New novel

Jan. 5th, 2010 11:10 am
nonionay: (Default)
I'm jittery right now, thanks to the new roommate situation. We've got one woman stopping by tonight, and we're meeting another guy for coffee tomorrow. This is putting me seriously off balance since hey, my home and my roommates are an important part of my life and identity, and I'm going to be intentionally bringing a complete stranger into this. At least I have a nice impression of our current candidate. I hope she likes us, too. One interesting thing to come of this is that I now feel like an editor. I got sixteen responses in less than 24 hours on the Craigslist ads. So here's a hint to people looking for a room: describe yourself and your living requirements a little. Offer to meet for coffee and please, if possible, don't have spelling errors. Assure us you've got a job. However, a generic "Hi, I'm Joe, let me know if the room's still open", is better than a description that makes you sound creepy.

In addition to roommate stress, I've probably got some post-novel ennui. So to keep myself distracted, I read a book (see previous post) and then sketched out my next novel. That helped, but exacerbated some stress, since this next novel is The Montana Book, and is exploiting the intense emotions I have wound up in the Bitterroot Valley. (The main character and I each have the same goal--to understand and banish the power this place holds over us.) And so, thinking on the book stirs up emotions.

Screw all that. It's time for the Day Job.
nonionay: (Default)
Last night I finished reading Cherie Priest's "Those Who Went Remain There Still". (About some Hatfield/McCoy analogs fighting monsters in creepy gross caves.) I shut it, put it back in the little plastic sleeve Subterranean sends out their books in, went to the bathroom, then checked Twitter.
[livejournal.com profile] kaerfel was saying she was in the mood for some horror reading, Silent Hill-style. And I was all, OMG and unwrapped the book for her.
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There is something about the acoustics of our house that makes certain (not all) noises in Audrey's room sound like they're coming from right in front of me, or to my left. (My desk faces the north wall of the house. The wall between our rooms is east/right of me. )

She's putting up Christmas lights around her room right now.

It sounds like there are things scritching and slithering through my walls.
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
So I'm coming out of the upstairs bathroom, when charging at me up the stairs is what appears to be a giant, sodden sewer beast. I freak out for a split second before realizing it's Teisel, recently emerged from the bath.
He's been a busy cat.
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So [livejournal.com profile] awriter and I were planning to go across town to the Fred Meyer. I glanced at the clock and said, "If we leave right now, or in the immediate future, we could catch the bus." And by that I meant, we can leave THIS VERY INSTANT and have a leisurely walk to the stop across the street, or we can leave in a couple minutes and RUN OUR ASSES OFF.

Audrey retreated to her room to Do Stuff.
She was Doing Stuff for a while.
I stood outside, occasionally calling out and occasionally getting an "I'm coming!"

She emerged holding a pink plastic grocery bag containing Stuff.
I instantly realized what had happened, but oh, well. I made her run, and we just barely caught the bus. All the while she cried, "I can't do it! It smells!" To which I responded, "How do you know! It doesn't!" (And it didn't.)

So yeah, that's how I made Audrey take cat poop on the bus.
Turns out she thought we were going to walk to the downtown station instead of catching the bus across the street, which is reasonable, but totally not what I had in mind. She tossed the bag in the garbage at the downtown station and all was well in the world.
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
Dude! My roommate modded an old camera to pick up infrared.
nonionay: (wwjd)
This morning I was in the kitchen trying to find the words to rant about writing Nazis. (I'm still trying to figure it out. I think I feel like I'm cheating. Easiest Villain Ever.)
Keffy turns to me: "Wait, you're writing about fairies and Nazis?"
Me: ... "Yes?"
Apparently Hellboy has ruined Keffy on the fairy/Nazi combination. If I'd thought it at the time, I would have whined, "But they're Pan's Labyrinth fairies, not Hellboy fairies!"
And it was in that moment that I realized I'm trying to be Guillermo Del Toro.
Well now I know what atrocious thing my Nazi's are going to to. Eye poking. Lots and lots of eye poking.Keffy
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
There are Teisel noises on tape. They don't start for about thirty seconds, though. And you have to imagine them three times as loud. At three am. For three hours straight.

nonionay: (Default)
Places that take exactly the length of The Doors' song, "The End" to walk to:

My work, from the old House of Entropy.
The grocery store and back, from The Nightmare House.
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
What goes, >jingle< >thud< >jingle< >thud< >jingle< >thud< ?

Princess the cat having sex against our front door!

Chelsea and I heard this noise, suspected the origin, but when we peered out the glass, we only saw an unfamiliar gray cat staring at us in terror. Chelsea opened the door, and Princess just sort of spilled in.
She's been howling all week, and she sounds disturbingly like Teisel.

>cue [livejournal.com profile] csinman saying, "I hate your neighbor"
nonionay: (Default)
Okay, I'm not much of a fan of undersized rat dogs, but out neighbor's new doberman chihuahua thing is stalking butterflies and bounding through the way-too-deep grass* and is totally cute.

*Seriously, it's like a foot and a half tall. And full of old bathroom fixtures.
nonionay: (Default)
Urghh... my head hurts. Sinus headache, I think.

I'm going to try to submit something for the next Sword and Sorceress anthology, deadline May 15th. I spent the last couple days brainstorming ideas--all of them based in my giant world, of course. If nothing else, I'm going to get some worldbuilding done.

Last night, I had the first of two sessions with my writing group critiquing my novel. We've never done anything like this before, and I think it went really well. Julie "Precious World Virgin" McGalliard, and Keffy managed to focus on different things--Julie on plot arcs, and Keffy on character arcs. They both picked up on what I was trying to do, and noted where I wasn't quite succeeding.

Tonight, I hear, there shall be Dexter and fake margaritas and Thai food. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll convince [livejournal.com profile] lordseamus to see if the pull cord on our lawnmower can be fixed, since no one in the house can turn the damn thing on and mow the lawn before our landlord yells at us.
nonionay: (wwjd)
The smell of squid is seeping into my room. ;_;
nonionay: (Default)
Don't worry too much about us up in Bellingham. We're not one of those towns that built themselves on a flood plain. >cough< Mt Vernon Centralia >cough<

It was raining wickedly last night, though. I ran into [livejournal.com profile] spencimusprime on the bus back from Western, and usually I would have walked home from downtown so I could hang out with him while walking. Not in that weather! I let him suffer alone.

At home, the kitten and Teisel were hanging out in the upstairs bathroom for a long time. Eventually, I found the kitten in the hall, tail bristling, staring down the stairs. I brought him downstairs and cuddled him on the couch. He kept staring at the stairs. I triangulated the spot he was focused on, determined he was not afraid of the piece of ribbon tied to the banister, nor the plush cameleon. Sherlock Holmes-style, I determined it must be ghosts or fairies. Not a very helpful answer. Eventually the kitten calmed down, and Audrey decided the kitten was terrified because the upstairs bathroom was shaking and roaring with the storm.
Poor kitten. :-(
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My aunt noted that I was probably the only person at Christmas who actually needed anything. This is true, and the only thing I need is new pants. Thankfully, that's what I received--a pair of very nice, very dark blue jeans. I wore these jeans quite a bit over the weekend, and was only able to take a very perfunctory, non-soapy shower on Saturday, thanks to the unpredictability of my aunt's plumbing. Yesterday was full of travel, Cabela's and late-running trains. No showers for me.
So when I went to take a shower this evening, I was most excited to do so. Right before I got in the shower, I thought, "I have zombie legs!" Because the light was making my legs look rather pallid, and I've been writing about zombies for 72 hours straight.

Then I got in the shower, and my legs really were cold, dead, grey-blue.

And that's what happens when you wear jeans before washing them. They turn you into a zombie.

Even more fun was when I got out of the shower and Teisel was throwing himself against the door. I let him in even before I dried off, just to shut him up. He proceeded to jump up on the edge of the tub and promptly became the second living being to lick my naked thigh. When I refused to let this continue, he licked the bathtub walls--not around the drain where he could actually get a drink. That, as Tye pointed out, would require him to actually get his toes wet.

And that's what happens when you live with the weirdest cat ever.
nonionay: (Default)
I admit, I'm not too worried about the potential economic doomsday we're facing. I've only a small student loan, I rent, and I have no credit cards. I live frugally. I do worry about our wonderful landlord losing the house, or my work (a small business) going under. My bank's already crashed, but I'm still alive. I'm thinking of moving to the credit union.

Here's a quote from a post by Douglas Rushkoff over on Boing Boing.

"Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us....
Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition. And if you do have money to invest, put it into whatever lets you and your friends do those things."

It's kind of idealistic, but I do love the idea of a small, locally based economy. I guess I do have some skills I could trade for stuff (design...drawing...I give a mean massage, I'm told.)

I'm very attached to the little platonic family I've gathered to myself. We've been helping each other for a while now. (Yay, rice cooker!) One of these days, I'll finally print out the house money, and we'll have the Nightmare House Microeconomy.

Just me babbling.
nonionay: (Default)
So the dead cat in our backyard? We're sure it was a hate crime. Because that poor cat wasn't black, its neighbors murdered it using their mysterious cat sorcery. When I came home, Tye and Chelsea were sitting on the back porch. "Princess", an adorable black kitty of delicate build, was rolling in the grass, gleefully making love to the sole dandelion that survived the last lawn mowing. Around the garage, the long-lost twin of [livejournal.com profile] cmpriest's Spain the Cat lurked. Next door, not one, but three black cats, only their beady green eyes visible, watched the exhibitionist Princess.
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About 3/4 of my books are now in the new house, and in almost completely random order, since I packed them based on size, not content. Chelsea and I wanted to buy more of these cheap, nifty not-actually-wicker shelves, but, being Sunday, Deals Only was closed. :-( So I dumped my books unceremoniously on a hastily erected grid-cubicle thingy, which will totally be changed once we get real shelves.

The exciting part of the day was shopping with Chelsea, free to be girly. We bought a lacy table runner with sunflowers on it from the dollar store.

I am so excited for my new living situation. I'm going to use it to figure out Fideilma, where marriages consist of two men and two women. Not that there will be any hanky-panky outside the actual married couple in our house, but then, I don't imagine all Fideilman linkages are non-stop orgies either.

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