MaxSpeak, You Listen!

This is good. This is going in my sidebar, next time I get round to futzing with it.

Resubmitted that rejected story to another mag. I'm trying to keep my resubmission times as low as I can right now; a day or two, long enough to reassess the story and make any necessary alterations before finding it another market. In the past there's been a tendency for me to bury anything that got rejected and never even look at it again for months. That's bad. It's negative, self-defeating and... well, fucking wet, frankly. So I'm getting back on the proverbial equine quadroped as rapidly as I can.

Anyhow, I need to finish some more stuff to send out before the weekend. My brain is not in fiction mode right now so I'm going to dig around my poetry files and see if I don't have anything worth punting out.

My immediate goal is keep it so that I have a minimum of five pieces under consideration at all times. I want to raise that to ten pieces before July; a modest goal.

Beef stew.

My imagination is broken.

Look, this is ridiculous. My stupid infection won't go away and it's stopping me from doing anything to write about on my blog.

Why am I sick anyway? I haven't done anything sickmaking. No going out clubbing with an insufficiently insulated chest, no persian rugs; I haven't cursed anyone for years, so it's not that.

My sleep is shot and it's taken my frikking writing with it. I mean, my output hasn't gone down (much), but it's just not as good. Maybe I shouldn't have kept plugging away at that stupid story the way I did. I got it finished but now I'm all fed up of writing because I got so bored. Blargh. Anyway it's finished now. Trouble is, none of my other writing projects is any healthier: gawdawful sword'n'sorcery short, couple of Forteany things, some lukewarm SMUT and this thing about people from another world living in London, which is never going to work in a million years but which I can't get out of my stupid head.

Stupid writing. Words are evil.

Oh, and I got a rejection today for a story I was really hopeful about, and which is utterly unsuitable for anywhere exept the ezine that rejected it. Blargh.

Yuuuck.

Man, this is no fun at all, but I'm on the mend. Well enough to go into a nearby town to do a bit of shopping, anyhoo, which was a relief. I get stir-crazy if I have to stay indoors. Gonna go out running tommorow, if the weather's okay.

Asked the guides what the heck was going on with this whole grotty infection business; apparently it's some sort of house-cleaning, and I'll be fitter afterwards, and blah blah blah. They also gave me a pi-jaw about my diet.

I have another big rant brewing about the increasingly hysterical and braindead comment in the blogosphere regarding the Spanish election result and the new regime's decision to pull out their troops from Iraq, but I just don't have the energy today.

Instead I've got this stupid short story to finish. It sucks--the ideas weak and the pace is off, but I have to get it finished. If I get it finished I'll be able to go back in a week and panel-beat the damn thing into some kind of shape, whereas if I can it now and work on something else, I'll probably never get around to sorting it out. God, I'm sick of it though.

I'm still sick.

And I blame you. Seriously, this is no fun at all. I'm missing my healer's meet today because of my cruddy chest (Oh, the irony). I was sick as a dog yesterday and got no bloody sleep.

Fix me. Fix me or I will harm you.

Coat.

Man, you people. It's just not working out, you know? As you Supreme Dark Ruler I need my acolytes to be actively involved in promoting my reign of terror, and you petty mortals just aren't pulling your weight. You aren't traking down gems of power, magicial rings, wands, or even volumes of forbidden lore for me; you aren't even making sacrifices to the Forces of Darkness for my greater power. Oh, don't try to deny it. If you were making even tiny sacrifices to the Forces of Darkness have been coughing up this yechhy stuff for the last two days.

Now shape up, or I'll feed you to the mutant cyborg piranahs.

I need to fix my coat again. It's still cool enough in the evenings that I can sweep about in a trenchie--or rather I could, were my trenchie not so fucked. The last lot of repairs caved in and have left me bereft of my big ol' PVC coat. *sob!*
I've given up trying to restore it to something like its former condition. I can't duplicate the original surface, no matter how I try, and am instead planning to settle for a more varied texture.

I was in La Bosc de Fades the other night with Lurid, and they had these wicked floor to ceiling curtains mae of--check this out--CHAIN MAIL! How cool is that? It wasn't ring-mail, then links were more like Z-shaped. It was gorgeous. I kept playing with it all the time I was sat there, and now I am consumed with an unrequietable desire to have a coat made out of the same stuff. Course, I'm never going to be able to afford something like that... but I'm wondering if I couldn't at least suggest a similar effect in places on my trenchie, for example on the front corners and places where the plastic has worn off. I'm thinking a kind of applìque, but with chains, fine ones but not too fine. Dunno where I'm going to find the right kind of chain. Will check out some hardware places later.

Chomsk's new blog

Fantastic! Noam Chomsky has joined the blogosphere.

Damn.

It's half-eleven, I'm already shagged out, and I've really got to finish this damn story by the morning. Got got got. Or I will cordially hate myself all day tomorrow.

Why do I respect self-imposed deadlines more than the externally imposed variety? I mean, I can certainly work to externally imposed deadlines, even blatanly ludicrous, pulled-out-of-a-manager's-earhole deadlines. I just don't get all emotional about it.

Random linkies...

TRAPPED BY UNDEAD, NEED HELP
(Via Flowers)

The Killer Gerbil
(Via blogger's "recently updated" list)

Poetryfox.com
(Via Ralan.com)

Run.

Started running again today, for the 3rd time this year. The last couple of times I got thwarted by a bashed toe and then a yuckky chest. I felt okay while I was doing it, but now I'm coughing up... you don't want to know. I reckon I have a week or so of coughing up this goo and then I'll be clear, and things will get easier. Doing the Breath of Fire excercise to help things along a bit.

I have to keep moving. When I stop moving, I get aches and pains and sundry annoyances: my right side cramps, my lungs fill up with crap. When I stop moving, things break down.

I'm having some trouble placing one of my fics. It's a light fantasy piece about a dad dragon giving a pi-jaw to his dragon son, and I just can't seem to settle it anywhere. I'm only submitting to pro markets at the moment, on principle.

Finished a poem last night; God knows who'll buy it, it's pretty bleak. No new stories tho'. I hate it when I don't finish a story for a couple of days coz I feel like I'm losing momentum, winding down. Falling behind. Rolling back to where I was a couple of years ago, when I was finishing one piece every few months, if that. I must finish something tomorrow. I have to keep on finishing, submitting, revising, rewriting, resubmitting.

I have to keep moving, or things break down.

Gnarrgh.

Bunnies. Fluffy bunnies.

Goddammit--why isn't there a 12-step programme for giving up passive-aggression? Specifically, that form of passive aggression which involves going off into one on your weblog about something someone said on a message board.

Miniature goats. Teeny little miniature goats, the ones that only come up to your knees.

I used to do that all the time, but I've been sober from it for about a year (I think), because I realised just how hurtful (not to mention bloody irritating) it can be.

Tapirs! Yay for tapirs! Exotic wuffles.

But I am sooo tempted to fall off the wagon right now, because an unwitting finger has poinked one of my buttons. And the worst of it is, I genuinely like the person doing the poinking and would bitterly regret tearing hir a new one.

Kittens. Of course.

I don't know why that makes it harder.

Tiny Shetland pony foals with weebly-woobly legs. Ring-tailed lemurs. Pipistrelles. Hedgehogs. Leeetle baby fox-cubs.

God, I'm so fucking petty.

Oi! Spooky perverts!

I've been cracking the keyboard all day, but I seem to have run out of ideas. Zap me, please.

Also: When the current stack of cats-in-a-box collapse their precious little waveforms, could there be just one or two kitties still feet-down instead of feet up? Ta.

No a la guerra

Piled out to the manifestación yesterday with Lurid A. It was pretty big; the Beeb say 200,000 but I'm betting it was more. Great atmosphere, as usual: floats, lavish home-made banners, samba music, kiddies in face-paint. It's really cute to see a whole family marching together, parents, grandparents, kids, all chanting in unison.
My fave costume? The seven-foot tall blue alien with the "PAZ UNIVERSALE" placard.

It was a festive atmosphere, but there was an edge of sorrow there too. Many people had added black ribbons to their anti-war banners; one man carried a placard that simply showed the black memorial ribbon with MADRID written below it and BAGDAD above. There was a great deal of anger, too, much of it directed to the recently-ousted Aznar.

I'm impressed by the peaceful nature of Spanish protests, as well as the high turn-outs. The police prescence was microscopic, not like back home. (Honestly, I've been on marches where the protesters were outnumbered two to one by the old Bill.)

Later we met a couple of friends for a meal in Barceloneta and then walked along the beach. There were a few protesters camped out in sleeping bags and tents, votive candles burning next to a placard remembering the dead of Madrid.

I found the culprit.

It was Wordpad. Eeeeeevil Wordpad.

Amongst other annoying glitches, wordpad is possessed by the Demons of 10ptyness. When you open your file in Wordpad it is automatically downsized from 10 to 12, which you don't notice because you're on the laptop and so inadvertantly piss off good and deserving editors with your teenytiny letters.

I say FIE unto Wordpad. How much FIE? Enough FIE that I have banished it from my toolbar in favour of a freeware wordprocessor called AbiWord. It's as shaky as Heck, tries to load a nonexistant dictionary every time you open a file, and crashes altogether if you try to use the Help... and yet strangely it still sux0rz less than bloody Wordpad. I'm running Star Office over on the big 'puter, of course, but Lurid needs that to shoot Klingons.

Edit: I've just resubmitted the story that got rejected yesterday to a different market. The ed. of the rejecting zine was right: the ending was too weak. I've altered it, and I think the story as a whole works way better now.

Dealing with rejection.

Okay, make that four bits in the post. Just got a rejection from one of the places I sent stuff off to yesterday.

I am sooooo pissed off. Not with the rejection, I mean, that's fair enough. But somewhere along the line, my attachment got reformatted down from 12 to 10 pt. font. 10 pt? What the fuck? I KNOW I formatted that bastard properly! I've been doing this since I was a kid! Double line space, single side, TWELVE POINT COURIER! How could this happen to me? Oh, the shame! The indignity! The helpful little note from the asst. ed. with a link to a writer's help site! AUUUUUUUUUUGHHHH!

How will I ever live this down?

Okay. Calm now.

Well, no, I'm not even a tiny bit calm, I'm still pissed off, but I'm all ranted out for now so I'll just whine about how hard it is to be a writahhhh for a bit.

Except that I can't, coz right now things are coming pretty well. I've been working pretty hard this past week, finished three new stories, and tarted up four old storys that I wrote some years back but never submitted anywhere. I submitted three pieces of short fiction to 3 zines, two pro and one semi-pro, which makes 4 bits in the post if you count my entry for the McSweeny prize. I also have a piece ready to send out to TSR (finally!) which I should do tomorrow. That'll clear the decks, leaving me to finish some more works which I've outlined but haven't filled in yet. Two high fantasy, one sorta Fortean-y thing. They shouldn't really take me longer than a week to finish, barring the tedious proofreading etc.

Realistically I need to keep that kind of pace up every week if I want to get anywhere with this. I want to be selling a piece to a pro market, a market that pays 3 cents a word minimum, every week. That's not so crazy. There are a lot of markets out there nowadays and I am writing faster and better than I ever have in my life.

Rummaging around the wonderful Ralan.com I've turned up some promising pro markets. Check it out.

Edit: Make that five bits in the post. It's all quality stuff too. You can hate me now, that's what I'm here for.

Roll over.

It looks a lot like Aznar and friends played up ETA's involvement for political gain, but then "Aznar is a complete git who'd sell his own granny to keep the PP in power" is hardly news round here.

I think we've all worked out by now that ETA was not soley responsible for last Thursday's atrocity (tho' not for want of trying). Most of the evidence now points to Al Qaeda, with maybe a side order of ETA. TBH, I didn't want to belive it myself, because I know damn well that out head honchos will most likely use this as an excuse to clamp down even more harshly on our civil rights.

But that's not what I want to talk about right now. Right now I have a very special message for the (largely) right-wing pro-war lobby, in respect of their comments on the Spanish election result. Obviously this is a complex issue, one which needs a sensitive and even handed approach, showing due regard to both sides, but then there's this whole part where the r-w, p-w all suck and need to be sworn at a very lot.

FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU YOU POINTLESS, POINTLESS, POINTLESS FUCKING BASTARDS! YOU KNOW NOTHING! YOU ARE NOTHING! YOU INSULT THE LIVING AND THE DEAD WITH YOUR WORTHLESS BITCHING! SO YOU DIDN'T GET THE ELECTION RESULT YOU WANTED -- BOO FUCKING HOO! CHOKE ON PROPER DEMOCRACY! HARRRGH!

That doesn't mean you get to attack the people of Spain, you ignorant, souless gits. Oh, I'm so terribly sorry that having FUCKING BOMBS GO OFF IN THEIR CAPITAL made more people turn out to vote than might otherwise have done so. I'm so fucking sorry you saw a guy in a 'Palestine scarf' in one of the photos. Jeeze, that must have been hard on you. I'm so fucking sorry that Spain as a whole decided it was sick of the taste of DUBYA'S RIM, and decided that Hey, maybe we should vote in someone with less of an appetite for bushmeat.

Oh, yeah. The Spanish voted in someone you didn't like, so they must have been "scared." I suppose they were also scared when they took to the streets to tell the terrorists to fuck off. I suppose they were scared when they piled, man and boy, woman and girl, into easily bombable public spaces. I suppose they were scared when they chanted anti-terrorist slogans.

I suppose, right, they were fucking scared when they buried their kids and then stumbled weeping from the graveside to vote in the election. I guess they were scared then, yeah?

God, you unfeeling, spiteful, ignorant, self-satisfied, pompous, narcisstic WANKERS. I hope you never lose anyone to a terroist attack. You lack anything like the emotional maturity to deal with it. These people have more fucking guts in there little fingers that you Tory hack SCUM WILL EVER HAVE in your ENTIRE BODIES.

I love Spain. I really love Catalunya. I'd raise a kid here, and that's saying something.

ps: "Appeasement" is not a magic word. Saying "appeasement" a lot does not make you be suddenly be right.

PPS: Democracy's a bitch when it ain't your democracy, innit?

Bleh.

Had a fit last night. First one for ages, so it came as a bit of a surprize. Hell if I know what brought it on; I was working pretty hard yesterday so maybe it was that.

Bleh.

The PP lost.

Spain's ruling PP has been ousted by the PSOE, the leading left-wing party over here. There was a bit more pot-banging tonight, this time in celebration. People cheered, sang, waved Catalan flags. Something like three-quarters of Spain's population turned out to vote, which rips the piss out of the UK's usual 50-odd percent.

I've just watched footage of a family who'd just buried a son killed in the bombing drag themselves weeping from the funeral to the polling booth, and I think I need to cry now.

This post over at Instapundit has many relevant links.

The vigil

Went to the anti-terrorism demo last night. It was massive; I think extra trains had been laid on but even so the train in was packed solid.

The Placa Catalunya was seething. I don't know how many people turned out to show their grief, their solidarity, their defiance, but there must have been tens, maybe hundreds of thousands. Mostly they were ordinary people, the kind of people who wouldn't normally demonstrate: there were far more salon perms than bleached dreds, more short-back-and-sides than pink fauxhawks. People painted their faces with peace signs, slogans, and loops to represent the little twist of black ribbon that has come to symbolise mourning here. That same image was repeated everywhere: real ribbons and painted; printed and photocopied, stuck on walls, windows, doors, coats, and bags.

Home-made banners were brandished above the heads of the crowd. Some of the slogans seemed inspired by the rumours of Islamic terrorism, attacking Bush, Blair and Aznar for provoking the bombings. Mostly though, it was peace that people were thinking of. PAU! PAZ! Terrorism No! ETA NO! said the signs; We won't forget you, Madrid. No more bombs. No more deaths. They flung their white-painted hands* in the air, or clutched votive candles that cast flickering shadows on painted faces.

There was some chanting: "ETA no! ETA no!" and "Hijo de puta!" (son of a whore). Mostly, though, people were subdued, talking quietly amongst themselves or calling to friends in the crowd. There was sorrow in the air, and anger, and fear, but also a kind of grave joy in their unity. Here in Barcelona and all across Spain, millions of people are turning out to say the same thing: We don't want your bombs. What we want is peace.




*"Manos blancos, " a symbol of peace and defiance against ETA and the name of a Spanish peace organisation.

Just got back from a small demo in the main plaça of the campus. No chanting, no banners, no hubbub, just a show of solidarity. Sort of brings home to you how useless you are in the face of something like this. Me, I can't even give blood.

Going into town for the big demo at 7:30 tonight. See if there's any volunteer-type stuff that an ex-cleaning lady with bad Spanish could do. I wish Madrid weren't so far away.

"In one hospital, a doctor answered the mobile phone of a critically injured woman to find it was the patient's cousin, desperately trying to trace her."

God, imagine it; trying to reach a loved one after a calamity like that, and hearing a stranger's voice on the other end of the phone... Or worse, getting no answer.

There's an anti-terrorism demo tomorrow night. I'm going. Fucking futile, of course; the people who plant the bombs don't give a shit what anyone thinks. But sometimes you just need to be around other people who feel the same way, you need to get together just to say This is wrong.

Tonight the balconies of my neighbourhood have erupted into a fury of protest: pots and pans are being banged together, airhorns are blasting, people are shouting, screaming, whooping, whistling, stamping, banging on doors and windows. They are angry and they need to be heard, even if it's only by one another.

"When Eta attacks, the Basque heart breaks into a thousand pieces."

ETA massacre in Madrid

Christ. When I went out this morning the death toll was around 60, 70; now it's up to 180+ and just keeps rising.

I can't fucking belive it. All those people. They hadn't done anything, nothing; just a bunch of ordinary people. All they wanted to do was get to work. People here are talking about it in the streets, on the train, in the bar, in this cybercafe. Impromptu banners and ribbons hang from the balconies: PAU, says a hand-lettered sign in one window: the Catalan word for peace. ETA NO, says another. Everyone's stunned.

Well done ETA, you gutless, mindless, worthless pack of scumfucks.

Madrid blasts: Who is to blame?

Who are Eta?

Free money.

Right. Now, when I entered the contest I promised myself that I wouldn't think about the contest at all until they announce the winner. But in my current state of penuriousness, I can't help it. Which is bad. I keep thinking about all the things I could do with that dough, and if (well, when, really) I don't win, I'm going to feel even more gutted about not being able to do those things than I did before I even knew there was a contest.

So here it is, once and never again, just to get it out of my system: the big fat list of Things I Could Do With That Money

Sign up for a TEFL course.
Get my Reiki 2 attunement.
Get on an advanced Spanish course.
Get some new clothes. Shiny shiny black clothes mmMMMmmm shiny.
Buy sword lessons. Big sword. Big pointy sword.
Go and see my folks.
Toys for Lurid.
Books on how to write more betterer.

Dearly beloved Spooky Perverts: Please fix it for me to win this contest, or if not this ontest, some other contest with a big wodge of prize money. Please help me to sort out my grubby little life. Thankyou.

In other news...

I sold another story. w00t! It's only ten bucks but what the hey. It's for this nifty fantasy & spec. fic. webzine and it'll be out at the end of March. That poem I sold will probably be in the same ish. Wow.

Suicide Note Generator

Dear Ungrateful World;


Although everyone on Earth has failed to give me even half the accolades and adulation that should go with me, Mordant Carnival, being the 3rd coming of christ, I will still fulfill my destiny. For you insolent pukes, I will shed my blood to once again open the gates of heaven.

Start erecting statues, singing songs, scoring touchdowns and doing other shit for my glory, because you fuckers owe me big,



Jesus Christ III
a.k.a. Mordant Carnival


P.S. Tell everyone I'm not psychotic.

Lies, damn lies, and GM spin

Champion article by George Monbiot, detailing exactly how the "GM will solve world hunger!" line is bullshit. I mean, we already knew that, but it's nice to see it all written down properly.

Ouch.

Punitiveshoes.com

Like I say, Ouch.

In other news: I've updated Leftover Parfait for the first time in fucking forever. I haven't got around to it for a while because I was focused on the more saleable, less sectionable side of my work, but I've been such a busy little wannabee lately that I thought I'd treat myself to some disposable fun. I think I may use the premise of this new piece for something, someday, but it isn't really strong enough to carry a whole story by itself.

Trees.

Had a good day today. Crawled home from Nocturna at around 7am (fun night, cute little Spanish Gothlings, and a pretty good set to boot) and fell into bed for a few hours. It was really sunny today so I took advantage of the fine weather to go for a walk in the woods with Lurid. We played catch.

Walking in the woods makes me happy.

earthbounddog.com

In case of alien abduction these dog tags may save
your life. The crucial data an alien will need to get
you back to Earth is die stamped into these dog tags.

And all for only $12.99!

Meanwhile, in Romania, they're gearing up for entry into the EU by getting rid of the vampires:

Haunted by "strigoi" - the undead - villagers on the slopes of the Carpathian mountains exhume a corpse from the graveyard and drive a stake through its heart to banish the evil spirit. They burn the remains of the heart, mix the ashes with water from the local well and drink it, to complete the macabre ritual.

1804? No, 2004. This February just gone, to be exact. Jeeze Louise.

Okayer...

Frisky little darling of a day today: Punted out a new short fic in the afternoon, then topped things off by entering for the Van Zorn prize. (the deadline's the 10th, BTW, so if you haven't entered yet you should get your skates on. They accept emails with a Word.doc attachment, so you've still got time. Go on, I know you freaks can come up with summat.)

So I'm jolly pleased with myself and am inspired to keep up the pace. I should have the D&D-style thing punted out by midweek; I reluctantly abandoned my original idea as being too grim for that particular market and am polishing off a rather lighter piece to send instead.

The fly in the ointment is that my entry for the Van Zorn prize has already been rejected (or rather pointedly ignored until I went away) by no less than two webzines. Don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. The other fly in the ointment is that I was planning on sending it to Interzone, and now I'll have to work like a demon to get something as good together in time for my self-imposed Sending Something To A Magazine That Pays More Than £20 A Pop deadline of this coming Friday. Fortunately I have something on the hard drive that fits the bill; unfortunately I wrote it when I was 24. Everything that I wrote around that time is either a) a not-very-thinly veiled attack on exploitative work practices in the UK, or b) incoherent due to sleep dep. The latter can be fun, the former less so.

Either way, it's going to take work.

Okay...

So I've done the working, with the help of the spooks, a map of Barcelona, a marker pen, and a plakky bottle of water from the fountain in town. Just going to let that stew now. I've done all I can, I think.

On to the next thing. I need more spook help for this, but it's for them as much as me.

Guys, you keep on at me to do this book of drawings and stuff. You keep dropping all these images in my head. Which is all well and good but in case you hadn't noticed, my drawing is really sucky at the moment. And being me, I get stressed out by the suckiness and that makes my drawing suck even more, which makes me more sucky, etc.

Deliver me from the Suck Loop. I'll work hard, I'll persist, I'll stick with it, but right now there is no IT to stick with. I need you guys to get me started, please. Inspire me, point me to a really good How To Draw site, or anything that'll help me address my particular set of problems.

Meanwhile, here's someone who can really create: Kurt Wenner, master street painter.

The Silent Healing CD

"The CD contains over 34,000 different bio-energetic and Homoeopathic resonance patterns, which have been sampled and stored on the CD. When played on a Hi Fi or other CD player it releases the bio-energetic and Homoeopathic type patterns to harmonise imbalances. Every imbalance in the body has a complementary energetic pattern that will bring it back to optimum health, the body knows best and responds through resonance and accepts the patterns it needs..."

Uh, yeah.

There's also the usual bunch of testimonials from people who sound like they've been eating paint since childhood, extolling the virtues of the Silent Healing CD.

The website neglects to point out that that same effect ould be acheived with a fucking blank CD and a random selection of gullible whackjobs.

Things are hotting up around here.

(Nah, not the weather.)

Last night I had one of the oddest nights in years. Went to be early, slept really erratically, and had loads of peculiar dreams. (I wrote them down, of course, but I'm not going to blog them until I work out what the hell my head was on about.) Woke up many times with sleep paralysis, something I'm accustomed to but still find irksome. The sleep paralysis was associated with difficulty in breathing and a very loud buzzing in my ears, like a giant insect.

Woke up feeling all drifty and weird. This better be something magick happening. If it's not magick it's probably 'flu, and I hate 'flu.

Oh, and today's the day I do that spell to get L.A. the Spanish grant. All good vibes appreciated.

RVTargets.com
Online Magical Library
Sacred-texts.com

Just added these to the ever-expanding beast that is my sidebar.

Into the Dead Zone

Lena gives us a tour of Chernobyl. Haunting.

Update on the nutbar side of my life.

Still keeping up with the RPK. Results variable, but graaaadually improving.

Developed a visualization to help with the thought intrusions (you know, the brain gangrene thing). Not sure whether to blog that or not tho'.

Decided to start working a bit harder on my RV. I'll be using the guess-the-tarot-card game from Liber 9. Obviously I've doen this sort of thing before but TBH I've never really stuck with it for long, nor have I kept very detailed records.

Oh, FFS...

Be more uptight. Maybe you'll implode. That'd be funny.

I'm hot.

I'm hot and I want an ice-cream.

It's all sunny out and the little studenty people are sprawling on the lawns. And on Sunday, it was snowing.

It's not hugely hot -- most of my ice-cream hankerings were generated by walking uphill -- but I confidently predict MAJOR heat soon. I reckon we'll be properly baking in a couple of weeks, and in a month I'll be splashing happily around in the Med.

This is bizzarre.

So, awhile ago this guy commented on my Lj and friended me, right? Which is nice, you know, friends are good. I visited his Lj and there were no entries. Well, he must be new, I shrugged. But the thing is... I've just gone back and he still has no entries. None.

So it looks as if this guy signed up with Lj just to comment on one of my fics. And to join Lj, you need a code which you must either purchace or beg from a friend who's already got an accont. It's not like just anyone can sgn up, you have to make a bit of an effort.

Which is flattering but... Dammit, I hate the idea of being important enough to make any kind of an effort. My only defence in this wicked world is the complete indifference of the vast majority of people.

(PS: talking of indifference, I've updated the green book.)

Why?

Why must you do this? WHY must you be such an INCREDIBLE bunch of FUCKBUBBLES? I'm coasting along, right as rain, happy as a sandboy, thinking nice calm thoughts, ready to wrap the whole world in the Joy of the Divine, and you! You come along with your stupid ideas and your smug, deluded self-aggrandisment and you TRASH MY MOOD to the point where I must ABANDON THE PATH OF LIGHT and go all EVIIIILLLLL. Again.

I pop open my blog so I can get at the sidebar links, and what should be advertised in the banner across the top of the page but this?

Apparently the author of the website, one Jhershierra, is going to show us the path to Immortality. Which is nice.
Of course, she was born with her gifts, which include astral travel and lucid dreaming. (Funny, coz everyone I know who claims to be able to do that shit had to work their arses off. Not saying it couldn't happen, just saying "hmmmm.")

She has also, and I quote, "been visited by Jesus, Immortals,Ascended Massters, Extraterrestrials, and other Spiritual Beings since childhood." Nice of old J.C. to drop by, eh? Not to mention those Ascended Massters. (According to the website, these include St. Germain and, uh, a "dark-skinned Indian woman." So spiritual, these dark-skinned folk, donchaknow.)

Of course there's a bit of a catch. In order to find out how we too can be immortal, we've got to buy her book and, location permitting, attend her classes. But it's a sweet deal -- these Ascended types pop up all the time to tell her what great classes she's giving and how super she is.

How come I never thought of doing this? Why am I boshing away with the green book when I could just invent invent a big pile of crap and imagine myself a nice friendly Ascended Master to shill for me? I'm so in the wrong job.

Shout out for magickal aid.

Okay. So after due consultation with Lurid Archive, I'm going to be doing a medium-sized working to get him the 5-year postdoc he's got his eye on. It's not just the best chance we have of staying in Spain, it's also the best chance Lurid has of getting a good solid job. (As opposed to more of this year here, year there stuff, which quite frankly we could both do without.)

I'm going into town tomorrow to do some stuff, so I'll probably go and score some agua from this fountain that if you drink it you're supposed to not leave Barca, which I will use in the ritual. (Also there's this thing where you light a candle in the Cathederal to similar effect.) Ritual will most likely take place on the 5th, when the proposal has to be in.

Any good vibes would be appreciated.

Also, if spooky perverts ML and RML are reading this: guys, help me out here. I promise to update your blog more if you would please please please help LA to get this grant. I'll update and I'll draw your weird little pictures and write your book and everything.