Deserted Island

Once again, iTool has devoured my playlists, ratings and other information from my vast music library. I dunno, the program might just not be geared to supporting the amount of music I own, some 23.000 songs (that's an update... I've been saying 22,000+ for a while now, but it just crossed over a few days ago when I bought a bunch of music...)

Because of this, I've started using Spotify in angry protest... tired of iToons... but it also means I've been listening to my entire library on random. I don't do this particularly often. Twenty three thousand songs would take over 2 months to go through if I did nothing but listened to music all day long. And I do sleep, watch TV, play video games, etc.

But random's cool. I've been remembering a lot of music that I'd sort of forgotten about, or hadn't heard in quite a long time.



Like this; it's a song about someone who was cat-sitting their friend's pet, which then escaped. (Not to worry, in stuff on the band's web page, the cat was found...)




Or this one... yeah... I sort of think of this song as being ode to an introvert...



I'm not very good at "favorite" games. I'm the girl who describes at least six people as being "my best friend." I don't like to pick one thing; I want this and that and the other and all that over there, too, while I'm at it. Favorite food? Cheese (mostly any sort, except American, which is just gross.), steak, escargot with butter and garlic, spinach dip, asparagus and cream cheese omelets, chocolate mint ice cream, sixlets, licorice, fresh tomato slices with just a bit of sea salt, salted caramel, coffee... really, can I stop now? I'm making myself hungry.

And I've also never been really good at the "if you were on a deserted island, what 5 books would you take with you?" Seriously? Most of the books I love come in series; the Liaden series, which I adore, is over 16 books just by itself! (and yes, I probably could read the whole series back to back for a while...) I mean, have y'all seen my bookshelves? If I still own the book, it means I've read it more than once. In fact, there are several sets of books I make it a habit to read once every few years (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Tenant of Wildefell Hall, the Liaden Universe, Uplift Saga, the Crystal Singer series, Dresden Files, the Vlad Taltos series, Watership Down, Rose of the Prohpet... )

Movies? Hunt for Red October, Mulan, Star Wars (yes, even episode 1. Fuck you. I don't care what you think.) the Duelists, Das Boot, Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name series, Hudson Hawk, Shaun of the Dead, the BBC Pride and Prejudice (the good one, not the craptastic Keirra Knightly version) the Mummy, xXx (yes. hush.), Lord of the Rings (elves! At helmsdeep. Oh, shut UP!) Fantasia, Shoot 'em Up (yes.), American Beauty... crap, now I want to go downstairs and watch tv all day...

But I thought, maybe - MAYBE, mind you - I could come up with 100 songs that I'd want to listen to for the rest of my life.

(Deserted island bullshit aside; seriously, if I can power a cd player, why the fuck can't I get off an island?)

I asked my husband what he thought and he said, "Oh, one song to listen to for the rest of my life? That's easy. 4:33."




Jerk.

If I'm going to talk about my "favorite" music, I can't not mention David Ford. Which is probably going to take a lot of (asides.) Sorry.

Aside #1: A few years back, the husband took me to the ballet for my birthday. I love the ballet. One of my best friends in high school was a dancer - my mom and I used to go watch her perform the nutcracker - and I always just loved it. She died on graduation night; she hadn't even been drinking, she just fell asleep at the wheel and went over the side of a bridge. Anyway, the husband took me to see Romeo and Juliet.

"On July 4, 2008, with the approval of the Prokofiev family and permission from the Russian State Archive, the original Prokofiev score was given its world premiere. Musicologist Simon Morrison, author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years, unearthed the original materials in the Moscow archives, obtained permissions, and reconstructed the entire score. Mark Morris created the choreography for the production. The Mark Morris Dance Group premiered the work at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in New York state. The production subsequently began a year-long tour to include Berkeley, Norfolk, London, New York, and Chicago." -- wikipedia article

Aside #2 Now, keep in mind that I'm a russo-phile (Russian artwork, music, literature, hell, I even minored in Russian Studies, a subject that might have done me more professional good if I'd bothered to learn to SPEAK RUSSIAN instead of Chinese... don't look at me like that, the line was shorter...) and this was just one of the most perfect birthday presents ever.

So, the Norfolk center for the arts starts sending me stuff about upcoming shows. Including what I thought was a really clever marketing idea; a CD with one song from each of the upcoming performers for that season.

Concert tickets are pretty expensive, however, so we don't usually bother to go. I ripped the CD and promptly forgot about it. I don't even know that I listened to it that day.

Several months later, I load my phone up with a random playlist - grabbed about 200 songs - and went to the laundromat. I've got my laptop out and I'm plugging away at my latest story when this song comes on:




The volume is cranked on my headphones, I'm trying desperately to ignore the other people doing their wash, and this music just crashes over me like a crescendo of words and music and emotions. Holy shit. I stopped what I was doing, closed my eyes, and had a fucking religious experience, right there in the laundromat.

Seriously. Listen to it again. Turn the music up as loud as you can until you can't hear anything else. Close your eyes. Just feel it.

Wow.

You'll see opinion dressed as fact

See definitions inexact

And explain away the darkest days

As misinterpretation

The dumbing down, it's so uncouth

Like there's one single fucking truth

I couldn't bear that right and wrong

Could be so uncomplicated.

Yes, I could listen to this song, this one song, every day for the rest of my life.

But I'd rather have some variety; so he's a random sampling of songs from my (as yet incomplete, but I have 46 songs on the list so far) Top 100

Black Velvet - Alannah Myles
Mohammed's Radio - Warren Zevon
She Said She was a Dancer - Jethro Tull
Ordinary World - Duran Duran
Birdhouse in your Soul - They Might Be Giants
Landslide - Fleetwood Mac
Non Je Ne Regrette Rein - Edith Pilaf
Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum
Alexandra Leaving - Leonard Cohen
The Speed of Pain - Marilyn Manson

In My Head (The devil made me do it)

So, I'm talking to a friend of mine last night; he's going through some tough times, and probably the worst of it is, someone he cares about has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So, he's coming to me for advice and a wall to wail against because I know a lot about bipolar disorder.

He asks me if bipolar can explain this, or that.

It's an excuse. It's like saying "The Devil Made me Do it." Yes, your brain is broken, but that doesn't mean you get to get out of the consequences of the stupid fucking decisions you made.

You drink, you get in the car, you drive over someone's daughter in the street. You'd have never done that when you were sober, but that doesn't change a damn thing. Someone's still dead and you are still a pathetic excuse of a human being.

I don't know about that. A lot of the time, these sorts of things go on almost entirely in our heads. I mean, how often do you look at me and think "She's practicing the speech she's going to give to her father when he finds out his only grandchild has smothered to death in her sleep." You'd be astonished how often what I'm thinking has nothing AT ALL to do with what's going on in the room. I've planned my own suicide more times than I could count. I know exactly how to spend the money if the husband should die and I get his life insurance policy. Almost every second of every day, I'm living my real life out here, and in my head there's at least 4 different other things going on; I'm almost always plotting or planning a novel/story/character/scene. I'm worrying about some long term problem (right now it's getting through Christmas dinner with my parents), visualizing everything that could possibly go wrong in that moment - falling down the stairs, rogue asteroid landing in the living room, being run over by a car, the house catching on fire... every single time I come home I have a brief moment of relief when I discover the house has NOT burned down - AND trying to pay attention to whatever the FUCK everyone is talking about at the moment.

Every minute of my life is like that. EVERY. Minute.

And that doesn't even include the depression that gets so bad I can't breathe, can't see an end in sight to any of the pain that I'm in, and I loathe myself with the kind of religious fervor that people reserve especially for the enemies of God.

Or the days when I can't sit still, I have to clean clean clean everything and nothing will ever be good enough, but if I sit down for more than two minutes, I'm listening to an internal monologue about what a bad housekeeper I am, and a bad mother, and did I really ever think I should be writing at all?

These are my elephants, and they're all in the room, and boy-howdy do they get in the way.

But at the same time, if I pay any attention to the shit going on in my head, they start trampling around.

Talking about this... doesn't make it easier. It makes it harder for me to build my life in the corners around the elephants.

My elephants are smaller than they used to be. I still hate myself, pretty much constantly. I've accepted that I don't see myself the way other people do, and I still try most of the time to act like I want to feel. It's an act, but it's generally a pretty damn good one. Sometimes I even fool myself. But I don't hate my life. And most of the time, I keep it under control.

But it was a long time coming. And I've known about my elephants for over 20 years now (back when they called it Manic-Depression, which I personally hate, because manic does not mean HAPPY, ok. Thank you.) and learned to deal with them. And my husband has learned to deal with them, and how to help me.

My friend, for the first time, has just realized there's an elephant in his life.


Ok, enough of the depressing shit. Go listen to my favorite song, and then go check out today's Smutty Advent Calendar!! Yay!

Wind in the Turret

I've gotten prizes off to my contest winners - don't forget, it's not too late to ask me for a Jonah Knight CD. I still have about 10 of them left, so leave a comment with your email (me at thismail dot com) and I'll get your shipping details to you.

I'm up in my office this morning, listening to the wind sighing through the trees. It's been unseasonably warm recently (I have three words to say about this: Global Warming Conspiracy! Because, you know, that's what scientists do... they make up shit for political reasons....) and I've got the balcony door open. After living right next to the interstate (and the fire station) it's strangely quiet over here.

Full Frontal Neighbor (the first time I saw him, he was stark naked. Of course he was walking around in his own house, and it's probably not like he knows that from a certain angle of my living room, I can see straight into his kitchen... I haven't told him. It's a nice view.) is on his porch right now, smoking a cigarette. I can smell just the faintest tang of tobacco and hear him talking to his cat.

The trees bend and sway in the wind - I think there's a good deal of warm air that comes off the nearby river - and the oaks make a strange groaning noise as they move around. I've never lived so close to trees in my life. Everyplace else that I've lived has been a collection of little box apartments with a few bushes around for aesthetic purposes, but only one or two trees.

This worries me, a bit. We get a lot of storms here, and the trees are really close. Our balcony and porch have been constantly three inches deep in leaves, despite several foliage removals. I worry that a strong will come through and we'll have an oak through the roof. Or my big picture window in the living room will get smashed. During the fall, we spent several weeks being pelted with acorns. My best friend, the librarian, looked it up. The variety of oak in our back yard has the biggest acorns in the world. It was like being under a driving range. Constantly.

Sometimes, alone in the turret, the wind swirling around the office, the sound of trees and the faintest rumble of neighbors moving around, getting their days started, I have a sip of coffee and I feel like a real writer.

How amazing.




Don't forget to drop by the Smutty Advent Calendar and see what interesting prizes they have for you today!

A Whole Week

So, I've managed to blog every day for an entire week! Wow.

Reminder; go check out today's prize on the Smutty Advent Calendar. Natasha Blackthorn has some stuff for you, including a free e-story just for participating.

And further reminder: Tomorrow is my turn! There will be a free prize to everyone who participates, and some give-aways for a random winner. Or two. I think two. I should check my email to make sure I'm doing what I said I was going to do...


I wish I had a picture of my great-grandmother. I mean, I have one wallet-sized pic of most of the family, but Mimi is tiny in that picture. Also, it's not a computer file, just a regular picture, and I don't have a scanner anymore. Maybe I'm glad I can't scan in that picture. You'd get to see me in all my sulky, over-done eyeliner and lipstick, 13 year old glory. And I do so totally not look like I want to be there. Emo, before emo was the thing.

But that's not really what I want to talk about. Mimi was my mother's mother's mother. Her full name after marriage was Nell Ardel Longwell Hall. Or, as a friend of hers called her, Nelly Ardelly Longwelly Hallelly. We called her Mimi. At the time of her death, she had 2 children (my grandmother and my grandmother's sister, my Aunt Kit), 5 grandchildren (my mom, her two sisters, and Kit's two sons)  8 great-grandchildren (me, my 5 blood-relative cousins and 2 adopted cousins) and 1 great-grandchild (my oldest male cousin's daughter).

That same summer that my sulky picture was taken by a professional photographer, Mimi started to lose her sight. She could see around the edges, but she had cataracts in both eyes and she could no longer read or watch television. She was a bit sly; if she didn't know you were watching her, she could make her own coffee, get her own breakfast, but if she happened to see you, she'd badger you into doing it for her.

I didn't mind. I thought it was kinda cute, actually. She always looked so mischievous, like she was getting away with something. Mimi's been gone a long time now, and I still remember how she liked her coffee. I made it for her often enough that year.

Because she couldn't read, we got into this habit, that last summer. I checked out books from the local library, and got some of the old radio plays on cassette tape. Sometimes we'd listen to broadcasts - several seasons of the original Shadow radio plays. And sometimes I'd read to her.

We would sit on the back porch at my grandparent's lake home, which was screened in against the mosquitoes, and faced west. The sun would set over the lake, and we sat in canvas deck chairs, and I read Wuthering Heights to her. It was the first time I'd read it.

I remember getting to the "I am Heathcliff" speech from Chapter nine.

"I think that's the worst motive you've given yet for being the wife of young Linton."

"It is not," retorted she; "it is the best! The others were the satisfaction of my whims: and for Edgar's sake, too, to satisfy him. This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable; and—"

I love this piece. I tear up every single time I read it, and sometimes even when I think of it. It's those things that make me want to write, make me want to feel, make me want to be. If I believed, truly believed, that I could affect even one person as much as this paragraph affected and continues to affect me... well, that would make everything worthwhile.

In my head, I'm thirteen again and I have no idea what love really is. I won't know it until I've lived at least as long as I already have. But on some other level, I understand what Cathy is saying. Tears are streaming down my cheeks and Mimi's hand is hard on my shoulder. Her grip is surprisingly strong, given her age. I steal a glance at her out of the corner of my eye. Her milky eyes, mostly blind, are looking directly into the setting sun. But she's no more seeing it than I am. She's far away, in England, or the landscape of her own youth. I rest my hand against hers, feel the parchment texture of her skin along her fingers.

I keep reading.

I've been reading ever since.

Ten Inch Plushie Dick and the Muse

First off, it's the 6th day of the Smutty Advent Calendar. M. A. Stacie is giving away a bag of Starbucks coffee.

Today I want to talk about the crap on my desk.

This is my 10-inch plushie Dick. He's probably not what people have in mind when I say I have a plushie Dick, but hey... I like being able to make the joke.

I have a lot of cute, weird, or just touchable stuff on my desk. My Jane Austen action figure, my tacky octopus Christmas tree ornament, my three dancing mushrooms...

Now, admittedly my desk is the repository for a lot of crap, but the actually decorative stuff... a lot of thought goes into that stuff. I want to feel both relaxed and inspired in my work-space.

I've always loved the dancing mushrooms... and a few years ago, my mom finally found these figures for me. (If I was a major tattoo person, I'd probably get these guys on my lower back. As it is, I'm still trying to talk myself into getting an octopus on my leg.)

I have stuff from Star Wars (2 lego copies of Slave 1 because in the whole show, no one is more badass than Boba Fett.) and a teddy bear made from an old mink coat and a totoro (with his arm in a "cast". He was a get-well present from a friend when I broke my leg in 5 places) and a geode, and some tiny pirate ships from a defunct card-game.

Every single one of these things has associations for me. Everything I keep has a story behind it. 

And nothing has more meaning to me than this:

This is my muse.

He lives on my desk, no matter where that desk is, no matter where my home is. No matter what. If I'm going to go somewhere else and do some writing, he goes in my bag. (The cage was initially to keep my cat from eating him, back in the day, and as his little sticky feet aren't sticky anymore, and haven't been for decades, this is a good way to make sure I don't lose him. 

I started writing stories when I was in fifth grade. In 7th grade, my parents bought me a word-processor for some holiday or other. Keep in mind, this was the 80's. This was a tiny little thing, grey, with a two-line "saved" window. You could actually go back and edit up to two lines of text before it would print those lines out. It used a sort of punch-out tape to stick letters to paper (and if I wasn't careful, you could peel those letters right off the paper) and had a very, VERY basic spell-checker. I typed out about two dozen short stories and one completely terrible, derivative horror novel.

Muse was a birthday present from the girl up the street. Yes, she gave me a homemade fuzzy ball with feet and eyeballs as a present. She had a ton of the things stuck to her ceiling in her bedroom, and I used to like to lay on her bed and stare at them.

I stuck him to the top of the word-processor and he watched me typing up stories for most of high school before my WP died a smoking, fiery death. (When the magic smoke comes out of the machine, it stops working!) I cried. 

And then I carefully peeled Muse off the smoldering machine and stuck him on my desk. My cat promptly jumped onto the desk and batted him onto the floor and under my bed. I recovered my Muse, stuffed him in the little cage (which is actually a leftover cat toy and probably wasn't the best idea I've ever had) and tied the whole kit and kaboodle to my desk lamp, so it hung down directly over my work space. 

And there he's been. Since I was 13 years old. He's lasted through seven computers, two marriages, five cats, three rats, two lizards, a turtle, probably ten hamsters, dozens of boyfriends, three girlfriends, tons of novels, short stories, really bad poetry and a few disastrous attempts on my part to write song lyrics.  

Interviewie Thingie

I meant to have this out earlier, but I woke up ill today. Or, more specifically, I went to bed sick last night and I'm still sick. Blech.

But I did this yesterday.

I am still completely weirded out by what my voice sounds like. It sounds completely different in my head.

I answer a bunch of questions, pitch a good dozen or so writers, talk about coffee and the process as writing... lots of fun stuff.

And you get to see the husband in the background there. (He was sort of grumbly about that...)

Also, don't forget to stop by the Smutty Advent Calendar. Sommer Marsden, who is mentioned in the interview, is giving away freeeeeeee stuff today!

Update: The video has been changed slightly to add in my author pic and book covers. None of the actual audio content is new, so if you watched this yesterday, great!

Something New

A few months back, I saw this Call for Submissions. (as a note, I hear that Sommer may be extending the deadline - oooh, punny! - a bit. If you're interested, keep an eye on the call and if she doesn't make her word count for the collection...) and then I saw this...

And I had a wonderful idea for a story. If you've read much of my work, you'll know I have a bit of a location fetish. This probably has to do with the fact that I rarely leave the house. So, my couples have a tendency to get it on in airships, on catwalks, on firetrucks, under bridges, in cars... so, wouldn't it be fun to have sex on a boat?

The story pretty much wrote itself at that point.

Except that it had to have zombies in it, right? Which means if my heroine isn't one of those wimpy sorts who has to be saved all the time, she needs to be able to use a firearm.

And for reasons I don't really want to get into, I hate guns. It's a long-standing prejudice left over from a traumatic event. And then I read this story line (particularly, this strip) from Something Positive. (as a note, the artist was doing something weird when this story got posted, and it's not in order... sorry about that... but you should be reading Something Positive anyway...)

Maybe it was time for me to examine my fears. (Back in college, when we had to do that trust issue thing - you know, falling backward off the bleachers and letting your classmates catch you? Ug. I was sobbing before I could do that. No, I don't trust you not to drop me. Asshole. In retrospect, I probably just should have failed the class.)

I have a few friends that are gun-bunnies, so I sent my friend a text, "Think you could teach me to shoot?"

Needless to say, she was extremely enthused. She also has an impressive collection of guns. (Weird fact*: While only about 45% of the population owns a gun, most gun owners have between three and nine guns... which is to say there are enough guns in the US for every man, woman, and child to have at least two.) But I can believe that. Brenda brought four guns with her, and I know she has more than that.

We discussed logistics and set a date; Tuesday afternoon. She picked a range over in our area because her range closes at 6pm on weekdays. I suppose we could have gone out on the weekend, but I think doing it on a weekday was better. Fewer people.

She sent me the info on the range - I had to read some safety rules in preparation to get a range card. I think this is a grand idea. I personally don't want to be shot by accident while at the range. My husband says the rules all pretty much boil down to "Don't be a douche canoe." Keep firearms with the action clear when not in use. Point all firearms downrange at all times; loaded or otherwise. Fire only at your own target, not at the floor, ceiling, or someone else's target. Sweep up your brass. Use eye and ear protection at all times. No eating, drinking, smoking, spitting, or taking pictures. (Shit. I love being able to document things...)

I had to ask for clarification on a number of these things, since I had no idea what they meant. There were a lot of other rules for specific types of weapons - rifles, automatics, etc. I hoped the "test" wouldn't include any of this, because there was no way in hell I was going to remember anything.

When we got there, it was relatively uncrowded. I could hear gunfire, even outside. On the occasion when it wasn't drowned out by jet noise from Oceana, that is. So, Brenda arrives with her duffle bag of guns... We go in and she tells us another gentleman will probably be joining us. My husband knows Brent from work - neither Brenda nor Brent work for my husband's employer any longer, but they used to.... anyway....

So, interesting fact. At gun range considers any women with men to be "escorted" and therefore we get free use of the range. (It's $15 per person for men, or women arriving alone...) Ladies night at the gun club, how adorable.

They had a variety of paper targets for sale - the standard round bullseye, a variety of Humanoid ones, and some interesting themed ones, like this:

I entertained myself with the idea of buying a zombie target; after all, this whole firing a handgun is supposed to be about research, right? and then decided I wasn't comfortable yet with the idea of shooting a humanoid target.

So, we head into the range; booth 2, lane 12. I was still messing with my ear protectors when we entered the booth so I got an earful of what a firearm actually sounds like. Ow. LOUD. Take everything you think you know about how loud a firearm is supposed to be +more NOISE. Wow. Trust me, I got my ear protectors on quickly.

Brenda unloaded her bag and placed four handguns on the counter. We loaded magazines and she told me about the different guns. This button pushes the slide in place. This unloads the magazine. This is the thumb safety. Line these three green dots up and then squeeze the trigger. Remember to breathe. Don't think about it too much.

I watched her fire several shots and then she laid the gun down on the counter for me.

I took up the gun, got my feet settled, lined up the sites. And fired. (Unseen by me, Brenda was apparently behind me for the first shot with her hands out, in case I wasn't braced well enough. I'd been expecting a lot of recoil. In movies, if they're not completely ignoring recoil, they show some dippy girl firing a gun and going flailing backward into a pile of books or something. So I had my feet spread and was braced for it... but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. And no, I didn't stagger backward.)

I fired off four shots, dislodged the magazine and stepped back. The husband took a turn (after a refresher explanation - he used to shoot a lot with a friend of his back before we were married, but the friend and I didn't get along because of my feelings about firearms, and the husband hasn't been shooting since we started dating.) and then Brent took a turn.

That first target came back full of holes; we'd all made a run at it. So we labeled the next one, I fired another 8 rounds into this target. The husband took a turn with the .40 caliber. Then Brent, then Brenda. And then we moved to a smaller gun; the one Brenda carries, the .330. I liked that one a little better; the trigger was a little harder to pull, but it seemed easier for me to get the shot lined up.

I didn't put a single shot "in the black", but I did hit the paper every time I fired, so for a beginner, that's pretty good.

I discovered something I'd heard before, but never experienced. Shell casings - called "brass" - are hot. They eject out of the gun forcefully, usually bounced off the wall and hit the floor, but from time to time, one of them would hit me, or the other people in my party. I got one down the front of my shirt and stuck in my bra - something Brenda found hilarious because it happens to her all the time. The husband managed to get one down the back of his collared shirt AND t-shirt, and had to untuck his t-shirt to get it out. He's actually got a crescent-shaped burn on his neck. (whereas apparently my experience with candle wax on the boobs prevented me from being more than just slightly annoyed).

In total, I fired ~20 rounds with two different guns.

The husband, I think, was hoping I'd be more enthused.

"What did you think?"

"I didn't hate it."

Sigh.

"Oh, come on! I don't loathe it and I didn't start to cry. What more do you want?"

I'm slightly exasperated about this. I know he's "manning up" as he says it, about the roller coasters (he's afraid of heights.) and going on the Loch Ness with me and the kiddo. And I appreciate it. But he won't go on any of the Big Kids coasters with me, just the ones that the kiddo can do. He's probably got another year before she'll be tall enough to hit Alpengeist or Apollo's Chariot, and maybe three before she's tall enough for Gryffon. So, you know, he's trying. But he's not jumping up and down and excited to get on a coaster, and I know, honestly, that he'd rather still not do it.

So, I went. I shot. I wouldn't be adverse to doing it again.

But I'm not ready to buy a gun.




* Fact meaning what information I can find, and that's still highly slanted and politically charged, even just for finding out information! I'm not going to post links to all the sites I looked at. You can do that info gathering yourself. I collated a LOT of data to get those figures and I'm certainly not sure it's correct.

Finding Yourself Somewhere Else

I've always mocked (gently, of course) my friends who have gone "looking for themselves."

Usually they have a pretty good reason for packing their crap and getting away from their various overbearing families, so I'm all in support of that. But finding yourself? How the hell do you LOSE yourself? I mean, here I am. All the time. This is me. I'm not lost.

Except that sometimes, you are.

Way back when, I lived in a town that I hated. I hated everything about the town, I didn't have any friends that I could relate to. I had a good job, and we were making all the ends meet, bills were getting paid and we had lots of extra money to get those things we need and many things that we wanted as well.

It was a good life. Except I hated it. With every fiber in my body, I wanted to be Somewhere Else. ANYWHERE else.

I was discussing this with someone I worked with and he looked at me and said, "Is it really Town that you hate, or will you be packing up your unhappy and taking it with you?"

Sometimes your environment can create clutter. The people who you see on a regular basis influence how you act, what you say, what you wear. The places you go - or can go - decide what your options are. Prevailing attitudes can color your mood - a liberal in a highly conservative work environment can get to feeling hostile, or put upon, or persecuted - or for that matter, an atheist in a highly religious area can start feeling very alone. But it's hard to tell, sometimes, whether those moods and attitudes are coming from within, or from without. Would I still feel alone in a new town where I still had no friends, but I didn't feel this wave of hostility every time I saw a "Only Man + Woman = Family" bumper sticker?

In order to figure out what's truly yours, sometimes you need to get away from all those things that aren't you. Family. Friends. Job. Television. Just be alone.

Where do you go, when you've got no familiar place to go? What do you do when you're the only one who has to be happy with that decision? Do you, for example, only hang out in the coffee shop because you feel like you should, or when you move to a new town, do you seek one out until you find someplace with a palatable espresso?

(As it turns out, it was Town that I hated. We moved. Our financial situation took a nasty downturn from the job switch, and I never did find good full time cubical hive work again... despite that, I was happier. And I still am.)

I'm talking about this because things are about to change for me. Big change.

We're getting a house.

For eight years, I've lived in a tiny apartment with no privacy. I write my stories in the same room with the television, and try to balance my life around two people that I can't help running into (sometimes literally) with every waking moment.

Sure, they're still going to be there. But I will have an office. And it will not be in the same room with the television.

The question is; what parts of me will I pack up and bring along...

And what am I going to leave behind?

Strong Women need Strong Men

public domain photo

I have the personality of a blaze orange locomotive; loud, bright, messy, headed-in-that-direction-damnit, and towing a lot of baggage.

That means I'm apt to run you over - like the proverbial cow by the Lonesome Pine that my grandmother used to sing about - if I've got my eyes set on a goal. (It also means that I have a tendency to get derailed.)

Now, why am I talking about my dominating, obnoxious personality?

Yesterday I won this contest; in order to do so, we had to tweet about what we liked about strong heroines.

I tweeted this: #SiranthaJax A strong heroine always has to have a man, not a boy, to be equal to her awesomeness. #equalpartners! @TheaHarrison

I do truly believe that. I know it. Because I'm a strong woman. I know I've been over-fucking-whelming to some of the "nicer" guys in my life.

My husband... is not a nice man. Don't get me wrong, I love him, but nice is not an adjective I'd use to describe him. He's driven. He's obnoxious. And sometimes he's completely fucking clueless. He's very alpha male. He likes to be at the top of the pecking order in a social situation. Better than YOU! (Why yes, people who think they're better are annoying to those of us who ARE!) He also takes pride in doing a good job (not that I don't like to do a good job, mind, but I've never considered corporate America and their obsession with meetings and widgets to be anything worth taking seriously enough to put the effort into a good job. But he does! He works HARD at his cubical hive job. weirdo.) and has a never-quit attitude that sometimes makes me roll my eyes. He's also high-strung and temperamental.

Which is to say; perfect. For me. He'd steam-roller a nice girl.

He is my match, my mate, and my partner in crime. He's better with computers. I can actually cook a meal. He beats my ass at chess and I wipe the floor with him in card games. We're both wickedly intelligent, sarcastic, and occasionally belligerent.

Neither of us is afraid to scream at the other.

I read a lot of romance novels; one of the things I hate more than anything - inevitably I want to transport into the book and slap the HELL out of the heroine whenever this happens - is when the alpha male gets all "you can't ever, ever put yourself at risk! never ever because I would die if something happened to you, so promise me you'll let me put you on the shelf and protect you..."

And inevitably, the heroine is soooooo overwhelmed that he wuuuuuvs her that she bats her eyelashes and agrees to it.

GYAH!

No.

Fuck. No.

Fuck you!

Look, you either love me, with all my bad habits, dangerous passions, and spark of life, or you love an idea.

I have ideas. I am NOT an idea.

(Anyway, I won one of the book packages and not the Ann Aguirre book. So I guess I'll just have to buy that one on my own... me and a girlfriend were just talking about sci-fi romances recently...)