davidgillon: Dina Meyer as Oracle, sitting a manual chair in front of a clock face (Wheelchair)

My submission to Disabled People Destroy Fantasy was meant to go in at the weekend, but I was sidetracked due to this plagiarism thing. Anyway, it's gone in tonight, because something's come up and I may need to dash north, and I noticed something when I was going through the process that isn't obvious from their webpage for it.

Submissions are open until the 28th, but that's 5AM London Time on the 28th, not end of day, or even end of the US working day.

If you're planning a last minute submission, that last minute is bearing down on you 19 hours earlier than you might potentially expect.

*rolls eyes*

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

So I'd no sooner gotten over Disabled People Destroy SF rejecting my fiction submission, than I got a rejection for my non-fiction submission - "didn't work for me". I suspect it may have been too confrontational for their liking. Turns out two rejections in relatively quick succession seems to double up on the effects. I was expecting the self-doubt and the depression, but the anger was new. Not quite sure how to deal with these other than to keep trying and seeing if I can build up a tolerance.

Damn, I really wanted to crack that market. Well, I want to crack any market, but that one particularly mattered to me.

The depression meant I was late getting back to my sister with my input for the next meeting re Dad's care funding, which meant she ran into various issues, and ended up with the two of us on the phone to each other at half past midnight last night, which is not an ideal time for discussing the technical minutiae of the CHC Decision Support Tool (though I suspect they'll be fairly freaked just by the fact we've looked it up and run through it ourselves). It turns out there is actually something more depressing than running through a benefit assessment form for yourself - running through it for a family member who can no longer handle it themselves.

One unexpected benefit of all of this was that when I went to open up the Word file for the DST, expecting to have to use Word Online, my desktop said "Hang on while I install Office" (or words to that effect). I'd worked out a couple of weeks ago that the desktop and laptop somehow had two different Microsoft accounts with the same email address, and when MS asked which one I was trying to use managed to get the desktop logged onto the laptop account, and that seems to have made the difference the next time I tried to open an Office file. I thought I was going to have to buy an additional license for the desktop to cover it (Word Online is too slow for anything but a backup), but clearly my Office subscription either covered the desktop under the main license or included a spare license - score!

When I should have been looking at the DST I was actually playing Ark. Which turns out to be very good as a distraction, but not so good for my wrists, which are stinging through overuse. I've had this before with other games, if I cut down on the amount I've been playing then they should settle down relatively quickly (but note the 'if'). I've also taken measures to cut down what I'm doing within the game by (quite literally) pitching two thirds of my dodos over the compound wall. OTOH I've now tamed two triceratops (Tyrone and Teri), which make good pack mules. Fortunately you can leave those tied to a hitching rail near a feeding trough and ignore them until you need them. I've also tamed six parasaurolophus (-opholi? Para, Ventura, Mara, Alpha and Omega and Lara) for riding. I only intended taming a couple of parasaurs, but Mara and Lara both spawned on my doorstep and it was easier to tame them than do anything else, while Alpha and Omega turned up as Mara and Ventura's egg.  What started out as a separate barn for the dodos (their squawking was driving me up the wall) has now become a dodo barn/general hatchery. Alpha and Omega worked fine (incidentally they have a particularly evil-looking colour scheme - black scales with orange highlights on their spinal ridges), but Tyrone and Teri's egg Treo dropped dead on me shortly after hatching. I'm now working my way through my stored fertile dodo eggs, but any hatchlings without interesting colour mutations get pitched over the wall - essentially I've turned into a breeder of overgrown budgies.


Bah!

Mar. 6th, 2018 12:48 pm
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
An email arrived last night just as I was thinking of going to bed. I made the mistake of checking it there and then - it was a rejection from Disabled People Destroy SF for The Art of Breathing. Damn, that was a market I really wanted to succeed in. They still have my essay, but it's the story I'm invested in. The only comment was that it had "some interesting ideas".

So I didn't get to sleep when I wanted, but I did do some useful thinking. Yoon's comments have set me to thinking that it's difficult to get a mystery to work in 6,000 words, particularly one that needs a significant amount of character background, and that really needs additional suspects (the mystery as it stands is "why did my ventilator fail", with the denoument as "Oh, actually that was an attempt to kill me, whoa!", whodunnit is obvious from that point). So the answer is probably to set it on the back burner, and let some additional sub-plots and characters ferment, then address it at longer length. One option is to pull it back to being near contemporary, rather than an undefined amount of time in the future, effectively shifting it into detective/technothriller rather than SF.

In other news, with the snow gone I managed to get out for the first time in a week and get some shopping done. Asda's sliced bread aisle appeared to have been stripped by locusts, though their in-house bakery was fully stocked. It looks like deliveries hadn't been getting through, which is a bit surprising when it's 2 minutes off the M2 and on a main road.

 

Cut for (Virtual) Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw )

 

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

... some mistake surely!

But no, the non-fiction "Why Helva is Bad for SF" followed the fictional "The Art of Breathing" off to "Disabled People Destroy SF" with a whole half a day of the submission window still in play.

Right. I may give myself tomorrow off, but that means I can now have a serious look at replacing the keyboard on the laptop, or getting it replaced by one of the local repair places if it turns out to be beyond me. Actually having Word on a computer I'm not fighting to type into would make writing substantially easier. I also need to look ar getting Word installed on the desktop. Word Online is okay for emergency stuff, but it's not a solution I'd use long term, so I'm willing to pay for the extra Word license. The only problem is that I appear to have two separate Microsoft accounts, and getting the right one is confusing.

davidgillon: Text: I really don't think you should put your hand inside the manticore, you don't know where it's been. (Don't put your hand inside the manticore)

Well, I finally submitted "The Art of Breathing" to Disabled People Destroy SF Monday evening. It was pretty much ready to go on Sunday, but computer issues, and a whole lot of submission anxiety, complicated the whole issue. I'm now noodling about with a non-fiction piece entitled "Why Helva is Bad for SF", and have until tomorrow to finish it if I want to submit if to the same destination. It's easy enough to show "The Ship Who Sang" is just plain bad about disability, despite being the book SF fans are likeliest to nominate as good about disability, but showing it's bad for the genre is a bit more difficult, and may require making the reader actually think.

It's snowing outside, and while I renamed 'the Beast from the East" as "the Pest headed West" based on yesterday's lack of performance, today actually is more convincing, with about 4" of snow on the ground. That's by far the most we've had this winter, but still falls short of its headline billing in my opinion. Of course it's still snowing, and has been almost constantly for about 16 hours, so there's time yet.

In Ark news, I pulled on my big girl panties (female character) and headed out for some exploration. My nervous foray onto the plateau at the top of the hill revealed it's actually Weathertop (yes, this is the official in-game name) and one of the few really safe areas. Looking north from the edge of Weathertop through my spyglass, I spotted a couple of Chalicotheriums, which very much remind me of the mecheiti in Cherryh's Foreigner books, though the most straightforward literary reference would be the actual chalicos used as riding beasts in Julian May's "Saga of the Exiles". I suspect I'll use Weathertop as a forward base from which to head north into the redwood forests, though I really want to tame a chalico so I can do that mounted. The dodos continue to be a nuisance and I'm massively expanding the pens so I can actually move around without being constantly blocked by dodos.

Speaking of Cherry's Foreigner books, I finished Deliverer last night. The blurb is oddly wrong, describing 8yo Cajeiri as "playing pranks and causing mischief". It's right that Cajeiri is bored, but what he is doing is far from playing pranks. He actually has a well-reasoned plan (for an 8yo who doesn't understand the security risks) for maximising his freedom and is pursuing it subtly. The closest he comes to a 'prank' is rudely yelling a question, and he understands exactly why it was wrong. The blurb is also completely wrong in categorising the threat to him as because he's spent two years living among humans. The threat is solely related to the fact he is Ilisidi's heir, the heir to Malguri, the Eastern fortress where the series first kicked into gear a decade or more ago. There are clearly threads left unexplained in the resolution, the Ship-Aijiin have got a huge explanation coming as to what they've been up to, with 'instrument packages' dropped all over the continent. but I think I'm actually going to go back and restart the series from Foreigner. I'd need to revisit the books to write the review I want to, and I know I missed some of the fundamental stuff feeding into the Destroyer/Pretender/Deliverer sequence, so rather than trying to find book 10, I'll restart from 1 and try to comment as I go.

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

... was that I got to watch Trumpcare: The Return of the Undead Shambling Horror being defeated live on twitter through the comments of the disabled Americans with most to lose.

The message to take away from this: 45, and 49 Republican Senators thought 15m more Americans without healthcare cover was an improvement.

And then the Disabled People Destroy SF kickstarter funded. Sweet!
 

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davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
David Gillon

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