Me!
I was!
OK, calm down. It's Tweet The Meat and it's for the princely sum of a dollar, and you can read it sometime next week on Twitter.
So, you know, only a potential audience of 8 million or so people.
However, paid for fiction! It might be 140 character fiction, but paid! Next ambition: paid for longer fiction! And also, I think I'll try and get published via Tweet The Meat again.
Right. Markets to research, things to write.
Back on April 1st, I instituted a real, honest to goodness competition.
When one comments, one is required to enter a random clump of letters to show one is not a spambot.
I have asked that commenters turn these into words and define them, with the very best winning something at the end of the year.
It's been a month - so how are we doing?
Eletingl - the creeping sense of horror you get when you suspect that a large animal has crept up on you very quietly and is now RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
- Lucy McGough
offacho: The kind of sneeze that makes you fall backwards from the bench you're sitting on.
- mand
saxirei: a complicated variety of clasp worn at the neck of Plyoogian cloaks and capes.
- mand
Armina - small Muslim country hiding in the mountains of Kazakhstan, hoping that no-one invades it. Exports horse-milk yoghurt and turquoise.
- Lucy McGough
frinessa: the state of being unable to distinguish between memories and dreams. Can occur when asleep or awake.
- Lucy McGough
dersh: the sound all that water makes when you close your umbrella suddenly
- mand
Noppr - Someone who, though tired beyond all reasonable measure, is prevented from taking refuge in sleep due to being sat at a desk (usually at work, though in the case of a noppree little work will actually be taking place).
Sometimes caused by being set a tedious task by your employer, or 'nopprific'...
- Graymalkin
mulneden, which is the practice of denying, while EITHER holding one's nose OR suffering a broken nose or nosebleed (though some authorities hold that mulneddlibbnen is the more correct term in the latter case), that one has recently ingested mulled wine.
- mand
So far so good. Keep commenting! And I'll attempt to post things that make you want to comment a bit more often, to keep the momentum going.
Rather foolishly, I have more or less convinced myself that if I can get a few things out of my head I can go back to work and concentrate.
So here I am. Doing precisely what I want to do instead of what I should be doing, which is a wretched and guilt-laden thing. But as John Ruskin said "Labour without joy is base".
What I want to be doing is writing, as usual. I put together four submissions for Tweet the Meat, dispatched them and felt gleeful about it. There is something immensely satisfying about having completed work which does not extend to actual employment work itself. The answer is to become much more intense about the work I would prefer to be doing, so that it becomes the work I live on. That's going to be an amusing journey, because I have to become a lot less lazy.
There are an assortment of excellent things happening. Two pieces for Celestial Toybox are in the works (one almost done, one still in the planning stages), I'm researching a new market (links etc when I know what it's all about) and working towards finishing a short story that has been around for ages, which rather lost it's way. The last bout of mania kicked off a whole swathe of short stories which I now need to work on, including -
the "Time War" fics.
- a rewrite of "Daleks on Goth", which is now actually not bad.
- a fic about Dhiren Koduri.
- a fic about Roseli
- a fic provisionally entitled "Prisoner of the Daleks", which I now have to retitle because someone has written an actual Doctor Who novel with that title.
- I have to plan and write a fic about Tom the PostHuman, because that's the last part of the characters trilogy, and should be about the fall of Gallifrey, possibly.
Parting Gesture
- which has been "in the works" forever, and needs to be finished.
and a few other things that are currently no more than a frantic scribble or two and an enthused note.
In related happiness: Write Monkey is a lovely thing and those who would like a distraction free writing environment will find it useful. I'm enjoying it. I would be enjoying it a lot more if they made a version for Linux, and I might well make a perm. swap to Ubuntu 9.04, or the next LTS version, and use Write Monkey via WINE, or something similar.
In a week, I shall look back on this post and giggle at my optimism.
I think I might have Tweeted about this; on the way to work this morning, listening to KFrothingYankeeIdiot, the conversation in the car turned to Swine Flu. It's a serious concern; we're waiting for Grace and Michaela's school to close thanks to a pupil coming down with flu symptoms and, if that happens, there's a domino effect: if Grace and Mike were exposed, then Danielle was, and if she was then I was. Basically, we have to stay home until we get sick, get better or five days passes with no symptoms.
One thing that's not helping: it's allergy season. A lot of plants are blooming, which means a lot of people are sneezing and spluttering. It's hard to tell whether you're sick or are having an allergic reaction to something. It also means an awful lot of people are sneezing all over the place, which is going to increase the changes of catching whatever they've just sneezed.
Although AZ was H1N1 free, today we hear that there are four cases; we get to work to find notes on the doors: if you're symptomatic or have been to Mexico, don't come into the building. This afternoon, we hear that the W.H.O. (still think they should be the United Nations Infection Taskforce) has upped their alert level and, moments ago, the company has put out a cheerful reminder that we need to maintain good personal hygiene etc. The key is "stay home if you are unwell" - and this is worth pointing out because it runs contrary to American corporate culture. People who get sick come to work. They sit in their cubes making unhappy gurgling noises and demand sympathy, or complain loudly in the elevators that they're so very, very ill and yet still at work. Well, no more of that. They now need to go home, and they also need to start following some very specific rules about coming back to work.
It's all getting a little more serious. I will probably check the bank account and make a couple of sensible purchases - water, fever reducers, some other helpful odds and ends - just in case. You know, the sort of stuff you should probably have in a flat anyway. I can normally rely on my immune system. It's put up with all kinds of abuse, and it generally copes with invaders thuswise: it invites them in for a few drinks and a game of pool, gets them horribly drunk, feeds them a suspicious kebab and then lets them enjoy the hangover next day. The point is, when it comes time for the virus to replicate, it's so drunk it can't, and the following day it's so mortified at the thought it might have replicated the niht before that it doesn't want to and shuffles off looking for a way home that involves meeting the fewest gazes possible.
Don't knock it. My disreputable immune system works.
Anyway, I'm slightly concerned because I'm the least fit I have ever been (and that's saying something...I am blob! Hear me...eat crisps!) and therefore at risk from viruses. If I was a PC, I'd be running unpatched XP with an equally unpatched IE6. It seems like a good time to put some measures in place that mean I can look after myself if I do get ill.
I love situations that contain an inherrant contradiction (which is why Discordianism is right for me!). So you can imagine how pleased I was to hear KFYI host Bruce Jacobs this morning, complaining about the Government's response to Swine Flu.
Bruce thinks we should be all President Madagascar* about the problem. American should close borders, should be checking people who fly in from Mexico at the airports, and the Government should be a part of this.
Bruce is, of course, a conservative. He would prefer the Government stay out of his business. He would prefer to take care of his own healthcare requirements and not be a part of any government mandated universal healthcare plan, or even have the government tell him what he can and cannot do about his own health. Until now, of course.
Bruce has tried to insist that the Bush administration laid in good stocks of 'flu vaccine. Of course, it did. For a different variant of flu. Bruce, it's not like prescription meds where you can get a less costly generic brand. Influenza vaccines have to be made to fight a specific strain or they're useless. So right now, the stockpile is useless for treating Swine Flu. Not that it matters to Bruce, howling for the Government to take charge and DO things!
Actually, the government has done about all it can; the best things for people to do right now are all about taking good care of themselves and reducing the risk of getting the disease. Stay away from crowds, wash your hands, try not to sneeze all over people. What else works? Well, not much right now. I would say "it's only the flu" but previous flu pandemics were horrific and I don't want to come back to this blog having crawled out of the smoking remains of civilisation to say "uhh...yeah...about that whole swine flu thing...".
I just find it interesting that Talk Radio is politicizing the disease and the response to the disease, that the conservative angle is at odds with their statements about how little they want the government to interfere in things, how they ask for airlines and airports to institute screening with no thought about cost or organisation (how many flights into how many airports around the country? And isn't it already too late? Because the virus has shown up in New York, and assorted other spots around the world, so to start screening now would be pointless: it's got dozens of other transmission routes already, and will already have spread via the various hubs...won't it?). I also find it ironic, since Bruce is the guy who hates Journalists and who seems incapable of doing the minimal research required to prevent himself sounding like an ass.
*some explanation is required. This is a reference to an online game called Pandemic 2, in which the player crafts and releases a disease with the express purpose of wiping out all human life on the planet. Part of the difficulty is getting your disease everywhere before countries close their borders - with Madagascar being particularly prone to isolating itself from the rest of the world. Hence this cartoon .
You know those days when nothing goes as you need it to, but nothing fails badly enough to warrant a bit fo a sob and some sympathy?
I'm having one of those.
It begins last night, with the Little Blue Pills of Doom.
I've not been sleeping well, not for about three weeks now; I've had no more than three or four hours sleep a night, which has started to affect my ability to think and also my temper. This is not a good thing for work, let alone anything else. On Tuesday, I caved in and went to the drug store. I bought a box of sleepy-time type tablets that were guaranteed non-habit forming etc. They didn't work at all on Tuesday night when I was awake until midnight and then only briefly able to sleep thereafter. Last night, I tried them again and was asleep by 7pm.
The dreams were interesting. Apparently, the pills pushed my body into sleep and left my head spinning, because I remember several vivid elements from my dreams.
Element One: the most awful horror film ever made. Not awful as in scary or gory, awful as in "dear god, did I pay money to watch this?" I remember watching this movie and seeing very low budget effects and makeup. I remember thinking it was utterly unconvincing. And then I was in it. The thing about unconvincing effects is that apparently the real thing is just as unconvincing.
Luckily, there were other people trapped in the movie with me and they had been there for some time. They rescued me from a horrific scene where something tried to make Richard Dean Anderson look younger by literally slicing pieces of his head off in an attempt to resculpt him.
My rescuers were older folks, all drove a volvo station wagon/estate car (there were six people and three cars, and they were all the same car. No, not three identical cars, the same car. Co-location? I have no idea myself) and claimed to be able to help me defend myself. They said they had guns.
Guns are what people never have in horror movies, but even so I was dubious as to their potential effectiveness. My rescuers seemed to be confident, so I was taken to their house to kit up. They had a Queen Anne style house - that would be Addams Family/Bates house style - with a really big garage and a lot of exposed interior walls. They showed me the guns: I was expecting revolvers or somesuch, and what I got was a transparent green plastic cylinder about 30cm long, with a darker green screw-cap at one end and a big metal spring at the other. There was a hole about half way along the cylinder. I was cheerfully informed that this was where the bullet exited, so I was to press the gun to the chest of the target and pull the trigger.
I pointed out that this was retarded. The sole advantage of a gun over, say, a machete, is that you can hurt people from a distance. Granted, the likes of Jason Voorhees are generally depicted as bullet proof, but my contention was that with a high enough rate of fire or a big enough round you could at least make the scary individual fall over andget time to run away.
I was told I was wrong. I then found that I couldn't load the gun; the big spring wouldn't coil, I couldn't put any pressure on it. Someone loaded the gun for me, but I could already see that the bullets were pointing to the screwcap instead of the hole; when the trigger was pulled, even with the exit hole pressed to the chest of the target, the gun would miss.
Now utterly baffled, I woke up very briefly and then went back to sleep and right back to the same dream, wherein I stayed.
When the alarm went off I stopped it and it took me 15 minutes to get out of bed. I couldn't find anything to shave with. It took me five minutes to find the shampoo that was on a shelf in front of me. It took me five minutes to find clean clothes, because I stood in the closet blinking stupidly at everything. All in all I was damned lucky to make it out of the flat.
I got to work, feeling that coffee would help; it hasn't. This is the only thing I have been able to concentrate on all morning, and I can only do this because the little blue pills have started wearing off, leaving me feeling very like a marionette with half his strings cut. As I type, I am making way moretypos than normal because my fingers are having problems registering that they have pressed the keys on the keyboard. My sense of space is off. And I am having real difficulty concentrating on repetative tasks.
It's almost as though a hemisphere of my brain has stopped working. I feel really creative, but can't pursue any mechanical task or exercise much in the way of logic. Like, i want to write but have no idea what to write or how to write it; the only reason that I can type this entry is because I am doing it in metapad and doing it in a stream of consciousness style. Occasionally with my eyes shut.
So it's all a bit mental.
Plus, the MP3 player has decided it can't sort itself out any more and has signalled to me that it needs my help. The oddness of the day means that what I really want to do right now is rush home and spend a couple of hours diagnosing and correcting the Firmware issue. I know I can (one of the reasons I love my MP3 player so much is that I feel very connected to it, having had to fix it myself on a number of occasions. I wouldn't part with it now, not after investing time and brainpower in nursing it through a couple of illnesses, and it has rewarded me by nursing me through my latest patch of oddness) so I will. The poor thing needs a firmware reinstall and a bit of a format; then I think I will reload the various audiobooks I was planning to listen to.
Why am I mentioning this? Because when it became clear that the MP3 player couldn't help itself I immediately wanted to go home, there and then, because I do not have (and cannot get) the tools to fix it at work. That's making me sadder than I ought to be.
See? Told you everything was a bit mental today.
© Free Blogger Templates Columnus by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
