When vanity-googling some year back, I discovered that I had an entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base. After being momentarily surprised that there was such a creature, I allowed myself a warm glow of imagined immortality– evidence of my presence which offered to outlast me (modern post-humanist thinking in the utopian spectrum notwithstanding).
Later, I found it had been updated to show my appearance on Pseudopod.
Later still… nothing. No updates. Because it relies on public effort, and is (or was) a little mysterious in how to do entries.
Last week, the ISFDB came up in online conversation, and I decided it was time to take the bull by the figurative horns (unless you are an agile Minoan, avoid doing this literally), and discovered that either it has become easier to add entries since I last looked at it, or I’m substantially more smartlier. Now not quite all of my published work is documented there. Along with a bunch of other folks, because it’s magazines and anthologies. Have a look, if you like, but be warned– there’s a picture of some kind of skunk-ape on the page. Very alarming.
It’s April and I’m a fool, so today’s my day to shine! A whole week of gentle but unstrained new writing! I might attribute it to the change in the weather, but for the shrieking blizzard we had on Tuesday. The change of sunlight’s angle, maybe.
Oh, yeah. It’s a whole study session for the Friday films. Rest assured that there’s not Lovecraft apologetics here, either– our presenter is not afraid to call a insulated xenophobe exactly that. It’s just an excellent extended consideration of cosmic horror, using the work of the uncomfortable poster-child of the genre.
The plan was to get that bit of site updating sorted out today. The reality was the gentle, silent death of our wifi router demanding a run to somewhere a replacement could be got. Fortunately, the amazingly elderly (it’s thirteen years old) Apple Airport the dead router replaced is still able to toss packets about, so Son’s online classes aren’t mysteriously cancelled.
I hope. I left the house before anyone else was up (bar one cat), so I don’t know if Wife has made sense of the hasty scribble I left by way of explanation. Maybe I should check…
† I hadn’t realized that the pen was so humble that I hadn’t even put together a page for it or its nth tier maker when I pulled it out of storage. I also hadn’t really meant to use this ink again so soon, but when the idea of putting a ridiculously expensive ink (free to me, but still) into a pen so cheap it was affordable during The Great Depression tickled me deeply.
I’ll try to edit in a picture of it later. Like a lot of really cheap pens, the celluloid is quite striking.
† It’s definitely the work-exhaustion that’s doing in my writing; I find I’m having to do things that I normally can see to between the regular duties of The Regular Job. Now, since I’m not shoved out of work like so many millions, I don’t want this construed as a complaint… although I am mightly happy that we are facing a long weekend. The prospects for a return to something more like my preferred level of work-effort are not certain, but there may be some relief next week. Mid-month is, generally speaking, slack time. All the same, I don’t feel wrong re-using this:
‡ I got a bottle of this as part of the social contract I perceive to be in place, which suggests that we who still have an income try to support local businesses. My favourite local place for pen and pen-proximate things, Paper Umbrella, has responded to the current plague by setting up a web-store. Locals like me can, on the way to collect vital groceries, pause to have stuff thrust out the door at us. So I did.
Sadly, you won’t see anything about the new ink on my own site, because my computer has finally noticed that it’s very very old and can no longer support running anything except its OS. I’d probable have started a Gofundme to seek the help of well-heeled but charitable folks, if not for the sudden explosion of people who are seeking the same money for more dire purposes– being able to maintain a site like mine is definitely not of the same importance as food and shelter.
I can, I think, manage my tax return without the computer, and because our household income is low, there’s a plague on, and we can expect a big fat rebate of the federal carbon tax, there’s some hope that tax refund can be turned into a new computer. Just like happened eleven years ago. Of course, I wouldn’t say no to a well-heeled passer-by throwing some money at me…
I should mention that I quite like the TWSBI blue-black. It’s only a little darker than Herbin Bleu Nuit, but it plays well on non-great paper, it’s reasonably water resistant, and it has a very inky scent. I’m sure there are some who would call that ink-stink, but I like it. It also comes in a whopping great 70ml bottle which has a plastic inner vessel to allow for low-ink filling, so the bottle will be a keeper even when it’s empty.
Long weekend, so no film tomorrow. I’m going to TRY to get some fiction out of me.
It’s fountain pen day! Huzzah! Rather than just a single video, I’m offering a whole heap of them, plus some cheesecake shots of pens you may well have already seen from me. Well… you get to see them again, because it’s FOUNTAIN PEN DAY! Let’s start with a look at who won the random draw to be the Pen of Fountain Pen Day in my life:
Oh, stop whining. NONE of us get the day off.
It beat out the Arte Italiana, the Targa 1005, and the Souverän M600 in a fair fight refereed by Random.Org. Here’s some photos of the lovely runners-up, provided by their publicist (me):
Honorable mentions to… well, almost every other pen I own. Now, on with the celebrations:
A poster from 1937
Enough of this, though– the true observance of the day is taking your pen out and giving it a good long write! Go and get some in on a page!
I had been having some trouble settling on the ending for the current project, having three viable but mutually incompatible possibilities. Happily, I remembered over the weekend that in this brave new technological age of ours, one can have a story with different endings. That “Choose Your Own Unspeakable Fate” thing I was working on last year (and am slowly putting into second draft, honest) is essentially just a bigger and more complex manifestation of the thing, but I even have a subscription to Sub-Q, a forum specifically intended for “interactive” texts. Thus, when “Discoveries…” is ready to roll, I know exactly where I’ll be submitting it first.
What's up at Ravens March. 
