(no subject)

I haven't mentioned the new washing machine. The old one blew up. Actually, the fuse blew.

I thought I didn't have fuse wire in the house so I swapped the fuse with one I didn't use much. Hit the main switch in the box and BANG! Arck! It left black marks behind too. So I found the wire, fixed both fuses, put them back in and BANG! Arck! Back inside (where the dog is rather sensibly hiding away from the fuse box) and made sure everything was turned off, fixed the fuse again and plugged it in. Nothing. Good...

Turned computer back on. Nothing. Good...

Looked suspicously at the washing machine that was 1/3 of the way through the cycle. Plugged it into a different power point on a different circle and BANG! Arck! Turned washing machine off.

It was an old machine. To get warm water wash, I had to put in on delicate, wait for it to fill up, run back in & turn it back to normal (to get the length) and turn off hot tap (or it dripped). I didn't realise this at first so all my washing was done with hot water only. Which would also not turn off properly when it was filled (and therefore flooded the bathroom, living room & kitchen).

But it was still better than the previous washing machine, which was a dodgy old twin tub that had to be filled manually at the wash stage & the rinse stage & the second rinse stage and washed a handful of clothes each time. More often than not, I'd drag a week's worth of clothes up to the laundrette instead.

Even so, that was better than the washing machine I had in Adelaide aka the laundry tub. Hand washing of everything.

The best one I'd have was mum's old machine at St Leonards, a decent sized automatic - turn the knob, pull it out and away it went. Until the load got unbalanced. Which it did every time. Rattle, rattle, stop. Rattle, stop. Spend half an hour each time trying to get it spinning

New washing machine: put clothes & powder in, push a few buttons, walk away, forget about it.

Wow.

(no subject)

I was grumbling the other day about a lack of female characters at this stage of the WIP. There's a reason for that, they're on a pirate ship out in the middle of nowhere somewhere (and yes, yes but the just-replaced-captain wouldn't have tolerated any other women on board).

Of course, I could have just arbitarily stuck a few in, but they'd need a reason to be there and that reason would then have to be part of the story (or twisting the setting to make it viable). Just to introduce a few token characters.

This is going to be a problem with any setting based on a male-dominated society. If you start fiddling with gender roles in a large way, then you need to start changing everything, from moral values to economics. Fiddling with them in a small way -- sure that's where stories come from.

So, if you start with a society where women stay at home and raise kids, and men go out to work and hunt merchant ships, then you're limited, aren't you? Is their a perception in our modern society that women of old, those who stayed home and raised a dozen kids, are inferieor, weaker, not the equal of their present day counterparts? Possibly I've mentioned before, how common it is to pick up a family history magazine and find an article written about someone's ancestress. How she managed to carve out a home in the middle of the bush, made all the clothes, the householdd equipment, ran the farm when the husband was away and raised 14 kids. So she was obviously superior to her peers. Except, as everyone seems to have at least one of these among their forebears, you have to wonder who their peers were. It was a fairly common story. Oh, there were some women who couldn't cope with all the above and those that stayed sensibly at home, but you have to admit, we do tend to look down on our stay-at-home predecessors.

These are the sort of female characters I keep writing about, competent, talented, intelligent women who have their place in society and try to fill it (with the occasional renegade pirate captain for variety). That's what I like exploring. If that means, I find myself with far fewer females than males, it's just a matter of quality vs quantity.

So I'll try to stop grumbling about it and get back to writing (they're currently on shore, staying overnight with the POV's sister, I think she's my favourite FC in this novel)