Giving 110%

I'm not sure I ever understood those type of statements. Because if I'm giving 110% then I suppose I'm working on a scale of 1000. So that would mean I'm really giving 11%, which is kind of lame. But whatever, that has nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to put a number in my title.

I'm sure everyone will be happy to know that my tooth sorta took care of itself. I don't think it was an infection, but instead something stupid, like clenching my teeth really hard in my sleep.

So, after installing a mouthguard while I slept I found the teeth startedfeeling better. For a day or two, I don't think I could recall enjoying the pure pleasure of eating more after the tooth thing passed. It had been more than a week since I'd had any solid food.

I celebrated by having oatmeal for breakfast.

Well, I always have oatmeal for breakfast when I'm at work - except for the week prior when my teeth hurt too bad to have oatmeal, which is a real thing, because even though oatmeal is pretty soft, you still have to chew it, and the chewing motion was excruciating - and so I made my perfect breakfast: Piping hot oatmeal.

Oh, which I promptly spilled all over myself.

Sigh.

The next day it looked like this:

That's weird, I don't recall my arm being that hairy.

I had to go to the doc for a checkup anyway, so I asked if it was anything to be worried about. Turns out that I'll probably be okay, although there may be some scarring. A few blisters formed and all.

So, to recap. I nearly lost a finger due to a 'getting myself dressed accident', nearly lost the ability to eat due to a tooth grinding incident, and nearly lost my arm due to an oatmeal related disaster.

And that's all during the last couple of months.

Is there any question that should the apocalypse actually happen that I'd be dead within hours? I get injured in my sleep people, I'm a dead man walking.

Anyhow, I've about done all I can with that one.

Logo by Vic Caswell!

I hope everyone is aware that a new podcast is on the scene. The most excellent Vic Caswell and Emily White have started their PodPeople podcast that focuses on YA lit. The first episode is up and it was great to hear them talk books. Please check it out.

In other news, I'm rolling back the number of posts I'm going to be putting up for a while, probably for the summer at least. Time is always my enemy. It marches on without any consideration for what I want it to do. So, while I've been giving blogging my all (pathetic, I know) I'm not getting as much writing done as I should be. So, the hope is for a bit more productivity from me as a result.

I'm thinking about two posts per week right now, I'll play it by ear though and see. Maybe I can make some of them sorta interesting.

I think I had actual news today, but I got caught up in my personal drama and can't seem to recall what it was.

Happy Monday folks.

Monday News... And PinkyHell 2012

Way back in January I mentioned some writing goals I had put on myself to complete this year. So far I've done the minimum amount required - but nothing really beyond that. I still have these big, nebulous goals I've not even worked on concerning novel writing. Stupid reality, it keeps dragging me down. 

BUT, I am so about to get right back at it. 

One of those goals was the completion of the first draft of my previous November’s fantasy novel. A more daunting task than it might seem because it’s got many viewpoint characters, an entirely created fantasy world, and a plot that is more intricate than anything I’ve ever written before.

And now, almost four months after I stopped working on it, I’m halfway through the first draft and can’t exactly remember where I was going with it. So I’ve been going back to my notes, notes about the story, about the world I’d made, about the characters, etc.

I can see why it takes George R.R. Martin a decade or so to write a novel. The damn thing can get to be this sprawling epic that is hard to keep a handle on. Of course, his are actually good. But aside from that, I think I have an appreciation for all the work he has to put in. It's really complicated.

Comment of the Week:

Angela won my heart with her mention of Wookies on Friday. Thank you Angela!

Let's see here, what else?I forget sometimes that there is a point to blogging, that it’s not just an excuse for me to express my awesomenity in written form. It’s actually a tool to raise awareness of not only my work, but that of others.

Brinda Berry, who kindly offers encouragement and pearls of wisdom when she comments here, as well as introducing me to the awesome digital painting videos on her blog recently, has released her second novel in her Whispering Woods series. Writing is hard, and I always want to hang on to stuff to do just one more pass, I'm impressed with her for plugging through, it shows real professionalism to be able to write till completion on her stories. I hope it does well. 

I feel like a warrior from a bygone era

Also, PinkyHell 2012 continues to plague me. It’s now been 2 weeks since that fateful day when putting on my t-shirt turned into a tale of overcoming adversity and overwhelming pain. Yes, I still manage to get dressed on my own, but I self diagnose as having some nerve damage, as it tingles still when I try to use it. It makes me happy that it’s pretty much only used for semi-colons on the keyboard, I use it for a few other things, but it can almost be ignored when typing.

And remember - It’s less than two weeks until the A-Z blogging challenge begins!

To Slay the Mighty Giant

People die in strange ways sometimes, if anyone has ever seen an episode of 1000 Ways to Die or read the Darwin award entries then I’m sure you understand. Now, this post isn’t another one of those about death in general, or even my death in particular, but instead is about how weird the real world is in comparison to a fictional one.

Imagine if Saruman was brought down by a hangnail instead of a surprisingly bitter Wormtongue (It was him, right? I haven’t read LOTR since 2000 or so), that just wouldn’t have the same emotional impact. It wouldn’t feel that satisfying, which of course, is why people enjoy fiction: Justice is served. No one is a slave to happenstance. Nope, people are squelched due to their ambitions blinding them to consequences of their actions. There is the occasional ironic cumuppins, but even those had their seeds sown earlier.

Guess which one is Robert.

Which is why I hate hearing the story of Robert Wadlow. As a kid I was quite fearful of being short. I was relatively undersized and that was made worse by being a tad young when compared to my classmates (I started college at 17 – work backwards from there and you should see I was usually the youngest kid in every class I was ever in growing up.)

I was never bullied as a kid, not at all, but I was certainly afraid of it. My favorite heroes were The Hulk, Superman, Thor… big time badasses that couldn’t be bullied. I was obsessed with big people in real life too. - body builders and giants.

Robert Wadlow was chief among the giants. Of course, I was unaware when I was really young that his untreated medical condition that caused him to grow so large didn’t make him any stronger. Many giants in fact suffer from profound weakness that makes doing much of anything physically difficult.

In my head, big meant strong. Big meant mighty. Big meant that you were unstoppable. Turns out being that big meant being unable to stand unassisted. It meant wearing leg braces. It also meant that the brace rubbing against his skin would lead to an infection… and he would die at the age of 22 from it.

I often wondered just how big he would have been if he hadn’t died when he did. He was still growing when he finally passed away. So tall that despite being skinny as a rail he still weighed nearly 500 pounds.

Don't you have a big boy elevator?

Nothing about that death meant much of anything. Except that you can still see wax figures of him in Ripley’s museums and the occasional TLC documentary where his incredible size come up.

Oh, how tall was he? When he finally died, he was within a Jersey Shore spiked hairdo of being nine feet tall. Nine feet. The human form, when scaled up that way, doesn’t work so well. Movies and comics might make it seem like it’s nothing but awesome, but once someone gets over six and a half feet tall, the heart has to do a lot of work, the muscles give diminishing returns, and a person has to struggle to overcome their own weight. It isn’t pretty.

Then again, he ain't tiny

That means folks like Shaquille O’Neal are rare, or, truth be told, unheard of. This was a man of enormous size, that had the mobility and musculature of a much smaller man. He outweighed most of his competition by 50 to 70 pounds when he was young, and by even more as he aged – people his height just aren't built like him - it wasn't that he was so tall, it was that he was so damned strong. He didn't suffer from a malady like Robert Wadlow did, he was just a normal person grown too big. That being said, Shaq was still 2 feet shorter than Robert Wadlow. It makes me wonder how big a human can really get and still be as physically imposing as Shaquille.

More typical 7 foot plus man

Regardless, the largest man in recorded history died from something as simple as a staph infection.  Awful.

Well, like all good stories, it eventually comes back around to something about me. Mondays are days that the gods have cursed, if there really is a hell, I’m pretty sure it feels a lot like Monday morning just after my alarm goes off.

Yesterday, I awoke, cursed the fates that have forced me to actually have to work for a living - well, not work work, just have a job – and began getting ready. I washed clothes this weekend and had freshly folded and neatly stacked t-shirts to wear. I pulled the collar over my head and put my right hand through the sleeve… and right into the gaping maw of hell itself!

Er, or I might have banged my hand against the door frame to the closet, whatever, the effect was the same: Blinding pain and a newly crippled hand.

Even now, the evening after the incident, it hurts. Blood has pooled and clotted in a massive way under the nail of my pinky to the point that typing is a struggle, holding a cup is hard, and cleaning the inside of my ear canal is now impossible (the pinky's most important function). I’m not sure my personal story is over just yet. But it feels like it might be. Done in by a pinky. How sad.