Many Words
June 15
4:30 p.m.
Why does The New Yorker have such long articles? I mean, I'm all for depth in reporting, but some of these things are extreme. Makes a nice break from reading SF, though, I have to admit... In addition to reading various back issues of T.N.Y., I'm reading Self Help by Lorrie Moore. It's good, if I read it like I read (some) poetry, for the pleasure of the language, and don't have any expectations regarding plot... also reading Carol Emshwiller stories; this Small Beer collection is better than the other two collections I've read by her (though those are quite good too, Joy In Our Cause and The Start of the End of It All), the stories are more consistently to my liking...
So, less randomly... work yesterday was pretty good, actually, I kept busy. I've gotten a lot of subliminally-nagging stuff taken care of this week, since I had some free time. It's nice, and has reduced my stress level at work, la. Last night Heather and I decided not to go to the gym, in favor of having a date! So we went to this super-hip sushi place in Berkeley, and ate lots, courtesy of our reader who sent us money. It's pretty cool to eat a big expensive sushi dinner when you're otherwise flat-ass-broke; are these the joys of celebrity? Heh.
Heather and I came home after that, and watched as much of Moulin Rouge as I could bear (I have trouble with the singing-and-dancing-and-absurdly-idealized-love kind of movies... I can be flexible on the absurd love, sometimes I find it sweet, but the singing-and-dancing tends to wear on me. Good sets, though. I'll give them that. I want to live inside a large elephant!), then we frolicked, and I took the train to sleepytown...
(Oh, I reread Rage by Stephen King/Richard Bachman a couple of nights ago, and while it's not as good as I remember it being, it still has some pretty amazing moments... I pretty much skipped all the painfully-Freudian-psychology bits, and read the classroom scenes instead, which are disturbing and often powerful...)
Slept in this morning, and frolicked with Heather, and wrote 1600 words on Rangergirl (a really cool scene, which I'd foolishly thought I'd be able to lift entirely from the short-story version, since it's one of the few scenes that's basically the same in both versions... but, of course, the tone of the scene as written for the story was all wrong for the same scene in the novel, and the level of description was woefully inadequate, so I had to rewrite it all, which might have actually taken longer than a plain-old-from-scratch attempt at writing the scene would have... I salvaged some nice lines from the original version, though...), and washed dishes, and then we went to the gym. Some guys were playing (amplified!) rock outside the BART station in Berkeley, and it was pretty cool, though it aggravated Heather's headache... The gym was nicely deserted, though weird people kept infringing their proximity on me. One guy was sitting on one of those big inflated exercise-balls, reading a newspaper and wiggling his hips suggestively, and another guy stretched out on the pads and started making bizarre I'm-having-a-nightmare noises. Then, up in the cardio room, I had to endure two giggling barely-teens each wearing headphones and talking loudly to one another about inane things... but such are the things we encounter when we go out in public, right?
I went to Au Coquelet, had food (Heather loaned me some money for a couple of days so I can, like, eat and have coffee and stuff in these few days before I get paid again), read a bit, and then came home. Soon we're going with the lovely Susan Marie into the City to see a reading by various people... I shall report on that when I return...
Oh, yeah -- I got my contract for "Fable From A Cage" from Realms today, and they're giving me a higher pay rate than they did last time! So even though this story is a third shorter than "Witch's Bicycle", I'm getting paid almost as much! Woo! I sent back the contract this afternoon. Whee, money, whee. I should get it in time to help with the costs of Worldcon, too.
More later...
10:38 p.m.
So, we could've gone to the superhero bar in the city, but instead we lamed out and came home... I wanted to get some work done anyway (and am currently not doing so, because I'm writing this entry instead). But:
The reading was really wonderful. Charles Anders emceed, and various cool people read, among them Daphne Gottlieb, who did some very impressive slam poetry (and came bearing the bad news that June Jordan died today, which is terribly sad; she's a major poet, and did amazing things for feminism and civil rights through her words); Thomas Roche, who does the Noirotica series of anthologies; Cory Doctorow; who read from his forthcoming Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; the astonishing Lynn Breedlove; Annalee Newitz, who writes a column called "Techsploitation"; and Heather Gold, funny lady. Cafe du Nord is a nice venue, too, a very cool little bar, though we got there a little late, so I had to stand for 2 hours, which sucked -- my right ankle still hurts. I enjoyed the show immensely anyway, though. A bunch of people went to a diner afterward, though due to seating logistics I ended up sitting with Heather and Susan and one person we didn't know beforehand, Allison, and being basically unable to talk to any of the other people, but it was still a very interesting conversation, if not as socially-outreaching as I might've wished. Heather wound up being asked to review a book for a very big magazine, though, so we weren't too far removed from the other people. The diner had pretty good food, too.
Now I'm home, where I should work on Rangergirl, or a story, or something. So I will.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 87,930
Words written since last entry: 2,860
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