scribbling damselfly

I'm feeling somewhat whimsical and philosophical this morning, so, a discussion question: love at first sight — does it exist?

Me, like all good fence-sitters, I can't quite decide — but if pressed I would have to say nope, it's wishful thinking and retrospective and hindsight.

I've certainly seen and experienced "like at first sight" (which is no small thing, I think), and there are people I've met who became family in that very first instant, even if I didn't always know it at the time. (I can be inattentive at the best of times. It's a feature, I tell you, not a flaw.)

Discuss, muse, theorise… basically have at it. Challenge me. Give me stuffs to ponder.

Or, alternatively, my cousin is on the look-out for stories of when you were away from home (100-200 words, moral or lesson optional). So if you find the concept of love at first sight far too boring, tell me one of your travel stories. Bonus points for those who can combine the two! (And by bonus points I mean, er, you win nothing particular.)

I hafta say, the number of people who oppose or fear or distrust the toe sock is a little worrying to me.

If I owned more than the single pair of toe socks, I would wear them every day for weeks and months on end, and treat you all to photographs every day, in the interests of teaching you not to fear, or at the very least wearing you down into submission. Sadly, I only have the one pair, and photos of them are going to get same-ish mighty quick. So you are all off the hook. For now.

I've been doing my best, as per my previous plan, to work on several projects at once. Originally I thought this would only encompass the gamma draft of the sequel to Shadow Queen and the alpha draft of the faerie novel. Life intervened, however, and I added an outline and blurb for a paranormal short(ish) story and the proofs for Shadow Queen to that. Hafta say, this multi-tasking is breaking my brain. Don't quite know how grown-up writers manage it.

I'm also not entirely sure how helpful I'm going to be to my publisher in proofreading Shadow Queen at this point, since I appear to be reading what has been hammered into my head by previous drafts, rather than what is actually on the page.

The proofs for Shadow Queen arrived a couple of days ago. While it's still an unbound slab of A4 sheaves of paper, it now has purty fonts and layout. In other words, this thing is beginning to look suspiciously like one of those critters you find on the shelves in bookstores.

I'm so new at all of this that I had to ask my editor what I was supposed to be doing this time with the stack of pretty paper. Looking for typos and stupidities I introduced while attempting to fix previous stupidities, it turns out. Which is actually pretty good timing, because reading through the first book now will help me notice inconsistencies as I attempt to conjure up a coherent gamma draft of the sequel. Or that's the plan. No plan survives first contact, though.

Also: I am wearing my toe socks today. Toe socks are made of awesome.

Me, reading aloud the name of the cracked.com article: The five greatest things ever accomplished while high…
Nurse: I sat in the lotus position while stoned once…
Me: you realise I have to blog that "achievement", don't you?

A real human is somebody who feels and who expresses his or her feelings. This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know what they feel — but that's thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling. And being real is feeling — not just knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but it's very difficult to learn to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for communicating nobody-but-yourself to others, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't real can possibly imagine. Why?

Because nothing is quite as easy as just being just like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we are not real.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've loved just once with a nobody-but-yourself heart, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become real is: do something easy, like dreaming of freedom — unless you're ready to commit yourself to feel and work and fight till you die.

ee cummings, "A Poet's Advice"

I have a weakness: computer games. No, not those computer games, where the world is meticulously constructed and the storylines evolve and devolve and extend for decades. The ones I cannot resist are those little junky ones, with cruddy graphics and a very simple, repetitive premise. In fact, the more repetitive the better. Maybe it's like meditation? I don't know. What I know is, if you sit me down in front of a game where I have to run around beating blobs in my quest to collect chips, or come up with anagrams against the clock, or match three or more jewels in a row to get a pretty explosion, I am utterly transfixed. It's like crack. I actually think I would go without food.

Last night, while exploring the iPhone, I came across some little junket game. The premise was that you tilted the phone this way and that to direct a spherical (smiling — they're always ludicrously happy)¹ bee through some kind of flower-filled maze… Two seconds in, and I was considering going without food to keep playing. Luckily, it was cold enough, and the lure of a hot cup of tea was tempting enough to pull me away, thereby narrowly averting a future of starving to death while giggling madly as I tilt the phone up, down, back and forth and mutter Just one last flower….

1. My brother had a game on his phone or ipod once, which involved sheep. I'm not entirely sure what the sheep was supposed to be doing, but I do remember if you steered the little black sheep near other little sheep, he got a little…er…randy. See? Ludicrously happy. [↩]

Hasn't there been an awful lot of talk in the past decade about global warming? (We'll leave out the cab driver who recently used the topic of global warming to expound on the petrol conspiracies designed entirely, as far as I could work out, to drive him out of business. There are rivers of the stuff, he tells me, flowing open over the ground over in the middle east. The flash point of petrol notwithstanding, obviously. I very tactfully didn't point that out — less out of politeness than weariness. It was too early in the morning to be listening to these rants, let alone encouraging them.)

So, yes, global warming. Where is it, again? Because I am freezing.

I live on the Australian coast. Not the southern coasts which huddle in the breath of antarctic winds half the year round, no, I live on the warm sunny coasts famed for lazing around and developing first-rate skin cancers. I should not need more than three layers of clothing at any time of day or night in order to keep the blood from freezing in my veins.

That is all.

One of the hardest parts about a revision, I find, is simply starting the dang thing. The whole concept is just too daunting. There are so many things to fix, and in my abortive fledgeling novels said fixes are never just a simple one-line tweak but rather involve complicated novel-length rearrangements and convolutions and the memory capacity of, well… an all-remembering thing.

Yeah, kinda fell over there, didn't I? It happens.

So this afternoon I have done what I should have done days ago: I printed out the novel onto paper and skimmed/read it, noting down a very rough outline. (This would be the sequel to Shadow Queen, for those keeping track.) I don't know why I've avoided the print-it-out trick before now, because it really is the best thing to wrap my head around the plot and where I can insert scenes and where I can delete them, and what I wanted to change and what my beta readers think I need to change… In other words, when I print it out on paper, it's not so daunting any more.

So, note to self, for future revisions (because, hey, I'll forget again, in time for the next revision): Stop hesitating. Smoosh the margins and reduce the font and print two pages to a sheet if you must, but just print it out already. You know you need to.

This evening I made it home, fired up with the energy that a brisk walk in the chilly drizzle will give you, ready to launch into my daily wordcount, ready to catch up on all the useless stupid little errands that conspire to eat all my available time… and then I read about the girl in the window (link courtesy of dooce).

Now I feel like I've been punched in the solar plexus.

Way back when I first ventured beyond Australian shores, I joined a frequent flyer program — because Australia, my friends, is a long way away from, well, anywhere. And the cost of flying out of Australia basically earns you enough frequent flyer points to fly out of Australia. (Or it did back then. These days your average frequent flyer point earns you diddly-squat of frig-all of a sparrow's fart, which is to say, nothing at all.)

My mistake was joining the frequent flyer program that included Ansett. It was a rational and reasonable move: the flights I'd booked were all going to earn Ansett points, not QANTAS points. So I joined Ansett's program, and I flew out of the country (on the day the Aussie dollar hit US$0.49), and I jaunted around Europe, mostly the central to eastern bits because they were the affordable ones given the Aussie dollar's ludicrous economic performance. And when I got home, I had earned enough points to pay for my next lot of flights out of Australia.

Except Ansett had hit financial difficulties, and summarily scrapped the award points. (It didn't help: the airline folded and vanished soon after, never to be heard from or of again.)

C'est la vie. It's not like I lost anything of concrete value, right?

Only, last month, I changed my credit card to one that earned me QANTAS frequent flyer points.

And this month? QANTAS planes are DROPPING OUT OF THE SKY.

Now, I'll grant you that this is not a particularly rigorous scientific study, and that a sample number of two is not statistically significant, but I think the truth is obvious to all right-minded individuals. Oh yes, people: I kill airlines.