Cleolinda everywhere

More Formspring questions. Posted 3/9/10.


( So ... dreamed about Brad Pitt lately? )

Feeling a little better. Not great, but better.

Oh, and I forgot to mention--the Shoebox Project's still hacked (comment with information); don't click anything over there. Update: It's back?

Only one Twilight link for the moment, and it is: reports of Robert Pattinson's death were greatly exaggerated. Particularly since he appeared on the Today show four hours after he supposedly died. Vampires: what're you gonna do?

diddakoi asks: Are guys actually intimidated by smart women? Do they really find intelligence unattractive, or is that one of those outdated fallacies? My personal theory is yes and no, in that order--a lot of guys do find intelligence attractive, but are too shy (read: intimidated) to do anything about it. Thoughts?

( Bad news for the Pushing Daisies folks )

Not that it's very interesting now, but I have scribbled down "How I found the photos--seven years to the day" as a reminder to talk about it, so: I had installed the program Need3Space because I have millions, literally millions, of files on my computer, and I was hoping to clear anything temporary off for a little breathing space. N3S doesn't delete files--it lists files that you might want to delete, so I take full responsibility for being a dumbass and apparently deleting an obscurely named file that Microsoft Word requires to function. I pulled it up to work on Cloverfield (which I finished a rough draft of today, while we're here) and it claimed that Word wasn't installed and that it needed the installation CD, which was (it informed me) not currently in any drive. Strangely enough, I could see Word behind this text box, and I could see the list of my most recently opened documents, so I knew it was on there. After some digging, I found the specific file it was missing and asked around to see if anyone could just email it to me, because the plastic chest where my software lives was four feet away and I am that lazy. Well, and also, it was under a tub of stuff, and I was afraid I'd open the chest and the software wouldn't be there, and then it would be time to panic. As long as I didn't know for sure--Schrodinger's software, if you will--I didn't have to panic yet. But finally, I wasn't getting any younger and Cloverfield wasn't writing itself, so I got up and moved the tub.

It's not a tub, exactly--it's a small plastic wastebasket I used in college, and since it was clean, I'd been using it for storage. Huh, I thought. What's in here, anyway? And that's when I found five envelopes of photos from my 2001 senior (college) trip to Cuba. Pictures that had been missing for seven years. And they'd been sitting four feet from my desk, covered by a small stack of greeting cards, all this time.

So I put the Microsoft Office installation CD into the drive, and Word cheerfully finished installing itself--it did all the work for me and took literally three seconds to do so. I am convinced that my being dumb enough to delete whichever file it was directly led to my finding the pictures, because I believe, somewhat idealistically, that things happen for a reason. Or at least some things. I found the pictures, by the way, pretty much seven years to the day that I arrived in Cuba.

(I still can't believe how sad I feel over the Heath Ledger thing. Anyway.)

Gathering linkspam makes me feel better, so--linkspam by section:

( Deaths: Heath Ledger )

( Oscar nominations )

( Cloverfield )

( Regular linkspam )

So I finally finished Carter Beats the Devil. I'd heard it was fantastic, and y'all may remember my interest in stage magic late last year, but... I read the opening section, liked it, and... just couldn't go any further. I just felt tired, I don't know. Sometimes I just develop strange aversions to things--"aversion" is too strong a word, even. It's just an inability to continue, or even to start. Usually this is in terms of writing, or books or movies--I meant to see this movie, I meant to read that book, I never got around to it. I've come to feel like that tends to happen for a reason: I'm just not ready for whatever it is yet. When the time's right, I'll come back to it. Apparently the time was right for Carter Beats the Devil, because I picked it back up yesterday afternoon, almost felt too tired to bother, and then proceeded to read straight from three in the afternoon to one in the morning.

A lot of times, a book will be so good that it will make me want to write. "I can do this!" I think to myself. Not in a bad way--"God, how did this get published? I could do this"--but in the most positive way possible, creativity sparking off example like flint on steel. Other times, a book will be so good that I sort of inwardly despair at ever being able to do anything like that. Carter is one of those books. To be fair, I think I was depressed mostly by the sheer amount of research that clearly went into the writing of it; I've been poking around my preferred era of history since I was thirteen, and I still don't think I could marshal what Glen David Gold says (in the afterword) that he put together in five years. I get the same feeling from The Crimson Petal and the White, as maddening as I find the ending--a kind of massively detailed verisimilitude I envy but despair of matching. But then there's Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart books, which are infinitely shorter than either of those two, and tell just as good a story with more economy of historical detail. So... turning right back to the front of Carter Beats the Devil and reading it again probably isn't a good idea, is it?

(There were actually two points in Carter where I started gasping aloud. You know how in The Neverending Story--the movie, I mean--the boy is so relieved at some point [the sphinxes?] that he practically passes out? Yeah. That was me. I actually had to stop reading for a couple of minutes. That was the first part [page 586, paperback]. The second part was page 633. And while we're handing out page numbers, can someone tell me if the penultimate chapter is supposed to stop mid-sentence, or if my copy's just weirdly cut off?)

Meanwhile, I'm back on Black Ribbon, trying to hash out a new opening, and it's like shoveling coal. The ideas are good, but the execution is awful. I'm to the point where I'm just trying to get the roughest possible representation of what I want and then keep moving.

( Linkspam )