Fingers, Numbers and Blessed Sleep

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Photograph a body part. Tell us something interesting about that body part. "Body part" for these purposes can also include scars and such. Also, although I know I don't have to remind you all about this: This is AOL. When shooting body parts, remember the Terms of Service, please.

Yes, I know it's a hand, but I want you to focus on just the middle finger here, the one that's curled into sort of a lopsided square shape. (Rhomboid? Everybody rhomboid! Sorry. Very obscure Bosom Buddies reference.)

Anyway, the significance of this is that this is as tightly as I can curl that particular finger, and it hurts to do even this much. This is the finger I broke my fall with last May, when I tripped outside Eva's 100th birthday party. Dr. L. was more concerned about the sprained finger than the sprained ankle, and she was right. The x-ray showed no break, but despite finger exercises and an apple-shaped squeeze ball, the finger has never fully healed. It probably never will. I also seem to have minor carpal tunnel-like symptoms - tingling and numbness - in this, my mousing hand. Sometimes at work I have to stop, shake my hand about, and grab my squeeze ball to try to get my hand to feel normal again. Does it help? Well, no, not much.

Now take a look at the same finger when I straighten out the hand. When the bottom half of the finger is vertical, the top half points to the right. That can't be right, can it? I'm sure it wasn't that way before May. But I suppose I just have to live with it.

I'm determined to go to bed soon, so the only other thing I want to add here tonight is the news that I tallied my final word count on Heirs of Mâvarin and cleaned up the previous draft of the synopsis as a starting point for the version I'll be sending out this year. Heirs grew by about 2,000 words since I last totaled it up. It's now 160,744 words on 540 double-spaced pages. That makes it pretty long, but it's nothing compared to the length of Mages.

Now, here's the part where I ask for a little help. I know my faithful beta readers will look over my query, cover letter and synopsis, and Julie has also agreed to do so. But I'd like at least one more person with a writing background or aspirations to look them over as well. The reason is that I need to know whether someone who does not already know the story will be able to follow the synopsis, and the explanation in the letters.

Linda? Shelly? Bea? Anyone?

Karen

P.S. It's probably time to mention a couple of technical glitches I've been having recently. Here's what Technorati lists for this blog, as of thirty seconds ago:

48 sites link to:

Outpost Mâvarin

Daily essays, rants, photos, poetry etc. from the author of the pending Mâvarin novels. Outpost Mâvarin replaces Musings from Mâvarin as my main blog. (Note: active; ping is broken)

• By Karen Blocher. Last updated 35 days ago
• Tagged AOL, Arizona, Blogger, Blogspot, Desert, Diary, Episcopal, Ethics, Fantasy, Fiction, Photography, Poetry, SF, Tucson Writing , More »
• Technorati Rank: 43,847 (116 links from 48 sites)

See the part I put in red? (Sorry, Shelly.) Yep, Technorati insists that I haven't updated Outpost Mavarin since the first week in December. I've pinged and pinged, followed the help page about pinging and Blogger, and even turned "Ping Weblogs.com" off and back on in the Blogger settings. I've also contacted Technorati twice. Nothing works. Every day, the number of days since they think I updated goes up again. Phooey. But you folks know I update daily, don't you?

The other glitch is that I've stopped getting email alerts of comments to my Blogspot blogs. I suspect that's true for a lot of us who still have AOL for email. (Yes, I do plan to leave AOL, but these things take time. I have a lot of archiving to do first.) My theory is that the number of alerts from Blogger to AOL screen names has reached some critical mass that tripped AOL's spam filters. The alerts aren't in my spam folder, but they wouldn't be if AOL is blocking the whole domain. Time to email someone at AOL about this!

Well, my bad finger is throbbing now, so I'll end this ridiculously long P.S. Good night!