ophelialaughs

At school we use macs, where you save by hitting Command + S.

At home I use a PC, where I save by hitting Ctrl + S.

The mac's CMD button and the PC's Alt button are in approximately the same place.

So when I knew my hard drive was in death's dooryard, I carefully backed everything up...except apparently I never saved the pages and pages of revisions to godlight's first chapter.  Except I suspect I did try to save it...by hitting Alt + S. 

Alt + S does not save anything.  :P

Then, I imagine, I closed the document and Word asked me if I wanted to save my changes and I hit NO because I hadn't made any changes since the last time I saved, or so I thought.

Word is always doing that, and I always say NO because I imagine I'm saving some accidental keystrokes, or perhaps some touchpad shenanigans that I don't want to save.  In Word, if you save, run a wordcount, and then close, it asks if you want to save your changes.  What changes!?

Anyhow, all those changes are gone, and have to be done over, and as I may have mentioned, I have zero time lately and I'm exhausted.

On one level I realize these are only a few pages of changes I'm talking about, but I am just so tired, and on the edge of despair all the time.  I feel like I will always be the B student in everything:  writing, school, housekeeping, dog guardianship.  I will never be a star at anything.

How can you be a writer if you can't manage to do something so simple as save a document correctly?

Yes, I am feeling very sorry for myself at the moment.

I hate macs.

Also Word.

I'd give up, except I don't know and can't imagine what I'd do instead.

Blargh.

Have you ever seen, probably on television, one of those booths where the contestant gets in and then  money blows all around while the person tries to grab as much cash as possible?  That is how it feels inside my head a good bit of the time, with ideas and thoughts instead of money.

Lately, I have not been able to grab much.

There's just too much in there.

No time to purge with morning pages.

Under the heading of IDEAS-GENERAL, there's the new beginning for godlight, the work in submissions.  There's the draft beginning for Seldom Untitled, the work -- allegedly -- in progress, although as for progress...ahem, mumblemutter.

Under IDEAS-SCHOOL we find the ideas for Digital Illustration class, where I am currently supposed to produce a series of zoo pictograms (icons).  There are ideas for Typography (which class I may be the first ever to  love).  There are the ideas for Drawing II.

Then we have RESPONSIBILITIES.  Under this heading find laundry, menu planning, shopping (what all did I forget last time and what all will I forget next time?) and prescriptions (human and pet) and cooking and cleaning.  Haha! if you could see my kitchen floor, you would be as appalled as I am ashamed; I should be in there mopping instead of in here blogging about how I should be mopping.  Also, maintaining relationships (phone calls, e-mails).  Feeding people and critters.  Cages, litter boxes.

I could really use a wife maid.

Up until about two weeks ago, I found myself thinking, in a recurrent way if not obsessively, that maybe I was done writing.  I'd told my one good story, and I had no particular burning drive to get on with telling another.  It occurred to me briefly that maybe, just as I only have seven hundred to twelve hundred good words in me per day, I might perhaps only have so much creativity in me per day.  Maybe, perhaps, I'm using it all up on school projects. 

After all, I did have a burning drive to finish that last DI project:



But no burn when it came to godlight or Seldom.  No particular guilt over lack of burn, either -- which was the most disturbing aspect.  Can a burning desire just wink out like that?  If it does go, does it ever come back?

What can I do to make it come back?

Even if I figure that out, should I make it come back?  Because I really do not have time.

I thought it was me, my inner whiner.  This is all well and good for kids living at home and men with wives.  I AM the home, and I AM the wife!  And:    Nobody else spends this much time doing school work.  I'm only taking four classes!  WTF?

Last week my hard drive self-destructed and the youngest spawn fell ill, so on top of everything else, there was alla that there to deal with.  The inner whiner was on a rip, let me tell you.

Then I heard one of the young people, a second-year student say almost exactly the same thing about how much out-of-class time we spend on school work, and I felt so relieved.  It's not just me!  There really is an exorbitant amount of homework in the graphic design program.  So. I could just quit, right?

Quit and do what?  Sit around having plenty of time to write but no desire to do it?

Well I could walk the dogs, there's that.  And spend more time trying to not think of all the things I'm not supposed to eat, which is always a worthy occupation.

For now, my writing goal is to finish typing in the changes to godlight's beginning.  When that is done, I'll submit both visions* for critique and see what they say.  While that's pending I can go back to work on Seldom in my -- ahem, spare -- time.

Meanwhile I'll keep thrashing out the school projects unless or until it becomes more pain than pleasure.  For instance, I needed an idea for a surrealist drawing yesterday, and the girls in the basement are simply not cooperating.

That's what's going on here, nothing much interesting...a whole lot of nothing much interesting, which is why I haven't blogged for a while.

I can't recall if I said before, but I'll risk repeating myself.  I'm taking four courses in school this quarter, Digital Illustration I, Typography I, Drawing II, and Organizational Behavior.  That last one is about human relations and is eating my brain.  The first one is eating my life.  Drawing is interesting, but I'm so slow!  I wonder if I'd be faster if I were younger.

Yesterday I was in the Mac Lab working on the Godzilla Galapagos Guava project.  There was a second year class in progress, so I had my earbuds in, but I heard the instructor say, "You all grew up with computers."  He's about--guessing--ten years younger than I am.  I tried to shoot daggers at him with my eyes, but apparently the eyedagger quiver was empty, or else just old and too decrepit to fire.  Well that, or he just couldn't see me all the way in the back row.

Dude.  I grew up with three black and white tv channels full of snow, and a bakelite wall phone with a three foot cord.  Nary a computer in sight.  In fact, they put computers in my high school the year I went to JVS, and they were installing the computers at the JVS as I graduated.  And honestly, having come to my smallish quantity of geekery late in life, I don't consider missing out on those dinosaurs to be all that much of a loss.

Ok, so swamped with school work, and taxi work.  I'm going to try to send (my youngest) Zor to driver's ed next summer, so she can occasionally free me up by transporting herself places.  Next year the school goes from quarters to semesters, and I'll have to take five classes instead of four, so I anticipate everything that's overwhelming this year to be even more so next.

Next up, hamsters.  I had originally kept one hamster, Dmitri.  When he died of old age, I let myself be talked into getting two, because dwarf hamsters are allegedly so social.  And thus I ended up with ten.  Two of the babies didn't survive, but six did, bringing the total to eight.  After much angst, I rehomed four, and kept four.  The parents Zandy (male) and Lita (female), and two babies, Algernon and Rocky (both female.)  Algernon and Lita co-habitated in the nursery bin, and Rocky and Zandy had their own cages.  But Algernon had developed a habit of chasing Lita around the cage, which was bizarre in my opinion, because Zandy got his own cage because Lita was beating him up.  (Rocky got her own cage because one of her siblings gave her a  bloody nose.)    Anyhow, on Saturday I ordered two more Dmitri-style cages from Amazon.  And on Wednesday I found Lita dead under the bedding of her cage.

I have no idea why; there were no signs of injury.

On that day there was also an outbreak of excruciating personal drama I don't feel right sharing (which might tell you something right there, since you may have realized I am the Empress of TMI.)  And I received a rejection letter.

I know we're not supposed to blog about those, but I mention it because, unlike other rejections I have received, this one stung, and I'm not sure why.  No one rejection has ever hurt my feelings before.  This was a form letter; it even said in the body of the letter, "This is a form letter."  There was nothing hurtful about the phrasing.  I'm not sure if the sting came from the fact that this was an agent I particularly hoped to land, or from all the other events of the day, or because it was a camel straw, but it knocked me for an emotional loop.  I found myself relieved to bury myself in my drawing class project.

...

So this blog entry has been open on my laptop for three days, and I have no idea how to close it.  I finished my drawing project and my exam, but missed the quiz by forgetting what day I was supposed to take it.  The new cages arrived, and the rodents are installed therein.  There was another minor disaster (by which I mean a loss of time) when two of the new water bottles leaked and both new cages had to be changed again the day after the new residents moved into them.  I have two extra cages now, and the inner voice that whispers, "HOARDER!" can just shut up, because I didn't need cages until I needed cages.

These are the sweetest, mellowest hamsters in the history of hamsters.  They are like powder puffs with faces.  Pygmy tribbles.

So.  My thoughts are distracted and fragmented, and I still haven't figured out how to end this.  I'll just say, til next time, later, taters.

Yum.  Taters.

With a side of commas...

Yesterday, the day after cx-mas, I took Kelly to the vet because she's been licking at her left front paw.  Zor said it had been bleeding, but I examined the foot and didn't see any evidence of that.  In fact, I didn't see anything wrong with it, and feeling around didn't show me anything either, no glass, no gravel.  I was puzzled, but not particularly worried, until Cobie started trying to lick it too.  Then T-Moth touched her paw and she yiped.  Kelly doesn't yipe, even when Cobie steps on her, so.

We use a multi-veterinarian practice, mostly because Cobie gets carsick and it's close.  I like all the vets we've seen there, but this particular vet's name is Wolf so I love her more.  They took Kelly to the back to examine her away from me, which always worries me, and I heard Kelly whine a little.  Then Dr Wolf said her claw was cracked down by the flesh where the claw grows out of the foot, and that it was very inflamed and painful, and she wanted to (asked if she could) keep Kelly for a while so she could give her a mild sedative, clean the area (mud season has dunlap disease this year; it's dunlapped over the holidays) and treat it without traumatizing the poor thing.

After laying all that out, she stood there waiting and I got a faint impression that she expected me to say no, and under different circumstances I might have had to, or at least negotiate for a payment plan, but I still had a wee bit o' student loan money hoarded back (earmarked for folders and printer paper) and so, even though I'm quite sure that's not what that money is for, of course I said yes.

Well, first I asked, "How long are we talking here," to which she replied, "A couple of hours, until this afternoon."  But I was already going to say yes before I asked, although leaving her there, without even getting to say goodbye, was one of the harder things I've done recently.  Way harder than, say, a colonoscopy.

"Pick her up after three but before six," Doc Wolf said.

So I went home.  Zor had watched Cobie, which she reported mostly consisted of listening to him whine disconsolately.  So I spent the afternoon taking down the cx-mas decorations and wearing him out so he wouldn't be so POUNCEY when Kelly got home.

This neighborhood isn't laid out in nice normal blocks, and I have nick-named most of the routes it's possible for me to go; there's the little block, the double block and now the triple block--not very creative, I know.  I was ecstatic to be able to make it all the way around the triple block in spite of not having been as active as I should have been since school let out in November.  I'd never tried the triple block before; once Tim had to come get me from the little block when my back went into spasm from  Cobie's relentless yanking.  But with Kelly not along, I could focus on getting Cobie to not yank, and he did pretty well, only almost yanking me off my feet one single time.

There seems to be a rule in this neighborhood that asshole dogs all live in corner lots so you have to walk past them twice as long.  Mom suggested that maybe living in corner lots makes good dogs turn into assholes, and that could be so, but I don't think it's true.  Our corner neighbor has a nice dog we hardly know is there.

So after the walk, we played Cobie-fetch with the Kong Ballistic boomerang.  Cobie-fetch involves a wrasslin match at the end of every fetch, until he arbitrarily decides to "gizzame it," which is my version of "release."  Oh, and he only plays fetch in the house.  Outdoors he just looks at you crazy, or waits til Kelly fetches and when she's almost brought it back, takes it away from her and runs away with it.  Anyway, we played in the house, a hundred pounds of moose galloping up and down the hall, for a half hour or forty minutes, whereupon he suddenly required a nap.

After that I got hooked into a marathon of Property Virgins, a program I very much enjoy but hardly ever watch.  I think I got my fill for a while yesterday though!  It was on until seven, and I only took an hour break to collect Kelly.

The vet's office was packed, and it took them a while to get to me.  Part of the delay was caused by a dog an elderly gentleman had brought in, a stray.  She was beautiful, a border collie and/or Australian Shepherd and/or something mix.  I don't know how long he had her before someone suggested her have her scanned.  Sure enough she had a chip installed, and there were records on file.  Unfortunately her humans didn't answer the phone and the chip company had to leave a message.  But they did learn her name is Tina and is an escape artist who has disappeared before.  So Tina will be going home soon, if she hasn't already.  And seriously, I was willing to wait a few more minutes to collect Kelly for this.

Microchips work.  Keep your info updated!

So finally Kelly and I were home, and she was really cold, which I related to because whenever I am physically traumatized I suffer low blood pressure afterwards and that just makes me BRRR.  So I cuddled her up beside me on the sofa and wrapped her in my hoodie, whereupon evil Oliver the asscat decided to pretend he didn't know she was in there and walked on her.  I knew she didn't feel well when she ignored that insult.  After about a half hour she warmed up and stopped shivering, bless her heart, and she was fine for the rest of the night, even reporting for begging duty at dinner time, although perhaps not with her usual enthusiasm.  She refused to go outside without a human escort, but she did all her business.  She also whined a little at bedtime, wanting to get in the bed with us, but she soon settled down.

Today she seems nearly back to normal.  She is stalking the hamsters, whining for tortilla chips, and devoured her peanutbutter-encased drugs (anti-biotic and NSAID) with gusto.

She's supposed to go back before Thursday to get her injury inspected, but I anticipate she will be back to her usual unsinkable self before then, bless her heart.  We made good use of the time she was gone, but we really missed her for those couple-five hours she wasn't here.

Forgive a moment of sap on my part:  She's my Kelly Doll, and I wuvs her.

I saw this little critter at Save-a-Lot:



Oh look, I thought, What a cute little olphinaunt.

Olphinaunt is what the twins called elephants when they were like, two.

He was as soft as a hamster but more amenable to pocket-travel.  I bet you're a lucky writing olphinaunt, I thought.  I had to have him, even though no one in the store knew how much he was.  Eventually we settled on 2.99, and Peanut (it says his name is) came home in the pocket of my hoodie, and I forgot to take him out.  So when Zor (the youngest) and I went to the store yesterday, Peanut was still in there, although I didn't realize it.

As I zoomed down the road that little voice whispered in my mind, "Go to Goodwill."

It's a build-it-and-they-will-come kind of voice, not to be ignored, so I asked Zor if she minded if we stopped.  She said no, so we stopped...for two hours.  We found clothes, a couple of books, and a picture frame for a project.  And I found one of those wheeled bookbags, like I scoured the city for at the beginning of fall quarter.  The cheapest I found then was $40.  This one was $7.  So, even though I'm really pretty in love with the leather backpack I found for $3 at a yard sale, the wheeled book bag came home with me.  Not sure how it's going to fit into all the things I need to carry to live at school three days a week, but if I need it, it will be here.

On to the grocery...

Hams for $10.  Kapow!  Almost made up for the $40 I spent at Goodwill.

Came home, carried things in, and when I reached into my pocket for my keys to open the van's tailgate, I felt something fuzzy.

Well you really are a lucky lil olphinaunt!  Maybe not a writing one (we'll see about that shortly) but definitely a shopping olphinaunt.

Welcome home, Peanut.

It's a miracle I ever read a novel, never mind wrote one, as I have the attention  span of a flea.  I signed on to post about the wild and crazy night of dreams I just had, and how I awoke with the knowledge that--oh look.  Dog videos!

Anyhow, ahem.  I dreamed rough and woke up because my arm had fallen so thoroughly asleep it hurt, and I was suddenly sure not only that I need to change the beginning of godlight, but also certain of how, which in spite of much mulling, has eluded me so far.  A way, I think, to move the beginning closer to the beginning (if you will) and yet still sparing me one of those in media res openings. 

Those are very popular now, stories that begin in the middle of action, but I personally hate them.  I want to know a little about the character before she plunges through the old wellcap on her way to the mailbox, and it's hard to fit that knowing in without telling, dumping, or what have you.  But if I don't know the character, I won't care if she falls through and dies down there or hauls herself out just as the cap collapses, or if she subsequently leaves a bloody trail upon the ground as she crawls to the mailbox and finds a letter from her dead sister in there.

So, changes.  Or a change, plus its ripples.  In a story, everything ripples out.

That's right, SEND.  Me, sending a rejection.

A self-published author sent me a message on goodreads.  It said:

As you may recall, you entered to win my book [REDACTED] from the Goodreads giveaway.

As I would like to have a few more reviews for the book, I am writing to offer you a copy of the book, free of charge, if you would be willing to read it and post a review on several of the online book sites (Amazon, B&N, GoodReads, your blog).

Of course, I would ask that you give the book a completely honest review.

If you are interested, please let me know. I can send the book in any format (Kindle, Sony, Epub, Palm, PDF or a printed copy).

Thank you in advance.

Warmly,

[REDACTED]

I have no recollection of entering any such giveaway, but that doesn't mean anything.  Thank goodness goodreads has a page of giveaways I've entered.  (This link will probably only work if you're a goodreads member and have entered giveaways.)  Anyhow, I gleefully pounce on the link to see whether my CRS has struck again or what, and nope--this book isn't on it.

My reply:

Actually I don't recall, and goodreads has no record of it either. Regardless, I'm extremely busy and can't guarantee I'll review any books at this time, much less promise to post reviews on multiple sites.

Thanks for thinking of me, though.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like someone was trying to hustle me here.  As a result I am NOT HAPPY.

As an aside, maybe my mother did too good a job of pounding it into my head, "If you can't say anything nice, just keep it to yourself," but I never post bad reviews.  Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it has no merit, or that other people won't adore it, and just because a story is not to my personal taste doesn't mean I'm all cool with making the author's job harder.  The Silmarillion springs to mind.  Also Twilight, or pretty nearly anything with monsters as sex objects.  I like my monsters ugly and eating people...  No one's really tickled my "monstrous and sensuous" bone since Claudia.

And yeah, sometimes books are not just not to my taste.  Sometimes they're really bad.  But I am not the book police, and at least you know when I rate something highly, I really mean it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised by how much I liked this story. It was a quick read in first person present tense--naturally. It didn't put me off the way many YA novels do, by spending far too much time on dialogue and exposition. There's enough action, and it's well done. At no time did I pray for the death of the female protagonist. This is a rare and wondrous accomplishment, although I may have wanted to shake her once or twice.

This book is an odd blend of Witch World and The Long Walk, but it works.

View all my reviews

It took me rougly eight tries to make it through Stephen King's The Stand.  At first he kept losing me after he turned his camera away from Stu Redman.  I just didn't care for Frannie, and I outright disliked Larry.  Everyone said what a wonderful book it was though, so I kept trying, and Nick was okay.  It was M-O-O-N, and that spells Tom Cullen, who led me through the rest of The Stand--although it took a couple of more tries, because King lost me again at a certain spoilery plot point late in the game.

It never pays to get too attached to King's characters.

So another month, another attempt to make it through, and finally--success!  I had finished reading The Stand.  I didn't care for the ending much at all.  With King, and for me as a reader, endings are hit or miss, and he is one author where I never skip to the end to see what happens and then back track to find out why and how it happened.  With King, the why and how might be the only part I want.

And with his science fiction, I might even want the why and how only once.

Is The Stand SF?  Technically yes, although it's softer SF than some.  When I think of King's SF, I'm more inclined to think first of The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher.  I've not been able to make it through either of those a second time despite multiple attempts, and despite the fact that I enjoyed them just fine the first time through.  Under the Dome was ok, but I doubt I'll ever try to read it again.  And...the jury's still out on Cell.  I actually want to read that one again (since I've forgotten most of it) but I'm afraid it will fall under the Curse of the SF Re-reads.

Which brings me the long way 'round to my actual topic, which is his latest novel, 11/23/63.  I very much enjoyed it, far more than UTD, more than any of his books since Lisey's Story, which is one of my favorites.  In this book, a teacher travels back in time to avert the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  This premise tickled both my socks off, because godlight originally was supposed to be about someone travelling back in time to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which was going to lead to a chain of events that put a Lincoln decendant in the White House at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

See, too often have I come up with what I thought was a fantabulous story idea only to discover (or realize) King has been there first.  The Pool Where We All Go Down to Drink from Lisey's Story explains this metaphorically, but has never made me feel any better about it.  I love you, but DAMN YOU, STEVE!  I still haven't forgiven you for Gray Matter, of which my version was called Couch Potato...

But this time, I drank first.  This makes me happy.

godlight ended up nothing at all like that original premise, no backward time travel, no changing the past, nothing of the sort.  And it's win-win, because King obviously writes better than I do, and his story is miles and miles better than mine could ever have been.

Oddly, I didn't care much about the whole JFK/Oswald plot line until just as it came to a head.  Until then, King kept my attention with other things, including Oswald's wife, and other characters also.  Especially engrossing was the love story between the teacher and a woman from the past.  When the time finally came and the teacher had to decide whether to return to his own time or not, it mattered hugely to me.  (This same question failed to matter in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, sad to say.)

Are there ramifications to changing the past?  How will we know if the protagonist never returns to the present?

The answer to those questions are spoilers.  They are also quintessential Stephen King, and I hardly got any sleep until I found out.

So this book I give a big hooray to.  Maybe even enough to forgive him for Gray Matter.

====================


My Top Ten Stephen King Novels (subject to change and re-ordering almost daily)

The Talisman (co-written with Peter Straub)
Lisey's Story
It (Bev saved my life)
Dolores Claiborne
11/23/63
Firestarter
Rose Madder
Hearts in Atlantis
Insomnia
Bag of Bones

I think I am supposed to be writing entries about the kinds of things that will appeal to and attract potential readers for my novel, but I don't know what kinds of things those might be.  I don't really like discussing my unsold stories in public much, ever since a critique group member absconded with no less than two character names and a major concept, and since there is no way to protect ideas except not to share them, I re-envisioned the whole story and have kept it quite close to the vest since.

The novel is a dystopian adventure about a collision between the near future and the far future.  Although I never come right out and explain it in the story, godlight is about using time travel to change the past, and to some extent, about the effect of time travel on multiple incarnations of the same soul.  It's about what it means to be human, and what it costs to belong.

In addition to the adventure, there's a love story (actually three, now I think about it, one of them a love-hate situation) and a mystery.  Did Cera--the heroine--kill her husband seven years ago and get away with it?  Just about everyone in the story world thinks so, except her one crazy companion.

There is no god in godlight.  It's not religious fiction and it's not my intention to confirm or deny the existence of a divine being.

Now if I think of any topics that might appeal, I'll be sure to post them here.  But while I'm working on Seldom, I won't be able to discuss her story for fear of killing it.  So I'll probably continue to share minutiae about life, the varmints, and everything.  I hope that's ok, because that's pretty much all I have in the silo right now.