Weeknotes 2023 W44: COVID at last

Blah. I caught COVID-19, finally, for the first time.

I was feeling a little funky on Wednesday evening, and on Thursday I fell proper sick. I slept for most of the day. Friday and Saturday were not much better. We’ll see how today goes. The fever is gone at least.

The worst symptom is the constant stabbing headache. This isn’t really a typical COVID symptom. The feeling of your head being electrocuted every 20–40s for several days straight is not at all fun, as you can imagine. I’ve had headaches like these before, but I’ll need to talk to my GP about it. My suspicion is that it’s occipital neuralgia, somehow triggered by COVID-19, but I’ll let the doctors figure it out for real soon.

I have attempted writing fiction this week — before I fell sick, that is — but to no avail. I’m stuck at outlining the story I’m working on, and I’m just not happy with the resolution.

Larger-scale plot structure is my nemesis. I’m good at writing sentences, and I’m good at joining them together into meaningful paragraphs. But beyond that, when it comes to larger structures, I can’t seem to get much good down on the page.

The books on story structure are generally useless, I find. I’m not sure what people get out of books like Story.¹¹¹ Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (Methuen, 2014).  They’re utterly, frustratingly impractical. Their huge flaw, as I see it, is that they confuse “if a story is good, it has structure” with “if a story has structure, it is good.”

Quick bits:

• I signed up for Instagram again. I felt like I needed one; you can’t just view individual posts without an account (because Instagram is evil).

Entertainment:

• Cities Skylines 2 is fun. That’s all.

Links:

• Does Your Brain Picture Things? (Kottke): Whoa! My brain can picture things quite well — strange to think that some people cannot do that at all.

• How I Procrastinate Less (Mike McQuaid): I might need to learn a thing or two from this.

• Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music (Tantacrul)

• This Just In: Schriftenkartei, a Typeface Index: What a treasure!

• Medieval Murder Maps