To Work, To Work

Ok. I've reworked all of my novel writing schedules so the two books I'm working on will get done on time. I've fallen behind on my schedule, and I need to get back on track. This means a whirlwind writing weekend over labor day.

And here's some breathing space, courtesy of New Zealand:

Good Bye, Viagra Guy

A Farewell Letter to Viagra guy:

Good bye, Viagra guy.

Congrats, good luck at your new job! I sure as hell am glad you got hired on somewhere else.

I do not envy your new coworkers.

Oh, hurrah, I shall never have to listen to you again at 8am on a Monday morning trying to make small talk about the consistency of coffee creamer.

Truly, the the universe is merciful.

Goodbye!

Buried in Books

I used to make fun of my roommate, Jenn, for the number of books she kept on her queen-sized bed. Last time she cleaned it off, she came back with a count upwards of 50 hiding in the sheets.

Now that I've switched from a single to a queen and shoved everything into a much smaller room, and having an out-of-town boyfriend who only visits once a month or so, I have discovered something quite peculiar.

The other night, I was startled to roll over and discover that I'd left a pile of books in bed with me.

Jenn has a really great coffee mug that says, "Book lovers never go to bed alone."

Ain't that the truth.

We're at over 1700 books right now, and the rest of Jenn's SO's books will arrive this weekend, which will likely but us close to 2000, so we can relate to the plight of the poor buried bibliophile:

For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life's central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright décor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion.

I can't wait to have a proper library. In the meantime, there are books in every room in our house. I'm glad we don't live in earthquake country.

Rushdie on Writers

"my view is that writers need to go everywhere. You need to put your hands into as many pieces of life as you can. You've got to go to the whorehouse or the ball game or the prison or the nightclub, it doesn't matter. You've got to go everywhere. Because otherwise you don't know enough."

(via Culture Space)

I Am So Tired

I am so tired.

Wow, it's only Wednesday!

Judging a Book By Its Cover

Rick Moody, author of literay book The Ice Storm, had some advance copies go out for his new book, The Diviner. The cover was a "garishly illustrated blaze-orange cover depicting a shirtless, Conan the Barbarian-type warrior standing atop a mountain peak, a shield in one hand and a forked branch lofted, spearlike, in the other."

Sounds great, right? Well, yea, if you're marketing to a different audience. And the audience he wanted wasn't going for it.

"I saw a lot of people, particularly women, just turn away from the cover," said Michael Pietsch, the publisher. Before long, "I realized we were making a mistake," he continued, adding, "We loved it and the author loved it, too, but it was not communicating the information we wanted about the book."

I was reminded of the perpetual chatter about why women aren't more involved in gaming and comic-book reading. It's often because, well, women aren't marketed to.

Now, in this instance, a Conan-like cover would have been great as far as marketing to *me*, but last night I was reading through another comic book (I've been interested in getting more involved with reading comics, since they tend to have some really neat ideas and visuals), when I started getting kinda turned off by it, and wondered why.

It was an interesting story with organic tech, bugs, things exploding, a strong female character and etc, all of which I really like. So what was the issue?

The female character had boobs nearly as big as her head, fell for the dorky guy for no apparent reason, and the other two female characters in the story answered to a dead guy who directed all of their movements.

But really, it was the boobs thing.

I mean, nobody has boobs that big and a waist that small unless the boobs are fake. Boobs are made up of fat, which is why fat women often have bigger boobs. I lose a cup size when I drop weight. That's how it is. OK, yea, everybody in comic books is stylized, and I accept this, and I appreciate that comic books have beautiful, impossible people in them (well, mostly beautiful women, though the men's forms are exaggerated to some degree as well, I wouldn't call most of them beautiful).

But OK, so, it's a comic, there's big boobs. What's the big deal?

I guess what kept gnawing at me is that I felt the female characters weren't there so much to be cool and heroic and advance the plot as they were there to have their boobs looked at. Watching the two evil powerful women turn out to be getting orders from a guy, and watching the one "good" woman cuddle up with the male freak for no apparent reason just bugged me. It became abundantly clear early on that the author and illustrater weren't talking to me at all. They were talking to adolescent boys who they hoped were really fascinated by big boobs.

I mean, how many lesbians are fascinated so much by big boobs that they buy comic books for the sheer titillation at seeing something so "monstrous"? (please, feel free to disagree with me here)

I sometimes feel that women in a lot of comic books are just rolled up into bed with the rest of the "monsters" in the cast. This isn't always the case, and I know there's good stuff out there, but in general, I just don't see this stuff talking to me.

It's something the gamers at Utopian Hell bitch about as well: games that just don't talk to women at all, that just don't include them. It's why you'll see more women players with stuff like the Myst and Riven games (which I love) and less on the ones where we aren't treated like people but just like some of the other monsters. I can certainly run around as a guy, but if every female I run into during game play is a fiesty vixen who tries to seduce me or a dumb blond, I'd still get pretty insulted, and bored. Bored is probably the best way to describe it. It's like, "Can't you come up with some interesting characters? Do they all have to respond the same way? You've got an entire fantasy world to work with, and you're using a bunch of gender stereotypes the whole way through? What gives?"

Don't get me wrong: men act as monsters too in the games, but I'd like some of the women to be real people as opposed to monstrous Others. I want to be a Cool, Kick-ass Chick. And, being a woman, I recognize that monstrous boobs would really get in the way of being really active and kickass, particularly if you were trying to do it on a tiny frame. And really, what's the tactical advantage of boobs? You can't take them off and hit anybody with them (now there's a gaming idea!). You can put armor on them and jut them at somebody, but if you get that close, they'll gut you. And not every villain you run into is gonna be straight, interested in your boobs, or so incredibly stupid as to be "charmed" by your "feminine wiles." Or, they shouldn't be.

Again: how boring.

It is, in fact, possible to write up female characters with sensible boobs, for goodness sake. It happens. They can even show some skin and still be sensible people (even if they're named after flowers).

I'd like to play cool characters, not characatures of people who have the same genitals I do.

As with any story, I want to read about people. I want to be able to identify with them, and I want to take them seriously. We live in a culture that infantalizes women with boobs as big as their heads and small waists because it's something that doesn't happen naturally, and we associate those sorts of body-transformations with women who aren't taken seriously, women who seek to play the part of object.

There's a duel fault there: the stereotype we carry for women who choose to get implants, and the stereotyping we perpetuate in the entertainment we create.

Who wants to be to dumb, bitchy monstrous woman who always gets hacked up in the end by the guy who gives her orders?

That's not fantasy. That's not escape. That's not entertainment.

It's too much like watching CNN.

Show me some alternatives. Let me be taken seriously. Let me be cool and smart and strong, and maybe it'll help me realize I can be cool and smart and strong in real life, too.

The Next One's Out in November

More head-rolling shall ensue, I'm sure.

(thanks, Eli!)

Good Morning, Chiklits

I am awake, sort of.

I am alive, sort of.

My morning routine just isn't working out anymore. New house rules involve making sure to wipe down all counters, clean out the drain in the morning, close the shower curtain, medicine cabinent, and toilet seat, and trying to do all of that and make breakfast too has me stressed for time and swearing and running into things in the morning.

So it looks like I either need to 1) get up ten minutes earlier or 2) switch from eggs back to protein shakes, which take 10 less minutes to prepare.

Protein shakes it is.

I've also been overspeading myself on food again anyway, and I need to cut back (buying too many books didn't help either). I've got to get into the habit of cooking for the week's lunches on Sunday instead of opting for the more expensive but far easier frozen lunches.

I seem to be really cramped for time, and I'm trying to find more of it. I've been getting to bed by 9pm instead of 10pm because I tend to function better throughout the rest of the week with that extra hour of sleep. Unfortunately, this means that I lose 5 hours every week of actual "doing stuff" time. The goal is to start parsing out my "work" time so it's more productive to writing and other pet projects of mine.

I need to spend this weekend getting stories back into the mail. I need to spend my commute time reading more books. I've been more stressed out this month than I thought I was. I realized just how stressed I'd been when I opted to spend the whole of last weekend playing mindless computer games, something I hadn't done in ages, and something I'm sure I'll repeat for a few more hours this weekend. I just want something I can focus on that doesn't involve thinking about my life and everything I'm not doing.

Home Again, Home Again

Cooking some dinner for roommates and guest, got in some good time at the gym, good books have arrived, need to prep for tomorrow and get some sleep.

Also, currently reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Quite fun.

Good Morning, Chiklits

Sorted things out this weekend. It was a pretty shotgun of a week, and I had roommate stuff and relationship stuff to work out. The house is stocked up with victuals once again, we've got a week-night cooking schedule worked out, and I'm feeling level-headed enough to get back to the gym (I only went once last week. The goal is 3-4 times a week).

Oddly enough, after beating myself up about weight issue the last few years and up-and-down binge cycles and sporadic exercise schedules and deprevation followed by binging, what everybody tells you really is true. Now that I'm actually eating 2200 calories a day and lifting heavier weights, I'm fitting way better into my clothes. Even after a crazy week like last week when I only went in once.

And the kicker is that I'm not even killing myself doing it. There's a huge belief that you've gotta feel like you're gonna die after a workout and not eat anything in order to see any kind of change, but you know, I'm not killing myself. I even cut my cardio from 40 to 30 minutes to get in a little more weights time, and I'm still fitting more and more easily into my clothes.

I like not killing myself at the gym. I enjoy it as some "downtime" for myself, particularly because I now have two roommates, so getting some space to myself is healthy for all invovled. It's nice.

So, to sum up: I'm still tired, feeling slightly brain-dead, but last week's stress shouldn't be repeated this week, all willing. I think that's sorted out.

Friday Beer Blogging

Sam Adams sucks. Negra Modelo is still the Best.

Linkdump from Jenn

My roomie was pretty productive yesterday, and sent me lots of links for amusement:

Curvy Butts Are Great. As someone who's got a pretty bony ass, I can tell you, I'd much prefer having some more cushioning down there.

Luckily, Comcast isn't our internet provider anymore.

And, Bitch Ph.D. already posted about this one, but it really is classic: Check out all the exciting career choices deemed desirable for young girls circa 1966.

Finally, last but CERTAINLY not least:

Three guys decided to go to New Orleans for a College football game. One of their fathers works for Roots Canada and gave them each a Canadian Winter Olympic jacket to wear. So with that said, they decided that when people ask them about the jacket they would tell them they represent Canada's Hide and Seek team. Well, they b.s.'d enough to get interviewed live during the game on ESPN.

View the clip.

There's a sucker born every minute. Proof that if you stand up and bullshit like you know what the fuck you're saying, you can make people believe anything.

Good Morning, Chiklits

I need some coffeeeeeeee.

I'm Surrounded By Idiots

Work tends to fuck me off a lot more when I'm tired and irritated.

I'm going to go do something useful and write. I've decided to take up meditating to control some of this anger and irritation and stress, cause it ain't going away anytime soon. In the meantime, here's some more Alaska-themed breathing space:

Yet Another Open Letter To Viagra Guy

Dear Viagra guy:

Shut the fuck up.

I do not want to talk to you.

In fact, after two days of up-and-down hysterical roommate antics, long hysterical conversations with the boyfriend last night, five more freaked-out e-mails from said boyfriend this morning, and an out-of-bed alarm at 5:30 in the morning, I really have NO FUCKING INTEREST in exchanging pleasantries with you or ANYONE ELSE after I've just stumbled, bleary-eyed and exhausted, into the office at 8 O'CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING.

So don't take my lack of "niceness" as a personal affront.

Before 10 am, I don't really like ANYONE.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Evil Psycho Bitch

P.S. DO NOT TALK TO ME YOU FUCKTARD!!!!

Writing Today

Because writing is healthy, and hot damn, this is turning out to be a great book.

For your workaday breathing space, I give you random pics of Alaskan abodes, which I've been thinking of ever since I wrote this post:

Too Bad, You're Fat!

I was at the gym yesterday and saw a guy there who was probably close to 400 lbs. Obviously, this doesn't happen often, or it wouldn't be cause for comment. He was diligently using the lat pulldown and a series of other pull-strength exercises. He used a balance ball to sit on because, well, the machine seats are too narrow and hard for *my* ass, and this guy's twice as big as me.

I thought how cool it was that he was there doing some weightlifting, and wondered why he wasn't doing some cardio, too. And then I took a good look around at the cardio machines. I looked at the narrow handrails on the treadmill and the elliptical and the uncomfortable seats on most of the bikes, and I realized he was likely going to steer clear of those and... oh, and most of the weight machines, too, with their assumptions of "average male" (which works for me, cause I'm about the size of the average guy, but if you're really small or really big, not so much).

We live in a world that gets pissed at fat people for being fat but won't put together exercise equipment for them and welcome them into their facilities. There are very few exercise programs for really overweight people, but rich, usually thin, people like to bitch and bitch about all that "gross, unhealthy fat," while not recognizing we're living in a culture that so stigmatizes the fat that some women haven't had the nerve to get in a swimsuit and swim in 20 years. How screwed up is that?

Anyhow, it was cool to see him there, making the routines work for him. It would be great to see more big people at the gym. Gym culture tends to breed a lot of people who look really alike, and it's nice to see some variety. In the real world, people are a lot more diverse.

In Good Company

It's good to know that other writers felt like this:

The teenage me was cast into deep, dark despair by this. On my seventeenth birthday I had a midlife crisis. There I was seventeen years old and still no novel published! I was a complete and utter failure! What was wrong with me?

Rest Assured...

Now go get the coffee.

(via Jennifer)

I'm Late, I'm Late

Still bumbling around the house here. B was up at 3am to catch a flight back to NY, so I slept in a bit (as much as I hate my job, you almost can't beat the flexibility).

I need some more coffee.

More later.