Steph & Kam (& Oscar!) Take on the Darke Co. Fair. Or, Chicks Who Aren't Afraid to Eat

Steph and I decided to go to the Fair! Because it's fucking summer, yo. And the fair is full of awesome.



We just missed The Ohio State Fair in Columbus, so we traveled a tad north to the Darke County Fair.


We are arrived. Free parking, yo!


Did I mention we are arrived? Boy, we both needed a vacation....


Stephanie kicked my ass (TWICE) at the pig races. We decided beforehand that whoever won would gift the prize to the loser. I figured this was perfect, because I am awesome at rollerball games and I could totally win her a prize!

Then she kicked my ass. TWICE. So she won me this chicken! Or, maybe, it's a duck. A duck chicken. Really, we're not sure. I named him Oscar.


It's not the fair without some dinky princess tiara. The closest I'll ever come to wearing a Campbell tiara! I guess I just try and look forward to a Tiptree tiara?


Then it was on to other fair-time treats... like giant produce!


Stephanie, tho, had her eye on tasty, award-winning desserts. These were under bulletproof glass, let me tell you.


Checking out all that food made us hungry. Cause, let's face it, why else do you really go to the fair except for all the food? This place drew us in with this impressive BBQ rack. Those are old-school coals cooking that meat there yo.

And oh.... what meaty goodness it was!


Oscar, too, was getting pretty parched by this time.


Have I mentioned we were really here for the food? The tasty, tasty roast chicken? I suspected, at this point, that Oscar really was not a chicken, as this massacre of his fellow beast did not seem to bother him. But really, how could he be a duck? Have you ever seen a yellow duck?


Excuse me, this chicken bone here, ah... that's better.

Tasty food elicits goofy faces, srsly.

But Stephanie isn't such a meat person. Oh now, Stephanie had been pining after the fresh corn on the cob.

And oh boy, yes. Fresh corn, people. We passed fields and fields of Ohio corn on the way in. This was our reward.

And that was that.

Time for a brief rest before that other fair time attraction - livestock! What? You thought we'd do the rides right after we ate? What do you think we are, 15?

This is totally what Tessa and Kimmie the dawgs would look like if they were goats. Srsly.

Stephanie was not terribly interested in visiting the animals, but she seemed to get on well with this goat.

I think she fell in love with it, actually.

We found out later that we weren't supposed to be touching this sheep, as it had just been groomed for showing. Ooops. Way to read a sign, Hurley.

Kameron says, "This is a big motherfucking turkey."

Stephanie's imitation of this rooster.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner! This pheasant must surely be one of Oscar's kin. Could our duck-chicken really be a pheasant?

Which of these things is not like the other???

I don't think this is one of Oscar's stock.

This duck, then, perhaps?

Maybe this duck is Oscar's mom? Note the similiar hairstyles. We may never know. These are the mysteries that will keep me up at night.

Holy crap, Monty Python and the Holy Grail figurines. No self-respecting fair-goer should go home without these.


Classic Ohio vs. Michigan baby chic.

OK, yo, lunch is settled. Ferris wheel time!

View of the fairgrounds.

High up over Ohio! High on life, that is!

High on life with Oscar!!

Look, more fairgrounds! The fair was just about the right size for two krazy kats like us.

Rockin' out with Oscar on some more rides.

Singing the "Ooooo hiiiiii oooooooo" song with Oscar.

Oscar pretends to fly. I pretend to be impressed.

Rides are done. It's time for ice cream!

And what trip to the fair would be complete without face painting? What, you thought I'd leave without getting my face painted??

The look on my face says it all. Deep fried twinkies. Yes, they were selling deep fried twinkies at this Ohio fair. I just couldn't leave without one. Did I mention I stocked up on insulin yesterday in anticipation of just such an event?


Seriously. It's a deep fried twinkie. He totally dipped it in batter and fried it. "You want powdered sugar?" he said. "Oh sure!" I said. "Chocolate sauce?" "Er, I said, uh, no!" I mean, I have to draw the line somewhere, people!

Trying the first bite....
Actually, this is pretty fucking good!

Stephanie's obligatory, "I can't fucking believe I'm sitting here with a deep fried twinkie eating hippie in Ohio. What have I done with my life??"

My response, "Stop your bitching or the duck-chicken gets it."

And finally, what trip to the fair isn't complete without totally making yourself sick with that one extra treat just before you leave?

My obligatory "Gee golly the patriarchy loves me and my phallic desserts" shot (OMG this should totally be the author photo on my book jacket).

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Next year: deep fried Oreos and skee ball!

Conversations With Our Print Designer

"You know, if we all looked in real life the way we did after I got done with them in Photoshop, that would be pretty awesome."

Next Gen Parents

Mod of the Week

I'm thinking to keep the original "sparkle" plastic eyes with this one, which is a first. For the Nyx pony, I painted over the eyes. I'm also wondering if I should do wings.



But, until then, this is about how they all start. In the background, you can see what will soon be my Red Bull pony.

I am an uber 80s girl geek, aren't I?

DP&L

Bill this month = $110.76
Amount budgeted = $80.00

The good news is, trash & water came in $20 under budget, so at least I won't starve this month.

Can't wait for September and October when I can stop using the aircon.

OK, Seriously

Seriously, I can't believe I just did that to Nyx after everything I just did to everybody in this stupid book. The next book will be so much better. The "good" guys will actually "win"! .... sort of!.... in a roundabout way!!

It's like The Dark Knight of the series. Or the Empire Strikes Back at the Dark Knight.

Next book: less Dark Knight, more heads getting chopped off!

Really, that's what every book needs: more heads getting chopped off.

Less than 10K to go, probably more like 8k. It's mostly filler between big scenes now (yes, I wrote a lot of the latter half of this book out of order. This is the only series where I've ever been able to do that).

Tired

I must just really be burned out. I think I'll take off the Friday before labor day to give myself a 4-day break. I was in bed at 9 last night, and I'm headed to bed tonight at 8pm. I feel exhausted.

You can only juggle with so many "I have to" and "I need to"s in your head before you just burn out. What happens when I concentrate on doing everything well is that I do nothing well. I can only have 2 of the 3 major aspects of my life in alignment at the same time 1)Work Life 2) Social Life 3) Writing Life (actually, add "health life" in there as well, now).

(10K more words! 5 days a week of workouts! Better clothes! Happy relationship! Better social life! 2009 writing schedule! My career! Not being a midlist writer! Good day job work! Paying off my credit card! Getting home for the holidays! Financial security! Gaming job! Next novel contract! When to call the cops about the noisy neighbors! Sleeping! Bad food choices! No Chipotle, no! Interesting blog life! Great life! Full potential!)

... and, g'night, folks.

Tomato Soup & Cheese Pie

Had a project get pushed back to me at work today, one of those low priority projects that comes across your desk, you clean up as best you can in a couple passes, and send back out again.

It came back in the hands of one of our clients, who had marked it up and gave it back to our CEO... along with an offer for his copy editing services.

Yeah, seriously.

I had this terrifying moment where I wished I was just cleaning up and formatting technical SOPs and writing up exec bios and maybe internal memos again, instead of... well, instead of everything. I just wanted to work on things that didn't really matter. Things that nobody looked at. Things I could do where screwing up didn't look so huge and didn't make me look so goddamn incompetent.

I wanted to be nobody, doing nothing important.

I wanted a risk-free job. Because having a job where you actually do public-image type stuff means that not only are the odds good that you will fail - and fail often - but that you will look like a total incompetent ass in front of a great deal of people.

On the bus home, I wanted nothing more than to beeline for Chipotle. I was trying desperately to talk myself into pizza, but it makes me feel so much worse these days that it turned out to be easy to talk myself out of. I wanted something external to fix me and my incompetence. I wanted to hide under the floor, watch some crappy shows, and just disappear.

But you know what?

Here's the thing. Living is full of risk. Especially when you live like you want something. It's easy to do crap work that nobody cares about. It's easy to stay in the same job, in the same town, with the same friends, going to the same places, your whole life. There's nothing wrong with that. It involves minimal risk.

When I chose to be a writer, I chose to risk making an ass of myself in public when I fucked up. More than that, you don't even *risk* it, you just *do* it. Every time you put any kind of work up, any time you do something and put it up for public discussion, you *will* at one time or another, fail. You will fail utterly, and publicly. You just will. And you have to accept that. You accept it when you choose that life, or you find some other life, because this is what it is.

God's War is going to get slammed next year (if anybody even reads it. Slammed would be great, honestly, cause then it would mean people were reading it). I'm going to get called out on a lot of lazy shit. There will be typos. There will be offensive things to people of all walks of life, who will likely tell me just how offensive and stupid and ignorant I am (much of which will be true). There will be continuity errors. Huge plot holes. The occasional stupid line and unlikable character.

That's how it is.

I've had a lot of fear lately, because so much of my writing *has* felt disjointed, off. I've been writing a lot of blog posts and personal correspondence with typing errors; words show up in a sentence that shouldn't be there. Paragraphs don't tie together. Those deft open/close text packages aren't as easy to craft, in part, I think, because I haven't been working hard enough to create them.

I'm going too fast all the time, thinking ahead of what I'm typing, and then losing my train of thought (this post is a good example of that. I started out ready to tie it all up with a bow, and now I'm digressing into sugar numbers and copy edit errors, when I wanted to talk about fear and failure). I don't know what's wrong, if I just need a vacation, or what. My sugar numbers are fine. It's just harder to concentrate.

But whatever it is, temporary insanity or just my usual wackiness, this is how it is. Public failure is the price you pay for a public life, small as mine may be. Sometimes I fuck up. All you can do is work toward not fucking up next time. Or fucking up less spectacularly.

I need to go back to editing everything in triplicate before it goes out. I need to slow down. Not every project needs to go out an hour after I get it, which may be some of the problem. I'm always feeling a sense of urgency that's just not nearly as important as accuracy.

I remember working with my old boss back before he became President of another company, and how he'd work his ass off all night on projects. Things got done, yeah, but they weren't done without errors. And they weren't little errors. I remember one time we actually forgot to turn on an antenna at one of our cell sites. Another time, we sent guys up a tower we weren't sure we had a structural on (turns out we did, but we didn't know it when they were 100 ft up an icy, overloaded cell phone tower). We made a lot of mistakes. Tired, overworked mistakes.

But he kept all of our contracts, and got us new ones, because he fessed up to errors, accepted that they were going to happen, and knew how to make the best of them. Shit happens. It's the price you pay for running too hot, too fast.

And, like I said... in the three years I knew him, he went from Project Manager to President.

He made a lot of mistakes along the way. But he knew how to get shit done.

So it's back to boning up on my copy writing reading and research, which I've been lax about during our latest project, and, as said, instituting my triplicate copy check, exhausting as that may be.

I am not going to be a perfect person. That may be obvious, right? But here's the thing: when you fuck up big time, there's this part of you that says, "See, you're worthless! You're a total fuck up! You should go back to cleaning dog kennels!" and you're terrified it's true, that the whole world is smarter than you, that you're not fit to breathe, that you should have died two years ago in a hospital in Chicago.

And sure, all these things may be true. But you know what? Life is a persistence game, just like writing, just like 90% of the goals and dreams you set and make for yourself. There are a lot of people who give up when they fail the first time, the second, the third. And there are a lot of people who learn from their failures. And, of course, a lot of people who get by on pure incompetence.

I'd like to be in the second category.

Thing is, you know: I'm not a brilliant person. I work very hard just to have what I've got now. And I have to work harder to hold onto it, because there are down days, bad periods, and times when none of your emails or blog posts really make any sense anymore and what you really need is a vacation.

Maybe failure just means you need a vacation.

I'm going to go work on my pony mods and have Nyx chop somebody's head off.

I'm no better or worse than anybody else at anything. At life, at writing, none of it. I just have no interest in giving up or giving in on any of it.

Persistence.

Even when it's shit. You, your work, the world.

Persistence.

Because being dead is boring.

Money Shot

"You’ve spent your life imagining diverse races and cultures, and doing a hell of a good job. Yet your inability to imagine true love manifesting between two members of the same sex almost classifies you as retarded in my mind. It’s not even a moral issue. You’re just an idiot to me."

- Michael Swaim, in response to Orson Scott Card (just him in general, really)

The Boys

I was in the middle of writing a scene between Rhys and Yah Tayyib this morning, and realized how novel it was, writing a scene between two men in the God's War universe.

And then I realized they were talking about a woman.

Heh heh.

Typo of the Day

bel dames = bed dames

Prepping for Autumn

Had to wear a jacket to work this morning. Just a tad brisk. Autumn is coming, and then winter. And there's nothing better for the sanity than lots of projects. So I picked up a $25 craft table today!


Pony mods are back!

Have I mentioned how much I've gotten done since that free WoW subscription ran out?

Smoky Halls

"Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed."
- Roger Kahn

There are no boxing scenes in Black Desert. How can this book have no boxing scenes? Maybe this is its primary problem with the book.

That and the fact that I'm 10k from the fucking end.

Workadooo

Copywriter vs. print designer SMACKDOWN!!

I now understand the age-old rivalry between the copywriter and the print designer.

Love Notes for a Stressed Out, Sleep Deprived Monday

Workadoo