Disjoint Account

March 5

Well, I had a good run of updating every day. It had to end sometime.

I just didn't have the energy to write here last night. I could have said something, but it would have been a bleak and boring little paragraph, so I just gave it a miss.

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New poem! "The God of the Crossroads" is up at SH.

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I didn't go outside at all yesterday. The total nastiness of the weather was a factor, as was my continuing low energy-level. My energy is a bit closer to normal today, though I actually had to resort to ingesting caffeine to get me going this morning-- normally my zippy brain chemistry takes care of that for me (I drink coffee because I like the taste, and I drink caffeinated coffee because... I dunno why. Saves me a second at the counter when I don't ask for decaf, I guess. That's really the only reason I can think of).

Yesterday was pretty dreadful, for the most part. I finished Land of Laughs, which is a good book, but depressing. Even if I'd been in a happy-funtime state of mind, it would have depressed me. There are ways in which Zod Wallop is a Not Happy book, but it looks like flowers and rainbows compared to Land of Laughs.

Speaking of Zod Wallop, I read William Spencer's story collection The Return of Count Electric yesterday, too. I didn't like it very much. He's a good enough writer that I read all the stories, and I did rather like "Graven Images," but for the most part they left me unmoved. In the introduction he talks about short stories, and it's fairly obvious that he mostly means li-fi rather than speculative stuff. He complains that most stories don't seem to go anywhere, and that they aren't fun-- he wanted his stories to be different.

Some of them were kind of fun. Most of them didn't really go anywhere. Most of the stories were totally un-speculative, too, which isn't inherently bad, but it wasn't what I expected from the author of Zod Wallop and Résumé With Monsters, so I was a bit annoyed.

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A rejection from Talebones for the story they'd been holding. Sigh. Patrick said they had to make some "tough decisions," and that he didn't think I'd have any trouble selling this one elsewhere. Tra la. Maybe I'll win him over completely next time.

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Mmm. Caramel-coconut girl scout cookies. Mmm.

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Scott and Lynne think they saw Mo Rocca of The Daily Show (complete with bow tie) at the Saturn Café, so perhaps our fair beach town will be featured on Comedy Central at some point. We do wonder what the story could be-- sharks vs. surfers?

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I tried to watch television last night... and I find that my tolerance for television is really dwindling. There was a time when I enjoyed watching an hour or so a day, and a few hours on Sundays (which used to be the big Social Television Night in college)... now I get bored much more quickly. I was watching Futurama and Simpsons and King of the Hill, and I kept wandering off to check my e-mail or read. Maybe that was just my particular mental state yesterday, but I have noticed a general trend toward my own intolerance for television. I watched The Lone Gunmen premiere... and I was pretty sorely disappointed. Clunky, kinda dull, and it seemed much more interested in giving everybody characteristic phrases than it did in developing character or story (Langley's "B-I-N-G-O" and Froehicke's "Buddy"). I also wonder how enormous that text file they tried to download from the DOD must have been, if it took them that long to do so over a DSL line... I always liked the characters on the X-Files, and I'll give the show another couple of tries, but I'm sort of bummed that they couldn't do any better with their first episode.

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Today has been Work! Lots of running around, dealing with little stuff. Continuously busy but relatively unstressful. It's sort of nice to be back at work, actually-- I was beginning to feel like a shut-in, even with my outing on Saturday.

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Guess I'll upload this now. Maybe another entry later, if anything interesting transpires...