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.