Hooray for bitchcakes!

Just flung a story into the aether unsupported, in the hopes that it finds a soft landing at Circlet. Old antho that needed a couple more short stories to round it off– my editor from the first round sent me the info, and I managed somehow to write a decent story to meet the criteria in about… four days? Five? Less than a week to write, edit, revise, polish, send.

I think I’m insane.

My brain is vaguely squishy now, however, and so I feel very strongly that it’s bedtime for bitchcakes.

Crossed fingers and toes for acceptance to the antho, and that will be three publication credits to my name, which makes bitchcakes very happy indeed.

Even if the editor doesn’t take it, it’s a damn good story and I know it. So there.

 

Wordses.

Putting together a list of wordses to possibly be used in building Strangeandsavage.com.

Fringe
Underground
Outskirts (Out Skirts! I love a pun.)
Alternative
Unconventional
Weird
Queer (so many definitions…)
Aberrant
Deviant
Freak

I learned a new word, as well, in digging for wordses: heterodox. Loff. Loff! Say it out loud. Heh-ter-oh-docks. Hedderohdokz. Mmm. Tasty word with mmmmmeaning.

Brain is apparently set to random, although given RuPaul’s Drag Race is on in the background, this is not startling. Ah, Ru. You are such a distraction.

 

Spreading like a plague.

So we registered strangeandsavage.com in my name tonight.

The project is… the secondary, parallel track to my impulses to make things. Stories come first, but images are a close second.

Watch this space.

 

Brain dead.

Story open. Words there; no words in head. Story stares at me. I stare at story. Story says, “wriiiiiite meeeeeeee…”!

Want write! Brain dead.

Sad.

Maybe brain work later? Brain work after moved. Moving eating brain-words, filling brain with ‘deposits’ and ‘large truck’ and ‘hodeargod I have too much shit, where did it all COME from?’ and ‘I do not want to lift that sofa’ and ‘we should get more bookshelves’ and ‘holy shit this is expensive’.

Brain work after moved.

 

Scattering thoughts like birdseed.

TONIGHT IS A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING AND SPINNING IN CIRCLES AROUND AND AROUND OUTSIDE ON THE FROSTED GRASS

but the silence outside is immense. Cold cold cold with moon and stars up there hazy and overcast like someone dragged ripped gauze between me and the sky and there aren’t enough stars to stare at. They’ve all drifted down days ago, and when the sun came out next morning they fused together on top of the frozen ground. They’re a slick, shining sheet now, here and there where the shade kept it all safe and sound from the sun that tried like hell to make us think the cold would go away. If I stare at the ice and let my eyes unfocus just a bit, it looks like water, or the stretching slide of glacier or pack-ice, of which there is increasingly too little, we are told.

Winter always did spark something wild in me, but I’m older and wisdom has made me afraid, so I don’t go out there anymore, and I no longer let the wildness jerk me forward like a fishhook in my heart. I can ignore the tug, though sometimes, on nights like this one especially, it still hurts like I imagine does the phantom pain of a missing limb. But I remember the cool span of moonlight slicing down through a night so blackly crystalline that it brought tears to the eyes, physical pain and sharpness. I remember the pale light of it washing the snow and making something close to daylight out of midnight, or two a.m. I remember the crunch of snow under my feet, snow that nobody else had walked on, and I remember what it felt like, the huge, expansive awe-fulness of imagining that no-one else had or would see something so beautiful as unsullied snow under a moon bright enough to sear the vision.

Does snow still smell like the taste of tin? Does the scent of it still become almost a taste at the tip of the tongue the moment the flakes start to fall?

 

Shortpost, for my brain is goo.

I confess.

I’m addicted to Crack(ed).

It’s terribly fascinating, the stuff you find there. Today, I discovered the concept of unwrapping parties: Victorian well-to-do purchased mummies from the roaring traded in Egyptian relics, and used the unwrapping of the dead as a party theme.

“‘Lord Londesborough at Home: A Mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past Two”, read an invitational card. It was apparently quite the social phenomenon.

Fascinating. Morbid. God, how Victorian.

Of course, now there’s a story blossoming silently in the dark. Seeded, rooted, growing. Even the style of it, immediately apparent. Two hundred twenty-eight words begun, more to follow.

Of course, I make the decision to aim for the novel and not the stories, and a thousand-thousand blades of fictional grass sprout up in my head.

Of course, I’ll write them.

Of course, I’m mad.

Of course. Good night. :)

 

A break in the levee, one hopes.

By God, I managed to write nearly three thousand words yesterday, and the story is still going strong. That’s rare, that is, and needs to be habit instead.

I haven’t written anything in forever, and apparently I am making up for it in one fell stumble. I wrote 2597 words on a piece tentatively entitled Howl, which is a bizarre steampunky sort of thing that I first dreamt and then couldn’t quit thinking about until I wrote it down. I thought it wanted to be a short story but it’s still going and it’s only just started.

I also scribbled 219 words on a horrifying little piece of Poe-esquetry while I was at work last night, beginning in the middle of the story and going somewhere dreadful.

Oh, goody. :D

 

For a given definition of whimsical…

I have a bad habit of commenting on poor Jeff VanderMeer’s blog entries. (It won me a stack of fantastic books, once, which startled me more than a little.) The following, tangentially related to my last post, resulted from that habit. I’ve cross-posted it here from his blogpost, just because it’s the sort of crap I want to be able to look back on in a few years, turn slightly green and mutter ‘oh dear God what was I thinking’ over.

(Furthermore, as of moment of going to press, it’s moderated, and god knows if it’ll actually end up publicly posted. xD)

It was written on a whim, which makes it, by definition, whimsical. Er.

My hobby has been called by many grim.
The av’rage man, who avoids the macabre,
Shies away, afraid it will somehow rob
Him of humanity: it’s not for him.

I, though: I find those men far too prim.
In monuments to those who live no more,
I find naught ghastly; rather, I find sure
Beauty in the elder stones and the dim

Remembrance, though crumbling stone and rotten
Edifice, image of those forgotten.

…you know, they may be right in calling me a bit on the morbid side.