zonkered.net

Having a hideous day at work, but this is making me smile: Things to Do When I Am The Vampire.  My favorites:

3. The Hero will come armed with holy water, a cross and a stake. I will come armed with a 5.56 mm assault rifle and grenades. If the Hero has to cross open ground, there is no better way to reach out and touch someone than with a sniper rifle.

52. Although firearms are useless against me and the concubines they work quite effectively on the Hero and his friends. Therefore all concubines will be armed and taught to shoot. They will use hand and fang in attack only as a last resort.

63. As cute as the Vampire Slayer is, there are other girls just as cute who are not capable of destroying me.

The Smart Bitches have even more hilarity.

I have never submitted anything for publication. Mostly this is because I generally write fanfiction which, by its very nature, is unpublishable, but its also because I always assumed my original writing wasn’t ready yet. (this despite the fact that I have more than once wanted to go through a book with an editing pen and clean up the writing)

Anyway, I took a writing class back in October when my working life was intensely crappy and I decided to see if there was any possible way that I could theoretically make a living writing romance novels. I then proceeded to instead write a kind of stylized espionage genre story instead. Read some in class one day, the response was terrific, and the teacher told me to start submitting.

I bought a copy of Writer’s Market months ago intending to do just that, and then stuck it in a box when work and other stuff kept me from doing any writing whatsoever, let alone finishing the story I started back then. Picked it up again last night and skimmed through it looking for appropriate lit magazines to submit to. There aren’t very many. Most literary magazines, it seems, and even the general interest magazines all want modern lit. The higher-brow stuff. The ones that cater towards genre are usually for fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, maybe romance.

Me? I decided to write in the genre that’s published in about six publications, mostly online, mostly with offbeat names like Toasted Cheese (I can just hear that conversation with my mother now: “Hey, Mom! I’ve been published!” “Where? Esquire? Atlantic Monthly?” “Um. It’s an online journal. Called Toasted Cheese.” “….”).  I’m kind of disappointed that the pickings are so slim.

That doesn’t mean I won’t submit it.  I can send it to all of them pretty easily now is all.   Also, I still I have to rewrite it before it’s going anywhere.

Dominick, my cat, is spending Sunday afternoon the way Sundays are best spent:

We should all lead such lives.

This is un-PC of me, but recycling is such a pain in the ass.

I agree with the idea in principle, sure, but the rules and regulations drive me up a wall.  This and this is recyclable, but not this! Must remove labels!  And here’s the one that really gets me: all cardboard boxes must be flattened and tied.

Okay, flattened I get, but tied? Someone’s just going to have to untie them when they get to the recycling center.  Is it so important to maintain employment for the dude that disposes of the string?

All these rules do is make it a pain in the ass for the people they’re trying to get to recycle, and making in mandatory – as in WE WILL NOT PICK UP YOUR GARBAGE IF YOU DON’T DO THIS – isn’t going to do anything other than make people (like me) twitchy, and most still won’t bother.  Especially those who live in large apartment buildings like me.  What do they care?  It’s not like they’ll be able to pinpoint who isn’t following regulations.  The point is that recycling will never be popular unless you make it easy for people.

So I’ll be buying string today so that I can tie up the boxes from my multitudes of orders this week.  I can’t wait until I move in August of this year.  More and more my goal is to not only get out of this undeniably crappy apartment building with the shit apartment management but also to get out of the county entirely.  New Jersey or NYC in September!

I’m thinking eating stuffed jalapeño peppers for lunch was probably not a great idea.  Also, I am getting really sick of all this rain.

I need to just accept that I will never, ever, make it to one of the NY Metro Librarians Meet-ups.

My excuse when I worked in the ‘burbs was that the meetings were in New York (at Chipotle!) and I really didn’t want to get on a train for forty minutes to eat a burrito and mingle with other librarians.  In the middle of the week.  It was a valid excuse, I always thought.

My excuse now is that I would rather get on a train for forty minutes and go home/go to the gym instead of mingling with librarians.  (I might have gone, just for the sake of the burrito, except they moved it to some book/cafe)  It’s not so much a valid excuse now, so obviously, no matter how fun it seems in the abstract, I simply have no burning desire to talk to complete strangers in a cramped restaurant.

When I put it that way, it almost makes perfect sense.

I have a sad addiction to category romance novels – categories being those thin books available for sale in a grocery store near you. I started reading them my freshman year of college when the local More 4 (later EconoFoods) was as close as I could get to a bookstore, and while I have managed to kick the habit for extended periods of time in between then and now, I still have a weakness for them.

This is why I have two Harlequin Presents novels coming tomorrow from Amazon.  Part of me kinda feels ashamed.

More so than other categories, and definitely more so than full-length romance novels, a Presents novel is likely to be so cliched it’s like following a recipe:

1 overbearing, tempestuous rich hero. Typically Italian, Spanish, Australian, British, Greek, or a mythical desert sheik.

1 innocent/probably somehow wronged heroine. Bonus points if she’s a virgin or badly maligned ex-girlfriend of the hero. Further bonus points if she’s an innocent virgin but the hero arrogantly disbelieves this because she’s so worldly or beautiful

1 exotic locale

1 element of illogical drama! Examples include the ever popular SECRET BABIES, coerced marriages, boss/secretary romances, and the afore-mentioned innocent virgin believed to be experienced thing.

Stir to combine and cook for 100 hundred pages, or until Happily Ever After has been achieved.

No, I have no idea why I keep reading them either. They’re the literary equivalent of a cheesy daytime soap opera, and equally addicting.

What I find hardest to swallow about the whole Misha hoax is that so many people believed it.  A four year old girl raised by wolves and trekking 1900 miles to find her parents?  And no one wondered if maybe it was fiction?

Sometimes I wonder.

I don’t actually have a list of foods that I couldn’t possibly live without, but if I did, salt and vinegar potato chips would definitely be on the list. I spent last night munching on a bag, and every day at lunch I get a small bag with my lunch at Pret. At my last job in White Plains, I used to do the same thing at Quiznos (but Pret’s chips are inarguably better).

But it does make sense, because I am the person with seven different vinegars in her pantry, who always adds an extra splash or two (or three) of cider vinegar to hot german potato salad, and whose lunch order at Pret includes not just the chips but a chicken, mozzarella, tomato and basil baguette with balsamic vinegar.

Clearly, I’m a little obsessed.

I finished a story today while I ate breakfast at Atlanta Bread. It was something I’d started months ago – in October, when I was taking a writing class – but had been sitting in a perpetual state of almost-done ever since. I cleaned it up a little shortly before Christmas, intending to finish it when I was home for the holiday, but it didn’t happen. Then I changed jobs at the beginning of January, so it still didn’t happen.

Mostly, though, it wasn’t done because endings suck, and I can never find a satisfactory conclusion for a story. I’m not even entirely sure the one I ended up with is really a satisfactory ending, though its definitely better than what I had. This is the story of my (writing) life: I have a precise picture in my head of the beginning, and I breeze through the middle, but when it comes to the end I have no idea what to do. It’s frustrating, and easily the worst part of writing for me, followed closely by coming up with titles.

I think the problem is that I’m not really a plot-driven writer. I mean, this particular story is kind of plot-driven, it’s a spy short story sort of in the style of either James Bond or Alias, but I invented the plot for a character I already had in my head, Alex Woo (fun fact: Alex Woo’s original name was Kermit Woo, an awesome name I came across when deleting spam out of my email, but my beta reader found it jarring so I renamed him the more conventional Alexander).

That’s how I write – a character starts to develop in my head, and after I’ve daydreamed them into full realization, I build a story for them.  The beginning and middle is easy for me because it’s partially about building the relationships between the characters, but the endings are hell because I don’t know where to leave these relationships.  Often the story is left hanging.  It’s definitely my weak point as a writer, and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it.  It’s probably something I’ll always struggle with.

Randomly, the comment box for this layout was inexplicably in Italian.  Since I don’t read Italian and I doubt the rest of you do either, I’ve fixed that now.