Oh, yeah. Reality.

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.