loser sense... tingling!

Yes, I just spent two hours playing with Photoshop and ImageReady to make myself a bunch of new icons in honor of having bothered to buy more space for them.

It certainly was nice to go through my photos. I love any excuse to go through my photos.

i wish I had graphic design skillz. Oh well!!

I have only added about 600 words in the last fiveish hours. Sad. But, I made my goal-- 10,000 in the first 24. With a bunch to spare. :)

As of midnight, Mon Nov 1st (becoming Tues Nov 2nd), this is my wordcount:



added, because I don't think this is worth a whole separate post:


http://www.livejournal.com/allpics.bml?user=dragonlady7

I think that link will work to show the madness I have descended to. i am mad, drunk with power, drunk on ImageReady's animation palette, mad with the fullness of my iPhoto library, MUA HA HA.

Man, this has been a fun break from writing, I tell you.
Much more satisfying than web design, as well.

I am such a kook. :)

an answer

This was composed as a comment in response to kittyc1978's post of a couple hours ago, weherein she responded with distress to my earlier posts linking to Osama Bin Laden's video's transcript and translation / analysis. But it was too long, and didn't fit, and I didn't want to post it in her journal after all. So it's here.



Hmm... I must say, the speech struck me in a very different way.
Don't take any of this in the wrong way! Your feelings and response are valid! I am simply presenting mine because they are different and may be interesting to you. if it's just going to make you mad, don't read! The following are just my feelings and my response and my reasoning.

First off I was indignant that he should say this now-- I mean, he killed over 2000 people in New York City, the densest blue patch of blue in the overwhelmingly blue state of NY. The fact that he's pretty much admitting he did so because he personally objects to George W. Bush is pretty fucking rich. Sure, now you get political, you bastard. When it suits you.

It angered me a great deal, and I was glad I had already cast my vote (via absentee ballot) so that I could not claim to have been influenced by it all in any way. But, it also was extremely interesting to me, and gave me a great deal of very sobering food for thought. I mean, what an opportunity-- if you think of it this way, he explained himself. To all of those who cried out, "WHY?" on September 11th (I know I screamed that word at one point on that day, as I stood wrapped in my towel staring at the TV set (it being 9 in the morning and I being a college student, I had not yet begun my day)---- here is an ANSWER, which in itself must mean something.

And so I found that reading it with something other than indignation proved to be an interesting exercise, at the least.

My boyfriend recently engaged in a lengthy argument via e-mail with one of his professors, who demanded to know how anyone in his right mind could vote against Bush. My boyfriend responded that he didn't see how anyone in his right mind could vote for Bush.
Instead of just being idiots and sniping at each other, they then proceeded to discuss current events-- mostly, those warehouses full of missing explosives, which went missing after the US occupied Iraq, and the like. (They were WMD's, no they weren't, they were missing before!, no they weren't, the world is safer now, no it isn't., etc, all done in Dave's inimitably reasonable style, and far better-written than anything I've ever done.)

What it finally came down to, once they had no more to argue about, was that a vote for Bush was a vote against the U.N. and America's heavy involvement, even (some might say) subservience to foreign powers, a vote for Us Against The World, self-reliant and powerful and isolated.

A vote against Bush is a vote for the U.N., for America's involvement in the affairs of foreign powers as something other than A Superpower.


Given this line of reasoning, Osama (and some far, far more reasonable people, many of my family and friends included-- horrible as it is to find oneself agreeing with evil incarnate) feel that a vote for Bush is in essence a "fuck you" to the rest of the world. I might point out that on the 12th of September, the entire world was shocked and horrified and poured out sympathy for the US.
That position has reversed to the point where my best friend in London no longer speaks to me because she can't stand to think about what her government has done in the name of old alliances.

The world is very small.

Can we really afford to exercise our freedom in a vacuum? Can we really say, "I must vote for who I think best, without [bowing to pressures from / taking into consideration]* the rest of the world" ?

*due to human nature, which of those phrases you think fits there will be determined by how you already feel about the issue. That's human nature. There is no right or wrong choice there.

Because the fact remains, we did bomb those apartment towers in Lebanon, with women and children in them. It did happen, although not as he says it did.

There was nothing I hated more in high school than "revisionists" having their way with American history, and I happily spent many a class period beating down these people with my vastly superior logic and grasp of American history. I believe that this country has, for the most part, upheld the ideals upon which it was founded.
But we have made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Properly, the entire Israel/Pakistan crisis can be traced right to English mismanagement of conquered land. We are far less tarnished by colonialism than the earlier European superpowers.
But we inherited their messes, and now we are the last remaining superpower.
Our mistakes reach an unprecedented number of people.

I would therefore say that we cannot afford to exercise our freedom in our traditional isolation. We cannot bow to threats, no, but we have to make our decisions more responsibly than we have. Most of the evil done by the US has been done when we have leapt into situations saying "we must do something!" but, given our traditional isolationism, we don't understand the situation. This was brought home heartbreakingly to me by my history classes in college (particularly an awful African one that made me want to die), and more immediately by the tales my father told of Vietnam and its aftermath, and by the simple inability of my sister to explain where she is being deployed and why.

And so I made my decision to vote against Bush because I don't feel that he is interested enough in understanding the situation, and I feel that we must pay more attention to the rest of the world. The world is too unstable, and not big enough anymore.
I made that decision before this tape was released.

But I stick by it just as strongly after this tape was released.

Osama is trying to play the "reason" card and gain the sympathy of the rest of the world. We mustn't let him do that. We mustn't defy the rest of the world. We are tied to the rest of the world. My Norwegian cousin (the one who isn't an American citizen) is being sent to Afghanistan because of his country's involvement in NATO: the decisions of the US affect the rest of the world VERY concretely. The world is tiny and interconnected and we cannot continue as we have been.


There. I am sorry for going on so long and with such passion, but I had to put the thoughts down somewhere, and make an answer as best I could with the different viewpoint I have of the situation. Again, don't take offense. Your feelings are valid. The above are simply my feelings.

notes from the composition front

Have been falling prey to distractions quite easily, as we get into our second twenty-four-hour period. Heck, I spent most of yesterday evening distracted. I can focus for about 500 words, and then I futz around for an hour or two, and then I get another 50 while distracted, and then I focus for the other 500 so I can keep up my pace of making a post to treigylgweith every 1000-2000 words. (I am logging the process there, as well; the writing I'm posting isn't that important, compared to my notes on the process. I stick the writing behind a cut and don't even read it over. So anyone who wants to get a clearer picture of how I'm getting these wordcounts, it may be instructive to go over there. I'm not in any great hope of beta-reading at this point.)

This is going, structurally, a little differently than my usual. It is not unprecedented for me to be able to write very extended runs of sequential scenes. I have done this before. But it's coming much more clearly sequentially than usual, and I am actually feeling constrained to write in order, which I have not felt in the past.

I think this might be a response on my part to the noveling effort just prior to this, a messy affair that began intensively last January and extended, trailing off into intermittent spurts, until last month. That novel, I wrote freely all over the timeline, re-outlining at will, holding myself entirely unconstrained by time and space. i got some great ideas that way. But I also threw out nearly half a million words, over various plot lines that were abandoned. That is half a million words that I wrote, sometimes even polished, and could not use.

I am very eager now to have the majority of my words count. I would not take away the experience I've had this year. I have learned a ton. I have generated more ideas than I will ever use, but I have thoroughly composted my brain with them. I am entirely un-intimidated by even the most difficult plot twist.

But I am tired, tired of writing out of sequence and having to rewrite.

I am most eager that this particular tale should be told, in order, with as little waste as possible. Waste is important for creativity; I never made it as a painter because I couldn't stand to waste paint. You have to give yourself permission to do whatever it is that you feel you need to do next, even if it involves tremendous waste.

But, you have to be economical sometimes. I think it is fair to see this current novel as a well-fertilized stalk growing from the massive compost heap of the last one. (No, that wasn't me admitting that the last novel was shit! I refuse to put it into the past tense like that. ^.^) I can be spare and economical and sequential with this one, because it draws so much from my experience of the last one, despite being a different genre and different setting.

I prepared rigorously for this novel, doing extensive research and outlining to within an inch of my life. And so I think in this particular instance I have managed to skip the first-draft stage, for the most part. It feels, to me, like I'm writing a second draft already, even though I am composing as I go. I have simply imagined this novel so thoroughly already, and written about writing it so much, that I can go at a furious pace and spend little time in the awkward choreography that makes a first draft take so long.

So, here I am. I hope to make it to 15,000 today. My pace has fallen off; I have things to do, and outside issues in the world are worrying and distracting me. (Please, God, let this goddamn election go smoothly and let me get on with my life.)

Sigh. So, that's all.

Oh, my wordcount. On the left, the count as of 10 am Tuesday. On the right, the wordcount as most recently updated. :) Because I am a dork and may well reread this entry later.

neither NaNo nor election.

Just personal whining.


1) Mole people!!
I am trying to clean my house.
It is not a particularly dark or dingy little house.
But I have turned on every light I own and still it is not light enough to see.
Could it be a dingier, more stay-in-bed kind of day? I cleaned the floor but I have no idea how well I did, because it's DARK.

Also, sodden. I set up garbage cans and buckets under the drip of the porch's overhang, and they're all full, and the lawn is about three inches underwater anyway. Holy smokes. It's not pretty. I went to empty the buckets and am glad I lazily wore flip-flops, because I was over them in an instant. Sneakers would've just been drenched, and that's always a smelly mess for days.
There are holes where I removed some stepping stones that had settled, that I want to re-set. The holes? Full of water. Ugh. We have the Soggiest Lawn Ever.

2) I do not own any decent furniture. My living room is ridiculous. I do not own enough table lamps. I earnestly require a torchiere lamp.
I have set up the borrowed TV on a cardboard box because I do not have a TV stand.
The living room is dark and dingy and unappealing. A giant picture window does no good when it is DARK outside.
Nothing matches and I can't even afford slipcovers.
There are still boxes of books in the corner and we have lived here for TWO full MONTHS.

Have I irritated you enough with my whining yet? Oh, there is more, despite how well everything is going.

( how much can she complain about? )

eeeee

i cleaned the house and am perusing google news to figure out who's winning.
i don't dare turn on the tv.

gaaahhhhh i don't know! this isn't the good kind of anticipation, like christmas. no. it sucks. bleah. i want it OVER WITH ALREADY.

couldn't resist

so we have our little Political Party going on. Not a lot of people here.
But Chris and Rose Pannozzo showed up for a while. Chris is a lawyer (actually doesn't have the results back from the bar, but he's a juris doctor or whatever, works downtown for a big law firm) and is so rabidly Democrat that he twitched the entire time he was here.
Rose is a speech pathologist and works a few days a week at a Buffalo charter school down on Gennessee St.
Today, some of the kids asked her, "Miss Rose, who are you going to vote for?"
"Well," she answered, "I'm going to vote for John Kerry."
"Good," the children said. "George Bush doesn't like black people."


These were second graders.



More to come... I'm writing down Dan Ratherisms as we go along.

dfgaosdngwerlkdsfg!!!

Pennsylvania!!!
GFLDFOIEWsdfklasdgoaiefnsdflDW"Einfgldkgsd111!!!!!!111


GYEAHRHGH!!!

I have had rather too much to drink.

More!!!

Dan Rather quote on the moment, to tide yalls over:

"The race is hummin' along like Ray Charles." 9:42 pm

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

edited:
By the cold light of morning this post comes across as pretty damn stupid. People are justified in feeling offended. So I am editing it. Please bear in mind that I was drunk and crying when I wrote it.

[deleted expression of extreme distress over Florida's narrow Republican victory]

What the HELL are we gonna do now???


We just did double shots of Jack. "To Canada," we said.
"To the maximum draft age being 25," I said. (Dave, the youngest of us, will be 25 in December.)




No offense to Floridians, but [deleted expression of extreme distress over Florida's narrow Republican victory] !!@!@!@!!@@##$$(*#^!~~!!



Dan Rather quote of the moment, re John Kerry:

"He's got his back to the wall, bill collectors at the door, and his shirt tails on fire."