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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
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12:57 pm
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Reading Cormac McCarthy novels is like eating a really big meal with lots of awesome tastes thrown in - the most extravagant, impossible to pin down flavours you could ever imagine - but every once in awhile this withered old hobo comes in and sits down next to you, reeking of piss and peppermints and caked filth. As he picks his nose and wipes it on his shoe sole, he gives a soliloquy about man's place in the universe, the whims of fate, and the inscrutability of meaning.
Then he sodomizes a librarian to death sitting across the table and wears her labia as earmuffs for the rest of the dinner.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, June 13th, 2008
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2:56 pm
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There's a hole in the sky this morning.
Well, maybe not so much a hole as a nasty rent. You can see flaps of skin hanging from the edges - if skin is the right word - and beyond that a great suppurating mass of blood and pus. At least that's what it looks like. The scientists are saying it's some sort of atmospheric anomaly, nothing to be worried about, but folks are understandably unsettled when they look up and get an eyeful of that. It looks like something off a Judas Priest album cover.
I wouldn't be concerned, but it seems to be getting bigger. What happens when it tears completely? And does this have anything to do with the other rumours I've been hearing?
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 5th, 2008
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12:56 pm
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| Monday, May 26th, 2008
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11:52 pm
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I started an AU fic years and years ago about Shera getting Shinra-napped during the course of FFVII. It was pretty badly done, I stopped working on it, and now, in the interest of whetting my skills, I'm writing it over again.
( The Lady And The Tiger )
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
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6:43 am
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We liked various aspects of this, but I'm afraid that the story overall didn't quite work for us. Among other things, I had a hard time buying part of the core premise: I'm not really seeing a strong connection between bluesmen and tricksters. Certainly Robert Johnson's story is fairly widely known, but that seems more like general folklore than like a trickster story per se, and I don't think of other bluesmen having that kind of story associated with them either.
...I should also note that although I mostly liked the language in this, I felt that the diction and rhythms were subtly off in places, and a few bits felt a little too on-the-nose or a little too arch, like the phrase "its _coyoteness_, if you will" -- didn't quite feel like it fit the voice of the rest of the story. But that's just a gut feeling on my part; feel free to ignore it.
At any rate, we appreciate your interest in our magazine.
--Jed
---
And there's the rejection letter. But what's this? A personal rejection letter on the first go from Jed Hartman? A fairly well-detailed one, to boot?
God-damn. I don't feel nearly as bad about this as I should.
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 18th, 2008
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3:20 pm
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40 days. Still no rejection notice.
Every day that dreaded document doesn't show up in my inbox is a tiny personal victory.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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12:27 am
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| Sunday, February 17th, 2008
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8:31 pm
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Myself, my parents, and Fen are wandering around the now-empty store. Mum and Dad go outside; I stay behind, watching Fen snap photographs.
A very deliberate banging begins in the back, where the rear entrance and bathroom are. It stops, then gets louder. It's like someone is slamming their fists on the walls. I figure maybe somebody is knocking, even though this place is seriously miles from the ass-end of nowhere. Leaving Fen still taking photos, I walk outside and check around the back-door.
Nobody's there. Not a soul. Oh well, I think, maybe a hobo managed to get past the locks and chains and was pissed at us for disturbing his boozy slumber.
Later on, I talk to Fen about it. Turns out he wandered into the back room and there wasn't anyone there, either. Now, he heard the banging as well. He thought it was me. That leaves two options for the racket:
1. The tin on the roof was somehow making backdoor-bangy sounds.
2. Great-grandaddy 'Daddy Will' Harkins was not best pleased about me stealing his pickle jar.
I guess if anything abnormal shows up on the photographs we can have a good ol' X-Files moment, at any rate.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 16th, 2008
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11:45 pm
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| Friday, February 15th, 2008
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6:24 pm - DROPSY~
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5:07 pm
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Got the keys to my grandmother's store, so expect pictures soonish. I was lucky to have thought of this now; apparently the place was recently sold.
I was swinging from tenterhooks yesterday like a rhesus monkey in a fulling mill over the Strange Horizons submission. Today has been easier for a number of reasons, namely because of this and the overwhelming number of rejections listed therein. There's no way on God's big blue spinning marble I've got a chance of cracking SH with my first attempt, but I feel like I'm in good company (good company in this case being 98% of writers who have submitted since 2006).
Who knows, maybe they'll actually tell me some things I can work on. I'd enjoy that almost as much as a sell.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
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11:18 pm
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12:39 pm
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| Sunday, February 10th, 2008
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10:20 pm
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Since the twenties, my paternal grandmother's family has maintained a store out in the sticks. First it was run by my great-grandfather. When he died in 1964 of too much drink and the various sundry other ailments common to men of that era, my grandmother and great-aunt took things over. My great-aunt passed away around 1998; from then on out it was solely my grandmother's responsibility, and she ran it each and every day from early morning until late in the evening. My aunts and my father worried endlessly about her being out there alone - my great-grandmother was assaulted at the age of eighty or so in a house about thirty feet from said store one night, and there had been numerous robberies in the past - but it was what she had always done, and I think it gave her something to do. More than that, it was a tangible connection to her past, and she refused all pleas to vacate until around 2002.
Since then, the store has stood unused, a 'For Sale' sign posted out front. I got a chance to stop by late yesterday afternoon and had a good peek through the dirt-encrusted windows. It was fuckin' eerie. Everything was the same as I remember - the oversized pickle jar that used to hold a delightfully disgusting bounty of pickled pig's feet, the drygood shelves, the cracked barstool behind the counter, the big floor cooler for ice cream and frozen goods, even the cigar box for receipts - but it was empty and deserted and covered in a fine layer of dust. The door to the back room was hanging open; it was pitch-black and more than a little creepy.
Basically, between the dust and the sunlight and the grime on the windowpanes, it was like looking at a living sepia photograph of my family's past. I wonder if I should go try to take pictures through the door before someone else buys it and things change for good.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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3:37 pm
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Well, Christ on a Bagel Bite. If all it took to get published was making some sort of a name for fanfiction first, I'd be getting excited right about now.
Unfortunately it doesn't. Still waiting on that rejection letter, re: Strange Horizons. Gonna print and frame the fucker when it finally arrives, you can bet on that.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 9th, 2008
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6:39 pm
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Here is a meme, of sorts. It is about fanfiction. Answer it so I don't feel lonely and stuff. Or, y'know, don't, that's cool too.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, February 7th, 2008
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8:07 pm
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1:32 pm
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I made crawdad etouffee. It was a rousing success, despite my apprehension at the recipe calling for one stick of butter. Que sera sera. It was Fat Tuesday anyway. Cajun cooking isn't exactly the most health conscientious cuisine, calling for, as it does, lard, frying, the frying of lard, or any one of these two in conjunction with the other.
BUT HEY YOU LADLE IT OVER RICE RICE IS HEALTHY!!!
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(comment on this)
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2:43 am
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I've pretty much stopped writing fanfiction; when I do work on something these days, more often than not it's original work (still waiting for My First Rejection Letter, as previously stated). Still, that didn't stop me from finishing up an old Ico/SOTC fic about Mono doing the nasty with her adopted son/reincarnated boyfriend, because A. it was implied by the game(s), and B. I had already written a goodly chunk of it several months back and never got around to finishing the fucked-up little plotmogwai. But now I have, and aren't you all proud of me.
Occasionally I go back and re-read Ersatz's 'The Beginning', or pretty much anything by DK, and it makes me utterly, utterly envious of how smoothly some people can write without even straining themselves. In writing, there is hard-won competence, and there is god-given talent. Those of you who have the latter, I hope you're getting down on your knees every day and thanking God/Allah/Buddah/The Giving Tree for it, because goddamn.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
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2:35 pm
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Cats hate writers.
Let's be honest, cats hate anything not pertaining to cats, really. The computer is foremost among these villainous beasts that take precious attention away from Their Infernal Majesties, followed closely by books and newspapers. But what they hate most of all is when you try to write. Not only are you staring at a screen with your eyeholes, you're also using your hands - hands that could be put to much better use stroking your whiskered master/lady.
They have to put up with so much from us, really. It's a shameful state of affairs.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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