a little one. And I don't want to tell you about it because it's just a little weird brainquirk that is much, much more powerful in inference and in context.) And how Evangeline's Special Skills might get her pulled into the War, and how much things would be different with the addition of vampires and magic...

I was just trying to understand the political situation before the war, you know? Curses.

The last handful of days have been somewhat odd (she says matter-of-factly, because somehow she has forgotten how to panic?). There was much driving, and the car nearly broke down -- not the rental, ours -- and yesterday morning I learnt via a phonecall from my bank that my account has been overdrawn by about three hundred dollars. Approximately fifty of that I spent in Nova Scotia, on souvenirs (Stanfest t-shirt; inexpensive seashells; A Present; a vintage necklace) and snacks (Canadian sweets, which are frequently awesomer than ours, but expensive!; bread; pastries and cocoa at the coffeeshop). The rest is all fees. Fees from originally overdrawing my gorram account, which since I had no way of knowing I'd done so -- and I'm a little ashamed of myself, but I thought I had more money in my account than that; I should have checked -- and then those triggered more fees and still more and now I am three hundred dollars in the red. Mum owes me thirty-two, Dad owes me four, and I have three dollars in my wallet and some change, God help me. I might be able to get the bank to waive the fees considering that half the reason they built up so much was because I was out of the country, and this is my first bank account, and Mum suggested I look as close to tears as possible... if I can do that, fifty dollars shouldn't be terrifically impossible. Except that I have no job. No, I haven't been fired; I just haven't worked in a month. I really ought not to tell my boss that I'm going on holiday, because every time I ask for a week or two off, he just stops putting me on the schedule from then on until some time after I get back. I have no work next week, and no leftover paychecks. My manager said, almost reprovingly, "you can't get paid unless you're here," at which I suddenly wanted very much to hit or smash something. I asked for two weeks off. You didn't schedule me for the rest; it's hardly that I'm bloody unwilling.

My first inclination as I walked out was to burst into tears and crumple onto a bench somewhere, but I gulped it down and channelled it into determined rage, which wave I rode on for the next hour, stalking into half the stores in the mall and telling them that I needed a job. I picked up about seven applications, have a couple to look up online, and, oddly enough, have an interview with Claire's on Monday. The woman behind the register told me, "We're still accepting applications, and probably hiring in a week," and as I folded my application to put in my bag, she said, "When you bring that back -- are you available for an interview on Monday at 3:30?" "Absolutely," I said. I hope this is an encouraging sign.

Rode around town, didn't find much, came back sick from the humidity. Mum provided emergency chocolate, I curled up with a comfort book. Sometime today I'll go talk to the bank -- the little one across the street gave me a printout, but I have to talk to the bigger one a few blocks away. Ugh. Time fades courage, rather.