The sentimental value of string…

On my right wrist is a cheap string bracelet. You might know it as a friendship bracelet, a collection of a few lengths of embroidery thread wound around another length of thread. It’s a multicolored string, and nothing more.

I’ve had it on my wrist for almost three years now. I still recall the day in July when I came out of the subway stairwell at Duomo, and I was approached by an African trinket vendor. Here in Milan, you get used to seeing these guys wherever there are a lot of tourists. They speak something like nine languages, and they are as charming as they can be while they try to convince you to buy something from them.

This vendor in particular stunned me with his wide smile, and before I could think he’d already tied the bracelet on and moved to my hubby to haggle the price. In the meantime, he also tied a string around hubby’s wrist. I’m telling you, pickpockets aren’t this bold.

You Can’t Say That on the Internet!

These days, it feels to me like freedom of speech is just a figure of speech. Oh sure, you can still point to a law of the books about your freedom, but if you offer an unpopular opinion online, you will quickly learn how little freedom you have.

Let’s say you work at an insurance company, and after working on a rough case where the rules hamstrung you, you complained, “Insurance sucks! We need better regulations to stop this shit!” And then a week later, you get fired. You didn’t compromise company secrets, or engage in corporate espionage by revealing private policies. You just expressed an opinion unpopular with your boss, so now you’re fired.

Let’s use a journal entry as another example. Being an online journal, everyone is free to check it, but if your employer checks it and finds an opinion about them that they don’t like, they can fire you. Period. You have no expectation of privacy from an employer, and anything you say can and will be used against you. So even in your off time, you’re not really a free person. You are the private property of the company you work for, and any opinion you hold in your off time is also open to their judgments.

This is a bad idea.

Psyche!

No, that wasn’t a real horoscope. This was a social experiment only. =^P

(You’d get this joke if you were on Twitter.)

Making me Dark and Horny

After much time searching for ginger beer, I was able to find Old Jamaica in a local Asian food market not far from our place that just opened. So, finally having the ginger beer connection I needed, I was just about ready to make a dark and stormy.

Of course you can see the appeal for me, right? A dark fiction writer whose favorite drink is dark and stormies? It would be perfect! ^_^

Zombie Uprising: Giving Horror’s Favorite Monster a Face

Guest blog by Michele Lee

My five year old daughter knows what zombies are. Ask her to be a zombie and she tilts her head to the side, rolls her eyes up and moans, walking at you with her mouth open. Her first introduction to zombies was either the hilarious Shaun of the Dead, or the classic episode of The Powerpuff Girls featuring Abracadaver, a zombie magician.

My first exposure to zombies was in my early teens, when my cousin lived with us for a summer and rented Night of the Living Dead 3. I remember it less as a zombie movie and more for the bloody hot lead who fights her zombie nature with a little self mutilation that serves only to make her look hotter. I still salivate today when I see a hot redhead in torn fishnets. There was a love story in the movie too, which I learned later wasn’t as common.

Zombies are hard to love once they go feral.

Hubby training…

Often, women see me and hubby in public, and they notice how he’s happy to carry my purse. They see how he is always complimenting me or trying to make me smile. So they come to me and say, “My gosh, Zoe, how did you get so lucky to find such a great husband?”

But the real secret is, hubby didn’t start off great. He was good, but to make him great, I had to resort to torture.

Yes, I know, it’s an evil word and an even more evil deed. But you know what? Used in the right amounts, it can work wonders on men. Of course, torture tends to make men bitter and hateful too. So, how to counteract this?

A perspective check…

Please read aloud:

I am one person out of six and a half billion who all live on a planet spinning in a constellation twirling on the arm of a galaxy, which is hurtling away from 100 billion other galaxies in a cosmos expanding at the speed of light. Despite the cosmic odds against my existence, I am here, and I do not really know why. I do the best I can to guess, and maybe sometimes some of my guesses will hurt or help other people. At the end of my life, I can only hope that the number of people who liked me will outnumber the people who despised me.

(You can stop reading aloud now.)

You will often run into people who think they have all the answers to life, the universe and everything. What they’ve really got are guesses that sound logical to them. Even if you are an open minded person who is willing to explore the “big picture,” the reality is that the borders of that picture are expanding all the time, moving out into infinite space. At the same time, we are always finding new, smaller stuff as we develop more powerful equipment. Even a casual perusal of the scientific data can yield a dizzying view of our place in the cosmos. But even open minds have limits, and after a certain point, you have to bring your gaze back down here, where we all live.

Why no Blind Rage for sale?

You may have noticed that there hasn’t been a Kindle version of Blind Rage, nor have I put out anything through Mobipocket or Smashwords. Well there’s a good reason for that. While going over the layout for the PDF version, I noticed many typos. Most were things like missing punctuation marks, but the errors were in a large enough number that I do not feel right charging money for the story.

It’s one thing to have mistakes in a free story, provided they aren’t so bad as to make the book unreadable. I’ve already combed through the book many times, so I know there’s nothing that bad. But to my mind, asking you for money requires a certain level of quality control, and I don’t feel the story is there just yet.

I have returned…sorta…

Yes, I’m already back to work on one of my WIPs. That’s the good news, but the bad news is, I’m not yet ready to start posting up new serial fiction yet. Between the 3 WIP projects and the backlog of stories to edit, I can’t do all this work while I’m also editing chapters to post online. Something has to give, and for now, I’m letting the posting schedule go. From what I’ve heard from readers, most are still catching up anyway, so I can afford to take a break.

I’ve got plans to look at my site and decide on a full upgrade with a new interface, or just a minor change with some extra sidebar buttons that would go on certain pages. (But not on the whole site) I was gung ho for the new interface, but in thinking about most of the changes, I can’t see a reason why I’d need to make buttons in the overhead interface for them. Eh, I might update the picture on the main page, maybe. Oh, and add a link to this journal from the main page. Don’t mind me. I’m just thinking in text.