Missing

Friday's sunset, as seen from home

Friday's sunset, seen from Safeway

No, tonight's entry isn't really about sunsets, missing or otherwise. The two shots above just happened to be on my camera from yesterday. But I will admit that I missed tonight's sunset, due to not having been outside the house today.

I believe I mentioned in a previous entry that at some point I would stop zipping through a chapter or two per day in my edit of Mages of Mâvarin, when I could up with later chapters that need much more work than the earlier ones.

Well, I'm there.

One cause of my lack of forward movement on Chapter 10 of Another Mâvarin has clearly been my preoccupation with the whole First Magnus situation. I spent a lot of time on Thursday and Friday scouring the online news about it, and making preliminary gestures in the direction of getting another job. All perfectly understandable, right? But I had a hard time concentrating on the writing and editing, and after all my good progress recently that was not acceptable. I don't want to lose momentum again, just when I have more time to work on it! So last night I managed to write the ending for an incomplete scene between Wil Masan and Prince Talber, which had totally stymied me the evening before. It's not perfect, but it will do for this draft. Then I watched part of a Doctor Who episode and went to bed.

Two versions of the Lorsuma - Masha scene

But today was different. After eight hours of sleep I got up this afternoon and went to the computer, not to fuss with Google News but to clear away some email and then tackle the rest of that same chapter. Once I got started on the latter task, I soon came to the one remaining major sequence in the trilogy that I've never typed up at all, Lorsuma's attempt to murder Masha Awer. (Yes, I'm aware most of you don't know what and whom I'm talking about. Just roll with it.) So I went digging through a few boxes, looking for the notebook from 2002 that contained the handwritten scene. Wonder, of wonders, I found it! So I typed up nearly 700 words of it, called it a scene, and took a break for Doctor Who and dinner and such. I also took a few phone calls. One was from a friend, telling me about a phone center job with Geico (no thanks), the other from my 101-year-old friend Eva, telling me she's alive and nearly healed from a shoulder injury (hooray!).

Eventually, as I fussed with some alleged job opportunities courtesy of Career Builder (three unhelpful job "offers" by email, but also one good lead from the recommendation page) I realized that hadn't checked on the First Magnus news all day. So I went to the FMFC web site, looking to see whether those "Coming Soon" pages for employees had turned up yet. Bizarrely, the HR FAQ and the two-sentence home page were gone completely, replaced by the pre-collapse web site, more or less just as it was four days ago. It was as if someone was trying to roll back the clock, and make it seem the company was still in business and thriving. But I checked the news, but there was nothing new, except for one story about the Hawaii offices looking for another company to take them on. I hope that works out for them. I really do.

But why was the old web site there? Is there some information on it that they deemed helpful or necessary to have online, or was someone just embarrassed by a widely published AP story that mentioned the one-page version of the site from two days ago? I have no idea. But since the old version was there, I logged in and checked for HR info that way. Dang. That part was missing. Oh, well. I expect I'll get my answers on Monday. I signed out again.

Going back to Chapter 21 of Mages / chapter 10 of Another Mâvarin, I came across more continuity issues, and spent some time on those before I tackled the next part of the untyped sequence. After typing up my revision of a page and a half of handwritten text, I discovered the awful truth: there are two pages missing from the notebook, one whole sheet of paper. Having written the thing five years ago, I can only guess from the surviving pages that follow just what was supposed to happen at that point.

Ah, well, I'll write it again. But not tonight!

Karen