remote connection – Page 3 – Aphotic Ink: Words by Frances Rowat

February 5, 2014admin 4 Comments

As the riders rode on by him, he heard one call his name…

I like Westerns. Not as much as I like noir, but I like them. (I actually think there’s something to be said about the overlap between the two genres, but that’s a sidepoint.)

However: I love Weird Westerns, from the steampunk through the fantastic to the straight-up horror–admittedly with a strong preference for the horror end of things, but that’s just me. And there’s a new anthology possibly coming out, and the list of contributors is kind of making me wonder why I have heard almost nothing about it.

(What I have heard? Lucy A. Snyder tweeted about it. That’s it. I realize I may have missed some things, but…)

I am trying not to gush too much about that list, but one of the people on it wrote a scene in a horror novel that left me light-headed and faint. Another has written the only zombie story that made me cry. And there are thirteen authors on that list, and at the lowest pledge level that comes out to 77 cents a story and that’s not even counting any other contributors since it’s going to be open for submissions, and…

I get that genre fiction is one of those weird niche things, and Weird Westerns are the teeny-tiny cross-section of the genres that get the least space at our local public library.[1] I get that cash is often tight. I do.

But dammit, this is the Weird West, that place of high-noon glare and shrieking steam, of voices on the wind and grinning horrors in long black coats, of long shadows and bootheels clocking off the hours to midnight. And I believe with the heart of a hopeful fan that there are more than sixty-seven other people who want to get their hands on this anthology. So I figure that some people who would like it simply have not heard about it, and I am trying to pass word along.

Dark Trails. That link right there.

Maybe it’s not your thing. But if you know someone who’d like it, maybe pass the word along?
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[1] It’s true. It’s sad. A bookshelf unit has six shelves each, and the horror/western paperbacks only take up three shelves combined. It kind of makes me happy that they’re next to each other, though.

January 14, 2014admin No Comments

Frustration.

Sunday night–Sunday the 5th–I found that my desktop had died. Sunday night is a bad time to start poking at machines, so I left it until Monday. There was some tentative poking and attempts to get it to boot, and it was up and running for a while, but not for more than an hour and a half.

It went into the shop, and came home Friday with a diagnosis of “could not reproduce problem, very dusty, should be fine now that the heat sink’s cleaned.” And it worked! Ran perfectly. (I took this opportunity to get a backup of everything I was worried about–I had one anyway, but “fresh full backup” is to my mind more useful, or at least less hassle, than “old full backup plus many many many incremental changes”.)

And then last night I was reorganizing my office, and I turned off the computer so that I could unplug and rearrange the cords and the UPS[1] and everything connected one way or another to the wall sockets, and it wouldn’t turn back on. (It’s not the UPS or the socket, either. Tried different power cords, different sockets known to work, everything.)

It’s not the power supply, which would be an easy fix, and given that the computer in question is six years old, a replacement is not unreasonable. In the meantime, everything will be fine, it’s just a bit odd to be dealing with everything online and not using my desktop.

(Plus I really miss my Fallout: New Vegas games, dammit.)
—
[1] Not the delivery service. That other thing.

November 18, 2013admin No Comments

Of cats and wires

The technician who came to fix our internet connection seems competent and pleasant, but I don’t think the salesperson he was talking to quite followed what needs to be done differently for installation sales orders.

Hoping all issues are resolved so everyone gets internet access and gets paid.

Angus very bravely came out to watch the new human, at which point Piper sat on him. (Angus, not the technician.) The rewards of bravery are scant and cruel.

Right now the cats are patiently studying the high winds outside, and I am mourning the lovely weather we were having. Nice while it lasted.

Update:

Well, the internet problem is not actually fixed, which is really annoying. Hoping it gets sorted tomorrow morning. I mean, for the moment, we at least have flaky internet access, but we had that before so it isn’t really an improvement. And the afternoon was a whole lot of fussing back and forth that just enabled us to stay in one place.

Eh.

On the plus side, the weather hasn’t gotten quite as unpleasantly chillier as I was worried it would, and we are getting some lovely windy bluster and occasional spates of rain. Combined with a warm house and extensive amounts of tea, this actually makes for a pretty pleasant afternoon.

August 24, 2013admin No Comments

Drowning in information

The last couple of days, I have not kept on top of my e-mail inbox as much as I otherwise might, in an ideal world. And I have a fair amount of e-mail coming in, what with one thing and another and follows and notifications and updates and this and that, not to mention a small spike coordinating with a couple of people for splitting shipping on an absolutely lovely jewelry sale.

I had 431 e-mails in my inbox. 303 of them were unread.

(In a fit of composure of which I am rather proud, I did not actually flee screaming from the keyboard. Go me.)

I now have only 335 in my inbox, and 210 of them are unread. Am hoping I can get the unreads down to double digits by the end of the ~~night~~ weekend.

There has got to be a better way to handle my e-mails. However, I am pretty sure that actually having the metaphorical space to implement that better way involves a through unf*cking of my inbox, and that currently feels more than a little daunting. (Plus I am running low on junk TV to put on while I work on this, so my options seem to be “get distracted by interesting entertainment” or “get bored because there’s nothing in the background”.)

(…wow, talk about a first-world problem. I will stop complaining now.)

February 2, 2013admin No Comments

Quite tired.

The job hunt continues, and I think that’s enough said about that.

I’ve been tidying the house a fair bit, and while it was never horrible, it looks a lot less cluttered now. (I got rid of fifteen litres of yarn on Thursday, actually, and am rather ridiculously happy about that. Am currently trying to figure out how best to rehome comics and graphic novels.)

I lost two hours in the middle of the day, today, and while I don’t think it was a bad loss I wish I’d been a bit more productive.

And I’ve joined A Month of Letters because really, I have all these bits of stationery around and after a while an unused stack of paper can start to seem as sad as an unread book.

(I’m still working on books, too.)

One of our pets probably needs elbow surgery, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the surgeon (we, at this point, means both us and the vet we took her to see). I am trying very hard not to get frustrated at the delay, I understand that there are probably not a lot of veterinary surgeons in town, but I really want to know what can be done for her. She’s not okay, right now.

I’m trying not to get ground down. It’s mostly working.

December 2, 2011admin No Comments

It’s the little things.

The depression came up in a way I would honestly not have expected today.

I’ve got a cold. A really pretty vicious one–I sound worse than Harold, all wheezy and cracked, and as shall shortly become apparent, I am having trouble focussing. I made it out to the drugstore and got orange juice and tissues and Powerade and expectorant. And then I came back, and I discovered that that cough medicine in question advises that I consult a doctor before taking it if I am taking medication for depression.

It turns out that it can have some really fun interactions with my meds; I couldn’t made sense of that, but I managed to find a couple of people who were very kindly willing to explain, and the short version is something like “your meds slow down metabolism of that drug, how do you feel about potentially extreme side-effects including seizures?”

One of them also suggested calling a medical professional to check, which was helpful because that possibility had honestly not occurred to me in my current state. Despite the label on the cough medicine saying “Talk to a doctor before using this product if…”

Yeah, I’m that level of sick-and-out-of-it.

Anyway, I got a callback from the doctor’s office, and it should be okay.

It’s just…

There’s a very good analogy about spoons that explains how you need to manage things, think about things that most people get to take for granted. And I’m not saying that tripping up on taking cough medicine is the same as having Lupus! But needing to check, consciously learning that I need to pay attention to labels (even in this state, where I looked at the label before buying the stuff and didn’t even register that bit until I got home), it’s a weird feeling. A reminder that yes, this is part of my life and it’s going to mean paying attention, and sometimes the same condition that puts me in a state where I need to pay attention to things is going to be the condition that means I’m not able to do it.

It’s tiring, I guess. I wish I had a better word.

(In the meantime, though, I have made sure that the light of my life has the information on exactly which drugs and at what dosage I’m on, readily to hand. Between this and the “it should probably be fine”, I am going to stop sending energy on worrying and go drink a lot of orange juice.)

November 3, 2011admin No Comments

Oddly awake.

Yesterday I was up until four in the morning. And then I was up and functional by eight. Somehow I’m still not tired. Admittedly there was a nap in there, but…

One of the people I write with a fair bit of the time is doing NaNoWriMo. It’s rough going so far (mind, that doesn’t mean much yet), but she’s doing it. I, meanwhile, have written the hundred words of fiction in trip fragments this week.

I mean, it’s just been Hallowe’en; I practically feel guilty about not trying. It’s the time of year for (proper Lovecraft) ghouls and curiously meaningful scratches and shapes standing in the dark in the still of your room and just watching you.

You think.

You can’t see their eyes, after all.

(Oh yes, this is absolutely going to help me get to sleep. Because I needed a chaser after reading a third of the way through the House of Fear anthology. It’s a nice mix; part actual ghosts and part haunted houses (which are subtly different, but I fear I repeat myself), with a side order of the weird.)

Beginning to get sleepy, at least. The nice thing about the phone is that I can post in my room and don’t get distracted by the joys of the internet or the horror of the Sierra Madre. Much easier to lie down and go to sleep if you don’t need to tear yourself away from a computer motor.

(That’s the Sierra Madre from Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money. Which is a quite well-done little horror story set in a haunted house… one which both corrupts its victims and is inhabited by ghosts, now that I think of it.)

Tomorrow I’ll try and get my books sorted, I suppose. And maybe I’ll hear back about work. The estimated start date just keeps creeping forward; at this point I’d be surprised if anything happened before Monday.

September 28, 2011admin No Comments

Living up to deadlines.

It’s odd, I don’t usually think of deadlines as something to live up to.

I also don’t usually think of the day as being over at midnight, but that seems like a possibly specious distinction to work with at the moment, so I’m here again, composing on my phone. I’ve set it to vibrate, which is slightly less annoying than clicking for Sudoku, but I am finding it a bit buzzy for typing.

It’s occurring to me that I have a lot of electronic wafers–little slices of screen and plastic and buttons that exist as ways to get to something else that isn’t exactly tangible. My Kobo. My laptop. This phone.

I say, sometimes, that I love living in the future. Usually I say it when John tells me something new and wonderful about technology or medicine or astronomy. But I think the first time I really noticed was several years ago…

I was watching the realtime map for the London Underground, and some of the stations lit up (means there was a service interruption). I was curious and clicked for details, and it said there’d been an incident on the tracks with a passenger. The timestamp was seven minutes old.

Someone got onto the Tube tracks in London and I found out about it in seven minutes. I can’t walk a mile in seven minutes, and…how far away is London? How many people do I know who’ve never even seen it? And I’m getting news from there in less time than it takes to drink a coffee, unless you really chug it.

(Full disclosure; I am a slow coffee drinker.)

((Fuller disclosure; I had a morbid streak when I was younger, and my second thought upon seeing the map information was “I wonder how far he splashed.” Which is ridiculous, really, I don’t even know that anyone was hurt rather than just being a Gap-hopping twit, but… Oh, the lurid imaginations of youth.))

I think the second time the shrinking of intervening distances really hit me was several years later, when a friend in the UK had forgotten his wallet at work and didn’t have groceries in the house and I ordered him a pizza. Because Internet. You can do a lot with the Internet.

Have noticed a possible downside to composing on the phone; small screen means it’s harder to glance back up at what I said earlier, and easier to ramble very far afield. Will mind that in future. Of course, it’s also easier to not get bogged down in going back and editing yourself, which is something I’ve been hoping to work on for a bit.

Right. Been writing for half an hour, and want to get up early tomorrow. Think I will call it a night.

September 27, 2011admin No Comments

Marking time.

Light of my life appears to have gotten my Kobo working, which is wonderful. My favourite short story on it came off Smashwords, and I was getting really frustrated with not having it handy.

(Oh, there’s a word count on this! Handy.)

Taking advice on practicing time management; seeing if I can get down 200 words a day, reliably, until the end of October.

Other concerns ATM: very much behind on Excolo roundup, not enough sleep, top-to-bottom housecleaning due by Thursday night, work screw-up, general failure to write.

Writing a story with a friend, and between our schedules it’s bogging down. Need to talk to her to find out how she feels about my writing pieces of it alone, or stories that use the set-up we’ve created. I can see her disliking the idea, although I don’t think it’s likely. I cannot see being comfortable with just going ahead with it without asking her.

Also for consideration: am I using this as an excuse to procrastinate?

I have a handful of ideas for Iolace, and two stories. Unsurprisingly enough, neither of them is written yet.

Trying to coordinate my various journals, accounts, feeds, and any other ways that I track what people are doing online. I like having them, but having them all over the place is not useful. Not entirely sure how or if this will fit in with that; I’m hoping that if I organize everything else, this will naturally settle into its own niche.