The Last Book

Finally we are onto the last notebook of Arctic Raoul, after a slight panic when I couldn't identify it among the pile of various other books with other bits of other stories in them :-O (It's the one with "The Writing on the Wall" and the start of Hertha in it....)

2646 words of Chapter 33 typed so far, plus another page and a half still to go in the final notebook. I'm already over 120,000 words.

(It does seem to me that the entire business of the treasure might be an obvious target to leave out, given that the hoard got inflated to a bigger role (and value) than originally planned. If you omit all the references to that altogether you might be able to run Chapters 32 and 33 as a single section; if you reduce its value to just enough to pay for the wooden hut it wouldn't be such an issue....)

FFNet statistics have been down for over a month at this point; I went back into the library and discovered they *still* weren't working. But I don't suppose I missed much.

[Edit: final word count for Chapter 33 is 3409]

Beetroot seed

The nylon stocking that I had placed over the top of the flower spike of my gone-to-seed beetroot plant has been constantly drooping to the ground and soaking up any rain going, so I could not imagine that even if any seed had managed to ripen, that it would be fit to harvest. I stripped it off this morning and found a lot of very decayed looking bits (plus snails), plus a seedling that had evidently started to germinate through the nylon and been ripped in half.

I did find one thing that was presumably a seed and was putting out a reddish root, so I carefully buried it in a fresh (labelled) pot along with the rest of the debris to see if anything would come up for future salad use! I don't know if the similar stocking on the basil flower spike has harvested anything; at least that one has remained off the ground....

( spring onion and pink Swan River )

The two tomato stumps that put out fresh flowers a few weeks ago have set one fruit each, currently about thumbnail size. They probably won't get much bigger than that :-p


( Keapr site dead )

"The Chrysalids", John Wyndham

Calling "The Chrysalids" YA fiction has got to be the ultimate manifestation ad absurdum of identity politics, where the assumption is that the reader can only 'identify with' a protagonist who represents them -- and therefore fiction for children cannot show adult protagonists, and adult fiction cannot be written from the point of view of a child's growth to adulthood... unless, presumably, it's a memoir. This was very definitely not written for children; Wyndham is making conscious use of his young narrator to gradually reveal the full implications of his setting through oblivious eyes.

However, I read it as a child young enough to have no idea that 'Labrador' or 'Zealand' were real places (I think I had probably heard of New Zealand, but failed to make the connection), or to have any concept of post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre, so I took the whole business of the Tribulation pretty much as straight fantasy world history, much as its inhabitants do. To adult eyes there are all sorts of clues that this is the aftermath of a devastating nuclear apocalypse, and that the widespread mutations (like the 'muties' of Miles Vorkosigan's Barrayar) are the result of gradually fading radioactive pollution on the outer fringes of the conflict.( Read more... )