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.