My Dog Will Eat You!

My wife wanted to give any would be criminals or trespassers fair warning.

The attack dog would have come closer... but  he's scared of the sign.

Guster, the dog of doom, will devour your toes in a fit of fury should you dare to pass through into his domain.

I hope everyone had a pleasant weekend. I suppose I did. Although it was filled with missed opportunities.

However, now that it's Monday, I'm anxious to touch on the Comment Of The Week from last week. I don't have travel too far back in time to look. Turns out Friday's post had lots of great comments to choose from.

I think within a few seconds of the post going live (well, 32 minutes) I had someone expressing their displeasure with my portrayal of Esperanto. Then, a little while later I got this beaut:

After the first poster made his comment I started to backpedal some from my original point, but after I thought about it for awhile I decided I think I will stand by my assessment. If calling it a noble failure makes me ignorant, well, then people don't have wings, or something.

It's beauties like that that make me happy I put up without 1000 spam emails a day that I get (well, maybe 5) with folks trying to sell me coffee beans or porn. I thought I would get tons of people upset over the Chiropractor stuff, not Esperanto.

THIS IS THE LAST WEEK before the A-Z challenge begins. I'm still considering scrapping my whole month's worth of stuff and starting over. If so, I'll have a busy weekend next weekend writing new posts.

A Whole Month's Worth of Stuff - In One Post!

Wow. I have tried and failed at my last three attempts to post something. Not because I can’t figure out how to schedule posts (which I can’t, they say they’re scheduled – then they sit there as the scheduled time passes right on by), but because I cannot seem to write a post.

My mojo has left me.

I’m not saying I’ve got blogger’s block again, that never left me. No, instead, I’m saying that I can’t seem to write a coherent post. I’ll write them, read them, then delete them, deeming them unfit for humans to read. I’m finding this whole blogging business to be a big mess of confusion for me, and organizing my thoughts into a single, cohesive narrative is hard.  So I’ll just post a few notes.

On Writing

I think I’ve outlined a tentative plan for what I’m going to try to accomplish this summer on the writing front. I wrote quite a bit over the weekend and feel appropriately smug about that.  I can thank the heat for my burst of activity. It was too miserably hot to do yard work, which can take up a great deal of my weekends.

On Reading

I finished up Cindy Borgne’s Vallar, a fun read that I hope others check out. Then, quite by accident, I started reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I intended to read A Dance with Dragons but I was out and had some time to kill and had to thumb through my Kindle library on my phone. I’ve been building it up for a while now. I’ll see something I know I want to read go on sale and I’ll pick it up. If the big publishers ever catch wind of my buying habits once books get under $5 then watch out. I’ll be broke.

Anyway, I’m a third of the way through this new book and am committed to seeing this through. I like the premise. Now Jim Butcher’s Ghost Story comes out tomorrow. That means I’ll probably push back George R.R. Martin’s epic another week as a result. Oh well, I’ll just have to wait a bit longer to find out how much almond milk noble Tyrrion drinks over the course of 1000 pages or so.

Funny, I remember when I used to read science fiction exclusively. If I saw this reading list of mine as recently as a year ago I would have flogged myself for it.

Business

I’m still having thoughts about self-pubbing something. If I can handle the formatting I think it may be two works set in the same universe that are shorter in length. A novelette and a longish short story. Combined I believe they’ll be between 20 - 30k words long. Hopefully folks won’t feel robbed if I ask them to hand over cash – who knows, if I can do it, I might throw in some artwork as well. We’ll see, my plans in this area are pretty nebulous. I have a strong inclination to send stuff out via more traditional places. But I think I can use the education this will offer. Especially if I plan on putting something novel length out there soon.

On the Weather

How hot was it last weekend? My dog, er, my larger dog, has a bell she rings when she wants to go outside. This weekend she got in the habit of ringing the bell, then once I opened the door she would stick her head out, put a single paw on our deck, and promptly decide it was too hot and back right up until she was inside again. I agreed with her. I also learned she can hold her pee for a really long time. Good girl.

Barking is awesome. You should try it.

The bad side is that she usually goes outside to bark at stuff, she discovered that she could now bark at everything from inside a cool, comfortable place. Our bay windows look out over the neighborhood so she has a great view of all the stuff that pisses her off. She barked at the mailman, the movers down the street, the ice cream truck, a cat, a dog, another dog, a bird, my neighbors, and at least half a dozen things I couldn’t figure out. On a side note, my dog barks really loud.

Other

I’ve been thinking of putting a real photo of me as a profile pic. Everything I have online is a sketch, The one I’ve been using on blogger is also my Facebook profile. I have a Thor sketch I use on twitter, an Astronaut sketch on Goodreads, even a batman sketch as my work email avatar. So, the hidden face of Rusty may be revealed to the world soon. Everyone hold your collective breath.

This Makes Me Sick

I'm a pretty sensitive kind of guy. I really am. So, when folks start talking about their kids incessantly I indulge as much as I can. I try, I really do. I have kids of my own, both biological and step. I get it, you're proud. I am too. Which of course is why I indulge, I'm guilty of the same thing. I talk too long, show pictures to people who don't care and can't stop myself. That's just part of having kids.

But then, some folks go and do the same thing about their pets. Oh god no.

I'm about to become one of those people too.

I have a dog, I love it. It's the probably the best dog in the world. It's a 110 pound Great Pyrenees. How good is this dog? Well, I can leave the trash out all day because I pulled it from the trash can on my way to work and then forgot to take it out to the trash can outside. It's full of pizza crust, leftover chicken, cookies, whatever. I come home nine hours later and she is patiently waiting for me. Trash untouched.

She has a bell hanging from the door to the backyard, she just goes and rings the bell when she wants out. When I tell her to come, she comes. When I tell her to leave something alone, she does. She does all sorts of tricks upon command. If I open the door to the backyard to bring her in she sits and waits for me to give her permission before entering. I think she would wipe her feet if I put a mat out for her.

Best. Dog. Ever.

Anyway, as much as I love my dog. As a rule, I don't like pets. They are just walking heartaches, determined to make you care more about them than you thought possible... then they'll go get run over by a car or die of old age after a mere decade or so. Not worth it.

So anyway, I show up at the house after work on Thursday and what is sitting in my living room?

Why is there a squirrel in my house?

There is this bony, neglected, pitiful creature shivering in the floor with the entire family huddled around it. Every one is just staring at it like it's baby Jesus. Sigh.

Actually, it looks just like Dobby from the Harry Potter movies.

We took it to the vet, we think it will live. The family almost started to cry together when I referred to it as "dog" instead of "Drake." Yikes, heartbreak here we come.

Of course I was worried about how our existing dog will react. I should have known. She seems to be as enamored as the rest of the family is. They took turns guarding the back of the house today.

He'll learn how to drool soon.

Wait. maybe it's a bat

So, whatever. I'm nothing if not adaptable. I have two dogs now. I think I can keep from turning this into a "guess what my dogs did today" blog. So everyone can relax. I just figured I'm obligated to welcome the newest member of the family.

Also, it gave me a great excuse to not work on my synopsis for my novel. I've written it too many times and I'm so sick of working on it.

I freaks me out that if it isn't good, my novel will be rejected without the first word being read. I'm going to have a heart attack.

Oh What a Crapfest

Christmas is a difficult time for me. It doesn't help that my lovely wife had an opportunity to go home for the first time in 20 years or so and just couldn't pass up the chance. Therefore she has gone and the house feels really empty.

The weather sucks. It's snowed, sleeted, iced over, and we've had record low temperatures for this time of year. The kids haven't been going to school because of it and its wreaked havoc with my work schedule.

Dammit!

Even my poor dog has been depressed. At the time my wife was trying to say goodbye to her our beloved dog was too caught up in licking her crotch to notice. Now she wonders the house looking sad and trying to find my wife. Look who's sorry now.

But life goes on. I stood in line at the grocery store today for 10 minutes, watching in utter fascination as a young lady went through the self-checkout line and acted like each article must be carefully inspected before attempting to scan it. She bagged each can of ravioli like it was precious glassware that needed cushioned support before it could be placed in a bag for transport. I certainly appreciated her thoroughness, but the whole thing was surreal.

But when I'm not noting the idiosyncrasies of strangers I'm trying to cope with my own issues. I was thinking that while the missus was away I'd get to read and write much more than usual. So far I've written nothing. I'm too tired to muster up anything more than a passing thought of trying to produce some prose. Of course I am reading, currently I'm working my way through a short story collection that has as its theme the Fermi Paradox. One of my favorite distractions in life is to ponder the mystery and try to come up with my own solution. So far my best possible solution is that Alien civilizations are actively trying to hide from us. They've seen the whupass we can unleash when we feel like it.



But so far the book has been a pretty big disappointment. I'm nearly done and only a few of the stories stand out as exceptional. There was even one or two that I thought were embarrassingly bad  - how does stuff like that get published?

Anyway, I'll try to shake that melancholy mood and get back to my chipper self. I think it'll take me a few days to get in the mindset of being alone and then I'll start feeling all creative again.

Cheerio