Five things
Aug. 17th, 2022 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Update on my mother's missing choir director...
Apparently he missed his flight to Savannah, and ended up in Rhode Island with his friend Joan. His phone was broken, so he couldn't call anyone.
Me: Why didn't his friend Joan call someone?
Mother: I think she must have at some point. Anyhow he has no real memory of the past few days, or his memories of them are scant at best.
Me: Okay that's frightening.
Mother: I'm not sure if he'll be able to do your father's funeral.
Me: I'm sure someone else will be able to step in and help. Also if he's having that severe of a memory lapse about things - then he probably shouldn't be running the music at a funeral.
Mother: Yes, he's been forgetting things for some time now. His brother was supposed to come down and stay with him - to check things out with his Doctors.
Whew. Albeit scary.
More inspiration for leaving my job no later than sixty or sixty-two. Possibly earlier. Or I may end up going down the same road. The choir director is 70.
2. Crazy work place is driving me crazy, but it is Wednesday. So only two days left in the work week.
I'm making a chart in excel to figure out what questions have been answered by addendum, which haven't, how they've been answered, by what addendum and when, and also which firm asked them. Also realized that I need to add a tab keeping track of all the contractual changes by addendum.
This used to be easier to keep track of - without a spreadsheet. I'm copying a co-worker - who is doing the same thing, for the same reasons.
While doing said spreadsheet - I discovered something. Apparently I can write a phrase in English, then translate it to a made up language via just clicking on "the symbol" font. (I found this out cutting and pasting text, which kept falling under the symbol font, and I had to keep translating it back to Calibre font.) Ah, technology - what did we ever do without it?
Does make life easier - in making up fantastical languages for fantasy and sci-fi novels. (You no longer have to be an accomplished linguist to do it - technology has made it easy for just about anyone with microsoft word to give it a shot.) Yes, I'm still mainly interested in attempting to become a novelist - even if I have to do it entirely on my own dime.
Me: I'm worried about getting my vacation time at Xmas again.
Mother: It's too early - stop worrying ahead of time. It's a long way until then. You'll be fine.
I can't wait until I retire and no longer have to worry about this crap. It's insane that I have to worry about vacation time being approved. I was discussing this with a co-worker who agreed. Morale is kind of at rock bottom at the moment - the lowest it's ever been. Lower than it was during the pandemic. We actually weren't doing that badly during the pandemic, we were just scared.
3. I've never understood the English Lit Canon's insane love of 19th Century literature. I didn't understand it when I was an English Lit major - and I managed with some effort to avoid most of that section of the literary canon. (I did it by taking contemporary literature course, 18th Century Courses, Poetry, Science Fiction, British Children's Literature, Creative Writing, and Drama. In short I read a lot of plays and poetry instead.) I find it flowery, stagnant, boring, difficult to read, painfully passive, and overly formal. Also, why are people enamored with that time period? Women had no rights to speak of, men were assholes (more so than they are now - which is kind of saying something), everyone was terribly repressed and passive aggressive, and the poverty was kind of extreme. Medicine was backwards. And transportation was kind of impossible and dirty. Not to mention brutal on horses. Why would you worship a time period that had slavery, animal abuse, women couldn't vote, corsets, smog from coal, and scant indoor plumbing?
Maybe we should just send everyone who loves that time period back to it - in an alternate universe as slaves - after about five years, they can return, better informed and less enamored. [Yes, I know that they abolished most slavery in various countries including the US in the 1800s aka the 19th Century, but it was in the middle to late portion of the century, there were violent and bloody wars, and also it wasn't really completely abolished - in that regard until the 19th with the full-scale industrial age. (We still have slavery in various portions of the world of course, including this section, it's illegal, but it exists, because some people (the slave owners/traders) are monsters. Owning slaves is a monsterous practice that should be punishable with death or a life of hard labor in a prison. One or the other. There is no justification for it. I know about it - because I've known people who work hard or have worked hard in organizations to stop human trafficking. )
[Don't mind me, I'm irritable today. I blame work. The weather - it can't decide if it wants to rain - it's flirting with the concept as I type this. And eating too many M&M's with my nut mix.]
I like historical romances that blatantly ignore the formalized writing style of the 19th Century. (I'm neither a historian nor a linguist - so I don't care if it's accurate. It's a romance novel - it doesn't have to be accurate. Okay, a little accurate, maybe.)
4. Mother was rec'ing the new Elvis film by Baz Lurham to me today, the one starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. She said it had lots of musical performances, and focused more on his musical career with Parker, than on anything else. She liked it, with reservations. And recommended that I rent it.
She rented it on Amazon Prime - at my suggestion - I told her it should be available on one of the streaming channels to rent. She can't rent on demand - her cable/internet provider has done away with their on demand film service. (She has Hargraves - provided in deal with her retirement center. Not that Time Warner was all that much better. I actually like Optimum better than both - which is odd. )
5. Stealing time to revise my contemporary romance novel about the Female War Veteran who disarmed bombs, and the bisexual male sex therapist, who is her high school sweetheart/ex-fiancee. It's kind of a second chance at romance story, involving some of my favorite story kinks - he thought she was dead, she comes back different (he doesn't recognize her or know its her), she's an auto mechanic and disarmed bombs, he's a musician and sex therapist. There's a bit of a gender flip in roles. Also there's a lot of LGBTA in the book, and its very ethnically diverse. (I don't understand how people can't write ethnically diverse books? Everyone around me is a different race, creed, language, sexual orientation, gender...).
I don't know if it will get published. If it does, I may do it under a pseudonym? Or try the indie route. I've decided to pull out most if not all of physical descriptive adjectives - so you can't really tell what race a lot of these people are. They can be any race. At least I'm trying to do that. I've noticed other, better writers do it - John Scalzi uses few physical descriptors, as do a lot of other writers. It's a neat trick. The mind doesn't really grab them anyhow, and often skips over them in some cases. At any rate - when I finish revising - I'll hand it over to Wales to read. Not sure about mother, who is normally my reader.
I was talking to another co-worker today, and almost got teary eyed - mainly because I felt strongly about the topic. We were discussing the Howard Ashman documentary on Disney Plus - and how tragic it was. I told him that it was tragic that Ashman didn't feel safe and couldn't be who he truly was. Everyone would have been happier if he could have been. But no, we live in a world with people who feel everyone has to be like them or how they want to see things, so people can't be who they truly are. That makes me want to cry - we should be allowed to be who we are, not be forced to hide it. (Within reason of course - if you are a sociopath or psychopath, and who you really are - is well to be a serial killer - uhm no. Or a narcissistic personality shouldn't be allowed to run roughshod over folks to further their own ends. Actually, now that I think about it - that's the problem - we've given a bit too much power to the sociopaths and narcissists on the planet to be who they truly are, and not enough to the kind gentle souls who just want to love others, and be geeky about theater.)
We also talked about "kindness" and how it is really hard to be kind to people that we strongly dislike or aren't kind to us. The nameless, faceless people who make our lives painful. Or those we have names and faces for - and hurt us. Those are hard to be kind to. It's easy to be kind to people who are nice to us and we love, and cherish, and aren't irritated by.
I'm struggling with being kind to the people I would like to smack upside the head or throw off a parapet.
Apparently he missed his flight to Savannah, and ended up in Rhode Island with his friend Joan. His phone was broken, so he couldn't call anyone.
Me: Why didn't his friend Joan call someone?
Mother: I think she must have at some point. Anyhow he has no real memory of the past few days, or his memories of them are scant at best.
Me: Okay that's frightening.
Mother: I'm not sure if he'll be able to do your father's funeral.
Me: I'm sure someone else will be able to step in and help. Also if he's having that severe of a memory lapse about things - then he probably shouldn't be running the music at a funeral.
Mother: Yes, he's been forgetting things for some time now. His brother was supposed to come down and stay with him - to check things out with his Doctors.
Whew. Albeit scary.
More inspiration for leaving my job no later than sixty or sixty-two. Possibly earlier. Or I may end up going down the same road. The choir director is 70.
2. Crazy work place is driving me crazy, but it is Wednesday. So only two days left in the work week.
I'm making a chart in excel to figure out what questions have been answered by addendum, which haven't, how they've been answered, by what addendum and when, and also which firm asked them. Also realized that I need to add a tab keeping track of all the contractual changes by addendum.
This used to be easier to keep track of - without a spreadsheet. I'm copying a co-worker - who is doing the same thing, for the same reasons.
While doing said spreadsheet - I discovered something. Apparently I can write a phrase in English, then translate it to a made up language via just clicking on "the symbol" font. (I found this out cutting and pasting text, which kept falling under the symbol font, and I had to keep translating it back to Calibre font.) Ah, technology - what did we ever do without it?
Does make life easier - in making up fantastical languages for fantasy and sci-fi novels. (You no longer have to be an accomplished linguist to do it - technology has made it easy for just about anyone with microsoft word to give it a shot.) Yes, I'm still mainly interested in attempting to become a novelist - even if I have to do it entirely on my own dime.
Me: I'm worried about getting my vacation time at Xmas again.
Mother: It's too early - stop worrying ahead of time. It's a long way until then. You'll be fine.
I can't wait until I retire and no longer have to worry about this crap. It's insane that I have to worry about vacation time being approved. I was discussing this with a co-worker who agreed. Morale is kind of at rock bottom at the moment - the lowest it's ever been. Lower than it was during the pandemic. We actually weren't doing that badly during the pandemic, we were just scared.
3. I've never understood the English Lit Canon's insane love of 19th Century literature. I didn't understand it when I was an English Lit major - and I managed with some effort to avoid most of that section of the literary canon. (I did it by taking contemporary literature course, 18th Century Courses, Poetry, Science Fiction, British Children's Literature, Creative Writing, and Drama. In short I read a lot of plays and poetry instead.) I find it flowery, stagnant, boring, difficult to read, painfully passive, and overly formal. Also, why are people enamored with that time period? Women had no rights to speak of, men were assholes (more so than they are now - which is kind of saying something), everyone was terribly repressed and passive aggressive, and the poverty was kind of extreme. Medicine was backwards. And transportation was kind of impossible and dirty. Not to mention brutal on horses. Why would you worship a time period that had slavery, animal abuse, women couldn't vote, corsets, smog from coal, and scant indoor plumbing?
Maybe we should just send everyone who loves that time period back to it - in an alternate universe as slaves - after about five years, they can return, better informed and less enamored. [Yes, I know that they abolished most slavery in various countries including the US in the 1800s aka the 19th Century, but it was in the middle to late portion of the century, there were violent and bloody wars, and also it wasn't really completely abolished - in that regard until the 19th with the full-scale industrial age. (We still have slavery in various portions of the world of course, including this section, it's illegal, but it exists, because some people (the slave owners/traders) are monsters. Owning slaves is a monsterous practice that should be punishable with death or a life of hard labor in a prison. One or the other. There is no justification for it. I know about it - because I've known people who work hard or have worked hard in organizations to stop human trafficking. )
[Don't mind me, I'm irritable today. I blame work. The weather - it can't decide if it wants to rain - it's flirting with the concept as I type this. And eating too many M&M's with my nut mix.]
I like historical romances that blatantly ignore the formalized writing style of the 19th Century. (I'm neither a historian nor a linguist - so I don't care if it's accurate. It's a romance novel - it doesn't have to be accurate. Okay, a little accurate, maybe.)
4. Mother was rec'ing the new Elvis film by Baz Lurham to me today, the one starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. She said it had lots of musical performances, and focused more on his musical career with Parker, than on anything else. She liked it, with reservations. And recommended that I rent it.
She rented it on Amazon Prime - at my suggestion - I told her it should be available on one of the streaming channels to rent. She can't rent on demand - her cable/internet provider has done away with their on demand film service. (She has Hargraves - provided in deal with her retirement center. Not that Time Warner was all that much better. I actually like Optimum better than both - which is odd. )
5. Stealing time to revise my contemporary romance novel about the Female War Veteran who disarmed bombs, and the bisexual male sex therapist, who is her high school sweetheart/ex-fiancee. It's kind of a second chance at romance story, involving some of my favorite story kinks - he thought she was dead, she comes back different (he doesn't recognize her or know its her), she's an auto mechanic and disarmed bombs, he's a musician and sex therapist. There's a bit of a gender flip in roles. Also there's a lot of LGBTA in the book, and its very ethnically diverse. (I don't understand how people can't write ethnically diverse books? Everyone around me is a different race, creed, language, sexual orientation, gender...).
I don't know if it will get published. If it does, I may do it under a pseudonym? Or try the indie route. I've decided to pull out most if not all of physical descriptive adjectives - so you can't really tell what race a lot of these people are. They can be any race. At least I'm trying to do that. I've noticed other, better writers do it - John Scalzi uses few physical descriptors, as do a lot of other writers. It's a neat trick. The mind doesn't really grab them anyhow, and often skips over them in some cases. At any rate - when I finish revising - I'll hand it over to Wales to read. Not sure about mother, who is normally my reader.
I was talking to another co-worker today, and almost got teary eyed - mainly because I felt strongly about the topic. We were discussing the Howard Ashman documentary on Disney Plus - and how tragic it was. I told him that it was tragic that Ashman didn't feel safe and couldn't be who he truly was. Everyone would have been happier if he could have been. But no, we live in a world with people who feel everyone has to be like them or how they want to see things, so people can't be who they truly are. That makes me want to cry - we should be allowed to be who we are, not be forced to hide it. (Within reason of course - if you are a sociopath or psychopath, and who you really are - is well to be a serial killer - uhm no. Or a narcissistic personality shouldn't be allowed to run roughshod over folks to further their own ends. Actually, now that I think about it - that's the problem - we've given a bit too much power to the sociopaths and narcissists on the planet to be who they truly are, and not enough to the kind gentle souls who just want to love others, and be geeky about theater.)
We also talked about "kindness" and how it is really hard to be kind to people that we strongly dislike or aren't kind to us. The nameless, faceless people who make our lives painful. Or those we have names and faces for - and hurt us. Those are hard to be kind to. It's easy to be kind to people who are nice to us and we love, and cherish, and aren't irritated by.
I'm struggling with being kind to the people I would like to smack upside the head or throw off a parapet.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 08:40 am (UTC)The thing that continues to baffle me to this day is why do many people give too much power to them? Are they secretly wishing they could be like that, to just do whatever they want, whatever benefits them, no regard to how it affects others? To be a user, essentially a kind of slave owner?
Certainly, one thing Trump has made very clear to the populace at large is that crime really does pay. Just be clever enough about how you commit those crimes, and you become rich and powerful and the center of adulation. Perhaps one reason why so many people support the big lie is that to admit that it is a lie is to reveal one's inner desires to be like him-- rich, powerful, openly derisive of anyone who displeases you.
*******
Good news about the choir director, although not of course about his possible mental status. ~sigh~
*******
Mother was rec'ing the new Elvis film by Baz Lurham to me today.
IMO, pretty much anything by Baz is at least worth a look, although I'd need to wait for a DVD.
*******
Yes, I'm still mainly interested in attempting to become a novelist - even if I have to do it entirely on my own dime.
Go for it, you clearly have the talent, once you have the time.
BTW, book related... this lovely little store just opened up here in Lancaster in an old house nearby the former Hamilton Watch Factory. I visited it last week, and thus the "lovely" appellation. ~sigh~ It is-- I was way impressed. -- Now if only I still had the time to read books. But anyway...
Maybe send them a few copies of your first novel? They have a generous science fiction section.
https://www.pocketbooksshop.com/
Later! Stay not crazy!
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 08:57 am (UTC)Though, as a historian, I am also constantly moaning on also about how much it left out (because of the moral gatekeeping of the circulating libraries) and that women's lives weren't, actually, as constrained and neat and repressed as novels of the period lead people to believe.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 04:03 pm (UTC)Well... It depends on what you'd be happy with as an author. A few odd symbols you don't care if anyone can actually read? Sure! A few random cries and meaningful grunts like Klingon was before the linguists got to it? Sure! A genuine system an author can use repeatedly and consistently that someone else won't start poking at as a weakness in your fantasy/sci-fi universe, like Tolkien's Middle Earth Languages, Herbert's Freman or Klingon after linguists got to it? Well, just don't expect too much.
As a fellow dyslexic, if you want to use that kind of thing to make a few toss-in phrases, be sure to document everything you make up in you language well. Otherwise you might go back in just a month or so and not be able to tell what you meant to say with it.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 04:51 pm (UTC)Relatively little - or so I've found. The Brontes and Dickens weren't bad in that regard, although I find both to be rather ponderous and preachy at times. Also Dickens was more interested in the poverty of the working man, and not overly concerned with women. The Brontes were romantics. Henry James, tended to get self-indulgent (also a romantic) (although I can't make it through James any more than I can get through Hardy- so can't really comment on that aspect). The more contemporary writers delved into it more. It may have to do with the publishers - and what they were willing to publish. I know in the 20th, there were a lot of early 20th Century writers who had their own printing presses and kind of did it on their own.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 05:00 pm (UTC)On Google Translate - I was able to translate it to "sinhala":
ඔබට තේරෙන්නේ නැත - ඔබට දැන් සම්පූර්ණ ඡේදයක් සංකේත හෝ වෙනත් භාෂාවකට පරිවර්තනය කළ හැක.
https://translate.google.lk/?hl=en&vi=c&sl=en&tl=si&text=You%20don%27t%20understand%20-%20you%20can%20literally%20translate%20an%20entire%20paragraph%20to%20symbols%20or%20another%20language%20now.%0A&op=translate
Which is all you need for 90% of your readership and quick phrases here and there. Only someone writing a linguistic scholarly piece - needs to worry about more than that.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 11:03 pm (UTC)The female Victorian novelists were, not surprisingly, more interested in the injustices meted out to women. George Eliot can be pretty scathing about the denial of an education suited to letting them live as intellectual equals; you could say the crux of Middlemarch is about that, while The Mill on the Floss really puts the boot into inequalities and women suffering because of male arrogance. Mrs Gaskell was also good on the social injustice front. The Brontes were mostly living in Gondal and Angria, and didn't exactly strive for social realism. Thackeray (though not female!) is a very good satirist at his best.
Personally I'd take any of the above, or Trollope, over the self-indulgent Modernists like James, Woolf or Lawrence. I really struggle with them. But I did a specialist option on the Nineteenth Century Novel at undergrad level, and one on Victorian novels as part of my MA.
And, yes, some writers who had an affluent enough background did found their own publishing houses; I suspect you're thinking of the Hogarth Press? That didn't really make them SJWs, though - I particularly dislike Woolf's whininess about how tough life is because women's colleges don't have food as good as the mens'. Her idea of a room of one's own and £500 a year to live on needs to be seen in the context of labouring men of the period who were luck to earn £75 a year to cater for their entire families!
Sorry. [/rant]