Category: Writing

little squib of a post

Katie and Alex were here sleeping in the basement but they’re gone now. She’s got flu, picked it up from Rikes by the sound of things. She woke up and grabbed Alex on the way to pick up Ryker and she’s headed home to her own bed. Jeff and I are glad to have helped and are equally glad to get the basement back.

I’ve revised “Set of Steps” and once I’ve finished tinkering I’ll post it again.
Tink
Knit
K-Tin
Inkt
don’ worry that’s just a note to myself for later, four new characters just stepped up in a whole new world.

set of steps – new poem / song

YES I WROTE A SONG IN G#/Ab and I’m working on Uke chords…. I tightened the bottom string half a tone:::: and VOILA no more stretching my pinky like Elastoman’s dick stuck in a door.

An algorithm is a series set of steps
A set series of steps
Designed to get you to a certain place
what do I call how I got this way
I point and mimic and then I say
I’m
a set of steps in process
I
have not reached my the objective
It’s just as near and far
As the products of a star
I’m just a set of processes in tandem
Reaching for something
That looks like an objective.

And I said hold up, wait, wait a minute, stop
hold up, wait, wait a minute, stop
I said, hold up, wait, wait a minute
stop

Just getting here? my line
Went from being mats of slime!
To sitting on cardboard with a dog
begging for a dime!
The weight of my brain
On my neck
Is driving me insane
But I’m a set of steps
Flying in close formation
All my trials and tribulations
Are a set of steps

The algorithm looks a bit like plot
But it’s really not
And everything you grab on the way by
Is fleeting as the mood of the sky
I didn’t make the rules that I’m I am forced to live by
But something happened a long way back
You don’t always defend Don’t always play defence
Sometimes you can roll attack
Attack all the things that are holding you back
And
get a new (x3)
set of steps

You can’t erase
Or sponge off wipe out the old ones
They remain, they make themselves plain
They go through the same shit (steps, if you can’t swear) again and again
(They bleed through our whole lives again and again alternate line)
You don’t have free will and you can’t abstain
From the old set of steps

You don’t have free will
but something cunning and false
You can’t be mistaken for anyone else
The gametes roll/ed like invisible dice
And this part (snare slap) is almost automatic

(here follows a 2 minute percussive guitar solo, often omitted

to represent

ahem

the mating dance)

You can’t escape the way you were made
Nor will folks in the future I’m very much afraid
If we fuck with the steps they will fuck right back
(If we mess with the steps they will mess right back)
And we aren’t prepared to take steps like that

New poem – Someone must sell tickets

Imagine this : 107 beats per minute.
We’re used to hearing stuff synced
up to clocks so this is an almost
indivisible number for regular counted
time, the time of sports and records and
estimates and comparisons.

If you can’t hear, the part of your brain
that handles math and/or got rerouted
from where it would go if you could hear, that will do the job.

The brass instruments that are playing
in this tempo are lazy, barely registering,
with that unnatural dampening only the best can perform.
The percussion is robotic, uninspired,
trying very hard to be a clock
and yet not able to be there. There’s always an urge to speed up,

never to slow down.
The high hat and the snare
have the same unfortunate conversation,
the same eight bars, over and over again.
The brass is having trouble breathing,
each instrument breaks slowly free
of the ensemble of soft, tight harmonies, a
pinball bounce against the constraints of melody.

The flugelhorn, the trombones and the tubas
pause in horror as the piercing notes of the cornet
and the blaring agitated french horn crash into each other.

They perfect an oscillation which mimics the collision
of two great stellar masses. No one in the audience
cares about that, most of them want their money back.

The lone and level sands (new poem)

The lone and level sands

I know what’s going on
but these are social beings too
and my grief must crack
to allow them safe passage

so one doesn’t speak of it
as much as one thinks it
tries to derive grace from nature
a trick, a trick, a trick

because nature’s not full o’ grace
it’s a slow-to-react and messy drunk
and we can’t leave the room
for a couple of hundred years
unless we go to space
which needs more tech
and money than I suspect
we can sustain for long

No one knows how but here and there
people survive
the nature
that I worship now
the only nature

Alex is here

I’m thinking about Grandmothers in Gaza, holding dead children while the rockets sound. It’s hard not to.

Sent a new mixed media (sort of) poem fragment to Dave this am, wonder what he’ll make of it. It’s called My Advice and it’s advice to anyone born after 2010.

Chicken and Bean burrito WILL BE CONSTRUCTED for snack midmorning (have to adjust around when I’m taking Paul to his appointment.) Looking forward to that, Jeff is a big fan of refried beans!

Just a reminder parental love is unconditional BUT NOT INCONSEQUENTIAL.

made a few stabby efforts at the ‘driving instructor’ fanfic; I’ve been thinking a lot about the next Brad and Omar story, but I’m crying a lot because they have a big fight, which isn’t ‘big’ as in noisy but trust between them is hurt and will need to be rebuilt in their …. er…. idiom.

a former Defence Minister in Israel Moshe Ya-alon says Netanyahu went to war without even letting his cabinet talk to the Chief of Staff of the IDF. As someone who’s served in both capacities if he’s yelling for Netanyahu’s resignation he should be listened to.

he swears he read it

Dave says he read The Game of Kings but the rest of the Lymond Chronicles was just too much of a commitment. If someone gave it to me now I probably couldn’t read it for the first time so I see his point.

Writing seems pointless and yet I keep doing it. I have to figure out what the heavenly character is doing… Crowley writes himself, the bugger. (more GOmens references) Also, Neil Gaiman is sick with COVID right now.

I am not happy about Hamas and the dead Israelis, but that doesn’t stop the Israeli state from being an apartheid pariah with the power of life and death over Palestinians. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. I’d sure like it if North American Jews (and end of the world Republicans) quit raising money for Israel but that’s not going to happen, and I’m a fool to even post it.

 

 

Writing again!

jfc anything rather than edit. I mean it’s only 189 205 words so far but that’s still ‘pushing the peanut.’

The Lad is off to school and I’ll be calling Paul AGAIN today. Yesterday wasn’t good enough for him. I fed him pho. I helped him get his medications. I helped him get a toilet riser. I took him to get a charging cable and box for his Motorola phone. I did not yell at him for taking an hour to eat. I stayed with him as he walked, slower each day. And he took all the stuff I helped him buy out of the car and before he slammed the door bitched me out for not helping him get a box of wine when I specifically said I had to go get Alex next. He is not supposed to be drinking so much as a drop of alcohol. (Same same for me although I will occasionally…)

SOOOO now I’m waiting for brekkie at the old folks to be over so I can call him and arrange to do yet more things for him today which I am heavily disinclined to do. And I still have to get the new windshield wipers on the car. I tried to install one and nope, even a diagram was of no assistance.

LATER…. Paul called back, he has other plans for today (goddess keep and bless Rob W), he apologized for anything rude he said, acknowledged that I’m very helpful, and said he’d call me on the weekend if he needed me. ALL THAT IRE 4 NUTHIN. Story of mah fucking life. hi mOm lol

Diane Feinstein’s dead. The woman was a fucking menace to American democracy, no sadness here.

I am disgusted by the arrival of a neo Nazi in Parliament, to be given plaudits by people who don’t understand history and don’t care to. Fuck every parliamentarian but two and I’m not very keen on them anyway.

Bluesky continues to be a very pleasant refuge. Twitter I view but I’m not making content for them any more. I now have FOUR WHOLE UNIQUE INDIVIDUALS signed up for my weekly digest, coming November 2023.

complaints, kudos, complaints, lists

Nothing to complain of regarding Alex. Some mornings he wants to cuddle, other mornings he wants to go downstairs. Dropped him off in time for school, thought about going to Lordco because one of the Echo’s wiper blades flung itself off and lodged itself so firmly under the other wiper blade that I could still use it but it stuck to the car. This is the kind of luck I always get issued; sloppy but welcome.

Weather seasonal, rainy, not too cold.

Later this morning I have to go to Thornebridge, roust the wasband and tell him his girlfriend’s been admitted to hospital in Seattle after taking the wrong medication for a cold. She has a history of absolutely horrific, interpersonally damaging and completely avoidable meltdowns, usually thanks to hospitals ignoring her when she provides them with a list of what she reacts to. Everyone is calling COVID a cold now I see. I am not saying I hope Janice ups and dies, after all, I wrote “Invective” for her and I always have a soft spot for anyone who provides me with the impulse to compose, I just fail to see why I have to be all tenderhearted about the woman who brazenly busted up a marriage that I didn’t – as it turns out – want to stay in. Alan’s role in all of that got called out very close to the beginning of the end by Glenn, so HI GLENN THE SHIT CONTINUES BUD, same planet different day. So I acknowledge that I’m …. conflicted …. possibly hypocritical …. definitely snarky. Fuck it, have to go to Thornebridge. Nobody OF COURSE can raise Paul on the phone and I’m closest. I told him to go to Strong because memory care is a seamless transition, but the sisters put him in Thornebridge and those of us close to the problem get to watch him decompensate expensively. I loved that man far more than I can say and I wrote songs and poems and stories for him and now I’m wild with what a sting love has at the far end of that long tail.

almost 100 reads on the last story and ten kudos. Only one comment, sigh, but it was a beaut and I shared it with mOm.

This morning I on the downlow shared my distaste for an extremely popular sf/sff novel by agreeing with a poster “so polarizing I don’t have a public opinion about it’ so that’s as subtle as you get. After all, Canadian authors are supposed to close ranks – LOL: define Canadian, I’ll wait.

Jeff TOUCHED the dryer and it started working. Kiss pOp for me mother, he obviously passed the gift down. I’ll probably break it again when I go to load it up in a minute.

Must empty dishwasher.

 

 

Other worlds

Off in my own little one this morning, writing mush, just heartfelt mush for Brad and Omar. There are more ways to say I love you than there are stars in the universe. If it were not so we would not keep proving it, we lovers.

There’s no cream, so I’m eventually going to have tea. I’ve already played with Buster and brushed him, gotten some 90 Micron into me, written four hundred new words, had an entirely pain-free morning widdle – which only happens about 30 percent of the time so hey, we must grab these little happinesses as they go by is this not merely a truism but a mechanism by which daily life may in practical terms be a-accomplished?  she stammered… the keyboard barfed up an a so I stuck a hyphen in there and called it done.

I can go from piss to philosophy in seconds, so, do not try me, world! I have the words to roll you back again.

I find myself very blank and unthinking in most ways though. I am pressed on all sides by anxiety, and it is not all my own. So I think this feeling of blankness is an accommodation; if I am not reactive I won’t be making as much trouble. Of course, past a certain point, absence from human affairs starts taking you backward. I’ve spent my whole life, literally my whole life, trying not ‘to have it all’ but ‘to have all that I could reasonably attain without destroying myself as a creative being’, which involves a lot of decisions.

Having children never seemed like a decision. It was ordained. I felt it then, I felt it again as I typed it. The horror of childrearing and bearing that many modern women feel now is alien to me, but not anathema. I was among the last women who didn’t have reproductively impactful amounts of forever chemicals in my body during my pregnancies, so I remove myself from the pool of people who get judgy on modern women not wanting to have babies.  I have always been vocal in my support of the childless by choice. I understand the demographic arguments against the falling birth rate, and I reject them as propertarian and against self-interest (in planetary capacity terms). If I as a science fiction writer can posit three or four different social responses to a globally crashed birth rate (which is inescapable for reasons of deteriorated human health), each with their costs and benefits, how many responses can a whole nest of human civilizations come up with, depending on how resources are deployed? I still have hope, despite the countability of life.

Poems and songs turn over in my belly. something in there is wrathful, and something sad

it’s just gas

my brother said

Emotionally charged

Yeah, it was a day of emotionally charged phone calls. May it all be well. It was a relief candidly to talk to Dave D on the phone and just be shooting the shit about commonplaces.

Alex was here and we recorded (I managed to record me farting and Alex’s subsequent howl of outrage was so funny I put it all on loop and then the two of us nearly died laughing.) We never did manage to get down the road to Paul’s.

Lovely night of sleep, I have my mug of tea  and a light repast and my marching orders for the day (call landlord about the dryer again) and Alex’s calendar for next week (early dismissal on Wednesday!)

Later:

533 words on Yaks are Not Admitted Past This Point

Jeff will be home sometime this afternoon.

 

 

sorry I missed a post yesterday

Good thing I won’t have to do this – being this blog-  more in a couple of months. Yup, After November 16th it will be THE PRIVATE DIGEST OF ALLEGRA SLOMAN, sent specifically to you for your deletion, consumption, or hoarding for later, being a week’s worth of my ramblings, including whatever I’ve been writing in terms of fiction as a subsection ALWAYS WITH TRIGGER WARNINGS. I mean, if you don’t want to read smut, you would want a warning. If I’m never leaving the house I might as well be able to prove I’ve been busy, even if it’s for such a low life enterprise. You’ll even get my game scores so you can track my cognitive decline, what could be more exciting.

Alex continues to be wonderful. He got to interact with his other Grammy yesterday because SUZANNE was here and the enshinening happened, and she got emailed the entire ms for Totally Boned.

I get him for the whole day today. Childcare for an ADD family involves having the child tell you about the PRO-D day because his mom forgot. Katie is BUSY past ENDURANCE these days. She was apologetic and Suzanne and she and I stood on the front stoop laughing and hollering like trailer trash while two men of colour glared at us from across the street. White women, I tell ya. Anyway I’m going to take him

In other ‘that side of the family’ news, Unca Steve got two tags this year, one for a moose and one for an elk. (Dax is up there hunting with him right now which will also partly account for Katie’s state, since he pulls weight at home.) Anyway another hunter had a moose tag and gave up in disgust and gave the tag to Unca Steve and Steve bagged one and will get a cut of the carcass. (Unca Steve is a “this harvested animal will be consumed as food” kind of hunter.) So he got three tags for the price of two and his reputation as the family Nimrod is secure. (in the old as opposed to the cartoon sense of the word.)

Completed my rewatch of S1 GOmens but have not watched anything else since Jeff departed.

One of my music fans messaged me yesterday about a song, to tell me it meant a lot to him, and that was …. honestly so sweet and welcome.

Intelligent readers will skip the next paragraph / wall of blithering text. re fanfic.

The new Good Omens fanfic is posted on A03. I am going to retire the rest of the destiel fic I was working on (we’re talking a number of words not unadjacent to 300K of work, if I’m including the 200K unfinished doorstop ‘The Sword That Cries ‘Ruin!” which has the single best Own Character from all my fanfic, in my view, an ancient creature representing herself as a woman (she’s actually a sentient tree, of a species with a heritage older than earth because she’s ‘not from around here’ and she falls in love with Sam and he has to bury her in the ground so she doesn’t die because of her species’ life cycle, and it’s just so tragic and amazing and sad and glorious and beautiful and the smut I wrote about their goodbye tryst (have sex with me now and bury in the morning LOL) is so pure and awesome and then she wakes up twenty years later after her transformation and, because Dean’s been peeing on her grave (he HATES HER thinks she RUINED SAM’S LIFE) every time he’s at the bunker to visit Sam, when she wakes up she’s a foot taller. the explanation for this is also molto hilarious. I further wrote a crapstack of stuff about the hunter kids Cas and Dean adopt, one of whom takes on Crowley IN HELL and bests him (different Crowley – there’s a Crowley in Supernatural AND Good Omens.) Although it has been pointed out in tumblr that a) both Crowleys USE THE SAME THRONE – the side by side pics are HILARIOUS) AND B) AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE SIGIL IN THE CENTRE OF THE CIRCLE THAT AZIRAPHALE WARDS IN S1 IS A COMPLETELY MADE UP SIGIL FROM SUPERNATURAL – NOT EVEN ENOCHIAN – which according to rumour ‘was not deliberate’ which is the single funniest thing I have ever heard in my life about crossover media, whether or NOT IT’S TRUE.  AND in ‘Ruin’ THERE IS A TALKING CAT NAMED FELIS CATUS WHO IS ACTUALLY AN ALIEN WITCH’S FAMILIAR AND GETS HIMSELF PREGNANT AND GIVES BIRTH TO SENTIENT CATS i mean this story has damned close to every wacky witch trope I could jam down its gullet and parts of it are so terrifying and hilarious it’s among the best I ever wrote, AND THERE’S A LOT OF HIGHLY TECHNICAL B&D SEX BETWEEN CAS AND DEAN AND DISCUSSIONS ABOUT HOW IT’S HARD TO HAVE A GOOD DOM SUB RELATIONSHIP WHEN YOU’VE GOT TEENAGERS CRAWLING IN AND OUT OF YOUR HOUSE DAY AND NIGHT). Yeah. You can understand why I need 200K words for that.                                           BUT I was thinking of just plain deleting it all – good and bad – off Scrivener as a sacrifice to Erato, but who knows, maybe the sparkle will come back. I’m only four or five thousand words from the end of ‘Ruin’ but I can’t bring myself to unfray the knot.

I believe I’ll enjoy writing Brad and Omar stories more, anyway. I love my lively lads. They’re on a farm in Eastern Ontario right now, thinking about putting up a yurt. And yaks. Brad’s going to have a ‘newborn yak adventure’.

 

 

 

 

regular day

Did a little shop with Alex after school to get some SCHNAX into the house.

Brief aside. For the CHEESE TAX.

I am awake far too early. Miss Jeff. Forgot to lock the cat door yesterday and haven’t seen Buster since supper, I’ll update once he’s up / home. Started rewatching Good Omens S1 because I’m a dolt.

Apparently there were immense streamers of northern lights across the north shore mountains last night.

mOm’s given me her marching orders with respect to the next Brad and Omar story, which will have YAKS. I will take some time to ruminate and then start writing again.

Next order of biz coffee.