There was a time when I wrote–no exaggeration–more than 230 ms pages in one week. The project was bad, not because I wrote fast but because (to be totally honest) I sucked at crafting books at that point. I had not yet figured out basic plot and storytelling features, and I just let it wander wherever the heck the story wanted to go, which was eventually into insipidity.

My record for the number of ms pages written in one day is more than 50. That was just a particular heavy day that I bothered to count. And *those* pages? They were kick-ass awesome. *g*

Then something got in the way. I got incredibly sick and was sick for a long time. I have been recovering now for six years. I was in the very early stages of recovery when I got pregnant with the Bear, which is why I did not realize at first. My body had shut down all extraneous functions many months ago, so I did not notice a skipped period (though you should have seen the look on the OB/GYN’s face when I told her I hadn’t had a period in something like eight months by the time I saw her…), and since I was MERELY sleeping 12 hours a day instead of the 14 that I was sleeping at graduation, the 18 I was sleeping the months before, or the 22–yes, 22–I was sleeping during the worst of it, I didn’t realize I was “fatigued” at all.

I still don’t know what it was. Crushing fatigue, hypersomnia, intermittent low grade fever, mental confusion, irritability and mood swings, hallucinations, difficulty from distinguishing dreams and reality, increasingly severe prosopagnosia (to the point where I was afraid to pick up my mother from the airport because I wasn’t sure I could recognize her–to the point where I didn’t like to go out in public where I might get separated from my husband in a crowd because I might not be able to find him–I didn’t tell either one because how the hell can you tell your mother that you might not know her face or your husband that if another guy with the same haircut comes in, you may mistake him for you?), enormous cognitive impairment, difficulty speaking, severe short term memory problems (I can’t remember large parts of college), and difficulty understanding speech, and on top of this a really crushing muscle pain, at least part of which was connected to an underlying congenital condition. Occasionally, I’d get weird excesses, like being able to smell people–all people–as they passed me in the hall or on the street.

I disliked social situations because making small talk exhausted my mental processing, especially if there was more than one person. I hated shopping because I would have to sleep all afternoon after going to pick up groceries. Paying bills was completely enervating. And this was when I was getting better! At my worst, after walking from my on-campus apartment to try to make it to class, I collapsed in tears because I was so tired and in such pain. And then, in class, I fell asleep. That was a good day, since I got out of bed. I’d also have to chant what I was doing to myself at time so I didn’t forget. The doctor at the campus clinic at least never questioned that I was ill. She looked worried from the moment she laid eyes on me. I looked half dead.

I compensated to the point where most people couldn’t tell because I had a lot of starting material to compensate with–which is the only reason I didn’t fall completely into a stupor unable to even feed myself, to be honest. Some people doubt that there is a difference between a spirit or soul and a brain. I can tell you, from being trapped inside a brain that wouldn’t work, that wouldn’t go, that wouldn’t BE–that there is a profound difference. The brain is just the control panel. There is something behind it, whether you are aware of it or not, that is driving. I became aware of it, became acutely aware in a very immediate way, because there was a piece of me, behind the scenes, coupling this piece with that one, juryrigging this other part to handle something another bit dropped. I think you can get so muddle up that your body loses track of that bit or it loses track of your body, but I don’t think that it is an artifact of biology. It is the “I” behind all that.

There are several things that I’m much better at now than I was, including synthesis and analysis. That’s because I was forcing those bits of my brain to work overtime to figure out how I could deal with all the other bits that didn’t want to work right–like speech processing. I also have lingering problems, like greater error rates in typing and speech that continues to be affected somewhat, leading to verbal disorganization and abnormal problems retrieving common words in casual speech. I really need to do some therapy to restore my numerical fluency as well, when I have time to review calc and have another go at linear algebra–I made an A in the course in college, but that was one of many things that my mind couldn’t keep. It might seem odd to do linear algebra to improve arithmetical fluency, but the best way to fix something is to do it the hardest you can at the moment, not to aim at the lowest level.

What was wrong with me? I don’t know. I probably never will. It may have been mild encephalitis. It could have been nonrestorative sleep so disturbed that it caused brain damage. It could have been West Nile. It could have been a lot of things. It wasn’t a tumor because not only am I still alive, it got better. So that’s good!

I wrote VEIL during my first 1.25 years of recovery. It was, in a word, agonizing. For someone for whom so many things had once been so easy, this was a hard row to hoe. I continued to recover and became a better writer, and things got gradually easier. But even with SHADOWS, my book that will come out in March, I could write no more than 10 pages a day. It would only take me somewhere between 2.5 and 4 hours, but I couldn’t do any more because my body just couldn’t handle the toll. And then I’d be exhausted for days afterward, so I could only sustain an alternating pattern of 10 pages one day and 5 the next. Muscularly, I had almost recovered. My muscles were strong again. My immune system, with a few exceptions, was great. My brain, though, still wasn’t able to maintain sustained high-level exertion.

But I think I’ve finally had a breakthrough. I have been able to write 20 or more pages per day over the past week. A year ago, I would have been a trembling mess after one day and would have then slept for 14 hours straight. Now, though, I can do it–and I am FINE. I might have spend those four hours IMing or emailing someone.

That is freaking amazing.

I really, really want to work up to writing 4 hours a day everyday. If I can do that, I will be ecstatic.

I *do* so wish that people would stop making deceptive and exploitive statements about how wind/solar/hydroelectric/nuclear power holds the answer for freeing the US from oil dependency. In particular, I think it should be a hanging offense for a legislator to make such a comment. We need brochures with v-e-r-y small words and v-e-r-y big letter for our lawmakers:

ELECTRICITY in the United States is largely produced by burning COAL.

CARS, other GAS ENGINES, and some BOILERS run on OIL.

OIL and COAL are not the same.

Finding new sources of energy to replace COAL will do jack to lower OIL needs.

This followed by a quiz, to keep them from making weaselly claims about not knowing any better when they later misrepresent legislation to their constituents.

*sighs*

It’s not that I’m against finding alternates to oil. In fact, I think that it’s something we need desperately, if for no other reason than it’s bad practice to send billions of dollars to people when over 50% of them agree that blowing us up, in theory, is a Good Thing. I’m not terribly fond of air pollution, either, and would very much like to make our energy sources, whatever they are, as clean as possible–we’ve been doing a whole lot better over the past 30 years, but we need to do better still.

But everyone who should know better who is trying to represent an Atlantic wind farm as the first step toward oil independence to a credulous media should be smacked in the head.

And everyone who plays lip service to alternative energy sources in Congress while simultaneously pitching the world’s biggest hissy fit to avoid having a wind farm put up near their houses…well, they need two smacks in the head.

I am desperately missing sunlight here in MD. In NM, it was plentiful, not only because we were farther south and there’s a lot less rain and moisture in the air, but also because the elevation made the sun’s rays stronger.

Even after being in MD since July, I still can’t shake the sense that I am very often trapped in a perpetual twilight. Rainy days like this do not help. I spend hours every day in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in either the living room or kitchen, but still the fundamental sense of disruption remains. I have no sense of tiredness after dusk or wakefulness at dawn at least in part because there simply is not enough contrast between the two. I think I will start working outside as soon as my hands will work in the cold–perhaps that will help.

I never quite got the sense of the world under my feet in Indiana because the sky did not ever seem, in a fundamental sense, real. I am doing better here, but still I crave some level of tangibility that eludes me.

I wonder if some day we will learn to tear holes in space to make the stars come near enough to reach or will terraform Mars into a paradise but we will find ourselves unable to form a human society in these places because our bodies reject the reality of the place. Technology confounded by biology.

Then again, it may be that I’m just a freak. Again. My ancestors thrived in northern Europe–why can’t I seem to reset my brain to a higher latitude?

What I really want is to live here but somehow import the climate and location of Costa Rica. That would be just perfect!

Until then, I’m dreaming of riddling the living room and kitchen ceilings with Solatubes!

-Yes, the Bear needs glasses.

-Yes, the Bear has astigmatism.

-But he barely needs glasses (-.25x-.50×180 on both eyes).

-BUT the dr wants to see him in two months again to see what his eyeballs are doing!

BTW, this is yet another time that it is faaaaabulous that he can read. Made everything so much better–for the doctor, it was like working on a 10-year-old, which he really appreciated.

The Bear was an angel at the ophthalmologist’s, which I hadn’t at all been sure he would be because, honestly, some of that equipment is pretty darned scary! But the Bear thought it was all awesome and “freaky” (a term of high approbation), and I impressed very firmly upon him ahead of time the need for giving HONEST ANSWERS to the dr’s questions for the sake of his own vision and to avoid headaches, and, well, he did.

My child.

Completely cooperative with a stranger when asked to show non-age-normal abilities.

Whoa.

Anyhow, at the end, the ophthalmologist asked in a rather tentative and, well, puzzled voice whether the Bear was going to start Kindergarten next year (in reference to needing glasses to see the chalkboard). I gave a firm-but-friendly “not exactly; we homeschool,” and he seemed rather relieved! He asked–even more tentatively–why it was that we were homeschooling, and I said, “Well, the Bear reads at a fourth grade level now. By the time school rolls around, he’ll likely be reading at a 5th or 6th grade level. It just doesn’t seem quite fair to me to put a kid reading at a sixth grade level in a class where he’s supposed to be learning the letters of the alphabet.” The ophthalmologist heartily agreed and, well, that was that. Another stranger impressed by homeschooling after meeting the Bear–yay! *g* We are the Pernicious Homeschooling Myth-Busting Team.

Well, except the myth about all homeschoolers being freakishly precocious, but that’s not a PERNICIOUS myth, IM-N-S-HO.

(Of course, this is our sort of reply to a friendly inquirer. I haven’t had any hostile inquirers yet, but I’m working on the responses like, “We want to make sure our children are well-drilled in the skills of knife-throwing and rifle marksmanship so that we will be prepared when the Venusians land!” for when that happens. I wonder if I can get anyone to believe that. I’m usually pretty good at convincing people that I’m serious….)

So the Bear went to his 5-year physical…and failed the vision test. So tomorrow, we go to the ophthalmologist! This is likely DH’s genes–he got glasses after his first vision test at eight. I didn’t get mine until middle school. If the Bear’s got astigmatism or something like that really going on, he’ll wear his glasses daily, but it’s more likely that he’s got about 20/30 vision, so maybe -.50 diopters. My vision is about -1.50 in one eye and, I think, -1.25 in the other. Cf DH, who is something like -4.25 and -5.50, AKA blind as a bat…well, isn’t, really, if you’re going to get all zoological about it. *g*

Anyhow, if the Bear doesn’t have anything else going on, he’ll only use his glasses on an as-needed basis. Let’s hope for the best!

He also weighs 37 lbs and is 41.5″ tall…20th and about 25th percentile respectively, which is quite respectable considering genetics and the fact that he was born at the 5th percentile. (My family, while average in size as adults, are quite short until high school. When everyone else stops growing, we just keep plodding along until we catch more than a third of people up.)

Just a random thought.

Edison, famously, said:

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Nikolai Tesla noted:

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

(Tesla could kick Edison’s intellectual backside any day. Edison, though, had more money and less scruples at stealing, er, utilizing the work of others. So I guess it connects after all, in a roundabout way!)

What everyone seems to be missing on the subject of plagiarism is this aspect, quoted from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

“plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author’s reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.”

(my emphasis)

This means that the use of factoids about black-footed ferrets would have to be reasonably assumed to make readers think–or be intended to make readers think–better of CE because she had used those precise words, either because of the quality of the prose or because readers would think that she’d done the research herself. Ditto with the ethnographies where it was facts couched in serviceable language that were taken.

That’s why lyrical prose in Laughing Boy is critical to an accusation of plagiarism. First, it must be reasonable that the novel is improved through the taking of the language and second it must be reasonable that readers would think that it was Edwards’ original work. If she had taken passages that served the same function from the ethnographies, the problem would be the same. It’s about usage, not about fictional/nonfictional source.

If it doesn’t pass both tests, it isn’t plagiarism.

The Bear is five. Yes, FIVE. Wow.

He couldn’t believe it because he’s been telling me for weeks that when he was five, he’d be bigger than me, DH, and Werewolf (his friend). Of course, when he was no discernibly larger in the morning, he concluded that I must be mistaken about the whole birthday thing.

From us, he got Shrek 3 with a Puss in Boots toy and a helium balloon–a special request. I also made him a Thunder Cake from a book he’d read–also by request.

He got lots of videos and some toys from various relatives and friends. The VERY NOISY blaster from the in-laws was a big hit, and so was the C3PO that was inside a box of used toys from my cousins. (That was, I’d like to note, in addition to their usual presents–my mom had picked up a bunch of outgrown toys from their house, and she just wrapped some up so he’d have enough presents to open, since their present was sitting in the back yard!)

We had a light reading day, but we had a regular math day, and the only reason I didn’t do extra is because I am MEAN. MEAN, I tell you! MEAN!

Day before yesterday, the conversation went something like this:

Bear: We didn’t do math on Christmas.

Me: No, we didn’t, because I was taking a break with most of the homeschooling. (We were going to start a practice year in August, but he’s just been so danged SICK that I threw in the towel very early and just started up again this semester with math in addition to the reading he’s been doing.)

Bear: We should do math on Christmas when I’m five. It’s not good not to do math on Christmas.

Me: Okay.

Bear: Are we going to do math on my birthday?

Me: I was planning on it. Do you want to?

Bear: We HAVE to do math on my birthday. I want math.

Me: Okay.

Bear, with gravity: It is important to do math on my birthday. (Pause.) I want math FOR my birthday!

Well, I didn’t do that at least partly because of the meltdown about the cake. See, the Bear had imagined that he’d be able to wake up, open his presents, and have cake and math all day, when in reality, he had to wait for his father to get home and for Werewolf to come over. This was Traumatic, make no mistake. I got tired of the drama and banished him after the regular math lesson for a while so my head didn’t explode.

When evening finally came, though, he had a blast. So that was good!

I guess I’m the last person on earth to have noticed the new plagiarism scandal. I actually found out about it from Mrs. Demonspawn, the comic book/graphic novel writer, believe it or not.

Anyhow, my reaction is a bit different than many I’ve seen. First, yes, it’s bad to take words verbatim from any source unless you’re engaging in a bit of literary allusion, even if it’s a nonfic research source. Second, you just can’t take other people’s fiction…unless it’s allusion, again, and not simple hijacking.

But I’m beginning to get scared. I’ve never used a phrase from a research source of any sort, but I’m wondering if I should start having several pages of every single source I use or quote to keep from being caught up in a witch hunt.

Let’s see. I’ve quoted from Shakespeare and the Bible in just about every book. Thomas Jefferson and Donne have done their time. I have one four-word phrase that’s a winking homage to a specific Terry Pratchett book. I have a line from Star Wars in my latest one, out in March. I have an entire scene that’s a tribute to Bleak House by Dickens in Voices. Oh, and I use the name Pegoty, which was in David Copperfield, too. And I’ve used information from nonfic that ranges from 19th century muckraking journalism to some rather mediocre but lively 21st century publication on the Victorian age. Oh, and Mrs. Beaton, of course. Recently, I’ve read a lot of books and articles on cold reading and psychic frauds for my latest WIP, the results of which have become an integral part of my next novel. Oh, and I pore over 19th maps. And I did all sorts of research about Brighton for Shadows, quite a bit of which ended up in my book. (Should I cite the website where I found a picture of Brighton that clearly showed that the beach had pebbles and not sand? How about where I got pictures of the Pavilion? Or the history of it, so I knew when it had gas laid on?)

Not only that, but I have completely ripped off and turned on its head the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Shaw’s Pygmalion and its vast copycat literature, quite a bit of Shakespeare (including The Tempest), and a lot of Dickensian conventions, along with the sacrifice-self-for-daddeeeeeeee romance plot that goodness knows who wrote first.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if there is going to be a time that someone’s going to pop up and declare that my Othello reference in Veil means that I am an evil plagiarist who Must Be Stopped. See, this scandal didn’t start with the discovery that the author in question had lifted passages from another work of fiction–it started with the uncovering of some clumsy and badly integrated research, done in a verbatim way which makes it fall into the Bad category but otherwise unremarkable for anything except its awkwardness. So even that shades to the gray because YOU DON’T WRITE FICTION WITH A WORKS CITED LIST. Seriously, now. It is not a research paper, no matter how much research is in it. Footnotes are neither expected nor desired–but this might change. Artistically, this would be disastrous, as there is no surer way of pointing out the fakeness of your book than to start peppering it with references to sources. Way to break the fourth wall, there.

When things go this far, it makes me wonder, where will the line be drawn? And when will it stop?

Should I live in terror that next week someone is going to “uncover” the whole laundry list of allusions in my books and my career will be over because I employed a recognized, well-respected literary device?

I overheard this on the phone. June probably understood very little of it–the Bear is still VERY hard to understand over the phone.

He said, roughly:

“I got a germ, and I got very sick. I was throwing up. There were more germs and more germs and more germs and one turned red. And then they got all in my body. They got in my small intestine and my large intestine and my stomach and my liver and my lungs and my heart and everywhere. And I threw up. I threw up my stomach and my large intestine and my small intestine. And them my white blood cells killed the germs. They killed the germs in my body. My stomach’s okay now because they killed the germs in my stomach. And they killed the germs in my large intestine and in my heart and in my lungs. And now there’s only ONE GERM LEFT, and my white blood cells are going to kill it, too!”

This was followed by the description of where the various organs of the body are in relation to one another. At some point, I need to point out the spleen, gallbladder, kidneys, and pancreas. I swear, though, there’s no one cuter saying “ventricles.” It’s almost as cute as when he used to call molecule “molcolchules.”

(Yes, he is enormously enjoying his human anatomy books, along with the models he bought himself. The exhibit on illness in the National Academy of Science museum–linked above–obviously made an impression, too.)