Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Bullets and Blowhards

Pavowski5 Comments

Another day, another shooting. People are going to rush to judgment, fingers will be pointed, pulpits will be pounded upon. The dead will be used as bricks in a wall built around our violently entrenched personal beliefs.

This is not a political site, and I don’t want it to be. But it’s impossible to look the other way when there are two high-profile shootings with multiple fatalities within days of each other.

There are discussions to be had about religious fundamentalism and what needs to be done about it.

There is something to be said about terrorism, foreign and domestic.

Maybe there’s even something to be said about our own society: how we don’t know each other, how we’re more and more isolated on our own islands, not knowing what lives in our neighbor’s hearts.

But let’s first of all take a look at a sickness in our country which is undeniably caused (or, at least, worsened) by such ready, easy access to guns, and let’s maybe, just maybe, not go straight to the assumption that the answer to the problem is more guns in the hands of more people.

JUMP-TO-CONCLUSIONS-MAT

And then, on the other hand, let’s go ahead and grant that guns in the hands of the right people are what brought this particular massacre to an early end.

Pray about it, if that’s your thing (but don’t forget that whoever or whatever you’re praying to allows this stuff to happen, day in and day out). But also recognize that the only thing that is going to stop tragedies like this (or, let’s be honest, lessen tragedies like this — people are people, after all) is by making it harder for the wrong people to get the guns. And that means we have a duty to vote against the cement posts in the ground who block any and all gun legislation at every turn.

 

 

Sideways Short Fiction

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I’ve written a bit about the workshop I’m undertaking over the past several weeks, though I haven’t said anything about the works. (I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with these stories, so, y’know, sharing about them seems premature.)

But I’m on to the final “lesson” — writing the endings — and the workshop has offered some advice that really turns everything I thought I knew about narrative writing on its head.

It’s so different and powerful, I feel like I might actually do better writing in the future literally standing on my head. Because I feel like I’ve been doing this stuff wrong all along. Well… not wrong, per se. But maybe as if I’ve been driving a car around for hours, and I didn’t realize that the sun shield with the big dumb sunglasses painted on it was covering the windshield.

(Don’t pretend you don’t remember those things.)

I’ll shill for it again since I’m enjoying it so much — the program in question is Holly D. Lisle’s free fiction workshop at How To Think Sideways, and again, if you write a lot of short fiction like I do, it’s absolutely worth your time to check it out.

Anyway, the short fiction projects in progress should be wrapped in a week or two, and then it’ll be back to the Capital-P Projects — whether 2nd editing my first novel or 1st editing my second — and maybe finding some stability in my writing routine again.

Or not. God knows with Christmas rolling around, any sort of routine tends to go out the window.

Turkey-Drunk Takeover

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I’m guest-posting over at Linda G. Hill‘s place this week.

Specifically, I’m hosting her Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday this week; an event I regularly partake in on Saturdays. Of course, I’ll still be partaking, but at double the fun, since the prompt this week is mine, all mine!

*cue evil laugh*

Anyway, if you like what you read here, you might want to head over there and check it out. The prompt is live, too, if you want to jump in and take part.

Just tell them Pav sent you.

Except that when you get there, you’ll find me in the driver’s seat there as well. So you’d be telling me that I sent you.

But, y’know, tell me anyway.

I was going to post something funnier, but my heart just isn’t in it tonight, watching the shootout at a Planned Parenthood, of all things. Jesus Christ.

Anyway, happy Black Friday.

Channel Surfing At Its Worst

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I’m gonna keep this brief, because I’ve got leftovers to shove down my neck.

The Pavs are staying at a hotel this Thanksgiving, which means all the delightful things that go along with staying away from home as the parents of toddlers (packing a literal vanful of stuff for a two-day stayover, remembering that the 18-month old doesn’t do well at all with staying away and therefore won’t sleep or nap, and therefore, NEITHER WILL YOU… you know, minor inconveniences).

But today, I’m sitting here, both kids asleep (amazingly!) and with a little time to kill, so first of all I’m blarging a bit, and second of all I’m looking around to see what’s on TV, which is of course a mistake. Nothing’s on TV on Thanksgiving except a bunch of Black Friday ads that I don’t care about and the first in several networks’ series of holiday marathon movies. In short, I could turn the TV off from now until January and probably not miss a thing.

Anyway, I’m flipping through channels and not having a lot of luck, and I find this handy-dandy reference card by the TV. You know, the list of local stations. But there’s a problem…

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Just look at that abomination. Who in the name of all that’s holy designed that monstrosity? It’s totally unreadable and useless to anybody who might be looking at it. Channels arranged alphabetically? Who in their right mind, staying at the Holiday Inn Express from out of town, knows enough to wonder what station KET, Scottsville IND, or Trojan are on (these are all stations on the card, for the curious)?

Sorry, channel card designer, when I am sitting in my hotel room looking for something to kill thirty minutes on the idiot box, I want to know first what’s on the channels as I’m flipping through them, second — maybe — what I can expect to see in a few minutes on the same channel. Like, I’m flipping, and I see what looks like a documentary on giraffes, but I want to make sure I’m actually watching Animal Planet and not Fox News, where they’re about to replace the lovely peaceful image of a giraffe with some idiocy about how the giraffes have ruined the plumbing at the zoo and Obama is to blame.

Further, if you ARE going to list the channels alphabetically like an absolute tosspot, at least have the decency to list them left-t0-right. Top-to-bottom listings should be reserved strictly for numerical sortings. What are we, savages?

How dare they call this thing a Channel-Surfing Guide. More like a do-it-yourself instant aneurysm kit. My eyes won’t uncross.

On a more serious note, it’s Black Friday Eve, so I’m stockpiling ammunition and taser cartridges for my shopping sortie tomorrow. If you cross my path, it’s nothing personal, but I’m getting that last Minion doll.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Totally Not Helpful

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Reading the search results that lead people to my site (when they aren’t blocked… thanks Google) is sometimes insightful, sometimes telling, sometimes hilarious.

Today’s gem?

what happens if you accidentally inhale a puff of comet

You’re not going to see me going grammar stickler all over somebody’s search terms. It does, however, give me a fit of the giggles that somebody — presumably in a panic after breathing in a lungful of bathroom disinfectant — stumbles onto my site, looking for some sort of deliverance from their freshly bleached trachea, and finds only my short story about a kid who sneaks onto the train that carries the elderly into space on a one-way trip.

Totally not helpful, but maybe I have a new reader.

Unless the comet did its work and ravaged his throat and windpipe enough to make my site the last thing he saw. Which is, if you think about it, kind of still a win.