Category Archives: Blog

Your general-purpose blogging, consisting of me nattering on about whatever strikes my fancy.

NaNo, NaNo!

04 Monday Nov 2013

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My son talked me into NaNoWriMo, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is this psychopathic idea of writing a (short–50k) novel in one month. Max Draconum (my current effort) is lagging, so maybe this will pep me up.

Sorry not to have dragged out and re-written more Damascus; I need to go into Dark Crimson Corners (the trilogy) and chop the protagonist’s autobiography out first. Also, my beta-reader has almost convinced me to re-write Max‘s ending. I’m putting it all in the dryer while I pound out Eureka this month.

I’ll be posting the chapters here–I’m averaging one short one a day so far, but there will be three at once to start with–and if I actually finish it, will probably wrap it up in my epub software and stick it up on Amazon just for funsies.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I also have a bit of blogging catchup, so stay tuned!

Unmoved

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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I’m caught at work with nothing to do. Well, comparatively. I could be researching new groups; I could be working on my quilt block; I could even slip back to my office where I can do my tiny data-crunch of the people who visited the center in September. But I can’t concentrate on the first two and the third is awkward: I’m sort of invisibly babysitting a recovery group from the receptionist’s area.

I’m not part of the group officially for two reasons. For the first, it’s 90 minutes long, and that’s too long, even with coloring. (A perk of being a peer specialist is that people understand my need to focus on doing something like abstract artwork during meetings to hold down the wiggles and help me pay attention.) For the second, I’m not the official facilitator, but being Frau Direktor, it can sometimes be funky with group dynamics, and this group is new and a little wobbly.

But I’m here because earlier it looked like a peer would be present who’s been having a hard time recently. Last week, she threw a tantrum during a group–and that one was being run by an honest-to-john psychiatrist–and stormed out. The facilitator made it clear that it needed to be Handled somehow, if at all possible. So when I popped my head into the program to see how it was running and saw her here today mumbling to herself . . . uh-oh. So basically I stayed behind this afternoon in the role of possible official bouncer–but she’s not here after all. Just as well.

You may be thinking that it’s politically incorrect of us to have standards of behavior–after all, we’re all mad here–but I assure you, it’s necessary: People acting out can be frightening and triggering to other peers as well. Getting screamed at was one of the things they left off my job description during the hire (possibly because it was also done by the guy hiring me, who is thankfully no longer with the firm) but it is my job. As is calling security. Sigh. But not today. Today I try not to eavesdrop and sit here blogging to you. (Not a total loss. I’m able to touch base with building maintenance about the rock somebody threw through our window this morning. Sigh again.)

Meanwhile, back at my life: We still haven’t moved–but November 1 is now the ticket. It’s reached a level of unreality by now–the stress coating my soul has coagulated like the cheesy mold that coats a long-forgotten cup of coffee. I know on a purely intellectual level that it will be violently dug into by the cleaning brush of packing in two weeks, because by then I’ll be attending two 40-hour weeks of intensive training. In other words, I’ll be exhausted and cranky. I still haven’t finished the prop paintings I’m doing. Moving then would be a cruel joke, but we know the universe loves to laugh.

I’ve decided to participate in the zaniness of NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, which will force some sort of writing out of my head. I’ll link some bits here. And I haven’t forgotten about Damascus! m’ not dead yet! I’m getting better! I feel happy!

That Kind of Face

01 Sunday Sep 2013

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I have that kind of face. The one where people love to startle or appall me because my eyes get huge. I am making capital of it currently for a project. (Well, not literal clinky capital. It’s a freebie.) I have to do three large paintings for a play about bullying; the paintings are supposed to be by a talented eighth-grader, so I’m on my A-game, or feeling that I have to be, being insecure and all. But the first one is of his favorite teacher, and I thought, “Hey, swell! I can do a portrait of my daughter and maybe get some actual life practice in!” But no.

The teacher is explicitly described as having that kind of face. He has apparently not only caught her with her eyes bugging out, but in the middle of being about to laugh. The princess’ eyes do not bug, so it’s self-portrait time. She took an uproarious and unflattering photo of me, and I’ve sketched it in. God, but I have a fat head.

I used to think I was really unattractive because most photos of me do this. It’s hard to have strong self-esteem when you apparently look like your own caricature. Then when I was in my forties I woke up and realized that I was quite pretty; in fact my face matches the Golden Mean triangle thingy (which I am not a fine enough person to find and link for you) pretty well: Math says I’m lovely, so it must be so.

But that’s only when my face is behaving and holding still for a special event, instead of doing its usual squirmy bit. If I am writing fiction (or thinking about doing it) it twitches and wriggles and grimaces as if there were something more wrong with me than there really is. So I generally look like “benignly goofy fat lady who might give you spare change.” (I’m assuming, because beggars seem surprised and disappointed when I sail on past without remunerating them.)

But I don’t get any rewards for being pretty per se, no more than having passed it on to a pretty daughter. No, what people care about is that I make The Face in all of its myriad shades of meaning. And they love it. They burst out grinning and practically jiggle up and down. They’re not laughing at me (much), but just plain old enjoying creation: I have a gift.

I’d rather have emotional privacy; be able to tell a lie if I had to. To be thought of as that stately, attractive beauty who is aging so well. But I’m betting that the world would run smoother if we all just shut up and appreciated what our friends do about us, without wishing for somebody else’s imagined something-or-other.

It has taken me fifty years to realize that the very best thing about my face is that I am looking out of it, and as I do so with some transparency and it’s well-received, I should take that as a fine compliment indeed.

Although perhaps not, as the complimented face is one of the scrunchier squintier ones. Sigh.

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!

And it’s only Tuesday . . .

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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I’m having a bad week. And it’s only Tuesday.

Yesterday I went to my studio and found that my portfolio was missing. Plain old gone, and I have no idea where several other pieces of art went either. (They’d been held separate, having been in shows.) Nobody as much as mentioned the $90 check I’m owed for a piece that sold (for a hundred bucks less than my asking price because I caved)–God knows where that is in their machinery over there. All the people who would know what’s going on are on vacation this week.

On my way home, I thought of stopping by the farmer’s market, which has historically been kind enough to not only take food stamps, but to double their value in the little cards or plastic coins they give to pay the vendors. Thought of grabbing a bunch of basil for this fried rice dish my friend had told me about. And whatever else looked good. Farmer’s markets are great for the “What IS that? Hmm, let’s find out” enlargement of the palate.  Although I found having to use food stamps humiliating even before the last election year told me what a waste of oxygen I was, it was worth it to even see what these heirloom tomato things looked like.

So I went up to the place where they take your food stamps and do the conversion thingy, and was flabbergasted. No doubling. (Oh well, whatever.) But no face value. Instead, they were halving. E.g., if I gave them $20 off my Card o’ Shame–they would give me $10 in tokens. There are so many things wrong with this that it would take a really long blog which would end in my fingers hitting random keys to indicate random rage-filled sputtering. What immediately struck me is that this is the sort of food stamp fraud people have been pompous about: I’d be selling food stamps: getting a value from my stamps–and somebody else would be turning a profit: What the sheep were they doing with the extra money?

I was a Nice Lady, and didn’t tear off the guy’s head, move aside his laminated tag saying that he was the SNAP/EBT person, and piss down his neck. I just asked him twice over to make sure that was what it did and went away before I cried from being too tired and having skipped lunch and the injustice of it all.

I went home and wrote not-tantrumy email to the city employee listed on the website, and she called me within five minutes and was horrified and disbelieving. She promised to look into this, and I am interested in what she will find. I also posted this on my Facebook page, which alerted the brimstone-breathing professional lobbyist friend, who really doth hunger and thirst after righteousness. Bwah ha, crooked market people!

And then I found out that for the second time I had been passed over to take a professional training class which I need to retain my employment. (They won’t actually sack me, thank God. It wasn’t my fault–there are only 30-some spaces and over 100 people apply. And it means I won’t have to leave my house every August Wednesday at 6 a.m. to go to Woostah. But still.)

So I curled up and cried so piteously that my daughter gave me her Klondike bar.

Today, I woke up feeling better, and went to work, where I had the usual Tuesday case of too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time. No badness there. I stopped off at the Indian store on the way home, to grab rice and incense . . .

. . . and somehow . . .

. . . lost my wallet.

Fortuitously, my bank was on the next corner and shut down my card immediately, leaving me a week of replacing the other stuff at a price of some $50. Which isn’t the nightmare burden it once would have been, but will of course also take a great deal of time.

Needless to say, I’m depressed. I am superstitious enough to wonder if my run of bad luck will continue, which scares me. My life is filled with fragile pets and people and computers.

I lost my wallet this winter, and to my joy and amazement, the guy who found it immediately tracked me down and handed it over. No such luck so far. The finder (enriched by about $4) knows that I’m poor and disabled, and knows where I live and has my business card. But nada. The likelihood here seems that it’s your average creep. I am bummed beyond crying.

Instead, I posted the next-to-last chapter of Damascus, and decided to whinge to you here. Let’s just cross our fingers about tomorrow. My daughter is going out and getting me a wallet with a chain. Maybe it will be pink. Or leather or something. Ya never know.

Pain

04 Thursday Jul 2013

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Five weeks ago I gave myself a brutal sprained ankle, with the upshot that I’m not going to be going to the fireworks tonight–there’s still some residual inflammation, and the two miles would do me in. Hell, I’d be done in when I got there, and I don’t know if that beautiful rumble in my chest would pump out enough serotonin to compensate for the weedy little voice inside whining, “When do I get to sit do-o-own?” We live close enough to the action that we’ll be able to hear them–not loudly enough–but not see them at all. Which makes it worse.

(Hmm, what if I take one of my crutches . . .? What if I just open up a big #10 can of get-over-it?)

I also have arthritis in my knees, and I seem to recall this keeping me home last year. This is unfair, seeing as I got my magic cortisone shots this week, and all that hurts are these two or three acid-dipped rubber bands running up the inside of my lower calf. I’d love to go; to take my son, who is new to the Big City and Real Fireworks (set off by professionals who do not get their heads blown off). But there it is: I’m a wussy. There’s only so much soldiering through I can do.

The thing about this is that I’m a pain champion. Screw that tired labor/childbirth stuff (which I escaped via cesarean, therefore sullying my resume)–I get repeated kidney stones! (Women swear they’re worse, and I’ve lost count–probably 30ish, with two serious kidney infections to boot.) And I once had a bowel obstruction. I wanted to go to my emergency room, so at 5 am (thinking I just had a kidney stone, because that was how acute the pain was) I walked half a mile to the subway, changed trains, endured the longest 5 minute cab ride of my life, and showed up able to get the concepts “kidney stone” and “puking NOW” across. I get migraines! Champion, I tell you!

I suppose it’s the particular sort of pain–you can grit your teeth against a constant agony. Work on your breathing. Advice: don’t overdo this. I once had a stone obstruct (no good very bad life threatening) and the blob of clay I saw sent me home accusing me of “drug-seeking.” (N.B.: I wanted Toradol, which does nothing interesting to you at all.) I just wasn’t showing enough pain. In vain did I tell her that I had learned the hard way that crying doesn’t give the nice people in the E.R. the information they need. Letter in her file. Heh.

But when every step sends a needle of fire up my leg I whimper like the sissy little girl I really am. And it’s almost healed now, too. You should have seen me a couple of weeks ago, with the kids waiting on me and trying not to glare at the men who didn’t give me their seats on the train. (Five times out of six, seat-givers are women.)

I am, of course, no stranger to psychic pain, and I’ve had a boatload of that too. Sometimes I soldier, sometimes I whimper. Sometimes I try to figure out if watching all that CSI means I might not get caught, bwah ha.

But fireworks have always made it better. I was in the hospital in Indianapolis once (hyperemesis with daughter, sigh) and they had a huge window overlooking the river where they were setting them off. Best fireworks seat ever; mood a trifle dampened by it being in a cancer surgical ward; been puking for four days straight–all day–but . . . fireworks, man!

How much can it possibly hurt?

Linguistic Limbo

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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Plinky prompt: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

This is a toughie. I’m not one for censorship. The obvious problem is that words are like weeds: Pull one up, and two or three others spawn in its place. Can’t think of a replacement offhand? Hell, borrow some from other languages. It’s what we do here in English.

Moreover, even if you yank both signifier and sign–you still have the signified sitting there, with all its zits, grinning like Alfred E. Neuman. And sometimes that’s the real problem you have with a word–deep down inside, you want to ban the thing itself.

The problem with the words we use, love, hate, fear, and fumble for at the tips of our tongues is that they describe life. “Cancer”? People will still be sick. “Fat”? You’ll still take up a little more than your allotted seat on public transportation. “Illegal”? “Law” itself? Committees will form to make new ones by the time you get back from the john. Fundamentalist? There will always be new bombers and the Westboro Baptist Church.

If we get rid of all the words using “z” to form a plural, we still have the problematic social fear of young urban black and Latino people. “Awesome?” Banal things will still inspire awe and delight in people you look down upon. “Fuck?” Oh please, madam and sir. It’s possibly the most flexible word in the language; I propose we take it off the no-no list out of respect for its versatility: adjective, expletive, noun, verb–how awesome is that?

That said, I will admit to some peeves, and they involve the words which mean you have no idea of what you’re talking about; the ones that tell people you don’t read very much or very well. “Irregardless” always makes me embarrassed for its user. But the all time winner is “nucular.”

Another wince when falling from a friend’s mouth; I try to sit on the English degree, but it’s one of the ones that has “NUCLEAR!” popping out automatically before I can stop it. However, the people I hear use it most are responsible for the ultimate usage of the thing itself–politicians. And that scares the fuck out of me. Is it just me?

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Because I don’t want to be fired . . .

22 Saturday Jun 2013

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. . .  I just redacted my last post. It talked about stuff at work, and in a sort of recursive fashion talked about how they have a somewhat slavering belief in Being Very Careful About Email. Seeing as this is a blog, and I’m sure the dead-curious can find out who I am, I figured better safe than sorry. Damn it.

I was fairly annoyed when I wrote the post, and now having to self-censor makes me even more annoyed. However, I am sure my lack of skill at office politics will bite me in the ass sooner rather than later; I just hope like hell the kids have jobs by then. But then I can publish without being damned, bwah ha.

It’s a toughie–for so many of us, work is such a big part of our lives. How do you handle this, folks? I change names and small facts and try to be as anonymizing as possible. But I’m pretty sure that anything other than a glazed-eyed, slogan-spouting chirp will be seen as some sort of tragic heresy.

The slogan I’m thinking of is “Recovery is Real,” and it refers to the fact that people with mental illness can and do recover, using a combination of therapy, medication, recovery planning, and alternative therapies. It’s a powerful and exciting thing–I’m living proof of it–but sometimes . . .

. . . like any new idea, it can be kind of culty, and in a sense, we’re supposed to act like ministers for a religion that frowns on any critique of the church because it might be snapped up by the Evil Opposition. I’m not sure of who the E.O. are, as the concept of recovery is spreading like the good news it is.

But I’m an INTJ working with ESFPs (if that makes sense to you) and I totally fail at being circumlocutory. My emails have been harshed on because I keep confessing the emperor to be naked in matters great and small. It would help if the only professional training available didn’t only meet once a year with 30 slots; I’m pulling a lot of this out of my butt as I go along, and because for five months they just dumped me alone at my center, I haven’t even had the benefit of more experienced people in the field until just recently.

But in general, I do love the job, and am going to be telling myself so all week as I pull together a proposal for my first conference (woot!). God alone knows how *that* will be critiqued.

Le sigh.

The Private and the Personal

15 Saturday Jun 2013

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About two weeks ago I found a mostly blank book which had a few entries in it from when I was homeless, and I published the first as “Waiting for a Bed,” which talks about my first evening as an individual homeless person with no set shelter residence. (Otherwise known as a bag lady.) I was going to run the other two entries, written from the family shelter my daughter and I moved into shortly afterward, but much of it is riddled with people’s names, and I think that changing them defeats the purpose and negates the entries, as one entry is concerned with the difficulty of learning the names of 15 other moms and their kids. It took a while–I wasn’t good at it.

It wasn’t entirely my fault; it was a historically Latina shelter (Casa Nueva Vida), and my Spanish is rudimentary at best. Two of the women’s names differed by an “s” which wasn’t pronounced in the ambient dialect, so they were called “La Gorda” and “La Flaca,” or “the fat one” and “the skinny one.” What really thrilled me was that these terms were meant to be descriptive, not pejorative–bodies were bodies, and the less Americanized my sisters there were, the less they cared about how much they weighed.

I love Casa; they’re in a corner of the city that’s a minor pain in the ass to get to, or I’d visit more often. They are kind, warm, and caring people who made our seven month stay as comfortable as it might be, given that I shared a single bedroom with my 18-year-old daughter, who spent the last semester of her senior year in deep humiliation and terror that people would find out where she lived. Whereas I became at least a bit politicized there, and ended up serving on the board of Homes for Families, she just wants to push the whole horror out of her mind. (It didn’t help that I needed to go back to the hospital twice for short visits while they tweaked my medication.)

There are many things one can say, and many have said, about the particular horrors of having no room of one’s own–or any room at all. But the very worst part for a homeless introvert was the lack of privacy. Not just the annoyance of having my teenager as a roommate, but the larger sense of privacy rent away by the poverty system.

Everywhere you go, from housing worker to food stamps to Medicaid to this worker to that worker, you carry a folder. It becomes more and more battered with time and being carried about in shopping bags, bulging purses, and the undercarriage of strollers. Inside of it is your life: where you were born and to whom, who you married and when you divorced, the proof of custody of your children, disability attestation from your doctor, your Social Security card, criminal record (though everybody runs it themselves), probate records of name changes, titles of automobiles, bank records, income letters, tax forms, immigration history, the correspondence from all the poverty agencies–and the same set for each child. (If you are ever in this position, here’s a tip: Watch what they do with your original documents. Make sure you get them back after the inevitable photocopies. Not that they mean to steal them, but they don’t have time to care.)

No privacy. Anything not stripped away by opening your folder is shredded away by the inevitable questions: How did you lose your housing? Do you have anybody else to stay with? Where did you stay last night? What’s wrong with you anyway, you lazy loser bitch? 

And they mangle your name. (At least if it’s mine.) Sometimes it’s all we have left, that name-meaning-us, as opposed to the word which appears all through that folder, being misspelled, mispronounced, and sometimes misassigned. The private made public, the personal impersonal.

So I can’t take away the names of my sisters from Casa; it took me too long to earn them.

Over and Over Again

14 Friday Jun 2013

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As my 300K word epic trilogy Dark Crimson Corners will never be published as such, I’ve started taking it apart for quilting. I’m serializing the biography of serial killer Damascus to run here. (Toria and Tristram had been tossed in as a prologue; I’m surprised that I didn’t find a way to work in my Bad High School Poetry.) This means going through the bio and adding and fixing a gazillion tiny things.

I caught at least one of my aphasic neologisms. (One of my mood stabilizers adds a tendency toward mild aphasia to my already-numerous middle-aged moments and poor ADHD memory.) Sometimes when I can’t think of the word I just (put stuff that means what I want into parentheses) and keep on writing. Or else out pops something not-quite-right, like the word, “contentness.” (Thank heaven for redlining; the problem with self-editing is always that you know what you meant!)

It was a toss-up between “contentEDness” and “contentment,” and I was amused and intrigued to see that the closer one, which I’d clearly been trying for, conveyed the right nuance of not-as-permanent-a-state as “contentment.” How interesting that my brain got it partly right after all.

Anyway, I’m now going over this piece of writing for at least the twentieth time, what with all the past hopeful editing and re-versioning back when I thought my white elephant was comprehensible, let alone saleable. I need to make sure there is just enough info about my aliens to not confuse the hell out of new readers, which means a lot of tucking in and darning together (the quilting metaphor really seems to be the best) — and, oh my dear sweet sheep-all, I’m tired of it.

I really like this piece of writing, and I have an occasional spasm of willingness, even eagerness, to work with it, but most of it is being done page by page in the sort of unhappiness one has when one is Working and just wants to go home.

Meanwhile, my son spent an hour this afternoon playing and re-playing the same four or five bars of music on his flute. He was trying to get four similar-but-not-mechanically-exact tracks of this tune (a bit of video game music) in order to remix it. So he played it over and over again, and was very polite the time my cake-consuming fork made an itty-bitty clink against the plate. Over and over and over. Just like me and Damascus.

Sometimes making art sucks. The disturbing part of it is, you can work your butt off–and it turns out to not be much good anyway. I’ll leave you with that cheerful thought, and go back to forcing out another page of at-least-a-little-better. Le sigh.