Result of the year for Caley Thistle

I promise, this blog is NOT just about my soccer teams. But today, the Caley Thistle went into the toughest house in Scottish football and won. Dundee United had six wins and one draw from their first seven matches at home. They beat Rangers in that span. Today's 1-0 win by the Caley makes us the first team this year to get a result at Tannadice. It's been a tough start to the season, but things are starting to shape up a bit. Wee Ian Black's 20th minute strike was enough to take this one, for our second 1-0 win in as many weeks. When a team is struggling, a good manager (like Caley's Craig Brewster) shores up the defense and does his best to grind out results, and that's just what we've done. Mon the Caley!

Slow Weekend

As real-life work has once again reared its ugly head, I've been pretty quiet on the writing front. Since just before OryCon, I've been a little obsessed over a few time travel ideas, and they've been fleshed out a little, but not with any concrete results. I'm hoping to have one story ready by the middle of this week. We have about a week until the next online edition of 1097 is going up, so that will take up a pretty nice chunk of time this week as well, since we're not quite ready for that. The print edition isn't too far off, either, and there's work to be done there. Long story short: I'm busy.

In other news, there are two slightly uplifting stories involving my football teams. First, Caley Thistle won a tight match over St. Mirren in Inverness on Saturday, 1-0 on an early Don Cowie goal. Combined with Gretna's draw with Hearts, that puts us eight points above Gretna and one above Falkirk, who have been dropping like a rock. Nice to have another squad between us and the bottom. Caley is coming up on a very hard run of games, with Dundee United (#4 in Scotland), Hibernian (#3) and Celtic (#1) all coming up. I don't expect a lot from those matches, especially since United have been unstoppable at home this season. Hibs might be vulnerable - we'll see.

The other footie news is that Scotland has received their draw for the World Cup 2010 qualifiers. We will be in a five-team group with Holland, Norway, Macedonia and Iceland. It's a pretty good draw, certainly miles better than the Euro 2008 draw that saw us matched up with Italy, France and Ukraine. Holland is a team we have mixed results against, and Norway has been playing strong lately. We need at least second-place in the group to advance to the World Cup. Both of the minnows in the group, Iceland and Macedonia, are tricky, and can pull off the occasional upset, but that might not be the worst thing. In an even group like this, without a clear leader, it's the team that DOESN'T SCREW UP that wins. Scotland has been pretty consistent, and will play solid defensively if nothing else. We can reasonably hope that Macedonia has at least one upset in them (like their recent win over Croatia) and can hope that it's against Norway or Holland and not us. I like the draw. Holland is one of the only 1-seeded teams I think we may actually be better than on current form, and I'd put our odds of winning the group at about 4:1, odds of qualifying in second place at about even. Since there's 8 months or so to wait before the actual matches start, there's plenty of time for guessing.

Return from OryCon

I made my triumphant return to The Valley of Corn today, after a weekend in Portland for OryCon. It was ... hmmm ... Well, let me say what it wasn't. It was not a writers' conference. Not really. There were writers there, some of them very good and established writers. There were editors and other industry types too, but it was overwhelmingly a fan conference. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I just wasn't so into costume time with the furries. It says much more about me than them - they were all having a hell of a good time, and it really was their scene more than mine, so things were pretty much as they should have been. I really went to hang out with Camille anyway, and that was super cool. Tomorrow, a slush pile which is really more accurately described as a slush hill or even mountain awaits. Much editing will be done. Writing? Probably not so much for the next week or so.

The other news of the weekend, of course, is the end of Scotland's hopes in the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign. The team accomplished some truly incredible things this past year and a half, and though this was a sad note to go out on, it has set us up for a much better shot than before at World Cup qualifying. And when it comes down to it, that's the big show, the one that matters. South Africa 2010 is now the focus. Alba Gu Brath.

The Strike

There are some excellent videos on YouTube and elsewhere describing the current screenwriters' strike going on in Hollywood. Here is my favorite one:



It's an interesting situation. Obviously, I think writers deserve a huge chunk of television and movie profits, due to the fact that they are, along with the directors, the individuals most responsible for "creating" the content. What I don't agree with is the back-and-forth going on between people I know in the movie industry about who is the greedy backstabber putting the industry at risk. The fact is that this doesn't adequately describe either side. The producers and writers made an agreement, a long way back, about profits from video. The writers guild agreed to what was already a pretty bad deal back then, and has slowly devolved into a phenomenally, criminally unfair deal. Even worse, there was apparently no solid date set for renegotiation of the deal. Now I know that none of us could have predicted the way that DVD and the internet have changed motion picture media, but I would like to think a lot of us could have predicted that things would change in the past twenty years, enough that the terms of the contract might need to be revised.

I support the strike, but I think I support it for a different reason than a lot of writers. I refuse to get into the class warfare arguments I hear back and forth, and I really don't see greed as the issue. I see the strike as a good way of correcting a bad deal that was made a long time ago, and I hope that it will end in the writer's guild (who hopefully have smarter people working for them than they used to) making a better deal.

Basically, I side with the writers, and with the guild, but I hope that guild members realize that they should be as unhappy with their old leadership, who put them in this situation, as they are with the studio producers who have kept them in it. I also hope that people on both sides who are doing well financially are willing to buy a lunch every once in a while for the hundreds of crew members and skilled laborers who are out of work because of the strike. There are rich writers and poor writers (much more of the latter), but there are no rich key grips, and I hope for their sake as much as anyone's that the strike doesn't last too long.

In other news, Norman Mailer passed away. He was, by most accounts, a sexist and overall a fairly mean and unpleasant man, but even if all he ever did was co-found The Village Voice, one of the best independent newspapers in the world, I take my hat off to him for that. I was honestly never a huge fan of his books, but that is one hell of a paper, and I thank him for it.

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

Just a short note to remind you that whatever you do for a living, someone at NASA has a cooler job. They have just released actual sound files recorded by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons. Maybe its the constant glut of images that are a part of our daily experience, but for some reason a photo, even a photo taken on the surface of Mars, doesn't take me there. But, sound. Sound seems so much more real. Great stuff from NASA - Check it out.

When one thing is good

It's been a frustrating week. There are some work issues, and some family issues, and some other work issues ... that's what I get for trying to do more than one job. When the multitasking I've been trying to do works, I love it. It lets me define myself in more than one way, and get things that I find interesting done in a lot of different arenas. Great. But when it doesn't work, it REALLY doesn't work. I think I've got the beginning of a cold, which of course doesn't help, but I don't think that's so much a reason for as a symptom of the current blaahhhhh ... I swore this blog would never be a stupid emotional "Waah" party, and it's in great danger of becoming that, so I'll move on.

There is one bright spot lately, but even that is confusing. No, my soccer team hasn't been winning ... it's the OTHER thing that makes somewhat-grown men smile. That's right, somewhat-grown women. There is a very confusing girl on the scene ... promising, but a bit of a cypher. For those of you that no longer find yourself in the dating pool, take a minute right now to pat yourselves on the back, because no matter how much some people try to pretend they like it, it sucks. This particular part of the dating process, the "Do you like me, or like-like me?" part, makes me want to crap out a book about puke. I hate it. The last time I was actually in a relationship (with The One Who Shall Not Be Named), it just sort of happened. No dating. Just one part Me, one part SoulSuckingMonster, and Voila - relationship. No fuss, no muss. Sure, it ended horribly (hence the nicknames), but it worked for a pretty respectable amount of time. I want that beginning part again, where everything just sort of happens. No dinner-and-a-movie with an awkward part afterwards. Dinner, yes. Movie, yes. Awkward, not so much.

I've decided to have my first West Coast Christmas in a long time. I always go back East for the holidays, but the hassle and a half that is NY during Christmastime just isn't going to happen this year.

For those of you that don't care about my personal life and only want raw, cold numbers, here are the disappointing stats for my personal version of NaNoWrMo or whatever ... IaStWrAnRuMo

Words: 5400 after 7 days (-5100 from goal, or just over half, yuck.)
Running: 1.2 miles (-3.84 from goal, or WAY under half. More yuck.)

Oh Wha Tana Siam

Yeah, so, it's been a weird day. I feel like looking at it and waving my finger like a disappointed parental figure and asking it, "Why can't you be more like yesterday?" But that wouldn't be fair. It wasn't that yesterday was anything special. There was dinner that was good, and dinner company that was awesome. The fact that there was a couch at the place we ate was pretty much the best thing ever. I lost my point. Screw it - I'm not going back. That pretty much sums up today.

It started off badly. I always make myself a big breakfast on either Saturday or Sunday morning, and this week it was Sunday. That should have been a good start, but it wasn't. It was the most god-awful omelette I've ever made in my life. It tasted like feet. A harbinger of an altogether foot-tasting day to come.

Over at 1097 Magazine, we've had to make the very difficult decision to scale back our ridiculous pie-in-the-sky idea of a monthly web and print journal to a web edition every month and a print edition four times a year. I'm really disappointed, but it's a decision that, at best, could only have been postponed.

In other news, I am behind in both writing and running, and I'm not going to report how much right now. It's not that I don't know how much. Oh, I'm WAY too compulsive not to know. I'll report tomorrow, when I have made up a little ground. Seeing those two minus signs tonight will only serve to piss me off more at myself.

Thanks to Camille for the kind words and limerick. I think I'll be bringing the scotch with me. Thanks, really - this is one of those days that is bad, but bad in a way that none of my friends here really understand. Cheers.

A Novel, No.

Well, as several other writer's blogs have already announced, it is National Novel Writing Month, which strikes me as a very strange thing to honor with a whole month, but I suppose it means well. As I have nothing like a novel idea in my head, and nothing like the time to devote to such an endeavor, I will not be participating. But, in the spirit of those who are, like frequent visitor and Caley Thistle well-wisher Todd Wheeler, I will try to do my own version of the event. Instead of dedicating an entire month to a single story, I pledge to write at least 1500 words every day this month, spread over as many stories as it takes. That's 45,000 words at least, which isn't quite a novel, but it's still far more than I've been writing in any of the past few months. I need a goal like this to get me focused. Let's see if it works.

And, like Todd, I will be keeping track of my words here.

Oh, and the other good habit I've been avoiding is my running. In October, I logged a pathetic 6 miles. This spring, I was doing that in one race. Lame is what I was in October. Goal for November: 22 miles. 22 miles and 45,000 words and what do you get? Skinny and published.

Day 1
1250 words in 1 story (-250).
0 miles (-0.73).

Starting a bit slowly, but it's not where you start - it's where you finish. And other tired sports metaphors. That is all. As you were.

Well that didn't work ...

After spending the past few days asking all my friends to wear red and blue and think good thoughts for the boys at Caley Thistle, we got our asses handed to us today by Aberdeen. 4-1, with two penalties in the first 20 minutes or so that basically put the game out of reach as soon as it started. A cup semifinal really would have made up a bit for the dismal start to the season that saw us actually below Gretna for a bit. Luckily, that situation has resolved itself, thanks to the drumming we handed them this weekend, and we're safe from relegation for now. But, still, this would have been nice.

Well, at least Celtic lost too. Uppity bastards.

Happy Halloween everybody. I will be spending it working, but rest assured that come Friday night, I will be dressing up and going to a party. That's when all the cool kids do it. I guess.

Finally, a bloody story

If I could make one wish, relating to myself and my writing, I would wish that I could control the flow of half-decently coherent story ideas. It seems like there are some times when all my ideas make some sort of sense, and there are suddenly too many to write. I sit there with a pen in hand trying to catch them, like a game show contestant locked in a chamber filled with money, grabbing at it as it flies around me on the wings of a powerful fan. The more you want all of them, the less likely you are to get any individual one. Then there are times, such as the past few weeks, when nothing comes. I have always been very hard on my own writing, but I can honestly say that everything I have written in the past two weeks has been absolute rubbish. The plots don't make sense, the characters are flat, the scenes are uninteresting and the themes are tired. Finally, today, or more appropriately, tonight, I think I've got something decent. Even if nothing comes of it, it's better than the last dozen starts have been, and that's something.

PS - Caley Thistle is in the league cup quarterfinals against Aberdeen at Pittodrie tomorrow. So wear your blue and red, or at least whisper "Mon the Caley" to yourself at your keyboard. It would mean a lot to me, and I like to imagine a universe where it actually makes some difference in the game's result. Bye now.

Season of Mixed Blessings

There's something you should know about me. I hate the fall. The common response I usually get when making that blanket statement is either:

"How can you hate a whole season?"

or

"But it's so pretty in the fall!"

I agree. It is pretty. I also agree that it's insane to hate an entire quarter of every year, but that's just the way it is. Everything bad that has ever happened in my life, from breakups to deaths in the family to car accidents, have happened in the fall. Winter is often depicted as the season of death, but death is peaceful. Death is serene. When it comes down to it, people aren't really afraid of death, they're afraid of dying. The fall is the season of dying. It's the season when everything alive (at least at this latitude) rolls up and calls it a year.

There is only one thing that saves this time of year for me. Okay, not only one thing, but one thing that does it every year, and every time I realize it, I feel incredibly shallow for how happy it makes me. That thing, that savior of all Autumn, is, of course, eggnog.

I love eggnog. I rarely eat eggs and I only grudgingly drink milk, but somehow the natural midpoint between these two things, eggnog, managed to become my favorite drink in the world. I love it to such an extent that if it was a person, and we weren't, um... intimate, eggnog would slap a restraining order on me and push me back to 200 feet. I have had long debates with friends about the injustice of the fact that eggnog is only available in the fall. The duality of my favorite thing being exclusive to my least favorite time is pleasing in a way, but disturbing as well. Without egg nog, would falls be even worse? Or is the silver lining the dust that allowed the cloud to form in the first place?

Oh well. Happy Autumn, to those of you that enjoy it. Happy nog season, to the rest.

The End of Friendship

Hello, reader. How are you? Well, I hope.

See? I'm not an unfriendly person. I might walk around town with my headphones on because I don't want to talk to people, but that hardly means that if forced into a conversation with a stranger, I won't be perfectly civil to them. It doesn't even mean that I am against the idea of meeting new people. It just means that I like to choose the places and times that I do meet new people.

Once again, the internet complicates things. I have always put up a stalwart resistance to the social networking phenomenon. Yeah, I know, reading that on a blog isn't exactly convincing, but while my friends (the real, live, actual kind that hug and punch and sing) were joining MySpace and the like, I stayed away. I figured that if there was anyone I wanted to get in touch with, I would call them. Or go to their house and knock. For someone who makes their living on the internets, I have to admit I am still a bit of a Luddite sometimes.

Anyway, I recently broke down and joined Facebook. I found that it actually was a decent way to keep in touch with my many friends around the country. Unfortunately, as a side effect, there are people who I never thought of as friends, who are now getting in touch with me through it and wanting us to call ourselves "Friends".

For obvious reasons, language is important to me. The choices people make as to what to say and write say a lot about them, and I like to think I choose my words carefully. To me, "friend" is a word with power. It means something. It implies a relationship, or at least a mutual caring for each other's well-being. My issue with social networking in general, and today's "Friend Request" in particular, is that I believe it waters down what it means to be someone's friend. If I accepted that request, it would not only add to my list of friends, it would make each of the others on that list (about whom I legitimately care) less meaningful. And I won't do that. I've always believed that you can't be friends with everyone, and that if they thought about it, no one would really want to be. I stick by that. I just wish I could add people as "Acquaintances" or "People I would wave at if I saw them in the street", or perhaps start a new Facebook list of "I guess I'm glad you're still not dead. I guess."

RTFSG

Is it really so hard? I can't imagine that anyone who writes for a living, or even as an occasional hobby, can claim that reading a few hundred words is too taxing for them. The words I speak of are submission guidelines, and I am about to make one of those editorial rants that every single editor has made at least once since we were deciding whose mammoth drawing was worthy of the really good wall space in the cave. Five words: Read the ______ submission guidelines. The third word was excised from that sentence to maintain this post as family friendly, but it's seven letters long and rhymes with 'fucking'. Anyway, it's not those innocent souls who don't read the submission guidelines that really make me the most angry. I like to think of them as excited young artists, so enamored with their latest creation that the details escape them and they must send it now. No, more than these, the real bother is the applicant who prefaces their submission with the words "I read your submission guidelines", and then precedes to break every one of those guidelines, one by one. My God, people. It's like having a woman walk up to you and kick you in a very uncomfortable place, only to smile down at you, writhing in a ball on the floor, and say "I read today that it hurts when you kick someone there, and I swore I would never do it. Ever. Oh, by the way, can I have five dollars?"

Pushing Daisies is like Wonderfalls Light

I know it's a bit against the stereotype of a writer, but I like television. That's not to say that I disagree with the people that complain that it rots brains and replaces under-attentive parents. I know it does these things, and more. And most of what's on TV is crap. Every once in a while, a gem shines through, and a little gem in a massive pile of shit shines all the brighter. It's way better than just being another gem in a gem pile. Anyway, the point is, the background noise of awful television just makes me appreciate it more when something decent does come along. One particularly perfect little gem was Wonderfalls, a one-season show a while back on Fox. Fox is good at finding decent shows and canceling them after one season. I love that show to an extent that no other TV show can claim. I like Lost, I like Battlestar ... well, for now ... but I adored Wonderfalls.

So, when I heard that ABC had picked up a show with one of the creators (Bryan Fuller) and one of the stars (Lee Pace) of Wonderfalls, I was excited. Not schoolgirl excited ... that doesn't happen anymore ... but excited. I watched the pilot today, and I have to say, I'm cautiously optimistic. I've been burnt before, so I'm not putting myself out there until at the least the second date, er, episode, but I liked it. There's a half-real, half-fantasy feel to it that is pure Bryan Fuller. In WF, it was more subtle, but I like the way it plays here, and if it's anything like WF, the second episode will be completely different from the first anyway. So, for now, I'm satisfied. But don't you break my heart, ABC. Don't you make it suck.

They basically had me at the flying dog corpse and the field of perfect flowers. Lovely.

50 Years From Sputnik

Just a short note today, since I'm busy with all manner of things, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention October 4th's coolest birthday, the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the real beginning of the space age. Anyone with an interest in science, science fiction or both should look to the skies today and remember that only half a century ago, there were no satellites, no space stations, no shuttles. We are 50 years old today as an orbiting, space-going race, and that seems almost impossibly young. It's a good day to reflect on what we've accomplished in those 50 years, not least the first two space superpowers avoiding blowing each other up. It's also a good day to reflect on what we haven't done. Within 12 years of the Sputnik launch, a man was standing on the moon, but we only went back a handful of times, and no human has set foot on the moon in 35 years. I used to work in the desert, where on a clear night you could look up and see dozens of satellites criss-crossing the sky at what seemed like ridiculous speeds. Now, from town, they're hidden from me, but I'll still take a minute tonight and look out the window, knowing that the metal children of our fifty-year flirtation with space are out there.

1097 Launches

It's been a really long time since I mentioned it, but a few friends and I have been working on editing a print-and-online little monthly zine, called 1097 Magazine, and the first web version is now online at 1097mag.com. Feel free to come on over and check it out. It's all of our first forays into editing and publishing, so it should be interesting to see how much we trip over ourselves. It's been fun - a LOT of reading - and it definitely helps to get inside the heads of those that read my own work. I never really understood how a minor infraction against submission guidelines could send some editors into an insane fit of rage. Now I do. When you're reading 200 poems, give or take, one being out of order and taking an extra five minutes to format feels like the end of the world, and it's incredibly hard not to reply and just scream your brains out at the thoughtless bastard behind it, until you realize you have been that bastard ... and you don't.

In more personal news, I've been a bit down. The second of Western Oregon's two seasons (the rainy one) has arrived, and I'll need a bit of time to adjust to it. There are other things too, but frankly, this has never been a particularly personal blog. I had one of those once, one of the billions of "Waaaah, I hate my life" blogs, and frankly, I bored myself. It's been an odd year, and that may be all that needs to be said.

Link Insanity

Okay, maybe not insanity, but Miss Camille's blogroll post has inspired me (if you can call it inspiration when what you end up doing is kind of lazy) to post a linky-post. I have resigned myself to spending this lovely Oregon day writing, not blogging, and so the internets will have to step in and do the entertaining.

First and foremost, that's THREE in a row for my beloved Caley Thistle, thank you very much.

Also, it appears that Joey Fatone has lost 95 pounds and married a senior citizen.

If Kiefer Sutherland goes to jail, will he escape like he always does on 24?

If you still haven't seen Brazilian women play soccer, you need to take a look at this. Marta is on fire.

I always knew that when zombies finally came, they'd come from Philly.

Republicans skip out of having to talk about minorities, and Hilary wants to pay me $5000 to impregnate people.

That is all. Enjoy the weather. Unless you're in Utah or Tokyo, where the internet tells me it is currently raining.

Two in a row for Caley

These are tough days for the fans of my beloved Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club. The season in Scotland has started dismally for Caley Thistle (which we call them so we don't have to say that whole long thing very often), with 6 losses in the first 6 games, which left us, before this weekend, one point below Gretna, the newest top-level pro side in Scotland. But things are looking up. We won our first league match of the season on Saturday, defeating Hearts, which is sort of like two wins for me, since I despise Hearts so much. More on that some other time, but sufficed to say, they are all that is wrong in the world. Anyway, today, more good news from the Caley front, as we beat none other than Gretna in the league cup, 3-0. Finally, something to convince the 6,000 or so that can fit into Inverness' Caledonian Stadium to actually come out in the rain and watch some football. Even if we do still sit in last place in the league, we are through to the quarterfinals of the league cup, which at least five of the eleven other SPL teams are not. We have a bad history in cup competitions of blowing it at exactly this point, but it feels good to be two matches away from a cup final.

And for all the football fans that have to yell and scream in their apartments because they can't live close to the teams they love, here's me yelling and screaming in mine:

Back on the poetry horse

Between coming back home and going back to work, I have been on a vacation hangover, trying to bring myself to sit at a desk for the beautiful daytime hours and get something, anything, done. In the meantime, I've gotten absolute shite done in terms of writing. So I sat down this morning and took a couple of hours to myself and finally put pen to paper again. I think I'm going to go back, at least for a little while, to writing rough drafts on paper. Because I sit all day in front of a computer screen, my eyes are already sick of that particular glow by the time it's writing time, and my fatigue hurts the process terribly. I got some progress done on a few poems I started while in Britain, so that's good. There are also a few anthology deadlines coming up, and so I hope I can get back into the prose habit as well. When I split my writing time between poetry and prose, I think that's when I find myself happiest with the products of both. Oh well. Short post today - not much going on. Bye bye now.

I miss the castles

Not much to report today. An old friend was in town last night for her bachelorette party, so I went out and had a few beers more than I should have ... today has been less than pleasant. I've decided that on days when I have nothing particularly new to talk about, I'll live vicariously through my past self and show pictures from the Scotland trip. So, here goes. This is Inverness Castle.



The reason it looks so fancy and nice and new (and therefore less castley) is because it is new. During the Jacobite Revolution in Scotland, when English forces were on their way to the highlands, the Scots decided to blow up the castle rather than let the English take it and use it as a stronghold. On one hand, it made sense, since a battle fought purely in the fields would favor the home side, but it does seem that defending a castle gives some advantage. Anyway, they had a French engineer, who understandably had no more love for the English than the Scots did, take charge of the demolition. He succeeded, and the original castle was completely destroyed. Unfortunately he also blew himself up in the process. Live by the black powder, die by the black powder.

We Pretend That We're Dead

I have the. coolest. news. ever.

Wait for it.

I'm going to be a zombie. A local theatre is doing (HEhehehehe) a stage rendition of Night of the Living Dead, probably my favorite all-time horror movie, and they need zombies. I cannot tell you how awesome this is. It is awesome in a way that was formerly reserved for things like chocolate or democracy. I am literally happy with joy, and all because of the opportunity to get myself covered in latex and goo and grunt across a stage while people try to fake-blow my head off. Weird?

Before and After: The Shearing

This is my head:



This is my head after clipping:



Somewhere, there is a very happy dump rat with a new nest, and some whiny little emo kid feels just slightly more alone as there is one less person in the world that looks just like him.

Return to the Valley of Corn

Well, I'm back in lovely Corn Valley. I spent the past few days doing errands, catching up with a few friends, and trying desperately to return to my routine after almost two months of traveling. The biggest change to report is that approximately a pound of hair that used to be on my head is now waiting in a nearby dumpster, soon to be on its way to a local dump. I needed a haircut BEFORE my trip, and by the time I got back, had hair that I could pull down to past my nose, which for me is wicked long. I also had about an inch and a half of a beard. While it was clear that something needed to be done, and quickly, I suppose I might have been a little severe. I shaved my face completely, which is a little rare for me (being a pretty reliable bearded guy), and then I shaved my head. EEK. I still can't believe I shaved my head - haven't done that since high school, which is to say a very, very, very long time. So I now must adjust to life as a no-hair. Will people treat me differently? Will I be able to get jobs and friends that were once closed off to me as a long-haired freaky person, or will other long-haired freaky people shun me for my return to a more mainstream look? Report to follow. Back to work.

Puddle Jumpin'

Well, it's just about over. Tomorrow afternoon, I fly back to the good old U.S. of A. Instead of chips, I will now have to settle for fries, and football will once again mean that devolved game of rugby with all the pads. But, it will be good to be home. The trip has been a bit more eventful than I thought, what with the week or so of eating nothing but fruit and bread while my bank took its sweet-ass time to send me a new debit card and all that.

Ooh. I just realized. When I get home, I finally get to expend some real energy on bitching like a lame horse about my bank before I leave it and go to another one. Fun. There's a credit union in town, and if I'm going to get fleeced by someone, they might as well be local, right?

Anyway, bye bye Britain. It's been a blast. Call me.

Things done quickly

Well, I worked up one of my short-shorts and sent it off to Every Day Fiction. It took them all of about five hours to send it back, with comments. Let's just say ... not favorable. I have this thing about cliches ... I like them - I guess I like to try to find new angles at them, but the problem with that is that if you miss, you have nothing new at all, just the cliche itself. Note to self. Things done quickly have the dependable tendency to fail. Oh well. It was interesting to get comments back, and with the reviewers' names on them, no less. Always worth knowing who says what - helps to know who's worth listening to. Editing's a hard job, and sending the comments is extra work, so I'm impressed that they do it.

Every Day Fiction

For those of you that haven't heard, there is a great new project going on over at Every Day Fiction. In the same self-explanatory vein as "One Story", Every Day Fiction is one flash fiction story, every day, in your email box. It's free, and so far, the three stories in the series have been fantastic. Today's, "Lolita's Lynch Mob" by Sarah Hilary, is my favorite so far. It's a really brilliant little tale, which reminds me of "We Can Get Them For You Wholesale", one of my favorite Gaiman shorts. It has that same feeling of playing with something you don't understand, and realizing too late that it wasn't such a great idea. Any more and I'd ruin it. Anyway, I was considering submitting to EDF already, especially after frequent blog reader Camille encouraged me to do so. But, now, after this story, I am definitely going to concentrate on getting into this club. Go there and subscribe. You won't regret it.

Happy Save Creation Day

As you may have noticed from past postings, I love empty holidays dedicated to important issues. International Fight Desertification Day was a blast. Save Creation Day, better. The Pope, in a move that seems a bit of a departure from his conservative nature (this is the Pope that brought back Latin, after all), is joining with hairy hippies from all over Italy in Loreto for Save Creation Day. His Popeness is urging people to save the environment and make the tough choices that are necessary to do so. Of course, given that birth control and overpopulation have nothing to do with environmental decay, there should be no calls of hypocrisy here. Oh, wait. Scratch that.

In all seriousness, I can't fault His ... what do you call him, anyway, eminence? ... for doing something like this - it's a good idea and anything that a Christian leader can do to encourage a little more "stewardship" and a little less "mastery" in the interpretation of Man's role toward nature is great. It just has to eventually come with the admission that some of the tough choices involve social change that may not fit too terribly well with a conservative view of the Bible. If this was John Paul II, I'd have no comment on the matter, because the last Pope was a relatively liberal one when it came to admitting that the church had to change to survive. He was the Pope that admitted how much sense Darwinian evolution made, and apologized for killing Galileo. But this is the Pope of robes and Latin and everything that has turned people away from Catholicism for the past half of a century. He is the definition of old school Catholicism, and I just don't buy it as much from him.

I also like the logic of encouraging environmental protection by giving away 300,000 recycled-plastic knapsacks at the event. Using recycled plastic to replace a product that would have been made with first-use plastic is environmentally friendly - creating a new product made out of recycled plastic is a net loss, because of the resources spent in recycling it. Anyway, rant over. No new writing news ... I'm waiting on a few stories, and I have a few that need polishing before sending them out, so hopefully I'll have more news soon.

Mostly they come out at night. Mostly.

I've been pretty quiet, blog-wise, but I figured I would make a quick hello post. There are a few things about Britain that I just don't understand, and I'd like someone else's opinion about whether I have a point or I'm just being weird.

The first thing - this sign.



I understand that it means there's a traffic camera, but why the old-timeyness? It looks like it's warning us that there's dangerous do-it-yourself macro photography ahead .... eek. That one might just be me.

But this one is legitimate. The bathrooms, at least the public ones, all across Britain, have floor tiles covered in little sparkles. I'm sure they looked pretty when they were being picked out, but mostly, when you see little reflective sparkles on a bathroom floor, you don't think "Pretty". You think "Huh. Somebody peed here ... and here ... oh my god ... there's pee EVERYWHERE." Seriously, I'm not a freaky urine-phobe or anything, and this isn't the sort of thing I usually devote a lot of mind time to, but I have to think that having half the public bathrooms in the nation look like they've been peed all over just can't be a good advertisement. I briefly considered that perhaps British people like to pee on the floor, and the sparkles alleviate their guilt by making all floors, peed on or not peed on, appear the same. But that's insulting to British people, and I tend to like British people, so I reject that outright. Instead, I blame the tiling manufacturers, and the builders of public washrooms. Someone should be fired.

That is all.

Ahh the football

I took in a football match (aka soccer game) at Pittodrie Stadium in Aberdeen today. Not a great result for the home side, as they lost 3-1 to Celtic, but a good fast-paced match with some good goals, and that's really all I wanted. Other than that, it's been a quiet day. Light rain in Aberdeen. Wow - most exciting blog ever, quoting you Scottish weather. Anyway, here's a picture from Pittodrie, showing the scene. It's so nice to be in a place where soccer's a top sport (aka to be anywhere but the States).



Respect to those few fans sitting in the uncovered corner seats. But confusion to the ones sitting at the top of that section. There were seats available all the way down ... if you're going to get rained on, may as well have a nice view as well.

Piku

Yeah, so I sort of get stuck on things. Ideas, mostly. My submission of a formal poem this morning got me all psyched up about structure and rhythm and stuff. Then I started looking back at things I'd written lately, especially some haiku I'd been working on. A lot of people seem to think haiku are easy and meaningless, but if you really study them, they're neither. There are rules to follow, though in English, we tend to be a little lax with them. I decided to make the haiku a little harder. What I came up with was the "Piku", a haiku where the number of letters in each word is set by Pi. 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, etc. Nerdy, I know, but it's actually hard as hell to make a sensible haiku with three lines, of five, seven and five syllables, while also following the Pi letter rule. This is maybe the best I've come up with so far, expressing my need to settle back in after I get back from the trip.

Now I want a night
abstinent in Oregon -
Quiet and sober.

Even this is cheating a little, since it doesn't have the "season word" that a haiku should have, but I'm letting it go because I've already put way too much effort into this today.

Formality

Well, as I am once again in more regular web contact, I'll be trying my best to post here more often. I submitted a poem today to Trellis Magazine, the first time I've sent anyone any formal poetry, and it got me thinking. Formal poetry gets a bad rap. So many poets I know look down on poetry with rules, and the stricter the form is, the more they seem to despise it. Why? Isn't some of the greatest poetry in history written in the confines of structure, meter and rhyme? I'm not saying that free verse doesn't have its place - it certainly does. I both read and write free verse. But, personally, I really like writing in the confines of structure sometimes, especially an invented structure like the one in this last poem. There's something appealing to my nerdier side in sitting down, coming up with a set of alphabetical, metrical and/or rhyming rules, and then taking an idea and making it fit within them. Maybe its my science background. Oh well. Anyway, the yes-letter from Coyote Wild yesterday got me off my kiester and back to sending stuff out, so that's good. I've been concentrating so much on writing it this summer that I've forgotten the part where other people read it.

In other news, Happy Birthday to the CD. It will likely be the last dominant physical form for commercial music before it becomes entirely digital, or at least the last that sells anywhere near 200 billion copies. That's enough CD's that if you stacked them up, they would circle the Earth over 6 times. I love useless facts. By the way, for those keeping score, you can't stack them all up because my ex-girlfriend once broke one of my CDs in half. So, if you were planning on trying, blame her. I like CDs - a huge improvement over tapes, anyway, and digital downloads lack the joy that is liner notes, a loss that cannot be overestimated.

I am sofa kingdom ... and so on

Interesting day. Hi, everybody. It's been a really long time since I've posted - the trip through England and Scotland has been fantastic, but quite busy. I have some good news ... well, good news for me, bad news for my mental state, I guess. I got my first short story accepted today! It's a flash fiction (1400 words or so) piece, one that I've mentioned in a previous post, "Further Study". I am thrilled to have it accepted by Coyote Wild, an online quarterly I enjoy a lot. The bad news is that I don't remember submitting it to Coyote Wild. Looking back at my email vault, it seems that I did so in the middle of the night one night, which would usually be fine. The problem arises in that the other journal to which I submitted the story does not accept simultaneous submissions. I've written to the other journal, who I've heard nothing from, but still, I feel bad. I try to keep good records of what's rejected, what's accepted, and what's in the mail, but this one got by me. Oh well. I'm sorry to the other journal for the wasted work - there is a special place in heaven for those that read unsolicited submissions - but I'm also just thrilled about the acceptance from Coyote Wild. Check them out.

So, the credit card got sorted, as you may have assumed given that I haven't yet starved to death. I've moved on from London, which is lovely but a big city and not really my style for a long stay.

Thanks to Camille for stopping by and commenting. Check out her blog, littlebird blue. Cool stuff.

The trip continues, now, buoyed a bit by the news of the acceptance from CW. I'll try to post more often. Worst. Blogger. Ever. Bye now.

Yanks Abroad

Well, I'm in England. London, to be exact. Chelsea, to be ridiculously exact. I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I made it, I'm alive, and I'm well on my way to getting my first-ever press credentials to cover Rangers matches while I'm over here. The bad news is, some ass stole my credit card and made off with it. I've told the story so many times I'm going crazy, so I won't tell it again, but sufficed to say it's a huge pain in the ass not having a credit card in a foreign country. I can't pay for anything, and London is, to be perfectly frank, a very expensive city. An exchange rate of over 2 dollars to every pound doesn't help matters. Right now, I have shelter (a hotel paid with my father's credit card ... pathetic, I know), and some food (a burger for dinner tasted WAY better than it actually was). Tomorrow, my quests include not just the planned trips around the city and eventually to the train station out, but concentrate mainly on jaunts to the US embassy and a bank to try to make some sort of sensible way out of this. It sucks. Hopefully, by tomorrow, I'll work it out. My bank is shipping a card off to me, but it could take a week, and London is not the sort of town in which one can vacation for a week without any money.

But, like I said, I'm just about set up for my first real live press box, which will hopefully come August 4th in Inverness at the Caley Thistle-Rangers season opener. I will be reporting for Yanks Abroad, a website covering American athletes overseas. DeMarcus Beasley is my particular focus, as he is the only current American playing in the Scottish league.

I just hope I get my money sorted soon. Otherwise, the title of this blog may be suddenly much more fitting than I had planned.

In the airport

... on the way to London. Finally, after what seems like a year of waiting, I'm on my way to England and Scotland for a half-working vacation that I sorely need. I have already lost my phone and almost left my passport a handful of places, but who's counting? Next time I post, I will be in England, and writing furiously. As I've said, I want to come back with a vast array of at least starts for stories, if not a notebook full of poems and stories. The football work I'll be doing over there will be great, but its a means to an end also. Literary work is what I really want to get done over there. We'll see.

Having a try at Yog's

I discovered a cool little zine today called Yog's Notebook, and promptly sent them off a story. They seemed enamored of Lovecraft, from a little joke on their "About Us" page, and so I sent them a story called "Further Study", a little 1600-word short-short about Cthulhu and a scientist that witnesses his near-return. I'll be curious to know what they think of it.

In other news, I leave the cozy confines of the West coast in about a day and a half, first for New York, then for London. I'm hoping that I can find a nice little corner of Scotland to finally relax in, between football games of course. I've followed both my favorite national team (Scotland) and my favorite club (Inverness Caley Thistle) from afar for so long that I can't believe I'm actually going to get to see them play live. Between the matches, though, I'm planning on making writing a full-time job, and I'd really like to come back with notebooks full of work. While I'm here, I find it really difficult to find the time to write, and so I hope a trip to the old country is just what the doctor ordered. We shall see.

Me: 55 words; Them: 1 ... No

So, another day, another rejection letter. This one stung a bit more than the average, since it was a piece written specifically for the place I sent it. There's a cool little online litmag called "55 Words" that publishes, you guessed it, 55-word flash fiction. I hear people talk about novels and how impossible it can seem to write that much, but I think the opposite is true. It's relatively easy to tell a full and rich story in 10,000 words. Try it in 55 - now, that's a challenge. Anyway, regardless of their lack of interest in my particular story (or perhaps more so because of it), you should definitely check them out. Flash fiction is an interesting medium, and I'm looking forward to trying more of it.

Deserts BAAAAAD

Yeah, I know. I am the worst blogger ever. It's been like three weeks. I'm not even really posting right now, because it's late and I still have real work to do. The truth is, this blog has been last priority and so has been abandoned because the first-through-second-to-last priorities have taken up absolutely all my time.

But, it is World Day to Combat Desertification, and so how could I not post. I hope everyone took time today to ... not ... make ... anymore deserts ... (?)

Goodnight.

Brilliant

Enough said. Great website from Miranda July, whose movies (and now, websites) I absolutely adore. I will be immediately buying her book, which I also expect to like a lot.

Linky

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for introducing me to this via his blog.

That is all.

Ah ..... yup

So, there's no way around it. There's just not that much worth blogging about going on here in the Valley of Corn. There's been some personal stuff - that girl I was dating - well, that worked out sort of predictably badly. On the positive side, I think I actually succeeded in pushing her back to her ex-boyfriend. I should start a new sort of relationship counseling. I'll call it "Could Be Worse Relationship Services", and our slogan could be "Take What You Can Get". Anyhow, whoever you are, girl's ex-boyfriend, glad I could be there for you, mate. I assume the check is in the mail.

This is a short blog, because, like I said, not much is going on.

Something funny I saw on Kermit the Blog. I enjoyed it, and I'll be stopping by there more often to see if they're always so clever. Bye now.

Two movies ... one good and one ...

Okay, I don't curse all that much. I did at one point, but I now I find it much more effective to use my four-letter words sparsely. I find it gives them more meaning. So, please understand that I feel it's the best possible choice of words when I say that Spiderman 3 ... fucking sucked. To be more specific, the second act of Spiderman 3 fucking sucked. It was the worst middle of a movie I've seen in years, and the worst part about it was that I had just finished watching a really good movie about an hour before.

I had a date tonight. A second date, in fact, with a very cool girl that I really hope I can see more of. We went and saw The Namesake at a great little independent theater here in town. It was everything I expected - well written, beautifully photographed, well acted. It did all the little things right, the nuances. There's a great scene when a woman learns of the death of a loved one and just walks around the house turning on all the lights, realizing how alone she is, trying to bring some life into her house before she finally loses her composure. It's sad and sweet and beautiful.

Nothing about Spiderman was beautiful. Listen, I understand that I'm comparing apples and oranges here. One of these movies is a blockbuster, the other an independent. But I'm a comic book nerd, and I really liked the previous Spiderman movies. This one however, had nothing appealing. Aside from another great little cameo from Bruce Campbell, doing a brilliant fake-French waiter routine, everything was just so blah... The characters were either overacted or barely acted at all. The dialog was terrible. And there is a scene, about halfway through ... all I'll say is "Disco". It was the 2007 version of the rave in Zion in Matrix Reloaded, when all of us started to suspect that something might be headed in the wrong direction.

Luckily, my date was not subjected to this horror. After the movie, we hung out in a bookstore for a little while and then she went home. She lives in a different town, which is proving to be kind of tough. It makes it hard to have a beer together, which is something we both tend to do, when one has to drive 45 minutes home. Anyway, even if her stereo broke and she spent the drive home in silence, she still had a better ride entertainment-wise.

Now it is time for sleep. Tomorrow, for those that are cool enough to care, or lucky enough to have been born Scottish, is the Scottish Cup. Celtic and Pars. I'll be up insanely early in the morning to watch it here in the states. G'night.

A New Used Car, and Thanks, but No Thanks

Well, it's been a pretty full week here in the Valley of Corn, which has been blessed with remarkably good weather. I haven't seen a cloud in three days, meaning two things - first, I've become much more interested in my garden, and second, I've gotten nearly no real work done. However, I did manage to buy a car. The joy and rapture that is Craig's List came through for me once again, leading me to the car I now address as "Alice", a 1988 Chevy Corsica. I've always named any car I own after a woman's name with which I have no personal history, and I've always liked the name Alice for fairly obvious literary reasons, so it was an easy choice. This week, I also got a rejection letter in its most polite form, the "Thank you for your submission. It's a great piece but just not for us" letter. It was for an Earth Day related story, or at least one that I thought would tie in, and I kind of figured it had been rejected when Earth Day had come and gone, so it was no great disappointment. There is an art unto itself in deciding exactly where to send a story once you finish it, and I guess that's an art form in which I still need improvement. It was very nice to get personalized comments, though. That is rarer than most non-authors suppose. The vast, vast majority of manuscripts sent to editors are rejected, and almost all of those are thrown away or sent back with no comments at all, due to the time constraints of explaining why one piece is right and another is not. Editors are not English professors, and need all the time in their day just to read all the entries from crackpots like myself who think they can write for a living, so I do very much appreciate it when I get editorial comments, and make sure to take those comments very seriously.

I started work on a new short story today for the Susurrus Press anthology "I Am This Meat". The title is a Vonnegut reference, which in itself makes it something I want to be associated with, and I really like the idea. It's in a pretty early stage, so I'll be curious to see where the story goes and whether it becomes something or not. Hard to say when they're young, what they'll grow up to be.

Scots Wahey!

Hey - I have not been able to post since the event, but I definitely wanted to blog about the SNP victory in Scotland. For those of you not keeping up with Scottish parliamentary politics (for shame!), the SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party. Until fairly recently, the SNP was probably the third largest party in Scotland, but in the recent elections, they took the most seats in the Scottish parliament, wresting control away from the Labour Party, who currently control England's legislature. The one major policy of the SNP is Scottish independence, and they will likely be bringing a ballot measure to the people of Scotland to decide whether or not to leave the UK. As an ethic Scot, headed back to the old country this summer for the first time as an adult, I'm happy for Scotland. This issue should go to the voters, and if they approve it, Scotland can be truly independent for the first time in centuries. If not, if it's not what the people want, then that will be that, but Scots have a completely different culture than the English, and we've been lumped under the term "British" for too long. It's high time that the Empire, once spanning most of the known world, was pulled apart completely, until it spans not even the breadth of their own island.

Alba Gu Brath. Scotland forever.

Cinco de Mayo Puppy Watch

One of our finest annual traditions here in the Valley of Corn, the Cinco de Mayo pig roast has returned. As usual, this particular little piggy (who probably should have stayed home) is being prepared as we speak. Last year, I ate what I believe to be a personal record amount of food in a one-day period. I wasn't measuring, but that was a lot of pork for a man to eat, no doubt of that. This year, however, I have decided to bow out of this festival of gluttony and will instead be watching my friend T's house and dog. She is a lovely Rottweiler with the softest ears of any dog alive in the world, period. I was just remarking to a girl I met yesterday how much I missed having a dog, and when the offer came along, I thought "Well, since I wasn't remarking to a girl I just met how much I missed eating pork, I guess I want this more." So, other bellies will have to swell just a little more for my absence. Maybe I'll get a pork chop from the store and recreate the event in microcosm at T's place - then I can have the best of both worlds.

Introduction

How do I start this blog? I've run, and continue to run, a number of blogs around the various interwebs, mostly on soccer. I'm familiar with the blogger's routine of shuffling through the daily news sources to find those few gems worth expanding on, but this is different. This is about me. So, I guess I start with an introduction to me. My name is Ian, and I'm a displaced east coaster, living now in the moist and cloudy confines of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My formal training is as a scientist, a biologist to be exact, and I have spent the past four years working in northwestern Alaska studying seabirds and the little sea creatures they eat. After that project lost its federal funding, and after a few unwelcome changes in my personal life, I decided to seek therapy in an old habit, my writing. I've always been a huge reader and consumer of both poetry and prose, and wrote a lot for my self, but never thought I could write for the public. Mostly I was just lacking confidence in my work, and thinking that 28 was a little late to start a second (or more accurately, fourth) career. But, in the meantime, I was writing more than ever - pages and pages every day, notebooks every month, and some of it seemed to be better than before. It seemed as if the events of my life in recent years had focused me a little, and made me a little bit more interesting of a person, which I think of as an absolute prerequisite for being a good writer. I don't think I'm a good writer, not yet, but I think I'm getting better, and I'm happy to say that I have recently gotten my first acceptance! A poem of mine, called "You Are" was accepted by the online magazine Chantarelle's Notebook, a small but pretty well-known little website which has published some pieces I've really liked. That will be coming out in August, by the way, and I'll certainly blog about that here. This is my semi-public journal, where I'll talk about my writing, my life, traveling (I'll be in the UK for a good bit of the summer), etc. I hope it's enjoyable to read, or at least, if it's not, that it doesn't take too terribly long. Thanks for coming.

In addition, I am in the process, with a few friends, of putting together an online journal of our own. It will be called 1097 magazine, and will be exclusively dedicated to showing off the talents of new and emerging artists, authors and musicians. I'll be talking about 1097 a lot on here, and the site will eventually have a link to this blog.