Hooray for writing!

If one considers that it is still Tuesday in some places, then even with some major distractions in a day this makes three days in a row that I've had a major update (Other Tales, Tales, More Tales). The TOMU update on Monday inherited about a thousand words from last week, but the other two were written entirely within an otherwise hectic day.

I'm getting things back on track, folks.

The flash fiction is a big help. When I first started out writing stuff for the online public market, and then again when I moved to doing it full time, I used such short pieces to keep up the flow and keep my brain limber. It takes so little time to write them and people seem to enjoy the results. The problem was that I ran out of ideas too quickly that way. Jack doesn't seem to have that problem... he tells me he already has quite a list to choose from. A lot of them so far have been based around a single word, though some of them are more complicated. I could just pick words myself, of course, but there's a difference between trying to select a word to write a story about oneself and someone else going "I'd like to see what she comes up with for..."

Maybe it'll get tedious for him at some point. If it does, I will hopefully have plenty of momentum built up, and I'll work out a different source for prompts.

I've also been using the Write Or Die program. This program is pretty great for people like me who do their best writing at a brisk pace, but might have problems summoning that pace at need or maintaining their focus. I find I have to set the grace period up pretty high when writing a longer story, otherwise I find myself having to pause it to scroll back up and read over things. The desktop version lets you pause as often as you like, but doing so is counterproductive to the purpose of the program. Better to have a forgiving grace period and keep the timer running.

There's only one incentive left to hit in the first slate of the fall fundraisers. It's Hazel and Two, "kicking ass". I'm torn about how much more to say about it. I have a feeling that if I say exactly what it's going to entail, that will be a huge incentive, but on the other hand, I'd like there to be some surprise. Ah, well. When the next chapter goes up (dare I speculate that it might be tomorrow?), I'm going to remind folks of the fundraising goal and list the next few incentives after it. We'll see what happens there.

And with that, I should be getting to bed. I'll have another long, rambly blog post in the morning with some more details regarding stuff and things and other stuff.

State and Maine

So, marriage equality lost in Maine last night.

This morning, I caught myself wasting time and energy reading commentary on rabid conservative blogs gloating about how the public voting down gay marriage has succeeded 31 out of 31 times while insisting it's not about equal rights or love but about silencing and persecuting Christians. It takes a remarkably self-centered and insular point of view to come up with something like the latter "point", obviously, but the first point might seem harder to refute. It keeps getting voted down... so why do people keep trying?

The gloating social conservatives are asking that right now. "When are they going to learn? When are they going to give up? When are they going to realize that America doesn't want them?"

Their triumphant (and triumphalist) rhetoric likely masks a very real fear. They are losing. Each year that life and business proceed as usual in the states that allow gay marriage, each year that even more families have their separate-but-less-equal partnerships in even more jurisdictions and the nuclear family erodes no faster or further because of it, each year that children go to schools that have openly gay students and teachers and are exposed to openly gay artists and characters, their position erodes.

The generational gap on marriage equality is likely to be a death knell for its opposition. It's not guaranteed to be... some generational gaps exist more because of how individuals' viewpoints change as they age, not because of a shift in society. But I find that unlikely to be the case here. The members of the older generation who oppose gay marriage now were probably not in favor of it when they were youngsters.

So, yeah, it sucks that a majority of voters in Maine voted to turn back the clock on social progress. It isn't and it can't be the final word. As with most anything else in this life, we only fail when we give up... until then we only haven't succeeded yet.

In which I try to set a record straight.

( This post probably won't make sense if you haven't been following Cat Valente's European odyssey. )

Get your jive on Route 55.

A man named @AriCollins just tweeted a link to my flash fiction, and his profile led me to a link for the 55 a Day microfiction blog, which published a series of 21 fifty-five word stories of mine from late 2007 through early 2008. Some of you have probably already read them. If you're just seeing them for the first time, I recommend starting at the bottom, as some of them form a sequence/series.

A random plug.

Today has not been a good day for my blood pressure, obviously. I'm chilling out listening to Echo Slightly, an indie band that's come slumming around my ad slots a few times. I think I may have plugged them when I first heard their album, but that was a while ago. They're worth checking out.