An Assortment

It was brought to my attention last night via email that I have not been blogging. Looking back, it's true; I really, really haven't. You got your little Not Providence update, and that's it.

It's weird how in a way that's a good thing. It's not that I don't enjoy the Notes from the Underworld—I won't pay website fees to do something I hate. But if I'm not writing here, it's usually because I'm writing something else; my busiest periods of fiction writing are my dead periods here online.

Which is precisely where I've been. An editor came back to me requesting a rewrite (which, I tell myself, is a greater opportunity than a rejection, even if I loved what they wanted gone), and I decided to suck up the instinct to defend MY ARRRRRRRRT! and go ahead and take another crack at it. Since I have two weeks to get said bonesawing completed, I have been mostly busy with that. It turns out, the new version of the project is going extremely well. I wonder if this ever happened to Homer.

In other news, I have been watching The Venture Bros. For those not in the know, it's an Adult Swim cartoon, and one of the finer examples of its kind. Though I'm enjoying it, it is highlighting a thing about my brain and a thing about the world that I am really wondering about. It's often been joked that Literature majors like myself have trouble just reading a book or watching a show; that we always have to "unpack" everything, try to figure out the subtext, watching for the world behind the show. And I am fascinated by how solid the ideas and world-building are behind some of the shows I've been watching recently. Transformers Animated was impressive detailed without clubbing the viewer over the head with it, and The Venture Bros. is actually a very clever deconstruction of the super-science, pulp-hero genre. Unfortunately this also means that I get annoyed at the episodes that feature too much about Dr. Venture's sociopathic selfishness. And it's always possible that I'm wrong about these shows and have finally gone insane.

In other other news, I have been thinking about silence. It's no big secret that I'm a talker, always have been, always will be. But it was something I never really reflected on until recently, and I've found that I am a bigger talker the less comfortable I am. I enjoy good, long conversations, but only when we have something to discuss and are really engaged on the topic; a lot of the time, conversation is me making mouth-noise about whatever strikes me brain first, so I don't have to admit that secretly I am worried the people around me are incredibly bored and would rather be doing anything else, anything in the world that doesn't involve being near me.

For the last two days, I barely talked. I mostly drank vodka (good, real, quality Russian vodka) from a CCCP shot glass, watched Buffy, and talked about what we wanted to eat for dinner. In the company of one of my oldest friends and one of my newest but best. And it was really, very good.

And now, it's time to post this little ramble (or as I prefer, this assortment of miniature blog posts, like a Twitter stream with Tourette's) and get on to my big Labor Day plans: tri-tip steak, mashed potatoes, Mirror Pond ale, and Supernatural. (Which also has very solid world-building, and is impressively deconstructionist. Yeah, I said it.)

So yeah. That's what's happening in my world lately. How about you?