Yack. I wrote a whole lovely blog last night, and then I pressed the wrong button on the computer. I swear, I am not actually so stupid as to not know the difference between the computer's on/off button and the floppy drive's spit-the-disk-out button. Except that's what I did last night. Grr.

I can't be bothered writing it all again; I said it once (even if no-one but me saw it!), so it's said now and that's that.

Went in town this afternoon. Dropped into Schuh and discovered that their prices for Doc Martens are a bit more reasonable than China Blue's: EUR88 for a pair of 14-hole Docs as opposed to EUR101. But I don't have EUR88 to spare just now either, so I guess they'll have to wait another month. Bah. Went on to Forbidden Planet, which used to be my favourite bookshop. Was not impressed. The books were shelved in a very hard to browse manner, and they had little or nothing by any of my favourite writers. So I went down to check out their magazine selection. I figured, if anywhere in Dublin is going to have copies of the magazines I'm submitting to (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, etc.) it would be Forbidden Planet. Hah! The only fiction magazine they had at all was Albedo One, which doesn't even pay pro rates, and looks amateurish to boot. Though I was interested to see that the current issue has a story by Lauren Halkon; I accepted one of her stories for Ideomancer a couple of months back.

So then I went on to the Virgin Megastore. It's having a closing-down sale. I can't believe the Virgin Megastore is closing down! It's a huge shop on Aston Quay, and this was their first branch in Dublin. The other branches aren't closing, apparently; just the "flagship" one. Weird.

I don't remember disliking the shop this much before. It was badly lit, and I couldn't find what I wanted in it. Surely it didn't use to be like that? Maybe if they sorted out the lighting and the confusion, they wouldn't have to close it.

After that I gave up on my old haunts and went to Chapters to raid their second-hand section. Picked up a couple of kids' books and an SF one, and felt better.

Time to head back into town and meet people, before the last bus goes and I have to get a taxi.

Yay! The wind finally dropped! It's still in the west, but not strong enough to cause draughts around my desk. This is a good thing. In fact, in the late afternoon I was quite cosy with the sun shining in on me. That cheered me up a bit; I'd spent a chunk of the day feeling vauguely depressed, for no particular reason. That happens now and then. It's not bad depression, just a sort of unfocused not-quite-right feeling. I can deal. I've had bad depression. I know what it's like to dread getting out of bed every morning, for weeks or months on end. I know what it's like to feel tired before the day is half gone, just because dealing with people and life is so hard. I know what it's like to feel as if I'm at the bottom of a very deep, dark, pit, all the time, that I can't get out of.

But I did get out of it; even at the worst, I always believed, deep down inside, that things had got to get better. And eventually they did, and I haven't had a bad depression since I was about 20. Which is 13 years ago. So that's all good, and little vague downnesses are only an issue insofar as on my more paranoid days, I fear they may the harbringers of worse. But they haven't been so far, and if it does happen again...? Well, I dealt once; I'll deal again. But I hope I don't have to.

On to more cheerful things, before I psych myself into a full-blown depression!

More election fun; on the news this morning it was reported that Bertie Ahern said that Michael McDowell will not get to be Attorney General again (or words to that effect). Can we say "slow on the uptake"?

Mr. McDowell is currently Attorney General. He's also after joining the Progressive Democrats, and is running for election as one of their candidates. And on Monday or thereabouts, he spoke out against the "Bertie-Bowl", a huge great sports stadium that is Mr. Ahern's current pet project. As I recall, Mr. McDowell called it a "Ceaucescu-era monstrosity", or something of the sort. (It is, in my opinion, a vast waste of time and money, so Mr. McDowell and I agree on one thing, anyway!) But for someone who's running for the party that was part of the last government, and badly wants to be part of the next one, this was not a terribly smart remark to make. Ah well; with any luck, the PDs won't get enough seats to be of any use to anyone trying to form a coalition government.

No, I don't have much time for the PDs. They're rather right-wing, and as a wet-behind-the-ears liberal who votes Green and Red, they're not what I want to see running the country (or even helping). Furthermore, I can't abide their party leader; Mary Harney has the most annoying voice I think I've ever heard, and no sense to boot.

I finished "Trader" today. A great book; I may have to refuse to return it to its owner! I think it's up there with "Memory and Dream" as my favourite Charles de Lint book(s). (Hm. Must reread "Memory and Dream", now. I can see myself going off on an utter Charles de Lint kick!)

Wrote a legend of Heramacles for my LARP group, last night. That's all the creative writing I've done in a week. It's a Bank Holiday weekend, this weekend, and I'm telling myself I'll write then. But I know I won't. I'll fritter the three days away on frivolity and random faffing about. Sleeping and reading and going out with my friends. Well, gotta have a life too, huh? Can't write real people if I don't know any! Ahh, who am I kidding? I'm lazy, that's all there is to it. It's too damn' easy to come in from work and sit down at my computer. Read e-mail, talk to friends on AIM, surf the web a little...and then it's bedtime and what have I written? Nothing of any moment. Just an e-mail or two and some chat babbling.

Times like this, I miss my old job. I didn't much like being a secretary/telephonist/receptionist, but at least I had vast blanks of time that needed to be filled up while I waited for the phone to ring so I could answer it. And I often filled them with writing. Then I got moved up to become Project Administrator and Configuration Manager for the space team, and my working day is now filled with actual work. I need someone to pay me to do nothing. Or to pay me to write. But the only way to get that is to actually get a novel ready to go out, and then get a publishing contract, and then sell loads and loads of copies of my book, so I get a bigger better contract...

I need to get off my arse and work on "Mind Demons".

Another cold one; the wind was in the west again. Shiver, shiver, shiver, for most of the day. Though the DreadEd took things a bit far, and kept going down to the front office to sit on the radiator there. Why, I don't know; his desk is not in a draughty part of the space floor, and we have three radiators of our own. At times I think he just likes annoying the front office staff.

I've spent much of today and yesterday writing a synopsis of "A Sweet Girl Graduate" by L. T. Meade. It's a college story written in 1891, and rather fun. Way back in about November last year, we were discussing on the Girlsown list what books we might choose for this year's book discussions (we have an official book discussion every month), and I was foolish enough to say that I'd like a discussion on college books. The next thing I knew, I was booked to lead it! Of course, back then, May seemed a very long way away, but it snuck up on me as these things do, and I found myself on Monday with May looming and nothing done! This kind of thing happens to me a lot. I'm very good at procrastinating.

So I got the synopsis finished today...and then left the disk at work! So I'll have to wait till tomorrow to kick off the discussion...I suppose I could post the initial, discussion-sparking questions tonight, but I'd prefer to get the synopsis and questions out simultaneously. And I now have ten days to synopsise the other book I'm going to concentrate on, Jean Webster's "Daddy-Long-Legs".

(As an aside, it was years before I would read that book, because I'm phobic about crane-flies, which is what daddy-long-legses are here. It was only last year that I discovered that in the US, a daddy-long-legs is a type of spider!)

Went out for a couple of drinks last night with Patrick (of course) and his mother; she's away to America today for a couple of weeks. And despite my resolution to keep this blog secret for now, I told them about it. So I suppose I'd better tell Tempest and get her to link to it on her page, now. Public blogging, here I come! (Ulp.)

I've another possible taker for my "pay for the workshop" offer; depends on whether he can get a friend he has in New York to do it for him. Still waiting on the cheque from one of my two definites. Hrm.

More election fun. The Fine Gael leader, Michael Noonan, got a custard pie in the face while campaigning yesterday. This was reported in all the papers this morning, with varying degrees of gleefulness. Even the staid and respectable Irish Times made it their front-page picture. (Idiot Irish Times. They have a nice constituency map of Ireland on their site, but the Dublin section is still, apparently, not built. Grr. How am I supposed to find out who my candidates are?)

Well, I just checked the Green Party website. We do, at least, have a Green candidate...he hasn't got his posters up yet. Patrick wants to move quarter of a mile up the road so we'll be in the next-door constituency, but this is merely because the Green candidate there shares his surname.

We're filling in our census form now. Should have done it on Sunday, which was census day (and my father's birthday - happy birthday, Daddy!), but we were out. Luckily no-one's come looking to collect it yet. The census should actually have been held last year, but it was postponed because of the foot&mouth outbreak on the other island.

That was all a bit stupid, really; the British took minimal precauctions, held their census, failed to close anything, almost, and were generally rather careless. With the result that foot&mouth went on for months, with outbreaks all over the island and vast quantities of animals having to be slaughtered. Meanwhile, over here, if we could have shut the country down completely, we probably would have. As it was there were stringent checks on everyone coming in, disinfectant at every border crossing, all parks and such closed, the St. Patrick's Day Festival cancelled, no census...and we had a single case of the disease, just over the border from Northern Ireland. Well, which plan looks more sensible to you? Yes, we lost a lot of tourism business last year. No, we didn't lose our beef industry. That's all good, overall.
Just finished reading "City of Bones" by Martha Wells. I liked it, especially the setting (though I don't normally like post-apocalyptic fantasy), but thought the ending was a bit wishy-washy. I preferred "The Death of the Necromancer". Now I'm reading Charles de Lint's "Trader", and enjoying it immensely. I want to write like him. Not as in his style, but I want to meld the realistic and the fantastical as effortlessly as he does (or seems to!). I'm also rereading "Deep Secret" by Diana Wynne Jones. I reread that regularly; along with "Fire and Hemlock", it's my favourite of her books so far. She's coming to Dublin next month. Yay!

Haven't written much in the last week or so. The second first draft of my angel story is close to done, but I'm not sure that this one is much better than the first first draft. I shouldn't have written the first first draft on the computer; I don't seem to be able to do that any more. I write first drafts best longhand, which is what I'm doing in this second go. But it's still going a bit awkwardly. I have a bad feeling that I've bit off more than I can chew, that I'm trying to do things that are beyond my capabilities just now. But stuff it! I will finish this draft, and polish it, and make it work, dammit! And then I'll workshop it and fix it up some more and try to sell it. Never say die.

(And in the meantime, I've got about two dozen rejections on the four stories that are currently seeking homes...all grist to the mill. You're not a Real Writer until you have enough rejection slips to paper your bathroom. My bathroom is small, and I don't even have enough rejections to paper one wall of it, yet, not even if I printed out the e-jections! Gotta keep on going...)

Aha! After fighting this thing since yesterday evening, it finally appears to work! I hope...

Not a terribly interesting day, today. Like most of 'em, really. Freezing cold at work; the wind was in the west, and came howling in around the window by my desk. There are definite disadvantages to working in a Victorian building with many original features - like single-glazed windows with no draught exclusion. On the other hand, I'll never need step aerobics!

I'm gaining some mild amusement from the election posters...it's only day 5 so there are still new ones going up every day. Some of the would-be TDs have very interesting expressions. Bertie Ahern looks as if he's high on something. Derek McDowell looks as if he's only smiling because someone told him it was good PR to smile, but he'd rather be dismembering something - possibly the photographer. Bronwen Maher looks, rather endearingly, as if she feels like an idiot having her picture taken. And Finian McGrath looks like what he is: a headmaster. Probably of the variety that tells his pupils to look upon him as a friend.

Come to think of it, I find most aspects of General Elections entertaining. Canvassers can be a lot of fun to play with, though I was very annoyed, last election, by the number of candidates who simply shoved a leaflet into my hand and showed no interest in conversation. I'm thinking of sticking a notice beside the front door, this time: "Canvassers, please do not ring the doorbell unless you want to talk. If you just want to give us a leaflet, use the letterbox." But I probably won't. After all, it's also fun to make people talk who don't want to. Not that we've had any canvassers yet, this year. Though Larry O'Toole did show up on the doorstep one day last week to claim credit for getting the Corporation to fix the leaky stopcock on the pavement outside the house. All the Corpo did was dump a load of loose tarmac on the spot - they didn't even bother flattening it down. If I were Mr. O'Toole, I would not claim credit for such a botched job. But then, I'm not trying to get elected to Dail Eireann.

They're trying out electronic voting for the first time, this election. Only three constituencies are having it, till they see if it works. The results from those three constituencies will be in before the main count is even started! I'm not sure I hold with this. Part of the fun of a General Election is in the marathon counting session, complete with neck-and-neck races for the last seat in a constituency, and disgruntled candidates demanding recounts. (I thought the fuss about the recount in the last US Presidential Election was hilarious; we generally have at least three recounts in every election!)

(If anyone is reading this - seems unlikely, but you never know - and is wondering about our electoral system, there are two articles about it at http://www.ireland.com/focus/election_2002/voting/. The first is a straightforward explanation of the Single Transferable Vote system; the second is more personalised and quite funny in places.)

Hmph. I can't think of anything else to babble about tonight.

testing...

Hmph. Well, here goes nothing! All the talk of blogs on the writing list made me want my own, especially after reading some of my friends' blogs. I dunno, I've never been very good at journals - always too worried that someone might find and read my meanderings. But the whole point of this thing is that people will read it, so maybe I'll manage it okay.

Of course, given that I tend to get enthusiastic about something, and then lose interest a couple of weeks later, I don't know how long this blog will last. I'm not going to tell anyone I have it until I see if I'm going to lose interest or not.

So...what to talk about?

I should be at training right now; running about the Iveagh Gardens with a rubber sword, learning to use the thing effectively. But I just couldn't bring myself to get up this morning. I'll go next week - hah! I have to go next week. We're having the Volksraad to see if we'll accept the Tribe or not. The High Incantor of Armengar (me!) had better be there! But for this week, I'm staying home. Got up late, washed dishes, made potato salad...it came out pretty well, considering it was my first attempt! Read e-mail and web-surfed a bit. And now I'm blogging.

And now it's ten past five and I want to go to the supermarket which closes at six today, so I suppose I should stop babbling and do that. Maybe I'll add more later.