Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 621

I took the fourth off and thought about Seema’s advice to quit my job - specifically, how to go about doing it. I’ve never resigned before, so I don’t know how you deliver the letter (mail, email, by hand?), what it says, or how to say “I quit” politely in person. Maybe Seema knows.

Though I’ve considered quitting before, I’ve never taken that writer’s-eye view of it where you imagine waltzing into work singing Take This Job and Shove It with a chorus of fellow oppressed workers backing you up, or at least you fire off a pithy parting line like Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Maybe the muse will come up with something. Her low word count is due to the holiday and to having finished the first draft of a story, which means the count will no longer be increasing but fluctuating with edits.

Cool site of the day: A favicon gallery

I just can’t keep up with fandom. I know there’s a Homecoming scandal out there somewhere, but all I found was one comment in Rocky’s LiveJournal. I’m two hundred posts behind on ASC again, and my Khanfics are languishing while I work on the Wrong Novel. Given a choice, I tend to play with CSS rather than catch up on my blog backlog.

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that there are too many of you.

I’ve been mocked for painting crates and mac advocacy. News at 11.

Here’s Jintian’s 40 fannish facts meme, by way of Lori, Seema and Sara. I was too lazy to do it myself, so they helped. My corrections are in brackets.

1. (Seema) Fic must have weddings in it.
2. (Seema & Lori) I don’t need a biology lesson [about] slots and tabs.
3. (Lori) Everyone who sent feedback on story X, send me a copy, cause I never saw it!
4. (Seema) I write my fic on a Mac! You should too!
5. (Lori) You haven’t lived until you get jossed.
6. (Lori) I think Lori’s a world-class author who should be writing publishable fiction and sending it to agents.
7. (Seema) I wrote an amazing fic called ‘The Museum.’ In general, I win lots of awards [just like Seema].
8. (Seema) I started a mailing list when I should have been writing fic.
9. (Lori) Everyone should read Seema’s fic, so cruise over to her website.
10. (Sara) My filk makes Sara laugh far too much.
11. (Seema) I’m insufficiently reluctant. Go me!
12. (Lori) Colony is vastly underrated by all and sundry. Probably because it’s not read often enough [or wasn’t edited enough].
13. (Lori) My filk should win awards. Lori said so.
14. (Seema) Yellow rocks my cabash.
15. (Seema) I don’t do memes over 5 items so I conscripted my minions, Seema, Sara and Lori, to write this list for me.
16. (Lori) Picard/Janeway is one of my favorite pairings, if I liked pairing fic.
17. (Seema) I think there are aliens voting in fanfic contests. It’s the only explanation for the results.
18. (Lori) Fandom is like high school [only worse].
19. (Seema) I don’t find Icheb attractive.
20. (Seema) There is a Janeway/Picard fandom but there is no such thing as a [Doc]/Seven fandom.
21. (Lori) C/7 is the one true pairing, because it’s canon. Get Over It.
22. (Sara) Canon is queen here at Jemima’s Trek.
23. (Lori) Bitter Old Fan Queens rule.
24. (Seema) I like Seven. I [don’t] own a couple of catsuits just like hers.
25. (Seema) My fanfic is a gift.
26. (Lori) Badfic. Fandom’s car accident. Can’t quit rubbernecking.
27. (Seema) I’m scared of Seema.
28. (Seema) I got conscripted into the Blog Wars through no fault of mine. I was an innocent bystander, and bang! I got attacked by William James.
29. (Seema) Stylesheets rule.
30. (Lori) The few, the proud, the filkers….
31. (Seema) I love TOS. Really.
32. (Seema) I prefer my friends to be coherent and to have a minimal ability to spell and use punctuation properly.
33. (Lori) When you’re museless and wandering, start a fan list without a fandom, and anything can happen.
34. (Seema & Lori) Just say no to your fic taxes. No New Fic Taxes!
35. (Seema) I’m a BNF but I refuse to admit it.
36. (Lori) Ask not what ASC can do for you, but what you can be insufficiently reluctant to do for ASC!
37. (Seema) Just say no to LJ.
38. (Seema) Just say no to Virtual Seasons.
39. (Lori) Feedback. The final frontier…to seek out readers, to elicit their reactions… to have my story noticed where none have noticed before! (cue music)
40. (Lori) I’m writing a babyfic. Everyone is pregnant. Everyone who can be, anyway — I won’t stoop to mpreg, thankyouverymuch.

It’s that time of year and everybody knows the meme:

1. Sleep (for the muse)
2. Write 1,000 words a day
3. Get published (for money)
4. Finish revising Colony
5. Make serious inroads into the Seven Saga
6. Do all those little things I keep putting off, like the sewing and the cleaning
7. Reclaim a hobby lost to writing (I’m thinking cross-stitch)
8. Work 9 to 5 instead of 10 to 6 (or get laid off)
9. Use my health insurance before I get laid off

That’s a lot of new leaves to turn over, but if you don’t make resolutions, you’ll never break any. The depressing ones at the end are in honor of the worst December stock market showings since 1931.

Here’s a link to a cool mac story, thanks to Lori.

I took the political compass test that’s been meming around. I figured from reading the analysis page that I would come out authoritarian left, and I did. I was pretty close to the middle on both, though.

The idea of a four way political cube (left/right and authorian/libertarian, in this case) is neither new nor original to that site. Peter Kreeft wrote an article (The Politics of Architecture) about the four political types, using four real-life examples, back in 1996. I find it clearer to think of people as economically socialist or capitalist, and, separately, socially libertarian or conservative. Of course, neither fit me - I’m economically distributivist and socially particularist.

Word count: 3400

Pardon the lack of blog substance - I’m on vacation in NH. The leaves are well past peak, and my word count is still back in last weekend, but I’m picking up steam.

So I’m back…

Like Lizzy, I didn’t have enough time to reach the Lake District, nor did
I make it to the Hogwarts train station or the Dracula-inspiring park
bench. I did visit Haworth, former home and perpetual shrine to the
Brontë sisters. I saw cathedrals everywhere I went, but there was more
of a feeling of reverence in one room of the Brontë parsonage than in the
York Minster. I’ve seen (alleged) bits of the True Cross treated with less respect
than the Original Furniture. There is something supernatural about the
Brontës, I suppose.

People don’t build cathedrals anymore, but they still write novels. As I was
writing in the rain at Vindolanda for the Hadrian’s Wall bus, I passed the time by
reading Rob Roy. Most of it was good, but it had that sudden,
unexplained and unforeshadowed ending problem that I’d thought was unique to
sci-fi. Several major plot points were knocked off in the course of a few pages,
and not in a believable way. I guess if you’re Scott, you can get away with
all sorts of things.

In England, cheers means thank you, among other things. I’d say that’s the oddest linguistic variation I’ve come across.

My accidental business trip to England is turning into a literary tour. All the places I want to see are ones I heard of from literature. I took the Jane Austen tour of Bath and hiked around the White Horse of Uffington. (The Ballad of the White Horse is by G. K. Chesterton.) Now I hear there’s a bench were Bram Stoker got all his Dracula ideas. Maybe if I sit on it I’ll be inspired to write more Spike.

Anyway, I’m heading north. I think I have a better grip on what a down is, and my next goal is to see a real live moor. (I’ve seen real live Moors - there’s a word that gets around.) Then maybe some heath and peat, if those are different things. Oh, and maybe the train station from the Harry Potter movie - that’s up there on one of the scenic railways. I’m not promising to get out of the train, though.

This blog entry was made possible by clare009.

I’m alive and well and in England, trying to learn some English. It reminds me of back when I was in school studying Portuguese and our books would always have a set of Continental Portuguese words and a list on the side of Brazilian Portuguese words. For example, train was comboio or trem, depending on country.

Here, the word for one way is single, round trip is return and subway (T in Boston) is tube. It’s also a bit weird seeing the exits all labelled way out, like the U.K. is some sixties drug fantasy world. Now a lorry may sound like a wussy thing, but when it’s rushing at you at 80 miles an hour (yes, they use miles here, too) in the wrong direction, it’s just as impressive as a real live truck.

And they put vinegar on the chips (as in fish and chips, not wood chips) here, just like back in Rhode Island. It’s hard to believe this is another country and not just an especially expensive version of New England. But it’s a crazy hour of the night here and I should get to bed.

This blog entry was made possible by clare009 and her new laptop.