Saturday, February 25, 2012

You are what you eat, part 2

I sometimes (periodically, perhaps) forget just how much what I read affects how I write. The problem is that I hate to be exacting about what I read based on how I'm writing. Lately I've been stalling out in my writing time, doing a lot of world-building and a bit of poetry when plot and prose felt like tar pits. A little of it is having come to a tricky point in Nenle, but this would be less of a problem if I felt agile when I came to it.

Last night I realized that I've been reading more verse than usual,which might explain why my prose seemed to dry up and I was starting to get drips of poetry. I put The Fairy Queen aside at the end of Book 1, because it was moving just too slowly for me. I made use of my Kindle and picked up Pope's Iliad (after, you may recall, putting down his Odyssey). That has been more agreeable. For one thing--and it feels like the sort of thing that shouldn't matter, but does--the lines are arranged in the free Kindle edition like blocks of prose. The rhythm and rhymes are still clear, but the momentum keeps up better.* Which is to say, I'm actually enjoying The Iliad, which makes it more frustrating that I apparently need to read something else.

But I do. I wish I had a better grasp of my intellectual nutrition. The Iliad lacks something that I need, but to extend the metaphor, it's not hamburger. Or, at least, not cheap hamburger.** Perhaps it is more like spinach, if I liked spinach. Broccoli?

The problem ("the" problem) is that, unlike food, I tend to read one thing until I'm done, if I can help it. I'm a fifth of the way through The Iliad and if I had my druthers that means I would keep reading it until it was done. But the month or more that would probably take me is too long to be banging my head against my writing. I need propellant. Or, to return to the food metaphor, six weeks of broccoli would be very bad for me, not least if I followed it with a month of potatoes and a (moderate) three weeks of beef.

But that's the way I read. For one thing I don't read exceedingly quickly, and for another I have safeguards in place to keep me from sinking an entire day into reading if I have anything else to do. I don't think I can read more than one narrative at a time and keep them all in my head, either; I certainly don't think I could keep the Greeks and Trojans straight during a detour through, say, Anathem.*** Last night I picked up The Lord of the Rings again, and I feel more limber already for being half a dozen pages into Chapter 1, but while I read that I'm not reading anything new.

It's a dilemma, and a frustrating one. If it were only a matter of reading what I liked it would sort itself out relatively quickly. Where I run into trouble is the things I like that don't feed my writing.

I wish the next issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction would come. That's good fuel, but it only comes every other month.

When I started this post I expected to segue into another topic by the end, but now I can't remember what it was. That may just mean there will be another post close on the heels of this one.

* It would be interesting if this were toggleable in long verse narratives. We surely have the technology, and maybe someone has already done this without my notice.
** I had a surprisingly good hamburger last night at a bar called The Heights.
*** Another thing I got for the Kindle, since the hardcover edition of Anathem weighs 80 pounds and only fits through doors standing up.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Adventures in Baltimore

Presidents' Day weekend was a nice one. Girlfriend and I went to Baltimore, about as spontaneously as we do anything. That is, we wanted to do it. On Friday I did some research on what you can actually do in Baltimore. (The case for the city up to that point had rested mainly on proximity.) On Saturday we started actually planning it, looking at train tickets for Sunday morning and Monday evening, and reasonable hotels for in between. So as it had turned out, there are several good museums in Baltimore as well as an aquarium, but their hours, combined with the hours Girlfriend needed to be back in DC to get work done, were generating headaches. We'd be rushing to get there when there wouldn't be much to do, then rushing back to get back to work. I was beginning to wonder if we actually had time for a vacation, and was getting ready to call the whole thing off, when Girlfriend asked me, "What if we go tonight?"

It was 3 p.m. at this point and I had already made a hotel reservation for Sunday night. The deadline for cancelling that reservation was 4 p.m. the day before, or one hour from then. But over the next hour she convinced me she had the right idea. We canceled the reservation with five minutes to spare. We booked a different room at a different hotel and bought train tickets for 7 o'clock. Then we ran around the house throwing things into bags, swung by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had to have refilled that day, ate dinner at the mall food court, and were off.

I forgot to account for the track work on the Metro. We had a long wait for the red line to get us to Union Station. But, there we got, timed so perfectly that you would have thought I knew what I was doing.

So, there's a Quality Inn in Baltimore that's surprisingly nice. Actually, possibly the nicest hotel I have any memory of staying in. (I think the place in Westport was, on the whole, a better experience, but that was a family operation. Also, we got trapped in the parking lot by an elk.) Booking the room at the last minute apparently brought it back into our price range, so hooray for that!

Girlfriend particularly liked the window hangings.
She made a nest there and hibernated until Monday.

As you can see, Girlfriend remembered to bring her camera, which means I get to put pictures in this post.

We walked out that night to get drinks and some food. We had a frustrating time at the bar we finally settled on. It's partially, but not entirely, their fault. For example, it was unfortunate that they were out of Blue Moon. It was my fault that, when browsing their remaining beer selection more or less at random, I forgot what's special about O'Doul's. Similarly, it was not their fault that my girlfriend is passionately averse to the substance known as "nacho cheese," but it is their fault that their menu specified mozzarella. (It was special. Or supposed to be.) And ultimately it is on me that I didn't send either of these things back.

Downtown Baltimore looks pretty nice. On the walk back we saw the back of the Baltimore Basilica.
We intended to circle around to the front at some point, but didn't get around to it. We also saw the Washington Monument (not that one) and got a shot of that in daylight.
Commemorating George Washington's imprisonment atop the tower of Orthanc.

We found The Walter's Art Museum, and that's a pretty cool (free) place. We got to the bulk of it in our two hours or so there, but could have spent two, or six, more. I'll share one bronze thingy that caught my eye:

It was maybe one or two feet tall. That's the Fall of Adam and Eve, there, but what got my attention was the monkey munching away in the background. Conjures up some fun thoughts. Of course Darwin wouldn't come along for another two centuries or so, and inasmuch as this prefigures him it's a coincidence. The monkey, according to the museum card, symbolizes lust and foolishness or some such. But I like to imagine him a step behind Adam and Eve, waiting for his turn.

The chunk of the museum I found most interesting was an eclectic collection organized as the sort of things an Enlightenment-era nobleman might accumulate. An 11-inch Egyptian "mummy" filled with corn sat on a shelf under a Mesoamerican stone "idol," with cards explaining not only what they were, but what the people collecting them in the 1600s thought they were. A narwhal horn hung, contextless, on the wall. At least, I couldn't find an explanation. It looked about 10 feet long--much too big to have been passed off as something that grew out of a horse's forehead, as I understand they had been.

We went down from there to the Inner Harbor to check out the National Aquarium with some of Girlfriend's relatives. The aquarium's exhibits were interesting, but the layout made for a tightly-controlled experience. I felt like I was on an assembly line. It was dark, and hard to get good pictures.
Guess.*

But there were some successes.

There's a rainforest exhibit too. I found out what a Screaming Piha sounds like. That's something that stops being fun right away.

All in all, a good trip, a good break. I discover, over and over, how nice it is to just up and go somewhere with Girlfriend. We might go back to Baltimore some time. Then again, we might pick a completely different destination at random.

* It's the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Step 2: ???

No more stabbings since last post. The world is more like it should be.

Since I last mentioned it I have both completed and been paid for my first freelance writing gig. (I am currently trying to leverage a satisfied customer into more business, one way or another.) It was Girlfriend who pointed out to me that I have been paid for writing. That's a milestone in its own right, one I've been waiting for, and one I almost missed because it didn't happen like I thought that it would.

I don't know what milestone will come next. None follows as a matter of necessity. I had decided not to submit my fiction where it would be published for free, since I don't need anyone's help to publish for free. (I'm doing that now.) Consequently I imagined being published and being paid as a single event, occurring at two distinct but connected points in time. I don't think I'm counting freelance copy writing as being published, though, although at some point a person other than myself will be publicizing words I have written for their own purposes.

I don't know why I enjoy (or at least insist on) splitting hairs about exactly what has and hasn't happened yet. I could make a distinction about copyrights, and say I look forward to being paid for a license, rather than for my entire copyright to any given thing. In this case I have sold my copyright entirely. There are words that I have written--some of which I am proud of--that I do not own, and could technically be sued for publishing. It's an odd, interesting, somewhat unsettling state of affairs.

It still remains for me to be published in a regular sense, to be paid for fiction, and to make enough at any sort of writing to cover my expenses. When any of these happens, you will surely hear of it.

In lesser news, the new Xbox 360 came in the mail and works as it should, which is a comfort to me.

It amused me that the new, major update to Dwarf Fortress was released on Valentine's Day. This one has vampires and other undead, a massively useful tweak to the interface which would be tedious to detail, and the profound enmity of my very soul. This last feature is implemented as a bug which causes it to crash when I try to save. I did not realize that this degree of frustration was possible.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

This. Place.


This. Effing. Place.

I don’t think anyone necessarily should have seen it coming, but this is turning out to be a rather luckless location that I’ve moved to. Let’s review.

Before I moved here, Girlfriend did. I’ll give the area a pass on the sweltering heat in August, because it was August and actually pretty normal. I consider the real what-the-luck to have started with the earthquake on Girlfriend's second day of work. Then came the hurricane and the power outages, that very weekend if I recall correctly. Then the brawling teenagers in the driveway who broke down our basement door. The carbon monoxide leak.

This is all before I moved in, mind you. Things have been relatively low-key since then. The heat went on the fritz. The light fixture in the kitchen contrives to drip when I shower. While I understand that heat in the summer is the cost of doing business, I do hold it against the area that this winter there has been perhaps an inch of snow, total.

Last night someone was stabbed directly in front of my house. Directly. In. Front. You can’t see the blood on the sidewalk from the front door, because the two-foot hedge is in the way.

Okay. Before going further, I’ll let you know that the survived. He walked a few blocks until someone helped him. That’s basically all I know. I didn’t see anything.

Understanding that I am not remotely the person most inconvenienced by this, can I complain? Can I point out the maddening fact that this is the second time in six months that a stranger has bled on this property? May I point out that this is a row home, but these two incidents most emphatically happened in front of this house, not the contiguous houses on the left or the right of it? It’s not the neighborhood. I mean, this isn’t Medina, Washington, but we aren’t all averaging four assaults per street address per year.

I don’t know how awful it would have been to have seen that. There is something unsettling about having it happen within fifty feet of you and not finding out until a police detective knocks on your door and asks if you saw or heard anything. Answering “no” felt like a personal admission of failure. The callousness of me, the gall, not to notice a felony being committed through the bay window of my living room. Not to even be in the living room. What else could have been so important?

Ironically, the only one of us who saw anything at all was the one who wasn’t in the house. Beka had passed the victim and his good Samaritan a few blocks away while driving to the gym. I managed to feel somewhat useful by calling her up, and hooking the police up with her.

Of mild professional interest, last night was the first time I invoked the emergency clause of my contract and waived my unfinished requirements for the day. It was not quite the sort of emergency I had imagined when I wrote the clause, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Some days are better than others.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Freelancing and unrelated frustrations


Besides looking for regular jobs, I’ve been trawling the freelancing website Elance.com, without luck, until Thursday. Someone needed something written, I showed them how I would handle it, and they liked my style and/or my price. This job will not make me rich, famous, or sublime, but I am now officially a freelance writer.

A website wants witty product descriptions. I saw that, and thought, “I’m witty.” I ran over to Amazon.com and wrote descriptions of a couple of items picked at random from Today’s Deals, and thusly my wit was demonstrated.

Ill share one write-up that I did as a sample, because, well... anyway, heres a riff on some earrings:

Whatever the holiday, it’s always the right season to decorate your loved ones! Find the perfect shape and color for your favorite set of ears. Choose 6mm or 8mm gemstones for people with little ears or big ears. Choose round or checkerboard cut stones for people with round ears or square ears. Choose from all sorts of gems to look lovely on blue ears, red ears, green ears, or ears of any color. If you love anyone with ears, you’ve found the perfect gift for them.

Yeah, someone wanted more of that.

I spent some time writing in more detail about the project, but then I thought better of it. Going into freelancing I think I’ll make the decision now not to talk about specific clients and jobs. While there would always be something to talk about, sooner or later that something would be unprofessional to get into. I’m going to try to be professional about this. I’ve never really been able to sell myself as the flamboyant rebel or bunny-ears lawyer.

Today contained a number of frustrations. Scanner trouble, for one, although that at least resulted in me getting some use of an upright HP Scanjet I got back in college. I’d fancied I might use it for my digital art ambitions, but I soon became less ambitious in that sphere. I also stepped on the stupid thing almost immediately (My college roommates who read this will not be surprised that that could happen.) and put radial cracks across the glass pane. Luckily, it seems the cracks were not in the business end, and it still scans fine.

Long story short, it’s nice occasionally to be glad you did something that didn’t work out like you wanted back when you did it.

Other frustration, not so easily resolved: the Xbox 360 died last night in the middle of a Skyrim session. So it goes. The game froze and I got graphical bugs like I hadn’t seen since the last time I saw an NES break down. At first I was ready to blame Bethesda (again) and rant about buggy A-list games. (Is it too much to ask, that in addition to being innovative, awesome, fully-realized, etc., etc., it also work?) Every time I reset, though, the freeze came faster and faster, until the box started dying before the console even read the disc.

These things happen. It was old, and I guess it was time to go. The fact that ever since I bought it I had to give it a good whack at just the right time to make the disc tray open probably didn’t prolong it’s life any.

Right now I could do without buying a new game console, but I bit the bullet and ordered the cheapest refurbished machine I could find that looked likely to work. I’m not broke yet.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

How about that weather?

It's strange what specific memories can be called up by an exact feeling you'd forgotten ever having before. I'm going about my business when a place or a desire comes into my memory, apropos of nothing. I walked to the mall today to get myself out of the house, get some things, and treat myself to some food-court teriyaki.* (Sarku, incidentally, became a favorite commissary of mine back when I worked at the Northgate Mall. I definitely never expected one to turn up in Maryland, any more than I would expect to see a Taco Del Mar in Florida.** It feels like the Seattle embassy in Hyattsville.) Wow, I lost my train of thought. So, I was coming back from the mall, and as I was coming in the door I had the sudden urge to play a rented copy of Earthbound.

I rented Earthbound several weekends in, I think, the late summer and/or early school year of 1995. It's one of the games I just loved, and if it hadn't been for the hype around the Nintendo 64 I probably would have asked for it for that Christmas.***

I don't know exactly what brought this up. There are two sets of stairs between the street and my front door, now, just like there were then. Coming inside I felt a very particular change in temperature and odor. A specific, faintly musty smell on cool air always makes me nostalgic for my parents' basement, and that was some of it.

You might have noticed that the weather outside elicited my sense memory of a summer day on Long Island. I'm not a fan of the weather in Maryland right now. Today would have been a very pleasant day in late May, or a welcome reprieve in July, but on February 1 of a winter that's had approximately one inch of snow, I kind of resent it. Not least on Girlfriend's behalf--shouldn't she get a snow day or two. I don't think getting your third day of school off for earthquake repairs really compensates.

Until next time.

* Firefox's spell-check doesn't seem to recognize "teriyaki," but it suggests I change it to "sukiyaki." What an odd lexical phenomenon.
** There are those, too. Seattle's not that special, apparently.
*** I did get it for Christmas eventually, with Chrono Trigger. A very good year in that regard. This was back when there was a place called Funcoland, and before I realized that the price of a video game can go up as it gets older, otherwise I would have produced a more merciful Christmas list.