Wednesday

News For Today

Since so many of you (i.e., two) have asked: yes, I have decided - I will be repeating Fundraiser Friday for the remaining two Fridays in the month. The first one was a success in every sense: brought lots of activity to the race, saw the leader change several times, and there are a few comments from participants citing that it made them feel like their relatively smaller contributions mattered more.

I'm thinking of dropping the doubling for incentive purposes, though... we've already racked up quite a few of those and I don't want the pile to get too deep. I'm not sure.

Contributions will definitely count double for voting purposes on Friday, though. And since I'm actually deciding this one in advance, it'll start at midnight on Friday.

Personal Assessment

I'm pretty fine. It just occurred to me this morning that I've been waking up multiple times in the middle of the night a lot lately, and it hadn't registered to me as something worth noting because that's been normal for so much of my life. This might have something to do with the slight... not exactly malaise, but this week I just feel moderately less... well, just moderately less.

Dreams From Last Night

It was weird. Like a cross between My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Super Mario Galaxy, but set in the real world and featuring something like an adorable cartoon vashta nerada. Like, I was going around all these real places and there would be things like patches of living shadow wearing cartoon eyes and a lot of them were accessorized (like living shadow with a hat), and any time I found them I had to stop what I was doing to bargain with it, 10th Doctor style ("Let me find you a home or I'll destroy you."), and even though I was just myself in this dream, realistically rendered and with no other obvious superpowers, there were four different headquarters I could return to from any point in the world by jumping in the air and wishing for it at the high point of my jump. Only the mechanism was finicky about it being the exact high point so I usually had to jump multiple times, and I had my bad knees. The bases were were it got all SMG/MLP. It's hard to explain how. They were all just floating in space and populated by things like the luma things from SMG, but they were individuated more like the ponies in MLP.

Also, the adorable cartoon vashta nerada kept eating everyone in whatever base I left the ones I'd convinced to allow me to re-home.

Plans For Today

The biggest thing in terms of what you all will immediately see is posting chapter 7, but that's not much in the way of work. It's just a matter of waking up sufficiently to handle prose without breaking it. After that, I'm going to be putting together the newsletter from drafts and fragments. Those of you who are signed up for it should receive the first issue this afternoon/evening.

On a more "meta" level, getting the newsletter out is part of is one step in my next big task for myself.

I've got a handle on the writing thing. I've figured out how to approach it, how to handle it as part of my work day... how to set an obligation and meet it. I did this in part by separating it out from other (non-writing) work tasks. Now I need to similarly find a way to meet my other obligations. I have things I need to get mailed out. Lists I need to update. Things like that. Anxiety was one of the major obstacles in getting my writing on the consistent track it's on now. It's also the main obstacle here. The techniques I've learned for dealing with anxiety before I start writing will help a bit in the initial approach, but I need to do what I did with writing, which is basically throw out a lot of preconceptions about how I work or how things are supposed to be and find out what actually works for me.

Newsletter News

The newsletter business has given me more evidence to stick in the "don't announce or even plan on doing something before you know how to do it" file. When I started this online writing thing, I was making things up as I go because that's what fiction is that was the only way to do it... so now it's not so much that I'm going "Ready, Fire, Aim", it's more like, "Aim... wait, wait, Ready... am I ready? Okay, now Fire."

When I'm going for something that's already well within my means and capabilities, this works out awesomely. When I'm not... there's a lot of stumbling around.

The delay today is about HTML formatting problems (stemming from a small mistaken assumption on my part, one that would have been almost nothing if I'd thought to check it at the outset but now has resulted in quite a lot of tedious reformatting, even with find-and-replace) and the fact that I found some names missing from the mailing list that should be on there.

The major features of the first newsletter are as follows: an explanation of some of the choices I made in the wrap-up of volume 1 and launching of volume 2, behind-the-scenes commentary for The Gift of the Bad Guy with some discussion of its follow up (Working Class Villain), a brief sneak peek at a MUniverse political intrigue novella tentatively titled The Malbus Situation, and a complete (though not final) draft of an unpublished short story of mine called "Game Theory".

Smaller tidbits include things like an explanation of how the word "billy" came to be shire-slang for "boat".

Since I won't be sending it out before Friday, it's still not too late to get in on this thing just in case fantasy etymology really fascinates you.

Quote for the day.

This quote comes to us from Weird "Al" "Weird" Al Yankovic. It has nothing to do with Lady Gaga, except I wouldn't have seen a link to Al's blog if not for the thing with Lady Gaga. The quote comes from a blog post discussing his process for deciding what songs to include on his "essential" 2 CD collection back in September of 2009 (but still on the front page... apparently his blog is not a happening place?)

Anyway, the quote is as follows:

Hey, it’s not a democracy, it’s art.

This is something I feel I need to keep in mind... not so much so I can quote it at people who disagree with my choices, but so that I don't feel as much compulsion to justify them in the first place.

Defensiveness, you see, is the path to the Dark Side. Defensiveness leads to anger. Anger leads to hatred. You know the drill.

If anyone doesn't like my choices, I just need to tell myself: this isn't democracy, it's art. And if anyone questions me comparing what I do to what a multiplatinum musical genius does, I just need to tell myself: the genius was talking about which of two medleys of song covers done as polkas (out of a repertoire that includes about a dozen of the things) he was going to put on his collection of novelty songs.

With that... and on the off-chance that this blog is the only thing you've looked at on the internet all day... here's an embed of Weird Al's newest song, of which one of Lady Gaga's reps evidently told him she did not approve*.

(*My qualification there isn't an attempt to render an opinion on what actually happened; I see no reason why the internet needs me to weigh in on or wade into that.)