Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Cross-eyed and furry-tailed

I took a redeye from Seattle to DC then changed planes for Buffalo and got home dead beat and a little out of it...and couldn't sleep for a bit. It took me fifteen minutes to realize I was hungry. I hadn't eaten in 16 hours...aside from a couple of Dr. Peppers and crackers. Once belly was filled and I'd had a shower, I sacked out for 4 hours with Pandora playing some New Age music in the background. I'm now back to being cross-eyed, but mainly because I'm trying to finish up my paperwork and clear my table.

My apartment is a mess, and it's all because I'm lazy. I pile papers up to sort through and file, later...and later keeps getting later and later. I've got a couple of bookshelves so packed with books, the shelves are bowing. I have shredding to do that's been needing to be done for weeks. And let's not get started on bill-paying. Ugh! But it's deadening work and all I want to do is write...and draw, lately. I've also been itching to get back to sketching and painting. Another reason for me to win the lottery -- so I can leave my job and spend the rest of my life doing my own little thing.

But I can't quit. My little brother is now my dependent. So until such time as I sell a script or "The Lyons' Den" winds up on the NYT Bestseller list and brings me in some decent coin, I'm stuck working at a decent enough job and using my spare time to write and ignoring all the other stuff I need to do till it becomes too demanding.

That said, I've got it good in comparison to a lot of people. I've been following the "I am the 99%" blog and most of those stories are heartbreaking. Then in their usual "screw you" fashion, the right wing's started up this "I am the 53%" blog to showcase people who are willing to settle for being spat upon by the rich so long as they can still watch cable and have a beer after working 12 hour days, but by god they pay their taxes, right?

NOT exactly. One woman posted her situation and bitched about the OWS crowd and those "people who don't pay taxes" (which is bullshit; EVERYONE pays taxes but not everyone has to pay income tax). What she revealed was she was actually in the percentile that would not have to pay income tax because she had dependents and made under the minimum. There were others like that on the site.

Things like this scare me, because they show just how delusional those people are. They're protecting the tax breaks of billionaire polluters like the Koch Brothers and GE while denigrating those trying to just get the rich to pay their fair share. It makes no sense to me...unless they're self-destructive. Which is possible. But then again, when I went to the Museum of Tolerance in LA, it made no bones about pointing out that some Jews helped the Nazis during the Holocaust, probably thinking it would protect them from the same fate. It didn't, and any fool could have seen that...but there are a lot of serious fools in the world.

What a ramble. I guess I'm still tired and unfocused. No writing done, today, except for this...and I don't think I'll rework it. Let's see how it reads tomorrow. After work.

*Sigh*

Okay, I gotta kill this mood. Here's something to make me feel less freaky.
This was photographed by David Vance, and the angel is Levi Poulter, whom I used as the physical model for Tad/Ace in "The Lyons' Den." He comes across as a nice, smart, easy to like kind of guy (though for all I know he may be the polar opposite to that) so I played him against type, so to speak. Too bad we couldn't use him on the cover of the book, but buying use of his photograph is not cheap.

What's really fun is, the model I used for Van comes across in his photos as someone with a major amount of attitude, so I played him against type, too. At least, in my mind. And that's what counts, right?

(The guy Levi's holding is Paul Francis...I think.)

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