A Meerkat's Bolthole

Awake at 6am. Caffeinated and at my desk by 7am. Spent an hour correcting the copy-editor who thought that all dialog should be in textbook-perfect English grammatical structure, without regard for regional variations or personal speech patterns. *facepalm* I will cheerfully take correction, Universe knows. But please to be keeping your grubby hands off my character dialog, kthnxbai. Sent changes back to editor in time to feel Virtuous and still have entire day to do other needful stuff, yay.

Also, off comments in a locked post elsewhere about the 'joy' of Book Release Day, I present you with my procrastination of the morning:


To brace or not to brace; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The inevitability of that Klausner review,
Or to take refuge against a poor store display,
And by ignoring deny them? To work: to weep;
No more; and by weeping to say we endure
The heart-ache and the thousand returned books
An author is prone to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To work, to weep;
To weep: perchance to go out of stock: aye, there's the rub;
For in that work of bookstores what fears may come
When we have shuffled off this contractual coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of too little backlist;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Locus,
The reviewers's wrong, the disappointed reader's spite,
The pangs of despised love, the payment's delay,
The insolence of wannabes and the spurns
That patient merit of the unpublished takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a delete button? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of there being nothing after,
The remainder'd country from whose bourn
No author returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus publishing does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And manuscripts of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the pacing of action. - Soft you now!
The fair New York Times list! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

(and yeah, I couldn't get the scansion to work on the fly. Bite me)

Right. Back on the pony, Gilman.

I am sick and may die. So I pass along the work of another, to keep you entertained.


*Howl Twitter* (with abject apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best posters of my generation destroyed by politics,
commenting hysterical naked,
scrolling themselves through the n-word threads at dawn looking for
a snarky fix,
trucker-hatted hipsters burning for the cheapest DSL
connection to the bitwise dynamo in the datastream of night,
who pizza and tater-tots and poopsocking and high sat up typing in
the supernatural whiteness of rented condos surfing across the tubes
of internets contemplating porn,
who bared their breasts on MySpace under fake names and saw
Mohammedan bombers threatening in video streams illuminated,
who played through universities with radiant eyes
hallucinating Second Life and Warcraft tragedy among the scholars of
war,
who were banned from the websites for crazy & posting batshitinsane
on the Windows™ of the Bill,
who farted in unshaven rooms in underwear,
tossing their tissues in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror on
CNN...

From stavrostthewonderchicken on
http://emptybottle.org/glass/2007/03/not_a_howl_a_twitter.php


(link courtesy, as usual, of Walter Jon Williams. keep him off the internet -- buy his books!)

some days, I really do wonder at my brain.

Trying to write a Very Important scene, full of political undercurrents and snarkiness and Wren trying to stay cool, and what do I get?

Poetry.

Go fig...


( summer, 1984 )

( passion )