It’s supposed to be Spring, damnit. I’m supposed to be planting seedlings outside. Now, I’ll have to plant in the kitchen… I’m ready for the weather to change. Now.
Dropped off Steph at the airport this morning, after a weekend in NY with EricJames and his crew :) Now I get the house to myself! Woohoo! Wait… this is going to suck. Damn.
Got to work far too early, hit two miles on the treadmill, which is a personal high water mark for me. Still have approximately one billion pounds to go. Maybe I’ll organize my iTunes tonight….
Poem: “You made crusty bread rolls… ” by Gary Johnson.
You made crusty bread rolls… You made crusty bread rolls filled with chunks of brie And minced garlic and drizzled with olive oil And baked them until the brie was bubbly And we ate them thoughtfully, our legs coiled Together under the table And then salmon with dill And lemon and whole-wheat cous cous Baked with garlic and fresh ginger, and a hill Of green beans and carrots roasted with honey and tofu. it was beautiful, the candles and linens and silver, The winter sun setting on our snowy street, Me with my hand on your leg, you, my lover, In your jeans and green T-shirt and beautiful feet. How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed. We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed.
I wish it were a dream. I’m in California for business. Off to SFO in a little bit. Good thing about being here? It’s 75 degrees in San Diego. Bad thing about being here? I’m not home. I will say one thing about work travel. I get a lot done when there’s nothing to do but work, or talk about work. Had some great wine last night for dinner (which is a plus, but regretfully the plus is going to end up on my fat gut). Silver Oak is the vineyard, one to check out. I’ve already filled my work and social calendars until late April, which is sad. Next big trip is to London, followed by some hootin and hollerin in Tennessee.
My brother got a new job, he’s going to be the Director of Technology. Sounds like a great title! He also found time to find this, which is one of the only “Dad songs” that I can (pretty much) recite word for word. My Dad used to sit in the basement (which was finished with a big TV, a stereo and a bar) and listen to German “Umpah” band music all the time. I wonder if he was just remembering his glory years.
Have you seen Questionaut yet? Very well done flash game, and answering the questions will make you feel smart.
I loathe time travel as a plot line. Freakin’ loathe it. But I found this Wikihistory short short very entertaining.
I have some long train rides coming up, assuming I get my work done (no last minute working on the train!) I hope to be able to knock out some writing. Here’s a good post on writing conversationally.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.
Goodbye, sir. Know that your works live on. AP press release is here.
Life is just one big banana. Science fiction allows us all to peel open the reality and discover the yellow truth inside.
A post from here which I’m including in its entirety so I can think about doing it myself.
The first issue of Colored Chalk’s zine is nearly complete (edited by Caleb “thirstygerbil” Ross), in its final edits now and looking pretty damn sweet.
As luck would have it, the theme chosen for issue 2 was mine, so I get to play editor this time around. In the interest of getting this zine on a regular bi-monthly schedule, we’re getting a head start on calling for submissions for this issue. The window is open from now until the end of April. The zine will be published the last day of May.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
This theme is all about momentum. From its first sentence, your story should be moving and nothing should stop it from reaching its conclusion — not even the truncation of its last few paragraphs.
If you have to explain how your story ends, you’re using too many words. Focus on building the tension, not on how you want to release it. You should engage the audience in ways that they are cautiously certain of what will happen next, and then stop. Let that inertia carry them the rest of the way.
For an example of how one might interpret this theme, enjoy this classic video by RadioHead:
Email your submissions to jase@bucketweb.com. Stories may be in any style or genre, up to 1500 words. Acceptable formats are TXT, RTF, Microsoft Word DOC, PDF, and Open Office ODT.
Please put “Cockroaches Ate the Ending” somewhere in the subject line of your email so that I can spot it amidst the spam messages I get.
Thank you in advance for your submissions!
__________________________
“All the matter in the universe acts like a magnet. You aren’t just drawn to the Earth, the Earth is drawn to you. The effect is proportional to your mass, so it seems like only the planets and stars have gravity, but every animal and vegetable and mineral has this effect.
Link from kottke: The Virginia Quarterly Review did some simple math on the poems that get accepted in their journal, and they came up with interesting results. I never thought of doing text mining on prose, that’s an interesting idea, but I think this comment, lifted from the VQR blog post, says it all:
The only difference
between poetry
and that which is not
poetry
is how you use
the return key.
Which may explain why it is a
dead
art form,
Practiced by many
but read by none.
I do read poetry, but at times I do agree with the poster.
