Category: Writing

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.

 

finnegan beginegan

Because I am a complete compulsive graphomanic fool, I have commenced working on additional Brad and Omar stories. They will be assembled into my next book, which will be 10 or 12, 3000-12000 word stories continuing on in the Brad and Omar universe. (Dave already teased me that I might do this so yes you guessed right congrats sir!) This project is called “Matching Shorts: A Brad & Omar Collection”. It will cover the first couple of years after the events in Guyana.

I get Alex again this week. It’s such a privilege. It’s possible Jeff will be off to Victoria at some point soon to provide some assistance to mOm and pOp.

 

 

It’s done

My screwball thriller romcom “Totally Boned” is complete. Many will find the ending abrupt. I’m very pleased with it. I wrote it so that I could introduce a number of contemporary romance tropes and updates to my mother, since she introduced me to the romance genre in the first place, plus Omar and Brad just would not stop telling me what to do, and the final line of the story is the starting line for ANOTHER romance, so …

104K words give or take. Also sent to Dave.

I feel absolutely wonderful. Not everything in my life is great right now, and I forgot to wish Paul a happy 74th birthday. But honestly this is the best I’ve felt in weeks. I’m going to try to have the best day possible. Starting with emptying the dishwasher and getting to sink zero, I reckon.

I need coffee

378 words yesterday, and as is typical as soon as I get to the end (ish) of writing one novel another one presents itself. begging to be wrote

This is how it presented itself IN THE MIDDLE OF A TB SCENE

Dying gods.

The words echo. The words are not even a map, although they are a key. Words keep destroying our morality. Only deeds restore it. The messages you hear? They’re real. The gods who speak them are real. They’re also dying, and untrustworthy, and malicious as demented fuck.

The feeling when you’ve been given a ‘randomly selected’ opportunity offered by the provincial government to comment on things like racism in BC and you’re the only white people on your block…I mean, there may be other people who are white living on our Street but they do not look that way to me.

Alex again today and tomorrow. I have some stuff I have to do for Paul, wish me luck. Car’s insured. Buster stayed in the doorway looking at him yesterday for 20 whole seconds.

Load of laundry yesterday.

Can’t shake this utterly horrific feeling of impending doom, Pop is home from hospital and yet I can’t stop thinking the worst.

One of the non binary Indigenous people I follow on twitter had an elf-bear-baby on September 3 with their Indigenous love and they just posted a pic of the baby’s elf ear and I am dying of the cuteness. So you can see after posting the above thought I went looking for a styptic against the cuts of the world.

Alex again

Very peaceful stay. Buster of course is not happy.

672 words yesterday. Brad and Omar burst into song and how on earth do you respond to that as a reader why by reading more. Just remember folks, neurotypical people DO NOT BURST INTO SONG. I feel so sorry for people who can’t.

pOp still in hospital, Mary’s rehab continues, mOm is very downcast by his continued absence but she did get the laundry done.

house is cleaner

Of course, from the outside this house looks like a teensy little yellow hell-hole, covered in algae and arrayed in rotting concrete.

Suzanne and Alex and Katie and me all got to be in the same room at the same time yesterday so that was nice. Jeff kept gaming and gritted his teeth through the noise.

Must run the dishwasher, there’s no decent clean cups.

Buster is still hiding from Alex but progress is being made.

Just wrote the single funniest line of description I’ve ever written in my life. Don’t worry beta readers, you will know it when you see it. 553 words yesterday.

No news is good news from the recovering elders.

solid day

Got the ringer reset on Paul’s land line, sent some waords off to Dave, got a new watch battery into Paul’s watch, hung out with Alex. Spoke briefly to Keith to update him on some stuff, fired off an email covering all that to the kids and Ruth. Ate lunch there, what a disaster. Was seated with two other people; the man was deaf and the woman is early dementia; she had a permanently startled expression that was rather disturbing. I need to get over myself regarding my ableism, it’s startling.

Mary and pOp continue their recoveries in Victoria.

The laundry’s all folded and upstairs. In about ten minutes I’ll drive Alex to school.

374 words yesterday, 500 words so far today. Progress continues.

Much love to those who labour and worry.

Alex today

Actually I’ve got him all week.

Today will be the longest day, I’ve got him before school and then from 10ish to when Katie comes for him. I’ll be taking him with me on errands with Paul, who needs a battery stuck in his watch. He’ll be here in an hour or less.

466 words yesterday

Put away some laundry and the dishes.

Mike took me to supper at Little Minh’s. I had the Banh Hoi (Vietnamese pork sausages with cucumber and lettuce, fine rice noodles in sheets (never seen it like that before) with basil on top. (He had the chicken, fried egg and noodles.) He showed me videos of the animals he’s seen in Brunette and Alouette – a beaver and a young bear, respectively. The bear came right into the water so Mike was careful to mention that he was yonks away and the zoom function on his phone is crazy amazing. He’s given up all other activities but kayaking, and does that whenever he can. We didn’t really talk that much. Work is bad, but he’s not putting up with anything they throw at him. He’s being locked out of meetings for a product for which he’d normally be required to write customer support documentation. And the rollout is 3 weeks hence. Basically it’s the same shit as 2012, it’s just ten years on. And as soon as the meal was over, he drove me home. I think it was at his outer limit of what he can deal with socially, and I’m just glad he wanted to spend the time with me.

Mary is still on the mend, with all the tubes, and pOp had a fall and will likely be home from hospital today. I know I’m all blithe about it here, but I’m really not; I’m just letting my feelings be guided by my mother, who was concerned but not frantic.

Jeff of the Miracles

So someone decided to say on the internet PRONOUNCE POPSICLES THE GREEK WAY

and the following story appeared

Popsicles said to Spectacles – ‘Can’t you see what’s going on here?’

Spectacles replied, “Vehicles is trying to drive away, but Tentacles won’t let him go, Barnacles keeps trying to come along and Obstacles is in the way. You don’t have to be Oracles to see what’ll happen next.”

At which point I had to stuff my fist in my face not to howl with laughter.

35 words yesterday

Got a lovely comment on my most recent fic the other day.

Jeff of the Miracles got all the data off Paul’s old phone onto the new one AND got Gmail onto the new phone. We none of us deserve him. I fed Paul lunch and tried to help him run an errand but the shop was closed for repairs.

mOm talked to her sister Mary on the phone yesterday and words can cover the gratitude and relief. She’s still gravely ill but recovering.