Defect

It was really great having David over to visit, with meals and a trip out to Arcosanti, but the poor guy had some kind of monkey virus and was struggling with physical misery. So, should you encounter him on his road trip to Switzerland, do offer him some tea.

Speaking of sick, there's my laptop. It doesn't boot. It just sits there trying to boot, never quite making it. I'm taking it over to the Apple Store in a few minutes to see if anything can be done. I'm pretty sure I've got everything critical backed up, at least, but that laptop is my only computer. It's my music and work and communication. It's my life. And I'd rather have my life back than a copy of it downloaded to some temporary location, which really is uncomfortably close to living in a Philip K. Dick story.

Mine tastes like purple

For various reasons -- some unavoidable travel and inconveniently timed broken bones, mostly -- I've skipped the last few tests at my martial arts school, about five or six months worth of them. But tonight, no travel, no broken bones, so I was able to test, and it was a challenging and exhausting and occasionally silly experience. We started off with an hour of warm-ups and basic punching and kicking, which left me a winded and sweaty mess, on account of all the jumping and exercise and kicking and punching without cessation. Then we moved into doing combinations and kempos and breaking free of grabby people, which was easier than the first hour, because you get about ten seconds of rest while other people in your line of four people are doing their techniques. Then, onto forms. I did my form without much in the way of grace, but with a lot of energy and enthusiasm and martial arts screaming. I'm pretty good at the screaming Then, sparring. I sparred a guy the same rank as me, and he beat me, but only by one point, so no shame there. Then, I fought my instructor while fastened together by our waists with a pair of belts tied end to end, kicks only. He kicked me a lot. Then, I fought a guy while we were on our knees, kicks only again, which means things basically devolved into a couple of guys rolling around on the ground and kicking each other.

So, after a good three hours of tiring exertion and very banged up shins, I finally got my purple belt. Our school's purple belts used to be more of a lavender, but I guess they switched suppliers, cuz my new belt is a real purty purple.

Came home and found David M., on his way to Switzerland, in the apartment. I groaned at him feebly.

I think my prostate just grew

Oh, man, I wrote a whole journal entry full of critical self-analysis and baseball metaphors, but I've decided to spare you, my fellows, and I will just note that I done gone and got older again, on account of my mom having birthed me on this day, only it was decades ago and I don't remember it so well.

Five more

I got tagged by Maureen, but I'd already done the Five Weird Habits meme, and I begged off doing it again. But actually, I do have a lot of weird habits:

1. If I see a raised curb, such as a concrete tree planter of the sort one often sees in municpal settings, I have to walk at least a few feet of it as though it were a balance beam. This is a holdover from my childhood when going Look at me, I can walk on a curb was deserving of notice and praise. As I get older and more feeble, I realize that continuing this habit can only result in tears and the need for heat balms.

2. I put in my contact lenses, I go to martial arts class, I come home, I take a shower, I get out of the shower, I put on my glasses. Since I'm still wearing my contacts when I put on my glasses, I see nothing but major blur, and I say to myself, "Oh, I'm still wearing my contacts." I do this at least twice a week, since I go to martial arts class twice a week.

3. If I have a pen in my hand and a blank area of paper, I will doodle a fish. It will be a fish with a human face, like the ones in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. If the human-faced fish isn't the first thing I doodle, it will be the second, possibly the third, but if I get to four doodles, there is a 99.99999% chance that one of them will be the fish.

4. When I gargle, I gargle to the tune of "Way Down Upon the Swanee River".

5. I don't say "stew." I say something like, "SSSSHHteeeewwwww."

More robots

I am insufferably pleased to report that Tim and I have sold "Robots and Falling Hearts" to Kathryn Cramer's and David Hartwell's Year's Best Fantasy 6, to be published this summer in trade paperback by Tachyon Publications.

Also, my feet are very cold, so I'm going to go put on some socks now.

Old, fish, Waldo

My brother's old, he's old, ha ha ha, he got even older today, ha ha ha!!!

Happy birthday, bro. You're old.

***

More than a few people hit my blog yesterday after googling "Nomura's Jellyfish," no doubt prompted by this CNN story.

My favorite quote from the story:

"It's a terrible problem. They're like aliens," Noriyuki Kani of the fisheries federation in Toyama, northwest of Tokyo, told Reuters ahead of the conference.

It really is quite a fish.



***

Why are people greeting me with, "Where's Waldo?" today?

What are you listening to?

It may come as a visceral shock to some that I am writing this from inside the warm, drug-dispensing womb of the coffee joint. Was here before dawn, and now I'm watching the clouds in the Eastern sky turn the color of salmon. The woman with the gorgeous and ginormical St. Bernard has left, so now maybe I can stop thinking "PET BIG DOGGIE!" and concentrate on the blinking cursor in front of me.

I've been typing out some ideas I had in the shower (beyond "soap makes Greg clean!" and "I smell good, like a flower!"). The ideas always seem a little better when they're inside my brain. Exposed in the cold air, they tend to seem a little more obvious and shallow. But, enh, platonic ideals and all that. And I call myself a writer, not a thinker of wonderful but hidden thoughts.

I would like to stay in the coffee joint forever. Familiar faces, headphones on (just switched from John Lennon to Johnny Cash), baristas who know my name (and, more importantly, my drink order [a 16-ounce Americano in a ceramic mug]), and in sole control of my productivity, fate completely in my own hands.

Aaah! Big golden retriever outside!!!

***

I need new music. What are you listening to lately?

Hi, Mom!

I've stood over the shoulders of people playing with Google Earth, but I hadn't fooled around with it myself until today. It's pretty cool. It's pretty creepy.

I typed in my folks' address, and Google Earth came close to finding it, only two houses off. The white car in the lower third of the picture below is my parents' Ford Escort station wagon. If the resolution were any higher, I might be able to spot my mom watering plants in the back yard, or my dad being vexed by bluejays.

Rounding

Whoosh. Productive day at the Day Job, long drive home (because of traffic, not distance), now gonna eat some leftover gringo Mexican restaurant food, and then instead of settling in to watch some exciting NBA action, I'm gonna force myself to write. But since I'll be doing it at the coffee joint, it'll feel like goofing off. Productive goofing off with a pumpkin spice latte is not a bad way to round out a day.

Heart and gut

There are all these emotions in my belly and in my heart. There are images, too, and sensations, and bits of protolanguage, and rhythms of speech, and things that I don't know how to describe in any way other than as textures. If I could just get them out on the page, I don't know if I'd be a great writer or anything, but I'd be writing the stories that I most want to read. The ones that, despite the immense richness of wonderful stories by other writers, don't currently exist in the world. Not the exact ones.

My artistic ambitions aren't so big. I just want to get these things on the page. They're not necessarily important things or profound things, but they're the things I feel. The things that interest me, or amuse me, or scare me, or comfort me. They're the coals that fire my engines. And I do want to share them with others, but before that, I want to get them out in the light and open air such that I can look at them and understand them a little better, or just look at them and enjoy them. On the occasions when I think about writing as more than the making of a thing, like a chair or a row boat, I'm thinking about the things in my belly and heart. Making the chairs and the boats is the craft. And making a good boat is by itself a terribly difficult and worthwhile pursuit. If, at the end of my productive life, I've done nothing but fashion some solid, well-made boats that take me and others to interesting places, I'll probably be largely satisfied. But getting those things in my belly and heart out into the sunlight, that's the art. And integrating the craft and the art, that's how I want to spend my professional days.

***

I feel draped in gloom today. But it's actually a beautiful day out there. The air is crisp and cold. The colors are rich. I've got the day off. There's an art supply shop within walking distance. I bought a microphone for podcasting. I've got a book to write and notebooks to write it in. I think the day will turn out alright if I keep at it.

My very coherent thinking processes, be sure to take notes

I don't know if it's Duane Allman or Dickey Betts who makes me so happy on "Jessica". I guess maybe it's both of them. I guess that's the point of collaboration. When it's working the way it can sometimes work, it's both Allman and Betts. I've had the pleasure of working on collaborations that made me feel like I was Allman working with Betts or Betts working with Allman. Not that I'm as good a writer as Allman or Betts are guitarists, but that's not the point. The point is, I picked the wrong metaphor, but I'm going ahead and posting the blog entry anyway, because I don't have one of those blogs that's all about making myself look good to the reading public. I have one of those blogs where I'm basically saying, "Hey, this is what's going on in my head, and if it makes any more sense to you than it does to me, I would start worrying about you."

I'm going to listen to "Jessica" again.

***

I have no idea why there's no puppy rental service. It's just screwed, is all.

***
I'm trying to find a good Moleskine hack to hold my pen in place. Because that's the one major flaw of the Moleskine. No good way to keep your pen in place. This hack looks promising, but it won't work with the reporter style Moleskine. Someone recommended velcro, but sometimes I use really nice pens, and I don't want velcro on my pen. I guess instead of velcroing the pen to the Moleskine, I could just get a velcro tie. I guess I could try that. But I wish someone would devote all their energies and resources to designing, developing, and selling (for dirt cheap) a device with which to temporarily affix pens to Moleskines. That would be almost as cool as a puppy rental service.

***

I once saw Primus, Public Enemy, and Anthrax on the same bill. That was a really good show. I bet if I saw Primus, Public Enemy and Anthrax on the same bill today it wouldn't be as good. And if I see Primus, Public Enemy and Anthrax on the same bill ten years from now, it'll be in a casino. They'll be joined by Air Supply.

We all get old.

***

There should be a little USB device that fires a single bullet into the head of excessively loud people at the coffee joint. The iBullet.

Huh. Just as I typed that I accidently yanked the headphone cord out of my laptop, treating people at neighboring tables to a Ted Nugent guitar solo.

That was kind of ironic.

A picture is worth something or other

Via Jon, I came across MyHeritage, a site where you can upload a picture of yourself and, through the technological marvel of facial recognition software, see which of 2400 famous people you most closely resemble.

I tried it with three different pictures of myself. I got matched with Morgan Freeman, Cary Grant, and Gillian Anderson.

Someone's being insulted, and I'm not sure it's me.

Story Grenades

So, for the sake of posterity and availability, I've put up at storygrenades.com the flash pieces that originally appeared last year on my JournalScape journal. The site's a bit crude, and honestly I don't know if I'll ever do any more work on it, but there it is.

Melee!

Sparring last night was just ridiculously fun. We had a good showing of about a dozen people, and at one point our instructor set before us a simple scenario: Bar fight! Everybody fighting everybody. Several ganging up on one. No wallflowers. Did I learn anything? Well, I learned to watch my back, because people like to attack from behind. I learned to directly confront the most formidable opponents, because they'll get around to smacking you before too long anyway, so you might as well get it over with. Mostly, I learned that controlled melees are just stupid, stupid fun.

Birds, bullets, bizarre

Don't be a wimp.

The first stop on my road trip was Rooster Cogburn's Ostrich Ranch, where I paid the $2 admission, but declined a cup of feed until the proprietor (perhaps Rooster Cogburn himself) said, "Aw, yer gonna wanna feed 'em, don't be a wimp." So, I ended up causing at least one giant bird feeding frenzy.



Off the highway, not too far from the ostrich ranch, was a sprawling graveyard for jumbo jets. Hoping to snap some pics, I pulled off the road and headed toward 747 tail sections glinting in the Sun, but got turned back by a sentry. I think getting turned back by a sentry is a sign one's road trip is going in the right direction.

I'm your huckleberry.

A couple of hours later, I pulled into Tombstone, where the Clantons shot it out at the OK Corral with Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers. As I walked down a dusty street lined with authentic saloons and fudge shops, cowboys exhorted me to stake out a good vantage for the scheduled gunfight. But having stopped by Boot Hill Cemetery, I made sure to keep clear of flying lead.



It's turtles all the way down.

After an hour or so in Tombstone, I continued South, almost to the Mexican border, stopping in Bisbee. Bisbee is an old mining town, now home to bed and breakfasts, galleries, souvenir shops, and such. Here, I found the Bisbee Coffee Company, where I sat for a bit more than an hour, drinking a Cubano and writing fiction stuff and not-fiction stuff in my Moleskine. Afterwards, I stopped in at the Bisbee Grand Saloon, a real Old West-y saloon with a stamped tin ceiling and taxidermy, and I drank an IPA while scribbling more stuff in my notebook.





I came across this fellow ...



... whom I took to be a hidden master of the universe, because he had with him three mice ...



... which were borne upon the back of a cat ...



... which was borne upon the back of a dog.



What bore up the dog, I know not, and though some may claim to know, they are deceivers.

I settled into a hotel room, had a fairly crummy steak at the Bisbee Grille, and then finished the evening back at the coffee joint for more Moleskinning. Slept. Then breakfast, again at the coffee joint.

The Thing

I've been seeing billboards for The Thing for years, but my path never took me by The Thing. This time, I determined that my path would not only take me by The Thing, but that it would indeed be defined by The Thing, so before taking I-10 back toward Phoenix, I went in the opposite direction toward Texas Canyon.



When you go to see The Thing, you will actually see more than just one thing. You will see some bizarre driftwood sculpture. You will see a Rolls Royce allegedly driven by Adolph Hitler. You will see charming dioramas such as this:



And, of course, you will see The Thing itself.

It was just worth the price of admission, which was $1.

It was a short road trip, yes, its brevity necessitated by me not having a lot of available time, but I covered quite a bit of ground in Southern Arizona, and I think I packed a lot into less than two full days. I wish I had two weeks.

Roading

Checklist: Hiking shoes. Camera. Laptop. Moleskine. Pen. Underwear. Jerky.

Gonna point the car toward Mexico (don't think I'll be crossing the border) and hopefully write. Y'all have good weekends. Luv.

Peace and humptiness

Me at my desk listening to the Humpty Dance.

Which is another way of saying, I should go get some lunch. Or something.

Age

I finally got equipped with a computer at the Day Job (which means I can stop bringing in my own laptop), and it's lovely, a 20-inch iMac G5.

It took me an entire 45 minutes to get coffee stains on the keyboard. I must be slowing down in my old age.

And not connected to anything else, last night in sparring I got worked by a 13 year old girl. Usually when I'm matched up with the kids I go on the defensive and let them get in some kicks and punches, and I'll just occasionally use my reach to tap them on the head. With this girl, though, I really had to defend myself or else get killed, and I had a hard time scoring any hits on her. I'm not at all embarrassed by this, even though she's a lower belt rank than I am, and she did it with a smile on her face. She's going to be awesome. I found it inspiring.

Narnia

I never read the Narnia books, so I didn't go into the new movie with any anxiety about having my hopes and expectations fulfilled or dashed. I liked it well enough. There were moments of beauty and wonder, and the actors portraying the kids turned in performances ranging from solid (Edmund and Peter) to really quite good (Susan and Lucy). The production design and visual effects were excellent, ESPECIALLY THE CGI WORK DONE BY MY FRIEND BRIAN TATOSKY WHICH IN AND OF ITSELF MADE THE MOVIE WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION. The Christian allegory was subtle enough that it didn't bug me (check out the comments in Jed's journal entry for an interesting discussion of the theology in the Narnia books), but the reliance on the idea of prophecy, a staple of fantasy, did annoy me. When characters are rewarded and granted positions of influence and privilege simply by showing up, it seems like inherited wealth to me. I get grumpy and resentful about it, and I find it dramatically unsatisfying. I like meritocracies, even in fantasy. Overall, though, a very enjoyable movie.

***

It was probably back in 1993 that I read the most very basic article on HTML in New Media Magazine, and I was thrilled ... THRILLED ... when I made my very first web page with MS-Notepad, and it had blue hyperlinks and grey background, and I found such power and joy and fun in the enterprise I almost collapsed right there on my kitchen floor. I made me a little webzine (containing almost exclusively my own stuff) called Nailgun, and it had a little logo and everything. And then, as I started to earn my living at Day Jobs doing web stuff and started working extensively with Shockwave and Flash, it became a little less tingly fun and a little more like work, even when I was animating chromosomes that looked like tube socks.

Now that I have my own domain to play with, however, it's starting to feel more like, well, play. I'm goofing off with domain forwarding, with subdomains (right now I'm trying to figure out if I can do domain masking without frames) and even though I'm basically just using my hosting service's web-based administration tools, it's fun to pretend that I'm a real admin guy doing real admin things, although I'm so totally not a real admin guy at all, just like I've never been a real web developer, and I really don't ever want to be. But right now the internet is like a new toy again, and I've always loved playing with new toys.

None of the stuff I'm playing with involves the blog, btw, so there's little danger that I'll break anything here while I'm screwing around.

Gestures and grunts

It looks like I'm going to a novel workshop this May, which means I need to have the first 50 pages of the book written by Feb. 15, and the whole thing (or at least the first 200 pages) by March 15. Given my customary writing pace, that's going to be quite a challenge for me, and there's only one thing to do when faced with a challenge: Drink more coffee.

My laptop battery no longer stores enough charge for me to finish my 16-ounce coffee beverage at the coffee joint, which means it's time for a new battery. So, off I went to the computer store. Not an official white and gleaming Apple store, but just a little hole that sells Apple products. Every single PowerBook battery in the place is in a box that's been opened and resealed with tape. The clerk tells me all the batteries are fine. I ask why they've all been opened. He tells me sometimes people buy the wrong battery and then have to return them. But every one? Every single one? He asks me what kind of computer I have. I tell him it's a 15-inch PowerBook. He points out that the box in my hand contains a battery for a 17-inch PowerBook, which he offers as evidence that he's telling the truth and that I'm simple.

Still didn't buy an opened and re-sealed battery from them, even as simple as I am. Since I depend on coffee and battery life to help get my writing done, I view this less as a consumer decision than an artistic one.

I'm going to try to combine writing/coffee drinking with a short little road trip this weekend. To that end, I'm aiming to go someplace where there's not a whole lot to do. Possibly not even any interthing. Possibly not even any human interaction, save for a barrista and/or beertender. And even with them, I might only communicate with gestures and grunts.

More than just a pill

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that, if not properly treated, can be utterly debilitating. The drug she depends on to keep her functioning and productive has just been banned. Basically, an FDA decision, spurred by Ralph Nader, has just turned her life and the lives of thousands of others into a kind of nightmare.

Read about it here.

Any ideas?

On something close to a whim, I've registered storygrenades.com.

Er.

What should I do with it?

Looking back, looking forward

In 2005 I published collaborations in Asimov's ("California King" with Mike) and in Realms of Fantasy ("Robots and Falling Hearts" with Tim). Also sold "Gillian Underground" to Polyphony 5, written with Mike and Tim. Good guys and good writers, Mike and Tim.

Published "Authorwerx" in the slick but short-lived Amazing Stories.

Wrote a bunch of flash fiction for fun and escape and sold some of it to Escape Pod (along with the Tim collab, and also Show and Tell).

Published "Tales From the City of Seams" in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 18.

Sold "The Osteomancer's Son" to Asimov's, probably out in the April/May 2006 issue.

Sold "Anywhere There's a Game" to Realms of Fantasy, out sometime in 2006.

Got nominated for a Nebula Award.

Broke bones in martial arts, kept coming back for more. There's a lesson there.

***

I do have some New Year's resolutions that I'm taking quite seriously, but they're intensely personal and maybe not for the journal. Two that I'm willing to share:

Put myself in positions where I'm saying "you're welcome" more often than I'm saying "thank you." In other words, return the generosity I've received from so many this year.

And be a better man.

To a better year. I intend to kick ass.