Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy

I'm 23 today! ...Wait. Strike that; reverse it.

I've been lax and slack about posting this year, and I wish I could tell you it was because I've been producing brilliant Art instead; but no, mostly it's just that I'm getting old and lazy and it's winter and, yeah. You know this tune.

But as I failed to report in a timely fashion, the last gig went quite well, and I have another lined up for February 18th, so obviously we're not doing too badly. (Thanks, indeed, to everyone who dropped in and made that weekend the roaring Bacchanalian success it was.) And I got a new job over last weekend; more details on that later. The point being that things are indeed looking up.

And Janine has now joined the household, which is a good thing for everyone. We've already managed to get the Buffy hook in her, because, well, that's what we do.

More of everything soon. Meanwhile, I'm off for a celebratory drink to mark my inverted Illumination. Whee!

A Cup of Kindness

It's the last afternoon of a year I'm not exactly sorry to see the end of. But I'm looking forward with high hopes to the next one.

Yesterday was a year since PaPa died, something which has certainly cast a long shadow over my life ever since. I probably miss him every day, a little bit; not who he was at the end of his life, but who he was as I remember him. I don't wish he'd kept on continuing, as tired and broken as he was, but I often wish that what he used to be was still here. Which I suppose it sort of is, because that's what remains of him more than anything else in art and memory. If there is something that endures the body - and I don't think I can quite bring myself to believe there isn't, somehow - I hope it's the best of what we are, those things we remember with most fondness. That's what I miss about him, and the only wish I'd make is that he hadn't released all that into the Mystery so long ago. I wish he'd been happier, at the end.

Likewise, this year, as hard as it's been, is one I want to remember not for its hardships but for the fruit it bore, which wound up being bountiful in many ways. And when I look back on it, there are a lot of very bright lights in the shadows of 2005, for which I have to thank the love and good company of my friends and family. You were there for me when I needed you; I hope I can do the same in turn. And I hope for happiness for myself as well, as a gift to me and to the people who love me. I intend to choose it as much as I can, come what may. If I have anything like a resolution for the New Year, that would be it.

And the best of this past year has given me a lot to be happy about; I have a novel well in the works (which I encourage you all to continue hounding me to finish), with further projects waiting in the wings; a growing body of work with OVO, the creation of which continues to be a source of wonder and joy; and not least of all, friendships that have only gotten better and closer, which is always preferable to the alternative. (Not to mention there are now some lights at the end of the tunnel concerning finances and all that vulgar stuff.)

So Happy New Year, everyone; I trust that it will be, for all of us. Take care of each other, both here at the end and in the new beginning. And I'll see you all in January.

Ring, Solstice Bells

Happy Yule, everyone! Light a candle, down some wassail, and hail the returning day; remember that it only gets better from here.

Me, I'm having some spiked nog, and then off to bed for my annual reread of Hogfather. And after tomorrow, a brief but much-needed holiday vacation will commence.

Meanwhile, Bono Dies Natalis Solis Invictis!

Show and Tale

By popular demand, new stuff is up at Otherwood now, with more to come sometime around the weekend. Go thou forth and read, my minions.

Most of you who can make it probably know this by now, but we've got another show at The Cup on Saturday; and once again, there's a lovely poster in .pdf format if you want one.

Not much to add to that, save that you should also go (if you haven't already) and visit the redesigned now-with-more-brooding Big Tony blog; and from thence check out the excellent new tunage he's been working on. (If we ever manage to all get in the same city at the same time again, the world may never be the same.)

High on a Downer, Again

I can't even say how much I appreciate the emails, phone calls and comments you guys have sent my way over the last couple of days. If I haven't responded to yours, I will; I've been pushing forward to hit 50K (which I did), since I knew giving up this close wasn't something I could live with, black mood or no.

It comes and goes, but I'm doing a little better - still broke, still stressed, still worried about things falling apart, but I'm clawing my way up. One of the worst things about when the bad chemicals kick in and I don't have a chance to do any kind of countermeasure is that horrible, horrible loss of perspective that comes with utter hopelessness. (And that's quite literally what it is - the sudden loss of all hope, or almost all. The possibility of things improving, when you're where even down looks up, seems like an absurdity.)

The disruption of my stable little world at work was a big blow. I'd been sticking around because my boss had plans to promote me, and the knowledge that that wasn't going to happen was a little too much shock and horror at the end of a bad year. Now it looks like I might get a little improvement there anyway, which helps a little in my not being full of must-get-outnow panic. I still feel very uncomfortable working for a system that would do what it did to him (and his worst fault seems to be not performing miracles with minimal resources, which describes forfuckssake everywhere I've ever worked); I don't like that feeling of having to wonder who the axe is being sharpened for next. But I at least feel like I can get by for a little while until something that's really right comes along. Not good, but tolerable. So it goes.

Anyway, I'm not what I'd call fine, but I can see it from here without a telescope. I'm really sorry about falling apart like this; I hate being a burden on the people that I care about, and I know how hard it can be to live with me. I don't ever want to feel like I've taken more from my friends than I've given back, and I don't want the price of loving me to be a cheering-up session two or three times a year. So thank you; I don't deserve it, but I don't know what I'd do without it.

Spiralling

Note to New Readers: I'm leaving this one up for archival purposes, and as a reminder that living with my Condition occasionally makes me irrational and strange; but it's not, um, representative of my normal posting habits. I swear I'm a Serious Blogger, really, and not some angsty 13-year-old with a LiveJournal. ;) -DLK

I'm three thousand odd words from goal and having the hardest time I've ever had getting there.

I can't remember the last time I was this depressed. It feels like I've been so far down for so long I don't even know how to get back there from here. Which is why I can't sleep now, though I'm so tired I barely feel alive.

It's been a truly dreadful year in many ways. I keep wondering where it was I made the fatal error that's put me here, and I've now lost count of the number of breakdowns I've had today while thinking about it. I'm looking at being a month behind on my mortgage for the foreseeable future, my job just took a turn for the abyssmal (the best manager I've ever worked for just became a victim of beaurocracy in a really ugly way), and I look at my prospects and start to think I've turned into a particularly useless waste of space.

I'm sorry, everyone. I'm sorry I didn't turn out to be a better person; I'm sorry about whatever chance it was I blew that made it so hard for me to get my act together now. I'm sorry I have this awful disease that I can't afford to treat that makes it so difficult to be close to me. I'm sorry I can't get Christmas presents for the people I love.

I'm sorry about all this. I told Stacy, when I hit what felt like bottom tonight, that I'm so tired of this stupid world. I'm sorry I'm not making it any better. It feels like it broke me at last.

Bird by Bird

Happy Thanksgiving to all and sundry; and today, a feast of words, with a fresh new update on Otherwood. (Some of you have already noted that the previous section went up unannounced over the weekend, but in case you hadn't, there's that too.)

My word count's more than doubled since my last recounting it here, which still puts me in crunch for the next week, but so it goes. I'm off to improve upon that right now.

In the meantime, much bounty and good wishes to all of you, near and far; and I'll raise a glass to you by and by. Cheers!

Clothed All in Green-O

Part 2 is now on the novel site, as I charge into the weekend proper with 16,526 words down. Footnotes to come as I get further along in the text itself. (There's more written now than is currently posted, but I figured that was a good stopping point.)

And y'all who have been so kind and supportive about the work so far: I point out, once again, that comments are enabled over there. Humor a neurotic writer and set it down for the sake of posterity.

And with that, I'm back to't.

Have Wood, Need Sheep

Day six, and I stand at a respectable 10,445 words, so that's a week well spent.

This means there is now text up at the Otherwood site, in all its imperfect glory, for your perusal and commentary, should you be so inclined. It's been a lot of fun so far, and more so because I had a couple of surprise volunteers for the cast this time around. (As I remarked to Stacy a couple of days ago, it may be a relief to some of you to learn that I actually can write a genuine girly-girl; of course, I could only make it work by making her a guy, so that's probably a draw.)

In other creative news, I neglected to mention last time that the Music link in my sidebar yonder will now take you to an actual webpage, where you can read me nattering on about the various downloadable songs and stuff. Huzzah for navel-gazing wank.

Speaking of which, back to the fappery now in progress. Onward!

Begin, Begin

A couple of odds and ends, before I get down to the business of strapping the Stratocaster to the chimp tomorrow and have no headspace for anything else:

First, just as OVO steps down from a first public exhibition, Big Tony (our absent and missed fourth) tells me we also have our first public release, on the Looper's Delight 3 compilation, which I think I mentioned we'd been up entirely too late putting together back in June. (Also known as Kreepy Walking Trees, Take 1.) Too cool.

Second, for those of you who want to follow along as I unleash this year's assault on literature onto the unsuspecting world, the work-in-progress will be posted in installments here. No actual content there yet, of course, but just you wait.

Thirdly, of course, to all my companions in Craft: Happy New Year. And to all the departed, crowded close at the thinning of the veil, peace and restfulness and safe journey to you, wherever the Mystery may take you Onwards. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde, neve lux somnum pertubet eorum.

And so to bed, and gather my wits and strength for November. Aum Shri Ganeshaya Namah. See you on the other side.

The Minstrel in the Coffeehouse

For those of you I've failed to announce this to already, some good news: I have an upcoming gig, a week from tonight - Friday the 28th - at The Cup (where I've been an intermittent performer at Uncle John's open mic these past months). Huzzah!

And he called the band down to the stage: Along with my usual solo folkery, that night will premier some brand-new material from OVO (or, well, the three-quarters of us who have had the opportunity to all be in the same room together over the last few months), who will join me onstage at some point to assist in throwing paint at the canvas. We promise not to read aloud in Enochian so close to All Hallows, but all other bets are off. (Insert your fannish in-joke about "showy Gypsy stuff" here.)

And he looked at all the friends he'd made: On adjacent planes of cool, I'm honored and humbled that ilyAIMY will be playing the opening set that night. Heather and rob are real musician's musicians, and they actually do this stuff for a living, so headlining for them is probably better than I deserve; I'm starting to understand how Steven Wilson must feel lately having to follow Fripp every night. Those of you in attendance who I somehow haven't inflicted "Hands" on in the last couple of years are in for a treat.

Be there or be square as we give the big wheel of the year a nudge into Winter. And remember that tipping musicians is good for your karma.

UPDATE: Download a poster for Friday's show!

"This is a tribute..."

Department of horrible revelations, item #7214: I realized the other day that Fish-era Marillion (which I'd only just recently been trying to describe) sounds exactly like Tenacious D without the irony.

I think this may even trump the time when I had Porcupine Tree playing in the car, and sometime during the long instrumental in "Russia On Ice" Stacy turned to me and said, "You know this is porno music, right?"

>0

MACLEANE: Still swinging both ways, Rochester?
ROCHESTER: Jamie, I swing every way.

- Plunkett & Macleane

Happy belated National Coming Out Day, all - which was officially two days ago, I know. QST, natch.

Mother Hold the Laptop Steady While I Vacuum the Cat

All too soon it's going to be that month again.

Brief notes of an outlining nature, now I have the better part of October to obsess about it: I'm back to writing Jenny this year. Last year's effort was interesting enough, but I didn't carry quite the burning love for it of previous years, so I think that's a lesson learned. I'm considering a story from relatively late in the saga, when Jenny's been settled and married a while, and how she deals with the inevitable weirdness with that perspective; but that's just first thoughts, and I may yet change my mind.

Also, I'm doing this one as a present to myself. I have no agenda for this, no thought of selling it; I may even post it online as I go, and first publication rights be damned. I want to get back to how much fun my first effort at this was, and what a grand time I had cavorting around my universe with my characters. That's what I want to do - a novel I'm not stressing over what kind of commercial chances it has. Too much of my headspace the last couple of years has been given to worrying about that ephemeral hypothetical, and I've lost sight of the reason I do all this in the first place. So there.

Fear not, though, you happy few who have given me joy by being Jenny's fans these last years; I've also been chipping away at a Second First Draft of The Vasty Deep, which I do hope to turn into a more polished - and finished! - work in the next year. Consider that an early heads-up for beta readers.

There's also, sometime on the horizon, the story commissioned by Niels, which has direction now; I'm still deciding whether I want to make it an Eldritch-cosmos story or not, but otherwise the wheels are in motion for that too. Watch this space!

Blog of the Plague Year

Pardon my recent silence, as I've been holed up for a week now with (of all damn things) an early case of the flu. It's better now, if not gone, and I've got a heavy-duty decongestant rendering me more or less functional; otherwise, it's been a week of heavy fluids, daytime TV, and waiting for it to pass.

(Sadly, this points up the sucky aspect of contract work, i.e., the not having insurance or paid sick days part. The cold star of Austerity continues to shine over me into autumn; so it goes.)

I seem to have been sick a lot this year, more so than normal. Stress and depression undoubtedly contributing factors, in these days of instability. Nothing to be done about that, but I look forward to not waking up feeling drained and full of ick every couple of months.

No Young Bloke Can Carpe Diem Like a Pirate in His Heyday

Mayhap ye been ashore some savage island these last years, or else ye be some poor sod of a landlubber; if so, we'll not keel-haul ye for not knowin' what day this be.

Avast, me hearties! Yo ho!

ADDENDARRRR: More o' this theme may be sighted if ye sail here.

To know by what name ye be called under the Code, see it writ here. (Or upon this parchment, or this.)

And this lot o' swag be the makin's of a fine sack o' plunder.

Swill rum and swagger, me lads!

The Sound of Half a Hand Wanking

It's so inevitable that it should probably be a Law of Fandom, and Murphy knows, maybe it is: At least once in every calendar year, any sufficiently large group of fen will find a reason to have a discussion in which Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant gets a thorough kicking.

(Equally inevitable is the mention of this essay as some kind of supporting documentation - as excruciatingly nasty a piece of snobbery as you're likely to encounter in genre crit.)

I know I should just look away when this happens, but all that vitriol and eye-rolling is like a three-car pileup: you swear you'll avert your eyes, and then you can't help needing to see just how horrible it all is.

Okay, so, it's like this. I kinda get what the criticism is all about. I can see the things that might make Lord Foul's Bane and it sequels not to everyone's taste: the wordy, dense, occasionally tortured prose; the morbidity; the infuriating, completely unsympathetic non-hero. I don't know for sure that these count as "flaws," but I can certainly understand why they might be off-putting.

Nonetheless, my reaction to the gleeful pile-on that inevitably happens is: Oh, for fuck's sake. No matter how articulate you are about it, after a very short while it boils down to a lot of Comic Book Guys sitting around going "Worst trilogy ever."

Michael Suileabhain-Wilson identifies, with terrifying accuracy, the Five Geek Social Fallacies; to which list I've long thought should be added the primary geek psychological fallacy, which is "My tastes, especially my dislikes, are personal virtues." Hell, I've been prone to this one too - I think most of us are to one degree or other. It's especially hard to be at all on the fringes of society and not at least partially define yourself by what you don't like (or read, watch, listen to, play, fuck, eat), and it's easy to imagine that this elevates you somehow above the benighted masses who don't have your refined tastes.

But you know what? A bunch of people who seem to have nothing better to talk about than how much they hate something is just... unpleasant. There are a few cases where I'd agree that excessive vitriol can be appropriate: actual hate literature, say, or artless Premillenial Dispensationalist godporn (same thing). I'm unconvinced that the Covenant books fall into such a category.

Am I being oversensitive? Of course I am. I freely admit that I have an excessive desire to see everyone playing nice, and that I think it's a shame (and, y'know, unbecoming) when people indulge in sneering rather than choosing to shrug and say "de gustibus." And I do take it a little personally, though I know I shouldn't, that this kind of conversation sends me a clear signal that there are things I can't admit to and still be in the club with the Cool Kids. (Why I'm not used to that by now I don't know.)

Mostly, though, it's just this: eleven years ago, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever blew me away. I'm not an undiscerning reader, and I wasn't then either. Donaldson made me root for a protagonist I couldn't admire; he made me fall in love with the Land, with all its richness and strangeness and shadowed, fragile hope; and he changed the way I thought about fantasy and what it was capable of and how it could do it. I don't really believe all that was merely a lack of taste, intelligence or maturity on my part.

It's probably too much to ask that niceness be restored to the discourse of fandom. I'm sure it's silly and naive of me to wish for it. But I'm tired enough of half-apologizing for things that I like, that I don't actually think call for an apology or embarassment on my part, that I'm tempted to design a new t-shirt, suitable for congoing: If you can't think of anything nice to say, go on and fuck yourself.

...Beggarman, Thief

"The reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars....

"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

- Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms

Also, what he said; and the followup.

Storming the Reality Studio

I try not to engage in reflexive television-bashing, tempting though I admit it sometimes is. When I was a wee theatre undergrad a decade ago, there was a popular t-shirt that read Theatre is Life; Film is Art; Television is Furniture, and I suppose I thought it was sort of clever then; now I mostly think it's nasty triumphalist snobbery, about half a sneer away from "Your Favorite Band Sucks," and equally undeserving of the nodding gravitas that's usually accorded it by the more-aloof-than-thou. And while it's undeniable that Sturgeon's Law holds sway in the land of the Great Glass Teat as much as everywhere else, when one stops to consider that the same soil brought forth the fruit of Buffy and Farscape and The West Wing and Gilmore Girls and... well, I could go on, but it becomes clear that the medium itself is not the problem.

(And besides, all the tut-tutting that often goes on about TV, and what it's doing to the collective intelligence, attention span, imagination, what-have-you of our culture, sounds awfully familiar to me; it's the same dumb crap that gets trotted out every so often about comics, and it's dead wrong there, and there's a good argument to be made that it's completely off the mark about the so-called Idiot Box too. But anyway.)

Nonetheless, I'll be the first in line to say that "Reality TV" is an oxymoron, and that the current fashion for it in network programming is troubling on many levels. Which is why this cartoon by Ampersand made my morning. Hell, I'd tune in to see that; it may even be better than my idea of having the hosts of What Not To Wear thrown amongst punks and hippies and taunted about their clothes until they cry.

Don't Try to Revive Me

I've been alternately avoiding and following with sick fascination news of the post-Katrina apocalypse down south, and trying not to think too hard about a city I've had a great love for these last two years - one of the jewels of our Republic - becoming a hideous toxic lake while the Gummint apparently does its hell-bent best to raise the suffering and misery and death to truly Biblical proportions.

But I will say that if this doesn't make you ill with outrage, you're not paying sufficient attention. In which case, I suggest at least checking in with the coverage at Making Light, where the Nielsen Haydens and company have been relentlessly, unblinkingly keeping abreast of the atrocities; start, say, here, and read on through. Follow the links until your capacity for being appalled is reached; rinse, repeat.

If you had any lingering doubts that the current American regime is both grossly incompetent and actually evil - consider those scales fallen.

The Further Fall of Darth Rosenberg

I do try to limit my snark these days, but I have to wonder if this is going to be worth a half-hour out of my week just to see new material from Ally Hannigan.

Not that we her die-hard sycophantic fans aren't happy to see she's getting work, and all. Nor to suggest that the sitcom is a format without potential for a kind of Art. But one gets the very strong impression that, having seen the incredible things she's capable of, watching her in this is going to be something like listening to Adrian Belew play a coffee jingle.

The Long Solo Ends

Robert Moog, 1934-2005.

Validation?

One does try to leaven optimism with caution, but I'm all aflutter with the possibility that this may be what we've all been waiting for - an Alan Moore-inspired movie that doesn't suck.