(no subject)

Apropos of nothing else in this post: This is cultural trufax.

You know the bit in Ender's Game right near the beginning where they take out the monitor and Ender keeps having these moments of "wtf was I just doing, did I forget something"? I spent most of last night like that. I mean, I wrote the little Lumo-clipping blurb at the end of The Dead Isle, and then I kind of stared stupidly at it for a while before I realised it was done. Then I posted about being done, because I like to mark these things, and I sat down on the futon and sort of shook for a while. Which is normal for me, even though it screams SENSITIVE ARTISTE, it's what I do.

And then I ate some pizza and everything was fine, except, you know, every so often I'd get this sense of WTF that I couldn't shake. For the first time in over a year, I have no original work in progress. I'm going to have to do some editing, but the story is complete, there's no more need to be concerned with the suspense of the reader. Besides, I'm giving myself a week off, at least, before I start editing.

I've been trying to articulate what the process of editing will be for The Dead Isle, and why it'll be different from most other stories I've written, but it's hard going. I don't ordinarily outline my stories in much detail, but usually I know an endpoint that I'm working towards. With this story, the endpoint shifted and changed, and there were a lot of ways to get to it. So within the body of the story there are all these starts at plots and subplots that seem to drift off into unimportance as the main thread of narrative emerged. I'm glad those starts are there because they allowed me a diversity of choice as I wrote -- I had options and could choose the strongest plot of several to continue with -- but now begins the process of eliminating those false starts from the story. Which is complicated in its own way, because while they are false starts they also lead into events that are part of the main narrative, so they can't just be removed -- something else has to be put in their place.

Essentially, I'm going to be performing a cross between topiary and a quadruple bypass.

But all that is in the future -- for today I'm resting my brain a bit, and today and tomorrow I need to start making some choices about the Sekrit Project. I'm still not sure precisely how it will be presented, but affecting my decision will be my stupidly recent realisation that that non-paying users and the general public see ads when they visit non-paid comms, and that sucks. So we'll see...

What Not To Wear: Torchwood Edition

I must say I am not entirely pleased with the design houses lately. The 2009 collections show a definite lack of couture male businesswear capable of withstanding multiple bulletholes without becoming passe.

For example: Gaetano Navarra shoes.

Good for kicking things, bad for running.

I've often considered adding small spikes to the toes of my shoes for increased kickability in desperate straits, but the first test of the device involved bleeding (not mine) and a turned ankle (mine).

Incorporating that much lethality into the design of the shoe itself seems to be going downright overboard.

And that's just the pointy tip of the iceberg.

( Ianto Jones's Fashion Week In Review )

(no subject)

I gave R two weeks without TV and Internet. He caved after 2 days. And is paying way too much.

He asked me to come make it work, and I did. And this was amusing until his estranged father's side of the family called him about his violent alcoholic grandfather who is dying.

How to fuck up a 28 year old man in ten minutes or less.

So I'm here for a while because he's messed up and has to talk to his mum about it which is a whole new brand of fucking crazy. Good times. Glad I'm here though.

(no subject)

So I'm home. R seemed to need a little alonetime to sort out his head and was tinkering with How To Watch TV On The Internet when I left. He'll be okay, it's not like he's sad that asshole is dead or anything.

Oh yes! So. They called him at six o'clock, his aunt or something, and said his grandfather was dying. He called his mum to get her thoughts on her ex-father-in-law's impending death and Crazy R's Mother said, oh no, they called me earlier, he passed around noon.

WHO DOES THAT. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.

The angst and confusion he's feeling isn't the result of losing a grandparent, even an estranged one. I'm not going to go into details because it's not my biz to tell the internet about that kind of thing, but R and I talked for a while and I think it's just as well his father bolted when he was a kid because clearly there's some damage done there and the only thing that side of the family could have done at any point was fuck R up further. As is evidenced by "Oh, we think your grandfather's going to die six hours ago."

So mostly he's just not sure what to do, whether to go to the funeral and be forced into the awkwardness of being "family" with people who don't know him at all and whom he doesn't wish to know, or stay home and wonder and possibly regret it. He says he's regretted missing funerals in the past. I didn't point out that they were probably people he actually liked. I just thought it at him really hard and might have made the Matt Parkman Is Thinking At You face a little. You know the one.

Anyway, he'll let me know if he's taking off to attend the funeral. And presumably he'll let me know if I need to hire Bulletproof to follow him up there and slap some sense into half of R's gene pool.