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.