Please can I bill the courier for twelve hours of my life?

[desperance]

The copy-edit did - you will be astonished to learn! - not come. I have communed with New York, and butts are to be kicked. They are large butts, and they are to be kicked largely: the company paid for overnight and AM guaranteed, and neither of these good things occurred.

So I was in all day, and as I foretold thee, I have achieved almost nothing. I roasted a pan of cherry tomatoes with rosemary, for soup tomorrow; that's almost the highlight. Otherwise, I mostly poked at Linux. Having finally got myself prepared nerved up to upgrade my distribution, I discovered that the Live CD doesn't offer upgrades as an option, only a clean install or nothing. Which is no use to me (as I don't know how to build a new install next to an existing one, and make both bootable; I know it can be done, it's probably easy, but I just don't know how). So now I'm downloading the full install DVD, which promises to take ten hours or so. Fine, whatever. I don't care.

Why don't I care? Because I finally cracked, at 6.30pm. I went out. Out! And found the world waiting for me, with - as I foretold thee! am I not a prophet in my own land, all unwelcome? - the start of my next chapter in its pocket. It starts with the old man hitting him with a stick, and then the two women join in. With blades. (It's a love thing.) Obviously.

Also, talking of coming out and finding someone waiting, this occurred in my head:

He'd changed his hair.

That was the first thing I noticed. Also he was laughing with another lad, as they came out from work. That was new, too. How long was it, since I'd seen him laugh?

His mate turned off towards the bike racks; he came my way, as I knew he would. And saw me, sat on the wall there; and knew me, of course, straight off. I wasn't laughing, and I hadn't changed my hair. Hell, I'd hardly changed my clothes. Same old yellow jacket: just a bit shabbier, a bit sadder, a bit more tired. Just like me.

It's just an opening, teen romance for the use of. Sweet nostalgia: how many hundreds of those did I pick up and run with, back in the day? Tens of hundreds, over the years? Well, not tens, perhaps, but certainly ten. Three a week, give or take, for 'way too long: I must have written a thousand, and probably more. I still miss those days, sometimes; it was all a hell of a lot simpler, and I had actual money in the bank and no debt, and I knew the good stuff was all to come. *sighs*

Still, I am not going to pick this up and run with it. Not even for the sake of:

"Come on, then," I said softly. "Give a boy a kiss." (I was, I think, the first man ever to sell a tale of gay romance to a teen girls' magazine. Twenty-five years or so ago, it felt like a triumph.)

Instead, I am going to start my much-delayed chapter. Our young hero is going to be hit, by his friends, until he bleeds: in the interests of science, or possibly costumery. And I am going to drink this bottle of wine withal, until I am too drunk to keep on working; and then I am going to stop working, and carry on drinking. A murrain upon it, I tell 'ee...

Comments

[cinderberry.livejournal.com]

Wait, whut? You're *not* picking it up? *whimpers*

But it's good? And I want to know what happens next?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, phoo. It's a paragraph, a moment. At that stage, they're all good. There are a dozen of those, for every one that gets written. At least, there used to be. I really don't do this any more; only the cats know why I suddenly found myself with this in my head. I came out of the supermarket, and there's a wall, and... Suddenly I was quarter of a century younger, and doing what I did then. I guess this is what happens when you lock me in for a day. I get all overtaken by story, on a very basic level. Girl meets boy after work - no! Boy meets boy! That'll shock 'em! etc. It's not for serious.

But will you e-mail me your e-mail? I wanted to tell you something, privily...

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Teen gay romance is hot right now. (David Levithan rules!)

And I, too, want to know what happens next.

[julesjones]

I'll second that.

Alas, I also know entirely too well what gay romance stories fetch, and the answer is not as much as what he's supposed to be writing, by nigh on an order of magnitude. I am not displeased with my latest royalty statement, but it would not be enough to both keep Barry in vegetables *and* keep a roof over the desperance household.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Just tell me one thing - do you intend to peel the cherry tomatoes? Methinks life is too short.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Way, way too short. I might pick off the most-blackened bits from the roasting, but I probably won't. I have a very powerful blender, and a very good sieve (tho' in fact I probably won't sieve it: I like a bit of texture in my soup. The recent discovery was that in converting gazpacho to juice, I don't like texture in my Bloody Mary. That I sieved).

[time-freak.livejournal.com]

write it write it write it write it.

There can never be enough gay teen romance ever ever ever.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

How strange: I read this as a post about multi-boot Linux installation, but all the comments relate to that gay romance tangent, perhaps I am still at heart a geeky computer boy.

It's actually very straight-forward, you just install the different Linuxes into different partitions (you must know about partitions, made with Druid or the modern equivalent), and configure your boot loader (usually LILO) with a suitable tool or by editing its text config file to include the options (google LILO for details). Alternatively, if you still have a floppy drive, you can leave the hard disk booting into one version and make a floppy that boots into the other when it's in the drive.

The versions can share the partitions, even swap, though of course it's a good idea for everyone to agree on exactly which are swap and which are file systems.

You can even put Windows into a third partition and never boot it, that'll show Bill who's boss.

It's fun, you'll like it :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup, this is more or less the level on which I knew it could be done: make partitions, install, instruct boot loader. I just don't know the process well enough to have the confidence to do it, when one of the installations contains my life, y'know? My first-ever iteration of Linux - Red Hat 4, perhaps? - was pre-GUI and I had to build partitions by hand from the command line, and that was fun, but only because it was an old machine that didn't matter; and since then the installation process has always done the partitioning for me. Probably there's a way to tell Suse that I want to keep the previous installation and line up another on the side, and it would do all that and fix the boot loader (grub these days, not lilo; they changed over, a version or two ago); but, but but but. I could get it wrong, it could misunderstand, I could accidentally obliterate everything. And my experience of following step-by-step instructions is that they're never quite right, something's always changed somewhere, and eek. Basically, lots of eek.

I've said it before, I hate how ignorant I am. What I should do, I should set up the old computer and do trial runs, learn what I'm doing - but that's so old, it doesn't have a DVD drive. Eek.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You can even put Windows into a third partition and never boot it, that'll show Bill who's boss.

This, on the other hand, I do do. Or rather, it gets done for me, on installation. All my Linux machines have been dual-boot, with the original Windoze swept gently to one side and given a bag of sweeties to amuse itself with while we tiptoe out and lock the door behind us. I've only ever needed it with my last Suse install, which didn't like some of the new hardware so that I only had working video and connectivity through Windows, until my guru handheld me through fixing it. Which all left me rather less confident even than I had been before...

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

The story that you sold to the teen girls' magazine? Any chance of you still having a copy of it that could be postable somewhere? (Hell, if you only have a paper copy of it, I'll scan it, so it can be posted). I'd like to read it, anyway. 'Cos, you know, Brenchley-texts that have been unread by me? SO not allowed...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Dar-ling! There are so many stories from that era that you have not read. And never will. I don't have most of them (I suffered a moment of weakness, under another's thumb: vast quantities of early me were thrown out, on the grounds that I didn't actually need them. Ouchie...). I might still have the story to which I referred above, but - well. Don't hold your breath. Purple silk is lovely, but purple skin? Not so much.

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

That is a hideous concept. Firstly, the idea of not needing writing? Does not compute... and secondly, not needing your own writing? Really, really does not compute!

I think what we need is an archiving session where we get all the remaining extant texts and digitise them.