![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, Maryland. That was pretty awesome. The high ropes course? Awesome. The wine festival? Awesome. (Found the best mead ever, there, and then discovered they can't export it out of state. That was nigh heartbreaking.) Playing board games with friends? Awesome. Lounging around on the couch watching friends play video games? Awesome. (I have finally seen all the way through Portal and Portal 2, and can stop trying to avoid spoilers. Awesome!) Playing video games multiplayer, watching movies, going to a movie, eating delicious food... Really, it was an amazingly great vacation all around.
Now I'm back in Austin (hello, spouse! cats! iMac that can run Minecraft! power cord for the Kindle!), and...well. The stress. It is all coming back. I still don't know what I'm doing this summer, and won't until at least the 30th. I should probably start doing actual chores again. The novel-wrangling is being a bit wrangly, and I keep realizing that I've run into a weird bit of worldbuilding gap and then spending two hours increasingly frustrated on the lack of information on how littoral drift is going to work around an island with a city dumping its sewage down into the water. Or trying to come up with a lunar calendar system that has me increasingly tempted to go "Screw it, on this planet the lunar cycle is a PERFECT 28 days with no drifting!"
Which is probably cheating. But I was never good with astronomy.
I am desperately trying to resist the urge to do that pseudo-expert thing. You know. "I took one class in this. Now I know how everyone else is getting it wrong!" Because, hey, that one introductory class may in fact not cover the later complexities that lead to the "wrong" I'm seeing. (Sure, when I took sword and shield training, we were taught to do everything with either hand, in case of injury during battle not rendering one untrained with the remaining hand. But that doesn't mean that focusing on the dominant hand for single sword dueling is wrong.) ...but I do need to approximate. I'm trying to create a whole world, here. I don't really have the time to gain expert knowledge on astronomy, economics, geology, sociology, and the spread of transplanted hardwood through non-native climates, y'know? I just need to get them right enough that non-experts won't notice the errors, and experts will not start foaming over the simple, obvious things I got wrong.
Or so one hopes. Sometimes, I swear I write second-world fantasy just to avoid the history-and-guns errors that send people raging. And of course I'll make other errors anyway.
And of course this is all a distraction from getting the damn writing done, so I'll go back to working on that.
But I wish I could get a better idea of how this littoral drift is going to affect the smell down by the docks.
Now I'm back in Austin (hello, spouse! cats! iMac that can run Minecraft! power cord for the Kindle!), and...well. The stress. It is all coming back. I still don't know what I'm doing this summer, and won't until at least the 30th. I should probably start doing actual chores again. The novel-wrangling is being a bit wrangly, and I keep realizing that I've run into a weird bit of worldbuilding gap and then spending two hours increasingly frustrated on the lack of information on how littoral drift is going to work around an island with a city dumping its sewage down into the water. Or trying to come up with a lunar calendar system that has me increasingly tempted to go "Screw it, on this planet the lunar cycle is a PERFECT 28 days with no drifting!"
Which is probably cheating. But I was never good with astronomy.
I am desperately trying to resist the urge to do that pseudo-expert thing. You know. "I took one class in this. Now I know how everyone else is getting it wrong!" Because, hey, that one introductory class may in fact not cover the later complexities that lead to the "wrong" I'm seeing. (Sure, when I took sword and shield training, we were taught to do everything with either hand, in case of injury during battle not rendering one untrained with the remaining hand. But that doesn't mean that focusing on the dominant hand for single sword dueling is wrong.) ...but I do need to approximate. I'm trying to create a whole world, here. I don't really have the time to gain expert knowledge on astronomy, economics, geology, sociology, and the spread of transplanted hardwood through non-native climates, y'know? I just need to get them right enough that non-experts won't notice the errors, and experts will not start foaming over the simple, obvious things I got wrong.
Or so one hopes. Sometimes, I swear I write second-world fantasy just to avoid the history-and-guns errors that send people raging. And of course I'll make other errors anyway.
And of course this is all a distraction from getting the damn writing done, so I'll go back to working on that.
But I wish I could get a better idea of how this littoral drift is going to affect the smell down by the docks.