105

Finished 105 yesterday, a little something called CITY1.

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.

Gettin' Cocked At The Bookstore!

I had to bounce a drunk yesterday. Not something that happens everyday at a bookstore. This guy spilled a bottle all over the floor in our cafe and it was red wine. One of our cafe ladies cleaned it up. One of my boss ladies points the guy out to me, day-glo green shirt and big sunglasses. She's a softie, so I guess that's why she didn't throw him out. Later another employee tells me someone left a trail of puke on the way to the bathroom. Gee, I wonder who that could be? I mop up purple, wine-smelling vomit from the tiles and the carpet and this woman comes up to me complaining that this drunk guy pulled up a chair in the cafe and started hanging with her son (the kid looked to be about fifteen). I explained that I was cleaning up his vomit right in front of her and if the guy was still in the store I was going to toss him. I go into the bathroom and the guy has his sunglasses off. He looks totally fried.

I said, "Hey, man, you gotta hit the road. Customers are complaining about you and we're having to clean up after you. It's time to head out the door."

He said, "Am I that bad?"

I said, "Yeah."

I followed him to the exit and he said, "Sorry." Then I went back to the men's room to clean more purple vomit off of the floor and urinal.

Who's up for a glamorous career in retail?

For The Love of Keely

Check out my cyberpunk story, For the Love of Ceelie at Fusion Fragment:
http://www.apodispublishing.com/fusion/pages/09_ceelie.htm

Are they shortening days now? Seems so. I did inventory at another store last night. After a long drive home and picking up the dog from the former wife's house and basically screwing around online, I got to sleep around 5:30 this morning. That'll foul up your day. My day off doesn't seem off enough. Or enough off.

A six part Alan Moore interview at Newsarama. Sorry I had to post it like this, but they don't seem to have links to all six parts until you reach part six:

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040924-Moore1910.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040927-Moore2.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040928-Moore3.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040929-Moore4.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040930-Moore5.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/050901-Moore6.html

What a shame the solo's cut on this next one. I love you Keely. Louis fuckin' swings!

102-104

102 - Dear New Dad
103 - Mr. Bubbles
104 - Where I Hang my Hat

I don't watch Kimmel (or anything else anymore), but I see this feature on-line all the time and I love it. This Week in Unnecessary Censorship:

Ooooooo!

I've got a new follower! Welcome, Melissa. For those of you who aren't Melissa, we used to go to school together in another life. I've been something like thirteen hundred miles from home for a long, long time and it's always good to see someone (or their .jpg) from the salad days.

Strangely, another old school chum is working with me this week. Lance (yes, Missy, that Lance) is training in my store before heading back to his regular location. I saw him yesterday after a twenty year hiatus. I like it when mildly interesting things like that happen. I'd like it more if really interesting things would happen, but I take what I can get.

So I've been after the boy to talk with his guidance counselor so he can take those dual enrollment classes (I'm sure I mentioned them here at some point. College classes in high school, earn college credits, absolutely free.). Last Thursday, he brings home his worst report card ever. One B, One C, four Ds and an F. Suddenly I went from dreaming of college to wondering if he's going to be spending a second year in tenth grade. His mother and I assessed the situation and decided that he should live with her at least while class is in session. He spends far too much time with his friends and not nearly enough studying. So now he should get his homework done, study for tests, get more sleep and eat better food (His mother is a great cook). He moved in yesterday and I brought his bed over there today. That leaves one dog and me here. I'll miss the boy while he's gone, but I'll get more sleep and the house will be a lot more quiet.

Birthday. It was nothing spectacular, but I had a great day. Ate some Big Macs, which is sort of a tradition for me. If you hadn't figured it out yet, I'm a man of coarse tastes. Bought some comics, another thing I don't often do, went to the wife's house for cake, ice cream and socks and all in all had a nice day. Even with the worst ever report card the day before and the knowledge that the boy would be moving out, I was determined to have a good day. I turned off my internal misery machine. Why don't I do that more often? To be honest, I hadn't noticed the switch on the back before.

I've purposely not written anything for days now. I wanted a little break and I wanted to get a little bit of reading done, I'll probably start again soon. Let's go to the board now, shall we?

Let's see, current age has rolled over, we're now at 40. Current story count is 101. That means I have ten years left in which to write 899 stories. To be more precise, 3,649 days (I have a little widget that tracks that) or 1 story every 4.0589544 days.

Piece-a-cake.

Rhapsody In Silicon

Thanks to @JonathanStrahan for the tweet, The Register for the revelation, and most of all, the artist, bd594:

The Non-Vulcan Mind Meld

I got to join in on the latest Mind Meld at SF Signal. The question being, "Who are the best female writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy?" Check out my answer and a host of others here:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/04/mind-meld-the-best-women-writers-in-sff/

Comes the Sofa:


This week StarShipSofa is pleased to present Aural Delights no. 81. Blast off!

Aural Delights No 81 Marc Laidlaw

Editorial: J G Ballard Remembered by Tony C Smith

Poetry: Black Holes Holed Their Breath by Mike Allen

Flash Fiction: Different by Julio Flávio Meirelles Marchini

Fact: Book Review by The English Assassin

Short Fiction: Not Fade Away by Spider Robinson

Fact: Graphic Novels Review by Stephen Aryan

Main Fiction: Flight Risk by Marc Laidlaw

New Titles: The Space Opera Collection

Promo: www.dunesteef.com

Narrators: Kate Baker Annette Bowman The Dunesteef Team



What's that, little blog? You need a shot of energy? Well here you go:

Forty

I turn forty on Friday. I'm getting this downer post out of the way now so I can celebrate myself on Friday like I should. You've been warned.

Thirty was a really hard birthday to me. I had such big plans and I saw thirty as the end of my youth and I had pissed it all away. I don't feel that bad about forty, but I don't feel that I've made a lot of progress in the last ten years. I'm moving in the right direction, but I think I'm going to have to live to about the age of three-thousand years in order to get where I want to go. However, there's a better than good chance I'm past the halfway point of my life.

Sunday night I was really depressed (reading science fiction about the nukes dropping probably didn't help). Why? I'm writing some things that I'm happy with, but the sales aren't happening. I'm tying my self to my work. If it's going nowhere (and I'm strictly talking about popular acceptance and sales here, not the quality of the work) then I'm going nowhere. It seems far too late to do something else with my life and start at square one in a new field, but even if I felt there was plenty of time, there isn't actually something else that I really want to do. On top of this, I decided I wanted to make a living off of my fiction writing about twenty years ago (I don't really see this happening now). I feel like I have to go somewhere with this just to get past it. What I mean is, I want to have some fun, but I have to conquer this writing thing in my life before I can move on, and essentially I drove into the mud as a young man and I've been spinning my wheels ever since. So, the bottom line is my life equals a big screeching halt. This is why I was depressed. I was ready to quit writing Sunday night, but I had nothing else.

I've gone through enough depressions to know where I am in them. I went through the "everything is hopeless" stage and I knew I entered the "I'm going to talk myself out of this, but I don't know how" stage. I can do an entire depressive episode within an hour now, because I've gotten really good at it through years of practice. Finally, I settled on this:

You'll hear people say that they're going to do something or die trying. Often you'll hear this on television rather than real life. I realized that I'm now in the "Die trying" part of my life. I've given up hope of success, but I'm going to carry on, spitting in the face of fate until my last breath goes and I can't spit anymore. It feels very Bran Mak Morn and I think it suits me.

Friday will be better. I like carrot cake and accept all manner of gift cards and cash.

Storm

@expatpaul tweeted this. I love it.

Real Enough

This is kind of a pisser. I can't embed this video. I guess I'll just link to it. Back in the days before MTV, HBO had a half-hour show called Video Jukebox on which they showed music videos. This was so long ago, we didn't even know what to call videos. I'd say to my friends, "Did you see that . . . You know those movies they play with the songs in them? That one for Blondie?" I was glad once they were named. It made things faster and I didn't sound like an idiot (at least not for that particular reason). Anywho, I first saw this video on Video Jukebox and I saw it enough that it hooked me and although I've hardly seen it at all since then, it's stuck with me. It's Real Enough by Doug and the Slugs. It starts off sounding like a Doo-Wop song, then gets kinda Ska and then they throw in some solo guitar you might hear in a hard rock tune and what it winds up as is very eighties. I still like it, maybe you will as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6cGPpVGaQw

And here's the link to the first ever Sofanauts show. I'm happy to have been a part of it. Tony cleaned it up a bit in editing and Martyn's intro and outro are wonderful. Enjoy:
http://sofanauts.com/sofanauts/the-sofanauts-no-1

Sofa So Good

Guh.

Feel crappy right now. My one hour walk with the dog was cut to a half-hour due to rain. We got soaked. Now I'm blowing my nose a lot. I don't think I caught a cold or anything, we got back from the walk just twenty-five minutes ago, but the nose-blowing sucks.

Listen up for the first episode of The Sofanauts tomorrow. I'm on the show along with Tony, Jeremiah Tolbert and Damien Walters, yapping about the week in science fiction news. I'll post a link when the show pops up. It felt a bit more like work than I'd expected. maybe that's because I'm not used to working without a script. And Tony asked me about hitting that magical One-Thousand mark at fifty and I basically talked about how slow I've been and how it was a reasonable goal, which doesn't make sense at all. I neglected to mention that I'm picking up speed. But you make screw-ups. That's the fun of what's basically a single take. Anyway, I hope you guys like the show. Tony's already saying that he'd like me back sometime in the future so that's good. Hopefully I'll relax a bit more in the future.

I haven't mentioned stories 100 and 101 so let me do that here and now: Unhappy Day and The Boat are the newest members of the family.

Give a listen the latest Aural Delights on StarShipSofa. At the tail end you'll hear Fiction Crawler No. 6, a special on flash fiction online as suggested by obstinate non-follower Church.

Aural Delights No 80 James Lovegrove

Editorial: Sofanauts by Tony C Smith

Poetry: Epochs In Exile by Mike Allen & Charles Saplack

Fact: Science News by Jim Campanella

Main Fiction: Wings by James Lovegrove

Fact: Fiction Crawler by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Narrators: Nicola Seaton-Clark Kate Baker

This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. Download a free audiobook of your choice today at audiblepodcast.com/sofa

Links to Fiction Crawler:

Colonists by Barry Napier
Homecoming by Jessica Melusine
Prairie Star by Cat Rambo
They Called Her Larry by Steve Duffy
Thaumatrope
Outshine
Nanoism
Six Word Stories

AWESOME!

Christine Balfa Plays the Triangle

Click the "Listen Now" clicky to get a taste of Balfa's music.

I Like Square Butts

You've got to hand it to Weird Tales for doing everything they can to get the word out about their mag. They're currently looking for some micro-fiction for video. Check out their guidelines here.

Stories 98 and 99 are in the bag, called Fertile Crescent and Eating You respectively. These are twit-fic and there's no reason to title them for publication but I do have to title them so I can tell them from all the others. Eating You is such a great title to toss out there where no one will see it, but if I ever write a longer story worthy of the title, I will pilfer it and change the title of the twit-fic.

This book sells like hotcakes at our store:



This is cool and hypnotic:


Fluid Sculpture from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.