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December 23rd, 2009
December 22nd, 2009
- 06:41 girlamatic.com/godseeker/ New...art is up. Sorry folks, I know we said we'd start ch.2 this week, but we felt this needed posting. #
- 06:45 at least it's cute, right? C'mon, you know it's cute. And in color! Took me all night... #
I just wanted to drop a quick note to let y'all know that I'm still above ground. I took a break from writing/working on my revisions for _Almost to Die For_ to celebrate the holidays. What, already? Yep. Our family exchanges some gifts at Christmas time, but, for us, the big deal day is Winter Solstice/Yule (which was yesterday.) My folks (who are secular humanist/Unitarians) came up on Sunday to exchange some gifts and whatnot, and we had a great time. Mason got some great winter loot -- a new sled, a snow ball maker, a snow fort maker (like those sand castle molds, except for snow), a scooter, and ton of other stuff. I got a couple of Captain America shirts and money for my coffee card. Hooray! Shawn got this cool stain glass/plate thing she'd admired last time we were in LaCrosse and some "folding money" as her father would have put it, which she intends to use on some fun, frivolous shoes.
Last night, we lit the Yule log and exchanged more personal gifts. I gave Shawn a cloth/bling covered box she admired at Pier 1 as well as some silver earrings that depict Raven stealing the box of the sun. Shawn and I used to read the story of Raven to Mason when he was quite little, so the earrings have a lot of special meaning. Mason gave us a calendar he made at school. We gave him some family puzzles (we love those mystery puzzles, so I got him some of those) and games we could all play together. Shawn gave me a subscription to InTouch, my absolutely favoritest trashy celebrity magazine.
Life is good.
We took light from the Yule log and lit a couple of votive candles, which we let burn all night. Mason got one for his room, and Shawn and I had one in ours. The sun accepted our gift of light, as the candles were all burned out by morning.
Alas, I still have this deep chested cough. I _do_ think I'm getting better, but, man, recovery has been seriously slow going. I feel just rotten enough that getting back to work on revisions has been hard today. I look at all the good suggestions my editor has made on the text and I think, "Nah." Although, I have been doing them, I've just been hard pressed to be motivated to, you know?
I had a little panic this morning because a friend thought that she'd heard that _Tall, Dark & Dead_ was out of print. A friend of hers had tried to perchase it and couldn't. So I quick sent off an email to my editor, who assured me that it's still listed in print and they have over a thousand copies still in the warehouse. I guess there's a distributor who doesn't deal directly with Penguin that sometimes can cause this sort of thing to happen. I'm just glad I didn't miss an opportunity to buy copies of the remaindered book, though it does remind me that I should probably plan ahead and budget for that eventuality. I can't imagine the series is going to stay in print too much longer after the last in the series comes out next May.
Speaking of the last in the series things, Shawn and I watched the Christian Bale Terminator movie last night. There was *some* cool in that film, but the most interesting part of the story (the character of Marcus, a terminator who doesn't know he's a machine,) could have been explored more, IMHO. I kind of liked that the audience was in on Marcus' secret from the beginning, and so you had a chance to watch all clues build up to his big "oh crap!" moment, when he can see the machine bits poking out of his ruined body. Also, the whole theme of "what does it mean to be human?" is a noble one. I'm fairly convinced that Marcus was, in the end, a better human being than John Connor --our supposed hero -- who, ironically, ends up with a machine's heart. The implication THERE was never much explored, either. I mean, here's a guy who has, in many ways, stripped himself of his humanity to effectively fight the machines ending up with a HEART of a terminator -- a cold, mechanical (if efficient) heart. I mean, DUDE. It was very tin man all over again, you know? Which one of them had the bigger heart, as it were? The machine. Clearly.
But it wasn't presented as nearly that deep, alas.
The movie kind of suffered from having to be an action film. There were some nifty chase/fight scenes (I rather loved the driver-less motorcycles, and I liked the "harvesters"), but if I had been the director, I'd have removed a lot of the John Connor storyline and focused on Marcus. I'd have left just enough Connor in, so you could have the comparison (cold efficient killer = human; decent, caring protector = terminator), but the whole subplot of needing to destroy Skynet's San Francisco base could have been mostly sidelined to explore Marcus' delemia more, IMHO.
But they didn't ask me.
What's up with Hollywood, anyway? They should have called. My number is listed, after all. :-)
Last night, we lit the Yule log and exchanged more personal gifts. I gave Shawn a cloth/bling covered box she admired at Pier 1 as well as some silver earrings that depict Raven stealing the box of the sun. Shawn and I used to read the story of Raven to Mason when he was quite little, so the earrings have a lot of special meaning. Mason gave us a calendar he made at school. We gave him some family puzzles (we love those mystery puzzles, so I got him some of those) and games we could all play together. Shawn gave me a subscription to InTouch, my absolutely favoritest trashy celebrity magazine.
Life is good.
We took light from the Yule log and lit a couple of votive candles, which we let burn all night. Mason got one for his room, and Shawn and I had one in ours. The sun accepted our gift of light, as the candles were all burned out by morning.
Alas, I still have this deep chested cough. I _do_ think I'm getting better, but, man, recovery has been seriously slow going. I feel just rotten enough that getting back to work on revisions has been hard today. I look at all the good suggestions my editor has made on the text and I think, "Nah." Although, I have been doing them, I've just been hard pressed to be motivated to, you know?
I had a little panic this morning because a friend thought that she'd heard that _Tall, Dark & Dead_ was out of print. A friend of hers had tried to perchase it and couldn't. So I quick sent off an email to my editor, who assured me that it's still listed in print and they have over a thousand copies still in the warehouse. I guess there's a distributor who doesn't deal directly with Penguin that sometimes can cause this sort of thing to happen. I'm just glad I didn't miss an opportunity to buy copies of the remaindered book, though it does remind me that I should probably plan ahead and budget for that eventuality. I can't imagine the series is going to stay in print too much longer after the last in the series comes out next May.
Speaking of the last in the series things, Shawn and I watched the Christian Bale Terminator movie last night. There was *some* cool in that film, but the most interesting part of the story (the character of Marcus, a terminator who doesn't know he's a machine,) could have been explored more, IMHO. I kind of liked that the audience was in on Marcus' secret from the beginning, and so you had a chance to watch all clues build up to his big "oh crap!" moment, when he can see the machine bits poking out of his ruined body. Also, the whole theme of "what does it mean to be human?" is a noble one. I'm fairly convinced that Marcus was, in the end, a better human being than John Connor --our supposed hero -- who, ironically, ends up with a machine's heart. The implication THERE was never much explored, either. I mean, here's a guy who has, in many ways, stripped himself of his humanity to effectively fight the machines ending up with a HEART of a terminator -- a cold, mechanical (if efficient) heart. I mean, DUDE. It was very tin man all over again, you know? Which one of them had the bigger heart, as it were? The machine. Clearly.
But it wasn't presented as nearly that deep, alas.
The movie kind of suffered from having to be an action film. There were some nifty chase/fight scenes (I rather loved the driver-less motorcycles, and I liked the "harvesters"), but if I had been the director, I'd have removed a lot of the John Connor storyline and focused on Marcus. I'd have left just enough Connor in, so you could have the comparison (cold efficient killer = human; decent, caring protector = terminator), but the whole subplot of needing to destroy Skynet's San Francisco base could have been mostly sidelined to explore Marcus' delemia more, IMHO.
But they didn't ask me.
What's up with Hollywood, anyway? They should have called. My number is listed, after all. :-)
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December 21st, 2009
For the last three weeks Caleb and I have been throwing sickness back and forth. Mine is finally gone (bronchitis) and his has been reduced to few sniffles. Hurrah!
I did a ton of cleaning today and and I think I have all the lingering smells out. It is amazing how quickly this place falls apart when I don't do any housework for 5 days.
I'm going to be starting a play by mail/email/phone Blood Bowl game with my buddy Gee in Arizona. We are getting all the teams set up and will do it in a narrative style that should be amusing. http://www.heroesofaudioland.com/bloodb
I am in a painting competition for Warhammer war machines. I'm painting an Empire Helstorm Rocket Battery. I'm about half way through right now. You can click the thumbnails to see the "before" and "work in progess" pics.
I did a ton of cleaning today and and I think I have all the lingering smells out. It is amazing how quickly this place falls apart when I don't do any housework for 5 days.
I'm going to be starting a play by mail/email/phone Blood Bowl game with my buddy Gee in Arizona. We are getting all the teams set up and will do it in a narrative style that should be amusing. http://www.heroesofaudioland.com/bloodb
I am in a painting competition for Warhammer war machines. I'm painting an Empire Helstorm Rocket Battery. I'm about half way through right now. You can click the thumbnails to see the "before" and "work in progess" pics.
- 18:59 Ok. It's now 9. Have been cleaning, throwing things away, loading a truck full of donated stuff, of in transit since...i think 12ish #
- 19:44 So glad I'm not hosted on comicgenesis anymore. What an implosion. #
- 20:10 blog.comicspace.com/?p=1747 #
- 20:18 I find it odd that the classic way to judge who has "made it" in webcomics is whether or not they make a living at it. #
- 20:20 I mean, I like to think that my comics will be successful, but they will never even equal what I expect to make next year at my other job. #
- 20:22 And I LIKE my day job. I can't be the only one who loves their comic AND their non-comic day job, can I? I still always update on time. #
- 20:24 Anyone else love their webcomic AND their day job AND feel they can do both? Anyone? #webcomics #
- 07:22 Tonight, I'm gonna do a memorial drawing of Skillet. Will probly be our update this week. #
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December 20th, 2009
I played with Scrivener during November, and had decidedly mixed feelings about it. So I decided I should give the other main IDEs-for-prose a shot! My feelings about them were decidedly un-mixed.
Ulysses 2.0: I tried the first version back in '06 or so and loathed it, but my tastes have changed, and I figured its focus on markup-based* formatting might appeal more to me than Scrivener's NSTextView WYSIWYG. Yeah, no. God no. This program runs so counter to the way my brain works that I actually have a hard time imagining the existence of people who find it useful.** It has all the failings of an integrated writing environment, but it consciously rejects all of the benefits. I absolutely remember why I threw it aside last time and just went with BBEdit and a folder fulla text files.
StoryMill: Also no dice; even reading through the tutorial file made my head kind of spin. The dealkiller here was how much fidgeting and toggling and administrative nonsense you have to go through to do anything. Are you typing in the "Notes," or the "Text," or the "Chapter?" It's all the same text field, and you have to constantly fiddle with these controls at the top to make sure you're in the right place, which, NO, I have better things to do with my attention. (Also! It failed at importing some UTF8 text files and spat mojibake throughout. WTF? This is 2009, yo, I should not need to babysit charset conversion.)
In the meantime, it turned out that Scrivener'd made a good enough case for its utility during the trial period that I did, in fact, miss it. I have issues with it, but it's... actually a pretty good implementation of something that will make part of what I do a whole lot easier. And it fits with my current write-in-bits-on-the-train thing really really well. So, I bought it.
* Just for the record, what bugs me most about WYSIWYG composition is modal emphasis with no indicator. As in, you're looking at the screen and there is a blinking cursor: when you type something, is it going to be bold or italic? WHO KNOWS. Drives me bats. (Brief props: MS Word slants the cursor when you're in itals, which is cool. Everyone should do that, and make it blocky when you're in bold. That would solve the problem perfectly. But I seem to be the only person who's infuriated by the current situation, so whatever. Grumph.)
** Obviously they're around, and I am glad they enjoy it. Space aliens deserve good software too!
- 14:59 our chinchilla skillet has become suddenly and severly sick. dont know how well manage the vet bills. not sure what to do. #
- 16:10 goodbye, skillet. you were the best, sweetest pet ever. we love you so much. #
- 21:22 @DocGirlfriend Can I still join the #DeadlyButterflies? I have a whole book on flower meanings...that's henchy, right? #
- 21:27 Buh, it's hard to think about going to sleep when Skillet was such a part of my going-to-bed routine. #
- 21:28 brush teeth, play with skillet at the door to his cage, give him a healthy snack, watch him nibble it, tell him goodnight, sleep. #
- 21:35 Perhaps joining an evil legion of butterfly-themed badguys on twitter will cheer me up a little? #
- 21:44 Oh, I see, I post #JointheDeadlyButterflies. Sorry, Ma'am. not the best with technology. #
- 22:02 @DocGirlfriend If accepted, Ma'am, I'd like to be Begonia, please. #DeadlyButterflies #
- 08:17 Still missing Skillet. #
- 08:45 Need to get out of the house, do something fun and distracting, and not spend any money :/ #
- 11:08 Coping via massive stuff purge. #
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December 19th, 2009
- 15:19 Ok, electric bill confirmed, credit card with new name activated...now if I could only find my 3 missing paychecks... #
- 15:41 Youknow, I kinda wish I liked sushi. I love the look of sushi. I love the atmosphere that tends to accompany sushi. #
- 15:41 I'm just not so keen on the way seafood keeps trying to kill me. #
- 17:39 www.snorgtees.com/chinchillin-p-823.html?o
sCsid=b49118ea065f7264c1b6c7361cc997c8 Can one over have too many chinchilla shirts? # - 18:11 No, book publishers, I will not pay you the same amount of money for a book that you didn't have to print, ship, or stock. #
- 18:12 Seriously, whose going to buy e-readers when there's no price advantage to buying the books? KNOW YOUR MARKET, PEOPLE. #
- 18:35 I want a T-shirt that says "Tyrant" on it in light gray, over the Vetinary crest in a darker grey. The world needs more Discworld shirts. #
- 21:24 @kuronekohime YES #
When Senator Al Franken told Senator Joe Lieberman that he couldn't have another minute to finish his 10 minute speech I chuckled. When John McCain got up next, addressed Franken, and said that in all his too long of a time in the Senate (my opinion not his) he had never seen that happen before I laughed. The look on McCain's face said, "what is this rookie doing messing up my well organized Senate?!" He's not booked for a show until tomorrow! When Franken said that he had in fact done the same thing to someone else earlier in the day and McCain stuttered out a half response my sides hurt from laughing. The man does know his comedy.
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