Day in the Life of an Idiot

 The deep freeze has returned to Minnesota. When I got up this morning to take Mason to a robotics club build at Washington, it was - 11 F/ - 23.89 C (I am forever fascinated that Alexa always wants to tell me two decimal points out when she calculates Celsius for me. Do you folks who use Celsius really go that deep?)

Yesterday, it was also cold. Even so, I ventured out of the house to have lunch with my friend Rosanne. We met up at a place over in Minneapolis called Butter Bakery Café.  I found it very easily, despite not having GPS. I mention this because on Wednesday night when I gave a ride home to one of Mason's debate colleagues, we used her iPhone's GPS app to direct me to her house.  It was pretty darn slick and made me think that, if cell phone packages weren't so expensive, it would be almost worth it to have a built in direction-sense. I don't get lost very often, but when I do, I tend to get REALLY lost. I once was nearly a half hour late to work because I forgot how to get out to Mounds View Library.

Butter Bakery Café has a nice parking lot behind their building, too, so that made me very happy. I arrived few minutes before Roseanne so I had a chance to check out their menu.  I have to say, the food was very much in the only OK category. As I told Rosanne, I love breakfast out and I was excited to see they had all day breakfast.  But, their "sunny side up" involved a lot more gooey gross bits than I usually like from my eggs, alas. I got the potatoes and wheat toast as sides, and the potatoes were serviceable, but nothing to write home about.  So, that was a bit of a disappointment, but I wasn't there for the food. I was there for the company and Rosanne is always good company.

She and her partner are retiring. For Rosanne this means graduating writing coach clients, which sounds like it's been a long disentanglement, which makes sense to me. We talked a lot about how it's kind of a shame that writing doesn't work like a regular job, because it would have been nice for her to have an apprentice to pass these clients on to.  

I also agreed to write a blog post for her about my experience with NaNoWriMo, because it's always been Rosanne's contention that it's better to form lifelong habits for writing, and that the competitive nature of NaNoWriMo can actually make you feel like quitting.  I fit that mold.  Not everyone does. I know a lot of people who really LOVE NaNoWriMo for lots of different reasons, but when I tried it I discovered very quickly that the goal set for me 2,000 words a day did NOT work.  When I'm writing original fiction I can't work that fast.  A huge part of my process is revision, which actually takes away words at the end of the day more often than not.  So I kept putting in smaller and smaller word counts and NaNoWriMo "helpfully" produced a graph for me showing my declining "commitment" and so I quit.  This is made ironic by the fact that without anyone's prompting, I've successfully had the discipline to write and finish several published novels. To be fair, though, I set my life up to provide some of the support that I think people really love about NaNoWriMo, which is the community it generates. There are classes and group meet-ups where you can hang out with other writers.  I forged my own writers group that met regularly, and I'm certain that without them I would have given up on my writing, too.

So, it could be a good blog. I just have to figure out how to be more articulate and witty. :-)

The only bummer is by agreeing to meet with Rosanne on Friday, I ended up missing my usual Friday gathering with other women writer friends.  I comforted myself by the fact that a number of us Wyrdsmiths (my writers' group) braved the slippery mess  of Thursday evening's snow in order to give naomikritzer feedback she needed on a short story for an anthology she was invited to contribute to. We meet at Nina's and the coffee shop was startlingly DEAD.

This upcoming week I'm going to meet-up with a friend of mine from high school who got in contact with me because she was looking for contract advice about a non-fiction project she was working on.  (This is partly why I ended up getting back in touch with Rosanne after all this time; I figured Rosanne knew about non-fiction contracts.)  

So, even though it's cold as heck, I'm still getting out and about and meeting up with people. But for now?  Now, I think it's time for a nap under some comforters.

Ja matta!

Uffdah, as they say around here.  Mason is back at school after three weeks hiatus, and every SINGLE Crossroads parent seemed to have forgotten how to use the parking lot. I'm lucky I'm not still there (or responsible for some car/child accident!)

This weekend, Mason spent part of his time at KidCON, which is naomikritzer's gaming gathering of friends.  Mason came back really wanting to play Munchkin with us.  We have a basic set, and I've now been tasked to pick up a booster packs, if they have them, at MarsCON.  It was, admittedly, a lot of fun and totally got me jonesing for my RPGing days.  And Mason is the kind of person--not unlike myself--who actually ENJOYS hearing the tales of campaigns past, so I got to tell him about Fred Fumble, the Moon-Moon of the elf world, who routinely stumbled into his campaign mates and did THEM damage during a fight.  Fred's other name could have been Friendly Fire Fred.

It makes me wonder.... am I still one phone call away from a game?  If I asked around, could I find a D&D/RPG going down  RIGHT NOW to hook up with???

I used to joke that RPGs were my drug of choice, because if you go down the "Are you an Alcoholic/Drug Addict?" AA/NA pamphlet check list, "Do you have a hidden stash?" etc., my answers were often YES, if bent to include words like "of dice" or similar.  Do you think about gaming when you're not gaming?  OMG YES.  Do you schedule your life/change plans with others so you can game?  OMG YES.  Have you ever skipped work to game?  OMG YES.  The big one was always, "Could you get your drug of choice with one phone call/within the hour?"

Could I?  I used to be able to.  I had at least two friends on speed dial that were GMs who I probably could have talked into gathering something RIGHT NOW.  Actually, I bet I could... I still know gamers and their husbands/partners.

The other thing we did over the weekend was finally watch "The Wolverine."  True confession time: I can't remember every single detail of the Japan Saga.  I'm not even sure I ever read the Claremont & Miller original 4(?) issue miniseries in 1982 or if I caught up with Logan and Yukio later when Buscema penciled.  I have only the vaguest memories of those issues, and they kind of go like this: Yukio = kick ass; Makoto Mariko = tragic love interest (wife?); Silver Samurai = cool and adamantium.  The rest is lost to the annals of time or have been replaced by Bleach trivia.

Even with so little, I still feel like the movie betrayed my SACRED MEMORIES.

I will say, the filming on location, that was beautiful.  I wanted to live in all the houses they were in, particularly Mariko's bolthole in Nagasaki.  I also wanted her to feed me the nabemono she cooked Wolverine when they were there.

But the rest?  How did they make a cool arc so uncool?

I mean, Japan is just cool.  I don't know how you mess up Japan.  They even go to a love hotel and it's not nearly as funny and awkward and 'WTF, Japan?' as it should be.  There is talk of honor, but, I think, ultimately, it's hollow....particularly for the one person it should never be: Wolverine.

Shawn, half way through the film, turned to me and said, "They're making Wolverine nothing more than a brutish thug."  Casual fans of Wolverine might say, "And?" Isn't that his character?  No, it's really not, nor has it ever been.  Shawn is a much, MUCH bigger Wolverine fan than I am, but I can tell you the simple Marvel formula that sums up what Wolverine is about:  Wolverine is a beast struggling to be a man.

Wolverine stories, when they're at their best, tap this core issue.  I feel like (and I may be misremembering since I, frankly, remember almost nothing,) Claremont's Japan Saga and subsequent Japan arcs deal with this in a unique way--the idea of Wolverine as a ronin, as a masterless samurai.  They said those words in "The Wolverine" but they never meant them.  The writers of "The Wolverine" seemed to think this meant ronin = wild, lawless thug.  When, in fact, ronin should equal a lost soul that desperately craves honor and a code to live by.  This is a good analogy for Wolverine's constant struggle to tame his inner demon. Claremont knew that (I think.)  Or, if he didn't, subsequent writers who took on the Japan Wolverine really hammered that into my subconscious.

"The Wolverine" screwed this up a number of ways.  They did that thing modern superhero movies often get wrong, they focus on the super and not the HERO.  At one point Wolverine comes across one of the baddies and LITERALLY thows him over a hotel balcony.  We see that he's survived the fall by landing in a pool, but Yukio says, "How did you know that pool was there." Wolverine says, in full-on badass mode, "I didn't."

But, see, right attitude, WRONG MOVE.  Of all the Marvel heroes, Wolverine is most-likely-to-thoughtlessly-slaughter, but a good writer makes him suffer those moments because Logan/Wolverine doesn't WANT be only a beast.  Similarly, there's a moment when Wolverine sticks his chopsticks upright in the rice bowl and Mariko explains the chopstick taboo to him (which has to do with funerals and being considered bad luck/bad taste), but then he does it again.

I mean, okay, Wolverine is a brute.  This is one of the reasons I never entirely cottoned to him as character in the comic books.  However, I always felt that Mariko/Japan was one of the things that civilized him in a very sympathetic way.  I mean, it's classic, right? The love of a woman tames the wild man.  I'm pretty sure that started with Enkidu and is a total trope, but it's a good one... and it works with Wolverine, IMHO, because sometimes the love is slightly more platonic, like his relationship with Kitty Pryde.  And with Mariko/Japan there was (at least in my head) this lovely combination of love and HONOR.

The movie didn't seem to even try to go there, which is weird, because it was kind of slow in places.  If they were going to skip the character stuff, just SKIP IT, and go right into the ninja pile up, you know?

Ah, well, opportunities lost.  Once again, Hollywood neglected to call me.  I'm not sure what they're thinking when they don't tap me, honestly.

In other news, if you're curious about the other members of my writers' group, Wyrdsmiths, today on our blog Kelly McCullough is the featured interviewee.  Check it out: http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2014/03/kelly-mccullough-writes-fantasy-science.html

If I were in a beauty-type pagent right now, I'd be Ms. Confrontational.

I think my mood took a nose-dive this morning when I got a semi-angry/semi-panicked e-mail from the people who are running a Writers' Festival that I agreed to give a workshop at in March 2011. Apparently, the internet ate some of the messages that this group tried to send me (to my Hotmail account, so, yeah, that's actually very possible...) and, anyway, they were in a tizzy because they have a printing deadline and hadn't received any information from me at all. The concern was very reasonable, but the way that the organizer wrote to me, TOTALLY rubbed me the wrong way. Especially when it looked like they'd only sent me the request for stuff yesterday. And, before it was clear that the ether had eatten some of the earlier requests they'd sent, we had a very strange/strained back and forth which ended with a very weird exchange that still kind of baffles me. I'd explained that I have dial-up and so I'm not on-line very often (this was when I was apologizing, yet a bit snippy because I thought they'd only first tried to get this information from me yesterday), and the organizer's response was, "Don't you live in the city?"

I still don't understand that reaction. I *do* live in the city. In fact, I live in the capitol city. But, what does that have to do with my ability to afford high-speed internet?

Luckily, the whole conversation got shunted to another person involved in the event, and everything got resolved, but the whole thing left me feeling sort of on EDGE.

Then, I went over to check to see if anyone had updated the Wyrdsmiths blog, and discovered a whole bunch of responses from fellow Wyrdsmiths to a re-direct post I'd put up on Saturday about author self-promotion. Of course, I was already irritated, so the thing that struck me was how insular the conversation was. Here we were talking about whether or not author self-promotion worked or not, and it seemed mightly clear to me that not one of us knew a damn thing about self-promotion... since it seemed like we were the only ones who read our own blog. So I posted that observation.

No one has responded.

The more I think about this, the more our blog becomes a really interesting experiment/testament to our ability to self-promote. We set up the Wyrdsmiths blog specifically as a promotional tool for the group as a whole. From the comments I got to my re-direct post, it's pretty clear that the majority of the Wyrdsmiths don't think web/self-promotion works. But is that circular logic? Or a self-fufilling prophecy? Or... are they right?

Would the blog be more popular if we all thought that web promotion worked? Would we spend more time/effort making the blog more effective/interesting if more of us believed in self-promotion? Or is it simply true that an author comes with a certain amount of "it" factor, and there's really nothing you can do to change that?

Interestingly, if you look at the number of people "following" Wyrdsmiths vs. the number of people "following" Tate (via subscriptions or RSS feeds or whatever it is that blogspot tracks,) Tate has almost double the number of followers. And Tate almost NEVER posts on her blog.

Which would seem to imply the latter.

Yet, I can't shake the feeling that by expecting nothing, we get nothing. Which, I think, just ended up making me more cranky/confrontational. :-)

Also, Wyrdsmiths is supposed to have a presence at the St. Paul Art Crawl this weekend. We have almost completely dropped the ball on this (which also made me cranky and confrontational), but it looks like we will be staffing a table in the lobby of the Cosmopolitan on Sunday, October 10. If you are so inclined, please feel free to stop by. We will have chapbooks for sale, and I'll have some free promotional material out, including magnets!

Whoot.

Grumble.

After a long hiatus from the gym, I went back yesterday. I wasn't feeling it yesterday, but today? Oy.

Because we're expecting to have homework now that Mason is in first grade, I told Mason that on the days he didn't have homework, we could go to the library. He's taken me up on it already. We went on Tuesday and yesterday, although yesterday we decided to try a new library to see if they might have a better selection of Goosebumps and/or Captain Underpants. We went to the Highland Park branch. A nice library, actually, although I wish I'd had a better sense of the parking lot before we got into it. It looks, as you approach it from the street, like a large underground lot. When you get in, you discover it's a barely manuverable lot with less than a dozen spaces and NO PLACE TO TURN AROUND. By sheer luck, however, we squeezed our Ford into a spot between a column and an SUV (not unlike Scylla and Charybdis.) The library is part of an activity center built into the side of a hill overlooking a soccer field and park. It's very pretty. The library seems larger at first glance than our little Mirriam Park branch, but after perusing the shelives I decided not so much. For instance, they did not have nearly as many HIKARU NO GO titles, though I did find volume 16 in the library-wide catalogue and I put it on hold. However, I've since discovered that I've also not read volume 15. (I had to go to Shonen Jump's homepage to get a decent list of the graphic novels, wikipedia didn't help. Although I did discover that there's a TV show/Anime as well..? Who knew.)

I've got about an hour before I have to head off to Mason's school to start volunteering. His new teacher asked if I'd be willing to stuff Thursday folders, which I instantly accepted. It's a mindless task, but one at which I used to excell when I was a secretary for all those many years. Plus, it's an extremely easy way to help out and feel involved. I don't have to intrude into class time, but I can still sort of observe surrepticiously and get a early heads up on the stuff that's being sent home. The only weird thing about this year is that she's asked me to come in at 1:45 in the afternoon, which is really right in the middle of my day. I don't pick up Mason until 3:30, and it has rarely taken me more than 20 mintues when I used to do two classes worth (about 50 students) for the pre-K teacher. I'm thinking I may try to scoot off to the gym after I'm done stuffing... I might even bring along a towel and a change of shirts so I can shower there (I live so close that I usually just drive home sweaty so I can bathe in the comfort of my own home and not have to deal with a public shower.) We'll see how it work out. I may have to pack my computer and some change so I can go to the coffee shop.

Speaking of writing, I had an awesome writing day yesterday. I got a ton revised and actually made some decent forward progress. Today, not so much. I had a breakfast out with my friend and fellow writer Dave Hoffman-Dachelet and, well, I got derailed by good food and better company. Worse, tonight is going to be super busy. First, I have to scoot up the street with Mason to get his new glasses adjusted. The nose piece is a bit wonky, and it doesn't sit right on his face. Then, we'll pick up mama and head off to the house in the Hamline neighborhood that is the pick-up point for our CSA farm share box. Dinner and then off to Wyrdsmiths tonight, though it looks like we'll be down two members - Doug and Kelly. Which reminds me that I need to figure out where I left my intrepid heroine so I can print out a hand out for tonight.

Lots to do.

I suppose I should try to sneak in a bit of REAL work before all then, eh?