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Saw the eclipse with the pin-hole paper, but also saw it in the "pinholes" created as the sunlight slipped between the leaves of bushes and trees. Hundreds of tiny crescents that way, and they looked very cool.
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I'm glad some people had good viewing conditions. Here in Denver, we had about a 20-minute window from when the eclipse hit its peak to when the sun set behind the mountains. It was cloudy the whole time, so my pin-hole paper did not work.
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We used to take unscheduled breaks in the middle of the night and go outside and watch the shuttle go up...very impressive, that...
Never seen a solar eclipse close to total, just partial eclipses, but on occasion when it's been cloudy, it was noticeably darker.
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Well. I finally got one from Clarkesworld asking me to keep them in mind for the future. That's supposed to be good, isn't it?
LOL. This is pitiful. If I was doing this for a living, I'd quit and get a job at a car wash.
Oh well. It's only the 4th place I've sent this story, and it's a short one. Many more victims to inflict it on. Slush readers beware.
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That is good. Congrats. I've sent plenty of stories to Clarkesworld and I've never received a response like that.
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Not bad...I suppose none of the markets would want to insult the next Stephen King, even if the story in front of them isn't that good. (Supposedly King got even with F & SF by selling them something they rejected years before, or so I once heard...)
The last rejection I got included the sentence: "We hope you will consider submitting to Buzzy [Multimedia] again in the future as a possible home for your work." I suppose they meant it, but I take the page for a form letter. I'll think about sending something else, once I have something else...
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I think "supposedly" is the operating word..."alleged" might be better. I read the story in question at the time...his followup stories in F & SF were the ones collected in Volume One of the Dark Tower thing, and, I gather, were wrtten earlier and, I can only presume, rejected by someone...
If it were true...it's certainly low behavior. I'm inclined to the position that one should do one's best work all the time, 'cause there's somebody out there who hasn't seen you before and will judge you on that work. Like I said, I read the work---I'm pretty sure it's the first thing by Stephen King I ever read---and it doesn't stick in my mind.
I can't say precisely how Stephen King became S*T*E*P*H*E*N K*I*N*G, but, if this incident did happen that way, it wasn't because of it, it was in spite of it.
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quote:Originally posted by Robert Nowall: If it were true...it's certainly low behavior. I'm inclined to the position that one should do one's best work all the time, 'cause there's somebody out there who hasn't seen you before and will judge you on that work. Like I said, I read the work---I'm pretty sure it's the first thing by Stephen King I ever read---and it doesn't stick in my mind.
I can't say precisely how Stephen King became S*T*E*P*H*E*N K*I*N*G, but, if this incident did happen that way, it wasn't because of it, it was in spite of it.
You seem to persuaded that one's earlier work is invariably not as good as later work. Not necessarily true. I have seen authors (that I won't name because I don't want to fuss with anyone) whose earlier work I liked a lot better than their later writing. Besides, I am guessing King most likely did do his best work with those stories. Maybe he was a different person then, with a different viewpoint and a different voice. But that doesn't make automatically them bad or inferior.
Of course, maybe they were inferior. But I'm sure they still sold magazines anyway.
Posts: 884 | Registered: Feb 2012
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So I got glasses today. You can imagine my horror when I found out I needed them. I mean who has ever seen an author in glasses.
I had something in my eye a few weeks back, or so I thought. It just wouldn't come out so finally I got in to see an eye doctor that is part of my medical group. Turns out I had a scratch on my cornea. She does a brief exam, and then says, "Where are your glasses?" I tell her that I don't wear any. She tells me I need them and probably have for years.
So, for insurance reasons I go see another Eye Doctor. She checks my eyes and tells me how amazing it was that I never wore glasses.
I call my Mom. She tells me, "yea when you were a kid they told me you needed glasses but the astigmatism was minor that I didn't bother."
I guess as I've gotten older it has gotten worse. I had noticed some blurred vision in my left eye, but I had assumed it was due to my migraines.
Anyway, I consider it an upgrade from two eyes to four. Posts: 725 | Registered: Jan 2011
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Once you get used to chewing on the earpiece while you are thinking, you will wonder how you ever did without them.
Posts: 884 | Registered: Feb 2012
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Welcome to my world. I got glasses when I was fourteen, then had to wear them all the time when I was sixteen and needed 'em for driving, and from then on, wore 'em all the time.
Now my prescription is shifted, I have to take 'em off to see anything up close---like this, reading and writing right here---and, sometimes I get up and lose track of where I put 'em down...
*****
I think Stephen King has gotten away with one heckuva lot of lousy writing, and the only reason he has gotten away with it is because he's S*T*E*P*H*E*N K*I*N*G. (Also there's an unpleasant air of arrogance about him when he writes any non-fiction.) But every so often he turns out something pretty good.
I pulled out my copy of F & SF with the story in it. (It's at one end of my "relatively inaccessible" collection, and I could reach it with only a little trouble.) It's called "The Night of the Tiger," it's in the February 1978 issue of F & SF, I don't know if it's in any of King's collections, and a quick read through doesn't stimulate any memories---seems kinda derivative of better stories by Bradbury, actually.
On the face of it, it could be a prior reject, say, from King's college days...but there could've been something in the story King was fond of and thought readers should be given the opportunity to see.
(Funny, though. The only story in the issue that strikes a chord in my memory is "Stone," by Edward Bryant, the cover story---none of the others stirs anything at a glance, not even the "first short story" by Stephen R. "Thomas Covenant" Donaldson. I suppose that fate awaits us all if we succeed at our literary efforts. To be filed and forgotten with the rest.)
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EVOC. Don't worry my friend, do like I did. Get one of those thick black rim pairs and start a fashion trend. Soon everyone's wearing them. Its like they think it will give them your level of self-confidence or something like that...
But don't worry, people look at authors with glasses like they know what they're doing (like we've stayed up all night writing or something )
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Brown tortoiseshells with big lenses does it for me. But my current ones are a little uncomfortable, and, with a recent shift in the prescription for my left eye, I'm going to search farther afield for my next sets.
(Get prescription sunglasses, too...I don't know how I went all those years without 'em...)
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It must be the end of the school year. My youngest "graduated" from preschool two days ago, and this morning my 8-year-old got an award for perfect attendance. (I've always thought that was a strange award, like the school is saying, "Congratulations for not getting sick!")
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Oh, I thought it was congratulations for coming to school even if you are sick (and thereby getting all the other kids sick), which makes it an even stranger award, I guess.
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Much as I'd've liked to have perfect attendance, the pattern of my life that stretched through to work stretched back into my school appearance---every several months I'm sick for a few days, be it a cold or a stomach upset or something that might be funny if you go for that kind of scatological humor. The latter two have been less frequent of late, at least not big enough to affect going to work. (Damn.)
*****
I "googled" the judge's name to see if there was any prior history of strange rulings, but all I could find, at least among the first hundred pages, were followup stories and comments about this. (As I suspected, the judge was a JP, a Justice of the Peace---elsewhere in the USA a minor official, but in Texas a fully-empowered judge.)
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I will say I never send my children to school with anything worse than the common cold. My daughter missed several days of preschool this year for various ailments, but my son managed to avoid catching them. He had the biggest grin when he was on the stage getting his award. So from that standpoint, I'm proud of him for his accomplishment.
@rcmann: That story is so horrible that it's almost unbelievable. They should be giving that girl a medal and some foster parents, not a night in jail.
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We bought our house three and a half years ago. Yesterday, we had our Realtor over to see if there's a possibility for us to move.
We bought the house for 130,000 and then proceeded to spend about 20,000 dollars repairing, remodeling, painting, re-flooring, the works.
Our Realtor told us that our house is now worth 96,000 dollars.
Do you know how it feels to realize you've lost 54, 000 dollars? It sucks. It makes your bones ache. I don't want it to be real.
There are so many stories out there about people losing their homes to foreclosing, or a short sell. There are homeless people out there, and people who have health problems, or sick kids. I should be grateful that my husband has a job that he hates, but that pays the bills. I should be grateful for this house that no longer works for us, that we will never be able to move out from under.
But I don't.
I feel trapped.
I feel sad.
I feel like reading a book about faraway places, so that in my mind at least, I have a chance to get away.
Write more books, people.
Because it's not just me who needs them.
Posts: 1201 | Registered: Jan 2008
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Don't consider your house as if it were a bank account. A house isn't something you want to risk losing. It's an asset, but it can't be treated as if it's liquid capital, something you can cash in for the big bucks.
Your realtor only gave you its approximate dollar amount on the market, which can be higher or lower.
You also don't mention the other traditional accompanyment of a house purchase---a mortgage. If you've got one, you've got to pay it off...but once you have paid it off, and you sell your house then, it's, as they say, all gravy.
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shimiqua evidently a lot of people feel like you do. I might even if I was in the same situation except that my wife hates to move and if we bought a house three years ago she would want to stay in for at least seven more years. So she probably wouldn't care if the price dropped to half of what we paid for it.
But eventually the price will go back up. How soon eventually will be depends on what state you live in, the economy and other factors.
A few years ago house prices around her jumped when people on the coast decided to move inland. They could buy a house here with more land for half of what their house there would cost. So some did which caused our house prices to go up significantly.
In other words you never know when something odd will happen to cause your prices to go back up before everyone else's.
But I can understand why you would feel trapped even if you planned to stay there another two years at least. Because something could happen where you would want to move now. But at the same time I would keep telling myself I'm not planning to move anyway so it doesn't matter what the house is worth at the moment.
And at least around here some people are some how moving and buying houses. At lower prices and way lower interest rates and some how I don't think they are all first time buyers or rich people.
We would love to be one of them but we got two reasons we don't. One is lack of a big enough savings and two is a personal reason that is different than most people's.
Add to that a fear of being responsible for our own house. Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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Well, I won't give precise dollar amounts on my home purchase---belated revenge for when I tried (and failed) to get answers about how much people 'round here were getting for selling their stuff---but I bought my house for somewhat less than shimiqua's purchace price...since then I've put more money in it for assorted repairs, in particular a new roof...and in the course of the real estate bubble of the 2000s I saw houses nearby listed up past half a million...but now they're down, but houses in my neighborhood still sell more than I paid for mine.
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Life has been giving me a lot of back to back lessons on being grateful for what I have. Including moving back to my hometown, and then my wife promptly lost her job. Now I barely make enough to pay my rent.
But, life has a funny way of doing these kind of things to me. And, I've lived through much worse.
It can be hard to remember to look for the positive, but I try to do it anytime I get down on my situation. I find I have a lot more to be thankful for.
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We have been in some hard finical times in the past, I won't go into details but a couple have been very rough for a few months but now we are not doing so bad at all.
One thing that has happened to us recently, relatively minor compared to some of you but our cat went missing.
My wife was taking the cat to the vet and somewhere between the car and the vet's door the cat got out of its cardboard carrying box. The cat took off into the bushes. The vet is only a mile or so from us but it's been three days now and no sign of her--the cat that is. We are still looking though.
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Sympathies...you have walked around the area, haven't you? Sometimes when the cat sees a familiar person, he'll come out of hiding, particularly if you've got food and he's hungry...
*****
Couldn't get here yesterday---broke off my onlining activity at noon to eat lunch / dinner, and as I was eating the power went off. Went off, stayed off for over an hour, went off again later but I'd already gone to bed by then. Nuisance. I have battery backup but not enough for a lengthy session.
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I suppose many of you checked out the Transit of Venus today. Me, where I was, it was too cloudy to pick up anything. I'll try to take a look before sunset, but I'm not hopeful of improvment, and I guess I'll just have to wait until 2117 and watch it then.
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Kinda late here for some of you it will be June seventh but
Today is D-day. For those who are from other countries or have forgotten, The US invaded Normandy during WWII to stop Hitler. Hundreds of ships, I forget how many planes including gliders. Seven thousand men died in one day but we took the beach, a couple of cliffs and parachuted many men in to free France and other countries. A lot of the stuff the Germain had set ups and we brought in is still there.
Thanks to all the brave men who took part and planned it.
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My new favorite song. I went to college with this girl, and she's the nicest, most brilliantly talented person I've ever met, and I've met KDW. She's weird and quirky and... well brilliant. She's gonna be huge.
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For some reason I was utterly amused that Kathleen's post was Number Three Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty Three in this thread. I suppose this makes it Three Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty Four
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quote:Originally posted by Robert Nowall: (Also there's an unpleasant air of arrogance about him when he writes any non-fiction.) But every so often he turns out something pretty good.
Read both On Writing and Danse Macabre and found him utterly charming.
Can you post an example, Robert? This piqued my interest.
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I haven't got any copy to hand, but I remember how unapologetic King was in a comment about this mystery novel he turned out, where he set out a murder mystery and then utterly fails to solve it.
In On Writing, King tells the story of one of the inspirations for Carrie, this classmate girl who got laughed at, saved up so she could look nice in a new dress, and still got laughed at---and all I could wonder was, "Where was King when this was going on?" His absence from the story suggests to me he was one of the kids laughing at the poor outcast. And it bothers me. (I know I feel some psychic pain nowadays when I think of my own relation to and comments about the outcasts---and perhaps I was one myself, but if I was, I never noticed.)
King also had a column in Entertainment Weekly for several years, talking about this or that aspect of the entertainment industry---books, movies, music, the lot---where he took a tone of superiority while recommending stuff that, in all honesty, didn't seem that appealing to the likes of me, and, I suspect, anybody else.
Some of King's foreword / afterword comments about his work are kind of hard to take, too...
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Can't say for sure---I went over it several times and didn't have the impression of his presence, one way or another, but it's been awhile and I could still have missed something. (Being honest about it doesn't impress me that much, either.)
There were other things in On Writing that kind of cheesed me off, but at this late remove, and not knowing where my copy is, I can't say for sure what they were...
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For a lot of us, purging some of the bull**** we went through as kids is part of the reason we write. Either guilt or pain or both. Maybe Carrie was a form of penance for King.
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Certainly I carry the psychic pain of participating in such things. I'd tell you all the tale of The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Done, but I'm too embarrassed to ever put it to paper---well, maybe I'll leave something behind in a safe deposit box someday.
*****
Some of my distaste for King is rooted in his style---somebody (maybe Dean Koontz) once described it as "baroque," meaning extremely wordy and oddly put together, and many words are used where often just one will do. It was also said long ago (by Spider Robinson in a book review, I'm sure of that) that how do you tell a guy so successful that he's coming in fifty thousand words over his best fighting weight? I like wordy stuff as well as the next guy, but in my own writing I try to streamline it.
Also I have a certain distaste for King's ripoffs of old stories and ideas---in particular, his novella "The Langoliers," ripping off a well-known Twilight Zone episode, but this isn't the only case. He seems unapologetic about that, too. My own ideas are certainly old, and I'll be the first to admit it here and anywhere.
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Is anyone else having trouble logging into Yahoo? I don't know if it is the wifi access point here in York, NE or Yahoo is having a problem in general.
My blackberry is able to pull up their news. This access point can get into other websites I reguraly visit, like hatrack. It doesn't make sense why I can get *here* but not yahoo.
Posts: 3072 | Registered: Dec 2007
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Hmmm, interesting. I got on okay, but when I clicked on any of the top row of pictures with story the whole thing force. I couldn't do anything else. I went backwards to this page then back to Yahoo. That happened three times. Fourth time I clicked on my mail and it sent me to my E-mail. I went back to Yahoo and everything worked fine.
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It was my location. Walked to a local McDonalds. I was able to get right on with no problem at all.
Posts: 3072 | Registered: Dec 2007
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My computer had some updating set on it, so I thought I'd let it do that this morning---only the damned thing took more than an hour to update and shut down! Screwed up my whole morning, running late.
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Drat. There's an rcmann on Smashwords already. Not me. Now what? Change my nom de plume? Live with it? Hunt the guy down? Decisions, always decisions.
Posts: 884 | Registered: Feb 2012
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Since I haven't gotten published yet, it might be simpler just to change my pen name. Although I gather the other rcmann hasn't been published either.
I would use my real name, but it's as common as dirt. I am open to suggestions as to an alternate pen name if anyone wants to help me come up with one. You folks have seen enough of my style to get an idea of who I am.
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That's what's great about my real name---for all the awkward trouble it caused along the way, it's darned near unique. All but a tiny handful of online references to it are to me.
Other than "find a name you can live with," I haven't got much more to help, though.
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