Author: Frances K R

Arriving in a screech of dust.

Good god, that was a long break.

Spring has come, and then viciously run off again, and now come back grinning like a dog that wants you to understand they are really not a bad dog, they just saw this awesome squirrel and kinda had to leave you standing there with a snapped leash in your hand, yelling about how there’d been sun and things were melting and what the hell is this thirty-five degree drop from one day to the next!

(I think that’s a sixty-three degree drop, for people who use Farenheit.)

I’ve managed to do some serious cleaning out stuff that’s slowly accumulated and that I’m just not going to use anymore or that anyone’s not going to use anymore, so that’s nice. There’s a charity that schedules pick-ups of donations of clothes and household items, so having a deadline to work towards helped. All told, I’ve gotten five garbage bags[1] and a box of stuff out of the house, so I feel way better.

I’ve also managed to sort a lot of my knitting. I got rid of a couple of old finished pieces, and frogged a couple more. I put all my in-progress projects in one place, and all my yarn that I’ve decided on a specific use for in another (neatly bagged together with the pattern in question). It makes it feel a lot more manageable (and has drastically reduced my interest in buying more yarn for the foreseeable, so that’s nice).

It’s not exactly interesting progress, but I suppose it’s progress. And it’s nice to occasionally sit back and think about how much more air there is in the house, now that there’s more space for it.
—
[1] Garbage bags are what they ask you put old clothes in.

Deadlines and recalculations

A story I recently submitted got a lot further than I’d expected it to before coming back with a personal rejection. I’d submitted it very close to the deadline, and I told myself that when[1] it got rejected, I’d revise it one more time before sending it out again.

Now, though, I’m kind of unsure. It’s apparently a sounder story than I thought it was, and I’m wondering if more revisions are just procrastinating. (I’m not saying it’s perfect! I’m saying it might be as close to really good as I can get it, if you see the distinction.)

Therefore, on the horns of the dilemma of “do further revise an already good story” or “don’t revise a story which I felt needed more”, I am picking the obvious option. The only sensible option. The option which stands out as clearly as if spotlit from above with “Thus Spake Zarathustra” playing in the background.

To wit, “find an umbrella and go out for some form of fluffy beverage which incorporates both coffee and whipped cream.”

The rest can get sorted in a bit (possibly while keeping this in mind); right now it’s likely the warmest part of the day, and I always feel a bit odd if I don’t get outside at least once.
—
[1] This is how I plan for such things.

Cheers.

Well, the bleaching and dyeing went well! My hair is now purple–mostly a blue-purple, some parts reddish-purple, and a few bits of bleached-but-not-dyed hair wisping around in front of my ears. The Vaseline got on them, it’s a resist, it happens. 🙂 I wasn’t sure using the two different dyes would actually make a difference, but it seems to’ve done so.

(In comparison to the other vegetable dyes I have used–Manic Panic and SFX–Punky Colour seems to bleed not at all. It comes out a little with shampoo, of course, and I had to use cleaner on the bathtub when I first rinsed it out. But it only comes out with shampoo, doesn’t stain the bathtub after the first rinse, and the first night I put a towel over my pillow and could not actually find anyplace my hair had stained it in the morning.)

(It also smells like Grape KoolAid, or at least the two purple dyes I used do. I have no idea if this is a nod to the old… tradition? method? …of dyeing hair bright colours by using KoolAid, but I would not be surprised.)

I’m feeling like a bit of an ass for waiting so long to do this again, to tell the truth. I keep thinking about an old joke about the woman who gets a nose job, feels great, takes a cruise, goes mountain-climbing, deep-sea diving, has a wonderful time. She runs into her plastic surgeon at a party or something several months later, he asks her how she’s doing, and she bursts into tears.

“What’s wrong?” he says, confused. “I thought you’d had a wonderful time since I saw you?”

“Oh yes, doctor,” she says. “But I could have done it all with my old nose, and I feel so stupid for waiting.”

(Let us not unpack why this is expected to be funny, I am in a good mood right now. But the waiting. The maybe-it-won’t-be-right, the bloody inertia. I get that.)

In other news, my work contract is done, and spring is here. I am contemplating shovelling some of the snow off the lawn–the pile is currently only four feet high or so, but it’ll melt down to the grass faster if I take off a little. And Elise has posted a tease of names for some of her earrings, so I expect to be able to see some lovely shinies within the week.

Very few colours, I think, are unnatural.

I need to dye my hair this weekend, or possibly Monday evening. Because I’m using vegetable dyes (as opposed to dyes-in-a-box-that-come-with-developer), and because my hair is fairly dark, this is a two-step process. First I’ll need to bleach, then I’ll need to dye.

The dyeing is not the stressful part; I put it in and comb it through, and then I can leave it in for… well, there’s probably an upper limit, but IME six hours does not even come close to hitting it. Washing it out  takes mild effort to minimize the skin staining, but I had that down pretty well. I’m fairly sure I can still do it.

The bleaching… I haven’t bleached in ages. That bit I’m actually a bit uneasy about.

(I have asked the light of my life to promise that, if I burn all my hair off and he is moved to laugh at me, he will at least hug me while doing so. He agreed to this, and suggested he might call me Ms. Luthor and ask about my plans to destroy Superman. I told him I would rather not have DC references, and he could call me Charlene Xavier.)

Because it’s been so long, I am kind of tempted by the idea of only partially going blue-purple, but the two-stage nature of the process means I would need to first bleach in a streak and then dye in the same streak, and that seems rather more difficult that just treating all my hair at once. Maybe I will feel more optimistic about it tomorrow; will see.

Unwell

I have a few words for people who come in to work when they are snorking and wheezing and letting out those ragged velvety coughs that just make sure you know that their lungs are laced with muck.

I am feeling polite, so I am not reproducing those words here.

I am also (for reasons which I feel are not completely unrelated to being exposed to the current office plague) at home feeling drained and exhausted and needing to give serious consideration to whether I am up to looking at a computer screen instead of napping on the couch.

(I was going to go with sleeping on the couch, but Angus abandoned me. Without him, the couch is just this padded expanse of old fabric instead of a warm and comforting dispenser of purrs, which is much less appealing.)

(…I’m still using it, mind. I’m just not dozing on it.)

It’s being an unproductive day. I am mostly making my peace with this, and trying to recover.

Just because it’s a love story, doesn’t mean you can’t have a decapitation or two.

Apparently “watch all the Freddy Krueger” is this week’s recipe for decompression. The first few were watched after work, and today has been a marathon of terrible puns, body humour, body horror, and an origin story which cheerfully has more and more gingerbread added to it every other movie or so. (Child murderer! Who was the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs”[1]! Buried in ground that was deconsecrated by a dreaming dog peeing on it! And who was chosen by dream demons as the most evil person ever and given his powers! And who’s actually something greater and older than all these things–)

(Oh, Freddy.)

(Also, I’d apparently somehow completely missed seeing the sixth movie until earlier tonight. No idea how.)

And yet, I get why he appeals. I think, if I looked at the movies now, if I saw them in a vaccuum, I might not see enough to prompt the level of weird creeped-out fondness for the character that I currently have. But I’m not in a vaccuum, and that’s Freddy Krueger. When I was a kid waiting for the schoolbus, I picked up what must have been (I have determined through looking it up since) Freddy Krueger’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was a black-and-white comic, and I mostly just remember someone choosing the path that led away from flowers and fluffy bunnies and towards gross icky stuff, and that it ended with this page.

I would had to have been, I think, no older than eleven. That comic was not something I could afford, and it was not something I would have thought of actually owning anyway, I think.

But it was unspeakably neat. I mean, monsters and bad dreams! And the bad guy was telling jokes! And the art was much cooler than Archie comics and a lot more polished than the horribly cheesy B&W science-horror comics I had seen to that date. So I read it in dribs and spurts, sneaking it off the shelf at the corner store and going through a few pages and then putting it back on the rack when the school bus got there.

And that was how I met Freddy Krueger. I didn’t see any of the movies until years later, and the first one I saw was actually Dream Warriors, which I think was not the best of the bunch. But I knew who he was, because everyone knows who he was. Oh, not in a super-important way; I don’t think I ever even heard him mentioned as a topic of discussion for years. But he’s part of the background radiation of cultural consciousness.

It’s been interesting, deliberately concentrating on the source material instead of simply settling for what I already know.
—
[1] Oh don’t get me started. But anyway.

RightWellThen.

Apparently this “up at six, out of the house by seven, back around seven” thing is putting a bit of a crimp in my usual writing schedule. I am not very deeply surprised.

The work is work I am good at, and all the people there are quite pleasant. Also I’ve decided to see how long it takes me to knit a hat when I’m only knitting in transit to work or over lunch. It’s going pretty well.

The cats are yarbling at each other; there are apparently highly sensitive negotiations in progress, concerning such topics as who gets to lick whose head and which hollow in the cat-tree is Best Hollow. (Based on the available evidence, I would say Best Hollow is the one that already has a cat in it. But I may be missing some subtle nuances, here.)

Oh, hey, a reminder – submissions to Women Destroying Fantasy open up tomorrow, and Cat Rambo‘s posted some notes on what she’s looking for as editor. Very much looking forward to that issue coming out.

Staggering determinedly on

Yesterday I ran Zombies, Run! for the fourth day in a row. I’ve decided I’m aiming for the “Every day ending in ‘y'” achievement. The game counts days as running from midnight to midnight, which is fairly straightforward.

Unfortunately, it’s a British game, and I am in North America. So the time difference means that because I ran later in the day on Wednesday, and then ran again yesterday, it counted my runs for this week as happening “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday” rather than “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday”.

(There’s not much I can do about this but shrug. Oh well.)

I am hoping to at least keep going today and through the weekend, at which point I will be able to honestly say to myself that I ran every day for a week, even if I didn’t get the achievement. After that, I will see what happens, and probably get the hospital built for Abel Township. The base-building was revised in Season 2, and the collect-resources/spend-resources/upgrade aspect of it is very motivational when it comes to interval training. (Interval training consists of zombie chases, and if you don’t run fast enough, then you loose some of the items you’ve collected as you drop or throw them behind you to distract the zoms. This means you don’t have those resources to actually upgrade the amenities in Abel.)

Hoping to get the hospital built by the end of the weekend. It would have been done slightly sooner, except I sort of misclicked on the base, and accidentally expanded it in the wrong direction. Hospitals require a 3×3 space, and I managed to clear a 2×4 one instead.

Not very interesting, I know, but it’s been a long week and this is about the only area in which I feel that my efforts to be productive have produced a measurable result.

Counting centiBrads.

I actually got my tenth rejection on Monday, but it’s been a very long week. (Well, tenth since I’ve started tracking.) Still, this means I’ve actually completed my second centiBrad. This is a measure I like to track, since Bradbury apparently got hundreds of rejections before he got his first acceptance.

(Please note that I said apparently: while he’s spoken of writing a thousand dreadful stories and getting them rejected, I’m not sure if that’s literal. After a discussion in which someone told me that they’d rather believe “thousands of fans” who attributed a Le Guin quote to Tolkein than attribute it correctly[1], I am particularly hoping to avoid presenting vague anecdote as solid fact.)

Anyway! Therefore, five rejections is a hundredth of what Bradbury had (probably at least) gotten; five rejections is a centiBrad.

It’s not fun, or anything. But rejections happen (acceptance theoretically might happen, but rejections definitely happen), so since they’re there, it’s a metric to track them with. That’s something.
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[1] Most people, I’ve found, will be cheerily polite when you mention that a quote’s been misattributed. And then one person will fire back with “Well have you considered that the author you mentioned might have used plagiarism? I’ve never heard of them.” Oy.

The jaws that bite.

I am having one of those days, and today that day is one of those which involves trying to come up with a great long list of creatures (probably mythological or folkloric) which are particularly associated with biting or human-eating (most often corpses, but I am willing to be flexible).

Off the top of my head:

  • Ghouls. I don’t feel this one needs elaboration, except to point out that I do not mean D&D ghouls.
  • Redcaps, if the terrible bite schtick actually predates White Wolf’s Changeling: The Dreaming. I can’t actually find a cite for that (yet), and simply having huge teeth doesn’t count.
  • Aswangs. Creatures from Filipino folklore that eat human meat–corpses, but also the living, or unborn fetuses.
    (Fetusii? >googles< No, fetuses. Right, then–carry on.)
  • Zombies, the movie version. (The light of my life actually had to point this one out to me. I have no idea why.)
  • Werewolves, not because the bite is (sometimes) infectious, but strictly for the killing and eating of humans when it shows up. Also a hat-tip to CS Lewis and the classic line “Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy’s body and bury it with me.”
  • Related to that, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Not one I would have initially thought of, but the swallowing of bodies whole and in such rapid succession is impressive, even if they were alive. I may be being swayed by the fact that in some versions of the story, LRRH is actually called “Red Cap”.
  • Wendigos. Which I also do not feel needs elaboration.

Vampires specifically do not count, because of all the surviving/not noticing of the bite (at least the first time) and the distinction between drinking and eating.

Anything else coming to mind?