Tag: weekendcoffeeshare

#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?

#WeekendCoffeeShare: VD edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories3 Comments

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Let’s be honest: if we were having coffee, we would absolutely be talking about politics in one way or another, but I’m not super interested right now at 10:00 in the AM on a Sunday in talking about politics.  I’ve entered the Two Weeks of No Romance period of the year, guys; my wife’s birthday was yesterday, today is Valentine’s day, and this being Leap Year we actually get an anniversary on Feb. 29th this year.  We’ve been married 8 years, but this is our 2nd anniversary.

What do we do to celebrate these august (heh) events?  Well, nothing, really.  My wife and I both agreed that Fat Tony’s death was the best birthday present the universe could possibly have arranged for her, we’re dropping the boy off with his grandparents and going to see Deadpool today, and as for our anniversary … hell, we’ll come up with something.  What did I get her?  Nothing.  We aren’t gift people.  (For the record, she didn’t get me anything for my last birthday either, and we didn’t exchange gifts at Christmas.)  What will we be getting each other for our anniversary?  Chances are nothing, although we’ll certainly go somewhere and do something fun together.

Valentine’s Day?  Bah.  Neither of us care.

I married correctly, is what I’m saying here.

This was an odd week.  I got nothing done on either of the two fiction projects I’m working on during the week, a combination of exhaustion, depression, and what was probably a very mild flu completely taking me off my game from Monday through Thursday.  I had my son at home with me all day on Friday and somehow between Friday and yesterday managed to get something like four thousand words done on the new Benevolence Archives novella I’m working on.  Sunlight is still a little stalled, but I ought to be able to get back to that this week and I still have high hopes (ha!) of being able to get it done before C2E2.

Note that at one point I wanted it available at C2E2.  So that tells you how good I am at keeping on schedule for novel projects, if you weren’t already aware of it.  For what it’s worth I love the hell out of the BA story that’s responsible for my recent distraction.

The Walking Dead is back tonight, and I have the boy again tomorrow (he gets a four-day Winter Break weekend) and so somehow I have to manage to avoid spoilers for 24 hours.  This will be harder than usual, I think.  I’m glad the show’s back, although I think The Expanse may have supplanted it as my current favorite TV show.

(Are you watching The Expanse, fellow coffee-drinker?  Or, rather, did you, since the first season’s over?  I strongly suggest that you get on that right now.)

So, yeah.  That’s where I’m at.  How’re you?

#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.

#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.

#Weekendcoffeeshare: Blood Pressure edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

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If we were having coffee, I’d for damn sure be having tea or juice this time.  I had a day earlier this week where I was so tired and half-dead that I made a pot of coffee at 11 AM– a full two hours after I’m usually done with coffee for the day– and drank the entire thing myself.  You may recall a recent coffee chat we had where I showed you my new Walking Dead mug.  One of the things I’ve done a lot of this weekend is home improvement tasks; I hung a new mirror in the bathroom yesterday and we went to my parents’ today and tore out the old toilet and installed a new one.  My wife and I were greeted with those two monstrosities above.  The coffee cup on the right is a reasonable person’s coffee cup.  I can fit two full Walking Dead cups into each of those ridiculous bastards.  They aren’t for coffee.  That’s, like, a pot each.  They have to be for, like, soup or something.

I wouldn’t have a whole lot to talk about, actually; a not-infrequent theme of these posts and the natural consequence of writing about my nonsense life every single day on the blog anyway.  I somehow still have not sold an ebook in January, and that issue might come up, because it’s starting to get to me.  I did sell one book in print, and I picked up a really nice review of Searching for Malumba today (check the previous post) but I have sold a total of three ebooks on Amazon in the last month, a drought of nearly-unprecedented nature.  Please, for the love of God, if you ever read ebooks and have $5 to spare, check something out.  My confidence is starting to take a hit here.  🙂

Let’s see.  Writing on Sunlight has gone well, although I’ve officially reached the part in the outline where it just goes ??? DRAMA ACTION SCARY STUFF MYSTERY ??? MAYBE A HAMSTER ??? and part of me feels like I’m closer to the end than I really want to be.  I wrote 1100 words of something today, unrelated to anything else I’ve done, that popped into my head whole and complete while I was taking a shower and came with such intensity that I rushed through shaving my head so that I didn’t lose anything and ended up cutting the shit out of my scalp.

You would have noticed the Band-Aid already, and so that part might actually come up first.  But seriously: I wrote 1100 words of fiction during the time it took my wife to take a shower.  If you know anything about my process, you know how ridiculously, insanely fast that is.  I don’t know what this thing is yet; I mean, it’s a short story, but I sort of feel like it’s a proof-of-concept for something bigger.  You’ll probably hear more about it later.

Maybe I’ll get called for a job interview this week.  That would be nice.

How’re you?

#Weekendcoffeeshare: not really edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

weekend-coffee-shareIf we were having coffee… that would be really odd, actually, because what I’m supposed to be doing right now is getting ready to head up to Michigan for– wait for it– a baptism.  The religious ritual is secondary to finally meeting my new baby semicousin, but y’know.  I’ll take what I can get.

We’re doing the back-and-forth in one day and with a four-year-old, so, uh, I probably won’t be around much today.  Benevolence Archives is still free, though!

#Weekendcoffeeshare: 2016 edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories12 Comments

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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?