Not dead · 1:17am Oct 3rd, 2018
Just faking it pretty well due to an ongoing combination of RL factors. And watching my notifications climb (there's 871 unread items in my feed). It's long past time to call a notification amnesty, so I'm gonna do it before it hits four digits. (Amnesty means I won't be making any effort to hit the backlog, so if there's anything you've posted in the last … um, two months … that you think I'd find cool, please tell me in comments.)
Had an eventful and convention-filled summer — went to Campfire Tails, where I bounced between costuming, outdoor board games, and being volunteered into the event security team; went to Worldcon, where I was on TV; and went to SAREX (a Search & Rescue training weekend drawing members from the entire state of California), where I was chilling at wilderness movie night watching Deadpool 2 when a black bear of at least twice my weight wandered over to join me in the audience.
That's not a euphemism for anything, by the way. We'd just reached the scene where they were fighting the Juggernaught, and I heard a rustling from near the tent a few feet to my right. I looked away from the screen, clicked on my flashlight, and glanced to my right, and it was staring me in the face — at eye level; I was sitting down — from just bearly out of arm's reach.
Cue an impressive amount of not panicking.
(That was a shitshow of a weekend for reasons that had nothing to do with the bear. But I got some good training in, and bought a chest pouch that I'm now using for gear mount points out on searches: radio and GPS and the like.)
I managed to get some writing momentum going in early summer, which the unrelenting string of travel disruptions wiped out hard. Once that started to calm down I got sucked into gaming (both tabletop and computer). I'm starting to finally come up for air. I joined in at the Writeoffs for the first time in several months. I have a lot of things I need to publish, but that's not new.
As long as we're talking about writing — you may have seen Queen of Clubs name-dropped lately. It was featured over at Seattle's Angels a round or two ago! But there's some other news that wasn't quite as prominent: results for the Lunbra contest were (finally) announced a while back, and QoC took a respectable third place.
Out of four, granted. But still! It means I've officially pulled off the hat trick: the same story scored a first, second, and third-place win in three separate contests! How many authors can say that? 
(Answer: Me.)
If you've read QoC, by the way, you might be interested in my comment further down the contest results thread. (This is why I'm tagging the story, btw.) Ice Star offered a fairly detailed critique of the story, and so I went into some detail (with the benefit of hindsight) on why/how the story worked and didn't work; a defense of the triumph of style over narrative; and then a lengthy section on exposing the subtext of Drying Paint's motivations, pointing out a key moment of subtly unreliable narration that sets up some of the more deeply buried themes. Here you go.
Anyway, hope y'all have been well.
Wow. And I thought I was busy.
Always glad to see ya around the old place.
Now just to clear the air, I'm definitely not going to take this occasion to bug you about TEFL once again, because that'd just be gauche. Nor will I insinuate that it may yet inspire another "spiritual homage" that could have the potential to come out before TEFL itself has been released. Though who knows; if it did, will there be Time Enough For S9 canon to invalidate this hypothetical second story just as S7 canon did the first? Or will it perhaps just be mauled by a bear?
No seriously though, welcome back!!
What happened to the bear?
(Good to see you alive and kicking.
I'm definitely going to add Queen of Clubs to my "read sooner" list, though with how busy my semester is I've no idea when I'll actually get to read it.)
The world is measurably better for you being in it.
>inb4 "Ice Star is a big dummy head"
Ice Star is a big dummy head
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I'm beginning to get scared that I'm unwittingly holding the Seventh Seal, whose publication sounds the heavenly trumpets, and pours out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
I mean, we've been seeing an increasing number of the other six. :\
Still! It remains atop my backlog. And me breaking a month-and-a-half silence, while it's not work on the backlog, is at least a positive sign.
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Aw, thanks.
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Aw, thanks! I do always appreciate the attention.
However, if you're well behind on horizon stories, tbh I should steer you toward Administrative Angel or Watch! Watch! instead. Both are easily in my (published-stories) Top 3 and deserve all the superlatives they've gotten; QoC is certainly getting some critical acclaim but it's much more hit-or-miss in terms of whether it works for readers or not.
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Exit stage left, pursued by a
bearlarge group of armed men.… I mean. SAREX is a training camp for emergency responders. It was about 1/3 civilian volunteers, 1/3 armed uniformed law enforcement officers, and 1/3 literal Armed Forces personnel. When a bear wandered deep enough into the site to show up for the movie, the event organizers collectively said "OH HELLO, EXTREMELY LARGE PUBLIC SAFETY ISSUE SURROUNDED BY HUNDREDS OF TENT CAMPERS WE HAVE LEGAL LIABILITY FOR. PLEASE LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO MY FRIEND, MR. RIOT CONTROL ROUND."
I heard about a dozen bean-bag shots being fired five minutes later. I'm pretty sure it's still sprinting away.
Good to know! You are kind of necessary, after all. :B
I published a story that dominated the Featured Box on publication, the latest chapter of which is *super* controversial and brought me to 500 upvotes, as well as earned a solid 23 downvotes so far so that's super freaking cool.
In celebration of 500 I'm also running a Q&A thing that I don't think anyone is really interested in.
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I gigglesqueaked, dear christ.
4947305 Well, they don't get the opportunity to use their cool toys that often...
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The bear was most assuredly not rendered unconscious by soporific changeling goo and stuffed into a storage cocoon. That is exactly the opposite of what happened, in fact.
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Look, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that I just waved cheerfully at the bear and loudly said "Wow, you're a big one!" — and then due to my previously unmentioned reserves of raw personal charisma, it was so naturally intimidated that it backed away and loped off.
I mean, hungry bears wandering into thickly populated human gatherings — bears who are unintimidated enough by loud noises to check out the movie showing — do that all the time, right?
And at this point, given the half-life of goo in ursine physiology, nobody can prove otherwise.
horizon i need to tell u something
that is all
i.imgur.com/QdZZKDm.gif?1
Congratulations on your continuing to not be dead, good sir!
The past two months for me have been… radio silence, mostly. I'm still chipping away on the story I started at EFNW, the only respite from that being editing Epic Yarn's second and third stories. #2 is dangerous to read on an empty stomach, though; you might get arrested for breaking into a bakery.
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This is how I imagine that played out from the bear's perspective:
...I can't believe no-one's commented on this yet.
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sounds great! and powerful!
we brought you another bear, so you can show us exactly how you did that.
i.pinimg.com/originals/88/b2/4d/88b24dc501681b145aa1f456688cceaf.png
Poor bear!
Someone commented on Queen of Clubs that it's kind of a story of a school shooter, only ponified, and that still seems very accurate to me.
Good to see you're still alive!
Also, the way the tags got line-wrapped made me double-take when one of them got illusorily truncated to “why is horizon”.
Why is horizon? That's what the audience wants to know, on this episode of I'm Too Sleepy To Come Up With A Clever Title.
It has never not been excellent to hear from you, and this post is no exception.
Wow, look at those negatives. I hope I put the right number in. It's way too early, or late, or something.
Good to hear from you in a capacity other than RCL comments. Glad you had fun.
Also, I have a contest currently in progress if you're interested. Don't mind the deadline; it's going to be extended to the 15th at absolute minimum.
Ah... But you also claim to not be a changeling, so you may, in fact, be posting from beyond the grave!
And so from this chance meeting you and the bear became fast friends, thus forming the beginning of the union between bearkind and mankind, changing both societies forever.
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I read these two comments back-to-back and all I can think is
vintage.ponychan.net/chan/files/src/133088493438.jpg
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I'm glad it worked out well for everybear. Although I gotta admit this iron collar chafes.
For a very good but strange and unconventional story about that, see here.
Horizon, I recommend you read Aragon's & GhostOfHeraclitus' Bronycon blog posts. You may also like:
Walking with Hungry Ghosts and Jealous Gods - Writing about Addiction
Difficulty Levels
Underappreciated Author Spotlight: Newcomers Edition