i don't have to sell my soul

On the theory that post-novel ennui is inevitable, and I really only have one more short story to finish in the near future, I did a bad thing.

I ordered a computer game.

I pretty much get bored with shoot 'em ups in heartbeats, but I have a longstanding fondness for Sim Anything and Civilization. Which means this was a natural.

Yes, it's Interactive Sim Unintelligent Design.

The critters dance. And you can paint them fancy colors.

...I'll see you all in 2009.

Somewhere, larbalestier is jealous and doesn't know why.

Today I learned yet another reason why I fail bestsellerdom.

Because I will happily spend all day writing fraught and angsty conversation in which the characters thrash tiny points of ethics to death with great fervor, but romance bores me to snot.

All right, internets, entertain me. ;-)

 Anyone have any background on this? 

Oof. I can tell I climbed hard yesterday and pushed my limits, because my forearms and shoulders ache ferociously today. I did drag myself out of bed this morning and go for what we laughingly call a run, which means I ran for 8 minutes and then just walked out the rest of the two miles, because my calf muscles were also killing me. Anyway, now I am ensconced on the couch with cat and laptop and comforter and coffee, and I'm supposed to be finishing Smoke & Mirrors, but I may suspend operations for a brief nap. Because lo, I am groggy bear. And also, with the full-body ache.

Poor meat. I make it work so hard.

5 miles to Lothlorien.

3,277 words for the day, in two sessions. Really good writing day, and I am finishing this novella tomorrow.

It was a pretty good climbing day, too. I resent the easiest of the new routes, which can't be much more than like a 5.5 or so, but it's overhung in ways that make it interesting. And I like climbing it, because it proves to me that I am getting stronger, and better control of my body. I also sent the wall I flamed out on Wednesday--I think it's a 5.7 or a 5.7 plus--and managed to get a little ways up on two harder routes. If the one I did better on is really a 5.8, as several people seem to think it is, then that's the best I've ever done on a 5.8. Well, we'll try it again on Monday.

Also, I tried one in the corner with the crack, and have no idea how the heck to make a transition I need to make. Also, I watched a couple of people do the yellow route that was defeating me Wednesday, and I see how to do it, but I don't know if I have the go and the psychological fortitude to make the move I need to make to get past where I was stuck. It's not quite dyno, but it's definitely a jump.

I guess we'll see on Monday.

Still, I am improving. And all new routes is fun. You learn stuff.

And on that note, to bed. Night, guys.

Gah. Chaz is making me do physics homework for one line of introspection. Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz.

[22:17] stillsostrange: Write my scene, then
[22:17] matociquala: I have a worse fate.
[22:18] matociquala: I have to write a transition.
[22:18] stillsostrange: booo
[22:21] matociquala: Oh, apparently my transition is just Todd saying "God, I hate stakeouts."
[22:21] matociquala: You know, Duke is really nice to have around as a character.
[22:21] katallen: heh
[22:21] matociquala: He understands narrative.
[22:21] matociquala: And he's *Helpful* about moving it.
[22:21] stillsostrange: heee
[22:21] stillsostrange: I'll take a dozen
[22:21] matociquala: *shares*
[22:22] tanaise: It's all about the helpitude.
[22:22] matociquala: Yeah, Todd, you're right. I don't need a scene setting up the stakeout.
[22:22] tanaise: Also, it's about remembering to wash this lettuce when I make a salad again tomorrow.
[22:22] matociquala: I just need the readers to know that  we are about to have a long boring stakeout.
[22:22] matociquala: Which they will not be shown.
[22:23] matociquala: *cue montage of Todd bouncing a rubber ball against the wall while Brady paces and the pile of Snickers wrappers by Chaz's chair grows ever taller.*
=

Thanks scarlet_ibis_ for the heads up, and Solo's Kotchka.
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[14:31] stillsostrange: Where does this scene go?
[14:31] matociquala: How does this scene start?
[14:32] stillsostrange: "Don't you want it?"
[14:32] stillsostrange: (but is not as porny as that might be)
[14:32] matociquala: ...
[14:33] matociquala: Okay, since currently I have in this room, Reyes, Todd, Brady, Villette, the CotW, and two victims and their 7 month old twins...
[14:33] matociquala: ...
[14:33] matociquala: brainwash pls.
[14:33] stillsostrange: snerk
[14:34] stillsostrange: This book needs more porn

Yes, you all can stop telling me I've been Thogged. I know. And while I can't complain about the attention, I'm becoming obsessed by a related question. You see, I keep looking at that sentence, and now I need to poll the audience, because I can't see what's wrong about it. Dependent clause still refers back to the subject of the sentence, right, and not the intervening adverbial phrase?

Sentence in question is:

The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the others that his father hadn't mended in fifteen years gone past.

Test the sentence by removing the adverbial phrase:

The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the others that his father hadn't mended in fifteen years gone past.

Let's take out the prepositional phrase too.

The stool wobbled under her, the one leg shorter than the others that his father hadn't mended in fifteen years gone past.

No, that still looks right. Am I misremembering my grammar that badly?

...I think I need a new career...

Obviously, now that I have unboxed my new steamer (the same as the old steamer, a Black and Decker that I originally got when I still lived in the garret on Charter Oak Street with ladegard, which conservatively puts its age at ~12 years, so I guess replacing a thirty-dollar piece of equipment that I use almost daily it isn't such a blow as all that), made tea, cleaned out the hutch, bagged up about twenty-five old empty tea tins and put them away in the hall closet, and sorted and thrown away a cache of old mail from 2007, the next step is to take a nice long shower, because I still have not written a word.

Come on, boys, give me some sugar.

This sorting and cleaning has led me to a couple of discoveries.

1) Oh, yeah, the ice cream maker. That's where that went. Tomorrow I should get peaches and make ice cream while peaches are still in season.

2) Yes, I know I have a birthday coming up. Please, don't buy me tea. I know, it seems like an easy gift idea, and you can tell yourself "Well, at least she can use the tins." Except really it's not. Because I'm terribly fussy about what tea I drink, and I generally buy my own, mail order, in vast quantities from www.uptontea.com and www.stashtea.com, and I don't drink tea in bags except for when I am at conventions or one Sunday a month when I go to Fall River for a D&D game, and see above, the ~25 empty tea tins I just cleaned out of the hutch. (It might have been thirty.)

No, really, please god. No more tea. Because if you send it, I will guiltily attempt to drink it, and that will keep me from getting through the vast quantities of tea already in my tea cabinet (Yes, I have an entire tea cabinet) which is slowly going stale because I keep guiltily drinking other tea I don't actually like as much. Exceptions to this rule: kelliem, the Russian stuff you sent was awesome. Of course, I bought more when I finished it, and haven't gotten through the second tin yet because of Tea Guilt....

Vicious cycle.

3) I have got to break down and buy a dust buster, because the floor robot does not do crevices or corners or the bit behind the power strip under the computer table. I keep asking my mother for a dust buster for my birthday, and instead she buys me tea.*

4) Nor do I actually need a new teapot, though I do keep wishing the blue one from Target would break so I can get one I like more. Alas, the old hideous ugly white china one with the giant cabbage roses and the cracked-and-much-glued lid, which I did like in spite of it looking like the pride of your great-grandmother's china collection, broke instead. This is not really a tragedy, however, as I still have the glass one with the infuser basket that's good for green and white tea (the infuser basket does not allow black tea to expand sufficiently, however, and you can't use it without the basket because of the design of the lid) and the blue one from Target with the stupid hollow handle that gets hot, and the black cast iron Japanese tetsubin. And the tiny little black one-serving one that I am pretty sure stillnotbored sent me as a housewarming present, unless that was also kelliem.

In my lifetime, I have now broken three teapots, I think. I had the Japanese one with the black and red dragons that I bought in Provincetown when The Jeff and I were dating, which had a long and happy life as netcurmudgeon-and-my Midnight Teapot of choice. (I still have two of the cups that went with it, though.) I had the plain green earthenware one very much along the lines of a Brown Betty, which held about ten cups of tea and saw me through two apartments and part of my stay in Las Vegas, before I realized that it was mineralizing around the cracks and I should probably throw it away before the day when I filled it with ten cups of boiling water and it exploded. And there was the abovementioned Hideous Monstrosity with the cabbage roses, which was a gift from my former mother in law and made excellent tea, and poured really well.

Yes. I'm hard on the furniture. I am still on my first electric kettle, though. At umpteen years and counting.

And now it's time for that shower, and then possibly some further displacement activity, or maybe actual work.

...nah.

---

*This joke unfair to my mother, who actually has not bought me tea in quite some time.

Yes, it's September, and after spending a good part of August sleeping with the windows open, I am back to huddling in the A/C waiting for the weather to break. 80 degrees and 90% humidity already at 8:54 AM. I tell you what.

The cat appears to have had a fine night of rearranging me last night, judging by the glitterballs on my pillow and the kink in my neck. Thank god she's an indoor cat, so I get glitterballs rather than bits of vole. It's a mark of esteem, really. As is her current parade along the back of the couch singing arias and rubbing against my neck.

The good news is, climbing with the Jeff tonight after all, and if I can get enough work done, I may go down a little early and work on a bouldering problem. Of course, I am signally failing to get that work done currently. I claim it's because I'm waiting to figure out whose POV this next scene should be in. I got ~2400 words of "Smoke & Mirrors" yesterday, though, putting the total word count at 17,777 (isn't that cute? I didn't even do that on purpose.) which means that I've gotten four days in a row of at least two thousand words. That makes me feel good, and also like my writer-brain is functioning properly again.

I expect I will finish this thing, in draft at least, by Monday. I have the Awful Troof to write, and then the Climactic Space-Battle and the Earth-Shattering Kaboom.

Remnants of TS Hanna are expected to come through over the weekend, bringing rain and cooler temperatures; this will work out well for the running schedule. (I like running in the rain; my bulky heat-retaining northern European/Slavic body likes external cooling.)

Yesterday's only exercise was archery, at which I stank; I let my blood sugar get a little too low and was having stability problems. Including a moment of epic fail where I let my release slip while still drawing and put an arrow into the sheetrock eight feet off the floor. Le sigh. Fortunately, we were on the walk-up range, so I did not have to do the Walk Of Shame in front of the crowd over on the automatic range.

Of course, then I can come on the internets and tell six thousand of my closest friends all about it.

Right. Time to get this scene written and also drink some tea.

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I am aktually totes in lust with Tim Roth right now.

He is many good things like...

( Lord Mayor of Twinky Town )

Someone I can legitimately slash with David Sylvian when he looked like that because they had the same management in the early Eighties and Roth lived in Lewisham and Sylvia's family lived there.


( Totes OTP with Gary Oldman )

I've been looking him up on YouTube and he made this film called Captives, where he plays a man in prison for murdering his wife who  has temporo mandibular joint syndrome (which I have lol) who enters into a 'forbidden' lol affair with a prison dentist played by Julia Ormand and I really want to see it. The sex scene is on YouTube and is brilliant, even if all the preamble to it is totes unbelievable it has a skein of fascinating lol for it's soft porn plotting.

CAPTIVES SEX SCENE

I mean watch Ormand in that clip being all repressed, stiff and austere (lol she even has a bun and a white coat), literally telegraphing her desperat, desperat desire for peen with every flicker of cool, icy friendliness. Whilst Roth is trying to be all swagger and roguish charm and failing in being half way seksi because he and Ormand have absolutely NO CHEMISTRY WHATSOEVER. Curiously when they get to sexxing  though it's like kaboooom the sexiest thing evah but god is the build up horrible.

Maybe it's all horrible and I am hideously biased to see the sex as sexxi because I think Roth is sexxi but how would I know?

Also from the bits of Rob Roy that are on YouTube (I haven't seen the film) I enjoy him playing the sadistic fop so much that it almost makes me want to buy it. Even though I can already tell from the trailer that it is a hideous, horror of Hollywood over simplification of history and human psychology. Seriously the Neeson as Rob Roy bit of that film looks so fucking sappy and horrible I can never imagine how anyone would watch it let alone root for him from the clips I have seen. Next to Roth his character is so dull and yet of course Roth dies in the end....

Withness

First Roth sword fight

Roth vs Liam Neeson sword fight

"It's been years since I buggered a boy and in my defense I thought him a girl at the point of entry."

Also I love him for these quotes

The worst haircut he ever had? "I saw Rosemary's Baby fell in love with Mia Farrow, went to the barber and asked for a Mia Farrow cut. It looked fucking stupid. Next question."

"Do you reckon Prince Andrew's a good fuck? I have my doubts."

"Prince Charles brought out a book, and in it said, 'I never really loved (Diana)?' Well, fuck you, mister, because we paid for that big fucking wedding you had. You could have said something, you could have saved us some cash."

"Acting, it's what the poofs do,"

He related a couple of interesting anecdotes, the most intriguing being one about the Four Rooms wrap party, during which he got drunk and put on Madonna's black dress and sang "Like a Virgin". "Madonna had this really, really good black velvet dress and she wasn't at this party we had, so I wore it instead..."

Is it true you told David Bowie to quit acting when he was trying to get you onboard for Absolute Beginners? "Probably, I used to be a little less guarded about what I said back then. But he's a nice fella..."  - lol immune to Bowie charm?

"I tried to play guitar in a couple of bands but I was so awful -- even at a time when you could be awful, I was beyond."
( Roth as disembodied hed )

Basically I bought Emmet's Mark for 99p, having seen and found him sexxi in the Hulk and I find his scenes with Gabriel Byrne in that film so dark and sexxy - gah Byrne is hawt too. Then I began to read the excellent daddykink Reservoir Dogs slash fic written by bitterfig and borrowed Reservoir Dogs from my brother and lol ever since I have been in love with him.

There is this site full of his interviews in the press and reading them is the funniest most revelatory thing ever because all the women's magazines say things like he's a bad boy and paint his portrait in a shower of words like defense and camoflauge that make it so obv that he is not anything like the roles he plays or the way that most interviews/articles present him as. I find it the best thing that they are pleased to find he isn't like that there because I mean surely the world has outgrown the image of the ultra male as a man who has to be 'ard and violent.

Then I read men's mag and see the interesting way that they buy into all that bullshit and try to uphold it. Totally fooled by the visage and devastated at finding that his image as sold through his typecasting as some psychotic, rough, hard man is largely a habitual facade he wears to cover a vulnerably soft psyche.

as an example I offer this LOADED (MEN'S MAG) ARTICLE/INTERVIEW as an example of the many like this.

Sample quotes of fail:

"His tattoo looks just like that Scouse bird's one in the Spice Girls. He's only 5 foot 7. That's short arse country. And his accent has a sort of mid-Atlantic posh Englishness to it. Suddenly before me is a bloke from Dulwich with a ponce's voice who I could probably beat in a fight."

Why do men asess one another in terms of whether they could fight one another? Do they realistically? If you do then I would suggest that you have something wrong with you.

Do you own a gun?
"No."
Do you think you need one?
"No."
Why don't you want one?
"Guns scare me. I don't like working with them, I don't like using them in films, I hate them. I think they bring bad luck."
Could you shoot someone?
"I don't know. I'd find it hard enough to hit somebody let alone fire a gun at them. I can play violent but I wouldn't want to be that."
See what I mean?

That see what I mean bit at the end is the writer's addition, proof that Roth is a ponce...clearly lesser than expected...

Roth wanders perilously close to luvvy country as he talks of his profession. He names actors he's worked with, some of whom I've never heard of, and tells of each being "great" or "lovely".

REAL MEN DONT USE THE WORDS GREAT OR LOVELY AWROIGHT ROTH!!! DAMNIT GET THIS MAN THE MAN MANUAL AT ONCE!!

The writer is just ceaselessly on this quest to prove that he is a NANCY just because he isn't violent and instead of being like yay that's really refreshing and admirable and the best way to be he's like srsly disappointed because he should totes be a 'proper' man y'all and lol that attitude is so fucking tired and redundant. I despise all things that say that men or women have to act a certain way to be accepted which is why I spend so much time laughing at men who are like constantly like lol IM REALLY MANLY I AM.  See from reading his articles I thought that Roth himself was like that but it's getting clearer to me that in fact it's just that the male media just channels all their own weird gender attitudes through him.

Like they constantly ask him questions that dwell on stereotypically 'male' behaviours to try to cling onto their own masculinity. They present him in this light as if he's one of them but he isn't necessarily. Or really at all.

GAH

AH MEN, "WHEN WILL YOU ACCEPT YOURSELVES FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE", THEN AGAIN NEVER CHANGE BECAUSE YOUR ANGST PROVIDES ME WITH SUCH LOLZ!!!!


----------------
Listening to: Drug Addix - Gay Boys In Bondage

[12:03] tanaise: Aw. A newt used to be an ewt.
[12:03] tanaise: I want an ewt!
[12:03] matociquala: and an adder used to be a nadder.
[12:03] matociquala: poor ewts and nadders.
[12:04] tanaise: I don't care about nadders or naperons or numpires.
[12:04] tanaise: but ewtes and eke names
[12:04] tanaise: that's just sad.
[12:05] matociquala: (I am so blogging this)

[12:16] matociquala: *turns tanaise into an ewte*

---

Yeah well, I went through the existing parts of this story and tidied them up, adding ~213 words in the process (Lo, I underwrite my drafts) and now I am staring at the scene I am meant to be writing, and even though I know what happens in it, I am completely stuck as to how to write it.

I guess that means I should eat some more jelly beans.

Come on, Todd. You love having POV. Say something scene-stealing. 

So when I got the news about Signy, I was coming back from the climbing gym--our first visit since they closed last week to repaint and re-route the entire front room.

They've made a very nice space, with warm red climbing walls that look like parts of the Southwest where I used to live. [cvillette, you'd like it. Looks like the Valley of Fire.) Only a very few routes are up--I tried three, but could only manage one of them (I got two moves up another and needed one more damned foothold, and then got stuck two moves from the top of the final one and thrashed there for twenty minutes or so before I took pity on my belayer [this is a lie; what really happened is that I scralped several layers of callus off my fingers and then burned out my forearms to the point where I couldn't hold on any more, and dammit, it's not a strength issue, it's a technique issue, and that pisses me off] and asked to be dirted.) and none of them are rated yet, so there's a lot of just random adventuring going on. Which is kind of cool. Because you look at a route and think, "Maybe I could do that."

...and then you try and find out, well, er, Maybe no.

Me: "But there's no blood! It's just lymph!"
Alisa: "Hardcore."

She makes me laugh.

Next time, dammit.

Also, there's a couple of other routes I want to try, though I think at least one of them is way too hard for me.