Cleolinda everywhere

I am a terrible, terrible person who promised to mention something for the Lovely Emily last week and then forgot (eep!). Without further ado: the Lovely Emily's Team In Training page for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, where she's collecting donations for the Mercedes Half Marathon she'll be running in February. Donations will support research for blood cancers (like leukemia, lymphoma, and Hodgkin lymphoma) and patient services.

Meanwhile, I'm grappling with fear-induced writer's block. As in, writer's block caused by my not opening Word at all. Whenever I was anxious as a kid (which was, oh, 95% of the time), my father used to ask me, in the most smug and least helpful way possible, "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Despite the fact that he boarded the failboat a long time ago, and that "Whatever he did, do the opposite" is a fairly good approach to living, "What's the worst thing that could happen?" is perhaps the one useful thing he has passed on to me. Except that, of course, he wasn't doing it right. (I used to get so frustrated with him that I think that, on at least on one occasion, I actually said, "THE WORLD WILL END.") He was using it in the sense of, "Well, nothing, really, so it doesn't matter anyway." I've found it's far more useful to think of actual, meaningful answers to the question and deal with those. And sometimes it involves saying, "Well, yeah, this could happen, and that would probably suck. But here's what we'll do if that happens, and here's what we could possibly do to avoid it." Life goes down a bit easier when you're walking into that eighth-grade oral book report not under a cloud of vague fear, but knowing that you could start flailing, and you probably will, but if you do, just stop, swallow, and start your sentence over. That kind of thing. Expect it, don't fear it.

So here's what I'm worried about: ( Well, because you're a dumbass, mostly )

( War on string may be unwinnable )

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 )

Mmm, watermelon. I think Infamous is on cable later tonight (Capote's somewhere Monday afternoon) and I'm reading the newish issue of Vanity Fair right now, and that's pretty much my plan for the day.

( Famous doesn't look like a word anymore )

You know how you see a movie when you're very young, and you kind of remember key parts but not much else, so when you see it as an adult it's like you've never seen it before? Yeah. One of the Encore channels has been having a Dirty Dancing marathon today. ( I carried a watermelon? )

(By the way: the writing of this entry just now was interrupted by my mother dragging me downstairs: "Look! THE STARS ARE MOVING!" "What? God, the moon is bright--" "They were MOVING! Back and forth! Like this, and then back like this, and then--" "I see stars. Twinkling. That's all." "They were MOVING!" "Well, look, if the aliens come tomorrow, you can tell me you told me so till the cows come home. Where's the Advil? I'm going back inside.")

So, until I came down with a splitting headache roughly around the time I was marched outside to stargaze, I've spent the last couple of days feeling weirdly giddy. I mean, really happy. Which is great; I just can't explain why. I mean, not that I need a reason to be happy--that sounds terrible--but you know how you'd normally describe a pleasant default state as "content"? This is actually happy. I feel like I have some kind of wonderful secret I'm keeping, or like I'm in love (and it's neither, trust me). It's just so giddy and persistent, I can't explain it. Maybe it's all the vitamin D I'm getting from being out in the sun swimming. I don't know.

On the downside: I'm still having weird spells of fatigue (am I coming down with happy cancer or something?), and my little Zen mp3 player has gone missing, although I keep it religiously in a white tote bag with all my current writing. If you have any search-and-discover gnomes, send them my way.

( Eh, the linkspam )

Ohhhhhhhh no. No no no no no. My mother put a load of my sister's laundry in to wash this morning and asked me to put it in the dryer for a little bit and then hang it all up to dry. (For those of you asking where my sister was that she couldn't do her own laundry, her shift started at five this morning and she had a class last night. She's been a lazy cuss in the past, yes, but for the last six months, her schedule's been insane.) So I throw the clothes in the dryer, don't really look at them, and come back a couple of hours later to hang them up. They're covered in spots. Clutches of small, random, oily spots. Most of the load was polo shirts for work, but also in there? The outfit she was going to wear on her date tonight. Ohhhhhhhh no. And Sister Girl has, let us say, an Irish temper. I thought I had an Irish temper, but I realized it isn't really--with me, the amount of bluster is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of mad I am. I read something ridiculous in the paper, and it's like, "OH, WHATEVER, I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS GUY, DID YOU SEEEEEEE THIS?!"; someone does something shitty directly to me and I turn into my mother with the "I'm sorry, this is NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR" Terrifying Calm thing. With Sister Girl, on the other hand, the dial's pretty much on eleven all the time. We're all going to die, is what I'm saying.

( CSI: Special Laundry Unit )

Movies this weekend: The Wicker Man at 17% fresh: snap. Crank seems to have amazingly good reviews at the moment, though.

Munch's "The Scream" found by police after two years.

Meanwhile: apparently by the time y'all got to the gelfling porn Wikipedia entry, it had been sanitized, making me look insane. Well, nothing ever disappears entirely from the internet, baby. (I like how a note on the history page says, "Classified everything below the first paragraph as 'Gelflings in Fan Fiction' since that is all the contents really are at best.")

Maybe the Russian Wtf, as y'all call it, was an ambulocetus? Yeah, I don't feel better.

("Russian Wtf" reminds me of the old joke--a reporter at a garden show or a greenhouse or something (look, I forget the context) asks the gardener what the big purple flower is, and he says, "Damn if I know." Next day in the paper, a picture of it with the caption: The rare purple damifino.)

Brian De Palma talks about The Black Dahlia a bit. "De Palma was juggling simultaneous plot lines 'that overlap in ways you don't realize until later,' he says. 'Some things I changed were too complex for audiences to absorb unless they were able to pick up the book. I had to pare down a lot of the eccentricities of the storytelling. If four things were going on simultaneously, we didn't need five.'" This is the kind of thing I find fascinating, if only for my own writerly purposes.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Okay, I howled at this one. Maybe it works in action, but it's just hilarious out of context in stills. I forget which other actors are playing Dylan--seven total, I believe--but more of the cast in general is here. Definitely Heath Ledger, apparently.

Queen Fights for Right to Party, Blog. Brian May is ready to go over to MySpace and "apply a fist or two." I support this motion one hundred percent, sir.