Oh, yeah. Reality.

[rowyn]

I haven't written much in rowyn lately. Three posts this month, one of which was just a link.

Mostly, I've been writing in Unfinished Tales, and recently decided to finish a short story I started and abandoned in 2003.

My mind is full of unreal things. I've been thinking a lot about the setting of Silver Scales, and Trepilon IX, the setting for the short story I've resumed. "A Game of October" has been wedging in around the corners, with a few spare thoughts for Prophecy, here and there. telnar finished reading it (making a total of three readers! woohoo!) and I talked to him a bit about it last week. He had a good suggestion for fixing a significant problem with the text, so that was cool. I've been thinking about doing another revision, maybe starting in July, probably just fixing whatever's been pointed out as a problem and that I know how to fix. And then sending it to some publisher to reject. I mean, what the heck. I've already spent three years writing it, I might as well get it rejected a time or two.

Been considering sending some short stories out for rejection, too. "A Doll's Life" hasn't had a chance to be rejected by anyone yet. That hardly seems fair. It's kinda long, even after tuftears kindly excised a quarter of it for me (for which service I am profoundly grateful! Thank you, Tufty! *hug*)

In between thinking about fictional worlds, I've been mostly playing Puzzle Pirates, which may not qualify has "fiction" but certainly ain't the Real World.

Anyway, I was thinking "I should write something about what's going on in my life. You know. The part that involves interacting in the flesh with real objects and living beings."

This forced me to think: what exactly do I do with real objects and living beings? On reflection, my actual life may be even more obscure and difficult to explain than my fictional ones.

A few days ago, as soon as I got home from work, Lut told me a funny story about his experiences looking for a second video card for his machine, the punchline of which revolved around him accidentally buying an AGP card instead of a PCI. What makes this funny (in retrospect) is that, at the time, I was tired and couldn't follow the acronyms and so when he got to the punchline, I just stared at him blankly. "What's an AGP? Why is this bad?" He'd explained all of this in the course of the story, I just hadn't been following it.

It's not that my life is especially dull or uninteresting. I've been having a good time at my job in the last few weeks, in fact. Mostly I've been using newly-learned features of Crystal to solve various small problems around my job. While Crystal is a bastard child of a programming language, it's still the only programming-language-like-thing that I have access to do in connection with my work, and it's nice to be able to program the occassional solution instead of doing the same dumb and annoying tasks manually every single day. Now that I've started to understand it a little better, it's as though I suddenly have a wrench and a screwdriver as well as a hammer! And all of those screws and bolts are responding so much better than they did when I was hitting them repeatedly with the hammer. Granted, it'd be nice to have a circular saw and a lathe and other heavy-duty tools for some of the big problems. But at least everything isn't a nail any more. ("Hmm. Nope, pounding that flat won't fix it. Sorry, can't help you".)

But I'm afraid any non-metaphorical discussion of my work would be terribly tedious for those without the soul of an accountant.

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Ah, if only I could share a few anecdotes about work. I might even have a few things to say! But, drat that non-disclosure stuff. ;)

All in all, though, I haven't had much to say - except, of course, about games, games, games. (It'd be nice if it were story, story, story - or perhaps something I could share, like art or new fonts or whatever ... but that just hasn't been the way the wheel's been turning lately.) It's really underscored when it comes time for me to call up Gwendel, who's up in South Carolina, taking care of her grandma: At the end of the day, I just don't have that much to tell her. (We don't typically interact by telling each other how our days went. We typically either watch some anime or J-dramas that Gwendel has downloaded, or go out somewhere.)

So, I can't hold it against you that you haven't any breaking news about dealing with sea serpents in your basement or that you're privately fighting off incursions of Cthuloid horrors.

...

Hmm. Half makes me tempted to "spice up" my LJ entries with a bit of fiction, but that might cost too many sanity points.

[rowyn]

Heehee! Those last suggestions remind me of "rabbit hole" day. That was fun. :) Maybe spicing up my LJ with some fiction wouldn't be all bad. >:)

You're no more boring than the rest of us, really...

[ex-strangess744.livejournal.com]

(smiles sympathetically) hon, modern life is designed around the struggle to make (through collective and individual action) it as easy as possible to
(a) "make a living"
(b) "have fun" when you're not (a)
Sometimes, for a given individual, (a) nor (b) are favorablely quantified variables. But even when things are going absolutely swimmingly, what is so terribly intrinsically interesting about either process ? For (a) a LOT of it is "you have to be there" or "you have to know the business"....and for (b) even with people that you are similar to and chatty with, it's rare not to have a fairly rutted routine...since "safety" comes generally at a sacrifice of "variety" or "peak experiences"....and eventually, it's natural to wonder "why am I even bothering to talk about this stuff ?everyone who knows me knows the range of stuff I'm in"...

or maybe you're not quite as depressed as I am and things look different. (wry smile)

I'll call you up soon since I _do_ have the soul of an accountant.

Re: You're no more boring than the rest of us, really...

[rowyn]

I'll call you up soon since I _do_ have the soul of an accountant.


Of course you do; you're my soul-sister. :D (You do know I was thinking of you when I wrote that line, right?)

I am pretty rutted, but it's a nice comfy rut and I don't mind. The main source of variety is fictional world I happen to be most obsessed with at any given time.

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

The soul of an accountant? Is THAT all that's required?

I've got one right here in this bottle. :-)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*purrrs Rowyn* Anytime. };)

Do send it out, it might even surprise you and get accepted somewhere! And then you can treat yourself and Lut to dinner on the money.

Forgive me if I'm intruding...

[the-redneck.livejournal.com]

But you mentioned sending your stories out... Where do you send 'em to?

I mean, is there a class of magazines or publishers you send 'em to, or is it more a matter of picking them out, or what?

And I always figgered if you cain't fix it with a hammer, it ain't worth fixing.

Re: Forgive me if I'm intruding...

[rowyn]

I write science fiction and fantasy. I've only mailed stories to publishers three times (all three rejected, of course). The three I submitted to, specifically, were Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Asimov Science Fiction.

I picked these titles partly based on "magazines I've heard of and read at least one or two stories published in them at some point in my life" and partly through a search at Storypilot's Science Fiction and Fantasy Market Research Engine. Which is an extremely handy little tool. I searched for SFWA pro-rated magazines that accepted science fiction. (The particular stories I submitted were science fiction.) Because if you're going to get rejected, you may as well get rejected by the very BEST, right? :)

This was sometime in 2003. I haven't tried since, more because I'm lazy than because I'm discouraged.

Re: Forgive me if I'm intruding...

[the-redneck.livejournal.com]

:) Might as well send to all of 'em, I suppose; I remember that my favorite author (Louis L'Amour--best there ever was) once wallpapered his room with rejection-slips.

Thanks, though.