Time flexing like a whore

Too little of it, need more to look at a picture of black and white fur. Nights are desolate places in my mind, no one watching, no one purring.

And too much of it. How much longer obliging this hobby-turned-into-job-and-hating-the-hobby. I had so many dreams, had so many break throughs.

Can I go back over twelve years, when the deadline was tomorrow and I wasn't even 30? Where I'd work a full day, come home and tend the flowers and weeds, and still find energy and time to spend with my friends who now sometimes keep me awake anight with their urgent questions. Always the same questions, as it is. Where will we go? How will we end? Tell us, write it all down...

Is that you, CowWatcher?
What was the name you called me? (wind - called - crow - lift head - lonely)

Spring

There's no fresh eyes like your own after taking a break from writing for whatever reason.

Existence of flow, and happiness, proven when you encounter well written scenes that you don't remember writing. Might look like modesty failing, saying such, but imagining some other genius writer hacked my computer to patch up my stories might be more than modesty fail alone.

All that was planned is either filtered and crystallized or erased.  In this time has a no nonsense, firm and patient hand.Choices I hesitated to make, now obvious.

Starving the Cow Watcher may have shriveled my language skills, but it seems I came out of the dark tunnel with a map in hand. Places I needed to go if only I knew the route lay waiting.

Let's go.

Where did February's rant go?

Ummm, into the private slice of life, digiblips, that's where. When life throws me lemons, I like to throw my dingy old juicer back at it, screw the lemonade.

Then things get messy, and it takes a whoooole lot of efforts to put things back together again.

No, seriously, things just keep cascading for the moment, and the balance between fencing stuff(1), life stuff(2), Russian stuff, work stuff (3) and supernormal daily toil(4) is very tight.


So like, I've spent all my ranting energy at walls and the hubby, and a tiny little bit at the cats (their expression of sympathy is slightly better than that of the walls). I've squared things with life and bought a new juicer. Let's not rock this boat by even thinking of making time for writing (5).

(1) everything from me fencing to fencing federation related things like me volunteering to help out with the accounting, because, really, what would I do with all that free time? *le sigh*
(2) things to do with dad
(3) busy busy stress with a good helping of conniving self-serving bitches and managerial idiots
(4) laundry, grocery, cooking, cleaning, and generally managing the necessary check-ups (dad, cats, car...)

(5) Though truth be told, nobody can stop the Cow Watcher. I've penned down a couple of pages worth of revision-paragraphs for Barynn, a tweak or two for Dreams of Cold Stone, and a dialogue for the UTA trilogy that has opened up much needed perspectives.

Actually, that's already a pretty damned lot of writing for not-writing. Thanks for pointing that out! I knew I could depend on you digiblips to turn my lemonade into Pepsi Max.

21 days

21 days later
I've got this ear infection bug pretty much conquered, no matter the allies it brought along (renewed sinusitis, flu and the common cold as finalizer).
In between the reading and sleeping and dragging myself through the days, I've managed to renew my efforts on the Barynn Companion. Some while ago I had decided on the form (geographical data, with history, biology and whatnot attached), and now I'm about half-way with gathering all the bits of data from my notes, digital or ink&paper, and integrating and checking all that into a single document. What makes this job huge is not the amount of data but the alertness I must display for typos (since part of the job consists of rebuilding the dictionaries for the spellchecker) and misidentifications (which was one of the main reasons to have a Companion). While I'm happy of the progress, I must admit that the pure administrative side of the job is terrible boring. Poke-yourself-in-the-eye boring.

Meanwhile ideas flit in and out the dark recesses where the Cow Watcher watches the Dungeon-Crawlers, throwing helpful hints in my face that will help delete over 20 pages from Barynn 1 while I'm dead-set on not working any further on any Barynn until the Companion is finished. Scritchyscratch with the pen in the little notebook and hope I remember to check my new set of notes before I start editing.

Belgium, the inventors of redundancy in politics.
And while all this happens, Belgium is still the political faerieland it was, with nothing moving, nothing changing, politicians trying to put the holy fear of bankruptcy in our hearts (to gloss over the fact they stockpiled debts to bail out banks that are now back to their regular business of golden handshakes instead of helping the small and medium business survive), and the people being mostly to busy calling each other rotten fish on facebook and other online media instead of thinking before they speak, and picking up the good ol' pitchfork and show them idjuts what democracy means.

Paris

was fun, exhausting, and it was great to see that even on the scale of a world championship event organizers can manage to screw up pretty big. But there was great fencing to see, and quite some surprises.

Things I'll remember of Satur/Sabreday: the American Homer who was up against a French opponent twice in a row (first Apithy, and what a match that was!, then Lopez), which means having the whole of the Grand Palais, as in hundreds of Frenchies cheering their fencer on and pin-drop silence when you score a point, and just marching on. That's quite some mental strength there. And of course the beautiful final: the German Limbach (who's 194cm but uses this length with surprising elegance and explosiveness) against the Korean Won (who can jump impressively high, probably over Limbach if he really wants to) and Won won.

Spent Sunday in my favorite Parisian museum, l'Hotel National Des Invalides, though the expo on the Tsars was a bit thin. But for all you digiblips that like to see weapons of all sorts, real fighting ones to beautifully inlaid hunting weapons and honorary sabres and uniforms and half the collection of Vauban's architectural models (the other half is kept in Lille) and also a good expo on the world wars: get there early, and you can easily while away a whole day in whatever period you like, and your ticket remains valid for the day (so you can leave and do something else if you're the kind of digiblip that could actually get enough of weaponry).

Monday was Epee day at the Championships, and though not my weapon, saw some great stuff too, even if our favorites managed to shoot themselves in the foot whenever they could. Had to leave before the finale to catch our Thalys, and then found out that the finalists we predicted did everything the other way around. Silly epeists...

On the writing front: on the train to the international station of Brussels Cow Watcher handed me an excellent solution for a problem that came out of something it thought up for part 3 in the Barynn trilogy and which has been bugging me for a very long time. Alas not an easy and simple solution, but damnit, a good one.

Digiworld abuzz and other thoughts

Oh no! It's the end of an era, like a death of the party, the community is dying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What's all this talk about death of an era? Don't you silly digiblips know that if you hang around long enough in cyberspace everything comes back, even when it's supposed to be dead?

First I believed this was because in this new millennium even retro is retro-recycled. We do retro so well we're remaking shit before it's made!

Then I thought, maybe it's because the community keeps bits alive like zombie raising necromancers.

But now I understand: cyberspace's got a hell of an echo.

NB: I'm sorta reacting to this and this and this and this ...

Interjection of random silliness: whenever I click through to Larry's blog I think of Gonads & Strife. And  my mind associates this with the death of an era, and somehow quite fittingly, the fall of two towers. Maybe one day, I'll talk about that. Gonads & Strife forever, man.

Anyways, there's been some hissyfitting over some dude (no offense) writing an article on fantasy and postmodernism, with all sorts of people (also no offense) commenting whilst trying to be so much wiser than the previous blogue(r) about the value of the article and postmodernism.

Seriously? Are you kidding me? Here I thought we were safely moving away from that old dead horse and entering the newer, though obviously not quite so imaginative, era of post-postmodernism. But maybe this *is* post-postmodernism at work: everybody's so stuck in/on postmodernism that the only way forward is to keep reinventing what it means to be postmodern. Ad infinitum. Fire up that retro-recycler dudes.

The way I see it, six decades and counting is a whole lot of time to react to modernism. The only place where postmodernism isn't dead is in philosophy, any kind of taste in philosophy. All the rest is resisting and rehashing what came before, which is a natural mechanism in any kind of movement, in any kind of creative act, whether it is in body and mind postmodern or not. Just like modernism reacted to what came before. I, for one, am done flogging a dead horse over and over again. Let's just skip the whole P-mod and move on.

So anyways. Here I am thinking about that Bruce Sterling quote on cyberspace cuz it came up in a convo with the hubby yesterday ("Cyberspace is the 'place' where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones.").

And I'm thinking of how people are always so surprised when people die in train stations or other busy transit nodes without anybody noticing; it doesn't surprise me, train stations are perfect for spies to meet, thieves to earn their living, terrorists to plant bombs: not because there are too many people packed upon each other for any one to notice something strange, but because there are too many people on automatic pilot zooming through this non-place, this haven of anonymity.

And then I'm thinking maybe it's not so much the anonymity, but the fact that a train station has to the people in the daily commute transit as much no real physical existence as cyberspace. It's that place where mind does one thing, while meat somewhere else does something else. That place where strangers meet, spend daily hours together for months on end, and then suddenly the "community" falls apart as all participants walk away, as if they were living in some collective hallucination. Very faerie adventure like. It's a weird fractured and fractalised reality. X-nay on the P-mod, 'kay?

 

And whereas in faerie-tales there would be a source, or a lady of the lake, or a burning bush marking the border of the here and the other place, there's no tollbooth except for the simple everyday items, like a keyboard or a ticket dispenser. Not sure if things would be different if there were things like ladies of the chips and stuff. Like nine sisters.

And this makes me want to watch Avalon again for the nth time, but I loaned out the DVD and I can't recall to whom. Ain't the real physical world a bitch like that?

Duplicity

So, once in a while my mind produces an ethical brainfart. I'm thinking it comes from a cousin of the Cow Watcher, since the idea/question comes to me in the same way as most of Cow Watcher's ideas for plots, stories or characters: not quite out of the blue, but finding a basis in a strange concoction of unrelated subjects occupying my mind. I can usually trace down pedigrees or roots of such light bulbs (or halo spotlights in the face interrogation style, depending) but most of the time I don't even want to.

The latest ethical brainfart is:
So, Stephanie Meyer. She's famous. She earns lots of money with crappy writing concerning a subject she confessed (or self-proclaimed) to know nothing about.
I can see where an agent and/or editor grasps the novelty of her ideas with both hands, but surely at one point one of those "professionals" must have also grasped the ideas that while the books are aimed at a public that will easily forgive crappy writing and the novelty would easily make the series a major hit (ka-ching!), the backlash at Meyer's creation and person would be enormous. Let's not forget that the backlash was already huge on J.K.Rowling who at least is a better writer.
The main ethical problem being: agents and editors are all about their darling authors and how they really like to treat them well and have long relationships with them and such, but the Meyer case seems to prove duplicity in motive. While I do find some amusement in the ridicule surrounding Twilight, some part of me wonders about Meyer: Is money enough to ignore (or pay the shrink bills or medication needed to get to the point of being able to ignore) that for every loving fan you have a hateful fanatic? That for every website expressing total love to your creation there's two finding all new ways to mock it? Loving fans are already an image from nightmare hell to me, hating fanatics are ten times worse. How does she get up and/or look in the mirror every morning? Somewhere along the line, one of those professionals that love their author so should have explained the dangers of being a bit of a deluded twit to Meyer, methinks.
Yup, duplicity. Not unlike the duplicity of the claim that they really hope to find excellent authors of novels that will survive the centuries (a formidable task considering the enormous slushpile), but they are simply forced to settle time and again for whatever sells. And this methinks is the logical consequence when you have agents work on commission whilst unable to dictate the market. Or something. It's a bit of a complicated brainfart anyway.