More links to blogs you can use! Writers and poets, working together, mangling pop culture references…you get the picture.
Copied a file the wrong way backing up to a flash drive and lost two days worth of edits. Not major edits, I can reproduce them in a few hours, but still.
Grr.
I gave up and started using Google docs to pass stuff from PC to PC (and back up). Don’t ask what happened to the flash drive. I probably should have waited for the morning coffee to kick in before doing a backup…
This does not help the burned-out feeling I’ve been fighting this month. Curiously, though, blogging about it seems to. Perhaps writing about things really does help put them in perspective.
In other news, I’m going to poke some people I know with blogs to see if they want to link. Solidarity, brothers.
So there I was, minding my own business, reading some blogs over at OpenSalon, when I saw a particularly heartwarming number a mom posted about her daughter.
It got me thinking: I could write about my son here. He’s always doing something interesting, or something I could make sound interesting at least. I should write more about children, anyway–good practice for some ideas I have on the back burner. And of course, I’d end up posting a lot more often.
Then I thought about what generally happens to parents who write about their children, and decided I really don’t want to find out if cat food tastes better heated up or straight out of the can when I’m 85.
It’s worth seeing, if you can find it. I found it rather sad that some critics couldn’t get past the Heath Ledger angle: if you didn’t know the back story, it wouldn’t matter to your appreciation of the film.
I especially recommend it for anyone who works in a creative field or has children, but it’s not FOR children. If you fall into both of these categories, as I do, it may leave you strangely disquieted for some time, but not in a bad way.
It’s a bit like Wagner’s later work: about redemption through love, and through art, and whether or not that stuff actually works, or we’re just fooling ourselves.
Unless it’s about something else entirely, which is possible. I mean, it is Terry Gilliam.
Don’t wait for the DVD if you can see it in a theater.
I need to weld my two faerie novels together. The first one in particular is simply too damn short to sell, at right under 50k. Adding anything to it would be padding. Combining them gives me something in the 105k range, which strikes me as more desirable.
This isn’t as Herculean an undertaking as it might sound. Mostly it involves changing the shading of some references to past events at the start of the second novel, since they won’t be in a separate volume any more. Beyond that, I need to tackle a new, expanded query (no problem, it was short) and a new, denser synopsis (bigger issue, since it wasn’t).
Oh, and it means the putative next installation in the story would have to be of a similar length as well, and will take longer to write and polish…but we’ll implode that bridge when we get to it.
And since I would use the current novel titles as the titles for parts one and two–I need a new overall title. Maybe I’ll go back and use one of those suggested by my critique group.
So in an effort to improve midwinter activity levels in the house, I bought us a Wii. I’d played with other people’s before, and they were fairly benign fun. Laura indicated an interest in the balance board/fitness pack. Kian, being a six year old, was an easy sell.
I am now compiling an official list of which Wii games most closely resemble a workout. I’m not including the ones designed to do so, but I could put together a parallel list of games that provide the best workout without feeling like one (the snowball fight might be a contender).
Right now the top three sweat-inducing games are: boxing, canoeing (which should be kayaking, really, since that’s what you’re in) and cycling. Of these boxing is the one that’s most likely to make you want to heave in a hurry. Maybe it’s the adrenaline involved adding extra oomph.
You know which snowflake is the first of the season, but never the last.
You fall in love with Christmas when you’re a kid, or at least I did, and I think I’m far from alone. If you’re like me, you have a fairly stable relationship after with it later. At some point though the doubts creep in. Is this the kind of holiday I want? If everyone expects you to be jolly and/or merry, does that make it easier or harder to be sincere about it? And what is a Noel anyway?*
Then comes the rocky stretch, where you’re maintaining the fiction of having a healthy relationship with Christmas for the sake of appearances. Maybe there’s an ugly scene or two where you end up screaming at the Christmas tree, or kicking the Yule log.
Everyone knows what’s coming. The Christmas breakup. The end of the affair. Afterward you feel bitter, but a little nostalgic too. Time passes, and the bitterness fades, leaving only the wistful regret at Christmas Past.
This is why it’s a good thing that Christmas conspires to make you stupid. You heal better when you’re not constantly picking at the wound. Then, one year, you’re at a stoplight, minding your own business, and you realize not only that Joy to the World has been playing on the radio, but you’ve been singing along, and you’re in the middle of the descant in the refrain.
And you’re okay with it. You see the holiday for what it is to you, not what it is to everyone else, and you can live with it again. At least until they play Little Drummer Boy.
*Yes, I know what a Noel is. This is a retrospective question asked by some metaphorical me of the past, not a request for information or links to Wikipedia.
Don’t deny it. The holiday season is a time for many things–joy, music, family, and overspending among them–but the burdens amount to a second job, and if you’ve ever had one, you know just how smart you feel after pulling a bunch of double shifts in a row.
The need for a holiday project manager, though, isn’t the only issue. Nor is the quintessential American notion of “if some is good, more must be better,” though it contributes too. I like Christmas music, for example, and Christmas decor, and Christmas cookies. That doesn’t mean I want to be awash in them for weeks. Endless loops of enforced Good Cheer are enough to make anyone antisocial–and anti-intellectual. Heaven help you if you point out the incongruity of celebrating a holiday whose mottos are joy and peace by buying first-person shooters for kids. What are you, some kind of Scrooge/Commie? (yes, there’s irony there).
I blame Victorian sentimentality in its most malignant and mawkish form. The marketers use it, of course, but it had to be there to use first.
