Nekkid, Clueless and Feelin' Good: August 1, 2001

Wednesday,
August 1, 2001

I may feel like crap, but at least I have the rent money

Remember how blech I felt on Monday? I suspect that it wasn't all muscle aches from fencing with Selina -- yes, I do believe I came down with Con Crud (the same kind of illness you get after being locked in an airplane for hours breathing recycled air that had previously been in the lungs of Zoroaster knows who, but they definitely had a thriving bacteria colony in there). In short, I feel like I've been hit with the Yucky Stick -- muscle aches, headache, congestion, general lack of enthusiasm for pretty much anything on the planet, that sort of thing. Which explains why I skipped yesterday's entry -- somehow I didn't think I'd be enthralling y'all with an entry that consisted of, "Got up. Felt tired. Watched TV. Ate a sandwich. Went to bed." It just lacks that je ne sai quois, somehow.

However, I feel much better today, in part because I finally sold the refrigerator that we've been carting around since 1996, and the money neatly covered the last part of the rent as well as part of the car payment. A very nice cab driver came over to check it out in the morning, we dickered a bit on the price, then he came back in the afternoon with his family to sling it in the back of a van and hand over the money. I'm depositing the cash tomorrow and getting the rent check cut, which takes a load off my mind (and yes, this means nobody has to hold a garage sale for me). At this rate, I might even feel sprightly enough to finish my entry for FutureClassics next week, seeing as we just instituted a submission cutoff of 12:00 am Friday before the next meeting.

And speaking of the fragility of a writer's ego

I got "I Play Dead" back from F&SF -- the slush reader liked the story right up to the point where Carnie revealed what she was, and after that the story went, erm, all to hell. The frustrating thing about this is, I agree with him -- the ending feels tacked on and totally dishonest. What I need to do is go back, turn my plotting brain off and just write the rest of it on instinct -- I already know that they're fated to part, never to be reunited again, but now I have to flesh that out and make it feel real. Which, of course, is the hardest thing to do, and is probably why I wimped out and tacked on that silly ending (which, come to think of it, is painfully derivative of a certain priestly potboiler).

The most annoying thing about the rejection is that I had him up until that point (and this is in no small part to the excellent suggestions I got from Bill and Lyndon regarding chopping out the extraneous exposition). Then I proceeded to shoot myself in the foot. Arrgh.

Oh, well. It goes back on the drawing board -- if I can get it right this time, I'll see about getting it back in the mail by Saturday.

I got ya MTV right here

And happiest of happy 20th birthdays to that broadcaster of music videos and perverter of America's children (according to various fundamentalist groups, at least), MTV. It's somewhat appalling to think that when they first broadcast the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," I was preparing to enter my junior year of high school -- twenty years later, I'm 35 and. . .well, no, I'm not really any more mature than I was back then, come to think of it.

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