retstak.org

I caught this picture of my cat Ebony on accident, but figured it’d make a great caption contest pic.

You all have the floor.

I swear, if I find the entity in charge of running the universe, I’m going to give the asshole a piece of my mind. I’m absolutely frickin’ tired of him/her/it pissing on me and mine.

Short of it, Mom’s in the hospital on top of everything else that this year has dumped on me so far. She’ll probably live — but that’s not the point. Anything to do with the ticker malfunctioning is pretty scary.

(The latest news can be found on my Twitter and Facebook, and I’ll write a substantial blog post when things calm down, hopefully towards the end of the week.)

New beginning, by cuellar on flickr

My psychiatrist chewed me out today. I can’t say I didn’t deserve it. In fact, in all honesty, I needed to be spoken to bluntly about the subject.

You see, last…oh, god, June, was it? When California was having really awful budget problems (err, well, I guess that’s still now, never mind — anyway, last summer), one of the consequences of the lack of state money is that I got kicked off the county mental health program. My psych gave me the number for the place he was moving to, and I made an effort to call, but of course, the callback went to the answering machine and I never got around to returning the tag. I had a couple refills in the system, so it wasn’t really any big deal — so I just forgot about making a new appointment.

…which leads to December and coming off the meds in a rather messy fashion. And yeah, this is a big no-no. Add in that I’m fairly certain the thyroid is out of whack again because I’ve been avoiding my primary care doc — I hate doctors that don’t listen to me — and yeah, it’s probably no frakking wonder *why* I crashed hard in December.

I’d went with the thought that I’d make no resolutions this year, but that’s kinda morphed around a bit. I think I do need to make some. I’m going to keep them low key and somewhat nebulous, because I’m fragile enough that not making them is going to hurt. So I’ve got two semi-nebulous ones out there:

1. Either have or be in a position to obtain full time work by December 31, 2010
2. Have done enough work to warrant enough nominations to end up on the long list of folks nominated for a Hugo for best fanwriter in 2011.

The first is relatively intuitive; the second is just a way of stating “do more fanac in 2010″. I mean, technically, if folks want to include me on their nominations list, that’s awesome, but I want to sorta feel, in my own mind, that I’ve done something I can point to and say that I’ve earned it.

But the doc’s kinda put a 1A that pops up to the top of the list — figure out where this tendency towards self-sabotage is coming from and begin the hard work to thwart it. I mean, I hear you all saying that I’m smart and I’m talented and all of that, and … yeah. I wanna believe you; I’m not entirely sure I can. Which plays into this, I think.

So, I had four monthly goals to achieve, and have done one. A second is coming up because performance reviews are on the table at work…which just makes my stomach even more flippyfloppy.

1. Visit doctor
2. Write resume
3. Begin learning C##
4. Pub ish by 1 Feb

Anyway. I’m going to need my friends. I’m going to need them more than ever. Will you help me?

New Year’s Eve Fireworks by mastermaq

I wanted to write a bit more about looking back and looking forward, but I’m probably going to have to push things back a couple days into the weekend. The house is full of Jill’s brownies, with all the ruckus and noise implied by nine second and third grade girls who are somewhat hopped up on sugar and excitement. In other words, it’s not exactly conductive to reflective thought.

Anyway, this here is just to say I’m alive on the precipice, but where I’m going from here is anybody’s guess.

So I suppose the thing I could most use on this precipice is the acknowledgment that my friends are out there and that they’ve got my back.

Happy new year everybody.

Candles at church, by me

I’ve been doing a lot of wheelspinning lately as I try to figure out something. I haven’t figured out much in the way of conclusions because I haven’t had the time to pursue threads all the way out, but there is one thing that comes to mind.

Ignore all that ‘must co-opt pagan holiday’ stuff that caused the birth of Jesus to be moved to the bleak midwinter as opposed to the more logical late spring that all the trappings of the story hint at, and look at it from a different perspective. As a storyteller, there is no better time of the year. The world is at its darkest in the days around the solstice, so much so that we light our homes with blazing electric lights to chase the darkness away. And metaphorically, isn’t that what the Christchild story is? Bringing light to a dark world?

The story demands the change.

Anyway, that’s one of the threads I’m still trying to follow to its conclusion; I may or may not continue to blog about it.

But for those who celebrate it, Merry Christmas! And if you don’t, may you have a good day today as well.

Tags: candles, christmas, holiday, life, light, ponder, thoughts

As jennkitty said, I could really use the egoboo right about now. It’s an anonymous thread, so I won’t know who you are, but I could use just a little light this holiday.

Linky here.

I’ll leave the commentary to the peanut gallery.

Ebony has the right idea of what to do on this cold morning. Wish I could have crawled under the covers and went back to sleep myself.

Yeah, that’s going to be the title of the fanzine I’m putting out. And I’m looking for contributions. I have the first year pretty much planned out as to topics. (I’m going to go approximately quarterly, so that means four topics.)

The first topic is ‘Beginnings’; I’ll need things by New Year’s for assembly and layout in early January. I’ll take anything folks want to throw at me, but my most pressing need would be a cover. I’ll probably end up having to whip something up using photographs since I don’t know how to ask for help (read: too nervous to ask), but I wanted to lay that out there as a thought.

The second right now seems to want to be called ‘Dreaming of Rockets’; my thought on that is Hugos, not the space race. I’m sure it’ll come up soon. That, I’m going to say, let’s shoot for a deadline of the Ides of March. This is a little more fluid, talk to me in January about it. I just wanted to throw the idea out there.

My email is katster AT retstak DOT org, or you can poke me via all the usual places (including the comments of this blog entry.)

Tags: fandom, fanzines, rhyme and paradox, science fiction, writing

Bookshelf cat laughs at your puny attempts to understand.

(Now it’s your turn. You caption the shot.)

Success, by Kevin Thoule as found on Flickr // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

So I got whacked between the eyes with an epiphany today.

It started yesterday, actually, but it didn’t quite completely come clear until today. I was reading a book on probability and how people are notoriously bad at it (The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow) and his last chapter is a bit about taking risks and why it’s sometimes important to do so — and one of the things he said was, yeah, random chance means you’re going to end up with a lot of failure, but just as streaks happen when you flip a coin, there’s always the random chance you’re going to succeed. If you don’t take the risks, you minimize your chance of failure, but you minimize your chance to succeed as well.

But it didn’t really hit me between the eyes until I was writing an email that I’ll send out to the region tomorrow. And in it, I was talking about the point of NaNoWriMo — it’s not so much about writing a novel as it is about throwing caution to the wind and doing something crazy. It’s about allowing yourself the right to suck and the right to fail, because both are hard. But if we fear failure, how can we find success? If we don’t do something because we’ll suck, how can we transcend to awesomeness?

It is that simple: in failure, we find success. In sucking, we lay the ground for becoming awesome.

I got a piece of this last Sunday when I went to the Night of Writing Dangerously. I said it myself in the post I wrote: I thought to myself that I was going to fail at reaching fifty thousand words that night. And I was going to feel miserable. But then I embraced the fear, embraced the suck, shoved the worry to the back of my mind. And what happened? I got my 50k and I rang that bell and it WAS AWESOME.

So, I’m going to stick my neck out a bit more. I have a final and a project due a week from Tuesday, and I’m going to use the time beyond that to (a) update my resume and start throwing it at jobs, (b) pick up a bit of C# with the goal of being able to contribute (even minimally) to projects at work by 1 Feb, and (c) get that fanzine together that I’ve been talking about.

Now it’s your turn: Tell me what you plan to do to embrace the suck and do something scary.

Tags: epiphany, failure, life, ponder, success, suck, thoughts

I seem to have acquired 15 Google Wave invites. They are free to good homes; leave a comment with an email if you don’t mind your email in public on the Intartubes, or toss me an email (katster AT retstak DOT org) if you do.

First come, first serve, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Back around 2005, the first time I did a NaNoWriMo in the friendly confines of the Sacramento region, we had a slight contest. I think I won this one, for most convoluted and long opening sentence. So, to share with you (since I found the notebook it was in), here it is:

In the beginning — if anything could be said to have a beginning that wasn’t some other beginning’s end or end’s beginning or end’s end or beginning’s beginning — the universe seeked heroes to uphold truth and justice and its very own internal structure and it called these heroes out when needed or even wanted; the universe, it seems, is in dire need of heroes to be eaten alive, and this story is about a particular groups of bold and brave heroes (and heroines, for heroes can be girls or anthropomorphic squirrels or protoplasm or transforming robots or whatever, really; the key is to simply be willing to be chewed up alive by the universe, and these heroes had that in spades.)

While I would never write a story starting this way, I’m oddly proud of that.

I have absolutely nothing to say today. (I should probably stick to Twitter.)

It was a great holiday. I got to talk with relatives, and I also got about three pages longhand of a piece of the novel that means I can move forward somewhat. And it started with a simple twist the bot gave me in our nano channel last night:

What happens if your main character wakes up as the other gender?

So yeah, things have just gotten interesting.

Hope your thanksgiving was great!

Tags: nablopomo