“If I were to lose my job, it’d be for sexual harrassment. There’s a woman in my office, about twenty years older than me, and I just want to tell her that if I was twenty years older, I’d be wishing she was ten years younger. I could never date a woman my own age.”
A friend whose mind wars between the lustful, and the over-analytical.
Oh yes, life and stuff. I’ve been taking a little break from the gym as my joints were starting to protest frequently, and along with a change of sleeping habits (I was lying with one arm under my head and it has been making my elbow very sore) the rest has been really good. I still feel quite fit and there’s no niggling pains. Back to the gym it is, then.
When Lips (see the last post for a link) came out, reviewers seemed to rave about the microphones being really professional and sturdy and whatnot. They feel very plasticky and light to me, like really cheap pepper grinders. maybe I’m just a clumsy, thick-fingered oaf?
In any case, the game really falls flat when you come to look at the track listings and the available downloads. It is so full of fail that it actually makes me wonder what drooling idiot authorised the release list. By far the worst (or best, if you like really bad things) to download is I Saw The Sign by Ace of Base.
For those of you using Spotify still, my latest reccomendation is Incredibad, by The Lonely Island. It’s a comedy album made by writers off of Saturday Night Live (or so I gather), and although some of the songs wear a little thin rapidly, the whole thing is redeemed by On A Boat (feat. T-Pain). Such a good song.
Tonight I was planning to work on the story a bit more but I just realised that we’re going to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Snikt: Also Has Deadpool: But Does He Know He’s In A Movie: The Movie tonight and obscenely muscular grumpy men with metal claws in their hands override any other tasks including but not limited to writing, eating, or catching Coughing Pig Death.
Chapter 7 is up now at the Work In Progress page. I was going to post it yesterday but I had far more important things to do, such as set up Lips for the Xbox and rack up some points singing Depeche Mode.
Looking at the downloads I still have at least 3 regular readers: nice to know I haven’t scared any of them off yet…
Chapter 7 goes a bit off to one side, basically introducing a 3rd faction into play very briefly, as I want to use the characters later on and just plonking them on the table in the 3rd act seems a little gauche. Also Belar has to pack up his valise and get ready for a trip, and that’s just boring to write about.
Working on chapter 10 and we finally get back to some drama. About time, too.
…and the windscreen wipers are still royally fucked.
Normally I’d bite the bullet and drive it across to the other side of town to one of the garages there to have a look at it but I can’t because it’s pissing it down and I can’t see out the windscreen.
We need a new car, I need income; it’s all good. In that totally inverse not good way.
Anyway – I also can’t get into my online bank account. It has decided that I don’t actually have access to online banking, or access to phone banking. They don’t know what they’ve done wrong, but it’s probably my fault, and at some point in the last two months while I’ve not been using the service, I have been able to deactivate my access by the simple act of not using it.
Perhaps I have some psychic power that perturbs the servers at RBS, although if I had that one wonders why I’m not a great deal richer.
I woke up this morning and the sun was gone,
Turned on some music to start my day.
I lost myself in a familiar song,
I closed my eyes and I slipped away.
It’s more than a feeling (more than a feeling)
When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling).
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away.
I see my Marianne walking away.
So many people have come and gone,
Their faces fade as the years go by;
Yet I still recall as I wander on,
As clear as the sun in the summer sky.
It’s more than a feeling (more than a feeling)
When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling).
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away.
I see my Marianne walking away.
When I’m tired and thinking cold
I hide in my music, forget the day,
And dream of a girl I used to know.
I closed my eyes and she slipped away.
She slipped away.
It’s more than a feeling (more than a feeling)
When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling).
I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)
Till I see Marianne walk away.
I see my Marianne walking away.
Is now online and you can access it as normal via the Work In Progress page.
I’ve been kind of quiet about how the writing is going. I had a bit of a stall going from 19-21k and have struggled through it. it’s not the best work ever but it closes some gaps between where I was and where I’m going, and I’ve had some cracking thoughts for where it’s going to go…so bear with me is what I’m saying, I guess.
I’m thinking that once I hit the 50k word point what I might do is go back and re-read the whole thing and not edit it but flag up points that I feel could be improved or switch a couple of things around. All reader comment is, as ever, appreciated.
In the real world, the windscreen wipers on the car appear to be screwed. They were sticking heavily due to gunk falling from the trees that line the car park, and that sticking seems to have damaged the arm or the motor to the extent that they move very little and stick halfway across. Very annoying. I went out with a bucket of soapy water and scrubbed the windscreen and blades to see if it would help, but it hasn’t, so a trip to the garage is on the cards.
Little by little, the Polo seems to be falling to bits. every time I get it fixed, something else pops up. It’s like playing whack-a-mole except every time you whack a mole your bank balance goes down.
Lisa and I are thoroughly regretting not changing to the summer duvet early enough. Last night was the boiling hell of infinite tog ratings, and as an apparent result, i spent most of the morning clutching my head and going “hnngrrrrh” in pain. Lovely.
In other news, I’m almost finished my copy of Toll the Hounds, by Stephen Erikson. I quite enjoyed his other books, being as they are full of an enormous sense of scale with its vast warrens – sources of magic – layered on top of the “real” world and a cast of thousands to go with it. Certainly there is an element of the ever-escalating about it: each successive chapter in some of the books seems set to introduce an ever-more ancient and ever-more powerful being to contest with the crowded muddle of super-powerful races that are already struggling with one another in the name of driving things onward, but it has never got in the way of the more appealing characters in the cast.
Toll the Hounds is a little different. In attempting to draw some threads together, Erikson pulls a cast together towards a confluence of powers that will result in destruction for some, and resolution for others. All well and good, but the tone and pacing leave a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of chaff about Anomander Rake and his servants that is intended to be full of foreboding, but just seems to be there as padding, to remind you that Rake is still there. There’s a great deal of omniscient narrator moralising, some of which is delivered in the style of the self-narrating Kruppe, and the rest is laid on with the interrogative air of a preacher pitching from the high ground. I’m not sure if there’s meant to be a lesson buried in there somewhere, but the narrative kind of put me off considering it much further.
I’m sure there are Erikson fans out there who love it. There’s a lot of story about things long passed and I’m sure anyone interested in cross-referencing the lot would have an absolute field day. Sadly, I’m not one of those people. I would have preferred a version with pretty much the entire cast of Tiste Andii excised from the text and all of the focus on the goings on in the city. Also, the author hasn’t yet learned that he cannot write poetry. I’ve never read verse so eminently skippable since I came across Tom Bombadil.**
*samma time, and the living is easy – God, Spike Milligan was a funny man.
**the library made me buy a new copy of Fellowship of the Ring. I jest, of course.
Lisa woke me up at around 5 am this morning with the question; “what’s that beeping noise?”
She was right to ask. It was actually two beeping noises, running out of sync with one another, blaring out discordantly and making a right racket in doing so. For a moment, I thought it was the timer on the cooker having a fit – had I bumped it with my hip while cooking? Looking back, it sounded nothing like it, but I was sleepy and you’ve got to check the obvious options.
It wasn’t the cooker. Smoke alarm, I thought, and not ours. So off I went into the stairwell, trying to work out where the hell the noise was coming from. One floor up, a door along, I find the source. There’s no smoke, no heat, nobody else in the building seems to be up or about – I knock on the door…and suddenly realise I’m knocking on a stranger’s door at 5 am in just my boxer shorts. A woman answers, her face screwed up in pained apology. With the door open, the noise is incredible.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to turn it off. There’s no fire. It says turn off the power before disconnecting, but I turned it off and it’s still making a noise.”
“Would you mind if I try?”
So I go into a total stranger’s flat, wearing just my pants, and stand on a chair in the middle of her open-plan kitchen with this insanely loud noise going off in my face, trying to lever the smoke alarm off of its ceiling mount.
“It says to turn the mains off – what if you get electrocuted?”
Then I’ll die wearing just my pants, standing on a stool in some random woman’s flat, thanks for asking, I think but fail to say. It would be rude, and the pants comment would draw attention to my unclothed state, which is not wise considering my waist is at her eye level.
There’s a tab on the side of the smoke detector. Press, lift, twist and heave, and off it comes. The sound dies away. I look at the back of the detector, and there’s a lot of brown staining on the visible sections of circuit board.
“Have you had a flood?”
“Yes, I redid the ceiling about a month ago.”
“That explains it. Looks like your smoke detector was more likely to catch fire than detect smoke.”
“Oh. Thanks ever so much for that. You’re a hero.”
“Aye, well, bye now.”
And I stomped off back down to the flat and back to bed.
Both found via the ever-excellent Boingboing.net, first off here’s yet more evidence demonstrating the shift of approach in Uk policing, particularly the Met, towards the inappropriate use of their extensive powers of search and arrest. Basically, a tourist taking photos of architecturally interesting places in London was commanded to delete all the photos, and had his details taken “to prevent terrorism”. His letter to the Guardian is at the bottom of this page, and the accompanying article is here.
A point to note is that, if you are stopped and searched by the police, they must give you a copy of a form detailing why you were stopped. I sincerely hope that Herr Matza has his copy, and that it does say what he alleges the police informed him: that photographing transport in London is forbidden, as the Met have commented that they know of no such law currently in place.
Meanwhile, in the US, a patrol stop goes South when the man stopped invokes his Fourth Amendment rights to refuse a search. Granted, there is a motor vehicle exemption to the Fourth Amendment that states, given probable cause, the police can search your vehicle without a warrant. I’ve got a feeling this is going to boil down to a he said, she said argument in court between the plaintiff and the police witnesses, and the judge will let the police off of the hook on the basis that non-compliance must be punished in today’s society. Nevertheless, kudos to him for standing up for himself, even if it did get him tasered and cut up for his trouble.
Or, at least, it was. Lisa and I chose to spend the time celebrating the death and ressurection of Jesus Christ by playing some Rock Band on the Xbox. Sorry, Xbox 360. Important distinction, apparently. We decided to take a tentative step upwards to the dizzying heights of Medium difficulty, since our band has capped at 276,000 fans and it won’t give us any more. Also Lisa gets 100% consistently on Easy guitar, which is sickening when I try my hardest and get 99% on drums.
I space out too much on drums, though. I start to think about things, like whether or not the drums are too loud and our neighbours can hear me drumming, and then I hear a door swing shut somewhere in the building and I start listening for a knock at the door and preparing myself for that conversation and suddenly I’m off the beat.
Anyway. I should put the rest of Chapter five up, shouldn’t I? I mean, I’m up to at least 4 readers now so I’d be doing them a disservice otherwise!
Word-count wise I managed to get up to 20k+ but then decided that a large portion of it was crap and heaved it, so we’re back down to 19.5 k halfway through Chapter 9. It was one of those difficult moments when you realise the characters are all behaving oddly because you, as writer, know what’s going to happen. Since this isn’t fanfiction or an episode of Doctor Who, I had to take an axe to it.
Chapter 5, part 2 coming soon. is now available to download.
