Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
How ’bout a little new wave on a Monday morning? Something slightly enigmatic from Duran Duran, something from 1984.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, la novel, had a heavy impact on many of us. False information from the government? Perpetual war, and war as a marketing tool? Big brother, and being spied upon, marked as an enemy of the state if you didn’t conform, with everything constantly monitored?
Fortunately, we avoided all of that, didn’t we?
Here’s “New Moon on Monday”.
Superfloofsition (floofinition) – in housepet quantum principles, the theory, practice, and observations that a housepet seems to be in two places at once.
In use: “She left Penny downstairs asleep in a sunlit living-room corner, but when she turned from opening her drawer to select her clothes, the little calico was sitting on the bed, watching her with luminous green eyes as its tail-tip tapped out a slow, amused beat.”
I’m continuing to work on the novel-in-progress, April Showers 1921. Its challenges remain remaining and satisfying with a few dips into frustrating.
I’ve recently re-discovered the joy of deleting to build and improve the tale. When I began with the concept, it had a bajillion directions that it could take. I wrote about half of them, writing two to three thousand word chapters about the directions, exploring the characters, plot, and arcs. That resulted in a complex novel with a complicated plot, and extensive raw material. As I neared completion of the first draft, I met the muses at a crossroads. We agreed that some matters needed clarified and changed.
With mostly their guidance, I went through, exploring that first mess. Sometimes I attempted to work something into the mix, mostly because I enjoyed the passage. But, as often noted, sometimes killing favorite scenes help. As I deleted them (putting them into another documented that was a collection of these things…just in case…), I discovered how much the process sharpened my insights into the characters, situation, storylines, plots, and arc. With more focused insights, my writing and story-telling became crisper. My direction was better defined; I had more understanding of the final destination.
All of this wasn’t done overnight, but through several days of frequently frustrating searching and thinking. Sometimes I went backwards and then had to retrace my steps.
Now I’ve gone on into thinking of this mass as more like a giant piece, waiting to be sculpted molded, or carved. Unlike working in clay, wood, stone, or other hard, substantial materials, the novel’s characteristics change, depending upon how, where, and why they fit. Some pieces of the novel are solid. Only fine chiseling and polishing are needed. Other sections are thick, and I carve whole chunks away. Some are softer and more pliable, demanding shaping to improve coherency, pacing, motivation, and story-telling.
The process of writing and thinking about writing a novel often intrigues me as much as the novel-in-progress. As every novel is unique, so is the process used to write it.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Hitchfloof (floofinition) – housepet’s mode of traveling by soliciting rides.
In use: “Beginning when he was a three pound puppy recovering from his horrid early life, the husky started hitchfloofing. Whenever they got up in the morning, the dog would jump up and go to one of them. Standing up on his hind legs with his front legs reaching up for them, he demanded to be carried around the house for a few minutes. Now that they were fifty years old and he was fifty-five pounds, it was harder to accommodate him.
“But they did.”
Rocking out to Bare Naked Ladies “One Week” (1998) in my mindstream as I walked today. Why them? Not sure of the stream’s origins. Here are the lines that were in my mind:
Chickity China the Chinese chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin’
Watchin’ X-Files with no lights on
We’re dans la maison
I hope the Smoking Man’s in this one
Like Harrison Ford I’m getting frantic
Like Sting I’m tantric
Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy
The song’s weird rap lyrics, strung around the fight between a couple, appeals to me because of its insights. The guy singing it knows how this fight went, and he knows how reconciliation will go, and he’s laughing at it. Most of us develop these insights into relationships. We know the little steps followed between growing annoyance, rising anger, the fight or disagreement, and the subsequent make-up.
It might be today’s sunny weather that kicked this song into the stream. We were house shopping in California when this song was released and rose in 1998. The connections could be that I was thinking, it’s a a beautiful day. Not being satisfied with that, I went on, flashing on sunshine splashing off waves and lamenting, I wish I was at the ocean. That triggered memories of glorious days in Half Moon Bay, where we eventually bought a place to live.
Or, maybe all that is just bullshit, and my mind just heard a noise that triggered the song, and so it began.
Floofturesque (floofinition) – visually attractive housepets.
In use: “As if aware that she was floofturesque, the cat let her tail drape over the wall and struck a demure but charming pose.”
Sounds ’bout right.
It’s humbling to think about how little I know, and disturbing to ponder how much I’ve learned and forgotten, or how often I learned, retained, and applied wrong information.
The information was sometimes wrong because we thought that’s how things worked back when we learned it. Then, later, you discovered, “Oh, shit, that works for everyone else, but it doesn’t work for me.”
Yes, this is another Big Lie rant. The Big Lie is that we’re all the same. Eat these foods, gain these nutrients, do these exercises, and you should be good to go.
Yeah, they then admit — you know they, the great aggregate of society, social media, medical professions, governments, you know, they — well, they admit, there are some exceptions. Like, you may be diabetic because your body rejects the insulin it makes. So you’re like, whaat?
Maybe you’re allergic to things. Or you may have problems because your body doesn’t process certain vitamins and minerals well, rejecting them. Maybe you hear things different. Perhaps you hear shapes, or you taste something because you hear a sound.
Whacked, right?
I grew up learning that people that talked to themselves were most likely not right in the head in some way. Now we’ve learned, no, they’re probably fine. Their personality is different from your personality. Conversely, telling me to come out of my shell and socialize more works on the assumption that I’ve made a choice to stay in my shell and not socialize, and not because of the components at work inside me.
Not all people we called slow were slow thinkers, but they didn’t benefit from the learning environment. Too bad for them, back then, because we didn’t know.
We keep learning that there’s a lot that we don’t know, and that what we thought we knew and pushed as truth was wrong. This was sometimes done deliberately to further someone’s wealth — remember how they told us for years that smoking cigarettes aren’t bad? — or to achieve a political advantage.
That takes me to food shopping. Oh, lawdy. I’ve decided to cut down on processed foods and reduce my sugar intake, so I’m reading labels more intently than before. A correlation often exists; if a food is low-fat or non-fat, it’ll be loaded with sugar. If it’s sugar-free, it has a lot of fat.
They say — now — that supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals probably doesn’t do anything for you, if you’re healthy. You really can’t tell that from the advertising and commercials that abound, can you?
If you’re not healthy, too much of one mineral or vitamin can cause greater problems. All this comes with that caveat, for some people. You need to learn early that you may be some people. You learn by observing your body and reactions to different inputs, studying those differences, and consulting experts when necessary.
And these deficiencies can have profound effects. Constipated, tired, and depressed? You might have a potassium deficiency. Or something else. Just saying.
Consulting experts — or the Internet — doesn’t always work out. Some experts dismiss study results. Reasons vary for why they dismiss the results, or skew them. It could be from ignorance, religion, or false information that they acquired. It could be because they’re being paid to dismiss the evidence, or they’re pathological liars, or protecting someone or something else. This spectrum about why is as broad as humanity.
Even when you find your flaws and shortcomings and address your patterns to cope, it ain’t over. Your body and brain, and our society, are dynamic. Our body is changing, sometimes from aging, sometimes from abuse. Sometimes, it’s just a slow shift because of habits.
As a society, we’re always learning new information, or revealing old frauds, or finding something new about the human body. Our food security gets exposed in unimaginable ways. Consider from this week:
In each case, these findings surprised scientists and investigators because it wasn’t expected. The sunscreen lotions were most interesting to me. They’ve been around back to a time before governments, industries, or individuals worried about the active ingredients in sunscreens, so they were never tested. That was partly propagated by the good ol’ common sense approach that sunscreen is rubbed on your skin; how the heck would it get into your blood? (That’s typically followed by mocking chortles because doesn’t that seem so self-evident?)
Yeah, there’s a lot that isn’t self-evident, isn’t there?
Michael Seidel, writer 