Lots of support

I find it interesting how supportive people are when I tell them that I'm writing a book. While a lot of people I know have written books (especially technical books, especially in the perl community), many of the people that I interact with casually (rather than professionally or through groups such as #perl) are highly positive. Even the recruiters who call me daily and nag me about some sysadmin job or another always exclaim how great it is that I'm sitting down to write. As I've told a couple people -- very cautiously at first, as I didn't know whether I was going to do it -- over the years, I've got a book or two in me. Why this fills other people with such ... hope is beyond me. The only thing I can compare it to is when we got married. Everyone, regardless of how we knew them, congratulated us. Now, when people ask me what I'm doing, I say "well, I'm taking some time off and writing a book. I figure I'll get back to work in a month or two," they are very supportive saying it's "great!" and so on.

Strange. They don't know what I'm writing, other than it's fiction. And those that have said they'd like to read the book, well, depending on how well you know me, you might not like to read 120,000 words that came out of my head. I'm not writing this book for anyone but me. If it gets published, hooray, that's great. I'll never get rich, and you can't make a movie out of it because it is just so brooding, sullen, and mean. I can self-publish, and put a copy of my book on my shelf. And that will be good enough for me.

Would people have congratulated or encouraged Lovecraft if they knew what he was writing? Or Poe? Maybe next time somebody asks me what I've been up to lately, I'll tell them "figuring out how to wipe cities off the surface of the planet." Hmm.

Drug-induced hiatus

At least one of the drugs I'm taking regularly is preventing me from getting into the really angry spot I was/am writing the book from. I do know where I am going with it, and I even know what to write. But the wording, making the set and setting feel right is something I just can't do. I have been exploring EBM as a possible cure for this. However, this means I have to swallow a $225 pill for the music from the iTunes Music Store. Wumpscut's "bloodchild", KMFDM's "Ruck Zuck", and Suicide Commando's "Bind, Torture, Kill" are all prime examples of the sort of things I've been queueing up for the next forward thrust in the book.

My next task as author is to kill some people. I guess I haven't gone into too much detail about Limits other than I was working on it. Let's just say it's a very dark, dark book. And of the two books I've got sketched out, it's almost the "cheerful" one.

Progress on book, adventures in taliskerville, car is superb

So I made a ton of progress on my book yesterday (title: Limits for the curious). I sort of figured out that I was drawing scenes that I'd had in my head, and moving characters through them, but nobody was talking! When somebody gets in a really cold car in the morning, they exclaim, "shit!" or similar. I remember when I worked at AOL (Reston, VA), getting out to the car at 6 or 7 pm, and it was single-digit or teens cold, it actually hurt to hold the steering wheel. The car (a Buick Park Avenue) wouldn't turn the heat on until it had determined the water flowing through the heater core was warm (so as to not blow cold air on you). And yet the main character just gets in the car, and I note that it is cold (as we are third-person-intense, not first person), and we progress to the next scene. So I ripped out a bunch of stuff that made no sense or was limp and uninteresting. I also ripped out a bunch of stuff that I had put in there as sort of proof-of-concept. It had little relevance to the story I was actually telling. So, while I ripped out left and right, I also added a lot of dialogue, additional scenes that link larger scenes together. I also defined the major issue in the book, what the primary crisis would be.

So I decided to celebrate. A simple whisky, Talisker 10, was in order. I damn near finished a fifth. We had chicken wings for dinner (I had tenders, she had wings), and we watched Aeon Flux (er, the Peter Chung animated series, not the movie). I'm not sure what motivated me to drink that much. I haven't actually been drunk in... well, what seems like ages. I was feeling a bit silly, very proud of myself for the work on the book, and depressed due to the oppressive week of rain. All of this amounts to a hangover this morning and my rolling out of bed around 1pm instead of my more typical 9am. There's a Sublime song, "What happened":

what am i doing here? who is this girl in my bed? what is this shit on my face? my god what is that awful smell?

Yup. Pretty much like that. The smell happened to be chicken wing remnants in the kitchen (and we just cleaned the kitchen!). There was thankfully a lack of shit on my face, but there was nag champa ash on the desk and I had smoked a couple cigarettes. Sigh.

And then there's the car. My god, this car is superb. Our Subaru STI is the most fun I've had since the Z. It is very quick. Mostly we aren't misbehaving with it. The fastest we've gone is the top of third (don't know how fast it was, I was looking at the tach, not the speedo). It is comfortable, despite the fact that it has recaro racing seats which are not especially adjustable. It is missing all the little luxury knick knacks the Buick had, which bothers me. However, the car was not intended to be a luxury car, and in fact cost about $13k less than a Lucerne which would by the Park Avenue's contemporary.

It looks like I will be commuting by car in the next job. The STI is supposed to be Sandy's car. So I find myself wondering what I'll do for transportation. I've been thinking about getting a 2003 or so BMW 540i. Those are neat cars, and cheapish too.

Job hunt

Dear Santa,

All I want for christmas is a TS-SCI with full scope poly and S/TK/Q. I know I asked for a carbon fibre tripod and a 11-25mm lens and a 300mm telephoto. I really think the clearance would be better for me. See, I can't find a job right now, even though there are literally hundreds of them available that I could fill, and fill well. But they're all with Booz-Allen-Hamilton, CSC, SAIC, CACI, and the other "usual suspects." They all list the "required clearance" down at the bottom, so you only see it after you've read the job description and realized you're a perfect fit.

Santa, it's totally unfair. I can get a clearance, I had one a few years ago. Back then, companies were willing to sponsor people to get clearances. Maybe there was a shortage of people in the market, so they would do anything to get the people on board.

But for me, it's a lump of coal. If I could just get that job (let alone a clearance!), I could buy all those other toys for myself, and save you the trouble. I even promise to buy sandy a present she'll love so you don't have to.

Yours most sincerely,
Alex

Powerbook failure

My powerbook is two years old now, maybe two and a half years. The optical drive has just gone out, and so I have to take it, with all my crucial data, to some stranger, where they will disassemble it and fiddle with its guts.

I wish this was as simple as the "hinge" problems my Tibook had.

The book is being backed up to nonvolatile memory now.