This Year And The Next

I went into 2018 with the knowledge that I wanted a more chaotic life than I had, because I finally realized that I thrive in a less controlled situation. I declared 2018 “the year of biting off more than I can chew,” and made a ridiculous list of goals. It’s not a surprise to me that I didn’t nail them all, but I did achieve some cool things and felt more alive than I had in a long time. Here are some good things about 2018:

* While working two jobs, I went back to school and picked up 27 college credits toward my AA. I made the dean’s list over the summer.

* I finished three short stories that I’m quite proud of.

* I sold one story, “Stars so Sharp They Break the Skin,” to Apex which was published in May in Apex 108. You can read it here: https://www.apex-magazine.com/stars-so-sharp-they-break-the-skin/

* I read my story, "The Wardrobe," at ICFA, which went over well. I met, and received praise from, Geoff Ryman, and that made my year (as you can see).

* I was promoted to a full-time gig at the library, which is so much better than all the retail jobs I’ve had over the last thirty years, it doesn’t feel like I’m really working (except for all those hours I’m not doing other things).

* That comes with good health insurance, which my kids and I didn’t have for about three and a half years. I had my first check-up recently, got back on some meds I needed, and I’ll be getting more issues checked out soon. I’ve also lost eight pounds in the last couple of months and plan on losing more in the coming months. I’ve made exercise a regular part of life.

* My daughter got her BS in Forensic Science and got her first full-time job mere days ago.

In 2019 I’m focusing on writing. I’ll be shedding some of my less productive activities and I hope to finish twelve stories this year, as well as complete the first draft of a novel I’ve been fooling with for far too long. That’s on top of the usual stuff for my patrons, which includes short fiction and podcasts. I’m excited about whatever it is I’m about to create.

I look forward to bigger and better things in the coming year, some of which I can’t yet imagine. I hope all of you have a fantastic new year, too!

The Challenge

As I said, I wanted to have seven more shows in the can this weekend. As I also said I took yesterday off. Ideally, I'd like to finish seven partial scripts today (some of those are extremely partial), record them tomorrow while The Boy's at work, and spend the rest of tomorrow editing and scheduling them.

I'm just sitting down to work now, after hanging with my daughter, going to the comic book shop, grocery shopping, and making and eating lunch. It's almost half-past four. I don't think there's any way I can make this happen, but what fun is there in not giving it a shot?

Off I go!

Beware the Hairy Mango 100!

Celebrate Beware the Hairy Mango's 100th episode video style with Lobsterman! With special guest stars, my kids! http://bewarethehairymango.com/episode-100-lobsterman/

Or watch it right here:

The Writing Advice At The End

I wanted to record Mango 100 today but both The Boy's voice and my own are jacked up due to sickness. Yes, he's going to be in it and so is his sister. But don't remember this in case it falls through.

Saw a beautiful movie called Somewhere with the daughter. She hated it. She claimed nothing happened. Don't listen to her. She's the one who picked it out and she can't remember why. I just wanted to see it because it was a Sofia Coppola film. It was my second and Sofia's two for two. Looking forward to three.

Here's some advice for the writers out there. It's one of those obvious things that we still need to be reminded of from time to time. You non-writers can probably get something out of it too:

Don't waste your time reading work that doesn't excite you. Don't waste your time writing what doesn't excite you. You don't have nine hundred years here. Get to the good stuff.

Sandhill Cranes

Welcome to new follower kaylaDawn!

A couple of sandhill cranes for you. I give my daughter driving lessons on weekends and a couple of weeks ago she was learning how to park at a local school parking lot. That's where we spotted these guys. The area is crawling with them. Best shot I could get as they insisted on staying in the shade. They even looked like they were trying to sit on this bench and take it easy.

Sawgrass Mills 1

I took my daughter to see Cirque du Soleil (Alegria) a few weeks back for her birthday and decided to show her Sawgrass Mills, a huge-ass outlet mall in Sunrise, Florida (west of Ft. Lauderdale). Here's the floor plan. My daughter hadn't been there since she was two years old. I took a bunch of pics because I'm a hick who doesn't get out much but I keep putting off posting them because there are too many to mess with at once. So I'll just show two or three at a time.

How could I possibly pass up a picture of a store with a name like this?

Here are a couple of pics from a candy store whose name I forget and can't find on that shitty floor plan above. I didn't quite capture the entire store.

The Boy Graduates!

The Boy, also known as Ian Alexander Sanborn Smith, graduated from Treasure Coast High School tonight. Yay! Looking at his grades a couple of months back, I wasn't sure if he was going to be able to pull it off, but he did lots of make-up work in the last few weeks of school, and here we are. 

The ceremony was held in the Adams Ranch Equestrian Arena. This made me hope that all the graduates would come barreling in on horses. No frickin' dice. Speaking of barrels, the blue one in the foreground is for garbage, not rodeo clowns.

Here are the graduates in the school colors, the boys in black, girls in gold. As you can see, we were in the nosebleed seats.

Here's The Boy with me. He looks like he stepped out of a Superman film.

Here's the blurry Boy with his sister. His mother was on his right but she demanded that she not be blogged

Taking A Breather

I'm taking a little writing break. It might last a day, it might last twenty years. Who knows? I'm going to do some reading. I'm not thrilled with what I've got on my writing plate at the moment (that's right, I write on a plate, doesn't everyone?). It all seems pretty mundane. I want to do something different but I don't know what yet. I'm thinking.

The boy's back in the house for the summer and I'm very happy to say that he's reading voluntarily and asking me for books. Yay! He's reading the Pendragon and Ranger's Apprentice series and he told me he just began the first Elric book. Double yay! His summer reading list is really lame, a bunch of that depressing shit that schools throw at kids. Racism, poverty, Holocaust, post-apocalypse. Not our thing. I think I'm going to give him a pass this summer. I'd rather he read what he enjoys now that he's finally doing so, rather than sour him to reading once again with yuchy stuff.

The high school my daughter will be attending in the fall made Newsweek's list of top U.S. high schools as, I found, it usually does. This year it's number 312. I think that's cool.

I go to Google's street view thingy every few months hoping that views of my childhood homes will be accessible. they aren't. The damn view veers off like about a quarter mile from the cool house, the one built in the 1840's. Someday. I get sad looking at the old town though. I'm cut off from that life as by an ocean.

Paul's got a trailer for a cool looking movie called Air Doll over on his site: http://www.pulpmovies.com/trailers/air-doll

Here's some of that hard-hitting shit you'll only find at The Huffington Post:
GOP Dominated By White Conservatives: Gallup Poll
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/01/poll-finds-gop-is-dominat_n_209764.html

It's this kind of investigative journalism that gives me hope that all will not be lost when the last newspaper disappears. Who knew there were conservatives in the Republican party? Or that they were white? It gives me chills to know that they've been lurking there all this time.

Where I Brag On My Girl

My daughter, Ivory, graduated eighth grade yesterday. She was valedictorian in a class of one-hundred and nineteen students. She won a reading award from her teacher, another award for a perfect score on the reading part of the FCAT (Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test), and she won a Presidential award supposedly signed by the O-man himself. She's been accepted to a magnet school for the arts and she's challenging herself by taking on the toughest course of classes they have. This is all by her own initiative. The girl goes through books like other people change socks. I'm not only proud, I'm impressed.

My Sofanauts episode is up here: http://sofanauts.com/sofanauts/the-sofanauts-no-8 if you watched, you know the attempt at video went awry. If you didn't watch, you know the attempt at video went awry.

I mentioned two of my stories during the show, so if you've come here looking for them, here are links:

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat at Blood Blade and Thruster (I know, I posted it yesterday. Won't kill me to post it again.) : http://bbtmagazine.presspublisher.us/articles/THE_LONELINESS_OF_THE_LONG_DISTANCE_DIPLOMAT_06,3,

For the Love of Ceelie at Fusion Fragment:
http://www.apodispublishing.com/fusion/pages/09_ceelie.htm

I'm a bit pissed at myself for not entering the nanoism contest I mentioned the other day. I completely forgot about it. Hopefully one of you guys didn't forget and can wave some prize money in my fat face. But here's another contest: miniWORDS 2009. You can submit up to three 50 word stories by August 10th. The winner gets £250! Cor blimey! Don't forget this one, Matt!
http://miniwords2009.sharedspace.org/index.php

Twits

Keep two eyes out for upcoming twit-fic from me. I've got a story at @thaumatrope on May 31st and my first ever story at @nanoism on June 1st.

My daughter went to her first nighttime dance tonight. They called it a prom (even though it was eighth grade) and dressed up. Her mother and I had to convince our little anti-social butterfly to go. She ended up having a great time.

Almost done tagging everything. I'll let you know.

Happy

Gaa! Already blew the once a day thing! If only I'd posted an hour and a half ago.

The big news is I'm happy! That doesn't usually happen, but I'm not usually this productive. In the last few days I finished a new story called Gray Holes (though it doesn't earn its number till I send it out), wrote a story for my boss to make her boss happy (and I had a blast writing it), got started on helping the daughter with her eighth grade graduation speech, and wrote, recorded and sent out Fiction Crawler 7.

Creation makes me feel good.

Hope I keep it up.

Denise Moody-Tackley

It took the daughter to the library yesterday and we enjoyed an unexpected treat: Art by Denise Moody-Tackley. She makes wedding dresses using the trappings of domestic life. And trappings is the appropriate word here. We saw gowns made from copper dish-scrubbing pads, mop-heads, safety pins, bedding, garbage bags and divorce papers. You can find a few photos of her work here, here and here. If you live near me, you can see her work at the St. Lucie County/IRSC/FAU library in St. Lucie West. I don't know how long her work will be there.

States the artist:

Examining how stereotypical views of women are constructed from the responsibilities of everyday life is the starting point of my work. For years I have been confronted with gender issues, boundary concerns, class differences, and the interpretation of the feminine identity. With the help of everyday objects that are inherent to a woman's life I create puns, wry and biting remarks about traditional women's roles.With safety pins, garbage bags, mops, doormats, and a myriad of seemingly insignificant objects, I build women's garments to question accepted notions of female identity. Long, flowing, traditional wedding dresses twist the idea of women's fashion and the ascribed roles they carry. What is believed and passed on moves from the internal to the external, clear markings and identifiers of expected women's knowledge worn like a badge, like a uniform.

Another Day Wasted

Let's see, what's been going on around here? Not much. Did a day of work. The former wife and the daughter saw Coraline in 3D. They weren't gushing about it, but they liked it well enough. The boy and the dog and I stuffed our faces with pasta and meatballs and garlic bread and dog food. Only the dog did that last one, other than that we were all on board. I read a bunch of crap on the internet and that brings us to now. Another day wasted.

I watched a few videos by this Haleybop lady. This song, I feel, stands above the rest.

Son-Of-A-Who-Cut-Your-Naval-String!

Loads of random shit (literally) and colons (but not the shitty kind):

The former wife, my daughter and I took their pug for a walk today. You wouldn't believe how much poo can be kept inside of a dog that small. It was like Christmas day with a new Play-Doh Fun Factory.



Today io9 has this headline:
You'll Never Guess Which Mutant Plays A Key Role In Wolverine!
I'm going to say . . . um . . . Wolverine?

I took the daughter to the library today and grabbed A Clockwork Orange for myself. Saw the movie when I was a teen, but never read the book. I just read a few pages into it at the library. I'd often heard about the language thing, but didn't realize it was so thick. This might require a second read. Here's something embarrassing: When I read William Golding's The Inheritors, large chunks of it went right over my head even though the language is quite simple. It's told from the point of view of one of the slowest of a small group of Neanderthals as they encounter their first Cro-Magnons. It's a hell of a time to figure out what the protagonist is seeing as he describes technology beyond his ken using his limited vocabulary. He sees boats as trees and oars as leaves and so on. That's a second-reader to be sure, but I haven't yet jumped into its second reading.

Just a reminder: This is the last chance you'll have to read this sentence for the first time. See. Told you. Next time you'll listen to me.

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Award today. Son-of-a-who-cut-your-naval-string! (That's a Trinidadian expression, of course. You people need to get out more.) Congrats to him!

Truth in advertising: The Hanes Beefy-T should really be called the Hanes Fatty-T. And by the way, if it really was the Beefy-T, these would not be the models for it. I mean, one guy is actually dressed like Gilligan. Nobody thinks, "Look at that Gilligan. God, but he's beefy!"

And I'm spent.

Just Skip To The Good Part

If you want to avoid all the crappy boring stuff, just skip to the video at the bottom. You've been warned.

The weekend. The wife was up at 4 am and I at 5 am to make breakfast for two-hundred people for the PTO's breakfast with Santa. Save for the part about getting three hours sleep, it was kind of fun. I had a brief Lileks moment. Understand that because of the way these meals had to be served, we had to package them individually, as if they would be purchased for take-out. The little packages of syrup we included were not labeled "maple syrup" but instead labeled "table syrup" and I pictured the stuff inside being refined from the sap of freshly squeezed tables.

Then a quick trip to the wife's house, walk the dogs, and off to the five hour parenting class, which made watching paint dry seem like downhill racing. Suddenly it was dark again and my daughter needed to get to my computer for a couple hours for a science project. Dropped her off, came back, started working on something for the Sofa. The wife called, this was like midnight now, and we had to talk out some stuff so I went over there, talked it out, got a couple hours sleep, went home, slept for another forty-five minutes before being called into work early.

You can imagine what a pleasant mood I was in by that time. I don't totally remember what happened last night (I know there was driving involved), but I had to go to the Dreaded Monday Morning Meeting today, and after errands and my quarterly visit with Dad (Who, as a veteran who fought at Pearl Harbor, was bumming because he received very little mention in yesterday's paper on the sixty-seventh anniversary of the attack), I went home and slept and slept. My son came home from school and after our post-school meet and greet I went back to sleep. Then supper, library with daughter, and now, at 10:20 pm, I'm thinking I'm going to sleep again. This is normally very early for me. It's partly about catching up on three night's of lost sleep, partly trying to wash the memory of the weekend away.

I'm posting this, because it's one of my favorites for Christmas. Hall and Oates got intentionally goofy here and the video is as much fun as the song:

My Little Hunter

The boy and I spent Thanksgiving at the wife's house. She stuffed us magnificently as usual. I got in a little golf on the Wii and dragged my score down. I'm out of practice, but at least I'm still pro.

We watched the new Futurama movie, Bender's Game. I'm sure there'll be a lot of haters out there like for the last one, but I loved it. It had a Dungeons & Dragons theme as the ads made clear, but they didn't spend as much time in the fantasy setting as I thought they would. Lots of Lord of the Rings jokes, D&D jokes and an inordinate amount of dwarf-eating. The family mostly slept through it as I laughed.

After my nap, I got up to see that my wife and her dog were gone. My dog, Cutie (I didn't name her), was whining to go out so I took her out and she struggled to run as she always does. She's a hunter and I assumed that she was on the scent of my wife, daughter and their pug, Pepper. I figured we'd catch up fast so I jogged behind her (as best I could). They weren't to be found right away, but I knew the dog was on the case.

She's the kind of dog that can take care of herself if left to her own devices. Years ago, when we would let her run loose, I'd find pieces of rabbit in the front yard. She ate well. She's almost ten, but she's got a clean bill of health from the vet and she's young at heart. I trusted her. We searched.

My wife sometimes takes rather long walks, so I wasn't put off by the lengthening journey. I kept thinking that we were about to find them around the next corner and my wife would say, "How did you find us here?" and I'd point proudly to my dog and say, "She tracked you here!" My wife would say, "No way." And I would say, "Yeah way." And then my wife would be so impressed that she'd call her sister on the other side of the state and her mother in Brooklyn and tell them about my incredible dog and they would be equally impressed.

We probably got past the mile and a half mark when I realized that Cutie had brought us around in a small loop and into a new direction I didn't think my wife would take. I checked the next street sign, walked a little farther and looked down at the dog.

"Bitch, you don't know where the fuck you're going, do you?" I said. She sniffed and tried to keep on. "No, I'm taking over now," I said and we made our way back. It was dark, it was cold (yes, it was only Florida cold, but if you live here for twenty years, it's the same as regular cold), and all I was thinking was, They're all just going to laugh at us now. My wife, my daughter, her sister, her mother, maybe even the pug. Cutie had seemed so confident!

Finally we got back. My wife said she had just walked around the corner, sans daughter, maybe two blocks away and come back, surprised we were gone.

My little hunter.

Now I walk and walk and walk, it's been part of my job for years. I can walk for miles and it doesn't bother me. But on this excursion, I moved pretty quickly, using my muscles in a running way more than a walking way, so three miles or so have messed me up. For some reason my left ankle told me to go screw. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't want to bend upwards any more, either. So I've been walking around like some sort moronic monster movie creature for the last four hours, having to lift my leg up more than normal to move my foot forward. My wife and daughter got good laughs. Not Futurama type laughs, but good just the same. Here's hoping I'll be closer to normal in the morning.

My Woman Done Left Me

My wife, daughter and my daughter's dog are now living in another house, leaving me, my son and my son's dog in this one. No divorce, no separation, just one family living in two different houses.

Today was a good day. Still on hernia leave, I spent the day at my wife's place, waiting for the DirecTV guy while she was at work. I had many hours away from the enormously distracting internet and away from my needy dogs. I had hours to write and came up with one shade of an idea, one piece of flash-fiction and one two-thousand word story. It’s amazing what you can do when there’s nothing else to do. I really need to get away from reality more often. So, anyway stories sixty-four (The Ones That Got Away) and sixty-five (Dust Dog) are in the bag, though they haven’t yet been sent out. But will be by this time tomorrow.

Sugar, Sugar

SUGAR, SUGAR

My daughter had yet another birthday the other day. She wanted one of those super cookie things instead of a birthday cake. Mrs. Fields(among other places) makes this thing that consists of a sixteen inch chocolate chip cookie stacked upon another sixteen inch chocolate chip cookie with a layer of buttercream frosting between them and more buttercream frosting on top. Now, those who know me know that my body consists primarily of fat, flour and sugar, but I have to say, maybe this cookie is a little too sweet. The good people in the Mrs. Fields labs have seem to have discovered a way to gain access to the space in between the cookie’s sugar molecules and somehow stick more sugar in there. I’m saying that eating a pound of confectioner’s sugar straight might seem kind of bland after you’ve had a piece of this cookie. For those of you who don’t know me, this is a recommendation.