Just a jumble of random thoughts today as I try to catch back up with posting…
Bernie gracefully ended his campaign and is supporting Clinton… and so am I. If you supported Bernie and believed in his causes, you will support her. Anyone who switches to supporting Trump wasn’t a true Sanders believer in the first place and didn’t belong, you can go align yourself with bigotry and hatred now as you should have from the start. Jill Stein supporters, I get you, I do, but Trump is a danger to this country and Clinton is not, even if you don’t agree with all of her policy choices in the past and her adherence to right of center economic policies. She’s not the horrible monster the right wing has been painting her to be since 1992, and which some Sanders supporters have grabbed onto. Perfect? No… but who is? Sanders is more pro-gun than I would like, Stein is a closet anti-vaxxer and supporter of “holistic” medicine (ie, snake oil that parts people from their money with few actual results and lots of negative complications), and that Libertarian guy – what’s his name again? – is anti-government and would undercut the real important things government does in providing safety nets for millions of Americans.
..A lot of what I see directed at Hillary is the same vacuous bullshit that’s been directed at women for a century now, going back to at least the Suffragette movement. I saw some posters about suffragettes from back in the day, and the use all the same spurious, ridiculous arguments to brand them as evil as people use today to target women in powerful positions or feminism. I would laugh about it if it wasn’t so sad and such a case of history repeating itself. I’ve added an example on the page. It’s the same argument I see on Reddit forums about feminism really being about hating men, and it’s as bullshit now as it was then.
The hatred for Hillary in particular began shortly after Bill Clinton took office. It seemed immediately everyone had an opinion about a first lady who didn’t simply dress nicely and host parties. They took offense that she might be assisting with important legislation, like the attempt that was made at universal healthcare. It only got worse as their time in the White House went on, bolstered by an article by a political commentator who went off on her as a horrible, terrible person who lies to achieve what she had. Never mind the lies he mentioned turned out to be not lies at all, and every so-called scandal they faced evaporated. But the falsehoods stuck, because everyone wanted to believe she was… well a little snobby I guess. She wanted to be more than a first lady, and they resented that. Twenty years later, same likes are still hovering around, even though everyone who works with her or meets her says she’s honest, forthright and driven. I’ll choose to believe the later now, thanks.
…I took a day off from writing, finally. 28 days straight, and I finally took a break, unclogged a tub drain, did laundry, cleaned. I did some brainstorming of ideas, though, to keep things fresh and moving once I returned to writing (the very next day of course). The comic fantasy novel is over 47,000 words now, and the Mira Sinclair (formerly Mercy Sinclair) novel is 3/4ths of the way through a last major re-write before I start submitting it again and try to find an agent. That work has also grown by almost 5,000 words, so I added that to my totals for the year. I’ve written roughly 234,000 words of new fiction in 2016, and should easily meet and exceed my goal of 350,000 words.
…I started using The Submissions Grinder for keeping track of the short stories I’ve submitted to various publications. I was using a Spreadsheet, which was fine for its purposes, but the Grinder helps me find lots of markets I was missing from my list and gives all the pertinent details that are hard to pin down sometimes (like price they pay per word). It’ll save me some time and work, and as much as I like making spreadsheets sometimes there’s no reason to duplicate the efforts of others.
… I like when my characters surprise me. It turned out, one of my characters was gay, and I didn’t even realize it for a long time. Amazing how certain things that weren’t quite clicking suddenly come into view and make perfect sense. Now the question is can I write it well enough and with the right sensitivity such a revelation will require of the people involved.
… Pokemon Go is showing up on every single site and feed I access. Everyone is talking about it, people at work are playing it in the halls, and I’m basically just darn shocked by the rapid rise of the whole thing. But at least it’s distracted us from a disastrous dumpster fire of a presidential campaign, so its got that going for it. And people are getting out and WALKING, which is a great thing to get gamers to do.
Seabiscuit out…
