Gramarye

Hmm. I have to officially admit that ??Medium?? is an excellent show, and one that I am no longer content to either watch or not depending on whether I happen to be over at my family’s house when they’re watching it.

I had for some time assumed it wouldn’t b e my cup of tea — the sort of gimmicky fantasy-for-the-masses program that’s just as well avoided, a la “Tru Calling” or the somewhat less objectionable “Early Edition” (or whatever it was called).

But ??Medium?? is excellent, not for its fantasy elements, but for its excellent realism in portraying human behavior and family life. One of the many areas in which tv and movie speculative fiction tends to lag behind written is in its ability to portray realistic people in unrealistic circumstances behaving in ways that are believable and human; ??Medium?? succeeds in this regard to a rather shocking extent. The characters are likeable, engaging, flawed, and they _all_ look more or less like real people. And can act. Even the kids.

How did this get on the air? Fortunately for it, I didn’t catch on soon enough for it to fall under the influence of Nick’s Law.

Hmm. The good folks at the Robot Co-Op have tweaked “All-Consuming”:http://allconsuming.net to make it blow less. I like what they’re doing with it, and I think it’s a great idea, but so much of what I consume is books, and “Librarything”:http://librarything.com is so good at books, I’m not sure it’ll be worth the trouble for me to pick AC back up, despite my affection for “43things”:http://43things.com and its sister projects…

Okay, so it’s done. I mean, it’s not done, done — there’s weeks of editing left, but I’m taking Renee’s advice and letting it sit for a little while before I try to make it suck less.

The last couple of days, I’ve been reading again, a little paperback Lovecraft collection with ??Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath?? as its centerpiece. I’ve been avoiding reading ??Dream Quest?? for a while, because it’s long; now that I’ve bitten the bullet and read it, I find my aversion was fully justified, because it’s also not that good. Lovecraft, despite being a raving nutjob, is a pretty skilled writer of short stories — but not of novellas; in fact, so far, quality is more or less inversely proportional to length in Lovecraft-land. Also, the ending is annoying. It reminded me, strangely, of ??Foucault’s Pendulum??, which seems totally insane, but whatever.

Not sure whether my next primary quixotic project will be editing the NaNoWriMo piece or something else (candidates include MMK, an old writing project (??Clock??), a completely new writing project…or something else.

However, I am actively considering making this 50k thing a goal for every month. It’s pretty hilarious.

Wow, that took forever to get validated. I guess I’m not the only early finisher to jump on the validation bandwagon almost as soon as it came online.

For Thanksgiving this year, we had a pretty impressive array of food: mashed potatoes, fried tofu, yams, artichokes, vegetarian stuffing and gravy, and enchiladas, along with a cheese-containing filo-dough thing and two pies covered the bulk of the food. However, we didn’t really eat that much of the finished product, because we were all pretty much eating as we went throughout the day, and by the time the food was actually finished, I, for one, was too full of chips, cottage cheese, and bloody marys (not clear on the plural, but Google likes this better than “maries”, which was my first instinct) to do much more than symbolically sample the food. It was fun, though. The enchiladas (a special request from the one person who wasn’t doing substantial cooking and was not, therefore, actually in the kitchen), which were at one point going to be discarded, were re-added to the menu at the last minute and more or less improvised — but still good. They, like many things, included bloody mary as a significant seasoning.

I contributed the tofu and the bloody marys. The tofu involved a marinate of tamari, balsamic vinegar, oil, tabasco (I took the little plastic thing off and really got it flowing — the joke about Andrew’s mother is left to the reader as an exercise), half a lemon, and some lovely Clausthaler non-alcoholic beer. The tofu, which was cut into relatively thin strips, was fried in a little oil under a lid for a fairly extensive period of time, so that, while the result wasn’t crispy (too much marinate to make deep frying feasible), it was chewy, and the sauce cooked down to a good intensity.

The bloody marys were made using V8, tabasco, a little soy sauce, and a little garlic salt, along with some brine from a jar of sweet cherry peppers, and some more of the aforementioned Clausthaler. The end result was very well received, and may end up being a part of regular repertoire for family events.

Oh, and I finished my NaNoWriMo project. Well, finished in the bare-bones sense of “Now it has an end as well as a beginning and a middle.” Much editing is required before it’s “finished” in any significant sense. I’ll be sticking through the validator once it goes up tomorrow.

I am _spent_[1].

I finally put 50k behind me. I’ve still got a little story to finish, though hopefully I can wrap it up, more or less, in a few pages and handle the rest in post, as it were. The story positively blows, on average, though there are quite a few bits of prose and whatnot that I’m actually almost fond of. Of course, “rewriting is key,”:http://www.partiallyclips.com/pclipslite.php?id=1247 and I may be able to turn this into something that’s at least semi-worthwhile. by worthwhile, I mean “the kind of thing I might have enjoyed killing an afternoon with when I was a kid, before I acquired taste.” (Note: Said taste was, once acquired, quickly killed in an elaborate ritual sacrifice.) In other words, the target here was pleasant escapist genre trash, which is actually what I always wanted to write whenever I thought about writing when I was younger.

But it’s not even that, yet; for that, we’ll need a bit more editing and especially plot doctoring than I can pull off in the next week.

But first, to finish the bitch.

fn1. In case Andrew is reading, I’d like to go on record as saying that by, “I am _spent_,” I mean, I haven’t been this exhausted since the last weekend I spent with your mother.” And in case Andrew’s mother is reading, I’d like go on record as saying that by, “I am _spent_,” I mean, “Are you available this weekend?”[2]

fn2. As you can see, I forgot that Wordpress’s implementation of textile doesn’t _do_ footnotes.

My little sister spent about twenty minutes last night trying to conform various horrible ethnic observations and reference to one or more tunes. I particularly liked her attack on the Welsh, in the person of Catherine Zeta Jones:

“I don’t know about her T, but her A is a mobile.”