Oh my goodness you guys, Shel Silverstein has a new book! Even though he died in 1999, which makes it kind of a trick.
( Read more... )

I've been having a lot of stress dreams lately because I accepted Pitt's offer for library school because for some reason I picked that one and immediately went JESUS WHAT? NO, BLOOMINGTON, I SHOULD HAVE WAITED MORE TO SEE IF I GET INTO BLOOMINGTON because Pittsburgh seemed about the best for me, but it's the least safe choice out of the ones I applied to. Indiana University is only about three hours from where my parents live, and one of our family friends has all her family forty minutes up the road in Indianapolis, and I loved it when I visited. Mom's family is from/around Milwaukee and that same family friend knows a lot of people up there (though I haven't been there since I was nine). Pittsburgh is a city I've visited once and thought I could get to like if I lived there even though I didn't have much fun visiting, it's six hours from home, and none of my friends or family know anyone there. But yes exactly: it's out of reach of these people who treat me like I'm ten years old (and were all sort of LOL OKAY YOU GOOF about me going to grad school until I started actually getting into programs). It's a real city--I liked Bloomington, but goddamn am I tired of having to drive forty minutes for almost literally everything except the grocery store, so if Dayton's eight hundred thousand-person metro area is too small and too small town for me, the eighty thousand-person town where I have to go up the road to Indy for everything is probably not going to meet my needs--and also the city with the lowest cost of living out of my choices. And I wanted to live in Bloomington, but I want to go to Pitt. So good enough. But I still keep having all these stupid dreams where someone shows me how awesome Bloomington is and then I go to Pittsburgh and terrible things happen.

Then yesterday I had a kind of an OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE freakout out when I read the part on their new admissions page where they estimated tuition to be 32K a year when Milwaukee is 14K and no one at the school has said anything to me about any kind of financial aid, because this is going to be the first year ever I clear five figures in pre-tax income. I can't go to grad school without help, I can't get a job in my field that's going to pay me more without an MLS, and even if I get one, I wouldn't be making enough to handle 64K in student loans.

Also recently I've reached the senioritis stage of my job because I'm leaving in April, I'm not doing my degree specialization in public libraries (because if I have to take 64K in student loans, it's not going to be so that I can check laptops out to people and fix Facebook for them), and as well as I fake it, I Just Don't Care.

So apparently my subconscious thinks my concern in all this is that someone will write up the routine small customer service dramaz that have been happening at the library on otf_wank and somehow that entry will derail into two pages of people talking about how they've always hated that bitch also_not_a_pipe. Which, of course. Isn't that the logical conclusion?

You know what that news story about the woman who pepper sprayed all those people for an XBox makes me think of?

That scene in "Casablanca" where Claude Rains, playing Captain Renault, scolds Rick for allowing gambling at his bar--"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here! [a croupier gives him his money, saying, "Your winnings, sir."] Oh, thank you very much. Everybody out at once!"

Which is why it's pissing me off so damn much.

Because as much as all the TV news departments are treating this like it's such a shock and such a horrible thing to happen, they knew something like this was going to happen. It happens every damn year. And for all their tut-tutting now about how greedy and awful people are these days, these are the same network affiliates who saturated their airtime and newspapers who filled their advertising flyers up with WOOO BLACK FRIDAY GET READY TO GET UP BEFORE THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SHOVE SOME PUNKS ads for the last week and a half.

And this would not be a hard problem to solve: if this sales model results in people getting hurt, stop using it. You don't have to keep stupid hours and stock and advertise in such a way as to all but guarantee that you'll have fifty times more people who want Shiny Thing than you have units of Shiny Thing on hand. But no one's going to stop. This same thing is just going to happen a different way next year, and I think it'd be safe money to bet that something worse might happen next year because this thing just keeps building and building; it used to just be Black Friday but now it's Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday and Black Friday Eve (Thanksgiving? What's that?) and all the advertising seems to have this air of businesses just licking their chops waiting for the money and the mayhem. They're purposely whipping up this spirit of FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT GREED GREED GREED MINE GIMME MINE. And if someone gets seriously hurt, they'll make statements where someone says how sorry they are about the maiming--gosh, who knew that dangling one chicken over a pit of twenty hungry, irritable gators could ever get that scary? Those darned greedy alligators!--but do they care that it happened? Hell no.

Because you know, it's cynical of me, but I think corporations want people to get hurt on Black Friday. It's not like they're out there laying pit traps in front of stores, but they're not stupid. They're purposely egging people on to behave like this. They want people to attack each other over linens and behave like rabid weasels, because it'd be tricky to pin any kind of liability on them, and when the news stations (who also kind of want this to happen, because yay ratings) spread the outrageous Black Friday outlier case across the country, they tend to mention the store it happened at, so hey, free publicity! More attention for their sales next year, when they'll make more money on their human cock fights over crap that no one actually needs. And the news will feature all their stories about how terrible people are to each other while politely ignoring the fact that it's their sponsors whipping up people into GREED GREED GREED MINE frenzies to line their pockets (if they even take it that seriously--I was listening to the weekend edition of All Things Considered while I was driving home and by the tone and the way the presenter was barely keeping from giggling, this incident where someone used the same paramilitary weapon as was shocking when police used it on OWS protesters was going to be their Wacky Story of the Day). And it's disgusting.

Renault is funny when he's wringing his hands over Rick's Cafe because of the irony and his shamelessness; he's being hypocritical and he knows it, and he doesn't give a flying damn who else knows it. Also because Claude Rains was one hell of the actor and knew not to ham the line up too much.

American news, you are no Captain Renault.

God help me, I was being bored on Ravelry the other day ("National Blog Post Month will get me in the habit of looking at Dreamwidth and LJ more regularly instead of wasting all my time on the Rav forums!" AH HA HA HA.), and now I have moved beyond meaning to chart the markings on Jack's forehead to actually designing a tabby hat in the back of my head. When I take in my head to annoy the cat, the next step after poking his forehead for thumbprint access is to trace all his twisty little markings and tell him he has cables on his face, et voila, the idea to make a cabled knitting motif of his markings. So I ask on Rav, "how would you go about designing cables that look like the markings on this little turkeybird?"


And the answer I got was basically, "I wouldn't; I would do it two-color stranded or brioche [in one of these two complicated forms of flat knitting that involve changing colors a lot]."

Then someone said "I would wear the hell out of a tabby hat" when I said I wasn't sure what I'd do with tabby cables anyway and about half a dozen people agreed with her. So since I'm easily swayed live to serve, I was like "oh hell yes! And he has those stripes that flare out down the back of his head, just like a plain ginger hat with those stripes going over the front and back and maybe his little cheek triangles because I am nothing if not overly ambitious would be awesomely quirky! I want to be mildly Internet famous by designing a pattern other people might knit!"
( Fifteen steps to a tabby hat )

That whole "take every shift offered and end up with a month of seven or eight days on/one day off weeks" thing? I might actually clear five figures this year, but otherwise so not a good idea. I have not had two days off in a row since September 17, and I don't get two days off in a row until November 5. I work and I sleep--not enough--and I eat out too much, and that's about it. And I am tiiiired. I feel kind of wimpy being like "WOES I DIE" about working thirty-seven hours this week (and thirty last week and the week before) when I was scheduled for fifteen, because it's still less than an average grown-up's work week, but there it is.

If nothing else, twenty miles to the closest of the branches where I work gives me plenty of time to think about nothing in particular. Which, especially since most of my driving to the two further branches is along these long two-lane state highways through farm country tends to be stuff like "why is dove hunting supposed to be fun? I mean, they just sit there; it can't be that much more challenging than plinking cans." But for all the vague I Am A Bad Writer guilt I feel about not working out all my plot problems and getting everything sorted so I can sit down and start typing as soon as I can get home, it works pretty well for the broad strokes. 1) The problem with Charlie and Nicholas's story, both their romantic back story and the space opera it spun off from, is that there really isn't an antagonist. 2)My problem is that I keep writing stories that revolve around one big, flashy-colored character and everything else is kind of afterthought; that's what my problem is. 3)I'm still not completely sure Augustin's story wouldn't work better if he were female.

Going to Hocking Hills has gone by the wayside now that I'm working past the end of pretty autumn. But now for some reason, now that I have a good bit of money I'm not spending on anything else right away, I've started to think that I'd like to commission art of the some of the characters from stories I'm working on. It's always kind of been one of the silly, frivolous things I'd like to do if I had the money to spare. Now that I do have at least a little--I mean, I'm not going anywhere until at least January--I've started looking at other people's character commissions and thinking I'd like to have someone do a picture of Augustin or Charlie and Nicholas.

But the odd thing is, the main reason I haven't done it yet is that I kind of feel like I don't deserve it yet. It seems kind of foolish to have someone draw characters from stories I haven't finished yet. Fan art someday when it's done and known, awesome. Asking for art when it's finished...ech, little desperate maybe, but sure, why not. Asking for art before it's done... self-indulgent and weird, and I don't quite know why I think that.

And the other Odd Reason I Can't is that it feels like I'm just being silly to request a picture when I don't know if I could describe exactly what I see right. I've been browsing Deviant Art, and most of the artists taking commissions want reference photos, which I don't have because my characters just kind of look like themselves. Augustin wouldn't be that hard--"he has these weird features and a face that used to be kind of sharply pretty like Jeff Goldblum or Ioan Gruffudd when they were younger, maybe a bit like David Krumholtz." But for as long as Charlie and Nicholas have been in my head, I don't have that clear a picture of them. I don't image that "Nicholas kind of reminds me of Simon Baker in that they both have the curly blond hair and fairly delicate features, but he really doesn't look anything like Simon Baker. And Charlie, he just doesn't look like anybody" would be much help to anyone.

But I guess it doesn't really matter, since I haven't found an artist I want to ask yet anyway.

Our dog, who we think is probably mostly schnauzer and springer spaniel, is apparently also part hamster.


I come home from work Saturday, and this was her solution to a bowl of food she didn't want to eat right away:

I just finished reading "Something Wicked This Way Comes", and... what an odd book. There's some beautiful prose in there and what could have been a really good story, but it just got buried under the pounds of prose. Some pages I had to go back and read again because I wasn't exactly sure what had just happened. And there were a lot of places where Bradbury would get a really good, creepy scene going, then just stop the story dead to pontificate on the nature of evil. The main thing I get from it is that "Johannes Cabal the Necromancer" is funnier now that I get the joke

.

Or I guess it's still only a double post since it's technically tomorrow. But hey, did you know that herbal tea with chickory in it will keep you just as awake as black tea? I didn't!

Thing 1:
The WIP meme going around DW. I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info. Ask away, if you're curious.

Vampire archivist thing I seriously need to write when I get the time: Belinda'd be an awesome boss even if she was a regular live person.

Augustine's thing: John Scopes was arrested down in Tennessee for teaching evolution the year Marion first saw the animals that she couldn't explain by any science she knew.

origfic_bingo prompt "illness": Charlie would never have told Nicholas this, not ever, not for all the stars you could see from the big plate-plastic windows during his time up on the station, but he thought of Nicholas a little like a cat.

Bingo card for Adarios and Etavia's fluffy romance: Etavia wasn't quite sure what she'd expected when Serevanno asked her permission to bring someone along to lunch.

Ha, it feels like I'm working on way more than just four things. I guess with all the scenes within bigger projects that I just want to get down before I forget them, I have more story than I have beginnings.

Thing 2:
I like Halloween, but I typically can't think of anything clever in time to get a costume together and I don't usually have anywhere to go on Halloween anyway. Last year when I had to dress up for work, I draped myself in yarn and knitting and went as call number 746.43.

But "French Perfume" is one of those songs I find myself listening to over and over in the car. Actually, the embarrassing truth is that I'll spend fifteen minutes flipping back and forth between that one and Gaelic Storm's "Rum Runners," since they're basically the same song except one's cheerier. I mean, listen to them.

But I started thinking that a ghostly bootlegger might be fun, or at least good research since Augustine has decided he started out as a Quebecois rum runner (and so I've probably also been spelling and pronouncing his name wrong all this time). Except I'm not exactly sure how to do it; it seems like it would just be a ghost in dark old-timey clothes. I thought about doing burn makeup if I was being that specific ghost smuggler from the song since his boat blew up, but that seems more like it would be zombie rum runner than ghost rum runner. I was also kind of thinking about stuffing my pockets with lots of packs of cigarettes or something, but then it would just like I was an ghost in dark old-timey clothes who smokes a lot. Someone suggested I carry a bottle of rum as a prop, but other than that I don't really know.

I dunno, is there something obvious that I'm not thinking of that would get the idea across?

The other thing that's really awesome lately is that I have a new project at the archives.

Someone who used to edit Dayton Power and Light's company newsletter kept a collection of old issues from about 1937-1982 and basically ran it as a lending library--he kept them in these five gigantic suitcases and take them around to company reunions and things so that former employees could borrow them. He or some relative of his donated it to Dayton History lately. The archive already has a DP&L collection, so what I'm doing is comparing the collections to see where the duplicates are. It's not terribly hard work, but I've asked the curator of collections a few times if she wants me to send her such or do that, and she basically just says, "however you want to do it, that's fine." So apparently this is my project to organize however I want. I have my own desk space and everything. I'm only in there one morning a week and I'm thinking about asking if I can go in more often, because after eight hours I'm almost through three of the five cases and apparently the archives's collection that I haven't even seen yet is ten times this size.

( And I'm going to lose so much time to just reading them, because they are *amazing.* )

The other thing that is amazing: A while ago we ordered Softpaws kitty nail caps because cutting Jack's nails is such a chore. When Mom and I tried to put them on him a couple weeks ago, he bit and fought and twisted so much that I was afraid he might actually hurt himself. We only got three on before we had to give up because he was stressing out too much. I didn't read the advice until later that you're really supposed to start out with a clear set so you can see how much glue you're putting into them (because the thing that makes them stay on: basically superglue), so I ordered him the Glamour Combo, which is hot pink, pastel pink, and pink glitter. I apparently only put the right amount of glue into one of them, because I found the hot pink one in his little bed under the lamp within minutes, and his pastel pink one just kind of vanished somewhere along the line. We've been saying to each other for it must be two weeks now that yes, we really need to get around to doing the cat's nails because one Softpaw really doesn't do much to curb scratching, but then we never quite get around to it because we know what a pain in the ass it's going to be.

So now our cat has been running around the better part of the month with a sparkly pink social finger.

Crimony, I ask for something to talk about, and I get something to talk about.

I got into Pitt's library program.

I really was not expecting to get into Pitt's library program, because they kept sending me emails that were like "hey, we don't do archives track admissions in spring and this aid you said you were interested in is only for on-campus residents starting in fall. Email us right now so we can fix this." And since I'm doing six-and eight-day work weeks lately, I kept meaning and forgetting to email them right now just as soon as I finished these five other things first.

So they sent me an email yesterdayFriday that was titled something like "Your Admission Decision is here," and I was kind of like "*siiigh* Wellp, I know what this one's going to be." I don't get things I try for, no matter how qualified I am or how hard I work for them. I just don't. I mean, the library I've subbed for four and a half years decided to hire nobody for the position I've been filling the last four months rather than hire me. That's what my luck is like. So it actually took me a minute to process that the words I'd just read were "we're pleased to offer you admission, welcome to our program" instead of "sorry chump, you didn't tell us in time that you still wanted to go here." I must have read their "hooray for you!" message seven times now, since they must send the same thing to everyone, but it's basically like, "Our program's really competitive and even for us we had a whole lot of applicants and a whole lot of really good applicants this year, but you, kitten, you're super-awesome. We know you're going to do great here and really like it. Rock on with your bad self! And also let us know if you want to come, because we've already picked you out an advisor." and it makes me go EEEEBIBBLE every time I look at it.

Which... Mom's too sick to get really excited right now (though she's apparently told everyone we know). The only thing Dad's said about it at all was "one of those "P" cities in Pennsylvania, who cares?" after Mom told him I'd got into Philadelphia and I corrected her, Even Aidan, when I saw him on Saturday, was just like "Ohhh, you're leaving too? But that one's too far away, just stay here and go to Wright State! Well then, do one of Kent's distance learning things!" (though I guess to be fair, he's taking it hard that Andy and Josh probably are moving to Columbus like they'd been talking about, and he seemed more stressed out than he wanted to admit over this slimy friend of Andy's who's been pressuring him aggressively for sex even though he knows that Aidan identifies as straight, has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to, is a rape survivor, and does not intend to talk to Andy or Josh about this. Which I guess are pretty damn good reasons to not be as super-cheerful as he normally is right now). So well, someone's got to be excited about it.

They offered me fall admission--which I guess is their solution to my never getting around to emailing them--and I've been waiting to see what Bloomington and Milwaukee have to say before I do anything about it. UWM sent me a letter a while ago saying basically "congratulations, you applied! Make a student account!" The last time I checked, my application "has been submitted for review," which I guess means they're working on it. I think Bloomington wants to make me an offer. Apparently one of my letters of recommendation didn't get there and the web application freaked out and erased half my information when I submitted it, because they keep sending me emails like "Where's your third letter? Where's your statement of purpose? Okay, good, but where's your resume?" I assume that if they weren't interested, they'd have just been like "well okay, forget you then" and sent a rejection letter instead of making all this effort.

So I should be patient and not pounce on the first offer someone makes me. But I am so tempted to just be like "screw it, I'm moving to Pittsburgh" and waiting out there until fall term. Especially after looking on Craigslist to see what rent is like around Pittsburgh and finding some gorgeous places for actually about the same as in Columbus or the nice parts of Dayton, and discovering that I apparently already Internet-know a ton of people out there. Especially especially since all the people I know out there are like "nooo, don't wait for those other guys, just cooome! Pitt is the best library school in the world! Also they give you bus passes and free museum admission and delicious candy! Come to Pittsburgh!" And since I remembered that as melancholy as I've been about not getting back to Hocking Hills before I start school, Pittsburgh is about the same distance down to Athens as it would be from here (I actually thought about going up to Pittsburgh for a weekend once or twice when I was in school just so I could go on vacation All by Myself Like A Real Adult and decided not to because I wasn't sure I could spare the money and man, Pittsburgh was like three hours from here. Unlike Dayton, which I went back to almost every weekend because Athens on the weekend was annoying and Dayton was only about three hours from here)... the only real reason I don't is that I might get into IU or UWM starting spring term.

I still cannot sleep, and I've been meaning to make each of these posts for like a month now. So here are um, both of these posts.

( Archives nerdishness )

( Screw finding the damn library school, I'm going to go look at the dinosaurs. )

Oh geez, I'm getting old.
( tl;dr )

So Saturday: went to visit my barely coherent friend in the hospital, ate dinner at 5:00, went to a movie where I got a movie and a cartoon and popcorn and soda for five bucks, then thought about going out more but decided that 10:00 on a Saturday night was too late to be out, and came home to watch silent movies.

Ha, yeah, I'm turning 32 on like Thursday.

Ahaha.

Back in February, I ordered some yarn to make the Vivian cardigan. It wanted me to buy twelve or thirteen skeins of bulky yarn, which would have been ridiculously expensive, so I ended up ordering three skeins of Cascade Eco Wool. It's just plain wool, but there's enough of it to a skein that I only needed three. Then a couple days later they sent me an email that oops, it wasn't on the website, but the color I had picked was out of stock and on back order.

I kept meaning and forgetting to tell them just to forget it, but I had so many other projects I was working on that I just never quite got around to it.

Then last weekend I went over to the yarn shop in Richmond to pick some yarn up to finish one of the projects, and discovered that they had Eco Wool in colors that worked just as well, so I bought one I liked and asked the owner to order a couple more for me. If I'm going to wait on someone to special order yarn for me, I'd just as soon it be someone I know. She has an order with Cascade that's supposed to be in about September, but I'm in no hurry. That's a big cake of yarn from which I'm working.

So guess what came in the mail while I was in Bloomington?

Or I guess more to the point, lavender or blue?

OH MY GOODNESS I HAVE TO GO TO THIS SCHOOL.
( Squeebibble )

I've been meaning to post this since about May, but it was never quite done enough. Because I have been working on it since March. As soon as I bought my new netbook, the first thing I did was start looking around for something to put it in. The thing’s only 10" by 7", so it didn't need anything huge. But I found that pattern and I started running off with myself the way I do, "oh, I'll knit it a little big so I can put my camera and all its lenses in it, and space for papers and pens and stuff, and carry just one bag around!" since I generally load myself down with my camera bag and the laptop case I'd been carrying the netbook around in and god-knows-what when I go out to Troy.

Then I stopped and thought well wait, do I really want all my expensive toys in one place out in public? Not... not really. So I just did it half-sized to fit the netbook.
( More pictures )
I almost want to do another one, but I have no idea what I'd do with it and I'm not sure Mom will be so willing to line another bag for me (I don't sew. Once I finished knitting, I basically ignored it until Mom asked if I wanted her to do it for me, and I was all like "ho ho, no, you don't need to finish my projects for me!" because I seriously meant to figure out how to do it. Then I kept ignoring it until she did it for me). I'm thinking I might do the Lotus Bag from one of the Stitch 'n Bitch books for my camera, or jut see if I can find and finish all the pieces of the Monk's Travel Satchel that I started in 2006 or 2007, since the camera case I have is a little small. But first I'm going to take a break and do something nice and simple like the Vivian cardigan, which at my rate, I'll finish just in time for Christmas.

I grew up in the late '80s and early '90s, but I was the kind of strange, snobby child who didn't want to listen to anything but musicals and classical music. Also I was only turning ten in 1989, so I was a little young for most of the really awesome 80s music. I knew who Pat Benatar and Adam Ant and Jon Bon Jovi were (That Damn Noise that my friends' parents were always yelling at my friends' high school-aged sisters to turn down when I was eight or so), but I was too young to really get what they were about. I knew the songs that were on the radio all the time even if I didn't know I was supposed to be paying attention to who sang them, and I was vaguely aware of Debbie Gibson because I remember thinking we were so cool and mature when I gave my best friend Electric Youth perfume (in a bottle with this weird twirl of hot pink and lime green plastic in the middle) for her ninth birthday. But mostly I just listened to "Cats" a whole lot and Mom and Dad's Peter, Paul and Mary albums and ignored the music my friends liked.

I'm going to Pittsburgh the first weekend in August for a thing at the University of Pittsburgh's library science department. And if I hear back from someone at Indiana University, I'm going to Bloomington one of the last couple weekends in July. And because I hate being alone in this house for four days with nothing to do and no one to talk to, I'm half-tempted to go down to Louisville or Frankfort the other weekend in July just because I never did get down that way back in spring, or up to Lake Erie because I've never been there and I have no idea how eastern Ohio north of Marietta actually fits together (why sure I'll swing by Ashtabula to see the covered bridges on the way to Pittsburgh! It's only 125 miles out of my way!). And either because my taste in mainstream music runs about twenty years behind the times--know who's completely awesome? Pat Benatar and Joan Osborne!--or because I have a loud character in my head who likes 80s music and I tend to gravitate toward listening to the kind of music my characters like when I have a story stewing, I've decided what I need for making many three or four hour drives is a mix CD of awesomely cheesy 80's pop.

So I've been getting annoying songs stuck in my head for days. Except it isn't even exactly the music I'm actually listening to that keeps earworming me. I remember George Harrison's "(Got My Mind) Set On You" better than most '80s songs because the video scared me so bad (the mounted animal heads are creepy enough when you aren't the world's most timid eight-year-old), but if I'm not thinking when it pops into my head, I'll end up mumbling "you really need wer-herds, whole lotta rhyming words, you gotta rhyme so many words..." along with it. And the first couple of times I listened to "I Think We're Alone Now", the song-recognizing part of my brain honestly expected it to contain lots of puns about clones.

Even though I haven't heard either of those songs for years before I went looking for them just now.

Oh Weird Al, you have ruined music (or my credibility as a bona fide '80s kid, one or the other) forever.

How to tell when I'm avoiding real work:

I really seriously need to get working on my grad school stuff. There's a draft of my statement of purpose in my head that could be half decent if I could just stop being scared and write the stupid thing. I found department contact info for the library science programs at Michigan and Indiana, but have I managed to work up the nerve to call and actually let them know that I was thinking of going to see them in a couple weeks? Not as such.

Now, so far I've managed to be good. Or mostly good. I finally finished the second draft of my first piece for "Augustine's thing" (hey, did I mention? I finished the first draft and posted it in the middle of a Friday night when no one's reading LJ/DW a couple weeks ago), but I haven't written anything new on it in a while since it's actually more important to get into a grad program than to make bingo.

I started thinking about vampires one of the last times I was entering data at the archive, and now I have a vampire archivist who collects MA degrees for fun, never quite got past the 1980s culturally, and is in charge of the late shift at the archive in Alden Library, OU's big research library (supernatural speed and no need to get up to eat or use the bathroom or anything gets a lot of records transcribed or accessions processed fast, the archives office at Alden gets very little natural light, it works) in my head who won't go away. There's a short story forming up there. I know the basic form of the plot and have the first scene and climax mostly written in my head, and I've scribbled down a couple of pointless character building scenes just to see how it goes. But I've left the story mostly alone because jeez. It's not like I don't have enough to work on if I get bored.


But no, now I've taken it into my head that there's a fic I kind of want to write.

I don't write fanfic. I've tried a couple times, but I just end up obsessing over getting every detail exactly perfect to canon and stressing myself out too much to make it worth writing so that I just quit halfway through.

But I've been progressively more and more in love with Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal stories. He's written two books, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer and Johannes Cabal the Detective, and has a handful of short stories about Cabal published in various magazines (such as this one. The first book is one of those "The Devil and Daniel Webster" kind of stories where someone who thinks he's clever traded his soul to the devil for whatever and has to win a bet with him to get it back. The second is more in line with movies like "The Mouse That Roared;" a very silly satire of political intrigue involving tiny made-up European nations. What makes them amusing is the very dry, sardonic narrative voice ("he scowled horribly, the smile falling from his face like a greased pig off a church roof") and that Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is an absolutely unlikable trouble magnet and unimpressed by anything. He's the kind of person who (paraphrased) rolls his eyes and huffs and says, "oh, for fuck's sake!" when someone tries to throw him out of an airship. What I really like about the books, though, is the world. It's the kind of mildly creepy horror setting that I could see making a good Tim Burton film, all full of ghosts and demons and monsters but also with steampunk flying machines, and it almost takes itself seriously but doesn't quite. They're short, silly books, but they're just tremendous fun.

I've said when I was trying to explain the first book to someone that some parts of it remind me of "Good Omens." But I was driving to work or brushing my teeth or something, and it hit me: this setting could totally work as a crossover with "Good Omens." It has the same kind of voice, the same actual Heaven and Hell, the same kind of mostly mundane world that happens to have the supernatural in it. The setup is easy as anything--Cabal regularly summons demons anyway, and one time he just happens to call up Crowley.

I don't even know what happens in this story, I don't know if I could get the voice right, but I so want to write it.

I was actually meaning to post this the other day, but I forgot.

There's this old canal town, Piqua, up about half an hour north of here. It's right adjacent to Troy, the Miami County county seat. They're both around the same size and age, only ten miles apart, and about the only parts of Miami County that contain more than five thousand people, so there's a little bit of a rivalry there. Apparently after Troy built their new courthouse back in the 19th century, Piqua basically said, "Oh yeah? Well screw you guys, we can build a giant gooey Victorian froth of a building too!" and built the Fort Piqua Plaza Hotel. The hotel's main purpose since the '80s or '90s has been to sit empty and look impressive while the town basically wrung its hands and went "woe, what will we do with this grand old hotel? Hotel, does your mother know that you've been sitting here derelict for years?" Then they decided to put the library in it. I've been meaning to go up there for ages to see it. I'm an architecture snob library worker with a history degree and a Nikon, how could I not?

And you guys. You guys, oh my god (or at this point, gods, I guess). It's right around the corner from a really good ice-cream-shop-with-salad-bar. It is gorgeous. It has a Winans Chocolates and Coffees off the lobby.

( This isn't the library where I want to work, this is where I want to go after I DIE. )

I guess that if nothing else, I know I'm headed in the right direction when I spent four hours the last couple Tuesdays entering data into Access alone in a cold room and barely noticed the time going by.
( Read more... )

I just finished reading Zombies vs. Unicorns, the fantasy anthology that caught my eye a couple weeks ago when I had to pull it for someone who'd requested to pick it up at another branch. Most of the stories seemed to run a little long, especially the ones past the middle of the book. At least three of them had me flipping pages to see just how much longer it was to the next story, but for the most part it was fun. At least I liked it better than the last YA I read (the first book in Eleanor Updale's Montmorency series, which was...fun for having no plot, I guess. While I was reading it, in the back of my mind I kept trying to think of ways to explain the book to people later and kept coming up with things like "It's like if Jean Valjean made himself respectable without actually abandoning his Valjean-the-criminal life or becoming all pious and moral and there's no Javert-type character. ...well no, it's more like if Percy Blakeney used his Scarlet Pimpernel guise for cat burglary instead of rescuing French aristocrats and wasn't so dashing, and there's no Chauvelin-type character. Wait, actually it's more if Horatio Alger were writing about James Bond's great-granddad and...").

Zombies vs. Unicorns surprised me in that I actually liked most of the zombie stories better than most of the unicorn stories. Zombies just hit too many of my triggers; at minimum they make me extremely anxious. Turning on the wrong twenty seconds of 28 Days Later unexpectedly interfered with my sleep for three days, because my brain insisted that unless I knew exactly how to get out of the house and to the car without being spotted, just in case, it was not safe to go to bed. So my plan was basically, "fine, I'll read the first couple pages and then I'll go on to the next story, because seriously. Zombies, no."

But I mean, there was a second-person POV story ("you do/think/say such and so") that was actually really good. I don't think I've ever seen one of those before. Overall the zombie stories seemed to have more an idea of what they were and didn't try so hard to be cute or get their point across as the unicorn stories. And I guess since they were short stories and written for teens they didn't go too far overboard with the emotionless shambling angry dead things and resulting gore and suffering that flake me out. There were a few times where I started getting really tense reading one of the zombie stories and had to put the book aside for a little while because I knew I just wasn't going to end up anywhere good, but for the most part I got through it okay.

What really took me by surprise, though?

My favorite story in the book was the one Cassie Clare wrote.

It's in the zombie category, but it struck me more really as a fairytale with people who happened to be dead walking around in it, and oh did it find the place my inner romantic likes to be scratched. It kind of weirded me out as I was reading, because in the back of my mind I was kind of going "I... I like something Cassie Clare wrote. But this is good. But... Cassie Clare." But absolutely, if she has more set in this world, even if it's not in Lychgate, I would read it and probably like it.

When I was about twelve, I went to visit my best friend from Madison, who moved to a suburb of Oakland, California about the same time we moved to Dayton. And while the main thing that trip did was to demonstrate just how thoroughly Dayton had kicked the emotional/mental crap out of me over just two years (I was about to turn ten when we moved down here; by the time I was sixteen, I truly, deeply believed that my old cat Bandit was the only living thing that loved me. Which I know now was silly, but it's still pretty high on the list of reasons I cannot like Dayton), we did have fun. Her mom drove us down to Monterey and up to a friend's cabin in Sonoma County for a weekend, and about the only thing tempting me in the least to join Facebook is to catch up with her again.

We were both children of the late 80s, so somehow we got to talking about all the cheesy fantasy movies we'd watched eight hundred times down in her TV room (because her family? Her family had a video player), which was decorated in junk her Deadhead uncle had left there, so it had a papsan chair and one of those egg-looking white swivel chairs and Grateful Dead posters on the walls in addition to the deep shag rug, and we thought it was the most awesome place ever. Labyrinth? Awesome! (even if we always did have to fast forward through at least the first five minutes because I was the most timid child ever and the scene where the goblins snatch baby Toby scared me). Princess Bride? Oh hell yes (even if I almost was twelve before I could watch the scene with the ROUS). The Neverending Story? Meh.

Wait, what?

My sister and I had loved The Neverending Story. She and one of our mutual friends were going to rent a video camera and make a "Neverending Story 2" where they were playing Bastian and Atreyu's sisters and our dog was playing Falkor and even when I was ten and they were eight, I was already the family tech nerd. After all, you someone to run the camera. So it was kind of inconceivable to me that anyone should not like The Neverending Story. Really? Not at all? Not even that scene at the end with Gmork the werewolf?

Oh, especially not that scene. She'd grown up on the book, and the movie was an awful adaptation. In the book, Atreyu meets Gmork in Spook City, where Gmork had been chained up by the Dark Princess of the Land of Ghosts and left to die. The wolf dies without them ever actually fighting, but then Atreyu gets too close to its body and its jaws snap shut on his leg and hold him there while the Nothing moves in. And then what? And then you go find the book and read the rest. Which was all she'd say when I tried to wheedle the rest out of her, "nope, go read it."

Then I spent the next ten years sort of going oh you bitch because our library didn't have and could get a copy of "The Neverending Story." It wasn't until I got a car and started using Greene County's libraries in the east of Dayton that I found a copy. (OMGSPOILERS It keeps him from walking into the Nothing long enough for Falkor to come save him.) But I pulled Goldman's Princess Bride down off the shelf to reference something in a writing discussion and that got me in the mood to read The Neverending Story again. Except my copy moved to Virginia with my sister, so I haven't actually read it in at least five or six years.
( And my anemia/angina/insomnia combo's acting up bad lately, so I just reread it in about three days. )

The last few days, it's been gorgeous out during the day so that I can't stay inside. "Augustine's thing" has been eating my brain and my time in giant, greedy gulps lately (but I feel really self-conscious about how much I talk about it lately, so when it comes down to post about that damn story again or don't post at all, I go for the second one). I've been going out to a park up north of the surburb next door to write, because going up to Night Sky in Troy every single day would get expensive, and it turns out that I'm most productive without any Internet signal at all.

Which is getting less and less effective seeing as it's in the middle of this gorgeous patch of hilly farm and mansion country that's all full of blackbirds and raggedy-winged vultures and wee little jumping spiders, so that I end up either trying to get pictures of them or wishing I'd remembered my camera and not doing much writing.

( And then I actually do remember it and end up driving around trying to find good places to stop to photograph all the pretty things along the side of these narrow little country roads. )

Then at night we have these incredible storms that prove the Thundershirt does at least slightly work.
( Or at least it's warm and she likes it. )
Unfortunately they also mean we have to unplug everything, so there's no Internet until morning. So generally I start reading and then if I'm not busy writing the next day, I'm in the middle of a book I want to finish.

It's supposed to get into the 90s before the end of the weekend, so I suspect that I'll probably lose less time to the park, but then I'll be working the regular part-time hours of someone who retired from one of the branches I sub for until they get it filled.

So perhaps someday I will be on the Internet again.