Nekkid, Clueless and Feelin' Good: July 5, 2001

Thursday,
July 5, 2001

Holy counter-spinning, Batman!

Um, wow. I just checked my counter, and it seems that close to 60 or so of you lovely, lovely readers checked in since yesterday (either that, or it's just a couple of you and you're really, really bored, which I can understand completely).

So, like, who are y'all? I'm serious -- I'd like to know who's reading the journal and sharing vicariously in my moneyless, jobless (I almost put sexless here, but that's not quite accurate. One of the nice things about being a writer is that you can hold all kinds of alternative realities in your head, and one of mine would be giving the Moral Majority conniption fits by now. Mmmm. . .) travails. Do I know any of you? (I recognize my Bodacious Brit, of course, and Dangerous, Nance -- Mikey, aren't you supposed to be at football practice or something?) That little mail icon up in the upper left corner does work, ya know. Send me mail -- remind me that I'm not really trapped in some hellish nightmare of my own making.

Is that a light on the horizon, or just another oncoming train?

I did some more surfing and found another job posting this morning, so I called the recruiter and did my spiel (I've learned this is the only way to break out of database dungeon -- if you don't call the recruiting company and talk to a human, you can forget about being put up for the posted job before it closes). She liked it and my resume enough to schedule me for an interview tomorrow -- not that I'm holding my breath anymore, but the market is slowly starting to pick up so eventually one of these bloody postings has got to pan out. Meanwhile, the lovely Christine is trying to find out what's going on with this backfill position she's trying to get me at A Very Big Wireless Phone Company -- my suspicion is either that they decided to just close the position and never bothered to tell the agency, or the person who's supposed to be seeing candidates is on vacation. Like what else is new.

At least my good buddy and ex-TBS drone Stan G. sent me another listing for a web designer that required lots of branding experience. Branding experience I have -- it's just not where you can actually see it. Now that I've handed y'all the perfect straight line, what I mean is that most of the branding work I did was for TBS and is salted away on their intranet, never to be seen by the non-Swedish eye (they don't really believe in advertising, which kinda explains why their stocks tanked so badly in the last two quarters). This wasn't particularly a problem, until the recruiter hiring for the branding job wanted to see some of the websites and products I've branded.

Um. . .heh? I did manage to get some screenshots and icon graphics from someone still working in Happy SwedeLand, and one website is available from the internet, but the rest of the sites are basically Circlet Press (which has changed somewhat from my original layout), FutureClassics and WebRats, none of which really count as big-name branding examples (although we are planning the "J.R. Ewing Sired My Two-Headed Love Child!" t-shirts for the FC crowd -- does that count?).

It's a shame -- I'm a media whore from way back, and this job would be really perfect. Maybe they'll be willing to interview me anyway.

Writing In Another's Tongue

And on the writing scene, I'm putting the finishing touches on "I Play Dead," a truly weird but fun homage to one of my favorite journalers, in time to submit it to FutureClassics. Well, I put my money where my mouth was this past weekend on sex in SF/F/H (don't even go there) so I might as well show them what I can do with it, right?

Yes, Nigel, there's sex in it, and with a fun-loving latex-wearing demoness. I thought that would make you happy.

The nifty part about writing this piece was trying to do it in a properly Grinderesque style without lapsing into parody or making it completely unintelligible to Americans (I do have to consider my audience, after all), and make it achingly sexy at the same time. So far I think I'm doing a pretty good job of it -- of course, having Garbage piped directly into my headphones makes for some extremely inspiring background sound.

Next week, the acid test. . .er, no. I don't think I'm going to make any comment about flagpoles, after all.

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