Resolved
Filed Under Life, Shred of Evidence, Writing, New Year's Resolutions
A few of the things I want to do in 2008:
1. Lose weight. (10 lbs. = required, 20 lbs. = strongly desired, 30 lbs. = very nice, 30+ lbs. = unlikely without use of a tapeworm.)
2. Explore tapeworm options.
3. Continue going to the gym regularly when it’s open. (Alum pricing is very nice; academic schedule, not so much.)
4. The Samhain writing goals I didn’t meet.
5. Quicker turn-around for Shred submissions. (I should be aiming for one month and not beating myself up over three, rather than aiming for three and congratulating myself for anything faster.)
There are a bunch of others, but if I talk about them prematurely something’s liable to go wrong.
I’m off to Hogmanay tonight. See you in 2008.
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2007 in review
Filed Under Life
On a personal level, 2007 sucked. I am not sad to see it go, though I’m not sure I’m too psyched for 2008.
I could do a best of list for books, movies, stories, or whatnot, but I’m too lazy. Anyone strangely eager to read my opinions is welcome to check the archives. I certainly haven’t cataloged everything I enjoyed, but there’s a smattering. Nor did I talk about everything I hated, but you don’t really need to hear me rant about politics or I Am Legend, do you?
Miscellaneous thoughts
Filed Under Life, Music, Games, Knitting
I’ve had “Still Alive” stuck in my head for several days. Oddly, I do not find this fact particularly irritating.
I have not gotten around to actually playing Portal. I’m not a big FPS fan—in no small part because I’m not very good—but I’ll give this one a whirl.
Went skiing Thursday night, got the misery of the first run out of the way. I misused my legs, and my calves were very unhappy with me yesterday afternoon and evening. They’re beginning to forgive me.
I really, really hate bobbles.
Roll your own
Filed Under Published
In the Long, Long Ago, in the Before Time—otherwise known as the late 80s—I was in a music store and saw a sign offering a brilliant service. You could choose a set of individual songs and they would sell you that album: as good as a mix tape, without the expense and hassle of buying a dozen albums. I though this was particularly brilliant because I was not sufficiently into music to spend large portions of my allowance on its procurement. I was more of a tape-it-off-the-radio sort of girl; that left more money for books. But in any case, I thought it was a great idea.
I still like the à la carte option, and as fun new technologies emerge it becomes even easier. As a fan of short fiction, I like webzines and Fictionwise. The other day I came across a site, AnthologyBuilder, that lets you roll your own anthology.
The site is still in beta, though I gather the full release will be ready soon. I’ve added three of my stories to the database (”Summer by the Ocean,” “Mr. Balloon Man,” and “The Demon in the Storehouse”) and will probably add others as well. I am unreasonably pleased that Tony Pi’s Shred story is also available; I felt a similar thrill when I saw Stephen D. Rogers had offered some of his stories for sale at Fictionwise. Somehow a reprint just reinforces the validity of the first publication, I guess.
This sort of thing is not going to be a cash cow for anyone involved, but I think it’s a neat idea and I hope it takes off. It keeps short stories in circulation and provides options for short fiction fans. Yes, it’s fun to dig through used bookstores, scoop up old copies of magazines, google titles and phrases you think you remember from that cool story you read years ago, or poke around with the Wayback Machine because you remember about when you read a good story in a webzine that folded before the dot com bubble burst. I love doing that. I feel so satisfied when I succeed, as if I’d slain a peckish mythological beast and dragged its corpse (or a portion thereof) back home. But sometimes it’s just nice to have the thing. Certainly that’s a good idea if you want to share it with someone else.
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A couple Christmas songs
Filed Under Music
“Holiday Schmedley” - Sixteen Feet
“Chiron Beta Prime” - Jonathan Coulton
Drug dealers hate Santa
Filed Under Uncategorized
Fortunately, no reindeer or Santas were harmed in the incident.
Seasonal reading
Filed Under Story picks
“The Grift of the Magi” by Sean Doolittle
If you are bitten by the spirit of generosity…
Filed Under Uncategorized
…please make sure to get your tetanus shot. After that, you may want to consider donating to a worthy cause:
Boing Boing’s annual charitable giving guide includes organizations from the EFF to Project Gutenberg to the ACLU.
Graham “No Relation” Powell is raising money for the United Way over at CrimeSpot.
Strange Horizons has a summer fund drive, but takes donations all year.
The I Do Foundation, for which my Spousal Unit directs technology, is a 501(c)(3) and accepts direct donations. They’re a neat organization engaged in hacking society to encourage charitable giving as a way of life.
Geeky solutions
I know knitters are geeks. (Okay, I guess my sample set is a bit skewed, but still.) KnitML is delightful. And yes, I really need to start my Dalek.
And speaking of Daleks, Charlie Stross advocates using them to secure the London Underground. He envisions hordes of Brits reflexively fleeing upward to escape, leaving the terrorists to be exterminated. As noted in comments, that will only work for the more mature Doctor Who fan; the rest will simply cower and await a display of aerial superiority. But hey, that’s the price of screwing with perfectly good alien killing machines.
Trophies, the meaning of
Filed Under Writing
I guess it’s an end of the year LJ meme—well, no, it’s an end of the year meme, period, I just happen to’ve seen it on a few LJs—for people to post lists of stories published during the calendar year.
I used to be very tickled each time I published a story. Well, okay, I’m still tickled. But at some point I stopped caring so much about the volume. The not caring was preceded by a period when I was bummed about my lowered output (and sometimes tried to console myself with the thought that I was working on longer projects—which was often true, though most of those projects languished). Then there was a sort of curmudgeonly period, because I’d been there, done that, have the bibliography page to prove it, thank you very much, and I remember the zines from the Long Long Ago, from the Before Time….
Now? Eh. I guess this attitude shift is part and parcel of my foot-dragging when polishing or resubmitting. It’s probably wrapped up in the feeling of having reached a plateau. It’s not a bad plateau. (I can see your house from here.) But it is sort of tough to get excited by the mere idea of moving around on the plateau. (If I move a bit to the left, your house looks pretty much the same.) Getting off this plateau will involve a certain amount of time, effort, skill, luck, and so forth, making it an uncertain business and not, incidentally, entirely enjoyable for those of a slothful persuasion.
I think it’s probably a net good that I don’t care about volume. I think it’s a net negative (for me personally; the world in general is not impacted in the slightest) that I go for long stretches without producing anything (published or not, writing can take the edge off my crankiness). Still, volume’s a nice, straightforward goal, and I miss that. I’m just generally having a tough time motivating myself to finish bullet points on a to-do list. Woo fucking hoo.
See? Cranky.