Writing Rewards

When, after 80,000 words, a new character (new to this book) finally starts to become a real person, and you realize you're very proud of how well she's grown up.

One For the Road

The Tudors

Showtime's version of Rome is... well... It has Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so it can't be all bad?

It's pretty, and there's politics, and, Jonathan Rhys Meyers? But holy hell, man, all the women in this story are sex bunnies used and abused by their respective male owners. You've got the Bolyn girls' father basically selling them out for sex to the King (there's a huge difference, I'm sorry to say, between a woman deciding to advance herself by seducing the king and a woman seducing the king cause her daddy tells her to).

I get that sex and women's bodies are historical commodities, but I just can't buy into a show that shows so many women as completely passive vessels. Where are the powerful matriarchs and scheming wives and willful daughters (Did Rome spoil me? And that's the sad thing, right, there were still way more male characters in Rome than female, but hot damn, the women charcters *didn't suck*)? One of the most dispicable lies in history is that women were just always passive slaves to men. That, historically, women had no power and no voice and contented themselves with their lot in life. If that was true, nobody would have burned witches, there would have been no laws against women owning property or having jobs, nobody would have considered wrapping up women's bodies or binding their feet or cutting off their clits.

You know why you make laws and powerful social mores that enslave a group of people? Cause they scare the living shit out of you. Because they have a lot of power. Because they are people too. And those people do what people do, and they often do it by whatever means necessary and whatever they have in their power.

Yes, women were confined by the restrictions of the times and societies they lived in, but you find ways to negotiate power and get want you want even with the worst of restrictions. You make it work. You play the game (a la Dangerous Liasons). There are always women with voices and women who get shit done. Not just the daily living stuff, but the deliberate work of kicking your husband's ass so he makes something of himself, getting your kids into worthwhile matches and positions, political backstabbing through gossip and rumor (and fashion!!), and whatever the hell else you have at your disposal. You use it because those are the only tools you have.

The tragedy of so much film and television and history books is pretending that these women never existed.

It makes me want to puke.

Stuff That Annoys Me

When people refer to Wikipedia as "Wiki."

This is Wiki. This is Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia is a Wiki, but it is not "the" Wiki.

More Creative Accounting

My water and trash bill is $18 less than I budgeted for! I can go bowling next weekend!

Being a grownup: not doing what you want to do when you want to do it, but when it makes financial sense to do it.

Fitting

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...

The Air Pirate

21% Elegant, 24% Technological, 20% Historical, 56% Adventurous and 57% Playful!

You are the Air Pirate, the embodiment of steampunk fantasy. Admittedly, you would probably be more comfortable in a pulp adventure or Eberron fantasy, but you are able to find your niche in the less serious side of the genre. You are probably somewhat light on your technological accessories, but the ones that you do carry have a roguish dash to them. Your clothes are most likely styled after those of Victorian aristocrats or loyal airship officers, the better to show off your wealth and the spoils of your raids. Chances are you prefer to be flashy and extravagant, and frock coats are perfect.

Try our other Steampunk test here.

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy

How to Sleep With a Writer

It's unavoidable, when you sleep with writers. Lovers, beware?

(Have I mentioned that Rhys's wife has ADD?)

July Budget

I think this is the first month since I started my new budget in January that I actually 1) didn't come in over budget 2) didn't put anything on my credit card 3) didn't go to Chipotle at least once a week (I only had two Chipotle receipts!)

Groceries

Budget: $350
Actual: $347.20
Creative accounting: I had $30 in gaming snacks I brought to our work LAN party and $5 in soda that I decided to count as "fun" money instead of grocery money in order to balance my books.


Fun Money

Budget: $150
Actual: $124.70
Creative accounting: I had $21 in pizza early in the month that should have gone here, but I budgeted $29 for internet that it turned out was already paid at installation, so I "saved" $29 and put this toward that. Like I said: creative accounting. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I also accomplished this by mistakenly believing I'd only budgeted $100 in fun money on this new budget, so I went the last two weeks of July thinking I'd blown it until I opened up my spreadsheet today and totaled up all my receipts. Go-go self-deception!


CC Payment

Budgeted: $750
Actual: $750
Creative accounting: None. This one hurt to pay. There's going to be a party when I pay this off. I better start saving for it now.

I did, in fact, "save" $100 this month. I have $100 every month budgeted towards meds. I'll end up using this month's meds money to get new contact lenses.

It's not glamorous, this life, but it's getting my shit together, one buck at a time (did you know a bottle of Coke zero costs $1.39???? $1.39, seriously. It's fucking criminal).

Note to Self

I drink too much diet Coke.

Things That Will Probably Suck But Let's Hope Not Anyway

Occlusion

The pod started beeping at me at 1:40am, which wasn't so bad because I was up anyway due to my 1:30 am sugar check and the fucking assholes downstairs with their yappy dog and loud college friends whose Friday and Saturday night parties seem to be carrying over into Sunday nights. This used to be such a quiet building before they moved in.

In any case, the pod and the meter started beeping, which usually means something bad, so I turned the meter back on and read, "Occlusion error, insulin delivery has stopped. Change pod now."

Oh, lovely.

Got up, deactivated it, filled up and activated a new one, and then couldn't get back to sleep for another hour because of said wild neighbors downstairs. Is it really necessary to slam every door in your apartment at 3am?

Honestly, I was far more annoyed at my asshole neighbors and their party-til-4am bullsit than a 2am pod change.

A Gallon of Gas is still Cheaper than a Gallon of Airline Water

Airline travel has been degenerating steeply since 9/11. It's not getting any better.

At least they still think that drinking from the bathroom tap is "just not classy."

I mean, they have *some* standards!

I'm not looking forward to my next plane trip, on any airline.

Sunday

Went over to Steph and the Old Man's today to help them put together the last of their shelves down in the basement. Learned how to properly use a power drill. They've been remodeling their bathroom all week, and using my shower while theirs is out of commission. Their bathroom looks like a real Oakwood bathroom now! Not a pink-tiled monstrosity from the 1940s! It's a miracle. Like Steph said, it looks like something out of a Pottery Barn catalogue.

It's been fun to help them out with the occasional thing around the house, whether it's building shelves or moving furniture or painting doors. It's a taste of what it'll look like if I decide to buy my own 1940s fixer-upper (tho I suspect mine would be in the 90-100K range and not the 120-130K range. Yes, I'm talking house prices. This is Ohio. House prices are the only advantage to living here).

I had some other things to say, but they popped right out of my head. Um.

So I guess I'm done.

One for the Road

Once Upon a Time...

August

The grass is brown, and the season puts me in the mood to look up, and up, always, for the first dead leaves of the season. Even though it's just August, it's the beginning of the end. Maybe I'm just reminded of Alaska, when the leaves were falling in mid-August, when the storms were coming in, when you got to watch it all go, swept away, in just a few short weeks.

Today I bought at least four kinds of cheese.

I laid out in the sun, I thought about August, Alaska, thought about who I used to be before I got sick. Kept wondering, god, who the hell am I now?

In some ways, I was worse then. I wasn't a nice person. Way worse than now. I'm not sure how much better I am now. But for me, back then, the summer was going to last forever. Things would just keep getting better. You blaze through on the way to somewhere. You keep going. The weather might change, but summer doesn't end.

Now I don't really know who I am, or what I do, really. Most of all, I don't know what I want, and that's what's been killing me.

Why Am I So Tired?

Went out and watched The Dark Knight again with a couple guys from work, and paid more attention to the gender dynamics that folks were mentioning. And yeah, it's true. It's so classicaly comic-bookey in the good way (good vs. evil, chaos vs. order, epic villian vs. epic hero, etc), and in the bad way. The one female character who's not a wife or girlfriend who gets blown up or introduced merely to act as revenge catalysts for the guys is Ramirez, and you know that part was written for a guy and they congratulated themselves for casting it the way they did.

It was still half an hour too long, and WTF is up with that *entire* Hong Kong sequence?

But anyway, by the end of it I realized I was incredibly tired, and it was only 8:30. This may be because I spent all day proofing our Ops Manual, then spent the next three hours sitting at a movie, and all that non-movement makes you pretty sluggish.

I've also been working at getting back into dating the last couple of weeks, and corresponding with bunches of folks, and I think that took some stuff out of me. Socializing can be hard work for me, even in the written form. Ever since the last breakup, I haven't been as self-confident when it comes to dealing with the dynamics of dating. Not that I was ever good at it, or socializing in general, and hence why I'll make huge efforts for a few weeks and then just... stop. To recover. Because it's just exhausting. It's why I don't have a lot of friends, either. Keeping social relationships together is really tough for me. I'm working at getting better at it, but it's a struggle.

When it comes to self confidence, I've been working hard to get that back, too, but it's slow going. Some of that, I know, is missing because I'm not getting any real writing done. I get all my energy from writing, and I've had nothing to show for it for several months but a bunch of company websites, an Ops Manual, and enough sales letters and corporate correspondence to cripple a horse. It concerns me. And it's not good for me.

In the end, what I mean to say is, it's just been a long week for some reason. A week that needs some sleeping here at the end of it. Some writing during it. And then I need to get back to the gym next week.

Need, need, need.

But for now, the sleeping.

And I Feel Fine

Science fiction will save us.

Notes to Myself

Is it a good or a bad sign that as I'm proofing our 300 page Ops Manual I'm thinking, "Well, at least this doesn't need to be SEO-optimized."

I've think I've officially become a corporate writer.

Avenge me....