Juggling Curveballs
Oct. 7th, 2020 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebeYesterday our power went out right before 9 AM (while I was on a conference call) and didn't come back until about 10 PM. According to our local power company, it was a 'bad cable' -- but there's also been a whole lot of construction near us and I'm pretty sure someone cut a power line in the process. It was a strange forced-vacation from work, but we also couldn't do any of the things we'd usually do to take advantage of it. CA is still pretty closed down due to the pandemic and well, we have no power.
We ended up eating out at Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch and again at Smoke Eaters for dinner. Ryan napped, and read, and played crossword puzzles on his phone. I mostly read a book called Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. The author first caught my attention with his deliciously sacrilegious Towing Jehovah, so I was really curious about this one. I thought it would detail a dude being changed into a kaiju as part of some military experiment during WWII as an alternative to the atomic bomb. I was only partially right.
The main character is a sorta-famous B-movie actor known for his roles in monster movies. He has a rival, of course, and a love interest who is a script-writer for the kind of low-rent flicks they make. One day, he's approached by the FBI and drafted into a secret project. The military has already MADE three kaiju, which they keep heavily sedated under a nearby lake. In order to demonstrate the destructive power of the mutated bipedal lizards, they also tried creating 'mini-kaiju', human-sized versions that would show off all the capabilities of their larger cousins on model cities. However, it turns out the mini-kaiju are all pretty tame and rather enjoy the company of people.
So, the Navy wants to use this guy and some cutting edge monster costumes to stage a demonstration on a model city. Since he's the best shambler in the business, they figure he can fool the Japanese delegation into thinking he's the real live thing and then they'll give up the war.
It's not quite what I was hoping for, but it's an enjoyable-enough brisk read. I'm not quite sure it earns the ending, though -- the author was going for something poignant that the rest of the story didn't really do much to support. And I think to earn that ending, the book itself would have had to be a few shades darker than it was. As it stands, it's a nice love-letter to the heyday of the gothic-horror movie in Hollywood; if you're a big fan of the Universal monster movies, this is a big, juicy fastball pitched your way.
Unfortunately I didn't make much headway with anything else really. But still, it's been ages since I've read a novel in one sitting and it felt good. I hoped that doing it would get me out of this years-long reading drought, and I think it just might have. I'm already thinking of the next book to read, though there's a lot of other things I need to do before then.
Puckles is...doing betterish. His energy has come back, though he still does have his down swings (because good Frith he's old). He's eating more, but his appetite still isn't back to where it was. And for a few days he had a worrying tilt of the head to the left side. According to various house-bun websites, this is likely an infection, which...poor little dude. I can only hope his current antibiotics course will take care of that, too.
With the power outage, though, and some significant spillage of the medication in storage, I'm not sure he'll have enough for two full weeks. I really ought to send an email to the usual vet letting them know about the treatment and having them stand-by for replacement antibiotics, just in case.
Writing is...not happening, but I would very much like to change that starting with this afternoon. I'll be working on the last little bit of "A Bearable Partner" for the Patreon and then diving right into "Swiftie's Bar". With "Swiftie's", I'd like to work a bit more on story structure pre-writing just so I know what I'm pitching to. I'm hoping this will help train me to think about scenes as a progression so I'm not just jazzing around but building towards something intentional. "Swiftie's" is designed to be a relatively simple romance/erotic story, but by setting out to examine what I can do with the protagonist's arc I can hopefully keep that in mind. I'm thinking that the main character is disillusioned in general with his place in the universe, and a chance encounter with someone who holds much more power allows him to soften ever so slightly. Honestly, it feels like a pretty good way to dive into my recent headspace.
I feel like a small man these days, but not in any negative way. I'm just a modest person of modest talents who will live a modest life. I'm comfortable with that! But I also feel like I can't just be that: with everything going on, I have to engage with a world that is chaotic and cold, where I'm powerless to do much of anything. It's hard to reconcile the two mindsets. There IS power in modesty, and I think the bulk of true societal change happens on that level, in the small moments and interactions between regular folks. But in activist circles it's very much the fashion that big bold action is the only thing that counts and if you're not doing that you're part of the problem. I get the impulse. We've been quietly asking for change, plugging away modestly at it, for a very long time now. And now there are white supremacists killing in the streets with the backing of the President.
After a brief dalliance into the more bombastic kind of activism, I've decided that's very much not my lane. I work best when pulling the political into the personal, showing how political ideology can manifest in everyday behavior for better or worse. "Swiftie's" feels like it could be a vehicle to explore that a bit. You don't win hearts and minds in marches or campaigns; you do it through quiet action and one conversation at a time. The more I think about it, the more I'd like my life to be my message. What I believe should come through in everything I do.
I'm a long ways off from that, but that's the beauty of being modest. I don't know if I can get to my destination, but I do know I can take a few steps closer to it.
We ended up eating out at Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch and again at Smoke Eaters for dinner. Ryan napped, and read, and played crossword puzzles on his phone. I mostly read a book called Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. The author first caught my attention with his deliciously sacrilegious Towing Jehovah, so I was really curious about this one. I thought it would detail a dude being changed into a kaiju as part of some military experiment during WWII as an alternative to the atomic bomb. I was only partially right.
The main character is a sorta-famous B-movie actor known for his roles in monster movies. He has a rival, of course, and a love interest who is a script-writer for the kind of low-rent flicks they make. One day, he's approached by the FBI and drafted into a secret project. The military has already MADE three kaiju, which they keep heavily sedated under a nearby lake. In order to demonstrate the destructive power of the mutated bipedal lizards, they also tried creating 'mini-kaiju', human-sized versions that would show off all the capabilities of their larger cousins on model cities. However, it turns out the mini-kaiju are all pretty tame and rather enjoy the company of people.
So, the Navy wants to use this guy and some cutting edge monster costumes to stage a demonstration on a model city. Since he's the best shambler in the business, they figure he can fool the Japanese delegation into thinking he's the real live thing and then they'll give up the war.
It's not quite what I was hoping for, but it's an enjoyable-enough brisk read. I'm not quite sure it earns the ending, though -- the author was going for something poignant that the rest of the story didn't really do much to support. And I think to earn that ending, the book itself would have had to be a few shades darker than it was. As it stands, it's a nice love-letter to the heyday of the gothic-horror movie in Hollywood; if you're a big fan of the Universal monster movies, this is a big, juicy fastball pitched your way.
Unfortunately I didn't make much headway with anything else really. But still, it's been ages since I've read a novel in one sitting and it felt good. I hoped that doing it would get me out of this years-long reading drought, and I think it just might have. I'm already thinking of the next book to read, though there's a lot of other things I need to do before then.
Puckles is...doing betterish. His energy has come back, though he still does have his down swings (because good Frith he's old). He's eating more, but his appetite still isn't back to where it was. And for a few days he had a worrying tilt of the head to the left side. According to various house-bun websites, this is likely an infection, which...poor little dude. I can only hope his current antibiotics course will take care of that, too.
With the power outage, though, and some significant spillage of the medication in storage, I'm not sure he'll have enough for two full weeks. I really ought to send an email to the usual vet letting them know about the treatment and having them stand-by for replacement antibiotics, just in case.
Writing is...not happening, but I would very much like to change that starting with this afternoon. I'll be working on the last little bit of "A Bearable Partner" for the Patreon and then diving right into "Swiftie's Bar". With "Swiftie's", I'd like to work a bit more on story structure pre-writing just so I know what I'm pitching to. I'm hoping this will help train me to think about scenes as a progression so I'm not just jazzing around but building towards something intentional. "Swiftie's" is designed to be a relatively simple romance/erotic story, but by setting out to examine what I can do with the protagonist's arc I can hopefully keep that in mind. I'm thinking that the main character is disillusioned in general with his place in the universe, and a chance encounter with someone who holds much more power allows him to soften ever so slightly. Honestly, it feels like a pretty good way to dive into my recent headspace.
I feel like a small man these days, but not in any negative way. I'm just a modest person of modest talents who will live a modest life. I'm comfortable with that! But I also feel like I can't just be that: with everything going on, I have to engage with a world that is chaotic and cold, where I'm powerless to do much of anything. It's hard to reconcile the two mindsets. There IS power in modesty, and I think the bulk of true societal change happens on that level, in the small moments and interactions between regular folks. But in activist circles it's very much the fashion that big bold action is the only thing that counts and if you're not doing that you're part of the problem. I get the impulse. We've been quietly asking for change, plugging away modestly at it, for a very long time now. And now there are white supremacists killing in the streets with the backing of the President.
After a brief dalliance into the more bombastic kind of activism, I've decided that's very much not my lane. I work best when pulling the political into the personal, showing how political ideology can manifest in everyday behavior for better or worse. "Swiftie's" feels like it could be a vehicle to explore that a bit. You don't win hearts and minds in marches or campaigns; you do it through quiet action and one conversation at a time. The more I think about it, the more I'd like my life to be my message. What I believe should come through in everything I do.
I'm a long ways off from that, but that's the beauty of being modest. I don't know if I can get to my destination, but I do know I can take a few steps closer to it.
