Treading Water

Sometimes your computations fail, and there's nothing you can do about it. This seems to have been true of most of my PhD work and its following iterations. Sometimes, a NaN just pops up, due to a negative pressure somewhere, and it all falls apart. There's nothing to be done but scream and throw bananas at the screen, like an angry monkey who has had its milkshakes taken away. Hmm, it occurs to me that milkshakes might not be given to monkeys, and might actually be very harmful. Please, readers out there in the virtual world of the Internet, don't give milkshakes to monkeys unless it's okayed by a fully qualified monkey doctor. (They're the monkeys wearing the stethoscopes and reflector discs on their heads.)

This writing lark seems to have taken a break towards the less than sane in recent days, which is a nice change to make. It's better than interrogation scenes in 'The Glove', which I still can't break. There's a lingering sense of selling out to it, or perhaps an idea that the initial idea just wasn't far enough out into kookiness to be interesting. Yes, it's a story about a Scottish-settled moon called Ganymede, orbiting the gas giant Troos, which has suffered some kind of cultural segregation based on science versus tradition, but is that particularly funny? Or interesting? I don't know. As a concept, the Ninjas of Health seem far more distinctive, as does the diary of a laundry robot. Why worry about it? Well, even though this is a hobby, it is also a personal challenge, and to fall down on a personal challenge is quite the disappointment. Dropping a story entirely seems like sacrilege!

This story problem happened once before, on the first one, which was called 'Night Trials'. Ultimately, reclaiming the narrative became a similar process to turning around and walking out of the cul-de-sac that had been driven into at random. Alternatively, a whole portion of 'The Disappearance' (a.k.a. 'The Plain Chocolate Digestive Detective') had to be thrown away, and the story rebooted... That's not the worst idea in the world, actually. It might even be the most practical thing to do, but where to draw the sacking line? There's a germ of a good idea there, and it might even be good now despite myself, but it's not hugely interesting to write! Where to draw the line? This sounds like a question to answer on the four hours of bus ride to Aberystwyth and back in a couple of days.

O.