Hiatus, Schmiatus!

Yeah, I know what I said.  And I'll be back on point come the first.  No foolin'.  But in the meantime, one of my heroes actually engaged in some man-splainin' a faux-pas*, like, I don't even fuckin' know how.  Well, I mean, I do.  I spotted it.  And, to his fully-deserved credit, he seems to have caught on and everything is looking great.  But I had some other things to say to our new friend, Austin Green, so I'm going to say them here on my own soapbox.  Here we go!  :)

* - EDIT:  Goddammit, I kicked myself over this all day.  On the way to work this morning, I realized that this wasn't actually man-splaining.  Man-splaining is when a man "explains" something to a woman (who often already knows what's being explained) in a condescending way.  That's not what this was.  The pointing out of man-splanation will often result in backpedaling, digging oneself deeper, getting defensive, and so on... some of which I saw, and then I went and affirmed the damned consequent because it looked kinda the same coming out the back-end.  So yeah.  Yoy my bad.  Sorry, Adam!

Hiatus

I wanted to do something, some kind of pun with like "HI-YAH!" or whatever, but it just didn't work out.  Too much of a stretch.  Those words sure look alike, but they don't sound very much alike at all.

Anyway.

I need a break.  I've been working at this book since, like, late September.  I'm just not feeling it right now.  I get home, and it's like, "Well, I could just bang something out," but I don't want to "just bang something out."  Batteries need to recharge.  Plus, locksmithing is hard, and when I get home, I don't want to think, I just wanna fuckin' veg out.

So I'm taking March off.  Writers go on sabbaticals all the time, right?  Right.  I'll see y'all the first of April.  No foolin'.

A Ray of Sunshine

Long couple of days at work.  Brain full of lock stuff.  Not feeling the "writing" vibe tonight.

Instead, I give you something my little sister CJ wrote:

Is it just me or does anybody else hate those posts that are like "LIKE, SHARE AND COMMENT IF YOU LOVE JESUS!...if you ignore though u will die a slow, painful and miserable death. Also the devil will take your soul and you will go to hell...YES hell!" Isn't life about being kind and giving to the community, not liking someones status.

I copied & pasted that directly.  Her words, exactly as they appear.  She is eleven years old.

I could not be prouder.  :)

101 Interesting Things, part fifty-three: Resettable locks!

Yesterday at work, I had an interesting and exciting opportunity come up.  During my downtime, I read trade magazines and practice picking locks (by the way, I think it's so cool that I get to play around picking locks when we have no customers!), and one of the articles in this month's Locksmith Ledger (or whatever the magazine was called) was on opening & servicing safe deposit locks.  It included instructions and pictures on various kinds of safe deposit locks, including resettable locks, which I didn't know existed.

Lo and behold, just a couple hours later that day, a customer brought in a lock that he had no key for.  It turned out to be a Sargent & Greenleaf resettable safe deposit lock (though it only had the one keyway).  So, because I'm all excited about that now, I'm going to give y'all a crash course on locks (using information that is freely available elsewhere on the internet, just so's I know I'm not giving away any trade secrets).

What would I tell teenagers about sex? A response to Forward Thinking.

I read over on Daylight Atheism (note to self:  update sidebar link!) that there's a new blog carnival on the 'tubes called Forward Thinking.  This month's prompt is, "What would you tell teenagers about sex?"

My first thought on the subject was, "Shit, I am the last person who should be advising teenagers about sex."  My second thought was, "Wait, I have a fourteen-year-old brother and an eleven-year-old sister.  I will probably be talking to them about sex at some point."  So I decided to get some thoughts together in some semblance of order, and here they are.

Jesus and Gender

I was totally planning on writing some Tooth and Claw tonight.  But as I lay in bed this morning, drifting in and out of sleep among interminable Snoozes with NPR talking at me, I had something of a dream.  I was in an academic setting, probably informed by whatever was on NPR, and I realized at some point that I wasn't actually going to be able to talk to people about this in an academic setting.  At least, not right then.  So I'ma talk about it here.

In my dream - and maybe, possibly on NPR, I was half-asleep and I'm not sure - they/we were talking about societal happiness and well-being.  In my head, regardless of the scenario, I rifled through a pile of half-remembered statistics and surveys, as well as multiple pieces of writing on the two subjects and how they seem to maybe be the same thing but really aren't.  I mean, to a certain point, happiness and well-being are correlated.  If you're in a truly shitty situation, nothing going your way, everything flushing down the tubes, you're not going to be happy.  And if you're on a hot streak, yeah, you're probably going to be happy about that.

It's the middle thing that's kind of the problem here.

OK, this is a little much. Even for me.

I'm trying to make Tooth and Claw be Like Reality Unless Noted, because that will make filming on location easier when I get a movie deal for it.  Ha!  Ha!  No, seriously, it's because the mood is best served by setting it in a world that's just like ours, only slightly off-kilter.  Tee-hee, still lying.  It's actually something of a behind-the-scenes homage to the playstyle of my gaming group, where we'd take real details from the real world (culled from our knowledge of the town or Google Maps) and then just overlay our campaign on top of it.  Jeez, I need to stop this.

OK, so all of those are partially true (or at least, in the case of the movie deal, earnest wishful thinking).  But the reason that actually gets ink on the paper, as it were, is that I am lazy and know nothing; and "the internet exists" means that a bit of on-the-spot research makes stealing details from reality way the fuck easier than inventing plausible details from whole cloth.

But sometimes, reality is a bit... shall we say, "generous."

Excuses!

I should probably mention that I'm on a road trip this weekend.  So there won't be an update until Tuesday at the earliest.  Y'all have a great one!  :)

Tooth and Claw: Alice Takes a Road Trip

Prologue, Words and Shadows, part two

Wednesday, July 4^th, 2012

                Alice sits at her desk, smoking a long black cigarette.  It had been a few days before she had been able to reach out to Jennie; something of an emergency had come up, trouble in the dreams of some of her fellow mages.  It was one of those things that seems to be nothing, then suddenly blows up in your face.  The Maestro had put her on the case, and it was shortly determined that there was a lesser demon trying to work its way into the world.  Life and spirit were Alice’s main concentrations, and she was something of a dabbler in fate magic as well, so she had been rather well-suited to tackle the problem.  Having put out that fire, she returned to the matter of Thomas’ missing hourglass, and put out a call to Fae Jennie.

                That was eight days ago, a week and a day, and Alice had a feeling that Jennie would be calling her today.  Her calendar was clear – her head, not so much.  It was brimming with questions and possibilities, slowly bubbling away on the backburner these past few days, and she hoped to have them answered soon.  Knowing Jennie, maybe not so soon, but there would at least be another bread crumb on the trail.

A True Work Conversation

My coworkers are a pretty bright bunch.  Generally.  I mean, it's hard to work on locks for a living, with all the mechanical and electrical work that it involves, while being dumb as a sack of hammers.  Some of my predecessors have been dumb as a sack of hammers.  They did not last long.

So when I hear someone say some shit, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.  "Oh, that's probably just how he was raised," I tell myself.  "Oh, she's from another generation," I think with a mental wave of my hand.  "Oh, I don't feel like getting fired for not being able to keep my mouth shut," is what's usually behind all that.  But sometimes... just... no.

Tooth and Claw: Words and Shadows, part two

Prologue, Words and Shadows, part one

                She spots Vernon after disembarking and turns in his direction without breaking her brisk stride.  Vernon spots her easily:  despite her black suit, she walks with the casual assurance of an experienced martial artist.

                “Vernon Christopher,” he says as she approaches, extending his hand.

                “Jones Kelly,” she replies, taking his hand and shaking it.

                “Any baggage to claim,” he asks.

                “No,” she says, adjusting the carry-on hanging from her shoulder.

                The Hunters leave the airport in Vernon’s car, a dark gray Lincoln.  Vernon takes an instant disliking to his new partner – something he can’t quite place about her eyes.  He studies her in small glimpses while looking this way and that as he navigates through the traffic.  Then he spots it:  as Jones tucks a lock of her shoulder-length black hair behind her ear, he sees a thin silvery scar encircling her left wrist.  As she folds her hands back in her lap, the scar is hidden by the cuff of her sleeve.  But now that he knows what to look for, it is unmistakable:  her hands don’t quite match.  Her left hand is the tiniest shade paler, the fingers a little more bony.  It’s a very good match, but not perfect.

                Vernon had heard of this before, but today was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes.  Hunters were garden variety homo sapiens, driven by vengeance or principle to war against the supernatural forces that threatened human civilization.  But the Hunters had one crippling disadvantage, which was that they had not gained dark powers by sacrificing their humanity.  Some seriously misguided Hunters (by Vernon’s judgment) had taken it upon themselves to even the odds by sacrificing their humanity in bits and pieces, to gain small amounts of the very tainting power they fought against.  Vernon found this to be the very height of hypocrisy and self-delusion – one does not extinguish the enemy by becoming the enemy.  Act like the enemy, when necessary; think like the enemy, when planning; infiltrate the enemy, when possible; but to become the enemy was to lose sight of why you were fighting in the first place.  It was worse, in a way, than simply joining the enemy outright.  At least the bloodsuckers and the dogs and the rest of them had the honest conviction to go all-out.  These monstrous abominations, no matter their technical proficiency, try to straddle the fence and just end up getting crushed in the middle.

Tooth and Claw: Words and Shadows, part one

Prologue, Whispers at the Window

Saturday, June 30^th, 2012

                Vernon Christopher stands in the Winslow-Lindbergh Regional Airport arrivals terminal, holding a placard that simply reads, JONES.  He had needed to think about this decision quite a lot more than he would have liked.

                Last night, he had received a terse note in his mailbox, hastily written:  KELLY, JONES.  W-L RGNL, UAL f718.  So he had to pick up KELLY, JONES at the airport; but KELLY, JONES would doubtless have no more idea how to identify him than he would have of how to identify KELLY, JONES.  So he decided to stand with a sign, as he’d seen done in movies.  He’d be wearing a suit, after all, and wouldn’t look out of place.

                But what to write on it?  Just KELLY might draw attention from all the Kellys who might be excited to get surprise limo service; just JONES could do the same for all the Joneses; KELLY, JONES would perhaps be indiscreet.  And how would he recognize this KELLY, JONES, anyway?  Was she a woman named Kelly Jones who had a mix-up in her personnel file?  Or a man, for that matter?  Or was this person actually named Jones Kelly – as someone with a given name easily switched with his surname himself, Vernon Christopher was sympathetic to the plight of this KELLY, JONES, whoever he or she was.