smoke me a kipper — i'll be back for breakfast

 journal, pre-crash, writing life  14 Responses »
May 312007
 

Today's adventures in driving: plonking my bag down on the passenger seat, driving away, only to have a horrendous bleat startle me as soon as I reached 20 kph. Turns out there's a weight sensor in said passenger seat, and the car was quite desperate to tell me that my bag had not fastened its seatbelt. Learn something new every day.

In other news, iTunes is driving me insane. I like iTunes, I really do, but talk about a heavy load on the CPU. And even more distressing is the habit of corrupting its database on exit. This routinely involves iTunes loading up a 3:00 song, telling me it's a 3:00 song … and playing 1:48 or so of it. It's teeth-grindingly annoying.

So, Pod-people out there: do you stick with iTunes, despite its rather charming features? Or have you switched, and if so, to what? At the moment I'm toying with MusikCube which, if it showed artwork, would be perfect. I've looked at MediaMonkey, but they don't provide smart/dynamic playlist functionality for free. I've looked at WinAmp, but that interface drives me insane. Any other advice?

In actual writing-related news: I haven't written for two whole days. I may not write tonight. (Although I will probably try to write a blurb or query letter for the novel, to start fishing for agents.)

H'm.

It's quite strange, actually. I feel a little lost, and definitely at a loose end. So far I'm filling my time with creating playlists for mp3 CDs for the car. I have a lot of songs. This could take a lot of CDs.

 Posted by at 5:43 pm

just when you're comfortable, life smacks you in the ear

 journal, pre-crash, shadow bound, shadow queen, writing life  5 Responses »
May 232007
 

The other morning I made the happy discovery that my iPod plugs directly into my new car. Dude! I was happy, back when I bought my second car, that it had a tape player. (My first car had only a radio station — an AM-only radio station, at that.) This is so much better.

Then I got to work, and had to make a booking for a young man to bank some sperm. He was starting chemotherapy that afternoon. He's all of nineteen.

Some days, the contrast is more extreme than others.

I've been doing what I do best, lately, namely burying myself in work. In this particular instance, it's novel revisions. I might, if I didn't know my beta readers were lovely (and geographically dispersed) people, I just might suspect them of ganging up with a plot to drive me batshit insane by contradicting each other at every turn. What? How did that happen? You never set that up, one cries, as another points out Yeah. I saw that coming ages ago.1 I have actually finished all the heavy-lifting of the revision; now I have only to flick back and do spot-changes here and there.

And then — because Tess and Leigh may well lynch me if I don't — it's on to writing the sequel.

  1. Reactions are paraphrased, naturally. Because exact examples require context. My brain has all the genius of stewed prunes these days; context is too difficult. [↩]

wordpress upgrade

 administrivia, pre-crash  Comments Off
May 232007
 

Apologies to those reading the blog via newsfeeds. I upgraded wordpress today (after much swearing and angsting over a couple of plugins which refused to play nice), and one of the results was a republishing of all my old posts as new.

If you notice any other fun quirks, let me know :|

 Posted by at 7:11 pm

joss on women

 journal, pre-crash  3 Responses »
May 212007
 

Joss Whedon on the gender inequality

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

…All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can’t think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that.

Read the entire essay.

 Posted by at 9:58 am  Tagged with:

a random assortment

 journal, pre-crash, shadow queen  7 Responses »
May 182007
 

Still no car. (I am now officially impatient.) (It has however finally arrived in town. I am picking it up, Tequila willing, tomorrow.)

Still no Doctor Who. (All you northern hemispherical types already watching it? Yeah. Not helping.) I am self-medicating with episodes of Firefly and past episodes of Doctor Who, but it's not helping much.

My workplace has ripped out all the nearby parking, and turned what's left into non-staff areas. So when I do have a car? I won't be able to park it anywhere.

Looking for an agent? OnyxHawke has gone mad.

I am buried in novel revisions, and have no brain for anything else. (Why do I change pivotal plot points at this late stage? Why?)

I need more sleep.

How about you?

impulsive? me?

 journal, pre-crash  3 Responses »
May 092007
 

Disappeared off the face of the internets for a while there, didn't I?

Mostly this was because my car, my faithful little car Tequila, started giving me troubles. Now Tequila, besides being a bright and shiny green, is 21 years old1 — so trouble isn't exactly out of the ordinary. She has her quirks: like the way the dashboard doesn't in fact light up when you turn on the headlights. Or the way the interior light turns on for every open door except the driver's.

But this was trouble piling on top of trouble, an endless list of necessary repairs and maintenance, and three breakdowns in as many days. When your car is only worth $1,000 in good condition (which Tequila is not, thanks to a chemical manufacturing plant which provided employee parking right under the ammonium nitrate fallout), you start to question the cost of repairs.

You start to think it's time to upgrade. Maybe, you dare to dream, maybe I could even own a car manufactured this century…

And then, if you're me, you pick your mother up2 and take a brand new Mazda 3 for a test drive. Just to know how they handle, of course.

You can guess the next part, can't you?

Yes, I just bought a new car. 8O
Not just new-to-me, but brand spanking new. She comes off the boat tomorrow, and I'll be picking her up (and hemorrhaging the rest of the purchase price) next week.

So, because I obviously cannot come up with content while my brain is this addled, have a couple of links:

  1. She's old enough to drink! And vote! Even in America. Which is something some members of my family can't claim ;) [↩]
  2. The mother is important, for she is impulsive and I am reticent to part with so much as a nickel. Together, we almost make a normal person who spends rationally [↩]

on cashing foreign cheques…

 journal, pre-crash, the wages of salt, writing life  2 Responses »
May 022007
 

So my cheque for PostScripts arrived in the mail yesterday. (Woot for publications which pay on acceptance!) It was such a cute cheque, with Superman1 on it, I was quite reluctant to hand it over to the bank.

My reluctance only intensified when I stood there for nigh on half an hour while the bank teller keyed in all the information she needed to. Granted, foreign cheques are always going to have the information in unfamiliar corners. And there's the whole American date format, which threw her for a while. The writing on the cheque was too small for her to make out. The always-fun moment where she accidently wiped everything and had to re-enter the data. And the especially fun moment where she wanted to know if perhaps the American cheque had been drawn in Australian dollars, since it didn't say anywhere that it was specifically American dollars…?2

And then she needed to know what city and state the cheque was from. I pointed out that "Cranston, Rhode Island" was probably what she was looking for there, but she was dubious. "Isn't Rhode Island a city?" she asks. "Which would make Cranston a suburb. And I need to know what state Rhode Island is in."

See, this is where watching movies and retaining trivia comes to your rescue. "I'm pretty sure Rhode Island is a state," I say. "After all, in Miss Congeniality, the contestants are all from states — Minnesota and Dakota and California, right? And one of them is from Rhode Island."

Not the most structurally-sound way to make a point, no. But it's all about the lowest common denominator, people. It was something she'd believe3, and it was going to be aeons quicker than asking her to google it.

You do what you gotta.

  1. Seriously! Superman! What kind of bank issues cheques with Superman on them? None of the banks I know have fun cheques. [↩]
  2. I gave her my best are-you-kidding-me? look. It seemed to work. [↩]
  3. As opposed to the alternative: "I'm pretty sure Rhode Island is a state, not a city. Although I don't have a map or supporting evidence on me… [↩]