Public service announcement.

Unless you’re very experienced with them and your cat is very accustomed to them, don’t ever try those cat bathing bags.

Not unless you want a traumatized, half-strangled kitty, water everywhere, and scratches on every area of skin he can reach when he manages to get one area of the bag open, kick it off his body, then invert it so his head is stuck inside while he thrashes around in a hysterical panic.

Next time?

PetSmart groomers.

Oi; my poor baby.

Vagaries.

The writing and publishing industry is an odd one. It’s full of fluctuations, many triumphs, and even more disappointments. The most important thing to remember when dealing with disappointment, though?

Never let it make you bitter.

No matter what cheerful face you put on, people will always be able to tell that you’re bitter, resentful, and angry at the status quo – and it will affect their perceptions of you, and their decisions about working with you versus working with your competition. If you’re going to be realistic, be realistic; anticipating failure in an industry with a 99.9% failure rate isn’t bitterness, it’s pragmatism. But there’s a line between pragmatism and bitterness, one fraught with sour temperaments, dire predictions, and a lot of whining. Don’t cross that line.

If you can’t be positive, calmly realistic, or the epitome of sunshine-farting pink kittens, then be silent. It’s better than venting your frustrations to the world. You never know when something you say might come back to bite you in the arse one day.

“You’ve got a rainbow in your mouth! Open it for the world!”

“An Insurrection” is done, and only needs 220 words trimmed off (minimum, I’m sure more will come out in edits). It makes me snicker with glee, if only because look! I can play straight! Or at least write straight. Or something. There’s a lot of talk of…things. Yes. Things I wouldn’t normally talk or write about. Hush and let me bask in finishing my first short story in ten years! (Seriously, a novel is easier for me to write than a short story.)

I feel like celebrating by feeding someone to a pack of rabid squirrels. Possibly Comcast. Yes. Comcast, or some entity personifying Comcast, because they won’t let me schedule a service transfer to our new place. They swear there’s an active, paying customer there even though the place is vacant, and they won’t let us move service with that other account in good standing.

Bah.

On the plus side, we may be spending the weekend at the new place. No furniture, just an air mattress and a duffel of clothes. We’re going floor camping, because we’re hardy adventurers. It’ll be like building forts in the living room, only with a bitchin’ view of the city skyline and a freaked-out cat wondering what strange, empty hell-chamber full of alien scents we’ve dragged him to now. If Hikaru kicks me onto the floor in his sleep, I’m stealing the blankets.

I just remembered, I have an itchy scarf to finish crocheting.

And I still want a pet Spock. I’ll clean him, I promise.

Might just be a milestone.

I’m almost done with “An Insurrection.” I figure I need about an hour of unbroken time after work to wrap up the last 500-odd words of it, filling in the little gaps I left during last night’s flurry to get the basic chain of events down.

It feels like quite an accomplishment, even if it’s something rather small. I haven’t finished a short story with a concrete beginning, middle, end, and overall plot in at least ten years (drabbles/snippets/scenes don’t count). I didn’t think I could. But this one’s pretty much done, waiting to be wrapped up. Makes me happy. I’m going to let it sit for a few days, then edit it and submit it in time for the Esquire contest deadline. It’s already up to 3,800 words, so I figure I’ll have to trim about 500-600 words off to get it near the contest maximum. Shouldn’t be a problem.

The story is a huge departure in style and theme from anything I’ve written before, but sometimes that’s needed. Freshen things up. Keep the imagination loose. Flex the mental muscles so they don’t atrophy and the ideas don’t grow stagnant.

And heaven help me, I actually think it’s good. As in, proud enough to read off turns of phrase that I particularly like out loud, making Hikaru endure my horrible attempts to narrate in character.

You know that means the story’s got to be pure crap.

Anyway. I’m just rambling and avoiding work in my current sleepless-zombie mode. No, I’m still not sleeping properly. It’s a lost cause. I likely never will.

Off I go. Though before I do, question:

Why do authors get so resentful and bent out of shape over agent rejections? I can understand being disappointed, but I don’t really understand the personal, targeted resentment and vitriol authors direct towards agents who rejected their queries or stories as an impersonal business decision. It just baffles me to hear stories about authors who answered rejection letters with flaming attacks. No, people. No. Business. Treat it as such. You wouldn’t send a flaming bag of poop to an employer who decided you weren’t right for a particular job opening, would you? No? Then don’t send the online equivalent of it to agents.

Insurrection.

Despite my previous growling on the subject, I may be willing to buy into the personification of a muse if only because mine, if he or she exists, is a contrary little cow who doesn’t like to let me sleep. I’ve been turning over a short story idea, as I really want to get past my seeming inability to write them (even picked up a helpful book on the topic), especially since I wanted to put together a submission for the Esquire short fiction contest. I even thought I’d fool my novel-oriented brain into writing short stories by planning an anthology of them, even if I have no intention of submitting a full anthology anywhere and would just send the separate short stories.

Well apparently something kicked my brain in its ass last night – as while I was trying to sleep, ideas started popping up. I really, really wanted to sleep. Really. But no, my creative half decides that 2:30a on a work night is the perfect time to start going off all half-cocked. It started off with a few opening lines on the Insurrection theme:

It started with the beer.

Every day George Hogan clocked out at exactly 5:45pm – and at 6:12, promptly clocked back in at O’Malley’s on Fifth. He punched his time card in peanut shells and pretzel crumbs, and ordered a beer on tap.

Next thing I know it’s 5a and I’ve written some 600 words on various segments of the story, and have almost the whole thing planned out. Just have to flesh it out.

I know I shouldn’t be complaining about suddenly having a workable short story idea when before I was complaining about not being able to write them at all…but dammit, can’t my ideas keep sane work hours?