Self Absorbed Whining

Today’s Writing Whine

Another day, another rejection. It looks like my goal of making my first professional sale this year isn’t going to happen.
I currently have three active submissions at three professional markets. I need to come up with two more. Hm.
Current Mood:  sad

Writing Angst

I’m a crappy writer.
Every story I’ve ever written is crap. Even the ones that have been published. The editors who bought my stories were blind on the days they read my stories, or they were simply charitable. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
My novel, The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, is [...]

Hangin’

For some reason, people often seem surprised when I tell them that I’m essentially a loner.  I mean it.  I guess I’m really good at interacting with people when I’m in social situations, but I don’t seek out such situations very often.  I love my friends dearly and I enjoy the time I have with [...]

And now on a whiny note

This has been a bad week.
No, scratch that.  It’s been a bad month.  Ever since we returned from Ireland, it seems that I’ve spent more time under the influence of my asthma than not.  The perpetual heat wave we’ve been experiencing in my neck of the woods (temps over 100 for almost two weeks continually [...]

Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Wedon

My wife pointed me to this:
TIME.com: Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Wedon
Two of my favorite creative geniuses together on the same… er, website. I take some comfort from the fact that they’re both in their 40’s and I’m 37; on the other hand, they’ve both been working since their late teens.
Current Mood: busyCurrent [...]

What sucks about being me

The MP3 player that Jennifer gave me for my birthday last year has room for forty gigabytes worth of music; I’ve filled up about twenty-seven so far. I don’t have a lot of pop music in my collection, but my MP3 player has music from many different genres. I have about a dozen different playlists, [...]

Two Errors

Robert Bly, in his poem "Four Ways of Knowing", writes, "I usually ignore the other three / and learn by falling." Some force — God, your higher self, whatever — is out there, says Bly, and there are times when you desperately need to learn something. It starts with subtle hints: a shape in a [...]

That Loop. The One Over There. The One I’m Out Of.

So the other night I had Evilpheemy, Cearalaith, and Craymore over for Session Two of "Incident at Mount Joyce", the Outer Darkness adventure that’s supposed to test the integrity of the system setting, just as much as it’s supposed to test the rules set that Evilpheemy’s come up with for the game, which we determined [...]

Being Where

So where have I been? I’ve been busy, and for some reason I haven’t had much inclination to update my journal of late. Here, then, is a brief summary of what’s been up with me.

Writing

I’ve revised a short story that I wrote about a month ago, something called "Ten Feet Tall, [...]

Bad Poetry and Strange News

While sitting at Borders this afternoon, I scribbled out this drivel. I think it basically counts as prose poetry. At any rate, here it is:

I get scared of how fast the day speeds by. This morning went by in a fog of unremembrance, and I did nothing to mark the day. I read a few [...]

Overheard Self-Talk

"Nothing has changed, you know."

"Huh?"

"I said, nothing’s changed."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, look at yourself. You’re trying to cop a new attitude. You’re trying to fix your thinking. You’re making a desperate attempt to get over yourself."

"What, like that’s not good?"

"It would be [...]

My Name is Richard, and I’m a Thoughtaholic

Did I confuse you with the extracts from my diary? I’m so terribly sorry.

This past weekend I was at DunDraCon XIX in San Ramon, California. Unlike Dragon*Con, which Jennifer and I went to back in September (a week before It happened), DunDraCon is focused entirely on role-playing games. I started going regularly [...]

Carburetor Mechanic

A carburetor mixes air and fuel in a car engine in order to provide just the right mix to make the fuel ignitable so that the engine can work. It’s a very important part of the whole internal combustion thing. But in newer cars, the carburetor has been replaced by the fuel injection system; in [...]

Final Exam

There’s really no excuse for this at all. I started this class back in June, so it’s been nearly seven months. Granted, there was a period of time when it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to reach the instructor at all, and there was confusion over who, exactly, was going to be [...]

Storm

The storms in the Greater Central Valley of California never get that impressive, at least not in Yolo and Solano Counties. True, there are floods and worse in this area every few years, but, on the whole, the weather around here is very mild. Today, the air has smelled like rain all day; I went [...]