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0 comments on "Hanging out at my brother’s, wishing I’d brought"

Hanging out at my brother’s, wishing I’d brought my laptop. I forgot he didn’t have much in the way of lights either. It’s a bit dark here.

Anyways, he’s looking to get some furniture tomorrow and I said I’d go with him. He’s for sure wanting a couch and we’ll figure out anything else once we get there.

In the meanwhile, we ate some pho and now he’s playing video games. It’s maybe a <I>little bit</I> boring. So I’ll work on some story outlines while I’m here.

Hogfather at Amazon
0 comments on "Washing clothes and daydreaming"

Someone switched the dryer setting to High heat. My dad’s clothes must have been cooking. I turned the heat down, but who knows how long it was on High.

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Wash clothes in cold/cold water, unless it’s a load of dirty jeans. In that case, wash the jeans in warm/cold water with some baking soda and vinegar. If there’s any grease or waxy/tarry substances, add a can of Coke to break up the binding agents.

Wash white towels in hot/cold water with either some bleach or some baking soda and vinegar.

I dry on low heat with a fabric softener sheet. (There was a horrible instance where I let a hotel launder my clothes, and they melted the designs on a bunch of tee shirts. I was so mad. I wash my own clothes.) Or if I’ve got a wrinkled shirt, I’ll either spritz it with water before tossing it in the dryer or add a damp towel. It’s great for when you don’t have the time to iron. Throw wrinkled clothes in the dryer while taking a shower and getting ready.
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Today has been one of those days when there was a lot of stuff I could do, but I just didn’t have the energy. I’ve added pages to my writing, but it’s like two pages to ATR, one to Tuesday, one to Jazz, and a bunch of fic stuff that’s turning into a flaming garbage bag of emotion that I’m not sure I want to share with anyone.

The funny thing is that I always feel like I’m being super constructive when I’m wasting time. I have to remind myself to stop screwing around and just write. Unless the research is really necessary to forming the story, put a placeholder (I use —-0000—- for typed words, or [] for handwritten pages) and keep going.

I let myself get bogged down overthinking scenes sometimes. Then I get distracted and drift off into other things. It’s ridiculous.

I’m constantly writing, but sometimes there’s no coherence in what I produce.

* *

EXCERPT– “Tuesday Night: Part Four”

They were squatting in a small two bedroom apartment. Wordlessly they shared the master bedroom, huddled around each other on the queen-sized bed. The door to the second room stayed firmly shut, the child’s single bed with its cartoon sheets undisturbed.

Tony hadn’t let himself dwell on the rust-colored stains on the playmat or the drag marks on the carpet. Definitely didn’t focus on the small size of the fingers that had made those marks, desperate and clawing.

There wasn’t a lot of food in the kitchen, but they had ration bars in their pockets and they made do. The last thing they wanted was to be wandering the city streets scavenging, not when the hive mind seemed to have changed tactics.

Drones had taken to the streets in roving packs. They hadn’t quite gotten to the point of doing building-by-building searches, but Tony figured it was only a matter of time. The hive mind was adapting.

They’d watched as a family of four was run out into the middle of the street. The woman had bucked and screamed as her husband was pressed facedown on the ground. The angle was bad, keeping Tony from seeing the details, but within moments the man was up, helping to hold down the two terrified children, then his wife.

Fifteen minutes later, the drone pack had four new members. They slunk off into the dusk in search of prey, gliding together as though they shared one spine. It had been a chilling display, one he couldn’t look away from.

“I feel like I’m trapped in a horror movie,” he said. They had fallen into whispers since leaving Triangle Park. It felt strange to be so afraid all the time, but Tony thought that he had forgotten any other way to be.

“There’s a reason why I don’t like horror movies.” Seth turned off the burner and carried the pot of ramen to their nest of couch cushions and blankets. He settled opposite Tony in a crosslegged position.

/EXCERPT

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An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good at Amazon
0 comments on "There will come a time when children won’t be able to read cursive"

It’s weird to think that kids in the future will find our writings and be unable to decipher them. They’ll hold up our papers, turning them in their hands, and wonder what our strange and curling method of producing words is all about.

They won’t know anything other than print. Their lives will be ruled by sans serif fonts and picture messages. Data will enter their brains as memes.

They won’t be taught cursive in schools and might not even be taught to use a pen and paper at all. Everything will be buttons and swype and “Alexa, lights please.”

The future is an as yet undiscovered country. And we’re driving straight into it and our brakes our broken. It’s forward momentum all the way, with no rest stops or chances to acclimate.

It’s like driving your car into a deer on a darkened road in the middle of nowhere.

What do you do?

CDandHBFH
When you have a box full of college ruled paper that has been written from one pink line to the next, how do you find someone to transcribe the words if they’ve never learned to read cursive?

Taking away a child’s ability to read would be a tragedy that parents wouldn’t stand for. But making one method incredibly unpopular? That’s easy.

And in the end, the future could be like in “Idiocracy,” when all anyone can do is point at pictures and grunt. And history isn’t something people bother to rewrite… because it won’t have existed at all. Because the words will be unreadable, language will shift and change, and the instructions on how to survive the apocalypse will be scrawled in a notebook somewhere, in cursive even worse than mine.

Small Gods at Amazon
0 comments on "Sometimes I lose track of what I’m doing."

Sometimes I lose track of what I’m doing. I don’t mean to be so flighty. It just sometimes happens that way.

Here’s a taste of Cake 2.8? to give you an idea of what happens.

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Title: Cake 2.8?
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: Drama, Celebrity
Character: Dahl Quinzant

CAKE 2.8?

“Someday I’m gonna be famous (or infamous), but it won’t be in my lifetime.”
– Dahl Quinzant

A thousand eyes burned against her skin. She thought she could feel the sunburn forming and she couldn’t stop it. There would never be enough sunblock to protect her from all of their attention.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she announced in her Companion’s office bright and early Monday morning. The sun was shining, birds were singing, and she wanted to rip out of her skin and scream. It would be like that scene in that one movie she’d done[1], when the demon/angel/genetic experiment monster had killed her.

“I have noticed that you’ve been a bit strange lately,”
Wallace said. “What seems to be the difficulty?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and let her fingers pick at the upholstery seam. With the money she paid, Wallace could afford to buy a new sofa or six. She wondered what he’d do if she tore a huge hole in the couch. Would he scream at her? Or would he look at her out of those tragically understanding eyes?

“Talk to me, Dahl. Tell me how you feel.” He leaned forward and his tone went pleading. “I want to help you, but you’ve got to talk to me. Please.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m just scared of being famous,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It feels like too much is happening too quick. Suddenly everyone knows my name.” Dahl licked her lips and stared at her knees. “I’m scared to go outside.”

[1. That horrible little job she’d only taken to pay for the electricity.

It hadn’t seemed so bad at the time. She’d walked in and everyone had been super nice to her. It was honestly one of the best on-set experiences she’d ever had. She’d filmed her scenes, enjoyed lunch from the craft table, and gone home. It was work as usual.

The movie didn’t reenter her focus until two years later. She got a phone call from Richmond Lee telling her that the movie had been entered in a film festival and there was hope that it might win some awards. He told her they’d mailed her a copy of her scene and that she’d receive tickets for the festival. She’d told him that it all sounded very cool and that she hoped the movie won “every award imaginable. I hope it sweeps the lists” to finally get him off the line.

Having a movie she’d acted in win an award should have had her enthusiastically looking up all information on the movie, but she was feeling a bit disaffected. Her mood had hit a fairly low point and she couldn’t get up the energy to care. (So she might win her very first movie award. Who cares. Nobody’s gonna want to watch such a hotbox of a movie. It isn’t worth getting all excited just to be disappointed. Keep your nose down and do your job.) It was easier to focus on getting out of bed and showering rather than to fall into imaginings of glamorous award ceremonies and too many beautiful people to count.

She passed on receiving the festival tickets, though she’d thanked them for offering. It had felt nicer to spend the night curled on the couch with her dog. She’d worn black and yellow Sunfire pajama pants and a ratty band tee shirt. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail and she was wearing her glasses for the first time in forever–at least two months–and she marathon-watched every episode of “Oh My Ghostess.” And she felt like herself for once.

In that period of goodness, she did twelve great movies. The roles weren’t exactly big, but she definitely got the vibe that she’d stolen her scenes. She was beginning to make a name for herself.

She’d been happy when she got the DVD in the mail. She’d immediately watched her scenes and winced a bit at the bad acting, but it had been fun too. She always enjoyed watching herself on video. It was like seeing someone else, and she was maybe half in love with that other girl, but whatever.

She’d liked watching her scene and thought that she’d done a pretty good job considering how inexperienced she’d been. Then she’d played the whole movie and it had been horrifying. They’d seemed like such nice people, yet they’d managed to produce one of the most disgusting horror movies of all time. And there her face was, right at the center of it all.

It was mortifying.

Dahl wasn’t ashamed that she’d taken work when it was offered. She just didn’t want her name associated with a violence porn movie that didn’t even offer up some form of social commentary at the end. An apology. A statement of intent. Some reason for why the movie had been made other than some people liked to watch humans die in full detail.

It was one of the few movies that she refused to talk about. Her manager even made sure interviewers knew they weren’t allowed to ask about it. It was the movie that had never happened, and she was sticking to it.]