Heading into Radio Silence due to con prep over here. Come see us next week, August 23-26, at Fan Expo, booth P66!
A fad?
Lately I’ve been reading the phrase “the Celtic fad of the 90s” (not the sports team, the sudden rise in interest in ancient Celtic culture and subsequent mythologizing and creation of neo-Celtic paganism) and it strikes me every time as slightly… I dunno. Offensive. Because I’d really hate to think that my own personal spirituality is based on a fad. Sort of like formulating a pagan spirituality that follows the dictates and practices of the Spice Girls.
Not that, I guess, there would be anything wrong with that, if that was your thing. Girl power!
Priorities
Don’t get me wrong, I love being a writer. That moment when it all comes together and you impress even yourself; finding the perfect turn of phrase; those points when your characters simply won’t do what you want, because that’s not who they are and you have to follow their lead instead.
And being an author has its moments as well. Talking to fans is always a blast. Making new fans, hearing how hooked they became on this or that series, is great.
But sometimes I miss being an artist (which is not to say that writing is not an art). I miss drawing things. I miss playing around in Photoshop. But as a full-time Day Job/dad/author/etc, time is at a premium. And until they perfect the sleep-suppressor, I need my six-to-eight hours. So you prioritize. I could spend an hour drawing, or I could get another 500-1000 words done.
Because sometimes, just sometimes, it’s crazy annoying, being a writer. Because my brain is full of ideas, and I will never have the time to tell them all. I will never be able to write everything I want to write. At present, I’m lucky if I can get one book out a year. Even if I quit the Day Job and wrote full time, I can’t imagine that becoming any more than four a year. Four books a year would be incredibly prolific… and still not enough to write it all down.
So you prioritize, right? Get what you can done, worry about what’s next at the end of this project, don’t get distracted by the New Shiny. But it’s soooo shiny…. But still. Priorities.
Sometimes I can be a little slow…
I’ve been listening to Weird Al’s I Want A New Duck for maybe oh let’s see… I bought Dare To Be Stupid in 1988 on a school trip to Manhattan. That tape and The Beach Boys’ Summer Fun Greatest Hits. (As an aside, I’d see them perform with Roy Orbison later that summer. My high school girlfriend bought me the tickets. I bought her tickets to see George Michael’s Faith tour at the Big O. SHUT UP he put on a helluva show. (As an aside to that aside, my beautiful and wonderful wife was at that same concert. It was FATE! Of course, so were like, 40000 other screaming fans.))
Where was I? Oh yeah. So I Want A New Duck pops up in the ol’ iPod and he sings “…knows how to get down.”
AND I FINALLY GOT THE JOKE.
Oy.
State of the Geek
The recent stink about sexual harassment at Readercon (and experiences of friends and colleagues at other conventions) leaves me… utterly tired. Borderline depressed, really. I mean, I know, there are people out there with social ineptitude so epic they require a guidebook to buy a pack of gum. Sometimes, that’s not their fault – they have actual, real, medical reasons for their social ineptitude. Sociophobes. Asperger’s. Autistics.
And there are some people who’ve had their social ineptitude thrust upon them. For one reason or another they were ostracized, made fun of, bullied, or overly sheltered, and that upbringing denied them the opportunity to expand their social skills.
But neither of those is an excuse for unwarranted, unappreciated attention. It angers me when I hear about it. It saddens me when I hear about it. It makes me not want to be associated with geeks and geek culture.
And the article about Fake Geek Girls (and John Scalzi’s scathing and entirely warranted reply) makes me wonder about the type of people who think that way, and how many of them are out there.
I have two daughters. They are geeks, or at least, geek padawans. I don’t want them to be geeks if this is the culture they’re going to be surrounded by. I have many, many geek friends who just happen to be women. I don’t want them to be geeks if it means they’ll be putting themselves at risk of sexual assault because they happen to be wearing a Star Trek Original Series uniform.
The more and more I hear about things like this, the less I want to be a geek. I used to be proud to proclaim my geekitude. Now I feel… like I did as a kid, when we had to hide our geekitude. Ashamed, I guess. Like I have to hide the fact that I’m a geek so that I’m not associated with these victimizing mouth-breathers.
And that’s wrong, I think. This is supposed to be the Golden Age of Geek! The geek have inherited the earth! But all that’s really happened is geeks have been made mainstream, and exposed to the light of day.
Real Life
So some real life unpleasantness (nothing too serious, or at least, nothing we won’t recover from and have a good laugh about in a couple of years) got in the way of the creativity, and the word count suffered a little. BUT! Sunset Val is still on track, charging her giant mech into a raging battlefield. OOPS SPOILERS
It’s the little things
It’s gratifying, as a writer, coming home from a long busy day at the Day Job, to be greeted by my beautiful, loving wife (and primary reader of the WIP, Sunset Val 4) and have her grab me by the lapels and shake me and say “YOU HAVE TO SEND ME THE NEXT CHAPTER!!!”
Password burnout
Are you like me, kids? Do you have so many passwords you don’t know what to do with them, or even how to remember them all? Despite constant messages telling us our passwords need to be secure and include letters, numbers, and symbols, the number one password out there is still “password”. Because people don’t have enough brain space to keep a separate, unique password for every goddam website they go to, that’s why!
New Blog
Well, the new blog is up and running. There will be stuff about writing, publishing, conventions and parenthood. Occasional venting about stupidities. Hopefully not so much of that.
Rob St.Martin 