Saturday, November 25
I had a thoughtful, insightful post all mapped out in my head. Then we went car shopping. Intellectually I understand we must do the car shopping; carless is not an option in an area this rural, and the van we drive currently, while I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth, is a cow to steer, a bitch to park, and an insult to my environmentalist sentiments every time we pull up to the pump. Therefore, we shop.
Emotionally? There's only one thing more likely to send me into introvert-shock than shopping, and that's shopping with used car salesmen getting in my face.
Add to that a long drive, traffic, directions that weren't, lack of food, massive sun-in-my-eyes headache from the long drive, and general exposure to cities... well... about a quarter of the way home I pulled over and made Dan drive, because my particular form of introvert-shock involves an increasing sense of disconnection to the world around me (difficulty hearing or coherently replying to people, difficulty focusing, nagging conviction that I am actually asleep and dreaming, etc), and I felt that someone increasingly inclined to believe that the "real world" was some bizarre and irritating hallucination should probably not be behind the wheel of a vehicle. Then I lay in the passenger's seat sort of fading in and out of consciousness for a while. I think I scared Dan, but that whole being a real person thing had just gotten to be too much trouble.
On the bright side, we had dinner at a very nice place, and in the twenty minutes it took to get seated I went outside and communed with their fishpond until I was human again.
But my insightful post is off playing with the fishies somewhere still. Better luck tomorrow.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 515, plus about 150 revising chapter 3 until it was workshop-worthy.
Comments: Twenty thousand words! Woo! Now I just have to figure out how somebody broke William's ankle while Elliot wasn't looking and tie the friggin' valet subplot back in here somehow, and I'm golden.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Why can't the words come out pretty the first time? Or at least the third or sixth or tenth time?
Snips: Poor Kotchi. No one trusts him. I wonder why?
To his utter surprise, Kotchi was still there, sitting in the corner with his forehands dangling between his knees. "Wasn't me," he said sulkily, meeting Elliot's accusing glare with a glare of his own. "Didn't do it. Stayed in boring room all day, like I was told."
Emotionally? There's only one thing more likely to send me into introvert-shock than shopping, and that's shopping with used car salesmen getting in my face.
Add to that a long drive, traffic, directions that weren't, lack of food, massive sun-in-my-eyes headache from the long drive, and general exposure to cities... well... about a quarter of the way home I pulled over and made Dan drive, because my particular form of introvert-shock involves an increasing sense of disconnection to the world around me (difficulty hearing or coherently replying to people, difficulty focusing, nagging conviction that I am actually asleep and dreaming, etc), and I felt that someone increasingly inclined to believe that the "real world" was some bizarre and irritating hallucination should probably not be behind the wheel of a vehicle. Then I lay in the passenger's seat sort of fading in and out of consciousness for a while. I think I scared Dan, but that whole being a real person thing had just gotten to be too much trouble.
On the bright side, we had dinner at a very nice place, and in the twenty minutes it took to get seated I went outside and communed with their fishpond until I was human again.
But my insightful post is off playing with the fishies somewhere still. Better luck tomorrow.
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 515, plus about 150 revising chapter 3 until it was workshop-worthy.
Comments: Twenty thousand words! Woo! Now I just have to figure out how somebody broke William's ankle while Elliot wasn't looking and tie the friggin' valet subplot back in here somehow, and I'm golden.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: Why can't the words come out pretty the first time? Or at least the third or sixth or tenth time?
Snips: Poor Kotchi. No one trusts him. I wonder why?
To his utter surprise, Kotchi was still there, sitting in the corner with his forehands dangling between his knees. "Wasn't me," he said sulkily, meeting Elliot's accusing glare with a glare of his own. "Didn't do it. Stayed in boring room all day, like I was told."
Thursday, November 09
Hello, and welcome to Kat's Obscenely Long Catch-Up Post.
For those of you with lives, I offer this cliffnotes version of the Catch-Up Post: WFC rocked my world. I voted. Work is kicking my ass. And I'm writing again.
Overall, I think that's a vote for the positive.
-----
So after much debate about cost Dan and I decided we'd go to World Fantasy in Austin this year. I don't think we'll bother with the debate next year. Unless I am broke enough to be living in a trash can, I will be going to this con.
Thanks to the remarkable kindness of juliarandolph we had both a ride to the con and a spot in the volunteer lineup, greatly helping with both the finances and the sanity, but also meaning that shortly after arriving at the con after a week's worth of hauling cheese to and from the basement, I was put to work hauling massive bags of books from the basement. My back did not appreciate the irony. It was probably a situation that would have been helped by packing at least one pair of sensible shoes, but dammit, I work on a farm. I spend nine-tenths of my life slopping around in men's jeans, sports bras, and ripped t-shirts. I wanted to dress like a girl for once, and to hell with the agonizing pains in my arches.
The majority of the con, however, was not spent hauling books: it was spent volunteering with cool people like KC and docdad2, then going to the bar and hanging out with cristalia, sosostris2012, stillnotbored, clarentine, and other willing or unwilling members of the Bar Amoeba, and listening to matociquala, jaylake, and scott-lynch try to one-up each other with stories (an experience well worth repeating, I might add, despite the rib pains from laughing that much.) I went to the ConSuite with everyonesakitty and jmeadows and learned that I am apparently an internet presence, or at least that my webpage's Google-Rankings-Fu is strong (don't people pay money for that?); I worked the autographs table and learned that, despite the autograph session starting at eight and officially ending at ten, people would come up to the table demanding to know -- with various levels of anger and despair -- when Michael Moorcock would be signing, until at least twenty to ten. (Though considering that Moorcock himself showed up at ten before the hour uttering the immortal words "I know I'm a bit late...", perhaps the moral of the story is that hope doesn't spring eternal enough.)
Does anyone spot a pattern here? Oh, yes. This was my socialization for the year. I'm pretty proud of myself for not collapsing into an introvert puddle midway through this one, though. For all of you who accidentally met my alter ego Badly Socialized Girl (she of the motor mouth and inability to pick up even blatant social cues) I apologize: I try to keep her in her cage, but occasionally a bit of the wild jungle nerd escapes.
In between my adventures with volunteering and the Bar Amoeba I did manage to attend a few panels. The first was called "Why Does Meritocracy Read Aristocracy?", a panel on why Americans in particular seem so addicted to monarchies in their fantasy. It was an interesting enough panel, if a bit disappointing. The three positions taken by both the panelists and the audience seemed to be a) because aristocrats and kings are the Natural State of humanity to which we will all return, b) because it's the accepted trappings of the genre from which we cannot escape, and c) because most writers are lazy buggers who don't want to think about politics. Position A was morally offensive to me, but position B I simply found inexplicable -- particularly since its main proponent was Michael Moorcock, who is from his comments on this panel a rabid anti-monarchist but nevertheless unquestioningly uses monarchies in his fantasy. I haven't really read much Moorcock, so perhaps this all makes sense in context, but it's the kind of disconnection between one's fiction and one's real-life views that I've never been able to achieve.
(I am, for the record, a proponent of Position D, which is really an extension of Position C which states that westerners in general have a fondness for pure hierarchical government, by which I mean "those kinds of government which only appear in books." In fantasy it's kings, in science fiction it's "democracies" in which the president has enough unchecked power to give Bush & Co. a year's worth of wet dreams, and in both cases everything is very neat and tidy and explicable. Real government is much more messy. And if you don't believe me, go read a history of the British monarchy.)
The second panel, "The Barbarian in Modern Fantasy", was also disappointing, though in hindsight I should have expected it given the theme of the con. There were a lot of interesting points made and some interesting observations shared, but the presence of the rather large (in both senses of the word) Robert E. Howard fanclub in the front row acting as Third Columnist panelists made sure that the focus remained claustrophobically Conan. I did find the concept of Howard and Tolkien as opposite ends of the spectrum interesting, since it coincides with my own ideas about those two.
The third and final panel I attended, "God or the Machine?", about uses of magic vs. uses of technology, was by far the most successful. Of course, it had Walter Jon Williams on it, and I've yet to attend a bad panel he's on, but there was a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion as well, including the statement (unattributed in my notes -- sorry, guys) that science is for discovering the laws of nature, whereas magic is for changing them. I was a bit sad that all of the panelists were proponents of the this-equals-that, rules-and-regulations style of magic in fantasy books, which is the style that least appeals to me. I enjoy magic systems where certain things are irreplicable, where one person can perform the same set of actions but -- because of personality, morality, or simple karma -- end up with an utterly different set of results. Of course, I've spent most of my life as a writer, a cheesemaker, or a farmer, where following a formula without adjusting for your circumstance frequently gets you a bad book, a sour vat of milk, or a very interesting set of bruises, respectively, so I may not be indicative of the general population.
One final point about WFC: dear God, what a con for books. Between the at-the-door handouts, the trading table, the special backroom stash for volunteers, the books Julia had been holding for me for six months, and our controlled (for us) foray into the dealer's room, we came home with twenty-seven books. I know the number because one of my first acts upon coming home was to unpack them and enter them into two seperate book databases on my computer. With the bar-code scanner I bought for that purpose.
Getting "GEEK" tattooed across my forehead is on next week's schedule.
-----
The first time I ever voted was in the 2000 elections. Yes, those elections, the ones that saddled us with the Dope Monkey and his war-mongering posse. I voted for Nader, which should tell you just how pissed off the results made me, and every succeeding election has only added insult to injury.
These are the first elections in which someone I actually voted for won. Not to mention the first evidence I've seen in a long time that my country is worth the time I've spent defending it to various incredulous outsiders.
It's not about the Democrats vs. Republicans. It's about sanity and being led by people who bear some resemblance to adults, rather than spoilt children.
You rock, guys.
-----
This was the week that we were supposed to have two pallets -- the first we'd ever tried to build -- picked up and shipped to two separate locations. This isn't a momentary burst of insanity on our part. No, this is a sustained burst of insanity, starting at roughly the beginning of August when we started making the extra cheese that would be needed to fill these orders and continuing through the next three months as we desperately juggled shelf space and fought with contractors trying to get our new cellar opened while our other two coolers bulged at the seams with twice the cheese we'd ever intended to store there, as we attempted to make sensible arrangements with various corporate entities for moving this cheese from us to them, as we ordered boxes and canceled because Corporate Entity One decided they'd rather have a different size of box and re-ordered boxes, as we called desperately up and down the East Coast looking for a shipping company that would admit to having refrigerated trucks on at least two subsequent phone calls....
... culminating in the insanity of this week. Which was not wrapping, weighing, labeling, boxing, and invoicing upwards of four hundred wheels of cheese; no, that was just hard work. The insanity has been in dealing with the shipping company, which has, on various occasions, forgotten which week they were supposed to pick us up on, forgotten they were supposed to pick us up at all, forgotten who we were and why we kept calling them talking about some "cheese" business, and forgotten that they were supposed to call us with (insert important bit of information here). The crowning glory was when they failed to call us by the promised date with our pickup time, leading my mother to call them this morning and have the dispatcher tell her they were going to be picking us up sometime between eight pm and midnight today.
"Today?" my mother said.
"Yes. Definitely today."
The dispatcher then tried to talk us out of having the cheese picked up by them (despite the fact they've already been paid for one of the pickups) and eventually, huffily, agreed to call my mother back before noon with the driver's phone number and a slightly narrower time frame. About one we started calling the dispatcher. There was no answer until four-thirty, when the phone was answered by some random truck driver who happened to be passing by -- the dispatcher having left for the day. He talked to someone with more knowledge than him and came back on the phone to assure us, with great confidence, that we would be picked up sometime late in the afternoon tomorrow.
My mother threw a snit, but he stood by his assertion. So we're now operating on the assumption that we'll be picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe a very annoyed truck driver will be showing up tonight. Since we can't assemble the pallet until a few hours before the truck comes, as it's too big when assembled for us to refrigerate, he's out of luck if he does show. My father's plan is to offer to pay for a hotel room and dinner in town. If he doesn't take the offer, we punch out his lights and steal his car keys.
I am somewhat dubious about this plan, but my father has worked with truck drivers far more often than any of the rest of us. We'll just have to assume he knows what he's doing.
-------
After a month-long dry spell, WFC has finally gotten me motivated to write again, which means y'all are once again subjected to the dreaded stats:
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 701 words.
Comments: After crawling on my belly through 300 and 400 word days, and then suddenly having a day where I had to force myself to stop writing, I've reached the inescapable conclusion: yup, still easier for me to write dialogue than it is for me to write description. But people whine if I leave all the stuff out. Curse you, foul description!
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I am still in a somewhat uncertain state with my adverbial tags, wherein people are telling me I use them too much (despite all attempts at self-control) but my little words look all naked and cold without them. And a large chunk of my writer-brain is convinced that if I just ignore all those nasty people for long enough, they will go away. Or at least move on to complaining about POV shifts. Bad writer-brain, no cookie.
Snips: No good ones. But Trevor and Darien did have to explain culling to poor, innocent Elliot. I've had that conversation myself, and I sympathize with them.
For those of you with lives, I offer this cliffnotes version of the Catch-Up Post: WFC rocked my world. I voted. Work is kicking my ass. And I'm writing again.
Overall, I think that's a vote for the positive.
-----
So after much debate about cost Dan and I decided we'd go to World Fantasy in Austin this year. I don't think we'll bother with the debate next year. Unless I am broke enough to be living in a trash can, I will be going to this con.
Thanks to the remarkable kindness of juliarandolph we had both a ride to the con and a spot in the volunteer lineup, greatly helping with both the finances and the sanity, but also meaning that shortly after arriving at the con after a week's worth of hauling cheese to and from the basement, I was put to work hauling massive bags of books from the basement. My back did not appreciate the irony. It was probably a situation that would have been helped by packing at least one pair of sensible shoes, but dammit, I work on a farm. I spend nine-tenths of my life slopping around in men's jeans, sports bras, and ripped t-shirts. I wanted to dress like a girl for once, and to hell with the agonizing pains in my arches.
The majority of the con, however, was not spent hauling books: it was spent volunteering with cool people like KC and docdad2, then going to the bar and hanging out with cristalia, sosostris2012, stillnotbored, clarentine, and other willing or unwilling members of the Bar Amoeba, and listening to matociquala, jaylake, and scott-lynch try to one-up each other with stories (an experience well worth repeating, I might add, despite the rib pains from laughing that much.) I went to the ConSuite with everyonesakitty and jmeadows and learned that I am apparently an internet presence, or at least that my webpage's Google-Rankings-Fu is strong (don't people pay money for that?); I worked the autographs table and learned that, despite the autograph session starting at eight and officially ending at ten, people would come up to the table demanding to know -- with various levels of anger and despair -- when Michael Moorcock would be signing, until at least twenty to ten. (Though considering that Moorcock himself showed up at ten before the hour uttering the immortal words "I know I'm a bit late...", perhaps the moral of the story is that hope doesn't spring eternal enough.)
Does anyone spot a pattern here? Oh, yes. This was my socialization for the year. I'm pretty proud of myself for not collapsing into an introvert puddle midway through this one, though. For all of you who accidentally met my alter ego Badly Socialized Girl (she of the motor mouth and inability to pick up even blatant social cues) I apologize: I try to keep her in her cage, but occasionally a bit of the wild jungle nerd escapes.
In between my adventures with volunteering and the Bar Amoeba I did manage to attend a few panels. The first was called "Why Does Meritocracy Read Aristocracy?", a panel on why Americans in particular seem so addicted to monarchies in their fantasy. It was an interesting enough panel, if a bit disappointing. The three positions taken by both the panelists and the audience seemed to be a) because aristocrats and kings are the Natural State of humanity to which we will all return, b) because it's the accepted trappings of the genre from which we cannot escape, and c) because most writers are lazy buggers who don't want to think about politics. Position A was morally offensive to me, but position B I simply found inexplicable -- particularly since its main proponent was Michael Moorcock, who is from his comments on this panel a rabid anti-monarchist but nevertheless unquestioningly uses monarchies in his fantasy. I haven't really read much Moorcock, so perhaps this all makes sense in context, but it's the kind of disconnection between one's fiction and one's real-life views that I've never been able to achieve.
(I am, for the record, a proponent of Position D, which is really an extension of Position C which states that westerners in general have a fondness for pure hierarchical government, by which I mean "those kinds of government which only appear in books." In fantasy it's kings, in science fiction it's "democracies" in which the president has enough unchecked power to give Bush & Co. a year's worth of wet dreams, and in both cases everything is very neat and tidy and explicable. Real government is much more messy. And if you don't believe me, go read a history of the British monarchy.)
The second panel, "The Barbarian in Modern Fantasy", was also disappointing, though in hindsight I should have expected it given the theme of the con. There were a lot of interesting points made and some interesting observations shared, but the presence of the rather large (in both senses of the word) Robert E. Howard fanclub in the front row acting as Third Columnist panelists made sure that the focus remained claustrophobically Conan. I did find the concept of Howard and Tolkien as opposite ends of the spectrum interesting, since it coincides with my own ideas about those two.
The third and final panel I attended, "God or the Machine?", about uses of magic vs. uses of technology, was by far the most successful. Of course, it had Walter Jon Williams on it, and I've yet to attend a bad panel he's on, but there was a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion as well, including the statement (unattributed in my notes -- sorry, guys) that science is for discovering the laws of nature, whereas magic is for changing them. I was a bit sad that all of the panelists were proponents of the this-equals-that, rules-and-regulations style of magic in fantasy books, which is the style that least appeals to me. I enjoy magic systems where certain things are irreplicable, where one person can perform the same set of actions but -- because of personality, morality, or simple karma -- end up with an utterly different set of results. Of course, I've spent most of my life as a writer, a cheesemaker, or a farmer, where following a formula without adjusting for your circumstance frequently gets you a bad book, a sour vat of milk, or a very interesting set of bruises, respectively, so I may not be indicative of the general population.
One final point about WFC: dear God, what a con for books. Between the at-the-door handouts, the trading table, the special backroom stash for volunteers, the books Julia had been holding for me for six months, and our controlled (for us) foray into the dealer's room, we came home with twenty-seven books. I know the number because one of my first acts upon coming home was to unpack them and enter them into two seperate book databases on my computer. With the bar-code scanner I bought for that purpose.
Getting "GEEK" tattooed across my forehead is on next week's schedule.
-----
The first time I ever voted was in the 2000 elections. Yes, those elections, the ones that saddled us with the Dope Monkey and his war-mongering posse. I voted for Nader, which should tell you just how pissed off the results made me, and every succeeding election has only added insult to injury.
These are the first elections in which someone I actually voted for won. Not to mention the first evidence I've seen in a long time that my country is worth the time I've spent defending it to various incredulous outsiders.
It's not about the Democrats vs. Republicans. It's about sanity and being led by people who bear some resemblance to adults, rather than spoilt children.
You rock, guys.
-----
This was the week that we were supposed to have two pallets -- the first we'd ever tried to build -- picked up and shipped to two separate locations. This isn't a momentary burst of insanity on our part. No, this is a sustained burst of insanity, starting at roughly the beginning of August when we started making the extra cheese that would be needed to fill these orders and continuing through the next three months as we desperately juggled shelf space and fought with contractors trying to get our new cellar opened while our other two coolers bulged at the seams with twice the cheese we'd ever intended to store there, as we attempted to make sensible arrangements with various corporate entities for moving this cheese from us to them, as we ordered boxes and canceled because Corporate Entity One decided they'd rather have a different size of box and re-ordered boxes, as we called desperately up and down the East Coast looking for a shipping company that would admit to having refrigerated trucks on at least two subsequent phone calls....
... culminating in the insanity of this week. Which was not wrapping, weighing, labeling, boxing, and invoicing upwards of four hundred wheels of cheese; no, that was just hard work. The insanity has been in dealing with the shipping company, which has, on various occasions, forgotten which week they were supposed to pick us up on, forgotten they were supposed to pick us up at all, forgotten who we were and why we kept calling them talking about some "cheese" business, and forgotten that they were supposed to call us with (insert important bit of information here). The crowning glory was when they failed to call us by the promised date with our pickup time, leading my mother to call them this morning and have the dispatcher tell her they were going to be picking us up sometime between eight pm and midnight today.
"Today?" my mother said.
"Yes. Definitely today."
The dispatcher then tried to talk us out of having the cheese picked up by them (despite the fact they've already been paid for one of the pickups) and eventually, huffily, agreed to call my mother back before noon with the driver's phone number and a slightly narrower time frame. About one we started calling the dispatcher. There was no answer until four-thirty, when the phone was answered by some random truck driver who happened to be passing by -- the dispatcher having left for the day. He talked to someone with more knowledge than him and came back on the phone to assure us, with great confidence, that we would be picked up sometime late in the afternoon tomorrow.
My mother threw a snit, but he stood by his assertion. So we're now operating on the assumption that we'll be picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe a very annoyed truck driver will be showing up tonight. Since we can't assemble the pallet until a few hours before the truck comes, as it's too big when assembled for us to refrigerate, he's out of luck if he does show. My father's plan is to offer to pay for a hotel room and dinner in town. If he doesn't take the offer, we punch out his lights and steal his car keys.
I am somewhat dubious about this plan, but my father has worked with truck drivers far more often than any of the rest of us. We'll just have to assume he knows what he's doing.
-------
After a month-long dry spell, WFC has finally gotten me motivated to write again, which means y'all are once again subjected to the dreaded stats:
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 701 words.
Comments: After crawling on my belly through 300 and 400 word days, and then suddenly having a day where I had to force myself to stop writing, I've reached the inescapable conclusion: yup, still easier for me to write dialogue than it is for me to write description. But people whine if I leave all the stuff out. Curse you, foul description!
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: I am still in a somewhat uncertain state with my adverbial tags, wherein people are telling me I use them too much (despite all attempts at self-control) but my little words look all naked and cold without them. And a large chunk of my writer-brain is convinced that if I just ignore all those nasty people for long enough, they will go away. Or at least move on to complaining about POV shifts. Bad writer-brain, no cookie.
Snips: No good ones. But Trevor and Darien did have to explain culling to poor, innocent Elliot. I've had that conversation myself, and I sympathize with them.
Wednesday, November 01
I'm twenty-six today. Um... woo? *half-heartedly blows a noisemaker*
Oh, wait, I get cake for that. Woo!
On to the main purpose of this post:
Tomorrow morning, at an insanely early hour, Dan and I will be getting on a plane to Austin, TX that we may attend World Fantasy. If you live in Austin and would like to meet me, or if you're going to World Fantasy and would like to meet me, please drop me a line or comment here. I seem to remember there was an unreasonable concentration of ex-Brin-L'ers in Austin (Marvin? Adam?) and it seems like we should at least do dinner er something, because God knows when I'll venture into the wilds of Texas again.
In the meantime, I need to move more cheese. We have finally completed the new cellar we've been working on for the last two years, which is good, and now we must carry much cheese into it, which is bad. I estimate that I hauled at least 500 pounds down the stairs yesterday. It is at times like these that you realize how much being an ectomorph sucks. My back hurts, my knees hurt, and I have a series of scrapes and lovely fresh bruises because any time I loose my balance and bump the wall, it's gonna bump a bone. I was so tired last night that I was literally falling asleep on my feet at points. And this morning I creak like an old woman. Bah. All this skinny-preying-mantis stuff is pretty enough, but when you've got a job that requires heavy lifting the problems rapidly start outweighing the benefits.
Oh, wait, I get cake for that. Woo!
On to the main purpose of this post:
Tomorrow morning, at an insanely early hour, Dan and I will be getting on a plane to Austin, TX that we may attend World Fantasy. If you live in Austin and would like to meet me, or if you're going to World Fantasy and would like to meet me, please drop me a line or comment here. I seem to remember there was an unreasonable concentration of ex-Brin-L'ers in Austin (Marvin? Adam?) and it seems like we should at least do dinner er something, because God knows when I'll venture into the wilds of Texas again.
In the meantime, I need to move more cheese. We have finally completed the new cellar we've been working on for the last two years, which is good, and now we must carry much cheese into it, which is bad. I estimate that I hauled at least 500 pounds down the stairs yesterday. It is at times like these that you realize how much being an ectomorph sucks. My back hurts, my knees hurt, and I have a series of scrapes and lovely fresh bruises because any time I loose my balance and bump the wall, it's gonna bump a bone. I was so tired last night that I was literally falling asleep on my feet at points. And this morning I creak like an old woman. Bah. All this skinny-preying-mantis stuff is pretty enough, but when you've got a job that requires heavy lifting the problems rapidly start outweighing the benefits.
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