Day 5: Steaming, not Smoking

Day 5 at 12.15. Bit more difficult today because I woke up with the right hump, Caroline has gone shopping and I’m sitting here alone at my desk trying to get some work done. I hasten to add that Caroline had already planned to go shopping and didn’t leave because of my hump, though I wouldn’t have blamed her. Anyway, after a bit of work in the morning I cycled over to my mother’s house. She was going out so I just had a brief chat before she left. I then adjusted the handlebars on what was Caroline’s bike, which had been a pain on way over, for the cycle back – round trip 8 miles.

Back here I’ve been puffing on an electronic cigarette, an inhalator and then tried a NiQuitin sweet. The sweet was a bit on the strong side. When I hadn’t quite got the hang of nicotine gum and thought you just chewed it like normal gum (many years ago) I found the stuff gave me the hiccups. These sweets are very much the same. Note to self: let it dissolve in the mouth and don’t eat it like a Minto in future.
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On the work front I’ve been steadily converting chapter notes for Penny Royal I: Isobel into a synopsis. For the writers amongst you here’s how it goes. This:

Chapter 1

PR made in Room 101

T is resurrected in virtuality

T on planet, polity forces bombed

Gets turned into this:

Chapter 1

Thorvald Spear wakes in a seemingly perfect hospital where he meets an old associate and learns that he has woken in a pre-resurrection virtuality. He died during the prador/human war which ended a century ago. Now buffered from the shock of returning from the dead he remembers some of his past. He was a bio-espionage expert amidst a division under General Berners, trapped on a world called Panarchia and surrounded by prador forces. Hoping for rescue he saw a Polity destroyer arrive but, instead of rescuing them it dropped antimatter bombs and annihilated them.   

After I’ve gone through the chapter notes turning them into neat little paragraphs I’ll sew them all together. It is a little more complicated than that because some shuffling around is required: bits scattered through concerning one thread, or character, have to be lumped together, some set-dressing has to be discarded. Eventually I’ll end up with a whole and long synopsis. I then begin hacking it down. This is all good stuff because throughout that process I find myself getting to the essence of the story.

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Now, back to the not smoking: After that damned sweet I’ve got a bit of a headache, in fact, precisely the same kind as I used to get when I smoked too much. Reading up on this stuff I see that a cigarette has about 9mg but absorption is about 1mg. So, I’ve had a piece of gum and a sweet at 4mg each and puffed on the e-cig and inhalator, so maybe, taking into account absorption, 6mg upwards? No way would I have smoked 6 or more cigarettes by this time of the day and, does that 1mg absorption apply to filtered roll-ups? Must exercise a bit more self-control with the NRT!