Twenty Palaces

It’s one a.m.

In two and a half hours, the shuttle van will be coming to pick up my wife for her week-long trip to Italy. She’ll be gone about a week and a half, and I will be staying home with my son.

There will be much writing time claimed, much pizza eaten (and salad) and some small amount of computer games played. I hope to clear the final level of Swordplay Showdown.

By which I mean that I’ll be checking email, but not doing a lot of internet reading/socializing. At least, I don’t think I will.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

(Oh, and I did a “Take Five” piece for Suvudu. It’s funny. Check it out.

Sometimes you just have to walk away

Here I am at my computer, and what do I need most? To not be at my computer.

I’m refreshing my email inbox to search for new comments, searching for places to send review copies of Game of Cages, checking Twitter to see if anyone has re-tweeted the announcement that chapter 3 is online, refreshing the book’s Amazon.com page…

And you know what? I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to check the Amazon.com or B&N page again. I’m not going to do an Icerocket search looking for reviews to link to. I’m certainly not going to go back to the Random House page, sort all their sf/f books by “bestsellers” and search through until I find where my book lies. No. It’s a waste of time.

Any marketing I do now, today, will have a tiny effect. The most effective marketing I could do was finished months ago when I turned in the book. The rest is up to readers and fate and dirty stinking luck.

So! I have two more emails to write, then I’m going to step away from the computer. First, I’ll clobber some hapless sword-wielders on Wii Sports Resort. Then shower, vacuum, clean the kitchen, clean the bathroom, make some pizza dough (or pretzel dough–I haven’t decided). But I have to get the hell away from my computer for a few hours. Jesus!

Randomness for 8/10

1) Smart phone defeats hedge row maze.

2) Star Wars and Blaxploitation–how perfectly they fit together. The spoof trailer for Blackstar Warrior. Video.

3) How to quit your job. I don’t care if it’s fake. It’s awesome.

4) How to propose to your gamer girlfriend.

5) YA Dealbreakers. I don’t mind bad covers too much if the book comes highly recommended, but I don’t much care about vampires and I absolutely don’t read supernatural stories about rock stars of any kind (this isn’t as big a deal as it used to be).

6) Real life Yakuza review a Yakuza console game. Pretty damn interesting.

Randomness for 7/28

1) Mom creates tableaus to illustrate what she imagines her sleeping baby is dreaming.

2) Via Sherwood Smith: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. (added later: Yeah, this has been going around for the past couple of days, but I’m not going to yank it just in case someone here still hasn’t had a chance to check it out.)

3) Introverts unite! (quietly).

4) Poppy Z. Brite, Tim Wildmon, and The Home Depot. I’m so tempted to send (anonymously) a copy of CoF to the AFA so they can boycott me, too. I could use the publicity.

5) Random House and Andrew Wylie clash over ebook publication.

6) How self-absorbed people behave: political columnist writes open letter to his ex on her wedding day and reacts badly when he’s criticized for it.

7) And we mourn the end of an era: No more blowing up Michael Jackson zombies with your cornapult.

Randomness for 7/2

1) Wonder Woman trades in her star-spangled panties for actual pants (and a very ’90’s jacket).

2) “Officer, I recognize that woman! Her name is Selena Kyle!”

3) OMG. Promoted from a comment Rose Fox made: The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. I love it!

4) Et Cetera and Otherwise: A Violent Book Trailer. That won a Moby Award for Best Foreign Book Trailer and I laughed my ass off.

5) The other Moby Award winning trailers are compiled here… except for the one named “Least Likely to Sell the Book”–aka: the worst book trailer of the year. The author pulled that one off of YouTube, and produced this new, “improved” version of the trailer. And I swear, if this is the good version, I can’t even imagine that bad one.

6) Batman’s Greatest Tweets. Sample: “We’ll miss you, Jack Bauer. If you ever come out of exile, I’ve got a pair of green ankle shoes and a yellow cape waiting.”

7) What sf ideas does Rudy Rucker wish you were writing about?

Randomness for 6/29

1) A half-hearted defense of the Star Wars prequels. I agree with his assessment of the attitudes of the Jedi in the prequels, but I’m not convinced that Lucas himself recognized that it was problematic.

2) British stores told they can no longer sell eggs by the dozen.

3) The NY Post reacts to U.S. World Cup elimination.

4) I’m not one to link to music videos, but here’s The Go-Go’s circa 1984 (love the lighting) cross-dressing onstage and looking good doing it. And Belinda Carlisle sings the hell out of this song.

5) AT-AT afternoon.

6) An American woman in a German supermarket discovers an American ethnic food section. What foods do you think they consider American?

7) More evidence on the brilliance of Facebook users. The fan page for this author’s book has 700,000 fans, and he is sure none of them care one bit about reading his book. But damn, if even three percent could be convinced to buy a copy…

Gah!

Stupid, time-consuming video games and with their short term rewards.

I buy my video games used…

Most of the time, anyway.

I also rarely see movies in the theater (unless it’s something for my son) and I don’t belong to Netflix or Blockbuster so I don’t rent DVDs. When I see movies (with a few exceptions) they’re borrowed from the library. And yesterday I saw the rebooted STAR TREK DVD sitting there on the shelf, so I snagged it.

Let me say upfront that I’m not a Star Trek devotee. The original series was mostly good. The Next Generation was mostly good after it worked the kinks out. Voyager was a bore and Enterprise couldn’t hold my attention. My favorite out of all of them is DS9.

So, understand that I’m not going to be all yay or nay based on the changes to canon…

Hoo boy. People liked this? Spoilers in the rant below. more »

Five things for a Friday

1- You know what’s annoying? Being unable to find a link to an article that you wrote about in your own blog. [added later: found it!]

2- I have a brilliant idea for a multi-million dollar invention: the ultimate alarm clock. Here’s how it works. At the time you want to wake up, it uses orgone energy electromagnetic waves to stimulate the dream centers of your brain. You have a dream where you wake up after the time you were supposed to be at work, and the blind dream-panic wakes you up for real, even in the dismal hours of the morning. Multi-million dollar invention, I tell you.

3- In keeping with my usual computer game protocol, I captured Hill 400 in Call of Duty 2 earlier this week. Soon I can try out Prince of Persia. Maybe tonight. Or maybe I’ll watch movies. Or do both. It all sounds good, as long as my entertainments are all several years old and cheaply acquired.

4- Remember my previous post about stress and my recent inability to write? Well, on Wednesday night I heard Bill Clinton talking about the US World Cup victory over Algeria. He did sound seriously ill (I blame the vuvuzelas) but he praised the team’s “mental toughness.” To paraphrase from memory: Every high level competition, from a championship game to a big election eventually comes down to mental toughness.

I like that! I like “mental toughness” better than “discipline” because the latter sounds like a lot of hard work, but the former sounds like something you just have. I went to bed thinking about it, and woke up on Thursday morning trying to imagine myself as a writer who was also a tough guy–stress doesn’t get to me! I can sit down and do the work whenever I have to, just like a professional athlete! Professional!

Then I opened a book and started reading.

5- That book I mentioned in number four above? It’s The Ivory Grin by Ross MacDonald, and although I’m only halfway through it. Still, it’s FANTASTIC! Maybe what The Buried King needs is not some new mental attitude but a new mental model. Thank you, dead author!

6- Bonus sixth thing! I’m deeply annoyed that day job is too busy for me to read this article of social influence and obesity. Reading it at home is going to seriously cut into my time-wasting time.

Amazing coincidences!

So, Wednesday after work I discovered I couldn’t connect to the internet at home. This was annoying, because I have writer-type crap that needs doing, but hey, it happens. I called Qwest tech support and after nearly an hour and a half I was told they’d traced the problem to my modem. I was entering the username and password correctly to connect to the ISP, but the modem wasn’t retaining the info (or something). They could access my modem, but I couldn’t get the internet.

Obviously the solution was to buy a new one, which I did. It wasted an hour and a half (notice the trend) of my evening, but I went out and bought a new Qwest-compatible wireless modem. ($90!)

When I brought it home to install it, guess what? Same. Exact. Problem.

After another long call to tech support (you know how long it took) the guy informed me that, by amazing coincidence, my brand new modem had the exact same problem as my old one. AMAZING! Go back to Best Buy, I was told, and exchange it for another one. And see if you can get them to test it right there in the store.

And… fine. I don’t believe them, but fine. I’m not going after work today (because I have a life[1]) but I will be going first thing tomorrow. So long, most productive writing time of the week! I will have to reschedule you, because I have to fix my fucking internet connection.

And if this doesn’t work, Qwest is out. I’d hate to lose the email address I’ve had for years but I may not have a choice. The main problem is that I don’t have any other really good options. The cable ISP in my area is Comcast, and those bastards are the ones pursuing the lawsuit against the FCC about packet-slowing. To hell with them. What other choices do I have?

::Shakes fist at corporate tech support::

Best Buy provides the email address for the manager of the store I’ll be visiting tomorrow. I’m going to drop him a line to let him know what’s going on and why I’ll be there. I’m sure Gary Mylie will be overjoyed.

[1] Not really