Neglect

Posted on 08/25/2007 by chick

Poor, neglected blog, with your writer sick in bed from a nasty cold and your Faithful Reader off on a wild Canadian whiskey binge. Things will get better soon. I promise.

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Cold Cold

Posted on 08/22/2007 by chick

It’s not fair to have a cold during summer. Neither is it fair for summer to be cold. What happened to the warm weather?

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It’s Magic

Posted on 08/21/2007 by chick

Latest book read: Magician by Raymond E. Feist

Grade: Lovable
I can’t give it a grade. I grew up with the characters in this book. They’re like friends and family, imperfect yet lovable.

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Five Titles, No Post

Posted on 08/21/2007 by chick

Not Again! Missing You. Rock Bottom. Old Friends. I’m Spartacus!

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The Story, Part III

Posted on 08/19/2007 by chick

For the beginning of the story, see the first and second installments.

After that, Dave started avoiding Phil, and the other employees of Subbasement 5 took their lead from Dave.

Every time Phil saw Dave ducking in or out of the hallway, he felt less guilty than annoyed, but the lack of interaction with his coworkers quickly began to take a toll on him. It was just small habits at first, such as reading the sock-bin labels aloud, but soon he was having full-blown discussions with himself, making up rhymes, and even singing to himself—anything to break the silence. Continue reading →

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Missing Day

Posted on 08/19/2007 by chick

If you’ve been reading for a while, then you know that I posted every day for a long, long time, then botched up yesterday. Sure, I could cheat time and set a post with yesterday’s date, but that seems dishonest. Several different factors played into my missing a day, but the main reason was that I was off playing high-stakes bingo and didn’t have the foresight to write a post earlier in the day. I didn’t win bingo, but I had a great time hanging out with my friends, so I hope you will forgive the lapse.

Today, of course, is Sunday which means that it’s time for story-writing, but that, too, may be delayed. If it is, then I promise two posts next Sunday.

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Instrumental Decision

Posted on 08/17/2007 by chick

I need a piano. I’ve been playing on an electric keyboard for about 10 years. It has full-size, weighted, touch-sensitive keys, so it plays very much like a piano, but though it can makes pianolike sounds issue from speakers, it is not an acoustic instrument. It can’t “sing.”

I asked my friend K—, “How much of one’s income do you suppose it is acceptable to spend on a piano?” She replied, “If I played like you, all of it.” That has to be the nicest thing that anyone has ever IMed to me. While I can’t quite spend it all, I am willing to spend what it takes to get a quality instrument. I might just wander into the piano store this weekend to see what the options are.

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Nay, Nay, Not the Nene!

Posted on 08/16/2007 by chick

Whew! Hawaii was not hit by the recent hurricane in the Pacific. I’m glad, not only because the people and nenes are unhurt, but also because no one should have to admit to getting their ass whupped by a storm called Flossie.

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A Twofer

Posted on 08/16/2007 by chick

I haven’t been able to sleep. So, with nothing better to do, I read another book, this time a Marion Zimmer Bradley twofer: The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones. I guess even the two together were not enough to fill a whole book, so the publisher also included a short story (“The Waterfall”) and “A Darkover Retrospective.”

The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Grades: C+ and B, respectively

The Planet Savers is readable but the basic premise, that a repressed person is likely to have an alternate personality that can, though hypnosis, be brought to the surface as the dominant personality for an indefinitely long period of time, is as hard to swallow as it is to say succinctly. The story doesn’t go into much detail about Darkovan society and it just doesn’t have the “magic” that I expect from a Darkover story. The Sword of Aldones is a muddled version of a story that is told, as I recall, much better in a later novel, but it has some real life to it, which is why it got the slightly better grade.

The short story was OK, by the way, and the retrospective was so dull that I just skimmed through it.

I probably won’t keep this book, but I’ll wait to see how I feel after reading the whole series.

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Too Many Midnights

Posted on 08/15/2007 by chick

I miss midnight. I mean the old midnight, the midnight when you got to feel naughty for staying up so late, or the midnight when it was creepy to be awake all alone, or the midnight that meant it was finally Christmas. If you see midnight too many times, it loses its magic.

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