we now return you to your scheduled programming

Right. Hi there. This is me, marginally returned from the brink of lunacy. At least, the incidence of seagull songs seems to be decreasing, steadily if not swiftly. 1

I have mailed the manuscript to my agent and my beta readers, and threatened them with Nasty Things if they so much as think of returning it too soon, and I have spent the past couple of days desperately avoiding the computer. I say desperately, because it was like crash withdrawal. What do people who don't write do with all that time?

In the interim, my cousin is beleaguered by a tricksome assignment. She wants my help but, given that my brain is broken, I thought she might get better help from the rest of you.

So, here's the assignment question:

think of a speculative technological object or device that you might propose to enhance or restrict the capacity of the human body. It may be serious, experimental or fantastic. It can be, but does not have to be, possible within the realms of current technology. It may extend, combine or depart from current technology devices (but should not to simply augment a ubiquitous technology such as a mobile phone or mp3 player). The representations that you will produce will all relate to this object or device.

Have at it. My suggestions were a jetpack, an amoeba bed which removes the need to eat (and therefore cook, clean up after cooking, plan the next meal, and shop for food)2, and I forget the third one, but there was a third one, and by golly it was brilliant. Oh! No, I remember. It was a dockable brain. A computer in my head.

Have at it, people. The more fantastic the better. What have you always wanted in the future?

  1. Y'all think I'm joking about the seagull singing, but honest to god I'm not. I even got so trashed by the whole novel-writing-revising process that I started my godawful yawping at the dayjob last week. Way to act professional. At least I had the sense not to … 'perform' in front of the patients. [↩]
  2. Plus, you could still overeat and indulge by taking a nap — seriously, what is NOT TO LOVE about that? [↩]

7 March 2008 @ 17:50 | 1 Comment

actually, it kinda fits

Spoke with my mother today and asked her why she didn't give me a hippie name.1 She said if she had given me a hippie name, it would have been Mudpuddle.

:|

Guess I got off lightly, all things considered.

  1. "Why didn't you call me … ?" is a favourite game of mine. I don't know why. My mother despairs of my ever growing tired of it. [↩]

21 January 2008 @ 19:33 | 5 Comments

subtle salvation in poems and prose

Digital photography. I think it's beginning to grow on me.

I've never been big on taking photos. (We're talking about someone who spent six months in Europe and didn't actually change the 24-exposure film in her camera, after all.) Partly it's the film mentality of composing shots carefully so as not to waste film; partly it's the viewfinder being ridiculously small and not particularly amenable to those who need glasses in order to see.

But digital, digital is a whole new attitude. The viewfinder is not meant to be squished up against my face. If a shot is bad it's deletable, no wastage. Composition is happily relegated to the luck of the moment. I could get to like this.

goatchannel.jpg

I promise I won't flood you all with photos of the spawn at the farm. Honest.1 But this was my second favourite shot of the day, and I truly want to know: how is it that child and goat wear the exact same expression? Is the child channelling the goat?2

  1. Partly because we're fast running out of any actually good shots of said day! [↩]
  2. Is the goat channelling the child? [↩]

Stories I Tell (Toad the Wet Sprocket — Fear)

8 January 2008 @ 12:12 | 2 Comments

let me 'splain. no, there is too much: let me sum up.

minichess.jpg

Yes, this is quite possibly the most boring photo ever taken. It does, however, have the signal honour of being the first photo I took with the new digital camera. Whee!

Also, it's the prize from my Christmas cracker. The little pieces and board are in fact magnetic, and the board is small enough to fit in the palm of my hand: (finicky) travel chess!

Other highlights from the Christmas break include playing dollhouse with the 18 month old. Normally, I find dollhouse is the least fun game in the world. (As a child, Barbie married Action Man. Unfortunately for Barbie, Action Man only wanted her for her inheritance, and shortly after the wedding she met a gruesome fate and he lived in largesse and languor.) However, the 18 month old is not the most finicky player of dollhouse: horses are allowed in the house, it is quite natural to shut the baby inside a cupboard, and the mouse always drives the car. I promptly played along by christening the mother doll Sylvia and plonking her head-first into the oven. I also draped the daughter doll over the bonnet of the car, because mice are notoriously bad drivers, after all.

We also took the 18 month old to the local (dinky) farmyard theme park, where she got frustrated by the way the ducks always ran away, got frightened by the emus, and fell in love with the pygmy goats. She was utterly stymied by the noise the geese made, however:

hesaidwhat.jpg

Dark Time (October Project — Falling Farther In)

5 January 2008 @ 10:04 | 2 Comments

five random things make a post

  • a word you never expected your aunt to know: frottage.
  • i had a haircut three whole days ago now. i still hate it. sign of a truly bad haircut. this one's gonna take a few months to undo.
  • is leonard cohen's "hallelujah" the most covered song ever in the history of mankind? i have twenty-seven versions of it on my hard drive, only one of them by the man himself, and i wasn't actually trying for a collection.
  • i am on annual leave from the dayjob, ostensibly to write lots on the novel. then the baby was born and the family descended. so while i'm still writing, i'm not getting much more done than i would have were i at work. life, and novels, they are sneaky.
  • i have no plot for my novel. stupid recalcitrant novel. we're coming up for the deathmarch now, the plot can't go walkabout now

Clocks (Coldplay — Rush of Blood to the Head)

5 October 2007 @ 17:37 | 2 Comments

all i have to do is hit quota, after all

I have a house full of people at the moment, all here to meet the new baby. The new baby is supremely unfazed by this, and feels sleep is the best course of action. I've heard him squall exactly once since he arrived a couple of days ago and, though he did put a scrap of passion into it, it lasted less than five minutes. I'm telling you, this is my kind of baby. Sprog and I, we agree on the finer things of life: namely, sleep. It's important.

All the people makes a nice change to the atmosphere, since last week it was me and the cats. The cats got bored, and I got angry with their whining.1

Having said that, however, the words come harder when I have people in the house. They're all out there in the great yonder otherwise known as the rest of the house, while I am squirrelled away in a quiet corner, attempting to write. I can hear them, talking, laughing, watching movies. It's tricky, staying focussed on the novel, when I'd rather be out there with them.

Sometimes I'll haul the laptop out and attempt to join them while still writing, but it's not always successful. In fact, only when they're watching a movie I've already seen, which is a pretty narrow set of circumstances, all things considered. If there's conversation, particularly conversation over a glass of wine, well. It's all over, rover.

The best solution would be to write, and write quickly, so I can join them without a guilt-monkey on my back, of course.

  1. It's worth noting that the cats are now whining about being chased about by the toddler, and are claiming they'd rather be bored. It appears my cats are not zen kitties, but whiny kitties. [↩]

Hallelujah (John Cale — Scrubs OST)

30 September 2007 @ 12:48 | 2 Comments

once, in flight school, i was laconic

Hands up, who remembers Snorgle? She's all of fifteen months old now, and as of a week ago she has a baby brother.

I've named him Sproglet. Sprog for short. He doesn't have a bib yet, but maybe he can share his sister's, because allegedly he snorgles more than she ever did.

I feel it's important, you see, that they have equal and matching names.

Snorgle welcomes Sproglet

Snorgle hugs the cats the same way, only they don't always stay so obligingly still for her.

Blue Caravan (Vienna Teng — Dreaming Through The Noise)

29 September 2007 @ 9:32 | 4 Comments

put your money on the table, strain the glass through your teeth

This morning, as I lay in bed reading, my computer switched itself on. Seriously. Apropos of nothing I can pinpoint (well, I was in bed without my glasses; you can't expect too much here), I heard the fan start up, and the computer booted itself up to the login screen. I stared at it for a while, wondered about power surges tripping a startup, or whether my computer had become sentient last night and, for its very first trick, had learnt how to induce guilt; and then I decided I'd fix it later. After I'd finished this chapter. But after I ignored it for a few minutes, the computer performed the equivalent of a shrug: it put itself back into hibernation. With an audible click that had me wondering about the guilt trip thing again.

I'm now left feeling a little like Neil from The Young Ones: technology hates me, man. Or at least it judges me. But, after a morning reading in bed, I'm good with that. There's very little in the way of ills that being curled up in bed with a book won't cure, I find.

This week has been a strange one. Lots of family, what with the new addition summoning relatives from far and wide. There are photos (my Lord are there photos!), but I don't want to post them without permission, so for now I'll just post a couple of Kaitlyn's hands. They actually rank as my favourites, anyway.

I also had thoughts this morning of confidence and apologising in writing, but they don't fit in this post. Plus they're still very vague and nebulous. So maybe a bit more on that later.

Broad Lic Nic (DAAS — Live at the National Theatre)

25 June 2006 @ 15:17 | 4 Comments

awww, lookit the baby

My brother's daughter arrived at 15:something yesterday. I think 15:10 or thereabouts. My brother said it's okay if I call her Snorgle.1

I had the day off from the dayjob today, and was looking forward to gathering up and corralling a slew of words on the page. No such luck, unfortunately. The going was slowslowslow, and after only 400 odd words I stopped because, quite frankly, all I was doing was writing filler. And no one wants to read filler. And writing filler? Possibly even more boring than reading it.

The problem of course is not only do I not know where I'm going with this story, any time I do think up a new snippet of plot, it's always just that: a snippet. A beat. Never a scene, with its own arc and turning point, just a beat. It's all so very disjointed. (I don't mind disorganised. I wrote my first novel out of order and without an outline. Disorganised is okay. Even though most of this novel has so far been written in sequence. But disjointed, where I can't feel a connection between what I'm writing and what I've written and what I'm planning, that's not okay.)

What I really need to do is collect the snippets up as beats, but not start on writing a new scene until I have a new scene. Surprises are okay, sure, but I really need to know the pivotal action, the beat that will be the turning point, the mini-narrative of the scene. Before going in. Otherwise, I'm going to write an awful lot of filler.

So, yeah, I'm plotting now. Or trying to. I have an uneasy relationship with plotting. I need to take it by surprise, ambush attacks, approach it whistling and thinking of other things.

  1. Yes, I did nickname the beagle puppy we didn't buy Snorgle. No, my brother doesn't know that. No, I may not be allowed to call his daughter Snorgle for long, if ever, if he ever discovers the connection. But I want it documented that he said I was allowed to. [↩]

The Dreaming Tree (Dave Matthews Band — Before These Crowded Streets)

19 June 2006 @ 20:43 | 6 Comments

disjointed update

Still not an aunt. But apparently it's happening today, by hook or by crook, so stay tuned. I'm finding it hard to concentrate, waiting for the Inevitable Announcement, but I don't think it's the waiting so much as the natural urge to procrastinate.

Nearly bought a beagle puppy who ow-oww-owwed for us. I've named her Snorgle but, for now at least, practicality wins the day and I left Snorgle at the pet store. A girl with two cats and a rabbit does not, actually, contrary to the infinite cuteness of puppies, need a beagle named Snorgle.

Dislike my new haircut intensely, although not quite so intensely today as I did yesterday. So perhaps, after the requisite week of adjustment has passed, I will come to actually like it. We can but hope. In the meantime, bobby pins are a girl's best friend.

The finish short stories! kick succeeded, as I suspected it would, in making my novel clamour for attention. Because the brain, it is perverse.

All these things shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only
love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.

Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet"

Wait (Get Set Go — Grey's Anatomy)

18 June 2006 @ 11:43 |
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