Jane Espenson writes about removing dignity as a writing tactic:
Loss of dignity is hilarious.
…But the fact that something dignified is made laughable… well, we all know that that can be tragic, too. The kind of humor I've been talking about is just a few degrees skewed from poignancy, a point well understood by anyone who's ever had the misfortune to get very angry while wearing a chipmunk costume.
It's around this time every year I start seriously contemplating life as a hermit. Or a recluse. I'd make an excellent recluse. (Yeah, yeah, I hear the resounding cries: You do a passable imitation for most of the year anyway, Deb…. Hush. Quiet in the galleries already.)
Last night's dream involved me explaining, in patient and excruciating detail, why you couldn't name an eskimo Deborah. (I don't know why, but for some reason in my head Jodi was determined to do precisely this.) It was a true corker of a theory, mind you, tying in the evolution of the Hebrew language and the nature of deserts and date trees and palms and oases and desert foxes and bats (are there bats in the desert?), and even Jesus. I can't quite remember the details, and for that we can all be grateful. Except dream-Jodi, I suppose, who was left with an unnamed eskimo.
No, I don't know the way my head works either. Just be grateful you don't have to live in it!
Before now, I've never really worked in a job that was high-public-contact. Before now, I didn't really know what a fake smile felt like.
I've always been one of those "if you don't feel it, you don't smile" types. Which is not to say I was surly and unsmiling, quite the contrary. Just that jobs involving the first line of defence, as I sometimes come to think of my job, mean the public have an uncanny knack of dropping in, or calling on the phone, at precisely the worst moment. But it's my job to deal with them and keep them away from interrupting anyone else. I have to smile, whether I want to or not.
Hence the fake smile, although fake is the wrong word. Insincere comes closer. Plastic feels best: it's not that it's not a smile, it's just that there's no real meaning other than the perfunctory and the professional behind it. No warmth or genuine attempt to bond.
And boy does that feel different. My eyes never feel quite right: they're too hard, and they sit at the top of my cheeks like a blockage, and the smile feels like it's cracking because my cheeks are so surprised to be pulling out a warm gesture when the body chemicals have given no warning.
Because if there's one thing you absolutely must know, it's What's the scale?
I have finely honed procrastination skills, and they're pretty much always at the fore. Tricking myself out of procrastinating is an endless process which constantly requires new weapons in the arsenal. Any time one tactic stops working, it's time to bring in a different big gun. Off the top of my head, here's ten of them1:
[↩]Heidi Kneale reports on Allen & Unwin editor Louise Thurtell's Friday Pitch.
Revising lately is a case of achingly slow and only marginally preferable to teeth-pulling. I'm not sure if this is because of my too-full days or something more sinister like a broken story. I'm going to blithely assume it's the former for a little while longer at least. It is entirely possible, what with everything that's going on in the non-writing part of my world, that I simply need a little fallow time. Much as I like to be a write every day type, the truth is … sometimes I'm not. Most times I am, but sometimes I'm not. Maybe this is one of those times.
The cats aren't talking to me today. They and I have a fundamental disagreement of this nature every twelve weeks, when I shove worm tablets down their gullets. I'm not too worried: I figure their eventual hunger will make them affectionate again, oh, around dinner time this afternoon.
I am on a Snow Patrol kick lately, and have been for the last few months. This is because their album, Eyes Open, frankly, rocks.
Luckily, she says sarcastically, one of their songs was featured in the recent (for Aussies) season's ending to Grey's Anatomy. Which means that every commercial radio station in the country is currently in some kind of escalating competition to see who can play said song the most during any given day. Because clearly that old absence makes the heart grow fonder saw is nothing but tripe and trollop and what we all need to fall in love with this song and thus run out and buy it is to hear it one! more! time!
