My Google search toolbar says "thesaurus chubby."
 

Is that when you make an ass of yourself, there's a record. Continued pondering (and consideration of Roger Zelazny's "Horseman!"* and Tim Pratt's "Caltrops") has led me to believe that most of my assertions about poetry vs narrative are, if not pure crap, at least poorly thought out. Oh well. I know more about what I think than I did before!

I had a really nice lunch with one of the designers from work. Fellow geeks unite! I hope we can become friends. She's a fun person.

Irritating thing happened when I stopped by my parents' house; I upset my sister (with the admittedly shitty act of interrupting her story with a laugh at her most annoying verbal tic) and then my mom would not stop ordering me to apologize. And I was going to apologize until she ordered me to! But then it felt weird and hollow and like I was just doing it because I was told, which she found nonsensical. And I wondered (not aloud!) when the last time was that she apologized to anyone herself. Because I cannot remember hearing her do so, like, ever. The closest she'll get is the occasional, "Oh, now I feel bad," when you point out something she did wrong. Ugh, the whole evening was just uncomfortable. I am infinitely glad to have my own place again. And I still need to apologize to my sister.

Then I came home and turned my frustrations at the stupid airlock non(?)story and hammered in some stakes (as in things at risk, not wooden spikes through the heart). We will see if any of it sticks in the harsh light of day, or if it all just falls apart.

I'm going to go to bed now (though there is a long thinky post on why "how do I get my readers to feel what my main character feels?" is the wrong question to be asking, that I really want to write for the Writers.net forums) because I need to be fresh tomorrow. I'm slacking at work, and that is Not Good. I'm going to go in tomorrow and make work my bitch.

The cats might be here in three days! EEEEEEE!



* - I picked up The Last Defender of Camelot in junior high because I was on an Arthurian binge at the time. It blew my little mind wide open. I can still remember how many times I read that anthology, not always understanding what he was going for or what was happening (I still do not understand the end of "He Who Shapes," and suspect I need some mythological/literary touchstone to do so) but I was completely engrossed. Only The Matrix has come close in sheer eye-opening, path-revealing scope. I was trying to explain it to my mom the other day, and completely failing to articulate why these pieces meant so much--just the knowledge that these things were out there! People had created them! Somewhere out there was a subculture with books and movies that were right up my alley. As an incredibly lonely kid, that meant the world to me.

I just reread "Horseman!" and found something else has endured: my (fannish) irritation at his foreward. "Oh I saw some clouds and then I dashed off this little story, la la la." GOD GENIUS CAN BE SO ANNOYING.

 

Restructuring bad queries on the Writers.net forums. (With lots of bracketed variables!)

Oh, god, I should have been in bed hours ago. I'm already running a sleep deficit this week. I'm going to be dying at work tomorrow.

Ellie, a 26-year-old editor, hasn't been sleeping well lately. So she [does concrete action]. This leads to [consequence]. She must [do specific thing] to [realize goal] and get a good night's sleep for once in 2010, or else she'll [face bad consequences] and zombie through her training tomorrow afternoon, because [obstacle/antagonist] is standing in her way.

WHY THE FUCK AM I NOT ASLEEP YET is a mystery thriller romance, complete at zzzzzzzzzzzzz words.
 

Reading through the Crowning Moment of Heartwarming entries on TV Tropes.

Yeah. This'll end well.

*munches oddly salty Shredded Wheat*
 

Square dancing is the most fun thing ever!

Just think of how great it will be when I actually know how to do all the moves!

I went to a large (300+ people) student dancers event on Saturday. It was super excellent. Our instructor was there as an assistant caller, and I danced a few songs with him. Aside from one move that had me flailing, I think I did him proud!

Off to save up for crinolines.

How much do I love the latest round of Swiffer commercials, where the sad, rejected mop finds love with the bowling ball?



(Hint: SO MUCH.)

 

You guys were nice enough to put up with the last long self-indulgent post, so I'll be kind and lj-cut this one.

Full credit: the idea of the poem as a pointing finger was inspired by a John Estes essay quoting C.K. Williams - "The poem makes enormous demands: we are to be confronted with all our inattention, with how small mind we pay to what is offered us. We are to become aware of how little we have allowed experience actually to touch us, and at the same time we are to face the responsibilities implied in our awareness of that experience."

Also, I got the plot types from ArtsEdge.

(I don't know why I'm giving this entry an academic prologue. I need hobbies.)

( Wherein I have lost the plot, and cop to some really, really awful writing )

"I will say this over and over, and often scrawl it atop the script that I'm working on myself -- a scene without opposition and emotional change is not a scene you need in the show. Or, as I've bellowed in my writers' room countless times:

'Who wants what, why can't they get it, and why do I give a shit?'"

- Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey

I am not sure if I have ever written a scene where those questions had clear answers. I'm not being down on myself; it's an honest assessment.

Poetry is one thing: I can see what I need to do to make a poem that works. Every once in a great while I even manage to do it. Fiction, plot, the narrative arc ... these things are slippery and mysterious and opaque to me. It's like looking at a coffee maker and trying to figure out what's inside so I can build my own. (Appliances are also mysterious to me.) The best I manage to do is a cardboard box labeled "coffee stuff in" on one end and "coffee out" on the other. No structure, no inner workings, and definitely no coffee.

I really pity the professors who had to try and teach me creative writing. Also, the patient and well-meaning Sluggites who attempted to play any of my shoddy, quickly abandoned RPGs.

As I said, I'm not sulking or looking for reassurance. Really, it's kind of fascinating to me, how there is this whole Thing there, with weight and structure and internal logic, and yet my brain cannot even begin to get a handhold on it. I'm not baffled that I can't write well, but that I really can't do it at all. I don't understand people, or why they do what they do, or why things have to be so hard, or how you solve a problem (like Maria or otherwise).

This also explains why so much of my life is taken up by worrying, flailing, and learning that the stove is hot by putting my hand on it six or seven times.

And I want to understand those things. I don't dream of being a professional writer or even a published one. I just want to do it already. Because no matter how many times I vow to be content as a reader and occasional critic, I get drawn back to trying it again. Or, trying to try. Not knowing how to start getting better.

Though I seem to be able to write intriguing 50-word fake plot summaries over on Evil Editor. And I'm pleased with some of my Twitterfiction pieces. Who knows, maybe it's not that I can't, but that I'm simply the world's slowest learner. Keep your eyes peeled for my first successful short story, due out in 2067.

Speaking of writing, the results of the Clarity of Night flash fiction contest came out today. I didn't place, not even with an honorable mention, which would have put me in the top 7%. I'm disappointed, of course, but whatevs. I wrote a story that amused me AND did not feature two sad people sitting around talking, nor was it the latest entry in my ongoing series, "Fucked-up Women and the Slightly Less Fucked-up Men Who Love Them." Baby steps, right?

Seriously, though, I can say I've improved in one area: I'm learning to sit with my writing for a while, put it aside, come back with fresh eyes, revise, repeat. I think it's the editing jobs that are helping with this. I'm still crap about actually getting things on paper, but if I can get that far, I can come back a second time. Invariably, something I thought was absolute genius will be nonsensical, and the things I remembered as 100% crap will be 99% crap and one truly funny line. (Never, ever, in a place I was trying to be funny.)

This entry is long and poorly structured and of no interest to anyone but me, but hey, gotta keep up with the standards I've set in this LJ over the past four years. FOUR! JESUS CHRIST YOU GUYS. I am old. Also, the amount of self-indulgent whining I have committed to the intertubes, when considered in total, truly beggars belief.
 

Yesterday at the coffeeshop we all brought a photo of ourselves in our glory years. Only mine was taken in 2010, not to mention since 1975.
- @wachendorfia

---

(via Formspring) If somebody made a movie of your life, what actor would you want playing you?
Some unknown. Let it be their big break.
- Erinkyan

---

I am at home, as it turns that there are lots of ways to hurt soft tissue, and most of them involve the skin turning funny colors later, but not a lot require a hospital. Not in this province. Oh, about the fall, the wheelchair is FINE!

Last night, I was up late. God, why so many colours of pain?

Sometimes I try to keep my face immobile to pretend the sobbing ain't happening.

Damn. ...

Right now, even resting is riding the wave. ...

Waimea [the most deadly wave in the world], it was forbidden to even Hawaiians and just the back surf had killed two surfers when Greg Noll went to ride it. His words describe what this disease stage feels like for me. Still alive though. But like Noll on the big killing waves, “Instead of getting smaller as I rode it, the sonofabitch grew on me. It got bigger and bigger, and I started going faster and faster, until I was absolutely locked into it. I felt like I was on a spaceship racing into a void. At first, I could hear my board chattering across the face of the wave in a constant rhythm. As my speed increased, the chattering noise became less frequent. Suddenly there was no noise. For about fifteen or twenty feet, I was airborne. Then I literally was blown off my board."

Greg made a special board. A giant surfboard for giant waves. And December 1969 a series of storms came together from different angles to combine into channeling all power and fury on that tip. Greg went to Makaha where black waves so large they had never been seen before in Hawaiian history were slamming over the beach. Alone on Dec 4th, none of the Waimea surfers daring what seemed sure death, Greg Noll paddled out into waves so large, they made the shore dark. He went on to surf the biggest wave ever ridden, before or after, eighty feet plus, before wiping out.

When stage two of autonomic failure is occurring for over two week, three weeks and there has not been a regular heart beat for how long? It is riding the wave.

Even resting is riding, the chattering noise become less and less. I don't want no noise. I want a bigger surfboard.

- Elizabeth McClung
 

(I love the internet, I really really do. To the point that sometimes I forget not everybody reads the same blogs I do.)

Little brother: *picks at food*

My mother: Stop that! Stop picking at your food. Eat like a man!

Me: *genuinely shocked* Mother! That's so heteronormative!

My mother: What?

Me: Heteronormative. Enforcing the stereotypes of the socially constructed gender binary.

My mother: And?

Me: It's BAD!

I rarely get to enjoy the weather anymore; I work in the center of a concrete building so dense and windowless that I don't even get cell phone service at my desk, and I arrive in the early-morning cold and leave after dark. So it was quite a pleasure to run out to my car to get something this afternoon, and enjoy a slice of a beautiful day: bright sun, soft breeze, snow melting everywhere, a hopeful feeling of spring. Then I got to enjoy it even longer, because it turned out I'd forgotten my keycard and had to walk all the way around to the visitors' entrance.

I am super-excited for tomorrow: I get to have one of my wisdom teeth pulled. (The other three can wait, the useless buggers.) This is the Broken Tooth of Doom; tooth of a thousand twinges and aches and interrupted sleeps; the tooth that has shed so many shards it's just a raggedy stump in my gums; the tooth that triggered the freaking expensive ER visit and Valuable Lesson about Tylenol Overdoses back in August. And now it is finally going away. And it is going to cost a lot of money and will probably hurt like hell and leave a huge gaping hole and I will be in agony for weeks and rue the day I ever got it yanked. But. That too shall pass.

Just over three weeks until David and the kitties get here. ABOUT TIME. I miss them so.

I went to a board game party for New Year's; I have my own apartment now; work is fun; I have cute new shoes and a gorgeous new coat; I've been doing some (terrible) writing lately; really, this is why I hardly update anymore, it just seems like bragging. My life is so lovely right now.

Although I did spend $13 on METAtropolis and found the whole thing a huge disappointment. Also, started watching Weeds from the beginning; good, except: rape jokes? Really? Dammit, media of all kinds, cut that shit out already.

And: what the hell, Lane Kiffin? WHAT THE HELL.
 

Today was so slow at work that I had time to write a piece of flash fiction, which I was going to brag about. But I'm going to link to this one instead, because it is incredibly good, whereas mine was all pensive and obsessed with airlocks. (Though at least it was not two people sitting around talking.)

The Night The Stars Sang Out My Name by Ken Scholes

I've been listening to Sufjan Stevens and reading modern poetry all afternoon. Time to go home and be moody at things.

I remembered that I liked this story, the first time I read it, but I'd forgotten how supremely excellent it is.

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss by Kij Johnson

I <3 you.

Hot damn, this is a good poem.

I Foresee the Breaking of All That Is Breakable by John Estes