Stung

I was stung by a wasp while walking Elka today.

At least I think it was a wasp. I felt the sharp pain on the inside of my right bicep and of course slapped it, then stomped on whatever the crumply corpse was that fell to the sidewalk. I'm not allergic to anything that I've encountered yet (Thank God), so I wasn't overly concerned. Just irritated, and now slightly hurting.

It was on the return trip, so we had less than a mile to go. I tried not to think about my exercise heightened heartbeat pumping poison around. Not allergic, remember! I checked the swelling once in awhile. Yup, looks like a wasp sting. No stinger left in the skin, either, which seemed like a decent tipoff. I wonder where the little fuck came from; I heard no buzzing, saw no nest, and there was only the one. At least it was me and not the dog.

Once home, I did what any good citizen of the Internet would do and consulted WebMd (well, I consulted The Google, and felt WebMd was my best bet.) Remove the stinger; check. Wash the site with cold water; check. Make a paste with baking soda to draw out the poison.

"Draw out the poison?" Doesn't that seem a big like an old wives' tale? Or like what they say in Old wives' tales? Really, though, I'm of the firm belief that baking soda is magical fairy dust. It does amazing things when I use it to clean my stove, or the rare occasions I have a burned pan! Really, WebMD said "baking soda or meat tenderizer", but I know from jellyfish experience that whoever slipped the meat tenderizer in there is an advocate of Satan. It makes whatever pain you felt from the initial sting multiply, and also burn. But, which are you more likely to have on a beach vacation, baking soda or meat tenderizer? Yeah.

So after the baking soda paste, and putting some ice on it, it looks pretty much exactly the way it did in the first place. Maybe it hurts less? Maybe the swelling is lower? I probably could've just left it alone too and had similar outcomes.

Prey on their fear

Fear is an interesting thing.

Everybody has different fears. Not everybody is afraid of death (or not everybody admits it). Not everybody is afraid of sharks. Not everybody is afraid of getting struck by lightning.

Not everybody is afraid of getting cancer from smoking, despite what anti-tobacco wants to do. In Australia, they've passed a law that no brand names will be on cigarettes, only the horrible pictures of diseased organs. In the United States, the court said "yeah, no, you won't be doing that diseased organ thing." Really, we've known for many years what cigarettes can do. Do they do it to everybody? No. But there's always the chance.

Not everybody is afraid of The Bomb. Frankly, not everybody even knows to anymore. I was alive during the Cold War, sure, but not really aware of it. I was alive when the Berlin Wall came down (and recently bought a piece of it at Salvation Army for $5!) but didn't know. I know now what Duck and Cover is; I know now what happened at Chernobyl (well, as much as any non-Soviet civilian might). I've watched nuclear test footage, I waited at the edge of my couch when the Fukushima reactor was going up. I'm nervous about Iran and North Korea having The Bomb; I don't understand how people can think that The Bomb Isn't a Big Deal. Japan certainly hasn't forgotten it. I've watched enough anime to know that.

Not everybody is afraid of monsters, per se, but many people know and are fascinated by man become monster (serial killers, spree killers, kidnappers, terrorists). Not everybody is afraid of "nature" as such, but there are certainly enough Natural Disaster movies that made a bajillion dollars (The Day After Tomorrow, The Perfect Storm) that it still works.

A story that makes people afraid, either of the situation itself or for what happens to the characters, is a good one. If you can evoke that sympathy from your audience, you've succeeded either in some small way, or in a major one. Good writing is visceral, and makes  a certain mindset happen. It dazes the reader when they look away from the page, because they've been transported by your words.

Use of the word "That"

So, not only have I been remiss in blogging here, but I sort of dropped off the face of Absolute Write as well. That's all right, they probably don't miss me. Not because I've made myself a nuisance there; more because I haven't made a name for myself there yet either. No big.

But, one thing I keep in mind when I write, or think about writing or revising, is a thing that the Absolute Write-rs really try to hammer home when people are all "LOL, I have a first draft I just finished, will somebody read it for me?" is a very simple trick, really: look for instances in which you use the word "that". You can probably remove them safely, leaving the meanings of your sentences intact.

I'd never heard this before, and it boggled and intrigued me. I of course went to the anthology which I'm editing and hit "Find", and typed "that". Then I read every sentence which continued the word "that", and damn if they weren't right. Most of them, I could remove. Some I left intact, because really, that's how people talk. They say "that" all the time, sometimes twice in a row. I kind of like a colloquial voice, depending. It's once reason I enjoyed Stephen King for as long as I did, I think; the writing is very easy to read, which might draw you in.

I haven't tried counting the "that"s in published books I have laying around. I wonder if there will be fewer in fiction versus non fiction? Fewer in a classic versus a contemporary work? It's an interesting thing to have brought to your attention.

Things that happened since I posted here last

So, since I posted here last (July 11, if you're keeping track!)

I turned 30 (I'm rather ambivalent about this, and that topic will be a post in and of itself. I promise.)

There was a fight in the library gazebo (no, it didn't involve me really in any way. but it was certainly an event!)

I totally forgot about the August CampNaNoWriMo Until like, August 4. So, another fail. November will be better, right? Right.

I watched the movie Chronicle. Which was freaking awesome. I recommend it, definitely.

I rewatched original Fantasia. Elka watched it with me, at least the beginning part, which is mostly shapes and colors.

I've worked on editing a short story anthology that I intend to publish through Amazon.

I made pancakes on my own from scratch for the first time. I'm not typically a pancakes kind of gal. I'd made pancakes before in the past, but mostly as the flipper, without having a hand in the rest of the process.

Camp NaNoWriMo 2012: Maybe August Will be Better?

So, I failed June's Camp NaNo, as one might have guessed. I should've updated before now but, there it is.

The problem I had with NaNo this time around was that I already had a body of work I was writing on. So, to interrupt those projects, to do a NaNo, just wasn't happening. I tried, I did, but only got a little ways in and stopped. I didn't outline or really prepare in any way because 1. I'm typically a pantser and 2. I was writing a different novel, and short stories. So it got to a point where I was guilty if I worked on my original works in progress, and I was guilty if I got involved with the NaNo, so I said screw it and wrote part of my dog training book instead.

Will I try again in August? If the mood takes me, yeah. National Novel Writing Month, whatever the month, is a fun exercise and can really get things going. But, since things were already going, I just kind of messed with the mojo.

Hope everybody's having a happy summer! Keep writing, but it's okay to take breaks too!

No, your library isn't trying to screw you

I'm surprised sometimes at the level of suspicion that some people have.

At my library, the overdue fine for books is 25 cents a day. That is per item, per day. Maximum of $5 for a book. No limit on book checkouts, they go for 3 weeks with no renewals if nobody else is waiting for them. And oh yes, we, the library, did have to pay money in order to get those books from Magical Book Land and place them on our shelves for you, the public, to check out. We, the library, also have to Pay Money for electricity, light bulbs, Internet, computers, printers, paper, phone, and natural gas. We also have to Pay Money for gasoline to put in the tractor that mows the grass and plows the snow and performs other groundskeeping duties.

Sometimes, people take out a lot of books. And they...forget about them. Not for a long time, maybe a week. Not so bad, right? Sometimes fines total out at $3, sometimes $10, that kind of thing. I've seen far larger, and far smaller as well. It's funny, because sometimes somebody will ride me like a rented mule over a seventy five cent fine (that's 3 days, mind you. 3 days. Pocket change. You could find it in the parking lot), and another person will have a fine of $240 for a bajillion late books and just ask me serenely who they make the check out to.

And oh, the comments we get.

"Oh, I guess I'd better just start buying my books. It'll be cheaper." We hear this one a lot. Daily, in fact. That $25.00 hardcover latest James Patterson would have been cheaper to buy than your $1.25 fine? Really?

"I'm paying taxes for this place!" Yeah, so am I. About $120 a year. I own my house in town, you see. Do you know how many books I could buy, new, for $120 a year? Let's be generous and say twelve, at a mix of paperbacks and hardcovers. You know how many books I read a year? Around 100. Sometimes more. Oh yeah, we have DVDs too. One week, no renewal, $1 a day if they're late. You can take 5 at a time. 5 DVDs, depending, is $120. You got your money's worth, I assure you. I've sometimes considered offering people the cash in exchange for a notarized statement saying they won't come back.

"It must be nice to sit around and read all day!" Yeah, it must be nice. Because I don't. I check books out, check books in. I turn the computer monitor back on for people (is it really that hard, not to touch a computer monitor?) I answer the phone and then do Google searches for people for directions, or phone numbers, or to spell words. Or to tell them celebrity birthdates and parents' names. I clean your greasy fingerprints off of CDs and DVDs. I clean mystery crud off of CD and DVD cases. Yeah, we have books on CD as well. They're $120 each for a library copy. Limit of six. Like a book, though, it's three weeks, two renewals, 25 cents a day overdue fine.

"Don't you have a grace period?" Yeah. You checked out your book for a week and have a two week grace period. Seriously. If you can't finish five books in three weeks...don't take five books. If you can't finish one book in 9 weeks (that's what one checkout plus two renewals equals) then maybe you should, in fact, buy it.

"Why can't I take my laptop bag/giant purse/suitcase/duffel bag with me through the library?" Well, people are scumbags and steal our stuff. So, because books and things cost money and not candy, we lose a lot of money yearly from people stealing. So we need to politely treat people with large bags like scumbags who might steal from us. No, we don't want to check your stuff when you're done. Yes, I know your laptop bag contains your laptop and that's why you came here.

Wait....it DOES look like candy

I confess, when I saw a whole bunch of articles about kids getting sick after eating laundry detergent, my first thoughts were not really kind. First and foremost, I wondered why these peoples' 2-year-olds had the time to get away, get into the detergent, and consume it. I also hadn't seen them yet, and wondered what had made them so mistakable for candy. In my day, detergent did not look like candy.

However. Exhibit A:

Remember the original Willy Wonka movie, with Gene Wilder? I'm using that one as the example, as i have not seen the Johnny Depp one. Remember the everlasting gobstoppers the kids were given? Remember what they looked like? Remember how fucking disappointed you were when you got a "real" box of gobstoppers and they were just marble sized balls? These detergent pods look like your magical movie candy dreams come true. Seriously, what the hell? Why is detergent more exciting looking than candy?