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Saturday, August 3, 2002

Spooky, spooky evening. Around 5:00 I abruptly decided to rewatch Victoria's Secret, with the goal of objectively noting some potential clips for vids. Of course, the minute it started, objective brain went out the window, and I was utterly sucked in, as I always am when watching this episode (which I actually haven't done all that many times, it's too damn painful), and every time I watch it I find some new things to ponder (in this case, all the conversations between Fraser and his father). Objectively, one could sit and pick at the plot holes in the episode, but when you're watching it, it's amazingly propulsive, with this marvellous gripping sense of inexorability.

Anyway, right around the time Victoria made her first appearance, the huge thunderstorms that had been hammering their way across the western prairies all day, big ominous red blobs on the radar, finally struck the city, and I paused the tape for a minute to go out on the back deck, to look at the black roiling sky and the lightning, the trees lashing around in the wind and the rain sheeting off the roof. Then I went back in, restarted the tape, and right in the middle of the scene where Fraser's tearing the Vecchio house apart looking for the key, an almighty bolt of lightning struck, the TV died, and the entire house went black, for a slow count of five. Then, inexplicably, the power came back on, and I restarted the tape, and watched it through to the end, and by the time Fraser lay twitching on the station platform with a bullet in his back, the storm had mostly passed on through. We're still under a tornado watch until midnight, so we could get hammered again, but I rather think the scariest part of the evening has passed.

I'm not going to sit here and make fatuous comments about how VS is one of the best two hours of television I've seen--I mean, it has its flaws, sure--but I will say this: it's what made me a fan of due South. Without that episode, I certainly would have enjoyed many aspects of the show, I would've dug the Rays and the humor and the general vibe. But VS is what really made me fall passionately and hopelessly for Fraser, and every time I see it again I come out a little shaky.

The thunder is still rumbling around in the distance, and I can hear sirens off to the north. I'm going to pour myself a couple of fingers of Lagavulin, and go sit on the back deck and have a smoke.

Posted @ 07:42 PM CST [Link]6 comments

Friday, August 2, 2002

Addendum: So, today's snail mail brought me yet another wholly unexpected present -- a check for my state tax refund, which I'd totally lost sight of and had assumed was just directed-deposited months ago. I interpreted the arrival of this lovely morsel of lagniappe on my birthday as a thumbs-up from the Gods of Shameless Self-Indulgence; hence, I just got done working up my nerve, pushing the button, and ordering a Pinnacle DV500 capture card and Premiere. In other words -- vidding ahoy! (And brace yourselves, gals and pals, for the eventual onslaught of Utter Sap.)

Posted @ 05:36 PM CST [Link]3 comments

A lovely present came in the mail, most unexpectedly -- deejay made me a button!

What a very nice thing to do -- I'm impressed both by her generosity and by her timing, since today is actually my birthday <g>. I don't make a big deal of birthdays, and this is not a landmark one--that's next year, when I hit the Big Five-Oh. (That'll be a new TV series, Kat-Five-Oh, featuring an aging slash-writing geek and her querulous asthmatic Siamese cat [they fight crime!].) I remain firm in my plan, one year from today, to go skydiving, thereby spitting in the eye of my lifelong terror of heights. After which there'll be champagne for everyone, and lots of tasty little sandwiches. I figure that way if my parachute flubs and I go splat, we'll be all set up for the wake.

But today will be low-key: writing, gym, plotting out clips for the uber-sappy vid which is temporarily eating my brain, and then being taken out to dinner by P. And lots of wallowing in the glorious 60-degree-temps with which the Weather Gods have gifted me (thanks, guys!)

Posted @ 07:46 AM CST [Link]17 comments

Thursday, August 1, 2002

Bliss bliss bliss. Though it was suffocatingly hot when I got up this morning, the long-promised cool Canadian high-pressure front swept through about 9, and temperature and humidity both dropped like a brick. God bless ya, Canada (though I will be cursing you for these same cold high-pressure fronts come January). And then I had a sudden cazart! moment in which I came up with a scene for the story that will (I think) enable me to tie together several necessary but heretofore incommensurable plot/theme threads in one swell foop, which fills me with joy (though I'm not sure I have the chops to carry out said scene, but we'll see). And then I went to the gym and kicked up the weight on all my machines, so my arms are like jello, which is always a masochistically gratifying feeling.

And I got my copy of the new JKL vid tape, which has given me much pleasure, and gotten me started again thinking about how much I'd like to do some vids. I hauled out all my rationalizations for not doing so, and thumbed them over, and realized that once I cut through all the piffle ("I don't have the technical mad skillz!" and "Money, money!" and "Time, time!") they really boil down to two things:

--though it is not apparent in my fiction, I have a subterrenean stream of pure, unalloyed sap running in my brain, and this sappiness seems to surface in my vid ideas. I will not go into details and give examples, due to general embarrassment potential. Just -- this unnerves me. I would like to make vids that are all edgy and audacious and razor-like, and instead I keep coming up with all this sap. Color me baffled.

--and also, and this is the biggie -- it's scary as hell to push into areas where one is wholly uncertain of one's competence. I mean, though I know my limits as a writer, I also know my strengths, and I have, after all, been dealing with words my whole life long. Language is my friend. But -- visual stuff? Music? That's alien turf to me; I don't see a lot of film, I don't listen to a lot of music. I don't have any clear intuitive sense of how to put those elements together to create a desired effect. The prospect of trying to do something so entirely new, in public, and perhaps flubbing to a mortifying degree -- that's pretty damn terrifying.

Which is probably exactly why I should do it. One has to keep pushing at those limits; I mean, it's that or die, right? (Well, it's that and die, right. But one might as well have some fun and make a fool of oneself publicly before kicking off, I guess.)

Posted @ 08:26 PM CST [Link]4 comments

Monday, July 29, 2002

Well, no tornadoes last night, but two inches of rain, so today the world is sodden. I can almost see steam rising off the deck when the sun hits it, and there are many small twigs and branches scattered around, torn loose by the wind.

I'm trying a new tactic in organizing the endlessly-infuriating WIP: I bought a bunch of 3x5 cards, then on each individual card I've jotted a few keywords indicating the various scenes that I am trying to figure out how to sequence--white cards for scenes-already-written, yellow for outlined-but-not-yet-written-out, pink for only-in-vague-concept-so-far. Then, emulating the Kinsey Millhone crime-solving technique, I have arrayed these cards on the dining table, and am moving them around, looking for patterns and order and some kind of thematic (if not chronological) sequence or coherence. There are fifty-one cards, at this point, mostly white (thank god). This only represents the latter two-thirds of the story. I think I need to let go of some scenes. Alas.

This feels like a surpassingly strange way to write a story--it's not at all my usual approach to fiction--but it is rather like the mind maps I used to do when writing academic papers, which I always found very useful. I'm not a particularly linear person, which makes the whole enterprise of novel-writing rather more difficult than it is already; and I find myself wistful for the (comparative) ease of structuring something under 100K long, and envious of the cool technique that Julad used in her latest story. One could, of course, attempt something like that in a long piece. One could, that is, if one were three or four times a better writer than I. Alas, again.

My computer has developed a mysterious intermittent glitch, in which clicking the close-window button in the upper right corner sometimes causes things to freeze up, and the text-select functions in Word go haywire from time to time. I have no idea what this is about, or how to fix it, and (as is the frustrating wont of intermittent glitches) can't figure out what if anything I'm doing differently on those occasions when it kicks in. Alas, cubed.

Other than this, life is grand. Except I should go out and pick up all those twigs and branches before it gets too much hotter.

Posted @ 01:29 PM CST [Link]4 comments

Sunday, July 28, 2002

You know that situation where you get a call from Family Member, asking if you can come over and help out with something, and you say, "Sure, glad to," and you arrive at the time appointed, only to find that what's really going on is that Family Member and Family Member's Spouse are locked in a fairly rancorous disagreement about how the situation in question ought to be handled, and they've decided that hauling in a Supposedly Objective Third Party will somehow help things? Except that nobody is copping to the existence of the Rancorous Disagreement, nor are they really talking with each other about it, and you're trying to figure out why you can't seem to get a fix on what anybody really wants done about the situation in question, or what the agenda is, or why FM and FM's S are not talking to each other but are directing toward you two entirely different versions of what it is they'd like you to do? You know that situation?

<sound of crickets chirping>

OK, well, anyway, that was my afternoon with my dad and stepmother and their finances. Bleagh. I mean, wholly aside from the fact that, as I told my dad, "If you are calling me in as the consultant on orderly organized fiscal management you are in even more trouble than you thought," since after all I'm the person who hasn't reconciled a bank statement in five years, and who's put all her bills on auto-pay because I can never remember to sit down and write the friggin' checks.

Anyway, they have somehow decided that involving some sort of computer-based budgeting system is going to help everything out, despite the fact that every time I go over there we reprise the "How to work the computer" conversation, which invariably begins with, "OK, so, first of all, you need to turn it on. You push that button. The grey one. On the CPU--I mean, on the box there. No, the big button. That's right."

And I so should not be bitching. My dad and stepmother are wonderful people, truly, sweet and loving and decent and responsible. And any time I think my family responsibilities feel a tad onerous, I can just hop over to Dargie's blog for a reality check. It's just that -- man. I don't want to get old, or at least not that way. I love them, no question, but every time I visit them, when I leave, I want to ... well, I want to drink about seven beers, listen to loud stupid rock 'n roll, dye my hair scarlet, put on leather pants, go to a club, and pick up some stranger for fast cheap sex. Not that I really did any of these things on departing, of course, but I did find "My Sharona" on the radio, crank it up to eleven, roll down all the windows, and exceed the speed limit, singing along and banging on the steering wheel and chain-smoking.

It's not so much that I have issues with aging, I just have issues with becoming elderly (and helpless, and dependent, and slowed-down, and confused, and ...). I'm fine with becoming the crazy old lady who lives by herself and can be heard cackling late at night and wears inappropriate clothing and scares the neighborhood kids. I just hope that option continues to be open to me.

Age is, as much as anything, all about the continual refinement of one's understanding of both how wonderful life is, and the circumstances under which one would no longer wish to cling to it despite its wonderfulness. I make these notes, as much as anything, so that I can go back and try to remember these boundaries, when I'm old and confused.

[Edited to add -- Tornado watch! Yeeee-hah! The sky is a really unnerving shade of slaty-greenish-grey, and it's gone dead still, and I can hear thunder in the distance. Ahhh, stormy weather. It's not quite the same as leather-pants-cheap-sex-with-a-stranger, but for us Midwesterners, it'll do.]

Posted @ 05:26 PM CST [Link]5 comments