Friday, July 08, 2005
I suppose I could until I'm awake to write these things, but then I'd be depriving the world of the spectacle of my bleary ramblings. Not awake. Not awake at all, though I have had breakfast and talked about catbirds and grackles and the weather (hot today, maybe storms). At least a third of me is still in a dream somewhere. But I can type. Yesterday, we did not catch up with the proofreading on To Charles Fort, With Love, but we did come close. We read "La Mer des Rêves," "The Road of Pins," and "Onion." Pages 83-141. And I dealt with a mountainous molehill's worth of e-mail. But I didn't get the short story started. That needs to happen today. And it has to be finished in about ten days, at the most, so I can get back to Daughter of Hounds.
I've slipped into proofreading mode. When in proofreading mode, I become unreasonably annoyed by persistent and especially dumb grammatical and spelling errors. For instance, "mic" when people mean "mike," or the belief that "unique" comes in degrees ("more unique," "less unique," etc.), beginning sentences with "anymore," the way journalists insist upon capitalizing "internet" and "web," "they're" used for "their" or "there" and vice versa, and so on. I hate being in proofreading mode, because, generally speaking, I couldn't care less what people do with their semicolons (one word) and apostrophes. Life if far too short and annoying to dwell on comma placement, especially if you're a writer.
Chris Ewen, Future Bible Heroes guru, sent me an instrumental version, sans the coming cellos, of my song, "Twelves Nights After," which will be appearing on his side-project CD, The Hidden Variable, along with songs written by folks like Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, and so forth. It's an entirely different score than the song's original music (it was one of the Death's Little Sister songs), and a somewhat different take. I love it. As soon as I can, I'll announce the vocalist. I've been told it's going to be someone very, very drad.
Speaking of drad things, my thanks to Gordon Duke (I think I know who he is on LJ, but I'm not sure) for a wonderful, belated birthday gift — Firefly on DVD. I very much appreciate these late presents trickling in.
I've turned to the BBC and The Guardian Unlimited for non-Americanized, non-Bushized coverage of yesterday's bombings in London. I can no longer endure the idiots on CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews. I managed to speak with a few friends and colleagues in London last night, and everyone's safe and accounted for. I'm still more or less speechless on the subject. It's hard to see past the things I fear. I fear the attacks may add fuel to the war against Iraq, fuel that Bush has been desperately looking for as his support in America begins to slip. I fear additional discrimination against non-extremist Islamic men and women. I fear the death toll may rise above 50. I fear additional attacks, of course. I feel as if the world is soundly at war now, and those of us who do not live our lives as religious fundamentalists are caught in the crossfire, because it's not only a war fought over money, but a war fought over fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. I'll close with a quote from Tagplazen, because he said it pretty well already (and with the appropriate amount of profanity):
...I don't give one flying fuck which crazy ass little book you're pulling your beliefs out of, the minute you think that your printed piece of shit gives you the right to tell other people how to live their lives, well, you can fuck right the fuck off. I have no wish to live in a theocracy, and don't try pretending that our choices are only between the rabid little ass monkeys sticking religious statues in courtrooms or the stupid fucks that lop hands off for stealing fruit out of the market. Both of them are the same fucking face of evil for all I can see.
10:56 AM
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