The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I had an idea for a blog post today, and as soon as I remember what it was I’ll write it, but for now, be aware:
Allow the following to be a minor insight into my personality. This is a portion of my desk:
Take note: Finn, Rey, a Stormtrooper, Kylo Ren, and Phasma. That’s all the figures from this current film that I own; let’s not talk about the other movies. I bought all of these before seeing THE FORCE AWAKENS. Since then I’ve been considering demoting the Stormtrooper and Phasma to some other location in the house (or possibly, in fact more likely, a box somewhere) and I’ve been tossing around the idea of grabbing a Poe Dameron figure, since Poe is one of the few 3 3/4″ figures you can actually count on finding nowadays.
Just the other day it hit me: if I found a Poe, I could put him right next to Finn, and I could probably contrive a way to make the figures hold hands. And then it became undeniable: I had to have a Poe Dameron for my desk.
I had a few errands to run and found one at Target just now. This is what the Poe figure that matches the rest of these look like:
That helmet is molded on. It can’t be removed. And I didn’t buy the figure, because if I’m going to get into yaoi shipping on my desk, I’m damn well gonna be able to look both of the toys in the eyes while I do it.
(It has come to my attention while working on this post that there is another slightly more expensive Poe figure that is the same size, but not wearing a helmet. In fact, he’s wearing the same jacket my Finn is wearing, which is even better. So I’m now on a hunt for that one.)
And, while we’re talking about toys, I don’t own any of the Disney Infinity games, and in fact I’ve been doing my damnedest to not ever get sucked into it, but if I ever find this in a store I’m buying it anyway:
Because awesome.
That is all.
Let’s start by ripping the band-aid off: after spending the entire day convinced I was going to throw up at any moment, I went in to school yesterday afternoon after the kids left, resigned, and cleaned out my classroom.
I’m done. It’s over. I’m no longer a teacher.
(Five minutes of staring into space.)
I’m still in much the same emotional place where I was last night: part of me wants to call everyone I know (especially the teachers) and have a huge party, and the rest of me wants to crawl into a corner and cry for a week. I let a lot of people down yesterday. Knowing that didn’t prevent me from doing it, and I don’t precisely feel bad about it, but it’s definitely a thing I did and I’m cognizant of it.
I suspect what I’ve done is gonna hit me really hard sometime next week.
Until I have another job, I’m a full time writer. I’m still looking; nothing has changed since my most recent #Weekendcoffeeshare post except that now it’s Tuesday and I’m really hoping for that phone call.
Anyone wishing to provide me with financial support during my period of unemployment is welcome to buy and/or review a book, obviously. 🙂 I highly recommend the print editions!
(Have I mentioned that The Sanctum of the Sphere is eligible for a Best Novel Hugo this year? No? It is. And Warrior Jayashree and the Young is eligible for Best Short Story! Neither of them have a chance to win but it’s fun to play pretend sometimes.)
But book sales aren’t going to pay the bills– well, maybe they will, but I’m gonna have to abruptly get really lucky. Maybe I’ll get nominated for a Hugo somehow.
But.
Until then: this is a thing now, (he said, burying the lede) as of right now this exact second. The website is still bare-bones, but Prostetnic Editing Services is available for anyone who may happen to desire book, story, or essay editing services. At the moment I’m just offering copy-editing and formatting, but if you need something else, let me know. I work relatively cheaply! And since I don’t have a damn thing to be doing right now, turnaround is pretty quick too!
What major life changes have you made lately?
Just one drone-fired Hellfire missile. Just one. The military would never miss it, and I think it would teach an important lesson to the others who think like this sewing circle of Cheeto-fed halfwits about the utter futility of waving their dicks at people who have missiles.
At least when my people dress up like superheroes and go out in public we know we’re doing it.
But no. I’m a fucking filthy liberal, and part of being a fucking filthy liberal is that we try to recognize when our ids are doing the thinking and not the more rational parts of our brains, and then we tell our ids to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and go try and do the right thing. “Kill ’em all!” is very much the conservative reaction, or at least it would be if these morons weren’t white.
(I watch with interest all the folks who have been insisting there is never any other option than murder when your target is a black child with a toy; those people have all gone surprisingly quiet. Well, okay, it’s not surprising. At all. If these fucks were black or Muslim or– horrors!– both, half of Oregon would have been burned to the ground by now.)
So, as much as I admit that I wouldn’t shed any tears if it went another way, I genuinely do want the government to solve this peacefully. Luckily, from what I’ve seen and read so far, #yokelharam seems to be doing a pretty good job of putting themselves in jail already. There are obviously a lot of unknowns here, and I’m also obviously not a law enforcement officer so I am open to being corrected here or changing my mind once I hear new information, but honestly this doesn’t seem like a terribly difficult situation to resolve. I’m hearing, for example, that this is their “supply room,” although I’m keeping my eyes open to see if anybody claims this picture is a fake:
So… apples, oranges, a boom box, and what appears to be a giant bag of cat litter or, charitably, maybe wheat germ or oats or some shit. I assume, but don’t know, that the government has already blocked off the (one? two, maybe?) roads leading up to this place, so resupply isn’t happening. If they haven’t, maybe wait a couple more days to see if the honeypot attracts any more morons, then close the roads.
Then cut off the heat, the electricity, the phones, the water, fence the place off, fire some beanbags through the windows, and wait. Keep the place under constant drone surveillance; if one of them tries to shoot it down, well, that’s another federal charge once they quit. You wanna be really mean? There’s a lake very close by. It’s cold and rainy in Oregon right now. It’s gonna stay that way for a while. Spend an hour a day hosing the place down. Knock out another couple windows a day while you’re at it. See a generator outside? Shoot it.
And wait.
These chucklefucks aren’t going to be there for “years.” And there aren’t 150 of them, and if there are, they’re going to regret that quickly. Because then sanitation becomes a problem much, much faster. And even if that picture is a fake there is just no way they have enough supplies for that many people. Or the space.
They’ll be fucking each other by the end of the week, eating each other by the end of the second, and rotting in jail at the end of the third.
This isn’t worth the life of a single law enforcement officer of any stripe, and honestly it’s not worth any of their lives either unless they’re stupid enough to start shooting, in which case I refer you to the Hellfire missile option above. They’ve been pretty open in describing themselves as an armed insurrection even though the news media won’t (again: white) and since there are no hostages there’s not really a whole lot of room for innocent lives to be lost here. Did you drive many miles to go live in a hut with a bunch of overfed slack-jawed cosplayers? Well, that was dumb, wasn’t it?
And when they surrender, hit them with every charge you can think of, maybe make up a few for the hell of it, and toss ’em in the clink until the diabeetus gets ’em.
Which, let’s be honest, won’t be very long.
Okay, I know some of these are duplicates and others are ghost or spam accounts, but…
Wow.
If we were having coffee, we’d be talking about the same thing everybody else is talking about: it’s 2016! What have you been doing with your life for the last couple of weeks? What do you want to do with your life next year?
I’m not super interested right now in looking back at 2015. I blogged every single day last year, most days more than once; feel free to start with January 1 and work your way through. The year had high points and low points much like any other and was, I think, on balance more high than low despite the chaos of the last few months while I’ve been on medical leave.
I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions happen in January and are abandoned by February. However, if you ask me what my current goals are in life and I don’t have any, it means I’m probably deeply depressed. I always have a couple of goals that I’m working on; right now is no exception. Most of them are related to my writing and I’ve already discussed. The rest, right now, are job-related.
I want a new job. Preferably soon. Real soon. I’ve put a hold on stressing out about it over the holidays; there was no point, as the holidays are a deeply bad time to be unemployed. You have to be unemployed through the whole several weeks; all the folks with job openings, on the other hand, are looking at piles of resumes and going “Yeah, we’ll deal with that when we get back.”
(The exception that proves the rule: my brother recently moved to Illinois to be with his fiancee, and has had some trouble finding work too. He had a series of interviews last week in rapid succession, and when the third interview in three days was “go downtown, talk to this person, and then do the paperwork for your background check” I told him he had the job and to not worry about it. Why? Because they pulled in teachers over winter break to interview him, and they did three interviews in three days, and that means they’re in a huge damn hurry to get the job filled. I was right. Most of the jobs I’m applying for are not jobs that are going to lead to death or dishonor if they’re not filled this week.)
Well, at any rate, tomorrow’s Monday, so everybody will be back. My suspicion is that every office on Earth will start with a horrible three-hour meeting and then 80% of the people at work will spend the rest of the day looking around their desks, bleary-eyed, and trying to remember their passwords, and that therefore the earliest any “Hey, come interview with us!” phone calls could possibly happen will be Tuesday.
I am desperately hoping to get a phone call on Tuesday, especially for one particular job that I applied for the week of Thanksgiving and was explicitly told not to hold my breath about until after New Year’s. We’ll see, I guess.
At any rate, I’m going insane over here and I need a new job. So that’s goal one, even before any writing stuff happens: get a damn job.
I kinda feel like that’s enough for right now. How about you? What are you working on right now?
Have I actually put this on the blog yet? No? Yes? Well if I have you get it again:
Let’s talk about George R.R. Martin.
I’ve been open, repeatedly, about what I think about the Song of Ice and Fire books. I think the first one is one of the greatest works of fantasy ever written and the series has gotten steadily worse with each book. The first one was good enough that it took four books to get to “bad” with A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons was so bad that frankly I don’t even really care when The Winds of Winter comes out.
(Disclaimer: GRRM is a better writer than me, and I cannot do what he does. I’m going to be comparing myself to him a fair amount in this post. This is true regardless of what I think of what he’s done with the latter ASoIaF books. Clear? Good.)
George just announced on his LiveJournal that no, The Winds of Winter won’t be out before Season Six of the television series starts in April– that he’s already blown two deadlines and that he needs “months” more to finish the book. He hints but does not directly state that it would probably take three or four months from the moment he turns the book in for it to hit shelves. One way or another, mid-April’s not happening.
A couple things about that.
First, let me repeat Neil Gaiman’s take on this: George R.R. Martin is not your bitch. He is still not your bitch. You’re allowed to be disappointed that the book isn’t here yet. That’s fine. You want to do a thing and you’re not able to do it yet. It’s okay if you’re disappointed.
That’s where it ends, though. I’ve already seen way too many people hinting or outright stating (assholes tend to not be especially subtle) that George R.R. Martin did X last year, and that instead of doing X he should have been working on his book.
Fuck you, if you think that way.
The thing is, I know exactly where the guy’s coming from. I was really, really hoping to have Sunlight ready for C2E2 in late March. It’s still possible, mind you, but it’s getting less and less likely every day. I know what it’s like to have a deadline and blow it because the words aren’t coming. And I suspect that Martin’s and my methods are not terribly different because of the way he describes working on TWoW in the post– he is not a word-count-every-day type of guy, because some days those words are not going to happen because what is in your head is Wrong and no wording is going to happen until Wrong becomes Right. He is absolutely not working on this book every day and he doesn’t fucking have to be. I haven’t written a single word of Sunlight in a couple of weeks because 1) I’m at a critical part that I need to get right and 2) I wrote a short story and 3) I’ve been the kind of busy that doesn’t allow me a lot of headspace for other stuff.
If I were GRRM, somebody might point at #2 and get on my case. How dare you write a Jayashree story when Sunlight isn’t finished!
Well, I wanted to write a Jayashree story, and Jayashree was what the Create-O-Matic in my brain was working on at the time, and shut up, I’m not your bitch. Hell, I’m juggling two different series right now, and there’s at least one more rattling around in my head. I’m not remotely famous enough that people are getting mad at me for working on one and not the other, but if/when one of them hits? It’s gonna happen. And I suspect that I will not react with calm equanimity when it does.
But what about the TV show?
Fuck the TV show.
No, seriously, fuck it.
I know George doesn’t feel that way; he says in the piece that he feels like he’s letting the show’s producers down. He shouldn’t. I’ve said this before, too: what they should do for the next two ASoIaF books and the Game of Thrones TV show is just never talk to each other again at this point. Let the TV show end the story its way and let George end it his and let the fans argue about how things really should have gone. That’s not the choice they made, though, and everybody wanted the book out before the TV show, and oh noez the TV show will spoil the books now!
Deal, chirren. Y’gonna be okay. At least now there’s something to spoil; one of the most tiring things about this show (which I’ve watched maybe a couple of episodes of) is that motherfuckers are insisting that it’s still possible to spoil something that happened in a book that came out thirteen years ago. So far the show seems to diverging from the books mainly just to add more rape. I can live without it, I think. You still get the story, or some version of it, you just get it in a (maybe) different way than you used to. Suck it up, Buttercup, you’ll be fine.
Here’s the other alarming thing: George R.R. Martin is 67 years old. And, honestly, after reading that post and getting stressed out myself over the borderline depression and stress leaking through the words, I halfway think he ought to wait until the show is done before he puts any more effort into these damn books. I’m worried about him, and not in an oh no my story might not get finished!!! sort of way, but in a he’s human and holy shit does the stress seem to be getting to him sort of way. Now, George has already expressed his feelings on the folks worried that Brandon Sanderson will be writing A Dream of Spring:
But … goddamn, George, you have proven your shit by now. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t liked the books lately. You’ve earned the right to fucking relax and I’m pretty sure the guy left writing for the money behind a while ago.
Fuck these folks. Write this book the way you want, how you want, as fast as you want, or, hell, not. No more stressing out about fucking HBO or people who watch TV, and sure as hell no apologizing to us again.
People have been reminded plenty of times that George R.R. Martin is not our bitch. But this is the first time I’ve felt like he needed to be reminded of it.
…anybody needs me, I’m just gonna keep this on loop all day: