Breaking several days of silence
Mar. 20th, 2003 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSo, I've been a stress puppy lately and haven't had much energy for posting to my journal. But having gotten over the hump of a writer's block the last couple of days seems also have had a beneficial effect on my ability to jot down stuff going on in my life as of late. So here goes. Lots of random here, some amusement, some worry.
I didn't get the promising Microsoft gig. Bleh. I'd pretty much written that off when the recruiter at Volt not only did not go out of her way to email me promptly after the interview, but took a week and a half to actually get back to me and let me know that the team with which I'd interviewed decided to go with somebody with, quote, "a lot of Microsoft experience," unquote. Which rather pisses me off, since I have a lot of Microsoft experience. It's just that none of it is recent. Grf.
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mamishka and boudiccathered have both been helping me immensely in playing with my novel-in-progress. Mimi is an absolute goddess when it comes to letting me bounce ideas in my brain off of her and giving me ways to rearrange them and make infinitely better sense. Bou is, so far, the first person to actually read some of these scenes I've been crafting, and she likes what she's seen so far, but then again Bou's partial to my writing. The first real test is going to be making it available to the Scuzzboppers, several of whom do not actually have any prior experience with my prose and who also do not see and/or interact with me on a daily basis, which will hopefully mean that there will be a bit of useful distance that will allow more useful commentary.
(I'm not prepared to let my brain go in the direction yet of 'what will happen when I actually start hunting for an agent'. Hell, I don't even have a complete outline yet! Though with my word count now at 13,070, I may just about have enough initial material to go with an outline. But I need to put some time into outline building soon, so I can figure out exactly how the hell long this beast is going to be. I just hopesolarbird doesn't wind up comparing me to Tad "Describe Every Blade of Grass For the Next Fifty Miles" Williams.)
I've started reading Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, finally. Not done with it yet, and so far I have two conflicting reactions about it. I've actually been enjoying the events described in the story, and the picture building in my head of some of the more remote areas of Newfoundland, but she's got two habits that keep driving me nuts. One is that her style involves huge hoards of sentence fragments; in fact, the majority of her sentences seem to be fragmentary. I keep wanting to yell "For gods' sake, woman, GET SOME VERBS!" at her. And the second thing is that she keeps having her Newfoundlander characters say things like "yar" and "yut" when it seems that they're saying "yeah" and "yes". I don't know if that's the way Newfoundlanders actually talk -- my dataset on this is admittedly limited, as it involves only inter-song banter between the various members of Great Big Sea at their concerts that I have attended -- but every occurrence of "yar" makes me think of pirates.
This past Sunday, Dar and I attendedkathrynt's wedding shower, hosted by jessicac and chipmunck. Very pleasant experience all around; Jessica makes delightful edibles for tea-type parties, and the conversation was enjoyable. So were the inevitable games designed to tease the hell out of the bride-to-be.
cassieclaire finally put up Legolas' Very Secret Diary for Two Towers. I am most amused by this.
Russell Crowe is getting married, as I mentioned in my last post, and his next movie is getting delayed, as I have also previously mentioned, but at least I am able to now console myself with reasonable assurance that the impending next album by 30 Odd Foot of Grunts is likely to not suck.
(Now, granted, I know, I'm talking from the biased perspective of a TOFOG fan whose entire reason for being a TOFOG fan is 50 percent Russell-obsessed hormones, but well hey, his band entertains me. And more often than not, the man can actually carry a tune. When he can't... well, that's what the technology for ripping only selected tracks off a CD to your MP3 player is for. And I am, furthermore, amused that Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders likes Russell's singing well enough that she even did a duet with him.)
Aaanyway, the interesting part of this is that out of three different sites that are taking pre-orders for said forthcoming album, all three have samples off the tracks that are of dramatically different quality. They're the exact same 30 second snippets of all the songs, but one site has extremely sucky samples and another, just listened to tonight, has versions of the exact same samples that sound quite good (i.e., all the instruments are clear, and backup vocals are actually distinct, and Mr. Crowe's vocals aren't nearly as muddy as the sucky samples were making him sound). What I don't get is why the exact same snippets of songs off the exact same album could sound so dramatically different on different sites; I'm wondering if promotional copies just got sent around to various places and they're cutting their own samples, and some people have sucky technology for doing this and some people don't.
Great Big Sea is touring, and word fromsyn who went to see them the other night down in Tennessee is that the guy they have playing bass with them is doing a more than adequate job. But GBS hasn't scheduled a return trip to here yet, dammit. I need me some singing Newfoundlander goodness. And lots of inter-song banter! So I can figure out if Newfoundlanders actually say "yar" -- yeah, that's it! It's research.
Speaking of Canada, I have decided that Dar and I need to go to Victoria soon so that we can have a nice relaxing day or two to ourselves. Kathryn has heartily recommended the bed and breakfast she andllachglin stayed at while they were up there, and has given me some pointers on stuff to look at. The only problem with what would be an otherwise fine plan is that I hear tell that the wait to cross the border is 1 1/2 to 2 hours, depending on which way you're going, and I am not confident that the events that transpired this evening in Baghdad are going to make my ability to go quietly enjoy myself in Canada any easier over the upcoming weeks.
Sigh.
I am not much pleased about the prospect of our going to war. I don't like to be cynical, but a big cynical part of me is just having a hard time finding faith that this war will actually do any good. I would like to believe that our armed forces will kick Hussein out of power and that this will lead to the eventual bringing down of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and whoever else was responsible for making airplanes fall down out of the sky on us. I want to go "rah rah America" -- and, mind you, although I am running low on faith in the reasons our armed forces are now over there bombing Baghdad, I am anxious that they succeed in the stated intent of doing as little damage as possible. Especially to innocent civilians. That's the part that really worries me; the notion that this won't be as clean an operation as the powers that be might like, and America will wind up, yet again, being seen as the big bad aggressor even by countries who are generally friendly to us.
And I'm worried that the current administration is so focused on this that the shambles that is our current economy will stay in this state until we have a new President in office. I look around me and I see a majority of my friends still without jobs, I see gas prices inflated to over two bucks a gallon. It would be nice to be able to believe that this war will lessen the chances that planes are going to fall down onto all our heads, but then again, it would also be nice to be assured that my kith and kin will continue to be able to afford to live their daily lives.
What else.
I've hammered my email inbox down some, but I'm still behind on it. I'm still behind on Jam Reports, too. And I need to send a thank you note and letter to my friend Yngvar in Norway, who was kind enough to send me a present on my birthday in January.
My brother is supposed to be here some time next month with Outspoken, to be performing at the EMP. And I have already been asked once by an online friend which of the guys on the back of the CD is my brother... and someone on Two Moons swooned at me about them. Heh.
Norwescon is coming up, at any rate. So even if Dar and I don't get to go to Victoria, that should be a pleasant diversion. And I'll even try to go to more panels. Maybe I'll even do something scary and try to TALK TO PEOPLE, as Dar is trying to encourage me to think about doing, though every time I contemplate this I keep remembering the article that (I think it wasspazzkat who quoted the link, again on the MurkMUSH) talked about the care and feeding of introverts.
Thailand is on the horizon, still distant, but coming closer by the day. I hope the war won't screw up our ability to go over there, either.
I didn't get the promising Microsoft gig. Bleh. I'd pretty much written that off when the recruiter at Volt not only did not go out of her way to email me promptly after the interview, but took a week and a half to actually get back to me and let me know that the team with which I'd interviewed decided to go with somebody with, quote, "a lot of Microsoft experience," unquote. Which rather pisses me off, since I have a lot of Microsoft experience. It's just that none of it is recent. Grf.
mamishka and boudiccathered have both been helping me immensely in playing with my novel-in-progress. Mimi is an absolute goddess when it comes to letting me bounce ideas in my brain off of her and giving me ways to rearrange them and make infinitely better sense. Bou is, so far, the first person to actually read some of these scenes I've been crafting, and she likes what she's seen so far, but then again Bou's partial to my writing. The first real test is going to be making it available to the Scuzzboppers, several of whom do not actually have any prior experience with my prose and who also do not see and/or interact with me on a daily basis, which will hopefully mean that there will be a bit of useful distance that will allow more useful commentary.(I'm not prepared to let my brain go in the direction yet of 'what will happen when I actually start hunting for an agent'. Hell, I don't even have a complete outline yet! Though with my word count now at 13,070, I may just about have enough initial material to go with an outline. But I need to put some time into outline building soon, so I can figure out exactly how the hell long this beast is going to be. I just hope
solarbird doesn't wind up comparing me to Tad "Describe Every Blade of Grass For the Next Fifty Miles" Williams.)I've started reading Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, finally. Not done with it yet, and so far I have two conflicting reactions about it. I've actually been enjoying the events described in the story, and the picture building in my head of some of the more remote areas of Newfoundland, but she's got two habits that keep driving me nuts. One is that her style involves huge hoards of sentence fragments; in fact, the majority of her sentences seem to be fragmentary. I keep wanting to yell "For gods' sake, woman, GET SOME VERBS!" at her. And the second thing is that she keeps having her Newfoundlander characters say things like "yar" and "yut" when it seems that they're saying "yeah" and "yes". I don't know if that's the way Newfoundlanders actually talk -- my dataset on this is admittedly limited, as it involves only inter-song banter between the various members of Great Big Sea at their concerts that I have attended -- but every occurrence of "yar" makes me think of pirates.
This past Sunday, Dar and I attended
kathrynt's wedding shower, hosted by jessicac and chipmunck. Very pleasant experience all around; Jessica makes delightful edibles for tea-type parties, and the conversation was enjoyable. So were the inevitable games designed to tease the hell out of the bride-to-be.cassieclaire finally put up Legolas' Very Secret Diary for Two Towers. I am most amused by this.Russell Crowe is getting married, as I mentioned in my last post, and his next movie is getting delayed, as I have also previously mentioned, but at least I am able to now console myself with reasonable assurance that the impending next album by 30 Odd Foot of Grunts is likely to not suck.
(Now, granted, I know, I'm talking from the biased perspective of a TOFOG fan whose entire reason for being a TOFOG fan is 50 percent Russell-obsessed hormones, but well hey, his band entertains me. And more often than not, the man can actually carry a tune. When he can't... well, that's what the technology for ripping only selected tracks off a CD to your MP3 player is for. And I am, furthermore, amused that Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders likes Russell's singing well enough that she even did a duet with him.)
Aaanyway, the interesting part of this is that out of three different sites that are taking pre-orders for said forthcoming album, all three have samples off the tracks that are of dramatically different quality. They're the exact same 30 second snippets of all the songs, but one site has extremely sucky samples and another, just listened to tonight, has versions of the exact same samples that sound quite good (i.e., all the instruments are clear, and backup vocals are actually distinct, and Mr. Crowe's vocals aren't nearly as muddy as the sucky samples were making him sound). What I don't get is why the exact same snippets of songs off the exact same album could sound so dramatically different on different sites; I'm wondering if promotional copies just got sent around to various places and they're cutting their own samples, and some people have sucky technology for doing this and some people don't.
Great Big Sea is touring, and word from
syn who went to see them the other night down in Tennessee is that the guy they have playing bass with them is doing a more than adequate job. But GBS hasn't scheduled a return trip to here yet, dammit. I need me some singing Newfoundlander goodness. And lots of inter-song banter! So I can figure out if Newfoundlanders actually say "yar" -- yeah, that's it! It's research.Speaking of Canada, I have decided that Dar and I need to go to Victoria soon so that we can have a nice relaxing day or two to ourselves. Kathryn has heartily recommended the bed and breakfast she and
llachglin stayed at while they were up there, and has given me some pointers on stuff to look at. The only problem with what would be an otherwise fine plan is that I hear tell that the wait to cross the border is 1 1/2 to 2 hours, depending on which way you're going, and I am not confident that the events that transpired this evening in Baghdad are going to make my ability to go quietly enjoy myself in Canada any easier over the upcoming weeks.Sigh.
I am not much pleased about the prospect of our going to war. I don't like to be cynical, but a big cynical part of me is just having a hard time finding faith that this war will actually do any good. I would like to believe that our armed forces will kick Hussein out of power and that this will lead to the eventual bringing down of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and whoever else was responsible for making airplanes fall down out of the sky on us. I want to go "rah rah America" -- and, mind you, although I am running low on faith in the reasons our armed forces are now over there bombing Baghdad, I am anxious that they succeed in the stated intent of doing as little damage as possible. Especially to innocent civilians. That's the part that really worries me; the notion that this won't be as clean an operation as the powers that be might like, and America will wind up, yet again, being seen as the big bad aggressor even by countries who are generally friendly to us.
And I'm worried that the current administration is so focused on this that the shambles that is our current economy will stay in this state until we have a new President in office. I look around me and I see a majority of my friends still without jobs, I see gas prices inflated to over two bucks a gallon. It would be nice to be able to believe that this war will lessen the chances that planes are going to fall down onto all our heads, but then again, it would also be nice to be assured that my kith and kin will continue to be able to afford to live their daily lives.
What else.
I've hammered my email inbox down some, but I'm still behind on it. I'm still behind on Jam Reports, too. And I need to send a thank you note and letter to my friend Yngvar in Norway, who was kind enough to send me a present on my birthday in January.
My brother is supposed to be here some time next month with Outspoken, to be performing at the EMP. And I have already been asked once by an online friend which of the guys on the back of the CD is my brother... and someone on Two Moons swooned at me about them. Heh.
Norwescon is coming up, at any rate. So even if Dar and I don't get to go to Victoria, that should be a pleasant diversion. And I'll even try to go to more panels. Maybe I'll even do something scary and try to TALK TO PEOPLE, as Dar is trying to encourage me to think about doing, though every time I contemplate this I keep remembering the article that (I think it was
spazzkat who quoted the link, again on the MurkMUSH) talked about the care and feeding of introverts.Thailand is on the horizon, still distant, but coming closer by the day. I hope the war won't screw up our ability to go over there, either.
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no subject
Date: 2003-03-20 06:00 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 11:32 am (UTC)I may have to rent the movie or see if I can get the Tivo to scarf it, though. I suspect I'd enjoy the movie more since it wouldn't have all the bloody sentence fragments. ;) And hey! Three GBS songs are supposed to be on the soundtrack!
no subject
Date: 2003-03-20 11:37 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 11:53 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 11:55 am (UTC)Also, I never bought Kevin Spacey as Doyle.
But you should rent it regardless, if for no other reason that the Nova Scotia location shots are almost as nice as what location shots in Newfie would have been like. It's not a terrible movie, just not a great book adaptation.
Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 12:10 pm (UTC)Huh, though; imdb.com says some locations in Newfoundland were used for filming as well as locations in Nova Scotia? Is imdb.com on crack? :)
And AH! I was wrong, there are FOUR Great Big Sea songs listed on the soundtrack. ^_^ Plus one other trad ditty that GBS actually did cover, but which in this film is covered by somebody else. Hee.
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Date: 2003-03-20 12:18 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 12:48 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 12:50 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-20 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-20 07:30 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-21 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-21 02:02 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-03-21 02:14 pm (UTC)