Bethanie's Brain

OK, so it's been a while since I last posted. But we are drowning here. Drowing in more ways than one. Drowning in life due to soccer, school events, and life events (we have a family wedding this weekend, so everyone's in town and wants to visit). Drowing in resposibilities at the Evil Day Job, which is getting perpetually stranger every single day... Oh, yes. And it's raining. It's been raining all week. We're supposed to have "possibly severe thunderstorms" today (so the wedding won't be outside this afternoon; poor sister-in-law-to-be :( And actually, we get a break from drowning in soccer today, since the fields are closed, which is good since because of the wedding we'd have been running around like crazy all day. This way we're only running around like crazy half the day....) I don't even want to talk about school - my school - and the test I have tomorrow and how I haven't even read the chapter yet, let alone done any studyi...

So The Husband and I got to go on one of our very rare movie dates this afternoon and picked Watchmen. Yaay for the small miracle of movie dates! Almost 30 bucks and 3 hours later, I'm still sort of shell shocked. It was violent. It was graphic. It was gory. It had waaay too many flashbacks and moved waaay slower than I would normally tolerate and yet I've come away from it thinking it was great. I'm struggling to put my finger on why. I mean, normally any movie that moves that slow has me yawning, bored and pissed off that I just spent 30 bucks to be bored halfway through and hoping it will end. Watchmen somehow eluded this fate. I think there are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, there was a giant, blue man walking around totally naked for most of the movie. Two thumbs, way up! ;-D Seriously, though... The characters had enough depth to keep me interested. Maybe not as much as I usually like, but there were interesting internal conflicts going on. There were...

So a few weeks back a Big Editing Company notified me that they wanted to hire me as a freelance editor, but didn't want me to edit in the field where I actually have editing experience -- they wanted me to edit in the field I have a degree in, even though I haven't done THING ONE in that field for 14 years. I didn't know what to tell them because I was so irritated with their lack of respect for the actual work that I DO and their apparent faith in a piece of paper given to me by my undergraduate university so long ago that it is now lost in the mists of time. So I did what came natually: I ignored them. Yesterday they emailed me back, ever so politely requesting that I send them the other stuff they need for me to start editing for them and again suggesting that I edit in that other field. Perhaps they're hard up for editors in that particular field. I don't know, I don't really care, and my inclination is to ignore them again. However. Drollerie Press ha...

Or: Maybe Not. So I decided last night that I was done. After reading so many good books lately while occasionally glancing at my growing pile of pathetic, feeble - and entirely unfinished - attempts at writing, I just gave up. "Fuck writing," I said. "I'm all done. I'll just read from now on. And edit. And maybe review some stuff." As I left the house at 6 AM this morning, I was resigned to just driving. No more plotting on the commute. No more conversations with my characters during the inevitable stop 'n' go near Trinity Lane. No more feeding Dorothy the Muse with my new favorite song while going 80 in the slow lane. Just no more. Dorothy apparently took offense at this decision and smacked me upside the head continuously the whole way to work with all kinds of things I've been stonewalled on for the past several weeks. Figures. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I may just ignore it and go ahead with the plan to take up s...

So Fictionwise - and it's little brother eReader.com - have been acquired by B&N apparently. I've been an eReader.com customer for ... well, a really, really long time. For me, the initial draw to ebooks was based on 1) convenience (lots of books available all the time, all in my purse on an itty-bitty reading device), 2) ease of storage (ebooks take up no physical space - a good thing in a small house), and 3) PRICE. PRICE was the big one (that's why it's in caps, heh-heh). Ebooks, back in the day, were cheaper than regular books (paperbacks or hardcover). The people who produced ebooks seemed to understand that since they aren't having to cover the cost of paper, printing, shipping, storage, etc., it ultimately costs them less to produce an ebook and hey, why not pass that savings on to readers. OK, yes, sure - they have to maintain servers and websites and such, but these days, most booksellers have to do that anyway. The price has gone up over the years,...

... every time I HAVE time to write, I find a 1001 other things to do instead and ... every time I'm up to my eyeballs in everything else, all I want to do is write? Why is that, huh?

I really have nothing to say, but I haven't been writing-writing much lately, since I'm deep in the thinking part of Think Sideways and/or otherwise occupying the brain with kids, food, laundry (and more laundry!), other people's writing, and various body parts (anatomy & physiology, people! heads out of gutters, please...), so my fingers are itchy and I'm here to scratch them, I guess. Anyway, I spent the entire weekend unplugged. I never even took my laptop out of the backpack I use to haul it to and from work-work. It was kind of nice. I got to sit in different chairs (our wireless router died 2 years ago and we haven't replaced it yet, so being online means being chained to my desk with a little blue cable...). I got to read One for the Money by Janet Evanovitch . Never read anything by her and it was GREAT! Especially as a study in characterization. Seriously. I think it was some part of Joely's Character Clinic that mentioned if you can remove all...