Category: Art

How do you like this

This is a fractal, possibly for the cover for my lamentable, never to be published porn side project from the Upsun universe, known as Sweetie’s House of Tentacles, which I ran off in a bunch of different colour palettes. This one I turned into a BEADING PATTERN and look how it turned out, look at it. Isn’t it stellar?

Fractal pattern converted into a bead pattern

 

 

Note to people I block on twitter

It’s possible I have you blocked because something you posted crawled all across my sensory homunculus rubbing salt in the unhealed blisters and cuts, and not because you’re a suppurating organ of discharge pulsing gleets of hatred and falsehood onto twitter.

I straight up loved Parabellum. Long may Keanu reign.

2019 commitment to not being an ableist fleshwad

So I’m working through my Youtube videos and captioning them. Already done: my most popular effort, at 14.2K distinct views! How to Cut Up a Pineapple. Lemming’s Twofer, Neener Neener and Blasteez (my advertisement for laxative coughdrops which, as you can likely imagine, work as poorly as advertised).

I shall continue with the making my videos more accessible until they are all done.

Don’t let them see.

I have met somebody who wears her heart on her sleeve. I’d like her to tuck it away, but I don’t get to make that call.

She got stuck at the airport. She is in the sf/horror fan community, knows about 30 people in common with me and since it’s her story to tell, how she got stuck there, I will stay quiet.  Katie let me borrow the car to unstick her, and now she’s either asleep or colouring mandalas. A few of the designs are straight up eyepopping.

Got Keith’s Christmas present to me set up – I regifted the Instant Pot from Mike to Katie; I’ll get it back at Litha.

It never ceases to amaze me how much better my life has been because of the people I’ve managed to get close to. Sometimes I think coupling up is an extended magical joke of some kind. Now I’m old and I want completely different things from partners; less excitement and more being there.

I talked to Katie last night and after I got home and started tidying up a bit I was standing at the sink and I just started crying because despite everything, all the stupid anger I’ve been holding onto, she gets me. And so does Keith and so does Paul. I’m glad they didn’t see me crying. They would have been upset on my behalf, and I’m feeling better than I have in ages.

Now I’m going to check if our houseguest is up and start singing like a chicken if she is because I can get away with that, and Jeff’s not ‘hear’ to plead for the sanctity of his eardrums. He’s supposed to be back today; hope the 5 to 10 cm of snow we’re getting (Erie PA got 6 inches of lake effect snow yestreen, how droll) doesn’t hurt his chances of getting back here safe from Victoria.

I salted all the walkways, I’ll salt the driveway before the predicted snow flies too hard. I put so much salt on the back deck that I can now hear it creaking as the compressed snow/ice starts to let go its grip.

That feeling when

Jeff calls the new Hulu show “Burn Tarot” and expects Jeffrey Donovan to be doing voiceovers “When you’re a psychic,” and you laugh so hard you pull a rib.

Some irritated person threatens to call the Site Leader (basically GOD ON CALL) when you warn them that work requests will be slow tonight because you’re at 50% staffing and your response is OH WOULD YOU PLEASE we’ll need her help sorting through all the work requests that were in the system AHEAD OF YOURS. That was 3/4 of an hour ago.  Yeah, you guessed it, no call. Just as an aside I actually paged the Site Leader yesterday and she didn’t answer, so make of that what you will. She probably pulled an Allegra and when she didn’t recognize the number didn’t pick up lollllol.

People who work nights and complain about the workload and do a shitty job and sleep in the ER until 5 am when they wake up and pretend to do more work are on the receiving end of one of your pointier emails.

I have 64 likes on my Supernatural fic and 4 kudos and I’m thinking I KNOW SOMEBODY LIKES MY WRITING and Jeff says my interest in slash fanfic for a show I don’t watch equals zero, interest in MMCo = 100% and you just think squee.

You’ve invented a fanfic universe in which you have a McGuffin to make any character pairing possible (with a lot of effort, but possible).

Your daughter calls and tells you she got a job, a good job, in a union environment, close to home and you’re dancing around like an idjit.

You think ‘I’m actually going to miss this job’. I mean, I quit a month ago and I’m still working here, it’s insane. And some of the people are so much fun, I come in early just so I can interact with them.  Others, well, you know how it is.

I’ve almost paid off my credit card debt and I did it with money I earned.

You forget to tell your mother that you received and deposited the cheque she sent you… a month ago.

You watch the Wrong Box again.

I’m putting it in my pile of movies to watch when I’m feeling icky. Because watching it put a bounce in my step. Figuring out that John Larroquette based his performance in the Librarians in part on Ralph Richardson’s tremendous turn as Joseph Finsbury; (so many classic lines among which ‘the playing of games, with balls of varying sizes’ never fails to crack me up), marvelling at Peter Sellers’ false nose and moggy filled apartment (at one point he mops up an ink blot with a kitten’s ass); drooling over the set dec and costumes, which are lovely, and the script (done in part by Larry Gelbart whom you may also know as one of the creators of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and M*A*S*H the tv show, also family faves), the hilarious and stylish music, with a score by John Barry, also a fave of mine (his theme for the Persuaders was one of the highlights for me on tv when I was a teen); John Mills’ voice; the ridiculous train derailment; Tutte Lemkow, the professional villain, and his entirely mute performance as the knitting mad Bournemouth Strangler. Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, and would like a film that amuses without cloying, it’s really, really good.

So yeah… all in all I’m having a good week, and writing 15k words in 4 days was… interesting. Graphomania is a helluva drug. I was literally pacing when I wanted to write and couldn’t, and that’s PSYCHOMOTOR AGITATION folks.  Perhaps the sun is coming back and making me twitterpated.

 

 

 

Ringing in the New Year via snow shovel

Dug out  the front stairs, walkway and sidewalk, the back stairs, side walkway, garage walkway, and the snow blocking passage to the laneway.

New Years Writing Resolutions:

 

Publish 5 books (4 out of 5 are written) block out five more, e-publish my book of homilies, write two more of fiction and two of non-fiction. Finally assemble all my filk songs as of the end of 2016 into a big pdf file. Dig more deeply into Scrivener and see what else it can do to help my work flow. Learn more about e-publishing. Print at least a small run of physical books (probably locally) so I can put them in my mOm’s hands. Put everything for free on my website so people who are broke can read it. Develop a mailing list for book marketing purposes. Learn to spam LinkedIn since it’s all they’ve ever done for me. Figure out if it’s worth it to put any version of the ‘trilogy plus bookends’ on Amazon, given all the hassles I hear about. Start a Patreon account. Move 1500 units. Start submitting to publishers once I have some sales. And remember that 1000 words a day is 4 books a year!

I am completely and utterly sober. I have five minutes to pour myself a toast of something before I greet the new year with some Moar Wrdz.

365 Daily Affirmations for the Revolutionary Proletarian Militant

I’m not a prole by virtue of upbringing, education and unemployment, so I really got it in memory of John.  I do like it, even if I don’t agree with all of it.  I supported the Kickstarter and it arrived yesterday and it’s gorgeous.

Yesterday the weather was so yeesh Paul and I mall walked at Brentwood instead, and I came home with more soap and more undies and much sorer feet than normal since we normally walk on more yielding substances than the terrazzo floors one finds in malls. I picked up a dark chocolate Sweet Georgia Brown for Jeff.

THE FOLLOWING RANT TRIGGERED BY THIS.

The novels I am working on honour and name some women’s experiences that don’t get spoken of much in fiction, and while I meant to write something overtly feminist and goofy (there is a LOT of goofiness in all of the novels, also stuff that’s really sad or formal or media-crunchy or just kinda sideways to the normal flow of contemporary novels) I wanted to deconstruct a lot of issues I find with fiction.

The first novel is written almost entirely from the points of view of the main characters.  They lie, they address the camera with every show of sincerity, and in some cases they go off into wacko country to expose themselves and their feelings to demonstrate how real and how weird they are, on purpose, kinda like a performance piece that you can’t look away from despite how terrible it is.  Later, you hear from a sympathetic female character that she doesn’t believe a word that our heroine wrote on the subject of her relationship with the lead alien, to which her sad response is, “I can’t believe the things that really happened,” which is me saying that erasure happens at every level of human life, fictional or not. Not everyone in your lifeboat is your friend.

What we are willing to consider unbelievable defines us.  When we open the floodgates to unmediated human experience and see with our x-ray eyes the patterns and radiating webworks of connection and alienations, our prejudices will define what we see, our linguistic traffic patterns will define how we talk about it OR IF WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL and what springs into the foreground for me as a writer is how crabbed and censored and tied in moneyed, legalistic, sexist knots all of my life is, including, overwhelmingly, most of the media I consume.

I am over the side of a little boat, trying to get a big damned net off a whale that has begged for my help BY BEING IN FRONT OF ME AND NEEDING MY HELP.

And if I’m really lucky, I will experience that moment of success. I’ll get the net off ONE WHALE. The whale will leap into the air and take me to the place of gratitude that belongs to all thinking creatures – at least the mammals.

I am trying to free language so that we can speak about things that mean something to us.  Women, men, everybody. We are all in a net of clunky concepts and ambiguous words.  It’s my job to jump over the side and free the whale.

So no, I’m not going to be a revolutionary militant, but I’m going to hold myself to my goal.  I want my readers to laugh and cry and think and shake their fists. And when they are done, to think about their own lives, all the risks untaken and all the kind words left unsaid, and all the fucking homophobic narcissistic sexist racist assholes who, every time we rub up against them, take a little of our skin and humanity with them.

My son said that the idea of reading ‘a book about alien pregnancy’ made him squick.  Paul laughed uproariously.  Nine months in my body, but disgusted by pregnancy, was his comment.  What a kid. The pregnancy is less than 10 percent of all the words in all three books but see what he has chosen to believe defines it.  And so, in the words of the black activists I follow on twitter, this is me shaking my damned head. (SMH)

Blerg

I am reading Patton Oswalt’s Silver Screen Fiend and IT’S OUTSTANDING.  Borrow it or buy it and read it.  Won’t say more, don’t have to.

And I have Caitlin Moran and the Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines to look forward to after this.

I can feel the well of my writing soul going dry, and there’s nothing to do but fill the cup at someone else’s spring.

Or have some more Great Blue Heron coffee. Yeah.

I have a couple of potential songs in the queue and since I’m ahead of schedule I’ll pause.  I practiced a good long time yesterday, it was very pleasant.

Paul and Keith are off to the Island this weekend.  Yay for family visits!

Today is Keith’s nth birthday, and glad I am I gave birth to him n years ago, about three hours from now.  I am more glad that we live in the same town/time zone, because he continues to be a good soul who takes no shit from me, and that is a good thing.

Back to Mr. Oswalt, who in his book is lodged firmly in the midnineties catching up on classic cinema.

Laundry list

This is for mOm. Art and cancer.

I said to Paul IF YOU WANT ME TO COOK IT YOU MUST BUY IT. So there’s a fresh turkey in my fridge, and I now have Katie, Alex, Keith, Paul, Rob W, Mike M, possibly one other person from Mike’s work and I hope Tammy for Christmas Eve dinner.  It’s a family plus orphans dinner!!!

Today I have to buy vegetables and hopefully I’ll remember the cranberry sauce. Also I need to lay on at least a couple of bottles of wine and some beer.

I’m seeing Tammy for lunch at Granville Island today.  Hope it’s the Keg, I am dying for lobster.

If you like Downton Abbey, you must see the Christmas Text to Santa special, in which George Clooney appears.  Happy sigh.

Andrew Wakefield, you are POND SCUM. Or, a carelessly formed biofilm of dubious utility.

Family drama is blergh.  But I like watching it sometimes anyway.  My reaction. (Sorta for Jeff, who’s doing a complete TNG rewatch).  I’m talking other people’s families… I am doing okay.

Chocolate cake for breakfast, FOR REASONS.

Heavy sighs for all the dust I’m going to raise getting the living room ready, har har.