this and that

Easing back into the groove

Moriah

It’s been almost a year since I started blogging and honestly I didn’t think I could keep it up this long. Oh, wait. I haven’t. I kind of dropped off the face of the planet in early March. I ran out of things to say about the same time I started becoming a slave to my stats, falling in like with Twitter, and having had some projects to work on.

The break has been nice, quite honestly, but I do have a backlog of things to say now and after I got a tweet from a concerned tweeter inquiring as to my rightness with the world, I eased my way back to twittering too. (I do love Twitter. Facebook … not so much. Actually, not at all.)

I’m going to pick up where I left off over at PubRen and start being more of a contributor over at that juggernaut April set up, Publetariat.

Tales from the cryptergarten

Moriah

The 5-year-old Tax Deduction has just informed me that [insert Trendy white-bread Suburban Male Name here]’s mom and dad are always fighting.

Me: So do they fight at school in front of the children?

TD1: No. At home.

Me: Is [TSMN] upset about this?

TD1: No. They don’t want to be together anymore.

Me: Oh, really? How do you know this?

TD1: [TSMN] told me.

Me: Hmm. Do YOUR mommy and daddy fight?

TD1: No. [beat] Do you?

Me: No … We discuss things.

TD1: Is that like fighting?

Me: Only if we have loud voices and yelling. Have you heard us do that?

TD1: No. And [insert Trendy white-bread Suburban Female Name here]’s mom and dad, too.

Me: [TSFN]’s too?

TD1: Yeah. They don’t want to be together, either.

Me [aside to self]: Two meanest kids in the class.

Still alive!

Moriah

I’m here, I promise!

Got some fairly big projects in the works, some related to publishing, some not, and I need to really concentrate on those. It’s a concession to my ADD, which likes the time to focus on a project, to tunnel right through it, and does not like to rotate through projects on a schedule. Honestly, I get more done that way.

Also, I’m working on my last piece in the cross-blog series David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I are doing on monetizing fiction, then I need to concentrate on putting up some pieces for Publetariat.

I’m also working on the next book in the Dunham series, Stay, which is taking on proportions I didn’t plan for. Sometimes my imaginary friends are very persuasive, which is to say, they won’t leave me the hell alone. Stay is a little more genre romance-y than The Proviso, and a lot less heavy on the religion. I’m aiming to release it on Valentine’s Day, 2010.

Tune in tomorrow. Same Bat-channel, same Bat-time.

Go to bat for Zoe, folks

Moriah

Blogpal Zoe Winters is in a competition for an erotic short story contest.  Let’s help her win, shall we?

Go here.  Vote for hers.  Even if you don’t read it, vote for it, ’cause it’s good and I wouldn’t tell you it was good if it wasn’t.  I just wouldn’t say anything at all and here I am, pimpin’ for the girl!

Go! Go now!

I need to get out more

Moriah

Today, February 7, at 4:25 CST in Kansas City, it is 70 degrees outside. I got a sick kid (have had for about 3 days now). I got a list of things to do a gazillion miles long. Since it is my mission in life to give birth to a new race (Glow in the Dark) and the sun cackles wickedly every time I go outside in anticipation of what evil it can wreak upon my skin, I don’t go out unless I have to. I’m a hermit, I tell you, and I like it that way.

But you know what?

I’m missing something, I think. I had a visitor yesterday, like, came to the door and rang the doorbell adult human type of visitor. The real deal. To visit. With me.

I’ve forgotten how to converse with people. My face feels all out of whack. My voice doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve begun to stutter. I space out faster. I don’t smile much. My small talk is microscopic. Once I actually manage to pry my mouth open, I talk in longer monologues than I used to. I mean, I’ve always felt more comfortable with the written word than the spoken—but lately I’ve just gotten downright terrible.

It’s been my goal in life to become that old woman on the block, you know, the one with the muumuu and the orthopedic shoes and the orthopedic stockings rolled down to her ankles and the funky straw hat, the one all the neighborhood kids whisper about (“I heard she’s a witch”). Mmmm, I dunno.

Mebbe not.

Pardon me, dearie, while I go stir my cauldron.

Beethoven makes me peevish

Moriah

A still shot of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) with the caption “Mother doesn’t like me playing Beethoven. She says I’m peevish afterwards.”Not really. I’ll take Ludwig over Wolfgang any day. But I have not bitched in at least 1/2 hour; thus, I am overdue.

One thing that totally gives me an emotional wedgie is this: When you reply to a blog post that asks an open-ended question, and you put a lot of time and care and thought into your reply, and you’re not acknowledged by the original poster, not told that you’re brilliant, not told that you’re a fucking idiot. What I mean is, NO ONE who comments is acknowledged and the blog doesn’t have enough traffic (read: any personality) to generate its own activity.

Hit’n’run poster who was doing her time on a group blog. I’m on several like that. They have one thing in common: They’re LDS. They’re about writing. PLONK

I don’t think I’ve done this (I try to be conscientious about commenting), but if I have, feel free to shove it back in my face.

And while I’m bitching, might as well throw this out, too:

Takes me about 3 days through the blogosphere these days to get tired of the latest catch phrases and buzzwords. And I’ve used some of them in the last 6 months. Well, no more.

drinking the Kool-Aid (thank you, O’Reilly, like, 3 years ago)
honing your craft (and plain ol’ “craft” by itself by now, no matter what it’s in reference to)
made of awesome
made of win
meme
OMGWTFBBQ and any variant thereof
FTW (for the win)
trope
srsly

And also? My blog is just way too cluttered for my taste. I’m going to have to figure out something workable before my ADD gets violent.

What are you latest internet pet peeves?

For fun and a free e-copy of The Proviso, be the first to peg the reference in this post’s title.

Oz never did give nuthin’ to the tin man

Moriah

Poster for the movie TIN MAN.that he didn’t already have.

—America, “Tin Man”

This is one of my favorite sentences and has been since I was a child. When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand it (and some days I think I still don’t), but it resonated with me deeply until I was old enough to at least grasp the intellectual concept. (Some of the best things I’ve ever read/heard come from a subconscious wisdom that it took chemical enhancement to drag kicking and screaming into the light, but what the hell, right?)

I still draw on it for strength and encouragement fairly often, at least once a week. I don’t have it posted anywhere; I don’t need to.

Go ahead. Be brave. Pony up with your guiding maxims.

Happy new year, pass the bleach

Moriah

Okay, so I’m a schmuck who makes New Year’s resolutions. Kinda sorta. Maybe. It depends.

Black and gold New Year’s Eve clipart with a clock, bottle, Martini, and confetti.This is how it goes.

On New Year’s Day, I take down the Christmas tree, throw a sheet over it and stick it in the coat closet. In my world (and it took me 6 years to bring Dude around to it, although he won’t ever completely be around to it), you decorate a Christmas tree once about every ten years. And only once.

Next: Taxes. This means bookkeeping.

If I’ve been a good girl all year, this will only take me 2 or 3 days. If I haven’t, well … a week. It involves the following:

  • Paring files.
  • Sorting receipts.
  • Tossing, shredding, burning.
  • And other activities indicative of office-spring-cleaning.

What do I end up with? A clean office, clean files, and my cursor on the TurboTax SEND button the minute Dude’s W-2 hits our mailbox.

  • Next: Hard drives.
  • Next: Storage room.
  • Next: Projects A, B, and C

Get the drift?

I might not get all of this done, but I like to spend the new year cleaning out the past year and preparing for the new one. I simply cannot make any New Year’s resolutions until I burn through the past, look to the future, and figure out where I need to go next—

—which means I usually end up making my New Year’s resolutions on or about November 12.

Officially on holiday

Moriah

An aluminum Christmas tree with white lights and blue satin ball ornaments, sitting on a blue box.I have a boatload of work to do on the damned day job (filthy lucre!!!) and I have 23 people coming for Christmas Eve (which wouldn’t actually mean much unless you saw my house) and Tax Deduction #1 is home on Christmas break (yay) and I want to spend some time reading and writing (and possibly sewing). I’ll be back Saturday or Sunday or thereabouts. Thought I’d leave you with a pic of what a friend called my “dreidel tree,” which lives in my office in November and December.

Shit or get off the pot

Moriah

So around the bloggernacle I go about twice a week. I don’t spend too much time there because everybody discusses the same things over and over and over again and it’s wearying. The feminists fondle the patriarchy of the church like a worry doll; the academes throw around their $100 words and concepts that I don’t understand (click away! click away!); the more-righteous-than-Mojo bewail the crumbling standards in the church and how wicked the world is; the artistes ask, “Where are our Miltons and Shakespeares?”

Yawn and no big.

But then there are the people with way too much time on their hands who come up with nifty ideas that they want Someone Else to (help) implement Right Now and then wail and moan that these ideas haven’t come to fruition and what is wrong with You All?

Endlessly.

This isn’t an LDS blog phenomenon, so don’t think I’m picking on my own again. I see it in every sector of the web I visit, in the smaller niche communities where, apparently, because we’re “all in this together,” we’re all supposed to roll with the Next Great Idea because of some artificial construct of solidarity.

And every time I see the same permabloggers on every blog they contribute to express their desire for the same thing they expressed elsewhere, with the same plaintive whiny tone, I just want to say, “Do it your owndamnself.”

I see all sorts of ideas and requests for programs and calls to change, but the work product is pretty much 50,000 words of “Why won’t you support Meeeeeeeeeeeeee and my Great Ideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee????” spread across about 14 blogs, mired in clarifications and addenda and backpeddling.

Oh, and speaking of backpeddling. When I began the process of actually implementing a (better, I thought) version of one of these ideas and shared it with one of the terminal whiners, the response was: “Yeah, good luck with that” with the internet equivalent of a sneer and no offer of help—for an idea that was GREAT! until it A) morphed out of this person’s comfort zone and B) started to require thought and action and money.

This happened to a friend of mine, too, in an interwebz community I inhabit, but she doesn’t. However, she’s good at looking at ideas and finding ways to monetize them. So she contacted the person with the Great Idea and the minute it involved A) work and B) money, the person promptly ignored her.

Eh, fuck ’em and the ideas they rode in on.

I’m not taking any of it seriously anymore until I see some evidence that it’s more than simply masturbating to Idea PrØn.

There’s a moral in this somewhere…

Moriah

Tax Deduction #2: Mama, after I eat my lunch, may I have candy?

Me: Yes.

TD#2 eats lunch. Carefully chooses a piece out of his bag of Halloween candy. Oh, goodie. Chewy Fireballs.

Me: Are you sure about this?

TD#2: Uh huh.

Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.

TD#2: Mama, tongue!

Me: Yeah, it’s hot, hunh? That’s cinnamon.

TD#2: Simmum for toas’.

Me: For candy, too. Want me to throw that away?

TD#2: No.

Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.

TD#2: Mama, hurts mouf!

Me: Yeah, I know. Are you sure you don’t want me to throw that away? Mama doesn’t like them, either.

TD#2: No.

Chomp. Big eyes. Tears. Wail.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

Moriah

I am resigned, although I have yet to make the official transition.

I have finally, irrevocably, inexorably decided that I cannot stem the tide of the use of “to raise” in reference to human beings. Much like the law of chastity, the use of “to rear” in reference to humans versus the use of “to raise” in reference to animals was beaten into my head from an early age and, well …

… I give up.

But I swear, they’ll have to waterboard me before I’ll give into “alright.”

The perfect purse

Moriah

The last time I had the perfect purse, I was 20 and on my way to Europe. Got it at Jones on sale and it was a tan leather saddlebag-looking thing, tall, thin, boxy and with my number one requirement, a very long strap. About the size of a glass block, only longer and narrower.

Yesterday, I took the Tax Deductions to the Liberty Fall Festival where TD #1 indulged her type T personality on all the carnival rides (although there was nary a roller coaster to be had). TD #2 consented to go on the merry-go-round, but he clung to me the entire ride.

Anyhoo, I found the perfect purse made by Journey Leather (their link is under construction, dagnabbit). It’s a black leather saddlebag-with-pockets-looking thing with a very long strap and is obviously designed to hold every electronic gadget ever made.

20080928_purse1
20080928_purse2
20080928_purse3
20080928_purse4

Except … my ebook reader. Or a paperback. It’s not that big. So I can do one of two things: I can fashion a strap to go on my ebook reader’s leather pouch or I can go get a Blackberry, which will not only allow me to carry my library around in my hand, it will also hold my brain, let me talk to people (verbally or writtenly), cruise the net, buy stuff, do business, listen to mp3s, and take pictures.

Yeah. Don’t tell Dude.

I yam what I yam

Moriah

I try to be literary. Really, I do. That’s what Smart People do.

I read Racy Romance Reviews and Read For Pleasure and Teach Me Tonight and I think, “Gee, these women are Smart.” I am not that Smart. So I don’t comment much.

I read the in-depth reviews at Dear Author when they talk about worldbuilding and layering symbolism and use all sorts of literary techniques I learned but didn’t absorb for whatever reason. I read Mrs. Giggles reviews, wherein she’s snarkalicious but not (IMO) unkind—and I think, “Gee, these people are Smart.”

I read A Motley Vision and occasionally, Segullah. I read Theric and Tyler and Trevor. I think, “Gee, these people are Smart.” I am not that Smart. So I don’t comment much, except at AMV, where I probably drive the regular inhabitants insane with my less-than-suave sensitivities. Every time I post there I think, “That was a stupid thing to say.” But I let it lie because that’s who I am, even if I don’t like it sometimes.

And this is why I didn’t study English lit. I can’t analyze worth a damn and half the time, I don’t even know what the existing analyses are saying. I suppose there’s something to be said against a writer who doesn’t think about Great Works beyond “thumbs up” and “thumbs down,” but really, I’ve just come to the point where I have to admit that I like what I like and a good portion of it is crass and commercial.

Then again, sometimes the labels are deceiving. Perhaps I do like crass and commercial, but most times when I pick up a romance novel that intrigues me (mostly historicals), they’re rich and complex, layered and moving so that I’m still thinking about them long after. Sometimes they depend more heavily on characterization or on plot, leaning to one side or the other, but I really don’t care. When they strike a balance—well, that’s a lagniappe.

All I want is a good book to curl up with and a story that sticks with me a while.

But hey—I liked “I’m Too Sexy,” too.