Broken laptop

Today was supposed to be a “book report” on the book I’ve spent half the summer reading, since I finally fonished it and wanted to share all I learned from it.  (Well, some of the highlights, anyway.)

But then my laptop wouldn’t turn on.

Fortunately, I can still get into my account from my iPad (I tend to rely too heavily on the “remember me” function on most sites) but my iPad’s keyboard is out of battery power, and no way I’m typing anything that long in an on-screen, touch-pad keyboard!  (And y’know how you charge the keyboard?  Yep, by hooking it up to a computer’s USB slot.)

Anyhow, I’ve pre-scheduled the next two Missing Letter Mondays due to, well, serendipity/inspiration, but other than that…this may actually interfere with my plan to complete the full year of daily posts on time.  ‘Cause I’m not sure I’ll always be willing to slog out into this heat to go to the library or my brother’s place to post something every day, and the repair place isn’t even going to look at what’s wrong with my laptop until Thursday, let alone start fixing it.  (And there’s a 50% chance it can’t even be fixed.)

Just, y’know, an FYI, in case I end up not posting tomorrow.

(Also, I apologize if there are spelling errors in this post.  This thing is really annoying to use, and doesn’t seem to do the nifty squiggly line to point out “you made an oopsie!” that I normally detest.)

This Past Thursday

Okay, I think I’ve recovered enough to talk about it now.

So Thursday starts out–no, let me back up a bit.  The previous Thursday, in class the professor said that “next week will be our last class meeting” but that he wanted to meet with all of us, individually, on Tuesday or Wednesday to talk about our previous papers and our upcoming final papers.  I had a dentist appointment on Tuesday (to get the crowns put in) but Wednesday was wide open, so I was okay with that.

So he starts an e-mail sign-up sheet on Sunday, for us to say what time we want to meet on Tuesday.  I reply by pointing out that Tuesday is off the table for me, but Wednesday is good.  He says he’ll let me know what times he’s open on Wednesday…and eventually–like, Wednesday morning–says that no, he’s not going to be available at all on Wednesday.  I reply and tell him that I have a doctor’s appointment for my arm problem on Thursday at 11:00, and that I don’t know how long it will last or how long it will take to get to campus from the hospital, but that I’d definitely be available right before or right after class.  He says he’ll only be in his office at 11:00 on Thursday, so we’ll have to talk about the paper via e-mail.  I’m like “okay, whatever,” and don’t reply, ’cause it didn’t seem like a reply was needed.

I guess it was.

But more on that later.  So, Thursday morning, I’m on the way to the hospital, and I’m pissed off at the weather, because I was promised thunderstorms, and I’m getting a bright sunny day.  Good for most people, but torturous for me, because my left arm feels hot all the time, and the sunlight streaming down on it through the car window as I’m driving is the worst.  (And no one was available to drive me to the hospital.)  Plus there were lots of crazy people out on the road, as usual.  And it usually feels like I’m the only person in a five million mile radius who obeys the speed limit.  But mostly it was the weather that was the problem.  I spent a lot of time on that drive screaming obscenities at the sky–and sometimes at other drivers–and I definitely cried some, too.  Frustration will do that to me sometimes.

I did more screaming of obscenities in the parking garage at the hospital, because the first decent parking place I found was for “valet parking.”  Who does valet parking at a hospital?  And, more importantly, why would the valet parking have the good parking places?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the furthest out parking places for the valet parking, since the valets are being paid to walk over there and retrieve the cars?

Sexism or Incompetence?

So, I had to take my car back to the dealership today.  The door over the gas tank lid had fallen off, and they hadn’t had one in stock, and had had to order one.  (I think I may have said this part before?)  Anyway, the part was in, I made the appointment, I went in to have the part put on the car so that I could finally not drive around looking like a freakin’ moron with my gas tank’s cap exposed like that.  (My car already looks pathetic enough without that.)

And so I get into the office, wait while they pull my car around into the service-receiving-bay (or whatever they call it) and then get helped at the counter by this man who is either a complete misogynist or utterly incompetent.  (I’ll let you judge.)

I give him the card that the dealership sent me to let me know the part was in stock, and he spends a ridiculous amount of time inputting the very tiny amount of data into the computer.  Then he says he’s going to go out and look at the car, and is gone before I can even process the absurdity of that.  Normally, it’s not that odd for the person at the counter to want to look at the situation.  But normally one is not dealing with something so simple, nor is it usually a return visit.  Anyway, he gets to the end of the car, looks at the gas cap, and I can hear him, clear as day, saying “yes, it’s missing.”

The car was in for service like two weeks ago.  I’m sure it said on the file in the computer that there was no door over the gas tank, hence the reason to order one.  Not to mention did he think I had ordered a new one just because I like them?!  Is he just stupid, or does he think that, since I’m a woman, I don’t know enough to realize that the door is open, not missing?

So, anyway, he tells me to have a seat, because the process shouldn’t take long.  (It took, btw, about an hour.  That got me from the tail end of the Peloponnesian War to the build-up to the arrival of Philip II of Macedon.)

I haven’t been waiting all that long, though, when this same guy comes up to me and says “I have good news and bad news.  The good news is, we have it in stock.  The bad news is, it hasn’t been painted.”

What I should have said is “That isn’t news of any sort; it can only be news if I’m not already aware of that.  The part was special ordered for me, and I already showed you the card telling me it had come in, so obviously I already knew that it was in stock.  And they told me at the time it was ordered that it wouldn’t be painted, so that isn’t in any way, shape or form ‘news’ either!”

That, of course, is not what I said.

What I actually said was “That’s all right,” followed by assurances that I could paint it myself if I thought it really needed painting.  He seemed shocked and appalled by the very idea of putting in on the car unpainted.

Why?

This car is a domestic, relatively inexpensive, lightweight model.  Which means, of course, that as much of the car as was physically possible is made out of industrial-weight plastic.  So it’s not like the part is going to rust or something.

Furthermore, the car is silver, and the part that came in is pale gray.  Even in bright sunlight, the main difference between the door and the rest of the car is that the door isn’t shiny.  It is about a thousand times less noticeable than the missing door had been.

And yet this guy was astonished that I didn’t want to wait (and pay through the nose) for them to paint the piece before it went on the car.  No doubt because now it doesn’t match; it isn’t properly pretty.  (FYI, this car could not be pretty no matter what you do to it.  It’s functional, not decorative.)

It’s not like I was projecting the image of the average vapid housewife, here.  (If there is, in fact, such a thing as an “average housewife” these days.  I suspect there isn’t, but…the concept lingers on, regardless of the fact that the real thing has deservedly vanished into the ether.)  I was not sitting there chatting on my cell phone, nor was I doing whatever it is that everyone else does while they’re sitting around staring at their “smart” phones for hours at a time.  (I don’t even have one of the fool things.  My phone’s a flip phone, and that’s plenty good enough for me:  it does the one thing I need it to do, in that it makes phone calls.)  I was sitting there reading a book.  Not some flimsy fashion mag, not a parenting-for-dummies handbook, but a history book.  Admittedly, it was a fairly general survey, but there’s no way he could tell that.  (Nor, I suspect, would that have made any impact on his reaction to the book.)

So, really, the question is, was this guy treating me in that condescending manner because I’m female, or does he treat everyone like that?

I don’t have an answer to that question, naturally.  But it seemed worth asking.

Why me?

I’m constantly plagued by little things.  The worst part about that is it makes me feel shallow and selfish for complaining, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying having to put up with it all.

Today, during my bath, my space heater packed it in.  I only got it last month.  (Or was it October?  Well, close enough, either way.)  And because the store didn’t have price tags on the shelf, I ended up paying a lot for it, about twice what I had expected to.  (But I couldn’t bring myself to tell the cashier that I hadn’t realized it was that expensive and wanted to put it back.)  So unless it miraculously starts working again, I’ll have to take it back tomorrow.  (It has a year’s warranty on it, thank goodness.)

But it’s not like I can do without a space heater in the bathroom.  It’s on the back of the house, and it’s got one of those windows with thick glass bricks around an openable window with a screen.  The glass bricks probably do a pretty good job of keeping out the cold, but the central part that can be opened is just a thin bit of plate glass, and it lets in a lot of cold air in the winter.  Fortunately, the glass doors to the shower/tub keep the worst of that out of the toilet area, but if I didn’t have a space heater, taking a bath would be frigid, no matter how hot the water.

Sigh.  Like I said, constant plague of little things.

Slow news day

As it were.

I just have nothing to say.  I spent most of the day reading about the French Revolution.

Except a couple hours at my brother’s place, checking out Hyrule Warriors.  (Typical, right?  I have tons of reading to do, and just committed to getting a book out there ASAP, and I go over and waste time on a game.  But…it was really cool…)

I need to hurry up and get some of my book available; it doesn’t show up right now on LeanPub, ’cause it’s not published yet (though it would show up on my “Author Page” if I had any other books out there to direct people there) so I can’t get anyone interested in it, so what’s the point in it being listed at all yet?

Sigh.

I’m totally not sure what to charge, either.  I mean, part of me wants to say “don’t charge, since you’re admitting it’s still a WIP” and another part is saying “if you don’t charge at least a little then anyone who thinks they might be interested in the finished product would ‘buy’ it now while it’s free, without bothering to read it until it’s finished!”  And I’m not sure which one is right, y’know?

Ergh.

On top of that, I still have to finish running the spell check on the thing.  ‘Cause I turned off those hideous squiggly lines in Word, so it doesn’t point out all my typos, because if I didn’t turn off those hideous squiggly lines, then all my character names–and many place names–would have hideous squiggly lines under them, and that would get annoying fast.  But running the spell check is also annoying, because then I have to sit there saying things like “Yes, I’m sure Theseus is spelled correctly!  What’s the matter with you?!”  (Seriously, it didn’t know Theseus.  It knew Poseidon, it knew Achilles and Zeus, but it didn’t know Theseus.  What’s up with that?  Theseus is kinda a big deal hero, y’know?  And it’s not like there are alternate transliterations, either.  (After all, it didn’t know Menelaos and Patroclos, but it did know Menelaus and Patroclus.))  ‘Tis horribly annoying.  But I don’t want to put a book on the market with spelling errors.  (Oh, then there was the classic “Possible Word Choice Error” message, saying that I surely must have meant “flew” instead of “fled”…because it makes so much more sense for Thetis to fly to the sea instead of to flee there.  Right.)

Plus who knows how much fine-tuning it’s going to take once I feel ready to convert the text.  I totally shouldn’t be doing this right now, but…among other things, I kinda need the money.

Which I suppose means I really should charge at least a couple of bucks, even though it’s still a WIP.

At least that’s one answer.

But right now I need to look up the bibliography information I keep forgetting about, and then I need to get back to reading about the French Revolution.  I have two books to read by next week–and the usual assignment to complete, too!–and so I need to finish the first book today, and I’m still thirty pages short of that.  They’re small pages, though, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.  As long as I don’t spend too long messing about on-line.

Small-scale but terrible day

I spent most of the morning in the kitchen, trying to get at and block off the point where the mice are getting in.  I thought I had at least reached it, even if my stop-gap measure to prevent them from coming in was unlikely to prove effective.  But I just heard one inside one of my cabinets.  An upper cabinet.  I have no idea how the heck it got in there.  Once I’m sure it’s gone again, I’ll have to get in there and clean it out and see if I can find out the access route.  I think I need to nail metal sheeting across all their access points, and hopefully that will make them give up and go away.

I’m worried that they might have chewed through the power cord to my stove, though.  (As you might guess, I don’t cook much…)  I have no idea what I’m going to do about it if they did.  I’d think having the power cord fixed would be cheaper than replacing it, but I don’t know if chewed-through power cords even can be fixed.

On top of that, my neck is killing me because I’ve been sleeping on it wrong, and/or because I’ve been tilting my head to one side or the other so much in all this reading.  That’s been the case for a while now, but now my…upper back?  Middle shoulders?  I’m not even sure how to describe what part is hurting.  It’s the area right between my shoulder blades, but a bit higher, sort of the upper half of the shoulder blades.  Hurts so much that putting my hair in a ponytail is painful.  I have no idea what I did to it to make it hurt like that.  Just slept wrong, I suppose?

And I jammed my finger on my bedroom door, too.  Just my pinky, so it’s not like I use it for anything, but still!

On top of everything else, I’m so far behind in my reading for next week that I’m only just now at about where I meant to be last night.  On the other hand, though, I’ve been writing the paper bit-by-bit as I’ve been going through the book, as a new approach, so that means I’m slightly less behind than it seems?

I don’t know.

I just know that today has been an all around lousy day.

“Friday the 13th come on a Saturday this month,” as Churchy would say, I guess.

Repost: 4%

Sep 7: 4%
I totally shouldn’t have looked.

I was at my parents’ place to watch the latest episode of “Doctor Who” and I noticed the Time Magazine for this week, which talked about having the answers to all the questions you’ve never asked, or however they put it. And I couldn’t help looking through it.

Mostly, that wasn’t a bad thing. The names of some of the “designer dog” breeds were really funny.

But then I found the page about love and sex and whatnot.

It said that most men lose their virginity at about 17, and most women at about 16. Or was it the other way around? Either way, that means I failed life while I was still in high school!

Worse still, then I noticed that fatal statistic that read “4%”.

And it said that was the percentage of people (can’t recall off-hand if it was world-wide or just in the US) between the ages of 29 and 58 who have have never had a relationship. (Or a serious relationship, or sex. The precise details aren’t important in this context.)

That’s how little companionship I have in my miserable state. I’m part of a teeny tiny 4%.

Worse still, I’m not part of that 4% by choice.

Because you realize some–maybe most–of them are part of it by choice. There are still nuns and monks out there. They’re still required to be chaste. I’m not sure, but I think chastity is still part of being a Catholic priest, as well. Now, some of them probably would have dated before entering into their religious vocation, but not all. (I know that in the Middle Ages, a woman couldn’t become a nun if she had already lost her virginity — even if she had done so within the confines of holy matrimony — but that was the Middle Ages. It’s probably changed since then.)

But not me. I didn’t choose to be alone my whole life.

I’ve just never met anyone willing to have anything to do with me.

And I’m already starting to feel like I’m too stupid to ever succeed in graduate school, and that my lack of work experience will prevent me from ever finding a job, and my books suck too much to ever sell, and…

…basically, I’ve failed life.

What I wouldn’t give for a “reset” button on life.

.

..

…

….

…..

Also, having something that would make those mice decide to pick up and leave my house would be good, too. I won’t do anything to kill them, because they’re cute and furry and I’d hate myself if I hurt them, but humane traps are totally ineffective, and I got one of those things where you plug it in and it’s supposed to send a noise along the electric lines that makes them want to leave, but I can hear it in my kitchen right now, and of course my cat is just sleeping and ignoring it.

My life really sucks.

I’m not sure how to fix it, though. I’m trying to fix it, but all my attempts seem to end in more failure.

…

I really want that “reset” button option.

Repost: How to annoy me.

Sep 5: How to annoy me.
So I’m trying to get through my reading today (need to read 122 pages each day from now to Tuesday in order to write the paper on Wednesday and have it by Thursday) when the phone rings.

Having it ring at all was annoying, especially since I was in the middle of looking up one of the esoteric words that I didn’t know, so I was already doing two things at once, and didn’t really want to add a third.

But I answered it anyway, and the woman on the other end asks to speak to me. When I tell her that she is speaking to me, she laughs and says “It’s harder to get hold of you than it is to get my kids to behave!”

I hated her already. For a woman who will probably never even lose her virginity, much less get to have kids (at my age, I’m not even sure if I’m still fertile!), having someone flaunt the fact that they have kids is never fun. More importantly, what the heck is supposed to be hard about getting in touch with me? I almost never leave my house. Unless her kids are amazingly well behaved, then her statement — no doubt intended to win sympathy and/or empathy — is both obnoxious and blatantly untrue.

Then she goes on to her point: ”I’m a professional fundraiser for — ”

Part of me wanted to hang up the phone as soon as she said “professional fundraiser.”

You know what that means, right? Someone pays her to call people and pester them for money. The organization paying her is allegedly a charity, but if they’re really so charitable, why are they wasting the money other people donate to them on paying people like her instead of giving it to the people they claim it’s for?

It would be one thing if she had said she was a volunteer fundraiser. But she said was a professional. She’s getting paid for that. Paid with the money people are agreeing to give to that organization, thinking it’s going to help someone. Instead, it’s going to her, and others like her.

That really annoys me.

Especially since I don’t have the guts to say any of that. So when I say “no” I always preface it with the (very true) statement that I have no job. Always. I always make sure to tell them that. And yet they always come back with something along the lines of “well, you don’t have to give a large amount. I’ll just put you down for $20, you can swing that, right?” Seriously, one time they said that right after I told them (again, quite truthfully) that my bank account was overdrawn.

The worst part is, if someone only gave twenty dollars, then not one red cent of it would ever go to the “charity” they thought they were giving it to. It would all go to the massive overhead of the “organization” hiring those people to make phone calls, and then hiring other people to send out mailers, et cetera. (Okay, technically, that is not actually “massive” overhead, but it’s much larger than it ought to be, which was my point.)

It makes me sick.

Worst of all, I have a feeling that the reason there are so many of them is that there are actually some suckers out there who habitually give them money.

That’s the part that really makes me sick.

But I should get back to my reading. I still have like fifty pages to go for today.

Ugh. I can’t wait until we move out of “the history of history” and into some actual history.

Repost: History is written by the…

Original URL:  http://39years.blog.com/2014/09/02/history-is-written-by/

Sep 2: History is written by…

Twice now, when I’ve told someone that one of my classes is starting with “the history of history” they’ve shuddered because “history is written by the winners”…which in this case doesn’t even make sense. (Why would that make them shudder? Even if I had meant that it was a general survey of all of world history, which I didn’t, why would that be shudder-worthy? Spending the same amount of time doing micro-history of something terrible, like the Holocaust, that would be shudder-worthy. Spending a few weeks on a general survey of world history would be so brief on all points that nothing terrible would get more than a few minutes.)

Of course, those shudders don’t just bother me because they make no sense in this context. They bother me more because that stupid platitude needs to be retired, pronto! It simply isn’t true! It’s as pointless and backwards as “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Because history is not written by “the winners.” History is and always has been written by whoever has the time, education and inclination to do so. In the beginning, that meant people like propagandists for Egyptian Pharaohs, or self-motivated Greeks like Herodotus and Thucydides. Now, yes, Herodotus was writing as “the winner” when he was writing about the Persian Wars. But Thucydides was an Athenian, and they lost the Peloponnesian War.

The Egyptians are the more typical, though. Whether the Pharaoh won his battle or lost it, they wrote about it none the less. They kept records, for example, of the Battle of Qadesh, even though Ramses II lost it. They simply played up his personal heroism despite being out-numbered, out-schemed and over-powered by the Hittites. Because those Egyptian scribes were writing for the true driving force of most of humanity’s self-recording: they were writing for the ones in power where they lived.

That’s very different from saying that “the winners” write history. An Athenian writing about the Peloponnesian War is one thing, after all, since there was no “publication” as we know it, thus the idea of restricting the “press” was impossible, since there wasn’t any “press” yet. But it’s not as though the losers in a war or battle never recorded them. Do you think that early 19th century English textbooks ignored the fact that the American Revolution happened, or that they imported textbooks from the US if they wanted to read about it? Would the 17th century Spaniards have pretended that the Spanish Armada wasn’t sunk in 1588? Did the French in the mid-nineteenth century pretend Napoleon never existed? No, no and no. They would have stilted their descriptions to fit their own outlook (less so in the Napoleon case, because of changes in the historical process by that point and because the issue is inherently more complex) but they wouldn’t have ignored their losses nor would they only have presented them in the way that the winners would have.

History can be a tool of terrible propaganda, and often has been, and no doubt will continue to be one as long as there are people out there who want to exert power over others, because the way information is presented can be a very powerful tool in that regard. But it has nothing to do with winning and losing. It’s important that people learn the difference.

Also important is this: if a history student (especially at the graduate level!) tells you they’re reading about the history of history, they almost certainly mean the progression of changes to the historical profession since the Enlightenment. It’s almost more philosophy than history, especially once you reach the postmodernists.

So if you must shudder, at least make it in sympathy for weighty and potentially dull texts full of philosophical erudition, and not “because history is written by the winners.”

The student you’re talking to will thank you for it.

Repost: First Day Blues

I was trying to use Blog.com, but the past few days it’s been weirding out on me, and I don’t know if anyone was even able to see the posts, so I’m starting over here, complete with re-posting all my entries from there.

Aug 18: First Day Blues
Having just hit my 39th birthday and being disgusted by the fact that I am essentially still waiting for my life to begin, I am keeping this blog for a year–hopefully–in order to publicly shame myself into getting off my fat ass and accomplishing something. Hopefully, that something will include making my ass (and the rest of me) less fat, and somehow managing to hook up with a man. (Or a woman. I’m in no position to be picky.) I’m hoping to post every day, an on-line diary of sorts. But once school starts–yes, I’m still a student, even at my age, working on a Master’s Degree–who knows if I’ll still manage to have time to post daily. Even if I do, it may quickly turn into rants about whatever I’m reading for my classes, or about the frustration as I try to get my first novel e-published. (Gave up on conventional publishing years ago, but until now have never taken the plunge into self-publishing.)

Right now, I’m still annoyed by my birthday itself. My family–the only people I have any contact with when class isn’t in session, outside the employees at the museum where I volunteer on Sundays–know I’m touchy about getting a year older, but did I get to spend the day by myself as I wanted? Nope! I had to go over to my parents’ house for lunch and a couple of DVDs. (Admittedly, it was the latest two “Doctor Who” specials, in preparation for the season premiere next week, but still, it was annoying!) I had wanted to either go back by myself to see “Guardians of the Galaxy” again, or to go to the Art Museum and see what they had in the way of ancient Greek art on display, but nooooooo, I had to spend it with my parents. Not cool.

Of course, “not cool” sums up my whole life quite succinctly.

Unlike probably 99.9% of my generation, I’ve never been on a date, never held a proper job for more than a month, nothing. I’m tempted to say that I’m the biggest loser ever, except that I really don’t feel like I am. At least I’m capable of using proper grammar–though I don’t always choose to do so–and I’ve read a lot of books, though lately most of them have been non-fiction. (Yet I still try writing fiction. Another sign of my hopelessness.)

Though I should be most worried, right now, about my classes–they start a week from today, and I haven’t even checked the syllabi yet–I’ve been much more worried about my novel for the past week or so.

But before I can say anything about that, let me give an example of what my life is like, by telling you about the previous sentence. When I noticed that “syllabi” had a little red squiggly line under it to indicate that this browser doesn’t know how to properly pluralize “syllabus”, I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t actually spelled it wrong, so I went to use the touchpad to check…only to have it not respond. Well, no biggie, right? This laptop does that from time to time, and I’ve never been able to figure out quite why or make it start working again, other than by turning off the computer. So I go fetch out my USB mouse, plug it in and….it doesn’t work. It chose today to stop working. So I had to plug in the laptop–because I couldn’t even check to see if there was enough power in the battery to simply leave it on!–and go out to the nearest store where I could buy a new mouse.

This is tragically typical of my life.

Anyhow, back to what I was saying before life interrupted my train of thought, I’ve been worrying more about getting my book ready than anything else. It’s a novel telling the story of the entire Trojan War, and it’s so long that I can’t realistically publish it in a single volume. (Clocks in at about 165k words, before the Author’s Notes and the all-important Glossary of proper nouns, without which most people would probably give up on the book in frustration, ’cause sometimes a character doesn’t get mentioned for 100 pages, and then is not re-explained when they do show up again. Probably some people will still find that insanely frustrating, but…given the narrative style, there’s really nothing else I can do about it. Those people would probably be put off by the narrative style long before they got a hundred pages in, anyway.) So in going over the book, trying to decide where to break off between volumes, the rough page/word count break point was absolutely terrible, and going further forward to get to a better one was far enough along that the chapter count was something like 31 in volume one and 22 in volume two. Obviously, since I’m e-publishing, I can make volume two cost a little less, but that still felt skewed, so I added a couple of extra chapters, one which should have been there all along (the battle in the Scamander River, for those who know their Iliad) and one which just felt like it needed to be there even though there wasn’t any real basis for the chapter in the myth. I think the new chapters turned out pretty well–especially the latter one–but I want to let them sit a while before I try editing them. Admittedly, I’m only trying to get volume one out the door right away, but even so!

I want to get the book e-published as soon as possible, though, so I can finally attempt to have some modicum of an income, though who knows if anyone will buy it. I had been preparing to e-publish a novella first–which I had kind of written as a backstory/in-betweener–of two of the chapters for this lengthy Trojan War opus, but…as I was going over it and going over it and going over it…I decided that in today’s world, it might be just a little bit squikky to publish a romance between a 25 year old man and a 15 year old boy. (Hmm…I’ve never tried to write ‘squikky’ before. I’ve been using it a lot lately, conversationally, but…maybe it should be ‘squicky’? That looks even worse, somehow…) I’m not usually the type of girl who goes in for male/male romance, but I needed to get their story confirmed to myself before I went too much further in working with their relationship. (I know it’s wrong for a woman only a year away from 40 to call herself a ‘girl’…but I still don’t feel like I’ve grown up yet. Maybe that sounds strange…) I know there’s a big audience for that kind of romance–especially among the fujoshi crowd, in anime terms–but I suspect usually the age gap isn’t so big, or at least the younger one isn’t quite so young. Admittedly, the story stops when they hit the kissing stage, but even so, it felt like “torch and pitchfork” time if I tried to publish, so I wasted about a week trying to get that ready for noting.

Okay, that’s probably enough dribbling out complaints for now. I’ll try and have something new to bitch about tomorrow.