Steampunky

Just posting to have a post. I'm going to look around right now and find something somewhat interesting to stick in here so you won't feel this has been a total waste of your time.

Let's see . . .

Okay, here's something. I'm not much of a steampunk fan but some of you may be. At any rate there are some lovely images here: http://blog.templates.com/other-side-perception-steampunk/ Here's a teaser by artist Jeremy Love:

Spiraling!

As I twittered a little while ago, I saw the preview for the upcoming PBS series "We Shall Remain," five stories exploring the Native American experience since the Europeans hit the shores. It looks like a great show. Episode one talks about the Plymouth pilgrims and the Wampanoag, a sliver of whom live on in me. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/

I started The Terror by Dan Simmons today. I've heard him read bits of the book on a couple of different podcasts and it sounds like a fantastic story. I talked it up enough to get a coworker reading it, even before I cracked the book.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Terror/Dan-Simmons/e/9780316008075/?itm=1

I don't know when I'll have time to read it, but I'm going to try to work it in. I'd like to say that my life seems to be spiraling out of control, but in fact it's always been like it is. It's always felt like it's spiraling out of control. I started today to try to get some exercise in, by walking the dog along a route that takes about an hour. That's good for catching up on podcasts too. But I've got writing to do, and I haven't been squeezing in more than a few notes for the past week. It's now past midnight, I have to get up in four and a half hours. I don't know how to make the most important things work.

We celebrated the former wife's birthday earlier. Cake, ice cream and a big bottle of Bailey's. She's been at her new place a little over a year now. Time truly flies.

97

97 - A romantic little piece of twitfic called Secret.

Gear Switcher

Church pointed me toward a new Twitter Fiction market, Nanoism. They're looking for literary fiction, though they're not adverse to genre stuff. Get out there and good luck.

If you're on Facebook and you're a fan of Gareth Stack's The Invisible Tour Guide go prove it here.

No people call me a Space Cowboy, none call me the Gangster of Love. I'm not a Joker, a smoker or a midnight toker. What I am is a twitcher, a gear switcher, a midnight bitcher. What I'm getting at is I'm switching gears again. I'm now planning on expanding a story that I really love, Dritty Does, from about 1,100 words to about 4,000 words. I think it will be swell.

But Wait, There's More!

I have one more month of my thirties. People say that life begins at forty, but it actually begins at zero.

I watched some Schoolhouse Rock vids with the boy on Saturday morning because for some reason the song Fireworks kept playing in my head. It's a groovy little tune:


But this song was always my favorite, riding the wave of fifties nostalgia in the seventies (Grease, American Graffiti, Happy Days, Sha Na Na). This was done by The Tokens, the guys who sang The Lion Sleeps Tonight:

Eggs, Obama, 96

When I take eggs out of the carton, I want the carton to balance at it's center if it ever had to. So if I take the first egg out of one corner, the next egg comes from the opposite corner. I strive to cook eggs in even numbers. This evening I discovered that the boy had removed one (1) egg from the carton. My world has descended into chaos.

Just saw a few minutes of Obama's press conference. Someone asked him why it took him so long to express his outrage over the AIG bonuses (boni?). He answered that he likes to know what he's talking about before he speaks. Good answer. Along those lines:


Story 96 saw light the other day. I call it, The Hottie.

Blah

You can read The Creepy Little Mailbox Man here:
http://everydayweirdness.com/e/20090322/

The Brain Trust at Fox always shows the Treehouse of Terror episodes on the Sunday after Halloween, so I guess it should be no surprise that they did an episode in Ireland today. What was surprising was the writing on this episode. There were a lot of very un-Simpson-like gags. There was still a lot of funny stuff, but I felt uncomfortable with some of the total misses. I hope it doesn't continue.

What the hell did I do today? Nothing, I think. I did catch up on a lot of missed sleep. Over the past week I had about four nights with only two or three hours of sleep. I slept a lot today and would have slept more if it weren't for my few tiny obligations.

I'm reading flash fiction for the next Fiction Crawler as per Church's suggestion. In some cases I may talk about individual stories, in others just the flash sites themselves.

I just saw what's supposed to be the final episode of Flight of the Conchords. I'll miss the show. I wonder what they'll work on next?

Next thing I'm working on has a working title of The Italian Federation. I conceived of the idea for John Joseph Adams' Federations anthology, but I hadn't even cobbled together a decent first draft by the time the deadline hit. This is the one I said I drove off a cliff a month or two back. I've got parts of a not very good story at the moment. If I can tie some of the elements together and add something really weird that I'm still trying to work out, I think it could be a great story. Yesterday I sat and stared at the points I had to bring together and I wasn't getting anywhere. That's when I realized I had to write another draft. Even though I have no idea how it's going to come together, that's the best way forward. Things come to you during the moment when you're writing. The fun, smarter part of your brain throws stuff in there and things get better. When Tolkien got stuck during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, he would start writing the book from the beginning again. That's part of the reason it took twenty years and part of the reason it's such a well-realized work. So I'm going to rewrite and see what happens.

If you're stuck, you should as well.

You Tweeted Me, You Tweeted Me

Hey! I just sold The Creepy Little Mailbox Man to Everyday Weirdness! Yay! It should be up on March 22nd for your eyeing pleasure.

If you're wondering about the title of this post, first off, you have to sing it to the tune of Anne Murray's You Needed Me. Secondly, it's there because people were tweeting lots of things I wanted to share.

@paolobacigalupi linked to this excellent article: The Gospel of Consumption.
For the past couple of months I've been asking people and just plain wondering, in light of what we see in the economy, is it impossible to run a healthy economy in which people can also save their money? I had my suspicions about how it could work and this article confirms them. Our economy today is based on businesses which want to make as much money as possible and consumers who feel the need to buy way more than they need. Dump as much money as you want into the system and it will all flow to the top given our current behaviors. Of course, when we dump all the money into the top in the first place, the people don't even get their products, they're by-passed completely. So, please, if you want to save, do so. Empowering the current economic model to screw you isn't your responsibility.

@expatpaul tweeted a link to this, and when you think about it, it fits in the last item. The media convinces us that what the government and corporations want is good for us:

Nobody tweeted this, but I think I might:
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. - Stendhal

@jfmarchini tied it all together in a brilliant summation by Bill Watterson (It's a Calvin and Hobbes comic so click on it already): https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV-UaiqGZYeP1MA-4BtAqxBMCGeo4GBBG5WGX76bGITYyfL7rBQpNZjI7Kp_vfyeU_Vj0UQiFnaKLPEZ89MoyP66a-Z2WRgaVbiVGq7BjR9UuzRqoCyVtJPTe3GLOumrePS4d/s1600-h/CalvinHobbs.BM

And on a fun, non-economic note:
@steveattwitter turned me on to this yesterday. Found it on youtube through HuffPo so I could embed it today and it seems to be popping up all over the web. Steve is a trend setter:


Lastly, I worked an early shift today and my co-manager turned on the 8os Muzak before we opened the store. I heard this song which I hadn't heard in over twenty-five years and had forgotten it even existed. It's a wonderful little thing to rediscover something like that:


I've got sheep, I've got Split Enz. Grant's going to think this is all about him. I just realized I mentioned Calvin and Hobbes and Stendhal in the same post. I'm the living embodiment of Generation X.

95!

Whooooo! I have defeated Process Five! I finished Three Kingdoms early this morning and shipped it off to find its way in the world. It's story number 95. I just ran a search of this blog for Process Five. On April 20th, 2006 I mentioned I was about to begin the second draft of Process Five. On May 13th, 2006 I wrote that I expected it to be story number 52 and that I'd probably have it finished the following week. On September 24th of 2008 I declared war on the story and stated that I'd conquer it in two weeks. Oh, past me, you are so easy to laugh at!

But now it's dead like a movie monster (at the end of the movie) and I can get on with my life. Yay!

Here's a fantastic quote from Alan Moore that Lou Anders posted in his Watchmen review. If you're a creator, copy this and hold it close to your heart always:

It is much more exciting and thus creatively energizing if you are attempting something where you are uncertain of its outcome, where you don’t know if it will work or not. And this is only the beginning. Eventually, increasingly confident of your talents to make a workable story out of most anything, you will come to regard being merely unsure of a work’s outcome as far too facile an approach. Instead, you may graduate to only attempting works which you privately suspect to be impossible. This is no bad thing, and if rigorously applied would weed out a great many dull and repetitive creators from the world while at the same time increasing the world’s relatively meager cache of genuine unexpected marvels. - Alan Moore

I swear this is not an Alan Moore fansite even though I've mentioned him in three of the last four posts. I'll stop for a while.

Alan Moore.

Say Nothing (Or, Dan Gets Lucky)

I just read some stuff on Watchmen and Alan Moore on Tor.com and io9 and I had some problems with some of the comments. But I decided not to get involved, even thought I read some facts that I think are incorrect. For one, I don't care that much. For another, one of the commenters went all youtube and said some unnecessarily harsh stuff that didn't really contribute to the conversation and I don't want to throw down because it only causes more chaos and unpleasant feelings.

But let me say something here, not about that, but about the movie. Lots of reviews are talking about how long the sex scene is and how awkward it makes them feel. In fact, when I saw the movie, I almost wondered if the sex scene had been trimmed because it didn't seem as unbearably long as people said it was. My former wife and I had no problem with the scene. I don't imagine it's a question of maturity, but just being comfortable watching people have sex. When I was a teenager watching a sex scene on HBO with my parents in the room made me want to smash the TV so it would stop. It was hideously uncomfortable. Maybe they felt the same way or maybe they didn't care. Watchmen was totally different. My parents weren't in the room, I was a middle-aged man, I had actually had sex with someone by that point and I was sitting next to that person. And we'd both watched plenty of porn.

The scene was fine. It wasn't nasty or overdone. It was two people who really needed each other and wanted each other sharing something wonderful and life-affirming and normal. And I didn't mind the Hallelujuh song either. If I was Über-geek Dan at that point, making it for the first time in who knows how long, making it with this very hot lady and getting it up when I hadn't before, in my head I'd be singing Hallelujuh too. Which brings me to another point. If you haven't read the book, but you've seen the movie you wouldn't know that the reason for Dan's impotence was the lack of costumes. The costumes get him hot. I wish they would have mentioned that as well as a lot of other things. Ah, well.

Just finished my rewrite of Three Kingdoms. Now I'm going to read it through out loud and see how I like it. I did add a couple of cool little things with this draft that I really liked. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Shit

Here's the link to the my other Thaumatrope St. Patrick's Day story: http://thaumatrope.greententacles.com/tweets/20090315/

Fellow Sofanaut Ieshido (Or as we know him on the SSS forums, Leshido (Ha!)) pointed me toward this cool Alan Moore interview: http://disinfo.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=438651 A genius and a nice guy. What more could anyone want from a hero. Maybe free candy, that would be nice. Some of those Reese's Easter Eggs with the high peanut butter to chocolate ratio. Mmmm.

What else is going on? Let's see, I think I may have offended some of my fellow employees with a politically incorrect phrase upon closing time a few hours ago. I'll have to seek each of them out and apologize the next time we work together. They may politely accept my apology, but for the the rest of our lives they may look at me and think to themselves, "I know what that jackass really thinks!" Ah, well. Maybe it will teach me to have a little more common sense next time. Don't leave comments asking me what I said. You think I want to offend someone here as well? Just know that I'm a jackass and we're good.

I have to clean out the disgusting things from my refrigerator since today is the garbage pickup. Funny what I'll keep in the refrigerator that I won't keep in the kitchen waste basket. Eat up, everyone!

I had something like four rejections last week. That blows. I'm hoping I'll get that one magic "OK!" from a certain someone. But I always hope something like that. And I wonder how that special person will contact me. Mail, e-mail or phone? I like to fantasize about such things so that when I get the rejection I feel even worse. I think that's it for now. I have to go play in old food and dishwashing and get up four hours from now for the dreaded Monday morning meeting which is always the worst part of my week.

Did this post make anyone else feel bad? Because it sure worked me over.

Writing Stuff

My new Thaumatrope story showed up yesterday. You can read it here. I should have another one up later today. I'll post the link next time around. Today's and yesterday's are both St. Patrick's Day stories.

I'm currently working on a rewrite of my Process Five story, Three Kingdoms. I'm saving the last version in case I fuck up the rewrite. I don't usually save previous versions when I do rewrites, but I will if I'm not sure the rewrite will improve the story. I've used the word rewrite five times in this paragraph.

I am ridiculously behind on Fiction Crawler 6. The only good story I've read so far is going to be on the Sofa as a Nebula nominee, so I don't want to use it. That means I've got no (0) stories to recommend so far. That will make for a mighty brief Fiction Crawler. I know Tony's going to be asking for it at any moment and he'll want it immediately. Gads!

Advice From Alan Moore

Still Here

Sorry I havent been here in a few days. Back to the job has me scattered and besides, I haven't had anything clever to say. Hopefully I'll come up with something soon.