Tag: blogging

In which I make a Brief Observation, one perhaps Better Suited for Twitter than WordPress

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

…writing a wedding ceremony is hard.  Like, not in fiction. An actual wedding ceremony that I will officiate.

If I wasn’t afraid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work5 Comments

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A few variations of the hashtag were floating around Twitter this weekend: what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

It’s an interesting question, and it’s been rolling around in my head for a few days, because it’s one of those things that I don’t really think Twitter is well-equipped to discuss.

Here’s what I’ve realized: on the macro level, at least, I’m already doing what I would be doing if I wasn’t afraid.

I’m writing.  Right now being a writer is my job.  We just started filling out financial aid paperwork for next year at Hogwarts, and one of the first things it asks is the father’s occupation.  There’s actually a box to click on to indicate unemployed.  I went back and forth with my wife for a couple of minutes and then typed “Self-Employed (Author)” in the box.

I did not click “Unemployed.”  I want, ultimately, to be a full-time writer.  And right now, that’s what I am.

Here is the punchline, of course: getting what I want is terrifying, and if I was offered a stable full-time job tomorrow I would take it in a second.  Because doing exactly what I would do if I had no fear is not, at the moment, contributing to my family’s well-being at all, unless you count the sizable tax refund we’re getting at least partially because I lost so much money playing at author last year.

So: I’m doing what I would be doing if I wasn’t afraid.  And I am afraid.  And it gets worse every time I do a large-scale job search (several times a week) and it gets worse every time I apply for a job that I’m perfectly capable of doing well and don’t even get an interview.

(Side note: I can understand asking for a college degree in a specific field if the job is for a 22-year-old.  I’m pushing 40.  I hate to break it to y’all but my college degree from eighteen years ago really doesn’t predict much about what I’m good at now.)

But anyway.  What would I do different?

I can only think of a few things, really.  I’d look more closely into advertising.  I haven’t shelled out money for, say, BookBub promotions or Kirkus reviews because I literally cannot afford to guess on these things.  I need to know that I’m going to be making back more than I’m shelling out or I can’t do it.  Because I’ve got a decent financial cushion right now, but I cannot afford to spend any of it frivolously because it has to last until I have more money coming in.  And thus far there has been nothing to give me any encouragement on the job front.

So, yeah: If I wasn’t afraid, I’d put more money into putting my books in front of the faces of other people, and I’d be more willing to experiment if I had a chance to do that.  If I wasn’t afraid, I’d probably have a membership at the Y, since I have time to swim again– and I don’t have, because the $60 a month is not something I want to get tied into right now.

If I wasn’t afraid, from the outside, my life would look exactly the same as it does right now, though.  That’s the kicker.

I just wouldn’t be trying to change it.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Annoying Toddler Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories11 Comments

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If we were having coffee, we’d be doing it in short-sleeved shirts.  I don’t know if the sudden warming trend is a Midwestern phenomenon or if everybody’s seeing a spike in temperatures yesterday, but my yard was covered in a few inches of snow on Thursday and by the time my wife got home from work yesterday it was ALL gone and now the universe is made of mud.  We literally went from 20s to 60s in a matter of a few days.  And the zoo’s open today!  It’s going to be insanely crowded, but we’re going anyway.

Also a fun feature of yesterday’s weather: insane winds.  I spent all day working in the office and waiting for a tree to fall over, and the winds managed to rip a shingle off the roof, which I’m not completely sure how to fix.  Plus I don’t know how much weight your average roof is okay to handle (the Googles will probably help with this) and so I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to go up there myself to check it out.  No trees down, though, at least not near me.

(Considers Googling “Am I too fat to go on the roof?”)

If we were having coffee, I might kvetch about parenting a bit.  Tell the truth: how many of you have had the urge to bark the words “You’re four, what the fuck do you know?” at your kids at least once?  Because I was just informed that blueberry juice exists by a very small person with the unshakeable confidence of a serial killer.  And you know this how, person who can’t read?  Don’t get me wrong: I like four way more than I liked three, two, one, or especially zero.  But dammit boy I know better than you so shut the hell up.

(NOTE:  I am reasonably sure all kids do this, and one way or another this is a turnabout-is-fair-play moment.  One of my earliest memories is barking “It’s a sword holder!” at a friend of my mother’s who had just innocently tried to teach me the word scabbard.  This is the shit I’m talking about.  I’m sure all the parents have encountered it before.)

The plan for this week:  back to Sunlight, which got put aside so that I could frantically blast through writing a Benevolence Archives story that grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go, and make some damn headway for an anthology story that I committed to months ago and have made a shamefully low amount of progress on.

Also maybe get a job.  That would be nice too.

How’re you?

Annoyingly happy baby is annoyingly happy

On By Luther M. SilerIn WorkLeave a comment

sleepbaby.jpgI have effectively taken this week off from any form of humanity.  I’ve been in bed before 9 three days running and (I think) four out of the last six, and I basically spent all day in bed yesterday.  No substantive work of any kind outside of one blog post got done.

Well, okay, I managed to go and get fitted for my suit for my brother’s wedding in June, but that was more an extended exercise in humiliation than getting something done.  I applied for a job on Monday.  Nothing else.

On Tuesday I damn near burned the entire concept of “Luther Siler”– which, remember, is a pen name– to the ground.

The “spend eight hours a day alone” thing is really starting to get to me, is what I’m saying here.

Today, I’ve got the boy with me all day, because he’s got today and Monday off from school.  So, on the one hand, there’s virtually no chance that any writing or productive work other than this post is going to get done.  That’s bad.  On the other hand, I’ll have him around to keep me out of my head.  That’s good.

I gotta get a job, people.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: White People edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

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If we were having coffee, I’d brag for a bit about my insane performance at trivia night last night.  I am smart and know a lot of stuff, but success at a trivia competition tends to be at least partially a function of the luck of the draw, because the categories are so critical to how you do.  I’ve only done these three times, but the previous two I wasn’t terribly useful because the categories were all in my bad spots.  This trivia night?  Ten categories, four of which were “David Bowie,” “Star Wars,” “Movie Quotes,” and “The 1990s.”

I kicked every bit of the ass, is what I’m saying.  We were tied for first place, only missing one question out of the first 70, until the “Super Bowl” round happened, and our one sports guy had virtually no backup.  Then there was the “Indiana History” round, where we missed a couple of questions we shouldn’t have because of team miscommunication, and we ended up in 4th place out of about 50 teams.  So, still, not bad, but we literally missed seven of our eight questions in two rounds.  

Also badass: the tiebreaker is predicting how many points your team will get right. I campaigned hard for 92 at the beginning and lost.  Our final score?  92.

Other than that, I refer you to this post from 2014, because the experience was basically identical, right down to hearing someone call for Ray Lee Ray and looking around and having the incredibly rare and insanely problematic thought my god I’m the only black person in the room float through my head.

I am not a black person, obviously, and I should never be thinking such things.  However, I suspect that were things like Trivia Night graded on a curve, I would be Yaphet Kotto.  Because holy shit are these things white.

The cheesecake went over quite well, by the way.

Speaking of sports: I understand that the Super Bowl is today, and it’s entirely possible that if we were having coffee that subject might come up.  I did not watch the Super Bowl last year, and as a result I missed seeing Missy Elliott live.   This year, Beyoncé is performing, and the rumor is she’ll be performing the single she dropped yesterday.  I will not be repeating that mistake.  Let’s take a moment:

(Will that work?  I dunno.  It doesn’t appear to be available for embedding on YouTube.)

(Holy shit!  It looks like it worked!)

At any rate, prior to going to the trivia night I’d been listening to and watching that  over and over again, and if there’s any chance that that song is getting performed live at the Super Bowl I’m ferdamnsure gonna be watching.

The fact that I’d been watching that over and over again– and, more importantly, watching the reaction to it on Twitter– might also have had something to do with the cultural whiplash upon arriving at the Snow Folk Palace later that evening, by the way.

So, yeah.  Are you having people over for the sportsenation?  Tell me what you’re cooking.

 

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Vidya Gaemz edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Stories7 Comments

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If we were having coffee, I’d be grateful: it would mean I was sitting down and out of the house and talking to an adult who is not my wife.  I love my wife dearly, don’t get me wrong, but this “unemployed/full time author” thing means I speak to no adults other than her on a typical day, and I miss contact with grown-ups.  Hell, I’m even starting to miss contact with kids, as the only one of those I ever see is my own son.

Yes, fine, I admit it, I’m starting to miss certain aspects of teaching, and all aspects of having a job.

You know what else I miss?  Video games.  I’m hoping you’re a gamer, because I kind of want to talk about them.  When winter break rolled around and I stopped having uninterrupted blocks of time during the day because the boy was around, I stopped playing Fallout 4, and I haven’t been back to it since.  I have three or four games on my iPad that get a lot of attention, but I just don’t seem to be able to carve out time for console gaming any longer (winter break has been over for nearly a month, remember) and when I do whatever I’m playing inevitably pisses me off somehow.

An example: I just heard from someone on Twitter that she bought The Witcher 3, a game I’d previously decided not to bother with, and she had to download twenty gigabytes of patches and updates before actually getting to play:

Which … holy crap, I’d never even fucking play the thing.  That would literally make me so angry that I’d abandon the very idea of playing the fucking game.  (Think I’m kidding?  I’ve done it before.)  I cannot properly express how much I hate what has happened with this generation of consoles.  I mean, that’s, what, eight hours of downloads, and who the hell knows what kind of shit your cable company pulls afterwards if you’re with the wrong people.  Bah.

For someone who spends ridiculous amounts of time sitting in front of his computer, you’d think computer gaming would be a viable use of my time.  Also no, despite being able to name several games off the top of my head that I’d like to be playing or that I actually have on my computer and have never actually opened.  Why?  I dunno.  I just don’t.  And I miss it, but despite having loads of free time and the means to be doing whatever I want, I’m not doing anything about it.

So I’m hoping you do, and we can talk about the games you’re playing, so that I can live vicariously through you.

The end.

On that job hunt

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

derbs.png.jpegA few months ago I sent out a flurry of applications for work-from-home, set-your-own-schedule types of jobs.  One of them was doing background checks on people who are trying to get security clearance to work for the federal government.  It didn’t look like something that would be super fulfilling as a life goal, but my mentality at the time was basically fuck it, apply anyway.

Forward to the end of January, yesterday specifically, and I get an email from these people, informing me that I’ve passed the first stage of screening (which apparently just involved reading my resume and cover letter) and need to take a couple of online tests as the next stage.

Tests?  ‘Kay.  Sure, why not, and I was stuck on the manuscript anyway so I needed something else to do.  The tests turned out to be childishly easy once I figured out what was actually going on; the first was a Flash replica of a Windows desktop and they asked me to perform several basic tasks like “attach this to an email,” “delete this file,” “rename this file,” and things like that.  They allotted fifteen minutes, I was done in five. You get to make one mistake on each question before you fail it, and I made a mistake on the very first question because I didn’t quite get what was going on (if they want you to open the Start menu to open a program, and you click anywhere other than the Start menu, that’s an error) but I was perfect from then on.

The second test was literally “write these three emails.”  The first was explaining a policy to an employee, the second was giving directions to a place to a job seeker, and the third was informing the staff of a mandatory meeting.  In each case they gave me a bunch of details they wanted me to include but otherwise let me write the message as I saw fit.

I resisted the urge to make the second email dude, here’s our address, if you can’t figure out a way to get directions in 2016 other than bothering me for them you don’t get the job.

I got another email late last night informing me that I had passed Stage Two and asking me to email them several times in the next few weeks where I would be available for a 30-minute phone interview.  Included in that email was a description of the training process for the job.

Which is three months long, full-time, mostly out of town, and unpaid.  And, furthermore, if I were to complete the three-month unpaid training and not spend a year in the job,(*) I would have to pay them for the training.

They will not be receiving a list of times to call.

The really sad thing is, that entire story legitimately represents the closest thing to good news on the job front I’ve gotten lately.  Whee!

(*) And if you thought to yourself I bet they haven’t said how much the job pays, you get a cookie, because no, they didn’t.

#WeekendCoffeeShare: Pop Culture Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Stories3 Comments

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If we were having coffee, I’d likely be humming a Bob Marley song to myself, or possibly Pon de Replay, which, okay, I recognize that Rihanna isn’t Jamaican but I can’t help what my brain does.  I just finished– as in literally ten minutes ago– Man Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James, a 700-page book containing far more than seven killings.

Probably 2/3 of the book is in Jamaican patois, which means that if I get through the entire conversation without the word bumbacloth or, God forbid, pussyhole falling out of my mouth, you should consider yourself lucky.  I’ve read more Jamaican profanity in the last four or five days than I will encounter in the entire rest of my life, and it’s sorta infected my brain.

Feel free to ask me if I liked it; I’ll trail off after a few seconds and change the subject.  I understand why it won the Booker Prize, but I don’t think I liked reading it at all. So… three stars?  Four?  Fuckit, I dunno.

But, yeah, let’s talk about movies and TV and stuff.  I still haven’t seen Force Awakens a second time yet, and I want to, and the trailer for Suicide Squad that just came out made me all sorts of excited about that, which surprises me.  Deadpool is going to be awesome.  And then there’s that maybe-sequel to Cloverfield, a movie I unapologetically love the hell out of, so I’m all excited about seeing that too.

TV?  You should be watching The Expanse, although if you’re like me you’re watching it with the closed captions on because half the time people are talking through masks, half the time they have thick accents, and oh, speaking of patois, half the time they’re not speaking English.  Yes, I know that’s three halves; I’ll sketch the Venn diagram out for you on a napkin if you don’t get it.  Point is, the sound mixing could be a lot better.  We watched the first episode of The Shannara Chronicles last night and I only got through it by mocking the hell out of everything I saw; the show appears to be unredeemably terrible unless making fun of it proves to have more legs than I thought.  Flash and Supergirl both remain better than they have any right to be.  One of these days I’ll get into Arrow.

What good comic books are you reading?  You should be reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and I enjoyed the Captain Marvel relaunch that just started.  I’m working through the Jessica Jones trades.  And Clean Room is insane and depraved and you should check that out too.  Unfollow looks like it might have potential.

But for right now, I need to read something that’s going to drive all this r’asscloth patois out of my brain; I just don’t know what that is.  You, for your part, should go read Searching for Malumba, because it’s free today and tomorrow.

Man, I need a nap.