Surprisingly relaxed

Today I did such things as sort out recycling, some housework, the washing up, tidying, and various other bits and pieces. I wrote stuff (poor Hanith and Irin) and maintained the calorie counting thing and entertained the cats.

I also spent most of the day, really, reading Honour's Knight by Rachel Bach, taking my sweet, sweet time over it, and finished it.

Then I spent most of the rest of the day working out the key points I want to cover in the review post. So that should be tomorrow. Unless I get completely sidetracked by... oh, I don't know, making mini carrot cakes or something. Hm, sounds like a plan.

Aside from the small amount of plotting for Dryden's sequel (with a side order of mad cackling for the new horrors Sarah helped me come up with for those long-suffering characters) that's pretty much today. Read a book, relaxed, got little things done. Feels like achievements. No complaints here. (EDIT: Also, laughed like a drain at the first couple of episodes of Helix; the musical choices are superb.)

I did have an invite to go round to friends', but didn't go, for once. Part laziness, part book, part today was Mother's Day here in the UK and I sort of wanted to stay indoors and avoid all mention of that this year. Normally at this point I'd be starting to get anxious and worried that I'd offended people and would never ever ever get asked to hang out again and oh dear gods I should have gone what was I thinking... but today, actually, I seem to be not doing that. These are, after all, the same friends who forgave me so readily when I was an hour and a half late getting to theirs last week, and I have no reason not to believe them when they said it's fine. It's kind of relaxing to not be worrying about that for a change.

There, feels like another achievement. Not too shabby.

Geekery is the song of my people

I really do have awesome friends. I've been a little bit too sedentary and apt to eat for the sake of it recently, and it's starting to have an impact. So I figured I'd try to get back to something that actually helped and was fun; dancing. Sadly the specific sci-fi conventions I used to go to and dance till I dropped three nights in row have now stopped running, so I need a more local alternative.

By the power of friendship (which is magic, don't you know) I've now acquired a spare... well, everything, required to get Dance Central on the XBox 360 running in the living room. Circumstances have led to my lovely friends having even a spare console sitting quietly gathering dust, so I don't feel like I'm inconveniencing anyone or imposing too much (aside from the enforced trip to a storage unit today, wherein I pretty much appeared, grabbed one of them, and kidnapped him for the afternoon. Next time, remind me, I will simply arrive on the doorstep and intone, "Come with me if you want to live").

Hopefully, therefore, there'll be a bit more activity shortly, as soon as we've (me and Daisy, who's both kind enough to let me stay at hers, and also keen to get the dancing going) cleared space for the Kinect to work. I did enjoy the Kinect games a lot when I lived with said briefly-kidnapped-friend and we had space. I used to be quite good at them... We'll soon see if I've lost my touch completely.

Before I dashed round to their place to steal all their tech and run away laughing, I also made it back in to the charity bookshop where I worked up until last September. One of my friends who's still there had essentially summoned me via the arcane email ritual of "We've had a ton of Dragonlance donated, help", so I appeared to perform the solemn rites of "Here, they go in this order and you should put these ones out on the shelf first; they're the rarest, and oh, I'm just going to borrow this one for the moment and let you have it back later..."

So I've acquired another book to read. But it's all about Raistlin, and he's cut from the same cloth as Loki, Dryden, all the wicked, dangerous characters I like so much. So that pleases me a great deal.

Not that I have a type in fiction, or anything like that, oh no.

Also there was much flailing and geeking out, which always happens every time I see that friend. Her enthusiasm for everything is wonderful, if occasionally a little like being flattened under a landslide of excitement. It doesn't leave you room to be annoyed or upset by anything, because the only way to survive such wild delight is to go with it. It pushes you into the frame of mind where you want to give back the same level of glee, so suddenly you're focusing on all the. best. possible. things, and the happy spiral twists into the most excitable snake eating its own tail you've ever seen, and everything is a reminder of something else wonderful that must be shared right now until your face starts to hurt from grinning and you remember the parking's about to run out on the car and have to leave... on the third attempt, because each time there's just one more thing either of you absolutely must mention before you go.

It is exhausting, when I'm so out of practice at sustained excitement, but very, very entertaining. And has a tendency to gear me up to go and achieve something, hence the unexpected and most useful trip round to the others', with the bonus of lots of hugs and chat with my lovely people.

Anyway, when I got back in I settled down and beta-read a friend's 8000 word fic and returned it, as I promised I would. I seem to recall, actually, promising I'd do it yesterday, but yesterday ended up being weird and almost-migraine and I got practically nothing done, so we're all counting today as a success and not too late.

I've even got another short story from the writing group to read and critique tomorrow, so that'll be fun.

When I type it all out like that, it seems like a very productive day. Which is, after all, the point of these blog posts.

Now I'm going to go and write more Hanith, because Hanith is fun.

As the tiger sang: That's what friends are for...

Today I was an hour and a half late meeting up with friends... Because the lovely people I'm living with happen to be epic, amazing board game geeks, and yesterday they acquired the latest expansion set for the game Sentinels of the Multiverse - which is a hilarious riff on classic comic book superheroes and villains, and a thoroughly enjoyable co-operative game too. So we started playing a game at 1pm, I needed to leave at 2pm at latest... I started to feel like maybe the game was taking a little too long shortly before we beat the scenario and wrapped it up, went off and checked the time... 3.20pm. Whoops! Fortunately my friends are lovely and understanding and most of them have played Sentinels before and know how absorbing it can be.

In any case, we made it out and about and tried a different restaurant to usual. Pulled pork all round, and much gossiping and silliness and relaxing in good company, so happy days.

I also managed to finally pull myself together and talk to one of my best friends in the world, who is insanely busy and lives in the US so has completely different time zones to me and we never get to meet up face to face. I miss her a lot, all the time, but I'm notoriously bad at keeping in touch and she, as I say, is ridiculously busy, so it's been a little while since last emails etc. I'm pleased I managed to get a little contact going again, and must try to email more often. My only resolution this year was to be better at keeping in touch (with a lot of people), and I've already let it slide too much.

I've been chatting to a couple of other friends on Skype as well, including my lone friend back in my hometown, who, similarly to my US friend, I don't talk to enough. Those two in particular always brighten my day. They somehow manage to settle some unstable part of me, even on the other side of a computer. I do get more anxious if I haven't talked to them in too long.

So generally today has been a day of my people, which is good and calming and helpful and fun. Tomorrow will be reading and writing again, and possibly even that weird cooking thing too...

The spider dream (or: Never underestimate your brain)

Today seems to have been an intermediate day. I have short stories in progress, and have read other people's too. I made it round to friends' (one of whom has started blogging) place and helped with shopping and appointments. I even got some Gospel of Loki review written, though not an awful lot, since everything was delayed today by a very late start. I woke up at about 2.30am kneeling at the foot of my bed with my hand on the light switch, you see, so I slept in later on.

See, when I get particularly stressed or anxious, my brain decides to punish me with the spider dream. This is almost exactly what it sounds like and arachnaphobes may wish to stop reading here. Suffice it to say that I don't always get a full night's sleep, I can be a little paranoid about spiders in my bedroom, just in case, and I keep a close eye on how I process what's going on around me.

This started off a very long time ago, in the run up to exams at school (possibly GCSEs, so I may have been 16, that formative age when your brain chemistry is a bit off kilter and you're under more stress than you've ever known to boot). I was just nodding off one night when I caught a glimpse of a horrific, huge spider (big, fluffy, tarantula-size) lurking among the books and papers on the floor by my bed. Naturally, I summoned my mother, but no amount of searching could find any sign of it. Somehow she persuaded me to go back to bed and sleep.

For years, I was convinced that that thing had been real and had vanished somewhere in my bedroom.

A while later, I woke to the terrifying scenario of a big, long-legged spider crawling up the covers towards me. I gained full consciousness on the other side of the room with my back against the wall, in tears. It took a lot of effort to drag myself around the corner to get to my bedroom door and run for help. Again, there was no sign of it, though we stripped the bed and shook everything out and remade it. I can't remember properly, but I think I may have gone and slept in the guest bedroom for that one.

The next one was a big spider sitting on the pillow three inches in front of my face. I hit the bedside light and it was gone.

At that point I suddenly realised that it had been dark, absolutely pitch black, in the room. There was no way I could have seen a spider. So I shook the pillows out just in case, checked thoroughly, and talked myself back into bed and sleep.

After that I started applying logic when I woke up in a panic. There couldn't be a tarantula on my bed. The odds against it were astronomical.

My brain fought back, though. If I came up with a logical reason to ignore the panicked awakening and go back to sleep, it would change the scenario. Tarantulas were too farfetched? Okay, so it was just a gangly standard (if overgrown) house spider. It couldn't be crawling up the bed, because I would have felt the weight or heard the rustle? Okay, then it was slowly sliding down from the ceiling on a web. It couldn't possibly be descending from the ceiling on gossamer because when I switched the light on the gossamer wasn't there? Okay, it would be crawling up the headboard instead. I couldn't have seen it so clearly and vividly because there just wasn't enough light in the room, even with street lights or a bright moon muted by the curtains? Okay, then it was just a silhouette, a fuzzy shape, a suggestion of movement.

I checked the ceiling and bed thoroughly for spiders every night, so I'd know for sure. And I really knew for sure that none of them had ever been real when it started happening when I was in other rooms, other houses. Modern, hermetically sealed sorts of places. Hotel rooms with nowhere for them to hide. Friends' rooms that had just been cleaned.

I think it was shortly after that when a close friend started on her medical degree and excitedly brought up hypnagogic hallucinations. She described them as auditory or visual effects that usually strike just as you're about to fall asleep, in the first stages of a sleep cycle, when you think you're still awake but you're not, or if you're halfway through the night and you've almost resurfaced and woken but think you're still fully asleep. They're most commonly voices calling your name. I've never had that, though I've heard of it a lot and it crops up all the time in fiction (usually as a lead in to ghosts or telepathy, to be fair, but it's a common enough effect that most people I've discussed it with have admitted to it happening every now and again). I think I'd much rather have eerie disembodied voices than spiders.

My point (I have a point, honest, though not a particularly blogworthy one, really) is that the brain is weird, and persuasive, and likes to trick itself. This is relevant to a lot of the things I'm writing at the moment.

It's also very odd to be aware of something like this. It makes me step back and think twice about everything, all the time. I overanalyse pretty much everything I think in case my brain is trying to trick me. I cling to logic in everything. At the moment this tends to mean I over-explain everything as well, because I'm aware that most people aren't in the habit of laying down half a dozen logical arguments just to get back to sleep, so I'm a little too eager to present all my reasoned thoughts for whatever choice has come up.

It does help with spotting plotholes, though, I must admit.

Names will never hurt me

I'm not fond of my real name. Most of the time I forget I have it; I'll happily hold conversations with random strangers without ever introducing myself, and when they ask for my name I'll flounder for a minute and try to remember what it is. When "Your name on a ---" tawdry gifts are involved I tend to look at L before I look at G. I answer to my internet username more readily than the name my mother gave me. Someone using my full real name in conversation tends to throw me for a loop. (Or just make me cringe.)

So it's not really that surprising I'm going for a pseudonym, right? I mean, I don't want to get stuck signing a name I don't like, or grimacing if I see my work connected to it. It would seem counterproductive. I don't want to be downplaying any actual publication success I get just because it has my name unfortunately attached to it. "Yeah, that one's mine, just don't show me the name on the cover, okay?"

Lea Fletcher, on the other hand, I have been toying with using for six or seven years. I like it. I like the diminutive "Leaf" available, I like the connection to archery, I like that nobody's currently publishing under that name (someone who shares my real name has apparently published a couple of economics textbooks), I like the fewer letters, I like that it's closely linked to what I've been going by online for a decade - Lea and Lali works for me. I'll quite happily answer to it, and proudly point it out on the shelves or in magazines if I get the chance.

It doesn't seem to cause any complications when it comes to publishing, either. Copyright is simple enough, payment likewise, and I don't mind if my real name's in the small print. That's much less off-putting.

I expect a lot of people I know will tell me I shouldn't bother and should just use my real name anyway, not least since it would allow for old acquaintances from real life to see my work and buy for nostalgia value or to see if I turned out to be any good after all... But hey, if I'd got married it would be a different name and that effect wouldn't apply anyway. And I have every intention of spreading the word via Facebook and email and popping back to my old school to give my English teachers a copy if I ever do get out there. I'll make sure they know, if that happens. I don't need to use the old full name for that.

So when I submit Hanith to the British Fantasy Society this week, it'll be as Lea Fletcher. Because I have identity issues.

And I don't want my grandfather to find all my LGBT sword and sorcery and have a heart attack.