Well, that does it!
I'm going to take a short break from the blog to sort out some personal stuff and avoid allowing BW to become a morass of random postage.
See you all on Monday. 
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
- Franz Kafka
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
- John-Paul Sartre
"I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong."
- Vita Sackville-West
"Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself."
- anon
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Blogging Break
Your Ideal Pose
Ah, Solitude
Well, Jenn's out tonight, which is actually nice, because even though I love her, we've spent a lot of time together since I got sick, and I know she's been avoiding social stuff.
Bah.
I'm not an invalid.
It's also good for me, I think. I'm reminded of why I both love and hate living on my own (a state of being which will soon come to pass once again). I love having space to myself, having time to breathe and think without worrying about how someone else is reading everything I'm doing, and trying to come up with ways to make sure they're happy. I hate it because, well, it's easier for me to sit around feeling sorry for myself. I spent all those lonely hours in South Africa drinking bottles and bottles of Laborie pinotage and chain smoking. But, you know, I also finished writing a 200,000 word novel. 60,000 words of which were worth keeping.
Eh. I'm going to go read something, and drink some diet Coke.
I Really Need to Stop Buying Books
This is getting ridiculous.
But you know what? I can't stress or comfort-eat anymore. I mean, about the best I can do is be like, "Whoooo! I'm going to go all out tonight and have three graham crackers after dinner!" or "Oh, man, I'm *totally* going to live on the edge and eat a 1/2 cup of those honey roasted peanuts instead of a quarter cup!" Rockin'.
I'm also limited to one alcoholic beverage a day, with meals (maybe two beverages, if I eat some extra bread at dinner).
I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. All I shoot up is synthetic insulin.
Reading and writing are the only vices I have left.
Why do books have to cost money?
Preying on Human Curiousity
How to hack a bank. It's a lot easier than you think:
We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us.
People are fascinating.
Nick, on Wimmin's Work
Nick's got a post up about.. basically, how to actually make money writing fiction.
And yea, it means stepping out of the ghetto.
I remember getting a ton of very nice rejections from various SF/F mag editors for my story "Two Girls." The most frustrating rejection came from an editor who suggested I send it to a feminist magazine. I raged for at least ten minutes. I already fucking write in the ghetto! I don't want to further ghettoize myself!
But you know what? Bitch Magazine's got a higher circulation count than any of the "big three" genre mags.
Personally, I want to be a regular writer for Oprah Magazine.
Because I'm like that. Then maybe I can move on up to National Geographic....
As much as I'd like some in-genre recognition because I'd really like some decent novel advances and sales, the more shit that goes on in my life, the more I realize that what I should really be doing is trying to make some fucking money.
I've got credit card and hospital bills up to my ears, and medication alone for the diabetes shit is going to cost me an extra $2500-3000 a year. That doesn't include the every-three-months visit to the endocrinologist and the yearly visits to the optician and the podiatrist.
Other people get paid to write stuff that's far less interesting than some of the blog posts I shoot off in the course of an afternoon.
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