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About this Journal
The comments and digressions of a struggling science fiction novelist. One who is admittedly not living in an unheated garret, has a nice family, good job, and absolutely no reason not to write.

Mild Content Warning:

I don't intend this to be a political journal, but because I am what I am, there will be occasional flashes of conservative opinion. Take them with a grain of salt, a slice of lime, and feel free to argue with me. Just keep it family-friendly.
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Nov. 9th, 2009 @ 12:00 pm Curses retracted! (head still hurts, though)
The agent just responded--two hours after I sent an email to her. Apparently she's closed to new queries as she tries to catch up on a backlog of work, but is willing to look at mine again around December.

She still sounds enthusiastic about it, too.
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Nov. 9th, 2009 @ 11:08 am twenty thousand boiling curses
The agent who expressed such an interest in my work is on hiatus until next February. It sounds like maternity leave, so I'm glad for her, but (slams head into desk) why (slam) didn't I (slam) get this done faster???

okay. (grabs some tylenol).

No problem. I still have many other agents to query. Will do that rather than wait passively for three months. (Deep breath while painkiller kicks in.) I can do this.
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Nov. 5th, 2009 @ 01:01 pm The cat came back the very next day . . .
Well, no, she didn't. She had to be fetched out of a neighbor's yard after being missing for five days. Five days of cold and hunger and nasty creatures taking a bite out of her (squirrel, I'm guessing), all while being no more than 500 yards from the house. All while her family searched and called for her.

She used to be known as Nara, Pretty Kitty, and occasionally, Dammit Cat, but now she will be forever known as Miss Too Stupid To Live.
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Oct. 28th, 2009 @ 03:25 pm my personal hell
Afternoon meetings. Attended by people energized by the discussion of minutiae. My brain streams out of my ears like dust poured out of an ancient wine bottle. Not even coffee helps. The room is darkening before my eyes.

A knock. The spell is broken. Another meeting follows ours and needs the room. We must leave before the enthusiastic one is ready, but he bears up under the disappointment.

Saved for yet another afternoon. Despite the loss of brains, this was only a minor setback in the holy quest to Get Things Done In Spite of Eternal Meetings.
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Oct. 24th, 2009 @ 07:21 am Writers are cold bastards
So I'm thinking about blowing up fuel depots strung across NM and Arizona, wondering what it would look like and how far away each explosion could be seen, when a fuel tank blows up in Puerto Rico. How wonderful, I say, and devour accounts of how far the black column of smoke rose, of how intense the earthquake-like shocks were. Only afterward, and with a great deal of effort, do I remember that people would have been hurt. Fortunately, no deaths, so I don't feel *too* ghoulish. But there's definitely something wrong with me.
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Oct. 20th, 2009 @ 02:25 pm Done with Wind out of Indigo
done done done DONE!**

I hate this story. I know, on an intellectual level, that it has some good moments in it, but I am blind to them. I have been with this story too long, I need a divorce. Or a good couples therapist.

Part of this hatred is driven by over-familiarity, but the real problem is that my mind, my imagination, is in the next world, one of Khazar legends, tanks, Romanovs, and Apache-Cossack raiders. So far. I'm still in the poking-around stage, although I've written the first chapter already.

**To my sorrow, not completely. The rewrite is done, now I have to go back and fix a few last problem areas. It will require all my will-power. It will require much chocolate.
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Oct. 12th, 2009 @ 01:28 pm (no subject)
so I had him home for two weeks. Good times, but now I'm wondering whether or not to wrap up all the trash and dirty dishes he left behind in his room and ship it to him in place of the books and junk food I normally send.

Or maybe send him the books and food, hiding them under the trash. Just because I'm evil.
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Oct. 5th, 2009 @ 01:56 pm the college years
I didn't think it was possible, but the Domestic Teenager is getting more flyers from colleges than my mother gets Christmas catalogs.
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Oct. 1st, 2009 @ 12:03 pm Peanut zombies
Link from my brother, who after all these years, has not given up his devotion to Devo . . .
Lord, this cheered me up.



Still playing with getting an image to embed. If it doesn't work, here's
the source.
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Sep. 30th, 2009 @ 12:47 pm Book review fail . . .
Found this review on Amazon:

"Bacigalupi is as unflinching in his examination of the unthinkable cruelty, humiliation and banal evil that humanity inflicts on the Other as he is on the bleak future that our mass consumption society will inevitably unleash. In his fictional vision, there will be no miraculous rescue from our moral or environmental sins. The Windup Girl will almost certainly be the most important SF novel of the year for its willingness to confront the most cherished notions of the genre, namely that our future is bright and we will overcome our selfish, cruel nature. --BookPage" http://tinyurl.com/ye4py2h

Well. What a marvelous pick-me-up *that* sounds like. Of course I read science fiction and fantasy to be told it's all hopeless, just lie down and die.
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Sep. 1st, 2009 @ 12:21 pm Steampunk romance
This may be an odd question, but for those of you who've read my work, could it arguably be called steampunk romance?

Question inspired by this post.
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Aug. 22nd, 2009 @ 08:04 am chat session
Words to warm a mother's heart: "They can't aim worth crap."
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Aug. 8th, 2009 @ 11:45 am The wrath of Mother Nature
Apparently I didn't take last year's warning seriously--and now I look like a bullfrog that has lost a barroom brawl. I was poking around under the hosta, searching for non-hosta invaders, when I found myself in possession of a certain three-leafed vine.

I do not react well to poison ivy--no matter how light the contact, I get outbreaks all over my body. For some reason, probably Mother Nature's nasty sense of humor, this time it concentrated on my face and neck. Thus the bullfrog in the barroom brawl.

blech blech blech
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Jul. 28th, 2009 @ 04:56 pm I really am 12 years old
I've fallen in love with Avatar, the Last Airbender.

Just watched season 1 streaming on Netflix, now can hardly wait for the DVDs of seasons 2 and 3 to arrive in the mail. Sigh. I love finding things long after they've been finished, no delayed gratification for me!

Apparently M Night Shyamalan is making the live action version, which gives me pause. What if instead of a great conflict of good against evil, it's really about global warming?
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Jul. 11th, 2009 @ 08:47 am Sex and the Saxon Churl
I found this on Quid Nimis: a reference to an essay called "Sex and the Saxon Churl" by Forence King. Florence King! The misanthrope herself apparently wrote a bodice-ripper, and the essay is a description of the experience:

It's love-hate at first sight. Thel pulls Lydda to him first chance he gets. "Desiste!" she cries, as well she might--by the time I got through with  his armor, it looked like Kaiser Bill's helmet. (p. 59, the Florence King Reader)
 
The mind, it burns. But it's hysterically funny if you, like Flo and me, misspent your youth reading Frank Yerby and Rosemary Rogers.

I found the essay here

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Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 01:24 pm Calling a rabbit a smeerp
Dear fantasy authors, you're not fooling anyone with your "kafis" and "kaffees" and "magic ground bean infusion that wakes me up in the morning"

If it's coffee, call it coffee. If the ambiance of your setting requires pretending that a civilization-spanning beverage is something strange and exotic, then you have other problems with your writing that neologisms won't fix. Nor will calling a trout a "troutfish", rabies, the "water sickness",  a prostitute a "streetseller", a shower a "fallwater", and so on. It just leaves me with the impression that your native language is German.
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Jun. 30th, 2009 @ 01:18 pm Agent Quest
It's like harumancy. Staring into brief emails, trying to understand the will of the gods in commas and apostrophes and the space between words.

I got an email from Agent #2--I had withdrawn my ms from his queue when I was dealing with Agent #1--saying he had partially read Wind out of Twilight  before he got the withdrawal message. He asked me to re-submit when I was ready again and promised a faster response time than he advertises on his website.

I'm going to take that as a good sign . . .
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Jun. 26th, 2009 @ 07:39 pm Re-writes Redux
I have declared war on sentence fragments.  I got tired of  page after page of nagging prompts from MS Word, finally realizing that I was relying too much on them to create dramatic effect. So now I am looking for green squiggly lines and trying to write my way out of them. It's like the time I trained myself out of using "he was beginning to" type of verb construction.

It keeps the horrible realization that it's almost July, and I'm barely one-quarter of the way through the re-write that's supposed to be done in 2 weeks, away from the front of my mind :P
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Jun. 24th, 2009 @ 08:36 am Armadillocon
Has anyone been to Armadillocon? Or wants to go?

It seems a smaller (and affordable!), but well-attended con, with more of an emphasis on books than other media. It also has a writer's workshop with some interesting instructors: http://www.fact.org/dillo/writers/index.htm

I'm thinking about going if no conflicts bubble up in my life.



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Jun. 9th, 2009 @ 08:19 am Somewhere in Eastern Afghanistan
He's somewhere in eastern Afghanistan now.

Or maybe not--after all, the army trademarked "hurry up and wait". He could just as easily be sitting on the tarmac in an airfield in Germany or Kyrgyzstan, desperately searching for wifi, his laptop in his lap, his M249 next to him. Or sleeping. In the days I was able to spend with him before he left, I watched in awe as he slept anywhere and in any position, waking up within a few minutes of when he was supposed to.

It was interesting meeting the other families. Young wives who knew exactly how the army worked and what went best in a care package, another mother who understood when I said it was just like the first day of kindergarten, NCOs with multiple tours who were calm and relaxed.

I restrained myself from embarrassing him in front of his squad, although the temptation was great. I did give in once, when I met his platoon sergeant,  who understood perfectly how important it was that  young soldiers KEEP IN CONTACT WITH THEIR MOTHERS . Any letter to him complaining of neglect would be taken seriously.

Soldier boy was practically dying by my side. It was wonderful.

Ah well. Time to put together my first care package, consisting of all the things he left behind in the rental car :)
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