Writing Update: 14-02-25
Added 2025-02-14 08:10:55 +0000 UTCChange: +7,041
Year-to-date: 31,683
Working through some of the thorny bits nearing the end of Chapter 8 has sapped some of the writing momentum from this week, as did a twelve-hour work day yesterday--by the time I was able to turn to the keyboard, I was too tired to produce anything more than a few hundred words. Overall though, I've kept to the target and progress is good. For whatever reason, this year I'm finding I can even hit that golden 2000 word daily target about once a week. I'll probably need a little break soon, but for now I'm really enjoying the feeling of progress even if, as I posted on Wednesday, the chapter's gotten a little out of hand.
Hopefully, readers are happy with the current direction (or digression) of the story. In the absence of feedback, I'll take the fact people aren't cancelling their memberships as tacit approval of David's current adventures in kinky play and housewife performance?
Meanwhile, I've got a strange little poll for you. As I look backwards with an eye on revising the earliest chapters of Constant, I'm considering ways of making the world-building a little more coherent. One small detail that readers might have noticed is that I've gone metric in the story's measurements: character height and weight in centimeters and kilograms, heel height and bra strap sizes, too. I made that decision awhile back, imagining a crazy sci-fi future where the ambiguously-American setting of the story went metric.
Constant is set about thirty years in the future. Putting aside the possibility of the republic imploding or anything like that, do you think the USA could or would ever go metric? And I mean for the average person on the street - not in labs or scientific institutes or anything like that, but for the day-to-day thinking of civilians driving to work, putting up shelves, buying shoes, thinking about dieting.
Vote in the poll below:
Comments
I'm somewhere in the middle ground, too: distance and speed in metric, height and weight in the old ways, temperature Celcius, obviously because it actually makes sense. But I've trained myself to metric for height and weight. For this kind of writing, inches also seems better - for heel height, and other bits. But my own opinion on the poll is that I just can't see America changing - especiallly within thirty years - thoughI guess if it did happen, it might happen surprisingly quickly.
David Sanders
2025-02-15 07:31:51 +0000 UTCI'm Australian and was born 3 years before we went metric. We're a functionally metric nation with all purchases, all building, all travel in meters, centimeters, liters, kilos ect. Even kilojoules and tonnes. Internal combustion engines are in 'liter displacement' and travel at KPH. Because all that makes sense and is intuitive math. But I always do humans in feet and stone. I was never taught the old imperial measures, but they kind of seeped in via TV music and books. I admit I just like the aesthetic. A person's height rendered in centimeters feels like a police description, but a 'seven foot tall' orc or a 'five foot three' girl generates a vivid image. Also for I guess other less mainstream 'cultural' reasons, marijuana is always in pounds and ounces. All that said, I'd have agreed the US would eventually move to the metric system, right up until they voted Trump in a second time. Now I'm wondering if they will regress to furlongs, cubits and barley corns just to spite their own face.
Julia
2025-02-14 19:27:31 +0000 UTC
