Brief life update post

[feuervogel]

When's the last time I wrote about what I've been doing, other than writing? Uh, can't recall. April 10, maybe?

Let's see. Sunday the 11th I went to the park to practice San Shou with my tai chi school, then went to UNC for the anime club's spring picnic/ohanami. That was fun, aside from there being no fucking parking on campus diediedie.

I did the usual weekday stuff during the week, then Friday I went to Charlotte to stay closer to where I was going for a writers conference. The conference itself was OK; it was only $20 so even if the session I went to in the morning was billed as a workshop but was more of a lecture on what to do than how to do and there were so goddamn many Christian-interest writers there, it wasn't a huge waste.

The afternoon session I went to was David Drake talking about how he writes - his process, that sort of thing - and taking questions. It was interesting, and he's really intense. He told me I shouldn't read Hammer's Slammers, because it would disturb me (eh?) because he wrote them after he got back from Vietnam and they were a form of therapy. Now, I like a good, realistic, gritty war story, so I'll see how that goes. I might have time to start reading again soon.

Saturday evening, since I was in the process of flipping out about that volcano in Iceland, after I got home, I texted my ex-coworker and we went out to the bar in Hillsborough. (There's just the one, actually.) Then I tipsy-posted when I got home.

Sunday I went to a Turkish festival out at the fairgrounds. It was OK; there was Turkish coffee, and for an extra $5 I could get it in a Kütahya porcelain cup to take home. I bought some more helva, and Ben got some chocolate-creme-filled cookies that were pretty damn tasty. There were demonstrations of ebru (video) and folk dances (these guys were pretty amazing).

Monday I went out to Greensboro to meet xjenavivex and J, to talk about starting a regional genre writers group, for things like networking, promotion, support, etc. The coffee machine at the Borders was broken, wtf. It was fun, and we're going to work on how to make it bigger & better. And maybe if we get enough interest, we can do a writers retreat out at the Outer Banks in like January when it's cheap(ish).

Coming up: Saturday I'm going to a conference/CME event on pain, addiction, and the law (from 7:30 am to 5 pm...but I'll get close to 8 hours of CE credit for it.) Sunday we have to run another blood glucose curve on Isis, so I'll be home all day. Then next week, I'll be running around and getting my shit together for Germany (clothes, toiletries, hair cut) and trying to see people before I go. L's having her birthday party Friday the 30th, and I may or may not go. I probably won't decide until Friday, actually. My plane leaves at 12 something (I forget if it's noon or like 12:45), so I'll have to be at the airport at like 10:30. We'll see.

Also, thanks to av3rnus I have a lot more German industrial & techno. I need to find time to sit down and make note of which bands I liked enough to want more of, now that I've listened to all 3 CDs like 2 or 3 times each. (The only band whose song I skipped was Einstürzende Neubauten. Sometimes music hits certain frequencies or rhythms or something that makes me either cringe or become anxious. I can't reliably describe what exactly it is, either. EN tripped that button, each time I listened to it. Thankfully, I know how to use the 'next track' button.)

Right, then. Time to get the last few scenes on this novel draft edited/written. I only have 4 left. Which means I'll need a few hours tomorrow to finish it, because I'm good for about 3 scenes a day, if they need extensive reworking, and these, uh, do.

Comments

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that the couple of times I met Drake, when he was joking around with Dan Breen at the Second F and whatnot, he was probably in a much mellower state of mind than the average.

As far as his de-recommendation of the Slammers stories, that's kind of interesting, because in the darker corners of his catalog it gets much, much worse. I just read the three Reaches novels, which apparently started out as light space opera (they're kinda the precursors to the RCN series) and eventually became a series of stories about four folks who go off to war in space and how two of them nearly destroy their own souls one horribly graphic boarding action at a time. Second one contains many scenes of what amounts to death by chainsaw.

I was actually just today reading Balefires, a short-story collection that presents a sort of cross-section of all the different genres he does. (Including the very first story he sold, which is...iffy. He got better fast, though.) Has a great fantasy/horror short called "The Barrow Troll" in it that I think won him a few awards.

[feuervogel]

He was pretty mellow, though he had some very strong words for people who wanted to argue with him about ancient Roman history. Some of his facial expressions and speech patterns reminded me of you a little, actually.

He was mostly concerned that, as a squishy civilian, I'm not his target audience for those (though it may also have been code for "you might be too liberal to read these"). He wrote them to get the PTSD out, after all.

It'd probably be an interesting intellectual exercise to reconcile my general pacifism and leftist tendencies with my predilection for war stories and military space opera. Too much effort, really.

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

That dude knows his classics. Somebody who tries to argue Roman history with him is either very brave or very silly.

I don't think you have to like war to enjoy war stories at all. Particularly of the sort that he writes, because while I don't think much of what he puts out has a blunt, explicit anti-war message, and some of it I think expresses the viewpoint that war is a grim necessity at times, certainly none of it makes going to war seem like anything a sane person would ever want to do.

[feuervogel]

The way he put it is "someone who doesn't know something is ignorant, and that's okay. Someone who argues from a position of ignorance is stupid." Then went into how no, really, Roman shields were made of plywood, stfu.

The impression I got from the way he talked about it, is that he thinks war is necessary at times, and it sucks to be in it. (He said outright that he thinks the government used the soldiers in Vietnam badly. Which, well, I can't say I disagree.) So you're about right on, there.