As many of you who've known me over the years have noticed (so that would be like, two people, right? ugh...), I tend to go through cycles of huge emotional ups and downs - and I feel a downturn coming along. Rather than hash it all out online in a series of what would probably be increasingly bizarre and troubling posts, I think it best to gracefully retire from blogging and reading blogs for the time being, and work out what I'm going through on my own, without all the myriad distractions of online life, such as it is. (Well, it's not life, and that's part of the problem.) And this is the most explanation you'll get - it's really all you need, and I see no sense in opening up my actions and motivations for snickering and lulz. I'm sure there'll be some of that anyway, but I need to minimize that shit on my end. I don't mind being a target - just, not now.

Feel free to dump my ass from your flist, if you wish. I'll be back sometime in August, after my - holyjesusfuck - 45th birthday. Crap, now I'm really depressed...

Please STOP WITH THE SHITTY WEATHER so I can come home. Tampa Airport sucks alligator balls (do alligators have balls? oh, for once I really don't want to know...).

No love,
Bitchface Livia

...as I was walking out the door this morning, I noticed a large number of black objects streaming across my bedroom floor, headed to the kitchen. OMG IT'S THE MAY ANT INVASION HOORAY! Either that, or Herbert the Centipede Overlord is throwing one metric fuckton of a party while I'm gone. Oh well. All I could do was spray the shit out of the apartment, throw my suitcase down the stairs to the car, and call the super on the way to the airport. I just can't worry about it, I've more important things to do.

Time for something with a wee umbrella in it!

Every year my company goes down to Florida for our big sales conference, where we eat lots of food, get drunk, cringe in horror as coworkers make awkward and out-of-date disco moves on the dance floor, and something about selling books we might be publishing... I don't know, that last part's kind of fuzzy. Anyway! Technically I report to work next Monday afternoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota (don't cry for me), but I'm going down this Saturday morning on the earliest flight possible - the holy-fuck-o'clock flight, I believe it's called. This gives me two days to do nothing but sit on a balcony with views like this, get room service like this, and finish fixing the novella in one horrific, expensive booze-fueled blaze of glory, just like this!

I know, I know: you're all making skeptical faces like this. No, really. In the last section, everyone gets hit by a dirigible. Driven by squirrels. THE END!

This morning I was brushing my teeth, staring absentmindedly into the mirror, and I saw it:

My first WHITE hair.

Yeah, it looks like I'm bypassing subtle shades of grey and going directly to Mountains of Madness blizzards. I blame this amazing predicament on Robert "Silver Fox" Levy, whose head briefly touched mine (see photographic evidence!) during his and his husband Dan's baby shower on Saturday. Whilst I and his many guests were innocently drinking thousands of glasses of wine and eating millions of tiny Cuban sandwiches (ok, well, that was just his father and me snarling over the sandwiches, lol), the "silver fox" virus was already infecting my hair follicles, bleeding the strawberry blonde right from my scalp! So, it's official: my life is over. Well, for my hair, anyway.

On the other hand, I think it's pretty cool. It looks like my new freakishly silver hair will be quite curly, which is a relief - the straight "ironed hair" look never worked for me, even in the 70's. And no, I'm not going to start pouring vats of dye onto my head. The world does not need another crazy old white woman with fire engine red hair that makes her look like she stole the wig off Ronald McDonald's head. I plan on being the crazy old white woman with the long unruly hair who scares little kids with her unnaturally crimson fruit-punch lipsticked mouth. Go me!

Now everyone get off my lawn!

1) I forgot it was International Pixel-Stained Techopeasant Wretch Day. Meh, whatevah. I'm tired, I'll destroy teh genre some other day.

2) Today is Shakespeare's birthday, and yesterday was Earth Day. So why is it that I'm only able to think about BOOBS BOOBS BOOBS...Ka-BONG!

3) I ripped 10,000 words out of my novella, and am now slowly combing through it, fixing a thread & character that needed to be fixed. It's sort of like making one of those potholders out of loops of polyester yarn (this is a 70's Craft Moment, fyi). Except, the yarn is my intestines. So: ouch.

4) I finally saw "Cloverfield". Monster = awesome. City destruction = awesome. But never have I so badly wanted a group of characters to DIE DIE DIE. Motherfucking entitled yuppie-spawn white-bread assholes - no wonder Mr. Cloverfield spit the cameraman out after he nommed him: these people haz no flavor.

5) How do I know summer is early this year? Because assholes and flowers are already in full bloom. Witness this exchange, from today on the PATH:

Man: "Hey, are you a 'natural' redhead?"
Me: "Hey, are you a 'natural' asshole?"

I can hardly wait till fall.

1. Eat spinach for lunch
2. Drink anything that gives me fruit-punch mouth
3. Smile

...at least it's not "Labia".

This time. :P

1) Still working on the Victorian Lovecraftian Clockpunk-Steampunk Dark Fantasy Novella. Almost there... almost there... I know this has been redonkulously long in the writing, but it's almost novel length now. Also, it's not half bad. Serious: it's sort of almost good! :P
2) A query has been sent out for a certain novelette. It's a long-shot, that's all I can say about it.
3) As you can see by the photo, the Lurker on the Fire Escape has returned. Honestly, he never left.
4) The toilet threw up tonight - it was like, I innocently flushed and KA-BAMB! Horror, everywhere. As I've had an irrational and all-consuming fear of toilets ever since a traumatic "overflow" incident from my childhood, I pretty much had a heart attack. Toilets are EVIL. They are EVIL EVIL EVIL. That's all I have to say about this. Fuck it: from now on, I'm pooping on the sidewalk, just like my smart homeless neighbors.
5) Madonna's new single and video make her look like a clueless, vampiric old granny-whore who is completely out of touch with what those young whippersnappers are really doing nowadays. God, I still love that bitch.
6) Despite barfing appliances and furry nut-loving infestations, I also still love my Apartment of Win. It's the crumbling urban bohemian wreck I always hoped to live in someday. I just wish the toilet didn't gurgle at me like that... and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear it laugh...

::hides in closet::

http://darkwisdom.com/

They're turning into a yearly anthology - the magazine is no more. Well, godspit and fuck. They were one of the first markets I ever sent stories to, and I've been trying for four years now to get something placed there. Ok, yeah, they'll have the anthology, but that makes my chances of getting anything placed there about as likely as getting a spot in a Borderlands antho - which is to say, about eleventy trillion to one. Crap.

He was born a few weeks after me, an August baby, but we didn't meet until kindergarten - University Place in Tacoma, 1968. Very bright and happy kid, with fine icy-blond hair. He was sweet, but you couldn't tell him that, because he was a guy, so you told him he was cool. And kind of a shy, sly fox. Yeah. We went to school at Narrows View Elementary for seven years, then to Curtis Junior/Senior High for six more. After I went off to college in Bellingham, I lost track of him, although I heard reports through the Network of Moms - he was in the military, got in a spot of trouble (didn't all us first-wave Gen-X'ers drift in and out of trouble through the eighties, though), sucked it up and got it together, got married (a couple of times, from what I heard), and had six (!) kids. He was a great guy - my mom ran into him a couple of times over the past few years, and she always made sure to tell him what I was doing, and let me know what he was doing in return. He got it together, he was doing well. Great husband, great father, great guy.

Unfortunately, my mom didn't tell me that he died early in March this year, of stage four stomach cancer, after an excruciating eight-month battle. She told me tonight, during an impromptu phone call home during the rain storm. I got most of the details from remnants on Google - already, he's disappearing from there, too. He was only 44 years old.

No, this isn't an April Fool's joke. And I feel so fucking bad, because I didn't know - I would have gone home, I would have emailed him or called him - anything, anything, anything. I didn't know.

I'm so sorry, Paul. I'm so sorry.

Haiku2 for livia_llewellyn
holy jesus fuck i am so ready for the next week yes i'm there
@ aboutmylife.netadvogato.orgblogger.comblogs.gnome.orgblogspot.comdeadjournal.comgreatestjournal.cominsanejournal.comlivejournal.commyspace.comspaces.msn.com
Created by Grahame

Starting Friday, I'll be AWOL while I finish up "Wondyrechaun" for [redacted market]. I'll be back the last week of March. Until then, you must find a way to angst and LOL without me. Don't make me make Herbert send the squirrel army after you....

...but it's 100% accurate:

Haiku2 for livia_llewellyn
bunch of angsty stuff about novels vs short stories and novelettes so
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Created by Grahame

All the electricity just went out. Also, the building seems to be swaying in a rather hypnotic yet alarming fashion...

Time to turn off the computer and start looking for my Maglites.

After spending many, many days slaving over the novella non-stop, I took today off. I did a bit of cleaning, but mostly I sat in my wee office and stared out the window, listening to the rain pouring down in buckets. It's truly not possible for me to articulate what it means to me to be able to listen to rain, and to hear nothing else: no radios, no tv's, no people screaming and shouting, no pounding of feet against the ceiling, no traffic, nothing at all. There was just me, the wind and the rain, and the creaking of the building. It was pure fucking bliss. And then after the rain died down, I took a long shower, popped Season Five of "24" into the TV, poured a big glass of pinot noir, and spent a couple of hours in the kitchen cooking up a storm. I made enchiladas, corn bread with jalapenos and cheese, and rice with black beans. More bliss followed.

Serious, this rickety eensy isolated apartment is the best fucking thing to happen to me since moving to the East Coast.

And now there's a massive wind storm whipping it up outside.

::WIN::

Last night the squirrels chewed through the wall and got into my office. I woke up to the crash of my lamp onto the floor, followed by noises in the kitchen and under my bed. I swear to fucking god, I have never been so goddamn frightened in my life - I froze, I was utterly unmovable. And disoriented, because part of me knew it wasn't someone breaking into the apartment, yet there was SOMETHING there - lots of somethings, and I had no idea what they were. It also is somewhat nightmarish to wake up without being able to see - since I take my contacts out at night, everything is fuzzy until I put my glasses on. I finally forced myself up, though, grabbed my glasses from the boxes doubling as a nightstand, and managed to very quietly crawl across the bed and reach for the light switch. I know - if it had been a person, I'd be dead by now, or worse. But like I said, I sort of knew. The light came on, and I saw a bushy tail whip past the closet into the kitchen. Mother FUCKER.

Sadly, I have no squirrel weapons of any kind, but I figured a broom might be my best weapon of defense - I wasn't interested in killing any of them as much as herding them away from me so I could get to my cell phone (which was stupidly in the kitchen) without getting any bites. However, I figured they must be pretty tame - I mean, I'm fairly certain the reason all this started was because those fucktards who had the apartment before me were feeding them on the fire escape. I just needed to get to my purse and call - ok, I hadn't figured out who to call yet, since it was three in the morning and this wasn't really an emergency. Maybe if I could get them back in the office and close the door? I don't know. I slipped on my boots, hoisted the broom into whack-a-mole position, and tip-toed into the small hallway, then stepped into the kitchen and flipped on the light.

From the kitchen counter, from the stacks of books, from my exercise bike, from the table - squirrels, everywhere, froze. Big, fat glossy creatures stared up at me with bright beady eyes, and I stared back. I think we were all too astonished and afraid of each other to make a first move. Which was probably for the best, because as I turned to the living room area, something stepped out of the shadows and made the first move for all of us.

"What the fuck," I croaked. "What the holy living FUCK is going on!"

"This is the LAST FUCKING TIME I USE SQUIRRELS." Herbert the Centipede Overlord slithered into standing position, as he threw a wet sack of flesh onto the floor with a wave of his black legs. It slid across the floor in a slick of blood, resting at my feet. "I told those stupid creatures to bring me the head of Jack Haringa, and all they brought me were his nuts."


Heh heh.

.

The picture pretty much says it all.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/04/arts/04fake.php

People, it's very simple: if it's FAKE, call it FICTION, not a motherfucking "memoir". You will still get paid, and no one will have to sue your sorry ass when the shit hits the fan.

By the way, I want everyone to know that I'm really a robot, and my novella-in-progress about giant bio-mechanical spiders and eensy cephalopodic Daughters of Dagon and sexxy mere-men is ALL TRUE. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go clean my cogs with that special "red grape" oil....

...because my downstairs neighbors started moving this morning. By "this morning", I mean "three o-fucking'clock in the morning" - because isn't that always the best time to start throwing furniture around your apartment, screaming at your SO that YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG AND WHY DID I HAVE YOUR BABY ANYWAY AND I'M STILL YOUNG AND HOT AND MOMMA WAS RIGHT I CAN GET A BETTER MAN LIKE THAT [MAKES SNAPPY NOISE]? Everything's better at three am, even the dissolution of relationships!

OTOH, it still didn't bother me anywhere near as much as Princess Stompypant's nightly cowboy booted square dances. I turned the TV on low, put some earplugs in and fell right back asleep, so I can't complain.

And now I will be spending the rest of the weekend doing the following:

* laundry - a couple months worth, because we hatesss doing teh laundriesss, precious
* baking - Satanic brownies with caramel and walnuts, just because I CAN
* cleaning - because that bed won't magically make itself, stupid non-magic bed!
* gym - I'm still losing weight, and I want to keep it that way despite the Satan brownies
* writing - my goal is 4000-6000 words total this weekend, and grocery lists don't count

Yes, it's only 7pm. But I'm cranky and tired and I still feel like shit, so it's Old Person Bedtime for me.

In other news, I LOVE MY CLOCKWORK/STEAMPUNK DARK VICTORIAN LOVECRAFTIAN NOVELLA. And when it is finished it will FUCKING ROCK.

That is all.

::crawls to bed::