Palimpsest!
July 22, again
Weird day. Good, bad, and all-mixed-up. Hmm. So let's start with yesterday.
After the morning I talked about in my last entry, I went to Berkeley and read for a while, had lunch, walked around -- just thinking, more or less. Tried to write and hopelessly failed -- just couldn't think in terms of narrative, and poetry was a no-go, too. So I came home and typed in a few thousand words on Rangergirl, handwritten stuff, but I wasn't even capable of revising much. I very rarely have days where I Can't Write, but yesterday was pretty close. In the evening I lolled about and watched television. Heather and I went grocery shopping around 11, and bought fairly modestly (got what may be some decent wine for half price). It's nice shopping so late -- the store isn't insanely crowded. It's only as crowded as, say, a Friday afternoon at a similarly-sized grocery store in the town in North Carolina where I grew up would be. Funny how we adjust to things... I started reading The Truth yesterday, which I was totally loving. Good stuff.
So this morning I got up and dragged myself into work and cranked all day. (The August issue goes to press this week.) I'd wanted to go with Heather and Susan to China Miéville's reading in San Francisco tonight, but it didn't work out -- I had to work late and didn't get home until almost 6:00, and I was starving. I would've had to take BART and a bus to get there, about an hour of travel time, and it was just a terribly annoying prospect. I'll meet China at Wiscon next year, if I really want to. I can wait.
I made some tater tots for dinner. Last night I bowed to thrift and bought the store-brand tater tots, rather than the divine Ore Ida tots, because they were drastically cheaper (buy one get one free, in fact). I figured, hey, they're shredded cylindrical potatoes, how much difference can there be? But, alas, this is clearly an inferior tot. They wept grease. Sigh.
I went to Au Coquelet (where I was captivated by a beautiful woman I've seen there a couple of times before; she's funky-cute-beautiful, wears nice glasses, my descriptive powers are failing me. If only I knew how to flirt. Or even talk to strangers. Sigh) and wrote a review of Breed; I think it's a decent review, more informal in tone than my reviews for A Certain Magazine usually are, but maybe that's okay.
As I was getting up to leave, I realized that, somewhere between BART and the coffee shop, I'd lost my copy of The Truth. In between I'd gone to the Post Office and to the cash machine, so there were several blocks along which I might've set it down and forgotten to pick it up again (done in by my habit of reading while walking! Curses!). It sucks. I only had, like, 80 pages left to read. I'm sure we have a copy at work, I can finish it on my lunch break sometime, but man, that blows. I was using my train ticket as a bookmark, too, so I'm out, like, $4.60 all together. Bummer. I walked down to the only bookstore open at that hour in the area, at the end of Shattuck, but they didn't have a copy (their SF section sucks). On the upside, they had a copy of Why Things Burn by Daphne Gottlieb, which was one of the books I'd been fruitlessly looking for on my buying-spree on Saturday. It's really damn good. So I guess it's an ill wind that blows no and so on.
I've been reading the porn-store clerk journal this evening. Very interesting, especially since Heather reviews porn, which means I've been exposed to lots of it in the past most-of-a-year, and while I can't relate to the porn-retail stuff especially, I can relate to the moral conundrums regarding the content of such films. (Daphne Gottlieb has an incredibly disturbing story/poem in Why Things Burn about a barely-eighteen porn site... chilling. Odd that the subject is coming up so much tonight...) Oh, and for the record, Rocco doesn't always end his Animal Trainer videos by having anal sex with a woman while sticking her head in a toilet and flushing. Only a couple of them end that way. Though the others are hardly nicer...
Anyway. Nice thing: The Tangent review of "The Witch's Bicycle" is up, and it's extremely positive! (Thanks to Mike and Toby for sending me the link, pretty much simultaneously!) Read it here. And it continues the lovely Tangent tradition of saying stuff about my work that I'd never think of saying myself -- from calling me "archetypally Fortean" to saying my work is "pseudo-Ballardian" to invoking images from Bergman films, and, most recently, noting that my story "features a contemporary setting overlaid like a palimpsest with fairy tale memes."
I had to look up "palimpsest." I'm not ashamed to admit it. When a reviewer is smarter than me, it means even more when they like my work. I knew what "memes" were, though. Those guys with the white facepaint and invisible baguettes.
In all seriousness, I'm delighted with the review.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 119,850
Words written since last entry: 550! Woo!
Send me some memes. Preferably non-infectious.
Tim Pratt Read about my current publications.
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