Kristyn and I did make it to PenguiCon 2008 this year, though we only made it for Saturday evening through Sunday early afternoon. It was a good time, all told (and before you ask, I was entirely oblivious to this controversial activity). I picked up a couple intriguing books (Where's My Jetpack by Daniel H. Wilson, and Discarded Science by John Grant), saw a number of I-seem-to-see-them-only-at-con friends, and generally had a fun time.

But by far, the coolest thing that went on at PenguiCon 2008 was this (as captured in this YouTube video):

The Singing Tesla Coils

(Note: this is the first of what looks like a series of videos chronicling the Tesla Coils at Penguicon, which had concerts on both Friday and Saturday evenings.)

--

Work has gone from just sitting on my head to jumping up and down on it. Apparently, it wears stiletto heels on its feet. Who knew?

And when that's not been happening, I've been in the middle of a re-finance of my mortgage (from an ARM to a fixed rate) that's somewhere between fiasco and farce, but is very nearly done.

So, I've been reading LJ off and on, usually only on weekends, but have had little time to post or even comment. And that will continue to be the case through March and probably the first couple weeks of April.

Damn, I have to do my taxes sometime in there, too.

But other than this, life is pretty fair. It could be worse. Last year at this time was considerably worse than now.

How's by you?

Rad 93, part one of three
Rad 93, part two of three
Rad 93, part three of three

This will likely be the last time I make specific note of a Superguy or Sfstory posting in this, my personal LiveJournal. Since I also post the notices to the superguy_list community, there's no real sense in doing it twice. So if you care to get such notices in the future via your LJ friends list, that's where to go.

I'll also be scaling back my Superguy efforts some in the coming year -- though only some, as I'm having much fun with it, and it's done wonders for banishing the creative funk I was in. But I need as to balance this fun stuff with... well, other fun stuff for which I hope to someday get paid. I've got short stories to whip into shape, a couple ideas for my next effort at a novel, a synopsis to write for an old novel I spent some of this year hammering into publishable shape (this is not to be confused with The Novel, which continues to languish on a slush pile somewhere), some collaborative notions I'm toying with... and who knows, maybe I'll even get a webcomic going. And maybe my spleen will start making squeaking noises. Anything is possible in the new year.

In the meantime, please enjoy the episode, and have a happy and rococo New Year.

--

I just learned this morning, from lemagia, that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with an early-onset form of Alzheimers. Which is not good news for anyone, though Terry's announcement handles it with optimism and warm wit.

I don't think I'm going to get into, just now, how much his books have affected me, or how I have in recent years read his books to see how it is he got so damn good at what he does. Like he says, he's 'not dead yet,' so no eulogies, please. (And the last line in the announcement is priceless, and pure Terry.) And well wishes shouldn't have anything to do with how many books he wrote (a lot), or how good they were (very very and very some more).

I met him at a science fiction convention held in Detroit a few years back (the first Penguicon, actually), and found him as kind, warm, witty and charming as anyone who's read his books could hope. So I'll just wish him my best in this, and hope that the end is still a long ways away.

I've finished html-ifying the Sfstory archives, for those who care about such matters. What's more, I've moved them to their very own subdomain on my Novitious.com website:

sfstory.novitious.com

And yes, I will finish the Universal Solvents series. Sometime before the end of the decade. Possibly.

--

The FFTFNAMIOA campaign has, at long last, reached its glorious conclusion. I completed the final draft of Brutal Light about three weeks ago, finished the dreaded and shadowy Putting It Into Standard Manuscript Format ceremony two weeks ago, and spent much of the last week doing the synopsis and cover letter and other arcana that publishers claim they like.

Today, I took my submissions package (consisting of the cover letter, prologue and first three chapters, synopsis, and stamped reply envelope) and I MAILED THE HELL OUT OF THAT THING!

(Actually, I just handed it to the guy at the post office. But on the inside, I mailed the hell out of it.)

So, off it goes, to darken slush piles for years to come. And I can actually write something else now. It makes me tingle in dreaded and shadowy places.

Thanks to everyone who offered to critique, said vaguely encouraging things, or at least put up with my incoherent rambles about the progress of the novel whenever asked about how it was going, or how I was doing, or if I like toast. (I do, by the way.) It helped me through the rough patches.

That's all. Enjoy the bacon bits.

--

I've been editing up a storm in my campaign to Finally Finish The Fucking Novel And Mail It Out Already, which is the principal reason I've not been making posts to LJ of late. (Well, that and a very nasty stomach bug that had me laid up most of last weekend and then jumped over to my wife, who is just now recovering.) This period of me not posting to LJ (and not doing very much commenting on friends posts, though I do continue to read them) will likely continue until the glorious FFTFNAMIOA campaign has reached its conclusion (which also means that every other writing project I've got in mind, not to mention Rad #92, is On Hold until then).

So... there. I guess.

In fact, the only reason you're getting a post now is because some of you still may have not seen the movie Pan's Labyrinth, and some of that subset of you may still have it showing at some reasonably local theater ("reasonably" as in "somewhere in the state in which you live"). If you are a part of this select group... why the hell are you still reading this? Why are you not out driving, biking, running, or crawling in the direction of that theater like crazed sinners who have suddenly seen the horrifying errors of your non-seeing-Pan's-Labyrinth ways? WHYYYYYYYYY???

Seriously. You should.

In the meantime, I have a grindstone to get fresh with.

This is going to be brief, because while I'm on vacation this week, I'm busier than I would be if I were at work. Such is the fate of those of us who wait until the last week to gift shop. And the pet stores are all out of humbug.

This has been a long and somewhat rough year for me, particularly these past three months, which is why I haven't been posting much. (Sorry... I know I shouldn't, but I tend to clam up when things aren't going good. Of course, I'm not very talkative when things are going good, too. It's all part of my mysterious allure.) But, without going into details, things are looking up once more, and I'm almost back to feeling like a functional human being again.

I have next week off, too, but I expect to be doing stuff other than spending time in front of the computer then, so you'll hear from me next in 2007. In the meantime, I hope you and yours have a great holiday time, and a great new year's celebration. Do something I wouldn't do, eh?

I'm going off to vote as soon as I finish this post. Not sure if it will make much difference which group of rascals gets into office, but there's at least one proposal on the statewide ballot in Michigan that I'd like to see go down to defeat (the anti-affirmative-action proposal, only on there in the first place because of the outright deception and fraud used by proponents to pass it off as having enough signatures).

In 'celebration' of two years on LJ, I have a new icon. Woo.

-

I'm not sure if there's much use in pointing this out yet, since there's not much there yet to see, but I've started up a website, called Novitious. It's an archaic word, meaning 'newly invented,' which I pinched off of my Forgotten English page-a-day calendar (based on Jeffrey Kacirk's Forgotten English books, which I'm going to have to pick up one of these days).

Originally, this was going to be the title of my webcomic, on that grand and glorious day when I actually started it up. That grand and glorious day is still farther off (and is getting no closer, sadly -- as much as I may talk, prose still owns me). But, I wanted to do things and learn new webbish things that having a small amount of space on a personal Earthlink site would make difficult at best, so I went off to Dreamhost, gave them some cash, and whoomp there it is.

So, the purpose of Novitious for now, I've decided, is going to be for longer essays, rants, reviews, and so on. I used to do that sort of thing back when I had an online journal (back in the days of 1999 and 2000, when huge iguanas roamed the earth, and journals were updated by manually creating the pages and uploading them via ftp), did it less often in my Blogger blog of 2001-2003, and don't seem to do at all now. And while I've never really subscribed to any formal notion of what form of blog or journal or whathaveyou is appropriate for long-form posts vs. short-form posts (that would require that I care), it seems as good an excuse as any.

Posts to Novitious will probably be rare enough that I will mention them here.

I haven't been posting, or even commenting, in a while, which makes me a naughty Gary. Last week was a financially stressful week in general, and one day in specific (thanks to an automotive brake repair job that revealed how bad off my car's rotors and brake pads and brake shoes and brake spitoons were looking). Today things are looking up somewhat. Or maybe I'm just high. It's hard to tell sometimes.

But now, it's meme time! This pinched from mrbankies:

If you ask...

1. I'll respond with something I like about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll name something we should do together.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (or just me).
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I'll leave you a quote that is somehow appropriate to you.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you, if I have such a thought.
8. If I do this for you, please post this on your journal so you can do the same for other people.

So. Spring has sprung. In case you were wondering what that rusty coiled metal thing was doing lodged in your right nostril. No point suing - you have a calendar to warn you about these things.

Back on the ranch, I'm more-or-less managing to get back into making progress on the second draft of the novel. Some bits are getting trimmed, other bits are getting added. More added then subtracted, so far. The date I gave before about shoveling this out to a publisher by Memorial Day? That's in the ground, making the flowers grow real purty. Next best guess is that by Memorial Day, I should at least be ready to start floating the first half or three-quarters out and about to beta readers. (And hopefully by then, I'll have figured out how the hell I want to do that -- the old school way of emailing a file, or the new school way of putting it up on a password protected web site. Probably wouldn't hurt to actually ask about who wants to be a beta reader, but I'm holding off on that 'till the day gets, you know, closer. So people don't volunteer, then forget, then feel guilty because they have lives and they're too busy just at the point when I come a'callin.)

Meanwhile, I'm also helping my wife set up her photography business, particularly the web-based portion of it. And I've got about five metric fuckloads of leaves to clear out of the backyard because I was too busy last fall to deal with it. Oh, yeah, and I have to do my taxes. And for some inscrutable, probably blamable-on-the-conspiracy-or-elves-or-Mitchell reason, I'm thinking of starting up a webcomic (though not until I've finished shoveling the novel at a publisher - because, you know, I like having my skull not explode), and I keep coming up with stuff for it instead of doing all the other stuff demanding my attention.

And somewhere in all of that, find some time to sleep. For a month.

Nnhhrrr. Glrrblglrrbl.

No, mommy, not the ninja suit...

Erk. I'm awake. I think.

I done got nudged awake. Which is good - I shouldn't have gone into hibernation in the first place. But the berries were so nice, and the cave had TiVo, so how could I resist?

But spring is close, and when spring is in the air, a young man's thoughts turn to romance. Or pie. Pie is good.

On second thought, mayhap I awoke too soon.

...here is the extremely belated Christmas card you never got from me. Now, several of you wouldn't have gotten it anyway, because I don't know where you live, but if I did, you still wouldn't have gotten it, because I never sent them out this year. The 'why' of it is a sad tale of modern youth gone amuck, with the moral being 'keep track of that little freaking cord that lets you magically transport your pictures from your digital camera to your computer.' We obviously eventually found said cord, of course, but too late for getting cards out on time. Or at all.

Oh, sure, we could have gone all old school and went out to the store and bought some cards, but where's the fun in that?

I'm the one in the upper left corner, with the dog. Those of you who have seen me before, this will probably be the first time you've seen me with grey hair. I don't mind it; I'm just glad it hasn't fallen out. :P

( Ho Ho Hwhatever )

Through no fault of my own, I seem to have survived into 2006 without having my brain-engorged cranium do any sort of harsh explodey thing. It was touch and go for a while, though. Without going into too much detail, let me just dispense this free advice: never, ever, in the month after having your home mortgage refinanced to pay off part of a mountain o' debt, allow your work vehicle's engine to go kaput in such a manner that you have to go out and buy another vehicle without doing any financing that would screw up the mortgage refinancing whilst simultaneously doing your holiday shopping and holiday party planning and paying to fix the radiator and brakes on your spouse's truck and caring for your dog whose immune system has apparently decided to flake out and attack her red blood cells and cause low appetite which the vet misses the first time around despite some expensive blood work.

Trust me. I know it's tempting, but... resist.

Fortunately, things are looking relatively up going into 2006:

--> The mortgage refinance went smoothly (having a brother-in-law who does these things on a regular basis helps greatly), and now that Kris is working again and some monthly spending has been trimmed and I've gotten my modest yearly salary boost, I'm hoping we can see the mountain o' debt shrink some this year. That would be... nice.

--> Thanks to some additional money coming in in December, we were able to get a '95 Saturn to replace my old dead work vehicle minivan. And thanks to the power of vehicle donations and the tax benefits they bring, we'll actually get more money back than we spent. As far as the vehicle itself goes, for its age, it had not-bad mileage (around 100k) and more importantly, great mileage per gallon of evil filthy costly gasoline.

--> The dog (Unni) is recovering and is regaining weight and energy, though we'll probably be going to the vet rather often for the next couple months or so while they monitor her progress.

--> Holiday shopping and festivities and such went smoothly, and some nice loot was given and acquired. My six-month-old niece excelled in cuteness and spitting up.

--> The truck is fixed and functional.

--> Tomorrow, I start on the long-awaited editing and redrafting of The Novel. Despite an almost four-month layoff from even looking at it, it still occupies vast tracts of my conscious and subconscious mind and swats at stray neurons like a giant ape swatting biplanes, which bodes very well for what is to come (since, clearly, I'll have to finish this first if I want to write anything else ever).

So, that's it, the long-promised, semi-mythical Life Update for Gary. Next up... the Christmas card you never received from me!

Ow. My cranium...

I am in a cheerier mood of late, thanks to Planet Man. I have been listening to an MP3 cd collection of 76 episodes of this early fifties science fiction radio series (thru episode 28 so far), and I am in awe at its cheesy grandeur.

The packaging describes as being a cross between Superman and Flash Gordon, but would be more accurate to describe it as something a lot like Rocky Jones, with a hero that sounds sort of like Clayton Moore (though he isn't) and would probably dress, if it were a movie serial instead of a radio serial, like Prince of Space. It has all the requisite characters of this kind of space opera (the elderly professor, not one but two perky golly-gee-willikers kids (who have so far demonstrated the bravery of lions and the intelligence of lawn chairs), a sinister space villian forever berating his underlings for their incompetence, a heroic sidekick with a hayseed accent, and of course the morally upright crusading hero (who is smarter than your average lawn chair, but not by much)).

I need more of this kind of thing in my life.

Amidst everything else that's been going on, I forgot to mention something I spotted a couple weeks ago that is considerable cause for cheer to folks with my sort of musical tastes: Kate Bush's new double album, "Aerial," comes out in November.

While I have to admit I've moved on from the level of fandom I had for Kate in the early-to-mid nineties (knocking off for twelve years between albums has that effect), I'm still looking forward to this.

Well, so long as I'm here, retroactively adding tags to the few sparse things I've put in this LJ...

As some of you know... well, as probably every one of you know, because I tend to ramble on about this sort of thing a lot, to make up for not actually doing it so much these days... I'm hacking away at a novel. It's the fifth variation on something I've been trying to finish since, oh, 1996. And I'm about two chapters and an epilogue away from finishing the first draft. (Well, some of it is still first draft. Other parts are well into the second or third or even fourth draft. But anyway.)

The closer I get to the end, the slower it goes. I'm wondering if this is some kind of literary law, or if it's just me. I estimate that by the time I get to the last line in the epilogue, I'll be typing at a velocity of roughly one letter per fortnight.

But I'm gonna get the fucker done. Because this time, this time, my hearties, this is the goods. This is the one that will see the light of day, even if every publisher in the universe rejects it and I have to self-publish it at gunpoint (something that is awkward all the way around, if you've ever been in that situation).

That's all for now.

Tags are fun.

So, the first chance in ages I have to just muddle around on a Saturday afternoon, and I'm too chilly to enjoy it. I'm down with a virus-thingy for probably the first time in a year or so, and could not go out with my wife and her dad to the various rummage sales that are happening this weekend in town. Not that I'm ordinarily interested in rummage sales, but with this many going on (it being the annual 'you-don't-need-a-permit' weekend), I figured I stood a good chance to score some desirable used books.

Not that I need books right at the moment. I've hit enough used bookstores recently to build a good backlog up, and there's going to be a fairly huge book sale in Livonia in mid-May. But still, they're out there.

Used/rare bookstores rock, by the way. Particularly ones with large SF / fantasy / horror / occult / mythology sections. Who needs Borders if they've got one near?

Enough rambling. I see I have no new Drabble requests, so I will shamble off to the couch to enjoy the xbox Mafia game. Fwee.

So, there is this drabble meme going on. To wit:

"Every person on your flist gets to request a drabble (real drabble: 100 words exactly) from you. In return, they have to post this in their journal and write a drabble for you. Post all fandoms you're willing to write for. Your friends can pick a relationship, a story arc, a missing scene, or pretty much anything they want, unless the author has previously mentioned that they will not write it. They comment with what they want, and you write drabbles and post it in your LiveJournal."

And my list is as follows (pared down as much as I could stand):

Superguy/Sfstory
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Harry Potter
El Santo
Marx Brothers
Lovecraft
Lost
24

And yes, I will do crossovers between topics, as long as it's just between two. (More than that does not really work in 100 words.)

Aiee.