Who’s Book Is This, Anyway? Part II

After a week of writing, my friends have, indeed, gotten what they wanted: the shopping mall got hit by terrorists. I thought I could avoid it, but then I went and typed the phrase “the nice, quiet shop.” And we all know what happens when someone uses the Q-word.

Boom!

And it went from a quirky possibly-short-story to a novel, in order to resolve that.

Somewhere along the way, I started researching diesel engines, fire codes, the use of counterfeit designer clothes & accessories sales to fund terrorist groups, and high-end shoes. When it goes from a joke to research, I think it’s officially become a project.

I’m waiting on feedback from a nurse for conditions that fit a set of symptoms, (which is not an imposition, because I haven’t gotten to that scene yet), and checking clothing descriptions with a costume designer.

Because I really needed to be cramming this around the regular job, typing this much with a sprained wrist, and… still need to mow the lawn and beta-read two friends’ projects.

Is there an unwritten rule somewhere about productivity being an inverse of how much time you have to do it?

20 thoughts on “Who’s Book Is This, Anyway? Part II”

  1. Pretty much that, yeah.

    Give that poor wrist heat, massage, gentle movement and mild anti-inflammatory meds.

    The Daughter Product discovered Leverage. Fun show: I look forward to your book.

      1. I read recently that RICE – particularly the ice and rest part -slows recovery. The D.P. had discovered Dick Francis, and I was re-reading them with her, and sure enough, that is not what jump jockeys did to get fit after a fall. Since half the med advice is pure crankery based on ideological nonsense (food pyramid? Low fat? cloth masks? Dr. Spock?) I thought I’d give the Jockey route a go when I sprained my thumb.

        It worked. Still a small data set, but interesting.

        1. RICE is extremely beneficial… within a certain time window immediately after the injury. After that time window, it is not always the right tool for the right job, anymore than applying romance beats to a noir mystery, or thriller pacing to a 500-page epic fantasy.

          The fault with a great many tools lies not in the tool itself, but in its misapplication, and in the desire of someone who has mastered that tool to make it a panacea.

          1. When a mare tried to crush my leg (PVC pipe gave rather than my leg, so she failed her mission), I spent the next two days with the leg propped up, a heating pad on it, and taking far too many aspirin. Why? In my case, to prevent blood clots from the terrible bruising. So rest, yes. Ice and compression? No! Elevate? Yes. But this was 24-48 hours after the initial injury, with doctor’s orders.

  2. If you need to know about Fire/Life Safety codes, I’m your man. Sprinklers, pull stations, detectors, emergency lighting, exits and signage, extinguishers, elevator recalls, dialers, you name it, I’m the compliance guy at my day job.

    Retail spaces are designed to have a lot of exits–much more than most people realize. Stores can put alarms on them, but they have to be there. And there are multiple redundancies built into all of the signaling systems–just cutting a phone line won’t stop a fire alarm from alerting the authorities.

    So your bad guys are going to have to do a lot of prep work if they want to control a large retail space.

    1. Thank you for the offer!

      That one turned out to be simpler than I thought: part of the issue with the Westgate mall in Nairobi is that African malls don’t have near as robust fire safety standards as we do. Once I rounded up a few friends who’ve worked in malls and been in the access corridors, they confirmed the layout of stairwells to freight elevators to outside access fire doors off the freight dock across a slew of multilevel malls in the USA was much closer to what I’m used to for airports than what was reported for that cluster.

      I mean, I know I’m setting it on a colony world in a distant future, but some things accrete culturally, and fire exit standards I expect to be one of them. Because we’re still human, and things will still burn.

    1. Tonight my alpha readers got into a good-natured debate about the best way to check for explosives under a restaurant table (depends on the type of explosives commonly used), and one of the old sailors snarked, “It’s a fish out of water story, sure, but she doesn’t realize she’s the fish!”

      So, it appears I can make a bunch of vets think it’s hilarious, even when it’s talking about clothes shopping.

  4. As long as your short story doesn’t turn into a ten book trilogy, it’s all good! [runs away at Warp Cat]

    1. So… Like Blood For Oil (the story with the fairy GodGunny, that’s now in copyedit and awaiting cover) started as a short story, when Twitch from Going Ballistic walked in and took over. And this one (current working title: A Perfect Day (with explosions)) has several characters from from that one…

      You were saying?

  5. For your wrists: compression gloves with wrist support and/or hand/wrist splints.
    I have arthritis in my hands and a touch of carpal tunnel syndrome. The gloves and splints saved me.
    There are a LOT of types of compression gloves. They may or may not help but if they do, they’re drug and surgery-free. I always get the kind that cover my entire hand other than the fingertips so I can type.
    I wear them for everything other than wet work like cooking or gardening.

    My soon to be 83-year-old mother broke her wrist in two places on Valentines Day. She had to wear a splint and it helped enormously.

    Wear gloves at night too. If your hands don’t get cold overnight, they won’t hurt as much in the morning. This matters more in the winter, of course.

    1. Yeah, I’ve been using soft splints off and on anyway, to help prevent carpal tunnel, and since this incident, been practically living in a splint for the sprained wrist. (Okay, in one of two; I do wash them!)

      1. For me, at lesst, I’ve found regularly shifting the wrist bones helps things from getting off the rails.

        Basically just massage and pull the wrista and fingers and try to get everything to do a little shifting around until it resettles in a comfortable way.

        I suspect a lot of carpal tunnel is things pinching soft tissue and nerves, and if you regularly pulls stuff apart enough to let them get loose, they don’t get pinched.

        Now, this doesn’t help an irritated joint.. The wayy hands are build, my wedding ring naturally rubs on the joint of my pinky finger, so thats more a case of trying to position it so it doesn’t do that, and tugging on the joint does not make it happy. Does help the rest of the joints in that finger/hand part though, so trickiness ensues…

  6. When you don’t have time, you’re motivated

    When you do have time, you’re not motivated

    That’s true for a lot of us

    1. And the ideas flow the best when there’s no way to write them down. In the shower and while driving are the best/worse for this.

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