Rage, and better things

...So I stayed in the house all day yesterday; and no, my bank manager did not call. During my final attempt to locate him, though, I had a conversation with an underling, who said "Ah, yes, I know the letter says that your overdraft will expire tomorrow, but in fact it won't, we'll give you a month's leeway to sort this out."

In other words, they are playing mind-games with me: scaring and harassing me with all this last-minute stuff, rather than taking the adult course of giving me a month's notice that we need to have a conversation. I'm sure it works, from their side; no doubt they get more people responding to an urgent prompt than they would to a month's warning. But it's not a win-win, it's a zero-sum game: their benefit is my loss. Specifically, in this instance I lost a day's work and a weekend of worry.

And, perhaps, a night's sleep: this night just gone has been appalling. I could blame my body, for I have been swallowing pain and other meds to small effect - but that in itself is a giveaway. If efficacious meds are ineffective, we should look elsewhere for the cause. I am glowering bank-wards.

Soon, I shall be writing bank-wards. Coffee first, I think, and then a serious discussion of points above. In a letter. Stuff this phoning lark, writing's my thing. If he phones before I'm finished, tough: I'm still writing the letter.

And then, I hope, I can get back to writing the novel. With a brief divagation for rewrites on last week's story. I submitted draft #1 last night, after hacking 750 words out of draft #0; and found a super-prompt email from the editor in my inbox this morning. I do love email. This almost equals my fastest-ever acceptance, where I sent a story off at 9pm on New Year's Eve, went to a party, came home six hours later to find I'd sold it.

Also, every time I write a story these days? I remember again how much I enjoy it, and how I want to write more.

Okay, here's a weird meme...

...because, yes, I am putting off writing that letter.

I picked this up from Poppy: google "[your name] needs" and post the top ten results. Thus we see:

Chaz needs a Bad Girl

Chaz needs to take action

Chaz needs to be vacuumed by Mr Tea (milk, no sugar)

Chaz needs your help! He wants to be able to run left and right

Chaz needs Braille now

Chaz needs a home ASAP

Chaz needs volunteers to dance

Chaz needs to get a good management team and involve his parents less

Chaz needs Baz and Baz needs Chaz [no, honestly! and it's not even from my blog...]

How much blood do you think Chaz needs?


- and that's ten, so there you go. Now you know much more about me than I did before. And now I really must write that damn letter..

Meh. And a review.

This is the sort of day I don't understand, when I'm working; it's been that sort of day where it's entirely impossible to understand how I ever can work. I can't imagine where the work would have fitted in.

Okay, I had a crap night; but I got up at the usual sort of time, and I have done nothing today that I might not do on a regular working day - written a letter, read some LJ, watched an hour's TV, walked into town for an hour - and yet on a regular day I would have written four or five pages by now. Today? Nothing. Not a word. Meh.

Still, Ian Whates sends a link to this review of his anthology 'DisLocations', wherein my story 'Terminal' is applauded, which is nice. Money shot:

"Chaz Brenchley's 'Terminal' is a rich, dense, highly textured story about the teleportation of consciousness and the nature of identity, set on an exotic planet, and which lingers long in the memory, and like the MacLeod story, is one of the best of the year, let alone in the book."

It also says that Ken MacLeod has none of my obvious glamour. There I go, being obvious again...