I’m not Impressionable at all… Oh, am I? 👾

We went to see Kong this weekend!

I found that I honestly really, really enjoyed the movie.

True, there were moments where the direction just failed on the dialogue, and there were some um, kinda uncomfortable choices made in the movie, and even though there were two women on the island, it totally completely utterly failed the Bechdel test, but I honestly didn’t go to it looking for depth or amazing dialogue.

I went looking for giant monsters.

And I was rewarded with giant monsters and pretty Tom Hiddleston and John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson acting their asses off, and really really good effects, and… giant monsters.

Also, as long as you accepted that you were watching a kaiju movie, the plot was pretty good, too.

And now I’m all excited to write more Fae Apoc in the apocalypse, because I’ve always imagined there being giant monsters there – not just dragons, who have always existed in fae apoc, but other creatures that came with the returned gods or were created with them. And I want to look more at the way that Ellehem (Where the gods went) actually works…

…all because I watched a giant sad ape and some skull-crawlers.

Which is pretty awesome, all things considered. I’m thinking about Escape from Rochester, which is a project I did for Camp Nano a few years back (longer than I’d thought, when I went looking), whose tagline is something like “8 billion people are about to die. Raven cares about 32 of them.” I was honestly trying to kill off a character a day as they escaped Rochester in the middle of the faerie apocalypse. I had trouble making the characters someone anyone would care about for a lot of it, but I was only doing like 1000 words a day. I think that requires something like 3x that amount…

Anyway, distracted, how much cooler would that be with rampaging giant monsters? I mean, really. Thud-thud footsteps shaking the earth and the bus bouncing and…

*coughs*

Yeah. I really like giant monsters, okay?

Okay so BIG MONSTERS and that was Kong and … there will probably be some monster stories in my future, maybe that ought to be on the Patreon theme poll.

But then I re-read The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff while I was sick (and since). I’m pretty sure I read this for the first time just about when I started writing the Aunt Family, because there are definite similarities. Eseme gave it to me, because she’d bought it and found some of the themes unpleasant. I’ve re-read it more times than I can count.

And NOW I want to write a novel about the Aunt Family, too. I’m not exactly sure where such a thing would start, my thoughts about Cat’s Mystery and writing a YA novel with Stone as the love interest aside, or what the plot would be, or any of those things – but every time I re-read Enchantment Emporium, I want to write more of it.

inventrix comments from time to time that I’m very impressionable, and I suppose since it’s been said so many times it’s probably true… *cough* That is. There’s definitely a truth to it. And one of the ways I love being impressionable is the way that taking in media can get me writing again on something completely different. If I want to change my writing voice up a bit, I read an author with a very strong voice. If I want to be inspired, I pick up something with a strong story (rix_scaedu‘s fiction does this to me, too!). Heathens has turned out to be the perfect song to get me writing early-era Boom.

I guess I should watch more monster movies…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1294132.html. You can comment here or there.

Protected: Weekend Blog – brain chemistry.

Mar23

Snowed In

Mar16

(Yes, I find it a little amusing that I have a “Blizzard” Icon. It’s from a setting!)

So, we spent the last two days snowed in, how about you?

The last time I can remember that a major storm was supposed to hit NY, with all of the bells and whistles and a name, was Sandy – the hurricane, which totally ignored Ithaca except some rain and went on to devastate NYC and New Jersey.

To be honest, I was expecting more of the same from Stella. Ithaca just doesn’t get snow most years, not like Rochester or Buffalo do (those giant inland seas dump a lot of snow on their cities…)

I figured I’d get up Tuesday morning and there’d still be grass visible.

As a matter of fact, when I woke up at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, there still was grass visible.

Not so much by 6 a.m.

Definitely not so much by mid-day.

At noon — long after I’d decided to work from home — the campus closed for 24 hours. Which then extended to 4:30 Wednesday.

By 6:30 Wednesday we’d dug out the driveway.

I did work from home for partial days both days. But I have to tell you, the little kid in me is still running around going “snow day! Snow day!”

I think the cats were happy to see me go back to work today…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1277609.html. You can comment here or there.

Weekend, with Hibernation

Mar13

So… I like winter. I actually do. The layers of clothing, the cozy feeling in front of the fire, hot cocoa and marshmallows. I like it. Yes, there’s also shoveling, brushing off the car, taking twice as long to get to work, hauling the firewood. But there’s always things like that.

What I like most about winter is the feeling of hibernation. You can spend an entire weekend or two just not leaving the house, and it seems perfectly reasonable. (Winters that I don’t get this, I get a little cranky, actually — long warm winters, winters without enough snow…)

(In my case, “enough snow” is gauged on a chart involving feet of snow, not inches, because I grew up on Lake Ontario, where the snow comes not in snowfalls but in giant snow dumps.)

This weekend, last weekend, I don’t have that much to blog about — because we hibernated. The weekend before this most recent one, we didn’t leave the house at all. This weekend, we got take-out (Nobody delivers to where we live) and went grocery shopping.

Exciting, right?

Very restful.

We fixed our stand mixer – it needed a new worm follower gear (I used to play White Wolf/World of Darkness a lot; the urge to think of that as a Wyrm Follower is strong), so we cleaned it out, replaced the gear, and packed grease into it.

We vacuumed the stairs and the hearth – we have three cats and heat with wood, making both of those weekly chores.

I made a bit loaf of bread and we ate Chinese take-out leftovers all weekend.

The house looks a little cleaner, my wordcount looks amazing, and all in all, I feel refreshed and recharged – never mind Daylight Savings Time, grumble grumble.

And that’s why I like hibernation. I get some quiet time, I get some stuff done, and there is very little that has to be done.

Spring is coming soon, and that will change the whole equation, but until then, I’ll enjoy my time trapped inside by the cold and the snow.

Stay warm, everyone. We’ve got a little more hibernation left.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1275454.html. You can comment here or there.

Weekend Blog: Commercials and Stereotypes

Mar1

A radio ad – think it was for McDonald’s – got me thinking, not for the first time, about cultural assumptions.

Okay, so there’s a long-running set of assumptions about Husbands in American culture. This particular one was “men don’t like to clean out the garage.”

This… is not true of the men I know, but hey, let’s keep going.

This goes along with the “men don’t like to do chores” tropes – the “Honey-Do” list, the chore jar, etc. The ignored tasks that pile up and up until Marge has to learn carpentry to fix them herself. (I watch a lot of Simpsons, okay? 😉 There seems to be a stack of assumptions that permeate American culture – especially comedy, which, Simpsons aside, I try not to watch too much of.

So, “who perpetuates these myths” is obvious: comedies, commercials, media. I think it probably goes along with the idea that men can’t parent, can’t do housework, are pretty much helpless children when it comes to the realm of the home.

Now, I know the separate spheres idea goes back at least to the late 1800’s, and I know my father, for instance, liked to pretend a helplessness with things like laundry and cooking that belied the years he’d spent living on his own. (Seriously, I was horrified as a teenager to have to show my dad how to use the washer). But my post-childhood experience with men has not been that they are helpless, useless, or lazy.

(There’s a certain amount of self-selection there, of course; I knew incompetent men, lazy men, useless men. I grew up with competent helpful skilled men — my grandfather is a farmer; my other grandfather used to build houses — and chose to marry the same.)

Why do you think this stereotype proliferates?

When you are writing, are there stereotypes you work into your writing? What sorts, and why?

What do you run into in media that just seems jarring vs. the way your life actually goes?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1260901.html. You can comment here or there.

Weekend Blog with Yard-Work and procrastination…

Feb27

Saturday morning, before the weather broke, my husband and I spent probably a half-hour cleaning out our culvert, digging wet leaves and sticks out of the ditch and hauling them to the hedgerow.

It’s achey work, bending-over, digging, lifting, wet work, and at least the weather was still in the fifties. It was necessary work, because in a heavy rain, our culvert fills all the way to the top, and, clogged as it was, it might have overflowed in unfortunate ways. It’s supposed to carry rain away, not keep it in our yard, after all.

There was the nice feeling of having done something physical that was productive was nice, that warm ache. But on the other hand…

So, I hate raking. I really, really hate raking. It goes back to being a child, and I am ridiculous about any number of chores that I had to do as a kid/teenager — but raking really ranks up there.

And we didn’t rake this fall.

And the leaves all blew, like they will, into the culvert.

You see where I’m going?

It reminded me of learning, maybe seven years ago, exactly how bad it could be when Iavoided conflict by not talking about problems or by trying to give in to everyone at once (Answer: everyone ends up mad at you and you end up with even more conflict than you’d originally been trying to avoid).

It’s one of those lessons I have to keep learning over and over again: the more you put something off, the more work it is.

Hopefully, I remember this in fall, when it’s time to rake again. Or the next time something threatens to pile up in my metaphorical culverts.

…kind of like the dishes in the sink…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1258532.html. You can comment here or there.

Weekend Blog: Writing Letters

Feb17

Writing letters and cleaning house: that’s what I did last weekend.

I’ve been taking part in the Month of Letters (http://lettermo.com/, it’s also http://incowrimo.org/) for almost half a month now — really, a whole two weeks, because I started writing on the 29th and mailing on the 30th January.

It’s weird. That’s the short version: It’s really weird. Also, it’s fun, although it’s perhaps, like most things I do, a little too all-consuming.

My letter-writing falls into a few categories:
* Writing to relatives I haven’t seen in a long time, or very rarely in that long time.
* Writing to facebook friends, who are generally IRL people I haven’t seen in a very long time and barely interact with.
* Writing to twitter friends — people I talk to every day on twitter but rarely see in person.
* Writing to people I encountered on the LetterMo site.
* Writing to and/or as fictional people, mostly to real people I know.
* Writing to family I see on a semi-regular basis.

All of these have their own unique challenges, and I’m finding all of them quite interesting for that.

For instance, writing to LetterMo people combines this “getting-to-know-each-other” sort of protocols with a fear of being judged by (and this isn’t really a thing) Professional PenPals (Okay, it might really be a thing, but I don’t know anyone who is). Like, am I doing enough? Is my letter pretty enough? Are there unspoken rules I’m breaking?

And then you add in all of that stress with contacting estranged family — people my father feuded with, or feuded with him, for instance, back when I was in college. Do they even want to hear from me? Do they remember me? My dad has four siblings, a half-sister, and four step-siblings, and almost all of them have kids. That’s a lot of nephews and nieces to keep track of.

(Okay, so there’s a lot of anxiety going on there).

Letters to family, I’ve been trying just to put into the world and let go. If they answer, they answer. If they don’t, I’m no less connected than I was before.

Twitter friends — that’s it’s own challenge. I talk to these people every day, or very near to it. (These people? Many of them are you guys.) What do I say that I wouldn’t share on twitter, or on gchat or in e-mail?

The thing is, for the most part, a little anxiety aside, these are fun challenges. And getting letters back in the mail — that’s amazingly fun. It makes going to the mailbox a blast!

Will I keep writing letters after LetterMo? Well, April is National Letter-Writing Month…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1254392.html. You can comment here or there.

Weekend Blog: Camera~

Feb8

This is another post about the Museum of Glass!

Not just because I didn’t so as much this past weekend (Well, we DID drive back to Corning…) but because I have more thoughts.

There are two things you need to know to understand this:

1) I am not generally a fan of art museums, unlike my husband and one of my friends I was travelling with.

2) I got my first smartphone (a tracfone) at the end of December. 2016. Yes, really.

I had a blast at the Museum of Glass. Not just the history parts – I love history museums, absolutely love living history, and am really excited about artifacts from the past (This is why I liked the Met so much). I liked the funny glass sculptures and the concept pieces. I read the descriptions and even thought about them — though some of them I think they put more artistry into the description than into the art piece.

I was taking pictures. I had that cheap little smartphone out, and I took pictures of everything.

And, you know what? It kept me engaged. It kept me looking at the things in front of me. Even if I was tweeting, too. This is the most fun I’ve at a museum in, like… ever. Well, ever at a non-living-history museum in my adult life.

I find this fascinating. Especially with all the pushback in media about — ha — taking in too much media, sticking too much to a phone, to our computers — I find it entertaining how much having a phone engaged me in the event.

And now I have a load of photos. Prickly kitty!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1248551.html. You can comment here or there.

Last Weekend’s Weekend Blog (whoops): Growing Up, going out, and Tips

Feb5

Growing up is a funny thing. Having grown-up friends is a very nice thing, and one I’m only now learning to truly appreciate.

This past weekend, our friends E.Mc and Kris came to visit, as they do a couple times a year. They live a few hours away — far enough that a day trip isn’t possible, but close enough that a 2-day trip is viable. Slumber party weekend!

We did a lot of fun things while they were here — we went to the Corning Museum of Glass; we went out to a tasting restaurant; we had Mexican on a whim in Corning (after all that glass, we were hungry!) We sat around talking about politics and nobody shouted or got hurt or called anyone names.

We did Christmas, too, which is also a lot of fun. I love watching people unwrap things we bought for them. And, let’s be honest, I love getting things, too.

Afterwards, I was feeling warm and fuzzy and motivated, the way I often am after they visit or we visit them — signs of a good friendship! I was also left with a pleased feeling of how smooth some things went.

That’s two meals out and an Event (which included four passes to make glass flowers). And now, we’re all grown-ups. So there was no question about who grabbed which check. We didn’t have to fight about it, nobody got stuck with paying for too much. It all balanced out.

I remember being in my early twenties going out to dinner at Friendly’s (an ice-cream and greasy-sandwich joint) and being at that stage where people were paying their portion of the tip with nickles and dimes; I remember when people would pay just their meal and not the tax or the tip on the meal, and someone else would be left picking up the difference. Once — the service had been pretty awful, but still — our tip ended up being a handful of change (on a fifteen-person table). The server ran outside and threw our change at us.

(I did mention the service was pretty awful).

It’s nice being a grown-up. It’s nice having a comfortable groove with friends, so nobody’s fighting over the check (whether it’s “you should pay” or “we should pay.”). It’s nice having our whole friendship move that smoothly.

When I was in my 20’s, I often referred to myself as a drama-vore, subsisting on drama. I’m pleased to be at a stage in my life where the drama is low and most often borrowed. It makes for a lot nicer slumber parties.

Also? Great food and nobody throwing our tip at us.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1247496.html. You can comment here or there.

Patreon! What I’ve been up to.

Feb5

It’s been a busy month on my Patreon, and I got a little behind in telling you all here on the blog what I’ve been doing. So here’s a summary!

Third Step
a story for the Liminal Spaces prompt call.
🚪
That door.

It would be too easy to say it looked like an ordinary door.

The thing was, it didn’t look ordinary.
🚪
read on…

Seasons’s Change
a winter repost story
Free for all to read!

Happy Sunday from my favorite Oligarcy
Kitty Pics

Another Door Opens
a repost story of Addergoole
Free for all to read!

Corning Museum of Glass
Glass Pics!

The Purple
a winter repost story
Free for all to read!

Patreon News

The Sea Eats
a story for the Liminal Spaces prompt call.

The sea ate boats.

In the villages along the coast, they spoke of this solemnly: Harun-sha has taken another boat. Harun-sha must be very hungry today.

In the cities, they either spoke cynically of it: “this criminal population is getting out of hand. We need to send an exploration ship out,” or they spoke of it negligently, “Ha. Harun-sha must be tetchy today.”

read on…

Tree on the Hill
A Trunk Story
For $3-and-up Patrons

February Prompt Call
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Homer
For $5-and-up Patrons

Month of Letters

Go take a look~~

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1247333.html. You can comment here or there.

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