Damn it! You know what? I'm sick of this crap. I'm sick of being the guy who eats insects and gets the funny syphilis. As of this moment, it's over. I'm finished being everybody's butt monkey!

Xander ,'Lessons'


The Great Write Way  

A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.


deborah grabien - Dec 28, 2004 11:40:45 am PST #8913 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Brynn, got it - thanks! And Susan, you're going to wind up with a huge list of names. Have you checked out some of the livejournal agents links?

Quickie lookin from a machine at the local Kinkos, because our #%%#$ DSL is down again. And right now, feverish and aching and dizzy so I'm going home to bed, shortly.


Topic!Cindy - Dec 28, 2004 11:43:29 am PST #8914 of 10001
What is even happening?

Kristin, that's exactly how I felt, Christmas day. Worse one I've ever had, right here in my house.


Pix - Dec 28, 2004 12:03:12 pm PST #8915 of 10001
We're all getting played with, babe. -Weird Barbie

Thanks, Cindy, and I'm so sorry. I think it's really hard to understand how terrible panic attacks are for people who haven't had them. I'm so grateful I haven't had one since last year. Before I was treated, I would go through periods where I had them frequently. It was the closest to hell on earth I hope to ever be.


Susan W. - Dec 28, 2004 2:14:06 pm PST #8916 of 10001
Good Trouble and Righteous Fights

Deb, I'm waiting till I'm home to start work in earnest, since that's where my market info all is. Plus, the conference chair has given me some basic parameters--one publishing house that must be represented this year if humanly possible, another we'd really like to have, one West Coast agent, etc.


WildDemon Cornelius - Dec 28, 2004 9:16:08 pm PST #8917 of 10001
Take your fingers off it, don't you dare touch it, you know it don't belong to you, to you...

That was amazing, Kristin...I wish I didn't know exactly about every bit of it, but I do, and you've described it accurately, precisely, and beautifully.

Cindy, I'm sorry you know what she's talking about.


deborah grabien - Dec 29, 2004 10:01:16 am PST #8918 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Panic attacks are nightmares on wheels. I never had them in my entire life, but when I'm having an MS exacerbation, I do occasionally get them now. Vile, horrible things. A powerful drabble, Kristin.

Can't write anything until I have my internet back up in the same damned place my hard drive lives. It's driving me bonkers. I'm expecting a contract for the Apocalyptic Clowns story momentarily, and the Newsweek piece is ready to go, and I have no damned internet access at home until Nic gets off his bum and fixes things. I'm posting from Kinko's.

FEH.


Brynn - Dec 29, 2004 10:27:05 am PST #8919 of 10001
"I'd rather discuss the permutations of swordplay, with an undertone of definite allusion to sex." Beverly, offering an example of when your characters give you 'tude.

Anyone feel like looking over a Christmas letter real quick? My grandma is adamant that it get sent out (she was in the hospital over Christmas) and I'm sick to death of the thing... Just a quick catch any typos type glance? Pretty please.

edit: I think it's pretty much fit to print... It could just use a fresh pair of eyes.


victor infante - Dec 29, 2004 3:51:08 pm PST #8920 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.

Weird new thing...

Andy Kaufman and Superman’s Phonebooth

I

In the line, he remembers he was someone else once—only briefly, mind, and this is not that man’s story. The card in his wallet allows him to drive—He sweated a mid-west winter when Ohio State Troopers took it a way one December night, when he was fleeing a burning building. He hadn’t set fires in years—he was someone else, then, remember—but he didn’t know what flags lurked behind the warrant check, the sound of old sins and gunfire whistling in the Cincinnati wind. This was in ’72, and when the card returned to him, he smiled and pulled away slowly. He paid the ticket the next day, registered to vote, as if in triumph.

II

Drunken sailors have no reasons to lie—the underlying truth of claustrophobia and lust and sea monsters splitting the water’s surface is as honest as sunshine and half as damning.

What rises beneath us is reptilian; knows only fear and hunger; changes color to stalk its prey and hide from predators. What rises beneath us is made smaller by whiskey, rough kisses too long delayed. What rises beneath us wishes desperately to be ignored.

III

He should have gone to sea, he thinks, but Ohio held him like a drunk lover’s fists. Columbus to Cincinnati to Akron, small moves to smaller and smaller lives. As a child, he dreamed of the ocean, of Aruba and Macao, shores so hot they’d scald the bottom of his feet; he dreamed of blue liquor and bluer moonlight, of women who moved like rolling tides, gentle across the shores. But he’ll haunt Ohio ‘til the day he dies, he thinks, maybe longer.

In this line outside an Akron Senior Center, mass of voter’s guides he hasn’t read in his hands, the memory of dreams bubbles like a water fountain. He remembers the spinning comic book rack of his childhood, wire-framed escape hatch, “If we don’t stop the death ray, Metropolis is doomed.” Silly ghost of flight, he thinks, silly to not want the skyline to end.

IV

Clark Kent should have stayed on the farm, helped his parents milk the cow, plowed the fields and flown at night. Instead, he stands each afternoon in a building of people looking for secrets—half in love with the idea that bob-haired brunette will rip open his shirt and find what’s underneath. There’s more danger in that than in radioactive apes or alien tyrants from outer space—the purloined letter behind thin spectacles. “I’m right here,” he thinks. “I’m standing right here. Can’t you see me?”

V

This line is a con game and this voters’ guide a bullet, and in both things, he knows of what he speaks. Never hid, as such, mostly melted away, exchanged anonymity for anonymity, maybe hid in plain sight. Worked factories and warehouses, came home and watched the television—Andy Kaufman, transforming from meek foreigner to Elvis Presley, in a blink of an eye. Andy Kaufman, wrestling women in Tennessee, and he knew that was a put on, too. It’s a game he’s good at—since that night the gun went off in his hand and bullets rained in all directions like brimstone, since someone fell and someone screamed and there was miles to go before he reached Columbus, running all night as something welled beneath him, reptilian and frightened, ready to strike.

Someone’s palmed a coin somewhere. He doesn’t know whom—he doesn’t read the papers much—but someone, somewhere, is hiding in plain sight, and he can see their outline. The papers in his hands, the ones he hasn’t read, are burning at him, scalding his palms like sunlit sand.

VI

On the Internet, no one knows you’re Andy Kaufman in a rubber Nixon mask; No one knows you’re a superhero cruising S&M sites, wishing you could be whipped so it actually hurts through invulnerable flesh; No one knows you’re a welder, a high-seas pirate, happily in love. Biding time from epiphany to pixilated epiphany, reality is Superman’s phone booth, and it is time to change.


erikaj - Dec 29, 2004 4:02:26 pm PST #8921 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Yeah, it's weird, but it's cool, Victor.


victor infante - Dec 29, 2004 4:03:07 pm PST #8922 of 10001
To understand what happened at the diner, we shall use Mr. Papaya! This is upsetting because he's the friendliest of fruits.

Yeah, it's weird, but it's cool, Victor.

Gracias.