A couple of things. First off, as a writer who primarily uses the computer to type his work, I urge my fellow geekazoids to BACK UP YOUR WORK! Having lost loads of work to computer crashes and power failures and what not, including an eighty thousand word chunk from one story, I learned this the hard way.

My personal computer's hard drive burned up a few days ago. This time, however, I had backed up everything previously on my handly little jump drive, and hardly felt the loss. So however you have to do it... floppy disks if you can fit the work on them, CD-RW if you can't and don't have a zip drive or jump drive. Seriously, don't let your work be roadkill on the technological freeway.

In other news, everyone who doesn't know, needs to know what a Marmoset is. Observe. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmoset

As for me... I'm learning patience, at some great cost to my life span. I'm getting better, though. This whole personal improvement thing is not so hard once the impossible things are pushed aside and ignored. *whistles*

We rented "V for Vendetta" yesterday. Anybody seen it? I haven't watched it yet, but I'm wondering if it's any good. I have kind of a problem sitting through a movie if I'm not really interested, so if someone could say 'watch it, and your eyeballs will bleed' that'd be wrong, but accepted!

When every day is the same day as the day before, how does one change anything? I always dread going to sleep (not just because there are spiders in my bed, that's why I don't ride on planes. There could be spiders on the plane. You know. Specially bred assassin spiders, working for the yakuza). I dread going to sleep because I know that when I wake up it's going to be the same day again. I'll do meaningless housework, maybe put in job applications that won't earn me anything, get in a fight with someone in my house, play some game, get on the computer, and wait for the whole cycle to repeat again. I dunno how to get out of this, not even where to start.

On the bright side, I've discovered that I've lost about ten pounds. Turns out my boxing and cardio training has been doing some good, after all! What puzzled me is that I've been boxing for months now, and have only lost ten pounds... seemed kinda small. Except, I also noticed that I'm putting on quite a bit of muscle, too. So, on the health front, things are finally going a little better.

Today is my two-year anniversary with my girlfriend. She's really a wonderful young woman, very talented, very... lots of things. 'I love her' just doesn't cut it, but that's about the only way I can say it here without going into it for a thousand more words. 

So yeah. Stuff stuff.

I realized this today, and to me, its pretty profound.

I no longer prefer metal to other kinds of music. o.o

This is big, for me. Metal's been my fixation since I was about twelve years old. But now, it just... seems to have lost its edge. I will forever be a fan of rock and roll (AC/DC forever, it seems) but... now I find I prefer celtic, classical, and *gasp* even trance to most metal. o.o Scary.

Lovely experience this morning. I was lying in bed, abjectly waiting for sleep like I always do, when I felt a miller (medium sized moth) on my shoulder. This, while not common, is not terrible as sometimes they come in when the door is opened at night. So I brushed it off and closed my eyes again, not thinking anything of it.

Around 4:30am I was still lying there, then I heard a quick, successive tap tap tap tap tap on my pillow. Now, my house makes your typical groaning and creaking noises in the wind, but this was not one of those noises, not even close. So I jumped up and flicked on the light... and sure enough, racing around my pillow was a frickin' spider about the size of a half-dollar. It turned and looked at me, and lifted its front two legs in the air in typical spider-defense stance.

So I bitch-slapped him with a dinner plate.

Based on the spiders coloration, the marks on its back, body size, and type of legs, I believe that this spider was a brown recluse. Having recalled the "miller" on my shoulder earlier in the night, I decided that long pants and long sleeves would make good pajamas instead of a sleeveless shirt and shorts.

Now, in general I am not afraid of spiders. I'm far more afraid of parking lots. But this creeped me the hell out. So I went and got my cat, Jinx, so I could have something to concentrate on instead of worrying whether that creak was a giant frickin' spider or not.

Jinx is an unbelievably bad bedfellow. His first mode of action is to climb onto my shoulder and meow in my ear until I pet him. Then when he finally decides its time to sleep, he likes to try and sleep as close to my face as possible, which usually means at least part of him is on my nose. This morning it was his left front paw, reached out just for the occasion. 

This was after he'd broken my favorite drinking glass, knocked two keyboards in the floar, and half-ripped down one of the drawrings on my wall. Then, he proceeded to go into the corner, find some fake gold leaves that rattle when you touch them, and start licking himself on them so that they rattled over and over and over. Yup, Jinx is a bad bedfellow. Thankfully he has a cat bed in a nother room, so I tossed him in there for the night. And then he went to sleep! Good kitty. Maybe.

But yeah, it was an adventure and a half.

Gots my rejection letter from Asimov's today. With that out of the way, time to soldier on! I'm thinking of submitting my 79.Sashenka Snip to the Writers of the Future contest this term as soon as I get at least one more read-through to make sure I haven't missed anything. ^^ Thanks go to those who've supported me on this piece, it's probably my favorite of my short stories.

My computer's wallpaper has a particular date on it, August 23rd. Below it, the words 'Never Forget' are written, put there as more of an inspirational message than as a literal reminder.

I wear a cross now. Religious folks who got to know me would probably not think of me as a religious person, and I don't suppose I am. Hell, a guy I knew in the way back once said, verbatim, "I can't believe you're a Christian". The cross I wear is not for religious inspiration. The cross I wear is the reminder. People a lot better than me have had it a lot worse than me for reasons that don't even approach 'fair', and it's easy to forget that sometimes.

As far as being religious goes, well... I always kind of figured that 'acting religious' would be like sobering up specifically to go to court for a drunk driving charge. Everyone could see through it anyway, and it wouldn't help me in the long run. I have a lot of personality flaws, and I'm working on them. Do I care what people think about them? Not particularly. But at the same time I don't want to raise anyone's ire or offend anyone without the intent to do so. This is why I don't mind when religious people judge me. I probably deserve it.

Tomorrow I have another job interview. I think that makes... the fifth one in about three and half months. I won't count the second interview that the sit-down restaurant gave me on the day I thought I was coming into work, because all they did was rehash some questions, act awkward, and send me out with a maybe. This interview is a formality, I think, because I've actually worked at this place once before, and they're shorthanded. Besides, everyone needs an ox at work, and though it won't pay much at all, I can at least use it to look for something better. Trying to improve myself, and all. 

I don't remember the quote exactly, help me out if you know the original source. I actually heard it on a pro wrestling show and I thought it was pertinent. "As long as you tout your misfortunes, they will own you." (not verbatim, it's 4:30 am and my memory is out drinking) I'm going to try to start living by that, a little bit more.

Whether or not you believe in Jesus Christ and his crucifixion, you have to believe in the scores of Christians who were nailed to crosses for their beliefs so long ago. They had it worse than me, you know. This cross I wear is a reminder.

Today I wove celtic knots out of wire. Tomorrow I'll do it again, hopefully better. And then, when I do it as well as I can, I'll do something else.

You know I love you all, even if I don't show it. Except you, reading this. *jests*

Going back to college, writing more stuff, disliking southern kentucky... same old!

Edit on the previous post. Apparently "Okay... come in on Tuesday at three" meant "Okay... come in on Tuesday at three and we're going to interview you again. No, we don't actually hire you, the general manager does. No you can't talk to her. We'll let you know after we string you along for another week or two."

Still smiling. But it takes more effort today.

Still trying new writing stuff, but the news for me is that I *finally* found a job. It only took about three months. ^^ The job market in my area is awful unless you know someone who can help, and I don't. But yeah! Job gooooood. 

Submitted work to Glimmer Train Stories today. Wish me luck. ^^

More writing contests to try. And then the groupies! With my luck they'll be hungry bengal tigers.

Won't be around until 11pm eastern standard time.

I picked up a copy of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact at the bookstore yesterday. Primarily due to the fact that it was the first literary magazine I had ever seen in any bookstore in my area ever, but also due in part to the nifty cover art. For six dollars (U.S.) I got a 240-page book with four short stories, four novellettes, a novella, and something called a 'serial' all by authors I've never heard of, plus a bunch of industry articles and reader-input jiggies. I just started the first story, Witherspin by Alexis Glynn Latner, and am thus far impressed with the way ingenuity and novelty are woven into sci-fi cliche. ^^ And at that price (which is amazingly reasonable considering that I paid $36 US for a four-issue subscription to Glimmer Train Stories magazine, especially since newsstand prices are always higher) I get bite-sized offerings from authors I may or may not like. This way I don't have to invest myself in something that might make we want to throw the book at the wall, like I did with Moreta, Myst, and The Lair of Bones. And, if it turns out that I enjoy the author's work, I can look hir up. I'm quite pleased with this.

Another note to everyone. Yard sales are even worse than flea markets. Cripes. Unless of course you like sore feet for a pittance.

Note to everyone: The Yakety Sax may be the single greatest piece of music ever written. It makes me laugh just hearing it... not the derisive 'ha ha, good lord, how can these twits call themselves musicians' laugh that rap and 'death metal' gets, but a real, genuine, amused laugh. 

Tomorrow morning I'm sending off a manuscript to Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. Here's hoping.

Today's method of waking up: younger brother trying to turn my locked doorknob, then proceeding to pound on the door.

"Travis, what are you doing?"

Normally, I would've explained my current immersion in ark-building. However, I was too tired to be cute, so I actually said, in the form of a question "I'm sleeping?"

"You called the cell phone, like, five times."

In my sleep, apparently. Now if I could learn to do manual labor in my sleep too, I could get a lot more stuff done in a day.

"The parents want you to clean the kitchen, I'm gonna go out."

Me: zzz...  Two minutes later, I hear someone pounding on the back door of the house for a solid ten seconds, and finally resign myself to getting up.

My genius brother, locked himself out of the house.

In writing new, I figured that, since most of my difficulties in novelling lie in the white noise sections (most people call this 'filler'), I would just try to write the major scenes first, and then fill in the noise. It worked astonishingly well, as I wrote about three times as much as I do in a normal night, and actually spent less time at the computer overall. Yay fresh tactics. ^^

Bereft of new things *that looked promising* to read, I broke down and picked up a Terry Goodkind book. Normally I avoid writers of massive series, but my brother had been suggesting this one for some time, and I figured I'd give it a shot.

In the seventeen pages I read during a short sit on a bench, this book Wizard's First Rule is already better by far than the last book I picked up, which was The Iron Tree by Cecillia Dart-Thornton. One hundred and sixty-six pages into that book I put it down, having no more patience for descriptions of plants. ^_^ But we'll see where this goes.

Define Art, Moorn.

Moorn: Oh, I suppose art is pretty much anything these days.

How do you mean?

Moorn: Well, there are medical arts, literary arts, social arts, liberal arts, martial arts, visual arts, aural arts, arts and crafts, modern art, classical art...

Are you coming to a point?

Moorn: No, not really. But we are talking about art.

So you're saying that art is just a meandering tool of the vernacular, used to explore the meaning of anything requiring dedication, perseverance, and creativity?

Moorn: No, you missed the point.

You had one?

Moorn: No.

Then how did I miss the point?

Moorn: Obviously, you didn't catch it. Therefore you missed it.

But I didn't miss it, so obviously I caught it.

Moorn: Well, did you catch it?

There was nothing to catch.

Moorn: So you didn't catch anything?

... no.

Moorn: Then you missed it.

... I hate you.

Moorn: My point exactly.

Speculative Fiction: Fiction that, uh, speculates.

Any thoughts on this? The term sort of supercedes 'fantasy' and 'science fiction' as respective genres these days, though it remains primarily a term that covers the ground science fiction used to. I like it, I do, but at the same time, it feels a bit... hm. Unnecessary.