Tag: blogging

In which the good news isn’t

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

36004771.jpgSo, in theory, I got offered a job last Wednesday, which ought to be good news.  I had a company contact me out of the blue regarding a resume that I had posted on a job site and asking for me to come in and do an interview.  The actual job itself wasn’t something I might have gone for on my own– sales, generically– but I suspected I could be good at it, and screw it, job.

Two interviews and some new clothes later, I actually got offered a position, asked for a couple of days to discuss it with my wife, and then found myself in the odd position of realizing that I need to have my scam filters up while interviewing for a job.  Long story short: the position pays on pure commission, which is bad enough (I have had one commission job in my life, which I quit after my second shift by simply not showing up for my third) but the way the commissions are determined is… we’ll say shifty.

When the guy interviewing you says, during the second interview, “It’s like a pyramid.  Not a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid!” it should throw up some red flags.  And it did, but they didn’t really fully register until I got home and my wife looked up the company on some web job boards.  And at that point… yeah.  No.

So I gotta email this guy tonight or tomorrow and turn down an at-least-in-theory paying job when I haven’t been to work since October, which chaps my ass something fierce to have to do, but I should never have to use the phrase “at least in theory” when referring to the paying part of a job, and for this job I kinda do.

So, yeah.  Still doing this: anybody wanna hire me?  I’m good at stuff!

“Regular blogging resumes tomorrow,” he said…

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

drugsinhand.jpgHA HA HA HA HA

So, right.  I’ve changed medications, and I’m somehow still recovering from C2E2, and the side effects of both withdrawal from drug A and going on drug B are drowsiness, and the end result of that is that for about the third day out of the last four I got home from taking my son to school and fell asleep, today until two fucking thirty in the afternoon.

I am not a human being any longer, folks.  I am a bag of flesh and sloth-scented humours held together by exhaustion and spite.  I have literally never been as tired in my life as I have been this week.

And then a spring storm blew through, and knocked a couple of trees and a utility pole over in my parents’ neighborhood, and now Mom’s spending the night because they don’t have any power and for various reasons I won’t get into she needs electricity at all times, and it took a bit to get that settled, and the end result is that it’s 7:30 and I’m just now like oh right I have a blog.

I owe y’all a recap of C2E2; the short version is that I had a hell of a lot of fun and I’m not doing it again.  And I’ll talk about the job offer from yesterday, too.  For right now, I just sort of want to curl up and die, possibly after having watched an episode of Daredevil, but let’s not hold our breath.  That would count as a major accomplishment, after how this week has gone.

Blech.

Back soon, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Regular, non-exhausted, non-photographic business as usual will resume tomorrow.  Until then: I was just offered a job, and I have a big decision to make.

It’s Big Mega Hoopty-Doopty Tuesday!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

electionsMore primaries today!  Let’s wantonly speculate!  I’m not getting paid for this, so it doesn’t matter if I’m right!

  • The Republican race is what it is.  I hear Kasich might come in first in Ohio, with Rubio winning in fourth.  Whatever.  That race is their problem; I’m not worrying about it right now.
  • Now, obviously, I’m basing just about all of this on the polls, and the polls shit the bed last week in rather spectacular fashion in Michigan.  It will be very interesting to see if they’re useful today or not.  I suspect part of the problem (PART!) with Michigan was Democrats who thought the election was in the bag for Hillary crossing party lines to vote against Trump.  I’m fully aware that anecdotes are not data, but my own aunt did precisely that, voting for Kasich; I’m sure she was not the only one. There was also probably a real late surge in people either switching to vote for Bernie or committing late.  One way or another, I don’t expect the first effect to be as strong this time around so I’m suspecting the polls to reflect reality a bit more closely.  But we’ll see.
  • Also, keep in mind that the nature of polling guarantees that occasionally it’s gonna shit the bed.  99% chance of yes means 1% chance of no.  That ain’t likely but it’s still gonna happen once in a while.
  • That said, if I wasn’t looking at polls, I’d say Hillary was in for a sweep today.  The Democrats vote in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri, which are all underneath the currently 86.2% white threshold where Bernie does best– he’s only won two contests in states with fewer white people than Minnesota.  Hillary has won eleven.  Illinois is 77.7% white, Ohio 83.2%, Florida 78.1%, North Carolina 71.7%, and Missouri 83.7%.  Further, Hillary is from Illinois, so I’d expect her to do quite well there.
  • That said: right now it looks like Hillary is going to win Florida and North Carolina quite handily.  Ohio and Illinois are both leaning toward her but are closer, and Missouri looks to be in tossup territory.  Illinois surprises me.  Best guess:  most of the Dem votes in Illinois are going to come out of Chicago, obviously, and Chicago’s a pretty young town.  Hillary tends to win young black millennials, but Chicago may prove to be the exception here.  We’ll see.
  • Every single poll aggregate shows motion in Bernie’s direction lately.
  • Now, here’s the thing:  CNN and the rest of the idiots will pay attention to the number of states won here, but this is all proportional.  All of it.  If Hillary rolls up big margins in FL and NC and it’s close, regardless of the winner, in the other states, that means Hillary wins.  Bernie has a gap of about 220 delegates to close, and that’s without counting the superdelegates, who are still hugely in Hillary’s corner but will move if the momentum switches.  If Bernie loses two states big and ties or wins slightly in the other three, he still ends the night farther behind.  And we’re taking three big-delegate states off the map today.  Looking ahead, I see no chance that Bernie wins New York, so that leaves him Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey as states where he could potentially try and run up big margins to catch up.  The rest of the states don’t have the delegates to produce big swings in his way even if he wins them.  I don’t see how it happens.
  • But I am wrong all the time.
  • I just don’t think this will be one of those times.  The math really, really isn’t in his favor.  But we’ll see how today goes.

Wheeeee!

Memory lane

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

…so, remember how last time they changed my medication I spent a week asleep?

…yeah.

It’s Utterly Normal Wednesday!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Writing9 Comments

tumblr_inline_ny6d6eV4D51tyv8ib_1280I am being That Guy and I have commandeered a table at a Panera and spread out with my laptop and various other digital accoutrements.  Annoyingly, I have forgotten headphones.  I should have remembered headphones.  But staying at home all day every day is starting to seriously fuck me up and if Getting the Hell Out of the House means that I need to spend more time staring at my laptop in a coffeeshop and less time in front of my desktop, then fuck it, that’s what I’m going to do.

Super Tuesday baaaaasically worked out like I thought it would.  The only place where I was really surprised was Bernie winning Oklahoma, and Bernie winning a state that’s 93% white shouldn’t be surprising– I just basically forgot it existed and lumped it in with the rest of the south.  Seeing Cruz win Alaska after Palin endorsed Drumpf was weirdly satisfying.  The Republican race will stay the same until at least Florida.  We’ll see if Rubio keeps giving victory speeches after Drumpf beats him in his home state.  You’re not Walter Mondale, dude, and just winning Minnesota and nowhere else doesn’t look good on you either.

I’m getting really worried about Sunlight, guys, and unless there’s a mental breakthrough in the next couple of days I’m going to put the thing on hold and shift my attention to other projects– namely, Tales from the Benevolence Archives, which I can imagine having out by June if I push hard at it.  I wanted Sunlight done in time for C2E2.  C2E2 is in twelve days, I’m not yet at the 2/3 mark, and I’ve written not a single word in the last, I think, three weeks.  The manuscript simply isn’t working in its current form and I’m pretty sure it needs a page one rewrite, because the corner I’ve backed myself into is not going to be salvageable by regular edits.  There are bits of it that can be saved, I think, but right now the whole book is treading water on its way to book 3, and that’s not acceptable to me.  The book’s just not good enough in its current form, and I don’t think I can save it with an action-packed last third, because the way it’s currently structured an action-packed last third doesn’t even really make sense. Right now if I wanted to I could have the book done in 10,000 words, easily. There’s nothing wrong with a 55K novel, especially in the age of the internet where most of my sales are going to be ebooks anyway, but there’s lots wrong with a 55K novel where not much of anything  happens, and that’s about where we’re at right now.

I can even do the damn series as a duology if I need to– there’s nothing sacrosanct about the idea of a trilogy– but if I decide that books 2 and 3 need to be one book, I still need to do some serious rewriting, as I don’t want the book coming out at 100K words.  Skylights came out just over 80,000 words, and that’s about what I’d want the sequel to be.

And cross all of that with the fact that I’ve been too depressed to write well most days lately.  I think I may need to go see my doctor and get my medications adjusted, but that’s a whole other thing.  I need to get this shit under control (where “this shit” refers to basically any aspect of my life you might care to name) and I need to do it soon.  I’m hoping to get at least a teeny bit of good news on the job front next week, but I’ve thought that before and the world hasn’t come through yet.  We’ll see.

Writers out there: how many of you have had to completely bail out and redo a manuscript?  How many of you have actually pulled that move off successfully?

#Weekendcoffeeshare: Anniversary Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

newcoffee

If we were having coffee…

Shit, what are we doing having coffee?  I’ve got packing to do!

This weekend (well, tonight, specifically) my lovely wife and I are celebrating our 8th year of marriage and our 2nd anniversary.  (Think about what year and month it is.)  We are generally homebodies and so we decided when we got married that, February already being crowded with other gifty holidays that we were ignoring, we were going to make our anniversary not a big thing other than every 4th year when the actual date of our marriage rolled around.  So today we’re dropping the boy off to spend the night at his grandparents’ for the first time and heading off for an insanely expensive meal and a night at a casino.

I don’t gamble.  This ought to be interesting.  I have perused the menu of the place where we’re having dinner, as the meal is far more significant to me than the gambling, and have discovered that there is a $120 steak on the menu.

I may not be able to pass up the opportunity to pay a hundred and twenty dollars for a chunk of cow.  And, conveniently, our tax refund showed up this morning.

But: point is, there’s a lot to be done before then, plus the actual driving, which isn’t obscenely far but the weather’s been crappy lately.  So let’s slurp the coffee down; I gotta bounce.  I’ll post a hotel room picture tonight, I promise.

In which I used to like these

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

Snow day today, the kind where there’s no visible precipitation of any kind in the early-morning hours where school is cancelled, but it happens anyway because people look at the weather forecast and see this coming:

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 8.20.29 AM.pngThat’s heading northeast, so we’re getting the long axis of it.  Last night before I went to bed they were suggesting we’d get 12+ inches of snow during “Wednesday” and another 1-3 “Wednesday night,” but both of those estimates have been revised downward a bit since I went to bed.  Still all sorts of nasty coming, though; we’ll probably have a foot of snow by bedtime tonight.

At any rate, Hogwarts cancelled, so I’ve got the boy home with me, and it’s even less likely that I’ll get anything done today in what has already been a monumentally unproductive week.  My former district did not cancel, nor did any of the other big districts in the area, so they’ve decided to catch crap from getting the kids home inevitably late, because most of the bullshit today will be toward the end of the school day– there are some flakes falling right now but no accumulation, but it’s supposed to get genuinely nasty after noon.  It’s a no-win situation either way and I’m really glad I’m no longer required to either participate in or defend it.

(I’d have cancelled, if it were up to me.  Or at least started with a two-hour delay to get better information.)

Last night was a night heavy with politics; I watched (and live-tweeted) the entire Democratic town hall event and then went to bed once I discovered that the Nevada caucuses wouldn’t even start reporting results until after midnight.  It’s looking like the fascist has finally managed a clean win; this was the first contest where #2 and #3 combined didn’t blow him away, and in fact Rubio and Cruz together still lost, implying that either Nevada is stronger territory for him than most (which makes a lot of sense, given the number of casinos) or that Bush’s people mostly migrated toward him. I am beginning to come around to the idea that this racist hairpiece is going to win the nomination, if only because either Rubio or Cruz needs to drop out right now for someone to beat Trump and neither of their egos (Cruz’s in particular) will allow them to do that.

I continue to believe that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will beat this shitpile like a rented mule in the actual election.  Obama got the lowest percentage of the white vote of any winning candidate in history and still won resoundingly; white voters are a smaller portion of the electorate than they were in 2008 or 2012 and the asshole’s open, unapologetic, undeniable racism will get even fewer votes from people of color than Romney did.

This is the candidate you deserve, Republicans.  He’s what you’ve been working towards for 30 years.  If you’re horrified, maybe you ought to reconsider your affiliation, because courting the worst parts of American society has been the core mission of the Republican party for decades.  This is what happens.  You can’t pretend to not notice anymore.  This is the election where you either have to embrace the fact that your candidate is literally a fascist or work to burn your party to the ground and hope that you can build something that isn’t made of racism, ignorance and hatred from the ashes.