Alcoholics and workaholics do grow from the same seed, after all.

I? Am a creature of extremes. When I'm drafting, it means that I'm drafting: 3000-4000 words a day, every day, until the book is finished. (In this case, until the series is finished. I'm going to need one hell of a pitcher of margaritas when it's done.) That's it. That's what I do. Well, that and walk around muttering to myself and clutching a mug of tea to my chest like it's a baby monkey and I'm it's mother, but I honestly sometimes do that solely because it's raining and I'm trapped inside for the weekend.

Let's meander our way back towards the point. Writing a draft takes a very specific part of my brain, one that is disturbingly non-analytical and more than a little crazy. Editing, covers, the nuts and bolts business end of things, all require a logical part of my brain that just doesn't mesh with the creative side. I kept having to switch back and forth between those aspects of my brain today, and I'm feeling a little schizophrenic as a result.

Good things happened, though! 2200 more words on No Such Place, bringing us to a current total of 24000, or just under one-third of the way through, and substantive work on three different covers, one of which is for a book not yet even written. It requires a pool, though, and I have a policy of not torturing my models if I can at all help it, so it's good to get these things nailed down in advance. In addition, I figured out a compromise for Super ≠ Model that I might even like better than my original dream cover, all with the bonus of not killing this model! Killing them is even worse than torturing them, right?

Now. Off for tea. I solemnly swear that I will neither pet it nor try to name it.

It's a perfect day to swan dramatically about the moors.

Hasn't stopped raining and thundering since about six this morning, and I've actually had to turn on my heat. I don't think that the new Jane Eyre is showing in my city yet, or this would be good weather for it. (Oh, Jaime Bell, the things that I do for you.)

I was planning on seeing the newest Scream offering with a friend yesterday, only to be felled by a truly hideous sinus headache that was the harbinger of the storm wailing and stomping outside my window right now. A shame that our schedules won't align today for a second go at it, because I am so in the mood for a good Final Girl right now. In the meantime, I suppose I should, you know, write a bit and justify my existence or something (I've only done 700 words today, that's pathetic), but weather like this nearly sucks out your will to live.

The random thoughts one has at the end of a vacation.

I would really like to see a vampire-human-werewolf novel wherein the werewolf character, in response to the human character expressing an interest in them, blurts out something along the lines of, "We are different species, what is wrong with you, that is sick!"

THAT IS HALF A SERIES. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN.

Human Remains



Two books down, two to go. It's too fat in the middle and too lean in the last three or so chapters where I was deeply, deeply tired and ready to be done, so that's a pretty accurate word count.

I figured that I would write ridiculous idfic for the rest of the day as a reward. I edited instead. Workaholic, thy name is Me.

Oh. Oh, that's a "but for the grace of flying spaghetti monster" moment if there ever was one.

Please make a special note to not ever do this. The career-killing response to what was, all things considered, a fairly kind review and the dog-piling in the comments. I've bitched about bad reviews. I've giggled over the bad behavior of others. These are both normal human impulses that don't even make you a moderately nasty person.

But for the love of tiny, dyspeptic puppies, people, do it off the internet.

Talking about Sucker Punch

Mainly the fact that Sucker Punch was hideous, and Zack Snyder has a thing about rape that makes Frank Miller's thing about prostitutes look downright classy.

But there was a point in cinema, particularly horror, in which rape was viewed as a bad thing.  Rape/revenge films made a lot of money in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The only rape/revenge films that I see making money in the 2000s are either remakes (the pretty good Last House on the Left), or are films made to deliberately made to fit a 70s exploitation aesthetic which, ironically, is more socially just than films made to fit current priorities (the excellent Death Proof, which I urge everyone to watch, both for the fact that it's a damned engaging movie on its own merits and then also because Tarantino is actually saying a lot of tremendously cogent things about rape and rape culture that he manages to slide past without outright acknowledging, the very best way to teach).  I am alternately optimistic and wary about the upcoming I Spit on Your Grave remake, because there is little way that this particular film can be made without stating outright that rape is among the worst things you can do to a person without murdering them that doesn't dismantle the whole damned thing.

I have a lot of ~thoughts~ about the horror genre, both as a fan and from the bygone days in which I was actually an academic.  I laugh in the face of anyone who says that genre fiction cannot also speak to the human condition; good lord, I know it's cliched, but who did Shakespeare speak to if not the groundlings?  Rape/revenge films were big on the second wave of feminism because people were talking about such things, and they were acknowledging that they were wrong.  Part of the reason that I am a fan of horror as a genre and "genre" as a genre is because so few people take it seriously that you can slide all kinds of lovely, subversive details in there without anyone noticing.  Criticism becomes irrelevant in the vacuum in which no one gives a damn from the outset, and instead you are touching the very freakin' heart of what concerns a culture at that moment.  

In this culture within the USA, right now, rape/revenge films are irrelevant.  Rape films, as Snyder as proved three times now, make money.

This bothers me, guys and gals.  This bothers me a lot.

There are days in which the words sing, everything is easy, and you can see yourself cranking out a readable first draft inside of a month.

And then there are days in which you ask, without a trace of irony, if photographs work off of mirror images.

Both of these days were today, actually. It was strange.