Ow ow ow ow

I’ve been taking my Clonazepam like a good girl; shouldn’t the pain be going away now? What’s the point of courting a dual addiction to Clonazepam and Caffeine if I’m still hurting? I can hurt with a clean system just as well as I can with a chemically jonesing one, dammit.

This morning I did something I thought I would never have to do again. I scraped ice off my car windows. I’m just glad we still have a scraper. The odds were high that we’d left all such devices back in the Midwest when we made our Southern exodus. But fortunately I found a (broken) specimen in my trunk that had enough of a blade to scritch away the thin layer of frozen condensation. Tonight I am putting my car in the garage come hell or high water.

Writing Stuff:

Got the urban fantasy that was obliquely rejected from the Creative Loafing fiction contest bubbling to the top of the Critters queue this week. I’m curious to see what people’s opinions will be as it’s a bit more mainstream that a lot of the fantasy I toss up.

Currently reading Shatterday by Harlan Ellison. It’s a deeper river of a collection. Deathbird Stories was like rapids or even a waterfall. The emotions were vivid, obvious, and visceral in those stories. The tales in Shatterday are more subtle, requiring some reflection to get the kick-in-the-teeth emotional effect that is the Ellison trademark. I haven’t been moved to tears or nausea once, but I leave each story feeling rather wistful and sad–sometimes thoughtful, sometimes melancholy. I wish I could evoke emotions in my fiction with even a fraction of the finesse and skill of Ellison.

I hope I’ll be able to interview him at Dragon*Con. If I do get the opportunity, I wonder what the chances are of me making remotely sensible noises instead of twittering and stammering like a fool fangirl. *snort*

New word count: 1000 on Novel2. And I’m calling the section I wrote yesterday “Prologue.” So I guess I’m now on Chapter 1. Still uncertain how to work the mythology into the thing. Later. Later.