not worth chewing through the leather straps

Monday Didn’t Break Me

Sunday night, the washer stopped working, and the Little Prince spilled a whole glass of ice water all over his nightstand. Plus there was the dropping of things, a couple other breakages, and even though I’d managed to get my housecleaning chores done, the entire thing just made me want to go to bed.

Cue up Monday, a flooded utility room because of the washer–I love my children, but I swear to God, the next time one of them puts a chunk of duct tape through the washer they are cleaning that goddamn room to white-glove–and finding out the major medication I rely on to allay the panic attacks somehow, mysteriously, just tripled in price since last month, and it wasn’t cheap before.

Needless to say, I was more than ready to crawl into bed and just consign the whole day to the dustheap. I rolled with it, sure, and it was even funny in places, but that shit is exhausting. I challenged Monday and it didn’t break me, it just made me tired.

On the bright side, I may get a zero of the werewolf novella out today. That will set it up for revision and release in a little while, and I’ll have to start thinking about cover design. I want to do the Beguine books/novellas myself; we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, once the werewolf zero is done there’s the Veil Knights book to revise, then it’s into the wilds of Afterwar to make that book as good as possible before it goes off to the editor as a Reasonable, Grown-Up First Draft. In between all that I do have to prep the genie-and-accountant story, and there’s a suspense book I want to write, not to mention the sequel to The Marked.

Now if all this work would just pay me a living wage, I’d be all set. *sigh*

I’m not very cheerful today, so if you see me around and I don’t wave or make eye contact, it’s because I’m buttoned up tightly to keep the stabby-stabby from escaping.

First order of business: that damn washing machine.

Over and out.

Weekend Reading

The weekend, with alternating sun and drenching cool rain, has spun spring into high gear. Fortunately, the winter’s hard freezes seem to have put a dent in the slug population, or my hostas have the jump on the things, I can’t tell which. It’s nice not to have them blasted by slug-trails as soon as they sprout this year. The apple trees are in bloom, the cherries are exuberant, and even the hail has been moderate. Of course, the squirrels dug up most of my favas, so I have to replant those to get some nitrogen-fixing into the soil, but after the winter I kind of don’t blame the little furry fuckers.

They’ve grown amazingly fat now. And they’ve taken to showing up on the deck during our dinner hour, which makes me frantically check to make sure everyone’s wearing shoes. The kids laugh at me, but I don’t find it very funny.

I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man this weekend. I thought it would feed Roadtrip Z, and my writing partner was reading it for her own purposes, so I picked it up from the library.

It’s been a long time since I hate-read a book, and this one I had to get furious over to finish. Not because of the author–Gilbert has serviceable prose, and does her best to present the subject fairly and honestly. I do wish she would have read The National Uncanny before spouting off about the “frontier”, though. (To be honest, I think The National Uncanny should be required reading for every American.)

No, what pissed me off to no end was the massive, entitled selfishness of her subject Eustace Conway. It’s similar to how I felt reading Krakauer’s Into the Wild–here are white boys from comfortable if not wealthy homes, leaving a trail of broken promises and people behind while they go off “into the wilderness” and, as if that’s not enough, have the sheer unmitigated gall to look down their noses at other people’s embrace of modernity. These jackasses keep being treated as if they’re somehow special, and it irks me to no end. Selfishness on this scale, while de rigueur for mediocre white men, is always irritating. I’ll use just one example here: Eustace Conway’s TED talk. Not only is it billed as him living a “deeper life” somehow, since he shits in the woods, but you’d have read Gilbert’s book to know that the horse trips he talks about were taken with other people–his brother and a female friend in the first case, and Conway’s then-girlfriend for the buggy ride. He completely discounts the work of others that make his little Davy Crockett dreams possible.

…yeah, you can tell what I thought of all of that. Massive, blinding privilege is all over this guy, and yet he gets kudos for being somehow “natural.” How many indigenous speakers could have used some of the PR air his blowhard self took up? Imagine, if he was a minority, how differently several parts of his story would have played out.

My fury, it has many parts. Suffice to say I finished the book, read some news articles about Conway’s legal troubles, and rolled my eyes so hard it probably caused a few of the neighbors to think there was spring thunder. To be stringently fair, my feelings about camping may have influenced me somewhat. Thousands of years we’ve spent as a species, getting away from being naked in the woods with no toilet paper, and some idiots think they want to go back.

Anyway, I’m on Sydenham’s The Girondins, after finishing Mathiez’s After Robespierre and a newer edition of Bruun’s Saint-Just: Apostle of the Terror. There really are no good in-depth biographies of Saint-Just, at least, in English. Part of that is probably that Robespierre eclipsed him, and another part is probably the paucity of documentary evidence. I have to say Tanith Lee’s The Gods are Thirsty has the best portrait of Saint-Just around, and it’s a novel, he’s only a secondary character.

The weekend encompassed much else, of course, including the washer acting up. Now that the coffee’s sunk in, I’m going to go prop it up and take a whack at fixing what I think the problem might be. Wish me luck, and if that doesn’t work, let’s hope the home warranty covers washers.

Over and out.

Bear, Storm

Pouring rain one moment, blinding sunshine the next. It’s definitely spring.

Along with muting a few Certain Keywords for a week, I decided to take yesterday mostly off social media. It was nice to sink fully into a story and not check what new beast was slouching to Bethlehem and Armageddon at the same time. I also turned my phone off once the Little Prince was home. That was welcome, let me tell you.

This morning I’m listening to an old radio show featuring Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie admits to not reading Grapes of Wrath, but “I seen the movie three times.” It may be time for a reread, now that I’ve listened to Ballad of Tom Joad with my mouth slightly open and my eyes closed, hearing history.

Maybe it’s the hail and the occasional thunder, but I’m curling up inside my shell this week. The sheer amount of hatred in the American air is overwhelming, and I have very little left to fight it with. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I recharge, but right now I’m channeling a polar bear–leave me alone, or I will stand up in a blizzard and wallop a head or two clean off.

Which reminds me, I’ve never seen John Carpenter’s The Thing. I hear the remake was dismal; should I even bother with it, or only admit the existence of the original, like I do with Star Wars? (No, I refuse to watch any more of those movies. You lost me with Jar Jar fucking Binks, Lucas.)

ANYWAY. Polar bear. Spring storms. My hackles are up, and I’m not even in my final fighting form.

Over and out.

Overwhelmed

Yesterday, I hit my limit, and muted a few words from my Twitter stream. I just got overwhelmed, and caught myself thinking several times that perhaps the people who voted that malignant mango-colored mudhole in deserve the pain they’re about to experience. The trouble with that is so many innocent people will also suffer, and when I find myself wishing for justice without mercy it’s a sign I need to back away and take a few deep breaths.

Anyway. I put together a “Fuck it, I’m going to the library” T-shirt on Zazzle. Yesterday, in the middle of trying to chip recalcitrant words from my cortex (who would have thought that werewolf smut would fight me so hard?) I got an email saying that a library hold had come in. So I threw up my hands and went to pick it up, and got a few movies to watch and some Preacher graphic novels to read as well. All in all, it was a pleasant hour, and I managed some wordcount when I got back.

The hold was for Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man. I don’t know what I expected, but only a few pages in and I’m ready to slap the asshole she’s writing about. It’s a combination of how he treats his poor horse and the fact that Gilbert doesn’t even think to ask about said horse that irritates me. Of course, I read Krakauer’s Into the Wild and suffered the same longing. The idolizing of a selfish asshat who goes “out into the wilderness to find himself”, leaving a trail of destruction and suffering among the people who care for him, is something I find particularly repugnant.

So today: a short run with Miss B, more werewolf smut, a short chapter from the POV of a new addition to the Roadtrip Z crew, and maybe, if I’m very good and the gods of plotting while running are kind, a stab at a space-midwife story.

Never boring, this job.

Over and out.

Bicycle, Back Spasm

I did ALL THE CHORES yesterday, and got a back spasm or two for my pains while taking apart a bicycle.

…perhaps I should explain.

Last summer (I think? Or maybe the summer before?) I spotted a bigger bicycle than the one the Little Prince currently had at a garage sale. He liked it, I dropped a few dollars, and he rode it until the wheels both blew. (He’s, uh, very active.) Time passed, a small royalty check came (hooray!) and I managed to save enough of it to get both kids new bikes.

That left the problem of what to do with the Prince’s old one. We could give the small one to the next-door neighbour’s little boy, but I couldn’t put a “free” sign on a bike with two blown wheels and feel reasonably good about it. So it sat behind the garage for a long while.

You know, I thought one day, while spreading compost, if you took the wheels and stuff off, it would make a reasonable trellis for peas and cucumbers. You could even string some twine from it to the uprights… The idea teased and tickled, but the time (and let’s face it, the weather) never seemed right. Cue up yesterday, when I was up at five AM to take another set of neighbours to the airport. Maybe lack of sleep made me ambitious; I took both tool sets outside and hoped I wouldn’t need anything gigantic.

There’s a certain satisfaction to looking at something and figuring out how to take it apart. The seat was easy, the handlebars were rusted tight–that’s okay, they’ll provide support for peas–but the wheels were a little challenging. Nevertheless, I bloody well persisted. After a bit of kneeling on concrete and wrestling, my back started to inform me that my Earth shoes were not proper for this sort of work, and furthermore, it was goddamn unhappy with quite a few things going on that day.

There was a lot of creative swearing. I think the term “monkeyfucking sideways bruncher” came out, and I’m not sure what exactly it means, but it sounded good at the time. thank God I left the dogs inside–their brand of “helping” would have had dire results. Of course, Miss B was pissy with me for daring to perform such surgery without her supervision, and Odd, having been freshly washed, complained of being looooooonely while I was outside for a mere half-hour. *eyeroll*

I have a long scrape down my right leg, and my back’s a little happier today. The denuded frame is in the garden, and of all the things I feel good about accomplishing yesterday, that’s the biggest. Go figure. I didn’t take the chain off, that can happen later.

Now, if only the damn squirrels would leave it alone…

I’m feeling pretty redneck gardener.

Contortionist Headache

After being utterly convinced all day yesterday that it was Friday, I am now in the middle of a Friday that feels like a Monday. Well, more like I’m in the first third of a Friday that feels like a Monday. My weekend is going to be full of research reading, and I’m fighting the urge to get started early, especially since more rain has moved in. Curling up on the couch with some tea and oodles of research sounds way more fun than writing a zombie attack or a vampire trapped at a boring orgy.

…yeah, maybe I’m getting sick or something, because the last sentence isn’t really like me at all. I mean, research is great, zombie attacks are too, and the hilarity of the vampire story pleases me immensely, but I’m just not feeling like myself. My dreams were full of strange hybrid beasts and stories, simmering in an unholy broth. While that’s fairly usual, the headache that resulted upon awakening is not. I can blame the headache on the Mad Tortie, who slept in my hair last night.

I’m glad my hair is long enough (Finally!) but the strain on my neck is pretty unbearable. When you add Miss B snuggling as close as she can every time I turn over, it’s a miracle I didn’t fall out of my own damn bed. Fortunately, it’s built pretty low to the ground, and I’m still pretty chewy and bendy at my age, but still.

So I’m pouring down as much water as I can drink, as well as contemplating bowing to the inevitable and taking some ibuprofen. I’ve got to work today, no matter how hard my head is throbbing or my neck feels like tangled wire. There’s just not enough coffee in the world this morning, either.

I wish I had something other than this cavalcade of complaints. Afterwar’s zero draft is set aside to marinate, I have two erotic novelettes I might test in Kindle Unlimited to achieve daily wordcount on, Roadtrip Z needs a zombie attack to move things along, and the Sekrit Projekt has just had its first big batch of murders and will go straight into vengeance. I’m already feeling the nerves from She Wolf’s upcoming release day, too.

Maybe, instead of retreating to the couch, I should just crawl back into bed. Except Odd Trundles decide, after sniffing his breakfast and discerning it was merely kibble (the horror! the horror!), to mutter fuck this shit and make himself comfortable on said bed. Shoveling him aside so I can get back in is more trouble than it’s worth, especially since between the 60lb bulldog and the wriggling Australian Shepherd there’s a space only a contortionist could sleep in.

I guess it’s work after all.

*wanders off to find ibuprofen*

Things I Think About

In lieu of an actual post today, here are some things rolling around inside my head, in no particular order.

* The Killer as Aesthete. I’ve been kicking around this idea of murderers portrayed with heightened sensory acuity as aesthetes for a while. From Anne Rice’s vampires and their florid sensory overloads to Hannibal Lecter and his refined palate–it’s strongly implied Hannibal senses/experiences things differently than normal people–the killers seem to have all sorts of supernatural senses. Once I started noticing it, it was everywhere. I am trying to decide if it’s a sense of writerly shame at diving into these horrid characters doing transgressive things, or a way to remove said characters safely into fantasy, or…? It’s an inchoate mass of concepts revolving in my head, and fun to think about.

* Often, I find myself looking at very large things–cranes, buildings, jets, bridges–and struck by the thought that hands no bigger than mine put these massive items together. Brains no bigger than mine conceived of it, figured out building it. Human beings are amazing.

* I think the gigantic squirrel who’s been taunting the dogs from the back fence is Beauregard, but he doesn’t seem to recognise me. This…could escalate quickly.

* Of course deciding to cut down on refined sugar means all I can think about are cupcakes. Fuck this noise. *eats cupcakes*

* Reading Rudé on the crowd in the French Revolution makes me wonder about the compositions of current protest crowds. It also made me wonder if der Turmper is analogous (however loosely) to the Thermidorean Reaction. It certainly seems we’re living in a counter-revolutionary (what a loaded term!) moment.

* Being so exhausted everything around you seems underwater, and your face begins twitching in strange ways, is odd. There’s got to be a word in some language for that precise state of being. I’m betting there’s one in German.

* Latin, piano, knitting. Apparently I can only have two of the three. BUT I WANT THEM ALL.

* There is a red bubble on my Slack icon that won’t go away. It distresses me with the idea that I’m missing something. CURSE YOU, TINY TELLTALE.

* A Year’s Worth of Water is a great story title. Grabbed from Cliff Mass’s weather blog, of all places.

* True to form, now that I’m focusing on only two instead of three projects at once, the Muse is trying to tempt me with a bakery witch, her crazy family, and her habit of helping other people fall in love. Goddammit.

And that is an (incomplete) list of things swimming around in my head. The rest would take too long to write.

Over and out.