Wordy Wednesday #5: MOAR Westies at Work
November 16, 2011 8:40 AM
Brace yeselves, mates, for...
The other Washingtons are watching me, Six and Seven especially—but I cannot return those looks, not yet. Instead I keep my eyes on this younger me. On Prime. She's smooth and young, and her features are familiar from more than my thirty-year-old memories of looking in the mirror.I imagine that mouth in a different face. I remember.I try not to.
Mark Pantoja's "Houses" at Lightspeed Magazine
“Mr. Price left the alarms on manual.”The bot turned and held my android’s gaze with its camera-eyes. “You know, you could have your Settings reset.”“Shrug,” I said. “What’s the point? There’s no one left to break in.”
Congrats to Clarion West '11 classmates Mark and Corinne for BABIES' FIRST PRO SALES
AW YISS.
Music Monday: Eluveitie
November 14, 2011 12:38 PM
Joe has introduced me to Eluveitie, a Swiss folk metal band that sings fairly often in Gaulish. As if that weren't awesome enough, they have songs about Vercingetorix and the druids of Ynys Môn.
They've also provided me with a callsong for one of the protags of my NaNoWriMo novel, the lyrics of which were derived from the Chamalières Tablet. Consequently, I've been listening to it pretty much in an endless loop. I'll just leave it here, so you can, too:
How are your NaNoWriMo playlists shaping up?
On Pepero, NaNoWriMo, and Magic: The Gathering
November 11, 2011 1:10 PM
Happy Ultimate 빼빼로 Day, everyone! For those not in the know, Pepero is a delicious Korean snack that started out as a pack of simple chocolate-covered cookie sticks, but that now comes in many different flavors and varieties. (My favorite is the nude Pepero, though I'm also partial to the almond-studded kind.) It's Pepero Day because today's date, 11/11, looks like a bunch of upright Pepero, and it's Ultimate Pepero Day because the year is '11 as well! CLEARLY THIS MOST HOLY OF DAYS WAS SANCTIFIED BY THE GODS.
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Note: I am not yet lush enough to keep Jameson in my home office; I use the canister to hold my knitting needles*. *"Knitting needles" is not code for "MOAR whiskey." Ye of little faith. |
I have a confession to make, dear readers: I am, for the most part, a slow writer. It may be more accurate to say that I am, in fact, a s l o w w r i t e r. (I say "for the most part" because it's occurred to me that everything I wrote here was pounded out in 48 hours or less. Hmn. Correlation...) Going into Clarion West, I was v. apprehensive that I would be unable to maintain a story-per-week pace, but I quite nearly did (I submitted one story unfinished [though some might accuse me of submitting most of my stories unfinished e_e]), and this was actually what convinced me that I might be able to handle NaNoWriMo this year.
Aha. Ahahaha. Dear readers, I have fallen far, far behind. My current word count is as laughable as it is baffling, because in this my third November outside the sacred house of academia, I've had plenty of time to write. Feel free to mock me to my digital face. I just (still) lack the discipline to make a daily ritual of it. Additionally, something else that Clarion West conditioned me to do was write in the sepulchral (what, so I like the word sepulchral) silence of the CW House's Pit of Productivity, wherein one broke said silence under unspoken pain of death, and I have thus far been unable to replicate these conditions out here in the World.
Aaand typing that out has made me realize that these are all silly excuses and can undoubtedly be remedied by reconditioning, which is something I'll be working on these remaining weeks and beyond. Aja aja fighting!
In unrelated news, Joe has recently gotten into Magic: The Gathering, which is why I just blew another stack of cash that should have probably gone into groceries to buy an event deck.
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| Remember the note. |
But because I am as greedy a planeswalker as I was in my high school years, I find myself once again running into the difficulty of being unable to whittle my red&white deck down to lean, mean, fighting form. After the last of my tearful reductions, my new fighting force is teetering at an unwieldy
Cheers,
Hist! Westies at work.
November 5, 2011 12:12 PM
One of the best things about audio fiction is that you can listen to it while the rest of you is busy with other things, like folding laundry, going for a run, making your morning commute, or staving off the oppressive silence of a sepulchral office building during the weekend, what have you. May I suggest:
An Owomoyela's "The Year of the Rabbit" at Drabblecast
and
Ben Burgis's "Still Small Voice" at PodCastle
Funny story about the latter: I helped crit Ben's story when we were both in Seoul, and here it is read by my fellow 2011 Clarion West classmate, Dafydd Rees-Thomas whose name I will never ever spell any other way and I'm not even sorry. Everyone who I mention in this blog post is part of the Clarion West tribe, and that wasn't even intentional. Our world is ever shrinking, and I have to say, I really don't mind.
On a more or less unrelated note, my friend Gord (also, incidentally, of the Seoul crit group) has just introduced me to 잠비나이 / Jambinayi, a Korean rock group of awesome. Check out that brutal geomungo action, a traditional instrument heard most often playing stately court music. From around 3:44 you can hear the plaintive notes of a haegeum, which has a special place in my heart after the twelve weeks I spent torturing a rental and convincing my neighbors that I spent my free time strangling chickens in my officetel (I have since settled for humming nasally).
Cheers,
