I would not have expected that hearing about the death of Rowdy Roddy Piper would hit me quite this hard. But it has. I’m genuinely upset right now.
Is it too much to hope that he’s saying that to St. Peter right now?
Month: July 2015
In which that’s not fair at all
So, see that fortune cookie in the post before this one? It’s from yesterday. We had Chinese last night.
I’m going through the blog in search of material for Malumba right now.
Aaightden
It’s been interesting, over the last several days, going through literally every single post of my previous blog in search of material for Searching for Malumba. My previous blog started in 2004 and finally petered out in 2009 or so, with a brief revival before moving to this space a couple of years ago.
I was really really angry during those years. Like, all the time. This isn’t a revelation to me, mind you; it was the Bush years, and I have not forgotten what those years were like, but getting the compiled output of my brain for five straight years of that nonsense– plus a year or so of startled relief toward the end after Obama’s election– all dumped into my brain at once has been a little sobering. I also had a horrible job for a good chunk of that time that didn’t help at all. Right now I’m just compiling these posts, but once I start actually rewriting and editing I will be removing a lot more profanity from the earlier posts than I will from the newer ones.
(I won’t be removing all the profanity, mind you, which will make my book a bit atypical in the “teacher memoir” genre. Most of those books are sanitized for the delicate sensibilities of the elderly kindergarten teacher. I will not be doing that. My policy on profanity for The Benevolence Archives has always been to remove about half of it on second pass, and I’ll be following more or less the same policy for Searching for Malumba. I’m considering putting a parental advisory sticker on the cover. I need to find out if that image is copyrighted or not.)*
Actually, speaking of copyright, the other thing I need to do is contact William Carlos Williams’ estate and see if I can get permission to reprint This is Just to Say in the book, because one of my favorite pieces is about that poem and it won’t work if I can’t actually include the poem. I’d quote it, but it’s only about 50 words long, so “excerpt” becomes “reprint half of it” really quickly.
Anyway. The image, in case you’re wondering, was one of my favorites from that time. I have no idea if I found it that way or if I added the speech bubble, but either way I cracked up and immediately saved it once I found it.
I’m starting to Sunday a bit, I think. I haven’t gotten a single callback for an interview all summer despite applying for several jobs that I’m perfectly qualified (if not actually ideal) for. I’ve told my principal I’ll be back at school on Monday; the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff we ordered at the end of the school year is currently strewn in boxes throughout the building and it will take at least a week to get through everything in anything resembling a coherent fashion. I still have one solid chance at a position that will keep me out of the classroom but I don’t know how much I should get my hopes up, especially since it comes with its own baggage anyway.
If I get the other job I intend to keep looking for other work, because it’ll be a job I can quit midyear without screwing anything up too badly. If I’m in the classroom… I don’t know. My wife insists that I need to keep looking even if I’m teaching. I don’t know if I can quit on a group of kids partway through the school year. And you never know; I used to like teaching quite a lot, and I’ve been reading lots of stuff about liking teaching. It might end up being a good year. I might not want to leave. But one way or another this has to be my last year with this district. Cold reality is starting to creep up in a way that has nothing to do with me and I need to be gone before all the rats flee the ship.
Actually, that’s not true. I still love teaching, if by “teaching” you mean “helping other people to understand things.” It’s everything else about teaching that I hate. All the non-teaching stuff is awful and gets worse every single year. Entertainingly, the IDOE is commissioning some sort of group to figure out why nobody seems to want teaching licenses in Indiana anymore. It’s been fun, because every article I’ve seen about it has been swarmed by teachers going “Are you kidding? You need to ask?”
The reason no one wants to teach in Indiana anymore is that the laws and policies passed by the Indiana legislature over the last dozen years or so are having their intended effect. This is exactly what they wanted, and no one anywhere has any right to pretend to be surprised.
So. Yeah. Plenty to do today; I just need to decide if I want to focus on fiction, nonfiction, getting my head back on straight, or getting my house back under control. Only a few more days before my time gets substantially restricted again.
Whee!
(* Answer: No! It’s basically just text and as such is ineligible for copyright. At least according to Wikipedia. So I probably will be including it, because doing so entertains me.)**
(** Slightly more complicated than that, but it still looks like it’s free so long as I file the proper paperwork.)
Blech.
My knees declared war on the rest of me last night as I was trying to grout the floor in the bathroom. I had actually bought knee pads for the occasion but apparently my legs are bigger than I thought they were and even the XL size were just big enough to technically fit, if by “fit” I mean “be incredibly painful, and not solve that glass-marble-pressing-into-the-side-of-my-kneecap thing that’s been happening lately.”
I took enough ibuprofen to kill a horse before I went to bed last night, and then refused to even entertain the idea of getting out of bed today before four digits were visible on the clock next to me. Then the power went out in my neighborhood, rendering me unable to do basically anything I’d wanted to do with my day at all, since the bathroom lacks windows and external light.
So I sat around and read on my Kindle, finishing Katherine Lampe’s The Unquiet Grave in the process, a book that I five-starred on Goodreads upon finishing it and which I’ll talk more about later.
Bathroom will be finished soon. You’ll get pictures then. No more until it’s done, or at least this phase is done. This phase doesn’t include lighting, though, so the bathroom’s still gonna look a bit weird until we get that fixed.
Other than that, I’m taking a mulligan on today. Hopefully tomorrow will be less filled with pain and more productive.
A couple more notes
(No, that’s not the cover; I heard y’all. But it’s a decent placeholder for right now.)
Spent my morning finishing off the rather lengthy process of culling the Teacher Posts from Blog Previous. I had initially thought that Malumba would come in around 75000 words; after the first round– and including nothing from this site, to say nothing of original material, and there probably ought to be some— I’m at 83000 words.
Now, this is just the first cull. There’s going to be a second phase where I decide to eliminate a lot of the stuff I just dumped into Scrivener. And about 1/3 of those 83000 words are “fuck,” so at least some of those probably ought to go. But damn. You may not have noticed, but I tend to talk about teaching a bit around here, and I feel weird letting the book abruptly just stop in 2012, especially since I wasn’t writing much in 2010 and 2011 and so those sections of the book are really sparse.
What I’m getting at is that this book might end up a bit longer than I had initially intended. Which, whatever; the ebook is still gonna cost $4.95 (or maybe less) and I doubt it’ll make a ton of difference in the cost of the print edition. But man. This could be a pretty long book.
(Next step: going through this blog, then figuring out how to organize this mess, then actually editing/rewriting everything. Whee!)
A couple notes
I had a good idea for this morning’s blog post before I went to bed last night, but it’s completely gone now. So I’ll settle for pointing out that all of my books, including THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE, are now live at Smashwords as of this morning, and SANCTUM should be percolating out to Barnes and Noble and iBooks and everywhere else over the next few days. So if you use some sort of e-device other than a Kindle for your reading, you can get whatever format you like over there now!
Also, I have a comics piece up at Sourcerer this morning, so go check that out too. I have grouting to do this morning (after I’ve gone out and bought kneepads, which needs to happen first) and I’ll try and put up a post with actual words after that.
Review: James S.A. Corey’s CIBOLA BURN. Sorta. Maybe not. I dunno.
James S. A. Corey, who is actually two people but who I’ll be using the singular for anyway, has been costing me sleep lately. I gobbled up Cibola Burn in something like three or four chunks, and at least twice ended up staying up way past when I’d normally want to be asleep to keep reading. I finished the first hundred pages this morning before getting out of bed. Like, my morning piss had to wait.
It’s that kind of book, and one of the things that is interesting to me about it is that this really is the kind of book I want to write. I’m not interested in writing, say, Anathem, even though I thought Anathem was a great book. I want to write books that you finish in a day and a half because you don’t want to put them down. Anathem is complicated and multilayered and needs, at least for me, to be read slowly. I like slow books, I just don’t want to write them. And Cibola Burn is anything but a slow book. It’s pretty much a roller coaster ride from the jump.
(It also touches on a theme I’m working with for Skylights and Starlight, which was kind of frustrating– I have to wall off parts of my brain whenever stuff like that happens so I don’t end up inadvertently borrowing from it– but that’s my problem, not the book’s. That said, I’m really glad Skylights came out before I read this.)
You can sum the plot up in a few sentences: humanity has, through the events of the last three Expanse books, gained access to worlds outside our solar system for the first time. Speculators and settlers have raced ahead of the law to claim these worlds while governments back in our solar system argue over who owns rights to what. When the corporation that thinks they own a planet comes into conflict with the people who got there first, hijinks ensue, and the crew of the Rocinante are called in to mediate.
And then all sorts of shit happens, most of it life-threatening.
I loved the hell out of this book while I was reading it; I’ve read two Expanse books this year (I’m a book behind; the fifth is already out in hardcover) and both of them have been five-starred and put on my shortlist for the 10 best books list later in the year. My trouble with this one is that I’m finding that now that I’m done with the roller-coaster gotta-read-one-more-chapter rush, it’s already kind of sinking a bit in my estimation. There are a couple of problematic characters, for one; the villain is a bit too one-dimensional even though Corey does his/their best to have him explain his motivations, and there’s this one female character who…. whew.
Lemme put it this way: reading last night, with my wife just having turned off the light next to me, I woke her up to tell her she had to read all four of the Expanse books so that I could hear her reaction to the way one specific subplot involving this character was resolved. She’s awful, and she’s not awful in a good way at all, she’s awful in a “have you spoken with any women since the 1930s?” sort of way. What’s especially weird is that the series features a number of awesome women already so it’s difficult to understand how this one went so sideways.
But. One hell of a ride. And the weaknesses are of the sort that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to them until after I finished the book, because must finish the book.
It’s a five-star right now. We’ll see how I feel in a week.
What I have waiting for me
Had to pop into work for a couple of hours this morning to deal with something minor that came up. While I was there I went to check on all the stuff we ordered at the end of June.
I… uh… I have a busy August ahead of me. Because this is all my problem. Not pictured: the boxes in the principal’s office and the boxes around the corner from the first picture.
I’m still not going in until August. Can’t make me.
This bottom picture is all the labels on the crates in the picture above.
Mmmkay.
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