Well, that Woot thing turned out to be lame, all the castoffs from Toys R Us coming through a mile a minute.

So I'm getting lots of rejection letters.

I take this as a good sign, because it means I'm sending lots of stuff out, and as long as it's all moving around, I'm pretty happy.

Better than that, lately they are all Encouraging Rejections. Which means they are all personalized, and they all say "No on this, but please send me more." Which is really good stuff, very encouraging.

The problem is, the lizard part of my brain (the one that likes gratification) is whining at me, saying, "But how come they ALL get rejected, if all these people like them enough to ask for more??"

But my forebrain knows I'm getting luckier all the time.

I hope.

Don't know if you know about woot.com, but they are great. Only one thing for sale every day, at good prices and with $5 shipping, regardless if it is a small toy or a big-screen TV. Occasionally they have "woot offs", where they get rid of their extra stuff (sometimes it's what's called a Bag O' Crap, some surprise item(s) that are usually good stuff).

The best thing about Woot is their blurbs, which manage to denigrate the product they're selling, sometimes in hilarious ways, while still giving you the product info so you can make your own choices. It's fun just reading it, like a daily comic strip about consumer products. I like that someone out there in marketing-land is intelligent and self-mocking.

Today Kids' Woot is having a woot off. That's right, Kids' Woot. The concept was so successful they've started spinoffs, like Wine Woot and Sellout Woot... and Kids' Woot. And today, they're having a woot-off. Which means if you have kids it's worth having a peek several times today. Cheap stuff. Random stuff. Good stuff. Totally silly and fun. And possibly useful for Christmas.

Check it out.

Laughing squid very often makes me laugh, which is actually kind of an achievement. This one did just because... well, WTF?? Pointlessness aside, who woulda thunk of something like this? And who has the time to create it??

http://laughingsquid.com/ultimate-muscle-roller-legend/

Although it does not technically count as machinima, the images all came from video games. And that's all I know, or care to know.

Just put up a post-it on my desk. It says:

BE MEAN!
HAVE YOUR CHARACTERS ACT STUPID!

Which can be explained thus:

A. (I have to stop coddling my characters, and as Bear says, when she's stuck she makes things worse for them. I want to emulate that a little more)

B. (I have a hard time letting them make bad decisions or judgement calls)

All right, folks, it's sink or swim time...

Ideas are like little critters who flee at the slightest intrusion of another person: crying children, schedules, people asking me things. They run away and hide in little cracks and then I have to rummage, turning my mind upside-down in search of them, and often I don't find them again.

Do other people have this kind of slippery mind? I quite often have the same thing happen to plot, or characters, or what I knew was going to happen to the story: they slide away off the smooth surface of my mind, and every time I sit down I have to start from scratch again. It's a real handicap when compared to people like Jay Lake, who go around with whole novels just sitting in their heads waiting for access.

I rearranged my schedule at work, and now I've started a morning regime (something nearly every successful writer will tell you to do). I lie in bed and think about the thing I'm working on for a little while and then I get up and work on it while my mind isn't cluttered with everyday crap. My husband has started taking the kids to school and getting them ready in the morning, so I get an average of 1000 words written before 10:30. Then I take care of other business, go to work, etc. feeling great because I already did my writing for the day. So little wasted time! So little fiddling about with email and so on while I tried to get back in the groove of writing.

The weird offshoots of this are that things don't slip away so badly, and I'm sending more stuff out. The stories are more present for me, so I don't have them slide quite as far out of my mind between writings. And then in the evening, when my brain's not working so well, I can do PR stuff: researching places to send stories, stuffing envelopes, etc. All the business end of the thing. Then that gets done, too, with a minimum of fuss. It's changed my life -- at least, for the last two weeks. Cross your fingers that I can keep it up when my husband goes back for Fall quarter at his university...

But who knew it could be so easy? All it took was asking that my partner took up a very specific section of slack, and it all fell into place.

It's making me really happy.

Eerie rainbow amber sunlight, like the light through a polarized lens, filters down on everything. The wind is crazy, rattling fences and windows and making the trees outside dance: the fire is creating its own weather, making our little California town feel like Dorothy's Kansas before the tornado.

Above the Eastern horizon there is a dark smudge, like a dirty erasure, topped by billowing white clouds which trail unnaturally away southward, contrasting sharply with the brilliant blue of the ocean and the seaside sky.

We wander around our borrowed house, unable to rest, unable to take action, drifting stupidly. None of the usual comforts of home are here. I cough a lot, either from my cold or from the smoke. There is a strange taste at the back of my throat.

I may go to the blockaded road where my house is and ask if they will let me go get my antibiotics from the house, which is not at the moment in danger. The boxes of peaches, the new squash from my garden, the freshly-bought chicken all call to me. At least if I had groceries I might feel some sense of agency, of my ability to take care of myself and my family.

We got the chickens out, and the mice, and the cat. A friend in the nearest town is on vacation, so we are staying in her house until she gets home on Saturday... we are all safe, and the mother chicken and her brood cheep noisily in their plastic bin in the living room. The van is full of boxes: the Ikea kitchen for the house we are hoping to build, the photos of family life from before digital storage, a few paintings and computers and a scanner.

Outside, the ashes fall like snow, coating the cars. The sky on one side is sulphurous yellowy-grey, the feeble sun glowing at us through the huge plume of smoke which has taken over the sky. It's like a scene from Pompeii. Everything would smell like smoke, but the breeze is fresh and capricious, changing directions constantly in an effort to drive us all wild, including the hundreds of firefighters hiking up into the woods to fight the fire.

If we end up homeless we at least saved our teardrop trailer, which gives us the advantage of not being too much of an imposition for friends. The fire is a half-mile from our house, and we stare at the sky and cross our fingers that the wind won't shift the wrong way. We have a pond, and a swimming pool, and firehoses everywhere, so we are pretty defensible. Rhabyt stayed up there until 1:30 am last night, soaking everything and helping carry paintings out of my parents' house. But when it came time to sleep, no one wants to do so with the fire so imminent, so we got him back by 2. Now after 5 hours' sleep, we hang around and wait, searching for the best sites on the internet to find accurate information and maps...

Hand pain continues; I'm trying lots of things to change it, other than ordering that really expensive keyboard which would probably save me. Sigh.

Eldest daughter is just finishing up a very nice monthly project for school. She has to do a report on a fantasy place she would like to go on vacation. The kids are encouraged to invent their fantasy place and bring in a t-shirt (or t-shirt design) from that place.

Of course, Eldest decided to do it in an epistolary style, writing as if she were a person discovering an island off the coast of Brazil. She is eschewing the t-shirt in exchange for some botanical specimens, souvenirs of her travels. The year is 1806, and what ensues is six pages of careful handwriting, constituting four letters written to someone named Tim from someone named Cathrine.

My job while she's sleeping is to age the letters appropriately.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I'm not dead; just having some problems with my hands. They get tired, and they don't always like me. I've been to physical therapy and it's not clear if there's repetitive strain going on or something closer to early arthritis. In any case, it's made me pause in my writing a bit, sticking mostly to things I *must* do. Even my Cabinet of Wonders blog has suffered.

I'm looking at ways to ergonomize (?) my workplace. I'm moving off the laptop and into an external keyboard and monitor, to help me sit up straight and hold my arms right. But I'm having issues with all the external keyboards I've tried. They all have such a deep-penetrating typing action and require far more pushing down than my laptop keyboard. Anyone know of an external keyboard with a delicate touch?

When I upgraded my computer recently I discovered, after a lot of typing time, that Apple had moved the keyboard closer to the screen. It's a difference of about an inch, but it seems to make everything worse. I hunch forward or I extend my arms trying to get to the keys, which is exhausting to the arms and the pads at the bottoms of my palms (which I seem to lean more heavily on now with the keyboard so far away).

On a different note: check out this link I found when looking for audio of a Cornish accent. It's a BBC page with a map of the UK. There are dots on it, and when you click on a dot it takes you to a page for that area with recordings of people talking in that accent, discussing local words. Quite funny and great if you're a writer trying to get the cadence of an accent in your head so you can write it.

Back to the other stuff... So nice to be back here!

I've been totally neglecting my LJ lately. I feel a little as if I've been in a movie that's on fast-forward. Stupid things like bringing snack to my childrens' classes; their monthly projects; taking our mountain of trash to the dump...how can the world be so full of things, begging for attention??

That said, I got a phone call tonight. I answered with my mouth full, slightly irritated, but found I was speaking to the Writers of the Future lady, Joanie Labaqui. I took the opportunity to apologize for the last time we spoke, when she called me at work and I didn't know who she was.

I WON SECOND PLACE!!!!! 750 much-needed dollars and a trip to LA (?) in August to do a week-long workshop with the judges, big-name writers all, as far as I can tell (their website is kind of out of date, so it's hard to tell exactly who the judges were and how this works without looking back through the blog). An awards ceremony - don't know anything about that - and, apparently, good treatment by all. You really can't complain about that.

Mostly, though, it's exciting that my writing was liked, and that I came in second out of a very large number of applicants. It makes me feel good, actually getting some recognition and getting paid a hunk of money for what I wrote. And I've been told it can be a shot in the arm for your career. Hooray!

My husband has a rowing machine in the basement. I've never really taken the idea of using it seriously, but lately I've grown so out of shape... Writing does that to me, I sit for hours and write and then try to cram the rest of my life around the edges; and exercise seems to be the one thing that really just gets jettisoned, because it takes time and you can't multitask very well.

Yesterday, though, I had a breakthrough. I decided, after I'd written about 500 words and was still stuck in the Machiavellian coils of my unfinished novel, that I wanted to go use the rowing machine. So I did.

At first it was hard and awkward: how does one coordinate all the different parts? Do you pull the thing to your chest? Do you lean back at the end? How far? I decided to just decide on my own method and then stick to it. I kept staring at how many strokes, what my heartbeat was, etc... It was boring, and the basement is no great shakes at a view.

Then I had the idea of closing my eyes and thinking about the tangled mess that is my novel. And you know, it worked! I forgot all about the fact that I was exercising, forgot in fact to be awkward, and just sort of meditated on the storyline. Not only did I get 20 minutes of exercise in, I figured out a whole bunch of important stuff about the plot.

And today, I feel much, much better than I have in a long time: I can feel my muscles. I like feeling them, even if they're a little sore: they make me feel like I really exist, and like I'm strong. It's a good feeling.

Now if I can only keep remembering how good that feeling really is...

This is wonderful. Two separate universes collide...

Thanks to Crooked Timber.

Wow.

I feel like I'm coming back out into the light after a really long time living in a tunnel. I finished things. I'm proud.

Let's see, there's the article for Make Magazine, the interview with intimidatingly older/wiser but wonderful artist for that article, the rewrite of a story for a magazine who actually sent it back to me marked up, and now the academic paper with Power Point presentation which I will be presenting to a huuuuge academic art professionals conference in February.

They are all off my plate. Whew.

And just in case I was starting to feel that my life was doomed to be about nonfiction, I got a very confusing phone call at work yesterday to tell me that Writers of the Future have chosen me for the top ten finalists in their contest. What??

I thought they were trying to sell me something, at first. That's usually the kind of phone calls I get at work: "You could get this great new networking system..." So I was less enthusiastic at first, but then the lady mentioned The Candy Store, and I started to realize. Then I suddenly thought how this was the same story I had reworked for the magazine (above), and I got kinda sweaty. Which version was better? I told the woman I had rewritten it, uh, did she want the rewrite? And she answered, "No, honey, this is it." She must have thought I was crazy - most writers would have been jumping up and down, and in fact I'm sure that is the fun part of her job. I did thank her, though, and muster some happiness at least, to please her and to convince myself I wasn't crazy - she had such a happy color in her voice, I knew this was a clue.

But it seems to be my destiny to react strangely to things. I think I was still in the tunnel, thinking my tunnel thoughts. Somehow, though, her ray of sunshine penetrated my brain and after I hung up I actually did jump up and down, right there in the elementary school hallway, with the secretary wondering what had gone wrong in my brain.

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage/relationship (or if you think you might be someday), and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

I am doing a Happy Rain Dance and grinning like a fool. This is the first *real* rain we've had since March. The chickens are confused and we are running around with tarps, but the smell is wonderful and I am rubbing my hands in anticipation of actual green, growing things dripping and flowering - rather than dry, dusty deadness. Sunshine be damned - I want rain, rain, and living things!

This quote from someone who wrote into the Daily Dish, which if you didn't know is a blog written by a man who is a smart, small "c" conservative:

"You were surely right when you wrote that both candidates looked tired. Obama, to me, did look and act tired. But for some reason, I found this utterly compelling and reassuring. It evoked the following scenario for me: There's been a tragedy in the middle of the night, and the shattered family gathers in the emergency room. There's fear, panic, and exhaustion. And Obama reminded me of a type of person who, despite his haggard complexion, would gather everyone around him and say to the family: 'Look, I don't know if Mom's gonna be alright. But we got to stick together as a family and hope. Now, I want you to go home and try to get some rest. I will call you as soon the doctor tells me something, and we'll decide what we're gonna do. Okay? We gotta stay strong and hold on together.'

"I haven't seen any politician exude that type of calm control. I might not like all of his policies, but I thought: 'This is the guy who needs to be in White House.' More and more, I've been forced to admit your point: Obama is, without doubt, one of the most talented political leaders this country has ever produced."

Nicely said.

My friend's son's memorial is today.

Last weekend we went to my mother-in-law's house to visit with her and my sister, who were mourning the death of their ex-husband/father, a few days previously.

The cement plant in the tiny town where my children go to school is putting Chromium-6 into the air (low levels, but worthy of notification). Town meetings, talking with testers, and so on. My husband, who is on the school board, is spending far too much time researching it and dealing with hysterical parents who didn't go to the meetings. It's eating our lives.

The economy is tanking. For us this means we are watching the Australian dollar, where we have our nest egg, go from 96 to 69 cents. We are watching the house we were going to build disappear. I'm just into hanging on and waiting for the dollar to tank enough that the Aussie dollar will mean something again (Sorry; not intending to be a vulture). We're also watching retirement funds go negative.

The election... well, we all know that tension. ARGH! That's all I can say about it - it's all terrifying, especially the things the Republicans are doing to disqualify Democrats from voting.

BUT: My children are wonderful, there are still tomatoes in the garden, and I'm writing like crazy on a new project that fills me with joy. So that's something.

Anyone know any good, trustworthy comic book artists I could hook up with? Not looking for a superhero type, more of a Castle Waiting/Locas/Bone type look. (No skintight suits here)...

I'm researching fingerprints, in biology and fingerprinting known as "friction ridges" or "papillary ridges" - and I need help with something. Lots of places talk about them helping keep the hands (or feet) from slipping, but I can't find any reference to the exact mechanism. Is it friction? Adhesion? Cohesian? Suction? Or some kind of mild Van der Waal force, like in geckos' feet?

Geeks, show me your stuff!

Thanks, all.

So after the long soliloquy on Domestic Argh Factor, guess what happened tonight? Husband went out for the evening, and 9-year-old says, "Mama, go watch a movie. I'll make dinner for me and my sister."

Hey, who am I to complain? I went in my room and watched Season 1, Episode 2 of Heroes (it was all the VPers who made me want to try it, I'd never heard of it before then), with a bowl of Fast-O Indian food and a glass of wine, while they ate chicken soup and sliced tomatoes over comic books in the kitchen.

Let me be clear: I have *never* watched a grownup movie before the kids were in bed before.

Then, later, without complaining, said angelic 9-year-old helped load the dishwasher. No more dishes!

Even later, they changed the sheets on their own beds (with a little help at the corners).

Lordy!! Dust bunnies be damned; I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or at least, until teenage hits. Better enjoy it while I can...!