Friday word count, reinstated

Since I’ve worked my way through the first draft and I’m getting in at least a few good days of writing every so often (thanks, AbFABB!), I think it’s high time to start keeping track of them here.
NOVEL WORD COUNT: 36,146
So there.

BSG

So, last night I finally watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. We don’t have the SciFi channel, you see, mainly because I do not want to get raped by Charter cable for it, so I have to obtain the episodes through, how shall we say, alternate channels. I didn’t watch until last night because [...]

Day of Writing II: the Wrath of First Draft

Yesterday AbFABB and I convened late morning at one of the many local coffee purveyors and, while a bluegrass duo fiddled and banjoed in the corner, and small children screamed just about everywhere else, we bent our heads in solemn supplication to Unimatrix Zero and SistahGirlMacBook and prayed for the words to come.
And indeed they [...]

Our failing school district + McBride exec = what, exactly?

For a moment, please, a little local perspective.
The St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) have been stripped of their accreditation by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. (You can read all about it and so much more at this site.) Subsequently, a three-member provisional board will be appointed to run the show once the [...]

Grammar geek on patrol

I am usually not very conscious in the morning, which is why I go to the gym then, before I have time to think better of it. This also may explain why, until today, I had not noticed that the signs on the locker room doors say “Womens Locker Room” and “Mens Locker Room.”
This, sadly, [...]

On second thought

I had written a post earlier today after listening to this afternoon’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. It was positively full of bile, vitriol, and spluttering rage.
And I used the word “fuck” a lot.
While it felt therapeutic to write, I don’t think it rises to the true level of Julia Sugarbaker worthiness to warrant [...]

Straight talk from Larry Kramer

“You may say you don’t hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what’s the difference? Our own country’s democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.”

Outline

I’ve been clearing out my old photos from iPhoto, backing them up to an external hard drive. I like to be organized, and I also like having a lot of free space on my hard drive. This is difficult because photos take up a lot of room (especially after I got a new camera with [...]

Karl Lagerfeld

I’m in the middle of reading the profile on Karl Lagerfeld in the March 19 New Yorker. (My problem keeping current with my issues of The New Yorker goes back a long way, but I try to at least read the latest issue and then go back to slogging through the backlog, at which point [...]

Jesus Fucking Christ, enough already!

It’s common knowledge that Sam Brownback (HA! BROWNBACK! His name sounds like a schoolyard taunt) is an idiot. So nice of him to go and provide additional evidence of this fact. But good God, doesn’t this illustrate why Gen. Pace is a bad Marine? The military does not set policy. It answers to the civilian [...]