(no subject)

I got a question via email the other day asking whether I'd ever posted anything on how to become a better writer, especially with the long-term goal of being published or self-publishing. I had a lot of thoughts about it, so maybe it's time I wrote them out.

FOUR THOUSAND WORDS LATER...

( Oh god, help. )

(no subject)

Can you tell after this morning I was a little blogged out?

I was supposed to go on a field trip today, but decided it wasn't worth the CTA fare and effort. I stayed in, prepped RFM for tomorrow, and cleaned the kitchen. Every damn summer I get fruit flies no matter how clean I keep the place, and usually they show up right around the time I'm expecting guests. You know who never gets fruit flies, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure there are dirty dishes in his living room from when I was living there? R. Maybe it's because there's never fruit in the flat.

It's cool though, my last guests taught me how to make a fruit fly trap from an empty Coke bottle and a banana.

I've spent most of the evening working my way backwards through a compilation that I was linked to of the best magazine articles of the 20th and 21st centuries. I've skipped the "best ever" for now and gone by era instead: I waded through the rather brief "Best since 2010" list and gave the "Best of the 00s" list a look, and I'm actually shocked at how many of these articles I've read. I'm not someone who subscribes to magazines or actively seeks them out online; the only reason I read ARTNews is that it happens to come free to my desk. It's not like I have anything against magazines, but I expected to have read precisely zero off this list, and it turns out I've read quite a few.

Especially the Vanity Fair article from 2001 about Furries, which was my introduction to the culture and also what triggered the realisation that a) a friend of mine was one and b) rather more startlingly, they had drawn art of me as a fur -- I just thought the art was a kind of off-the-wall gift. I wasn't terribly bothered by my friend being a Furry, because that was really just a name to put on her passion for stuffed cats and I was already dealing with other friends who had way more intense kinks requiring much more mental adaptation on my part. (What, you thought I learned about D/s from sex ed?)

I'm not sure where "involuntarily furified" falls in the scale of social boundaries, but I won't lie: I still have the art and it makes me vaguely uncomfortable to look at it.

Mind you, I do make a kickass lion.