| Current location: | Home |
| Current music: | stillness |
Just a check-in, though I'm tired and more tapped-out than usual. My family and I spent a lovely day yesterday at the Getty Villa in Malibu (probably the only truly cool-and-pleasant place in the LA area yesterday); the place itself as beautiful as the stuff inside it. It's astonishing, the sheer quantities of trivial facts about Greek and Roman history and mythology I can spout upon a moment's notice. I always could, and teaching Western Civ has made me infinitely worse.
Still frustratingly entangled in the Re-Write From Hell, so it's difficult to talk about anything: restless, sleep, bad dreams. Certainly the reason I haven't been on LJ since I got back from New Orleans. My neice came down to visit the night before, and we watched Enchanted: I realize the "Cute Little Animals Clean Up The House" song is supposed to be clever, but if I had a child who was at all phobic about some of the vermin (and I use the term advisedly) in that number, I'd hesitate to take them to see that film. There are shots in that sequence that are truly the stuff of nightmares.
Or maybe most kids aren't as twitchy as I was (and am).
In between sending in bits of "Is this what you had in mind?" to my editor (and having her be out of the office for a week or ten days) I am hacking at first draft of a historical mystery (the pseudonymous one I've been asked not to talk about). This is always slow and frustrating going: stopping every paragraph or so to look up how old Character A was in a flashback, and what would a horse cost in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-eighteenth century? (The closest I could get to a specific was that George Washington turned in an expense-account item to Congress asking to be reimbursed for six grand and change, for the purchase of five horses and a carriage, to go to the front in, which even at this distance seems to be pretty nervy). (George, famously, refused payment for his services as Commander in Chief - something he could afford to do, having married the richest widow in Virginia - and said, "I'll only take expense reimbursement." Meaning, all the other Continnental generals got paid in wildly inflated Continnental paper money, while George got paid back after Congress had gotten its financial act together and money was worth something again.) (I suppose, in a way, he was betting on the success of the Revolution, since if the Brits had won, he a) wouldn't have got paid anything and b) would have been hanged, drawn, and quartered - always supposing he and Martha didn't high-tail it to Mexico or France.)
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
barbara_hambly) wrote,
