How lovely to be in the middle of Sunday and realize that Monday will be free, free!
Spending the entire weekend writing!
Well, plus some laundry.
And cooking a few meals here and there.
Also: Hey, Laurie J. Marks is visiting for the whole weekend! Also writing.
It has not rained yet, although it keeps threatening to do so.
So mostly, I’m tucking myself into my little woody nook and pretending I’m deep in the wilderness (despite Lawnmower Man’s inescapable industriousness), and being All Creative and Stuff.
It's a flower. But it's green. It's a green flower.
These little things are all over the place. Can’t quite figure where they’re coming from….
they're everywhere
Okay, back to work.
I mean, back to fun.
I mean, back to work…
Oh, that’s right: Writing is work that is actually fun.
I admit that it took me a while to warm up to him. I did not love him immediately.
When I was a kid, I just couldn’t see the appeal. I thought Tin Tin was a) weird-looking, and b) not funny. Where were the jokes? So I categorized Tin Tin as Do Not Like, and passed him by whenever he showed up on the comics shelves.
This went on for, oh, thirty years or so…
And then, one time, I was in Europe, moaning yet again about my lack of skill in German. Whenever I’m in Germany, I regret not speaking German better, but when I’m not in Germany, how can I motivate myself to study German? I’ve got stuff to do! Urgent stuff! Interesting stuff! Plus: limited amount of time not devoted to whatever DayJob was currently in place.
Then it occurred to me: you know what would be a smart thing to do? Read comics in German! Because I read comics fairly often anyway; and there are pictures, which will give you a clue as to what they’re talking about; and the dialog is conversational, thus helping one get a solid grounding in the basics before excursions into difficult tenses.
So, there we were in Kiel, strolling down one of those dedicated store-front streets, and we wandered into a bookstore, where Sabine and I perplexed our aunts by parking ourselves in the comics section and not moving for a long time. Apparently adult German women of their generation did not read comic books.
But we were young! American! Geeks! We do not submit under the glare of society’s disapproval!
It was cool.
In amongst the weirder and wilder offerings, I came across this:
“Hm,” says I, picking it up, “that guy looks familiar.”
And I opened it up to a huge, glorious image of a plane crashed in the Himalayan snows, with such amazing detail, clarity, color — I was stunned. Had to have it, for its own lovely sake.
Plus: Adventure! Absolutely this was adventure. All the best stories are adventures.
And on the plane back to the States, when I pulled it out of my carry-on to have something to read while crossing the Atlantic, I discovered: plenty of humor, too. In fact, much funnier in German. Why? Beats me.
Thus began my love for reading Tin Tin in languages I barely know.
I wonder why I enjoy it so much more in unfamiliar languages? Is it something to do with the need to absolutely focus to extract the meaning from the text, that makes the experience — how can I put it? More adventurous? I think that’s it. More adventurous.
Of course, I soon came to appreciate Tin Tin in English as well. Now I’m a fan.
Why am I mentioning this now?
Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Stephen Moffat? How can this go wrong?
But if it does, I shall be oh, so sad…
On one hand, who remembers Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings?
On the other hand, who can forget M.Knight Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender?
The first most suckiest being the only other Starbucks within 40 minutes drive.
I love Starbucks! Why does Starbucks hate my town? Is this perhaps where bad barristas are sent to be punished? If they mend their ways, they’ll go to Starbucks in Fairfield?
And if it’s so crappy, why am I here?
It’s right next door to my new gym.
Trying to grab some writing time before working out. Thus neatly missing the peak rush hours.
Hard at work
The Funky Monkey is just too far away to combine with a gym night.
Comments Off on Second most suckiest Starbucks in existence.
For spaceflight enthusiasts like myself, this might be pretty cool, but I can’t tell until the shuttle Endeavor actually lifts off. Alas, I’ll be at the DayJob at that point, but maybe I can sneak a peek….
…Because being away from the freakin’ DayJob means that 40 hours of tasks were not done. And you can’t catch up 40 hours in just one week which already contains 40 hours of work.
Upside: overtime = bucks.
Downside: even more hours in the day during which I have to pretend to be obsessively detail-oriented, a mental state alien to me.
But, hey: I have the house to myself all weekend and part of the week, due to my sister going to a conference in Boston, and staying at the place I cat-sat two weeks ago.
The place of pear blossoms and pond and goldfinches and geese and these guys:
(I can’t believe that shot worked. I just stuck my little digital camera up to the eyepiece of the telescope, wiggled it until the view screen looked good, and clicked.)
Oh, and this guy:
Resemblance to John Scalzi's cat Ghlaghghee entirely coincidental
And yes, I’m instantly swamped with DayJob overtime from all the tasks that did not get done while I was gone. Thus: not much blogging going on…
Upside: I got a lot done on the Seekrit Project while I was away!
Downside: But I did not finish it yet.
Upside: But I did not lose my momentum, and it’s still in motion!
Downside: But I am not in motion, myself..
Nothing like tons of overtime to keep you sitting for hours at a time. I’ve always known this is a bad thing, but now there’s infographics to prove it:
At the DayJob I long ago set my computer to give me hourly reminders to get up and walk around. But sometimes they show up when I just can’t. When I do get up and walk around, I leave the prompt up on my screen so my boss knows why I’m not at my desk.
Ack! I’m late! Must run (and then not run for hours on end).
I am successfully ensconced in an exclusive luxurious literary hideaway (tranlation: cat-sitting for friends with a nice big house), and have been flailing my brain into a creative productive mode. The work at hand is, yes, still the Seekrit Project, sorry. But the damn thing is mocking me now, and must be shown who is the boss.
It’s nice to sleep as much as I need, and to read for more than 15 minutes at a time. My DayJob is a job of terrible little details, all of them antithetical to my nature. The only way I can be good at it is to expend massive amounts of brainpower on STUPID LITTLE THINGS.
There’s a reason that artists and writers and creative people tend to be absent-minded: our minds actually are someplace else when we’re creating. Being forced to be Right Here Right Now all the time can be pretty horrible.
So this week, I’m free to enter the airy realms of inspiration, to weave scintillating dreams, to explore the truths behind reality and sound the blazing heights of —
OMG! Baby geese, baby geese, BABY GEESE!
I shall call them William and Kate
Plus: Lots of sky.
Also: a good hour-long walking path around the pond where, although it is May, the results of April are much in evidence.
Like this:
... the droghte of March hath perced to the roote/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour...
And it looked like every tree had one of these guys:
I’m rushing about madly, packing things into my car so I can leave for my Week Off (I won’t call it a vacation) directly from the DayJob, thus beginning my entry into the joys of a purely writerly life that much sooner.
Ack! No time to post anything here — but I’ll give you this link (found via Tor.com), which I glanced at during a pause in my dashings-about, which had me either laughing until I wept, or vice versa.
Alas, the exquisite anguish of: Star Wars redone as a French Existentialist film!
A nice idea, as Amazon is probably where many people looking for me will start their search (although, in general, when looking for an author, it’s usually a good idea to start with www.thatauthor’sname.com).
Amazon’s feed starts with only the new posts, quite logically, and they suggest that authors repost any posts they want to show up on Amazon.
But alas, how boring for my steady blog-readers, to see the same damn stuff all over again!
So, I’m just going to post links to my favorite previous posts.
Because It Had to Be Done, containing my viral — well, nearly viral — okay, relatively famous poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Facebook” (See if you can spot the duplicated number.)
Sweet! Wherein I show my geek colors at my very-mundane DayJob, to the bemusement of onlookers. (Be sure to check the hovertext on all photos — put your cursor on the photo, and read the secret message that pops up.)
That’s enough for starters… must head off to said mundane day job.
(I wonder if my regular blog-readers have any suggestions as to what older posts I should link to for the Amazon feed?)
It was brilliant! Smart, funny, insightful. A commentary on modern society, and how the future is unevenly distributed, with a side comment on feminism and a quote from Janis Joplin (“Women are the waitresses at the banquet of life.”)
Then, when I hit “publish”, the computer went: “Post? What post? There was a post?”
Gone, all gone.
Why? Because: started the post yesterday. Brought it up today to finish it, lost the internet connection, did not realize, and blithely kept writing.
Meanwhile, out in the cloud, the server was going, “Hm, this person has timed out. I shall shut down WordPress now. Yes.”
“Post it!” says I. “Huh?” says my computer. “Oh, you were working on something? ”
“Maybe you should, like, sign in,” says WordPress. “That would be good.”
“Ack,” says I.
Now: out of time, must rush to the DayJob.
I’ll try to reconstruct, but you know, it’s never the same the second time around.
Rosemary Kirstein is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com
