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Friday, March 15, 2002

March blizzards are rather like the penultimate scene in your average horror movie -- the one where the monster's been killed, the heroine's been rescued, everyone's laughing and congratulating each other with manly backslapping hugs, the smooth orchestral strains of Happy Ending are swelling, and -- all of a sudden, rrRRRRARRRWWRRGGHGHHH, the monster comes roaring back to life. Because, y'know, not quite dead.

Which is to say that earlier this week it was in the 40s with bare ground and sun shining and everyone was thinking "Woo hoo, get out the bike, put away the snowshovel" -- and then yesterday we got eleven inches of snow. And, like the penultimate scene in average horror movies, this event is also utterly predictable (March being the snowiest month, the month of Huge Blizzards) and by its nature short-lived.

Have been out, have shovelled, my back is only mildly wrenched, it's supposed to be back into the 40s in a few days. Spring equinox is next week. We're almost out of the woods.

It is amusing to watch the feverish reactions to these predictable phenomena on the part of downy young TV weatherpersons who are not from these parts, and hence don't have the proper dour Calvinist/Scandinavian frame of emotional reference. (James Lilek's current Backfence column has a running riff on this: "Whoa: The weatherman has just upgraded this to the STORM OF THE PERIOD SINCE THE CONTINENTS WERE FUSED INTO THE MASS WE NOW CALL PANGEA.") The correct Minnesotan response, of course, is along the lines of "Yah, well, y'know, we were overdue for this," accompanied by two-millimeter lift of the shoulders. Or, if one wishes to strive for echt-Midwestern, "Yah, well, y'know, we need the moisture." "Moisture" is the correct agrarian term for precipitation of any kind, but to really pull it off, you need to have spent at least part of your formative years listening to farm price reports and school closing announcements on WCCO.

Posted @ 08:07 AM CST [Link]2 comments

Thursday, March 14, 2002

A few mildly spoilerish Buffy thoughts ... [more]

Posted by jones059 @ 08:32 AM CST [Link]1 Comment

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Cheesy clip art inserted to mark the fact that it was one year ago today I started this weblog, with a rather morose entry about wandering out into the snowfields and dying to the accompaniment of the Bach violin partitas. Heeee. Since then I have churned out something like 600K of blather here (if my arithmetic is accurate). God, if I'd managed to be even half that productive in fiction writing ...

I had, at the time, something like six or seven people linked in the side column. I had no idea if I was going to keep this new whim up for more than a few weeks. It's been quite a year; thanks to everyone who's come along for the ride.

Terse here today, because I am eyebrows-deep in story, writing slowly and intently, staring off into space for long stretches and moving my lips silently. God, it feels good to get back to this. And the cosmos is being kind; yesterday I was whining about how what I really want right now is time, free time, lots of time, so I can actually make some coherent progress, and then ten minutes later I got an office e-mail saying that since next week is spring break and the students won't be around we can all work reduced hours. I love my boss. Life is good.

Posted @ 07:23 AM CST [Link]4 comments

Monday, March 11, 2002

Lar has a link on her page to a "What Poet Are You?" quiz, which I took during an idle lunch moment. The results? A tie between -- wait for it -- Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

WTF???!?

Posted @ 12:47 PM CST [Link]3 comments

6 a.m. I'm sitting in front of my computer (well, duh), drinking coffee. A warm morning, all the way up to 20, and this will be a week of big sloppy thaw, slush galore.

(I'm suddenly struck by this diarist's impulse I have to situate entries in time and weather. Probably an effort to forge some tenuous connection between this moment--this, right here, right now, Monday morning, grey half-light filtering through the blinds onto my rosemary plant, coffee in my Ray-and-Fraser mug I bought at Connexions last year, cat snoring softly in her chair a few feet away -- and you readers, scattered all over, in places and houses I've never seen, at myriad opposite ends of this tangle of wires that holds us together.)

Connection, yes. I'm sipping coffee, and filled with a humbled glow of gratitude to all the people who e-mailed me with supportive comments and/or offers to provide beta help with the thing in progress. And also feeling a tentative, nervous optimism--I actually wrote some yesterday, for the first time in forever. I can see what comes next, I know where to do some adding and revising. Yup, thanks to several other virtual shoulders on the bumper next to mine, the thirty-ton semi is starting to move.

It's been hard for me to learn to accept--or, especially, to ask for--help with writing. On some deep irrational level I really believe I should be able to do it all myself. Y'know, if I were a real writer, and all that. It's hard for me to remember that this is not about my ego, it's about the story -- what's needed to make it happen, to make it better. I have to keep returning to Anne Lamott's little prayer -- "Please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written." My thanks to all those who--kindly, gently--move me out of the way, and move the story forward.

Posted @ 07:37 AM CST [Link]1 Comment

Sunday, March 10, 2002

I got up this morning early, stuck my head out the door to check the weather (3 above zero, still, clear, icy), made some coffee and some pancakes, and did a little idle blog-surfing. Read Vali's latest, noted that under "Listening to..." she'd entered "We'll send him cheesy movies, the worst we can find," grinned, and then...I suddenly realized I couldn't hear the MST3K theme song in my head. The words were all there, but no sense of how the tune went--not that it's at all tuneful, but I've heard it hundreds of times. I immediately thought Dear god, I've had a mini-stroke in my sleep, and it wiped out all the music centers in my brain! Did some frantic scrabbling-around for other songs, and to my great relief they were still there.
(10:00 a.m. update: MST3K theme is back on-line. I am not yet entirely senile.)

In other matters ... One thing I find amusing (and occasionally helpful), when working on a story, is to abuse the tools of my psychologist trade by playing around with mock psych-assessment profiles I create for the characters. Somewhere on my old harddrive I still have MMPI results that I confabulated for Mulder and Krycek; and I tend usually to have a sense of the MBTI types of everyone I'm writing.

A while back I got interested in looking at the Enneagram, which is a personality-typology system that in many respects sounds kind of whack, but which like all such systems can provide some interesting ways of looking at patterns of personality and behavior. In an idle moment, I plundered several on-line resources to put together Enneagram profiles for Fraser and RayK, and decided to put them up for the amusement of others. Pretty much everything that's in there is quoted from the sources cited at the bottom; it's definitely interesting to me to see how well they fit with the characters, or at least with my version of the characters.

Posted @ 11:00 AM CST [Link]7 comments