Friday, April 30, 2004
I managed, somehow, to write another 1,001 words on "Faces in Revolving Souls" yesterday. But I'm still extremely dissatisfied with the whole thing. I think this is one of those times when I have such high expectations for a story, when I see it so clearly in my mind, that, in mere prose, I can't even begin to get close to what I think it ought to be. It's like trying to transcribe a movie from memory, and still wind up with something that will affect readers the same way that the film would have. It's that frustrating. I haven't yet read back over everything I wrote yesterday. I'm a little afraid to. I know I'm not going to be happy with that last paragraph. And I need to write new stuff, not spend the day re-writing what I wrote yesterday.
At least tonight is Kid Night. I haven't needed one so badly in months, I think.
It occurred to me last night that there's an obvious alternative to the annoying verbing of "friend" when talking about LiveJournal. Here we have this perfectly good word already present in the English language, perfect for the task — befriend. When you add someone to your list of LiveJournal friends, why not simply say that you are befriending them, which has exactly the same meaning as the entirely atrocious and unnecessary "friending." We do not need to create new words when old words exist that will do the job just as well. Anyway, thanks to everyone who befriended greygirlbeast yesterday. May I click and list myself into an early grave.
Last night, after dinner, Spooky and I made margaritas and worked on the holster for Nar'eth's pulse pistol. Much later in the evening, I read Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" and Fredric Brown's "Arena." I'm definitely on an old-school science fiction kick right now, good stuff from the forties and fifties. Maybe, in another month or so, I'll have worked my way forward to the sixities. Or perhaps I'll go farther backwards.
I've been meaning to mention Sissy's monster-gathering project. He's attempting to round up scans of as many of my monster doodles as possible for a Monster Doodle Gallery. I've sent scads of these things out, but, as you can see, he currently has only a small precentage of them online. If you've been the recipient of a monster doodle and would like to help out, scan the md (72 dpi jpeg is fine) and e-mail it to him at sissy@scaredhedgehog.net.
I think I'm a little bummed out by Poppy's trip to California. Oh, I'm glad she's on the road plugging the book and all, but it has me nostalgic for trips of yore. May 1996, for example, when Christa and I drove from LA to San Francisco and then on north to Eugene, OR for the World Horror Convention. On the way back to LA, we took a "short cut" and got horribly lost somewhere in the wilds of the Klamath Mountains. We spent the whole night winding through the mountains along a dirt road too narrow to turn around on. It took us eight whole frelling hours to go a measly 45 miles (!), because the road was so bad. At any moment, we expected to be devoured by a sasquatch. Those were the good old days...
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