There Are Things I Miss About Working

Laughing at a customer’s completely unfunny jokes is not something I find myself craving.

Another customer at the dealership today was repeating the line, “If I get a ticket because you parked my car on the street, you’ll be paying it!” over and over to the poor guy at the desk. The guy first assured him that it was totally legal, then said that they would accept any such charges, and then finally realized it was meant to be a joke when the customer turned to me and said, “This young lady looks like she’s rolling in cash. Make her pay it!”

I almost gave the forced, awkward laugh that the service guy did- but then I remembered! No one can get me in trouble for not laughing at a “joke” any more! I raised an eyebrow at him and held his gaze until he turned away mumbling, “I just wanted to make you smile.”

I had been smiling, right up until he decided to make me part of his stupid joke.

I later heard him call one of the female service people “babycakes,” “honey,” and “sweetheart.”

Yeah. He’s exactly what I don’t miss about customer service jobs.

I Am His And He Is Mine

 

Five years. It really isn’t very long, but I can’t imagine these past five years any other way. There have been hard times and good ones.

I have so much to be happy about. So very much.

I love you, my Simon. Here’s to many more years together!

A Lovely New Toy

After another successful NaNoWriMo last year, I succumbed to the curiosity (and assurance from friends), and picked up Scrivener with my lovely coupon code.

It was so worth the money. It would have been worth the $40, too, if I hadn’t had a discount.

Before I start really glorifying the program, I want to make a few statements about my writing style. Once upon a time, Microsoft Word was free with Windows, and I hated the program so much that I would pay for a WordPerfect license. From the tales of others, I gather that Word is a good program- for people who have taken a class in the use of it. WordPerfect was intuitive and sleek. When I lost my ancient copy of WordPerfect and found that Word (curse its name) was no longer free, I opted to try OpenOffice. It worked, which was really all I needed from it. But none of these programs actually helped me write. In fact, the format was so frustrating that I ended up unable to write creatively on computers. Everything had to be handwritten, teal and purple pen in wide-rule spiral bounds, and then typed up and saved in eighteen thousand places.

Scrivener is different. Oh, it’s amazing! There is a tutorial that comes with it, to walk a beginner to the program through the basics. I actually didn’t watch the whole thing, realizing partway through that, while it can do almost anything you need, it’s simple.

Each project can be broken down as far as you want- by chapter, scene, even paragraph. Summary or notes go on a “notecard” that is pinned to a corkboard at the top level of your folders, and from that corkboard scenes can be rearranged with a simple drag-and-drop. There are options to mark certain parts of the documents as notes, first or second drafts, or final drafts, and this is clearly marked on the notecards.

There is a place specifically meant for research notes, even enabling links to online sources.

And I know it’s silly, but I love the name generator (far more useful than online lists of baby names), and the option to convert double spaces to singles. I learned how to type on a typewriter (wow, I feel old now…), and changing from the double space after a full stop to a single space after a full stop is a very hard thing to drill into my fingers. That one little option has really helped me catch the strays.

Simon uses Scrivener for game planning. He can easily break down maps, ideas, and characters into their own folders, and keeps another folder for brief notes of what happened in a session. He’s tried notebooks, Word, and OpenOffice, but he’s fallen as thoroughly in love with Scrivener as I have.

So, for my writerly friends- you know, the very few of you that haven’t already had Scrivener for years- you should get it. It’s worth every single penny.

Marketing FAIL

It was over a year and a half ago that I found out I was pregnant. WordPress doesn’t support Javascript widgets, so the only counter I used was a Facebook app. I didn’t sign up for any websites, and I never gave out my address or email to any pregnancy or baby-centric places (and Facebook has neither my current email address nor my physical address). I didn’t want to get bombarded with information that wasn’t going to apply for several months.

Then we lost the baby, just a few weeks later, and I was relieved that I hadn’t signed up for email alerts about my pregnancy.

But in December, emails started coming: You’re 9 weeks! You’re 12 weeks! I tried to unsubscribe, but they kept coming, from at least three different places. When unsubscribing failed, I just directed all of the emails to the spam folder.

About a year ago I began to get real, physical mail, with diaper coupons, registry information, formula samples. Not from sketchy places, either- directly from Target and Pampers and other big-name businesses. I made one attempt to be taken off one mailing list, but the phone number I found was a dead end. Since then I’ve tossed all the coupons and ads straight into the trash, cursing the names of whoever decided I needed to receive this stuff.

After my due date had passed, the amount of marketing mail lessened, bit by bit. Recently one of the emails missed the spam filter and I got a email entitled: “So close to potty-training!” I gritted my teeth and deleted.

Today, however, was particularly special. I got the mail to find an entire catalogue from a party store down the street from where we lived over two years ago, in a different state, all about how it was time for me to start planning a first birthday party.

This isn’t making me sad, for once. I’m angry. There is absolutely no reason for this to be happening. NONE.

(And before you ask, it wasn’t generic mail- it was all addressed to me, specifically, and all expressed that my due date was in July 2011.)

Not Just A Review

Once upon a few years ago, I read a book called The Magicians and Mrs Quent. It was a fun read, though the first third was pretty blatently taken from the pages of Pride and Prejudice and the second third was Jane Eyre all over.

Set in an alternate world version of Regency/Napoleonic Europe, there was magic and a gothic feel and some romance, all things that I just love.

So I bought the sequel (for a whole dollar!), and requested an advance copy of the third book. I started on The House on Durrow Street fairly recently, and read through a large chunk of it while I waited in the incredibly inhospitable waiting area for standby jurors.

It’s not a particularly light read- like the books to which the first in the series paid homage (homage isn’t quite strong enough- parody would indicate a humourous take- pastiche is the best term, though it’s far from satire), the language can be a bit formal, and sometimes even stiff. It’s a slow read, but one that builds and becomes more fascinating the further into the book one gets.

However-

And this is a huge stumbling block-

There are two things with which I take issue.

The first is oddly minor in comparison, though in almost any other book I would find it the strangest. There seem to be three types of magic- a rather cerebral, inherited magic held only by men in the nobility, a more earthy magic for women only, and illusions. The illusions are seen much as theater was in the associated English time: scandalous. The men (and it’s only men, again) are seen as almost a different species altogether. It took me a large portion of the first book before I realized that they were, indeed, human. I’d been under the impression that they were a sort of elf. Not elves, as it turns out- just gay men, every last one of them. For some reason.

There is one character with a minor talent for illusion magic, but he tries for respectable work in order to take care of his sister. Partway through the second book, he suddenly has a sexual encounter with his illusionist friend and finds that he can now work magic very well. I say suddenly, because I had to re-read the chapter because I thought I’d missed something. I had seen no indication that this character was either gay or attracted to his friend, but after that one drunken moment they were in love.

And that’s the minor issue. Some solid character development over a book and a half would have been handy there… Somehow a single chapter just doesn’t express the same thing.

The big one really hurts me in my science.

Yeah, it hurts me in my science. And I’m a person who is happy to let the brush of “fiction” cover over most physics issues, so long as there is an attempt at logic.

The earth that we live on turns around a slightly tilted axis, and orbits the sun elliptically. This creates days and nights that vary by season. Following me so far?

In the book, days and nights are called luminals and umbrals, and they vary in length. Not like they do in the real world, though. Think of a 24-hour time period. At equinox that’s 12 hours each of day and night. They will have a long day, a short night, a short day, a normal night, a normal day, a long night, a reeeeeeeally long day…predictable enough that almanacs come out each year so that people know how long of a day to expect, but random enough that science seems to have no part in it. If it were explained away as maaaaagic I’d have an easier time, but it seems intended to be just a physical, scientific fact of this single-sun world.

I searched for anything online explaining what kind of a rotation or orbit might cause something like this, but found only a link to a wikipedia entry on Nutation (think wobbling like a top), which wouldn’t explain the seeming randomness of these days and nights. Only a handful of people seem as bothered by this as I am.

Given the particulars of this world’s natural light, one might think that they would have developed a lot of alternative light sources and blackout curtains, but no. Instead they seem to attempt to live according to the days and nights as set by the sun. On long days they stay up as late as they can, on short nights they get up earlier.

I can’t think how a world could survive like this- no seasons, erratic days and nights. How would plants and crops properly grow? How are people not irritable from the lack of stable sleep patterns?

Why is this such a big deal in my mind that I don’t even know if I can continue reading?

Observations

Walking to and from the grocery store (all of a mile’s round trip) I saw:

Two mothers give me the stinkeye for returning their child’s smile.

Five cars parked in the road to pick up their children from school, and several more honking at the empty, parked cars.

Two construction worked who whistled at me.

One of the local homeless smoking pot outside the grocery store.

And a dog carrying a stuffed tiger shark in his mouth.

And there was a bizarre moment as I walked into the store and someone came running up to me yelling, “WHO SAID YOU COULD GO ON BREAK?” …I just kept walking.

To Prove A Point

Frequently I’m behind on whatever the Big New Scandal is, wherever I have happened to park myself on the internet. As much as I love watching trainwrecks unfold before my eyes, it can be far more enlightening to see the aftermath.

Like on a crime drama, you can see so much from the wreckage.

I’d been reading about some issues that happened on Goodreads, both about a year ago and a few months ago. There was some… backlash… over negative reviews. Backlash from authors, warning aspiring authors away from giving negative reviews. There was a lot of discussion and pontificating from both sides.

I noticed, in my extensive reading (because I will admit to absolutely loving internet drama. it’s so much better than reality tv), a few things. I wanted to take some screenshots, make some notes, point out a few things… but then I shrugged, and decided not to, because I didn’t want weird author drama following me if, someday, I actually got published.

…which was exactly the point of the reviewers. Whether it was meant or not, there is a group of authors that have made people worry about the things they post on the internet. Things that are not actually a problem. I know that they say that the internet is forever, and that’s true. But making others feel uncomfortable about posting anything because they’re afraid of a few mean girls? That’s just low.

Trying New Things

I love experimenting with my standard recipes, but I’ve held back on trying out new things with my go-to guacamole base. I know that I can’t go wrong with avocado, tomato, garlic, lime, cilantro, and salt, so why change it up? I’ve wanted to try adding chipotle peppers or maybe bacon (well, that wouldn’t have a downside. mixing bacon with avocado can’t go wrong), but I just haven’t tried.

Today I’m making guac for a Cinco de Mayo party, and I’m trying out both of them.

I figure that even if I’m not a fan of chipotle in my guac, someone else might like the smoky spiciness…

Eat, my guinea pigs! EAT!

Implausible Dreams

Last night I dreamt I was roller-skating with a bunch of my friends, along a road I haven’t seen for nearly five years.

Nothing about it seemed off, until I looked down at my feet and saw these:

Yeah…

I took one look at these suckers and went… I’m dreaming. These skates never worked smoothly.

And then I woke up.

Who knew? I got two seconds of lucid dreaming from roller skates!

Words In My Soul

I’ve never been able to just fall asleep. It takes me at least a half hour, usually an hour of lying in bed, trying not to think about the things that always hurt more in the dark. Sometimes the things that only hurt in the dark.

And you can’t just not think about something. Don’t think about elephants. Now. See how that works? You need something else to think about. A replacement.

One of the best things I’ve found for waning inspiration is making sure I’m thinking about my story as I fall asleep. Not just thinking about it, though. Choosing a character, and dwelling on them, hearing them as truly as I can in my head. Conversing with them, about the other characters, about the situation in which they find themselves. Imagining their responses to things I would never put into the story.

I picture the places. The Underhill, a castle covered in grass and moss where the Fey Folk dwell. A forest where no animals make a single sound and the trees never fade. Caves, carved by secret, ancient rivers and echoing with a waterfall that you can never quite find.

I think about the stories they would tell in that place, the songs they would sing, and I let all these things soak into my head as I gradually fall asleep.

Sometimes that means I have to dash out of bed to write something down seconds before I’d have fallen asleep, but starting the process over again is never a bad thing when I don’t have a particular timetable for the next day.

It helps. With everything.