And God's War Isn't "Marketable"...

... Then market it as "literary" spec fiction, yo.

The sight of 30 determined girls, many in headscarves, sparring and shadow-boxing, is extraordinary in Kabul. Women in burkas stalk the streets outside huddled against icy winds.

The teenage boxers, none of whom is older than 18, are part of a new generation which has grown up with only dim memories of Taleban rule and its stifling repression of women. They are ambitious, and can see nothing strange about women boxers.


Seriously, after writing the boxing stuff in God's War, this was kind of eerie to read.

Another Kind of Mod

Someday, I will be able to afford to put together my own gaming computer. And on that day, my friends, my modding skillz will finally be appreciated by pony aficionados and gamer geeks alike.

Lo, on that day...

Workah Workah

I've spent this week getting out of the last of my ennui. I've been trying to figure out what direction I want to push all of my energy into, and with the upshot my writing and career is sort of headed in right now, I decided to push all this extra energy into those directions.

Physically, I'm really healthy right now and feeling pretty fantastic. As said, I've got a lot of mental and physical energy, and no real firm place to put it. So.

With this strict budget of mine, and the one-year-for-a-car, two-years-for-a-house goals, I need to start putting more energy into getting to a place, careerwise, that I'd like to be. That is, finding ways to improve what I do, increase what I make, and certainly make more money freelancing (fiction and Other).

So I finally firmed up that decision this week. I have some ideas for work, and I've started putting together some corporate communication plans, building new projects for myself, and I'll do a couple meetings with some folks next week to talk about some corp marketing stuff and see where everyone is so I can figure out the best place to put myself.

The thing with working without any real supervisor is that I have to sort of anticipate what folks need and build it. If I want something bigger, I need to build it. I need to show I'm up to that. It's a fun place to cut my marketing and com teeth. I want to work toward that house. This is where I need to push this.

Even if I get cut after season, these are great skills I can transfer to other places. Showing what I can develop, build, and implement will look great on the old resume.

There's a huge shift I need to take, personally, to really move all my energies over there. I'm still sort of all over the board. But I did finally make the decision this week about what I feel is the most important thing right now, the best place to put displaced energy.

So making that decision, tough as it is, felt good, at least.

I'm in a good place.

I know where my heart is.

Thoughts

Should I sign up my pony mods for the Wiscon art show?

I'm wondering if people would actually pay for any of these, you think? I don't want to take up space that'd be better suited to more talented artists. It's a tough room.

Been thinking about it.

Sugar Sugar

I always forget that meatloaf is not, in fact, made entirely of meat.

Blast.

I Like You!

A Glimpse Inside the Head of a Schizophrenic

A taste of what it's like inside the head of a schizophrenic (Travis, don't watch this one. Seriously).

One For the Road

Temporary Insanity

Just crazy.

It's in the Walk

One of the details I put into GW was a nod to the fact that Rhys, my magician, was good at reading people. He knew a bel dame (a bounty hunter/draft dodger police type of person) just by looking at them.

Trouble with this "detail" was, I used that whole "Well, he just KNEW" language. Which looks like (and, let's face it, IS) a handwave. It bugged me again with this scene in Black Desert where he does a deal with three women he pegs as being authentic bel dames. "He just KNEW."

But what did he know? How did he know? Well, something about they way they stood, the way they walked, something, something....

And now I have a better idea on how to properly detail that something.

Check out this great writerly guide to police body language.

Sugar Blues

I've been really depressed the last couple of afternoons. Yesterday, I chalked this up as just overall blues, though I remember thinking it was incredibly strange that my sugar number after working out for over an hour was at 219. Where had that number come from? It meant I'd been riding a lot higher than that before exercise, but my pre-lunch number had been normal.

I'd been having some trouble with my insulin pen. I'd dial in a test unit and depress the plunger in the open air to make sure the syringe was clear (I usually do this before each dose now to make sure there's no blockage. I've had too many underdosage issues because of this), and not having any insulin come out after one, two, five dials. Once I had to dial in ten units of insulin and spray it out just to get it clear. I changed out my needles a couple of times, thinking somehow the insulin had gotten gummed up or something (anything's possible).

Today, growling through my "I want to poke out my eyes with spoons" and "maybe I should just kill myself" depression-induced litany, I went to Chipotle to use my birthday gift certificate and tested, once again, at 219.

Even without working out (depression has a habit of stealing motivation, which is why diabetics probably have to have their sugar under control before starting any kind of new routine or mental enterprise, which is sort of a catch 22, cause working out also helps your sugar, but depression caused by ass-unhappy sugar saps your energy in a big way), I should have only been at about 150, 170 tops.

So I dialed in my 6 unit bolus and plugged it in, and when I depressed the end of the pen, it just felt... weird. I wasn't getting any resistance, the way you'd get when you're injecting, you know, fluid into fat.

Then I went to dial in the 10 units of basal for the 219 number... and that's when I took a good look at the clear tubing of the pen plunger mechanism.

There's a screw-like piece of plastic that should be flush against the plunger that depresses it evenly when you dial it in. But in this pen, the plastic plunger had somehow gotten skewed at a nearly 90 degree angle, so when I depressed the plunger, I was getting a very low pressure "squirt" response from the insulin in the pen.



Meaning I wasn't getting even close to my full dose of insulin.

Dammit, man.

I came home and threw out the old pen and started up a new one. Easy fix, you know, but... I hate, hate HATE sugar-induced depression (granted, it wouldn't have been as bad if I wasn't low already, but I can do a better job fighting it off when I can think clearly).

Spending my afternoons wanted to tear people's heads off and claw out my eyes and weeping into my cornflakes just fucking kills me. It took a lot of effort to bleed through that last night, and now I get to set my 1am sugar-testing alarm, because I have no idea how much of that dinner insulin actually got injected into my system (I just tested at 298. I should be closer to 180 2 hours after dinner. Took a four unit correction, will test again at 1am).

It's shit like this that makes diabetes annoying. I'm really fucking thankful that I have some degree of control over my moods and of how hard this thing hits me, but leveling out, staying there, living the best you can with this fucking disorder, is a lot of hard fucking work.

Too many spoons. Too much mental energy, some days. Not just to keep it in my head, but to keep my head actually processing things optimally.

Keep on truckin'.

More Reasons to Hate Math

Because when you follow the rules, it actually works.

Sat down with what I had in the bank, what I'm getting paid Friday, and wrote out the next round of bills.

I had exactly $210 leftover for groceries for the next two weeks. About $30 more than is in the budget for said groceries. Until I realized I could take the Feb. rent payment out of my Feb 1st check, I thought I had completely hosed up my budget completely, and here I was, already in the hole again! I wouldn't be able to make the $900 a month in credit card payments that I need in order to be solvent in two years!

I was already failing!

Oh, wait.

Ah, yes, math. Hrm.

Math.

Never my strong suit.

But then, I'm not good at plot either, and it doesn't mean I just gave up and went, "Well, I can't write plot!"

I started working my ass off to learn how to plot.

Money is no different.

That's the idea, anyway.

Today's Fitness Regimen

Morning: 15 min free weights and 10 pushups

Afternoon (with health & wellness group & trainer at work): 30 min cardo & upper body weights work (machines and dumbbells)

Evening: 20 minutes cardio (I was depressed when I came home - it's a good way to lift mood) and 10 pushups.

For tonight: French, copywriting work, UT2K4

Tra-la

The StumbleUpon KISS OF DEATH

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

One of Those Days...

...when you feel like you're absolutely worth nothing, and what little worth you have must be measured in the width of your ass.

You know what the tragedy is? I like the way I look. I really do. I think I'm strong and attractive and have moments of incredible sexiness. I think I'm smart and funny and fun and I love making people laugh. During the health and wellness session at work today, I thought about how bizarre it was that I can lift more weight and have better endurance than a lot of other women of any age. I like being fit and strong and powerful; I like being big and intimidating. I like being able to hit things and have them fall over. I like being tough.

And it's frustrating, you know, to realize that that freaks some people out. It's not even that it doesn't do it for them, it's just that they feel like it shouldn't, so they freak out, and I go on being tough and kicking ass and they run off looking for salvation and companionship in a more socially acceptable package. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind. It's just sort of dumb. It doesn't make sense unless you're looking to live the life you think other people think you want. And I turned off that road ten years ago. That was a miserable fucking road.

The issue now is that I've gotten used to a bed partner and an extra toothbrush, and it was a silly, silly thing for me to get used to. I need to be smarter than that. Silly pirate.

Getting my own place next year will help a little more with that. Being smart in other areas of my life will help me be smarter in my personal life.

I need to remember that the only person who decides my worth is me.

I threw out the toothbrush.

It was a sorry waste of a toothbrush.

Writing for SEO

Mmmmmm copywriting to improve SEO. Tasty tasty skills building.

Challenging and annoying all at once!

Stuff that Creeps Me Out

Does it really bug anybody else when men refer to women as "females"?

Why do guys do this? I'd like to think it's because they're including "women and girls" in their description, so "females" is supposed to mean "all female-gendered persons in particular," but I don't go around saying, "I haven't been with many males," or "Some males really like back rubs" or "Males enjoy gardening."

It makes it sound like the men - "males" - in question are just dogs.

Recommended Reading

The Copywriter's Handbook, by Robert Bly.

As noted, I write just about everything at my job, from intranet news to forum Q&A to magazine blurbs to policy documents to press releases. And this book shows you how to write, well, just about everything.

So it's a good fit.

I love the versatility of this little book. What it's helped me with a lot, in particular, is writing marketing and ad copy. I took a crash-course in script writing when I wrote up copy for some training videos (and realized there's a reason you keep your sentences so short in script writing). The marketing and ad work has been largely crash-course, too.

This book at least lets me understand what all the gauges me. And mayb softens the landing.

I'd been writing brochures and proposals at work already, but there's some great advice in here. I think a lot of my writing is intuitive - I can fake average writing because I have a decent ear for it, so you throw something at me and I produce something workable. But if I want to be any *good* at all the stuff I'm doing, that takes some more work on my part. Give me tens years of a job like this one, and I'll be able to write this stuff like breathing. As it is, I sit and think a lot about what I'm doing, what I'm trying to say, who I'm saying it to, and looking at how other people are saying it. I've done research on our competitors and watched how they sell themselves and their brand(s).

I don't know why it didn't occur to me before to do industry research (come on, Good Job 101). I think I've been so hopped up with worry about whether or not I'll have a job after season that I'm not sure how comfortable I should get. It's a lot of work to do for a job that's fly-by-night.

But then, everything is a risk. You put time into things you believe in. If they don't pan out, it's easy to say all that time was wasted. I sure as hell know it FEELS wasted when you get shitcanned... but I guess everything I learn now is stuff I can put toward the next thing and the next.

Because of the health insurance issue, it's not like I still harbor this realistic fantasy that I'll make it as a freelance writer in the future. To some extent, having a chronic illness sort of forced me to pay more attention to having an actual career instead of gambling it all on being the next JK Rowling.

Not that I wouldn't mind making some ridiculous amount of book money, mind (and not that that isn't my ultimate goal. Mmmm money!). I just realize that I'll need to be working for the vast majority of my life even if I do make vast amounts of book money.

I suppose that's good for me.

Builds character.

Makes me a more well-rounded individual.

Um.

Ah well.

Some Thoughts on Internet Dating

Really, if I want to meet anybody worth my while, I need to get a car. The great thing about being smack right between Cincinnati and Columbus is that civilization is, indeed, just there over the horizon. The drawback is, you don't live there.

All the good ones are an hour away, dammit.

Well, there's a spring project for me.

Until then: way behind on Black Desert.

I do need to keep my priorities straight.

More Sugar-Busting Tips

20 minutes on the elliptical on weekend mornings, after pancakes. Pancakes have been killing my sugar more than usual lately, but 20 easy-going minutes while channel surfing on Sat and Sunday was enough to keep me nice and stable (70-80) from noon to seven.

Yum.