I Aten't Dead

*Sidles back onto the internet*

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey guuuuuuuuuuuuys...

So, OK, I might have gotten a bit carried away and spent... wow... 13 months reading stuff on the internet instead of doing anything else on the internet.

I found a few blogs whose archives I tore through, which led to other blogs which led to collections of short stories that led to collections of longer stories that led to stories long enough to consider books and of course I had to read all of them as well and all this was liberally interspersed with trying to get all the way back to the first post of several tumblrs and some people post so much stuff to their tumblrs that by the time you wake up the next morning the page number you were up to the day before is now showing stuff from four days ago and you aren't so much catching up as being buried alive...

I became straight up obsessed with 'finishing'.

Finishing each blog, each tumblr, each author's selection of stories, each set of stories in a particular genre or collection.

All of it.

I have no idea where it came from.

I haven't been obsessed with anything like that in years and never for that long.

I would have read millions of words worth of fiction and non-fiction while at the same time reading nothing that could be added to my Reading List.

I achieved very little else last year.

Didn't watch many TV shows or movies, did no sewing or drawing, tried fewer new recipes, didn't keep up with my Italian, did very little knitting.

Just made a concentrated effort to READ THE ENTIRE INTERNET!!! 0_0

But I think I'm OK now.

I honestly had a 'the fog lifted' moment and almost full on Ebenezer Scrooge 'You, boy, what day is this!?' style noticed the rest of the world.

Enthusiasm for and interest in other things came flooding back in.

I hadn't by any means felt myself to be depressed, just mysteriously fixated to the exclusion of all else.

The crazy thing is that the entire time I was staring slack-jawed at the pretty screen, I was taking notes for things I wanted to write and projects I wanted to start but popped them to the side because meh, I'd get to them later when I was done.

So now that I've blinked myself awake like Rip Van Winkle I'm going to start posting again.

I'm also going to try post things for all the ideas I had but didn't use and post them up listed when I would have posted them if I hadn't been in a trance state.
These I will clearly mark as backdated posts because I very definitely was not anything approaching productive during that time and I'll not pretend otherwise.

So, yes, hello!

I am in fine health, I've had no negative life events, I just drifted away like a beagle who has locked on to a scent and have now finally found my way back.

I hope you've all been more engaged in the world than I have and look forward to seeing what you have all been doing while I was in my zombie-like state.

And because you can never have enough Nanny Ogg or Granny Weatherwax...

(I swear, if I could find these for sale I would snap them up faster than you could say 'MINE!!!')

Surely It Can't Be Much Further...

[This is a backdated post] 

The internet is a big, dangerous, deadly, deceptive jerk.

When you pick up a book you can look at how big it is, how thick it is, the size of the font, the number of chapters.

You can see how far you've gotten and how far there is to go.

You can know when you might as well push on because it's only x amount more pages or chapters and when you should call it a day because you need your face not to be sliding off your skull when you roll in to work the next day.

The internet isn't like that.

The internet is misleading.

And if you're pootling along reading through someone's blog or tumblr or open a certain amount of tabs and decide that you're going to get through them before you do this other thing you're supposed to do.

It's not a useful plan.

It's the 'I'll just eat all the chips/ice-cream/other foodstuff now so that they won't be tempting/distracting me later' plan of digital browsing.

Especially as a lot of blogging platforms don't show you how many pages there are or present their archive information accurately so you may be 500 pages deep into someone's tumblr and have no idea that they have over 2000 pages of stuff that they're adding to every day.

Some folk reblog and post like it's a competitive sport and they're going for gold.

Either because they are teenagers who both have the time and the burning enthusiasm to curate a bunch of stuff, or they're creative and can't stop, or they like to share or they've been doing this for a while or... Well you get the point.

This is far from the first time I've become ensnared in a 'must read the archive' or 'just one more page' whirlpool, I know that subconsciously I recognise the warning signs but there are just so many stories to read, so many pictures to see, so much sass - lovely lovely sass - to revel in that I somehow sail right past them and into the building storm.

In this metaphor my laptop and my phone are little boats, the internet is the ocean and my inability to turn the damn things off or put them down are the dark clouds gathering on the horizon.

On the positive side the 'episodes' are getting milder, I'm not getting quite so caught up for so long and I'm not putting aside things I need to do* in order to read something I find more interesting than real life.


It's the temptation of short-term reward that sucks you in.

Short-term reward saunters up behind long-term goals, belts them over their collective bonces, takes their wallets, and runs cackling off into the night.

The 'yes I'll be cross at myself later if I go back to sleep now BUT it's not later yet and my bed is warm now' reflex is strong with this one.

And if you're reading short stories or looking at great art, or ending up in a never-ending spiral of 'you may also enjoy...' TED Talk or article recommendations, you get the lovely lovely pay off of the story wrapping up or the article or video educating you or the art blowing your mind without having to put much effort in yourself.

Yes, you are reading or watching or looking at the thing but you didn't have to produce it, you didn't have to sit yourself down and put the effort in.

I am getting better but I will be honest, I am still pretty easy to ensnare.

At this point I'm just looking to achieve a better balance and to let long-term goals steer a bit more often as short-term reward has had a good long go at the wheel and probably need to calm down and take a step back.



*With work, or responsibilities that dictate how my life runs

Annual Attempted Self-Improvement-Palooza

Yeesh, time flies!

I had actually forgotten that I'd made any resolutions for last year - thanks, sieve-for-a-brain! - but I managed to do OK, OK here defined as 'achieving my usual 2-out-of-3-ain't-bad success rate'.

I cocked up a few times but my punctuality is better - success!

I did not manage to detach myself from the internet to the degree I'd have liked - dang!

I did do a comic for every day of last year - extra success! - and have decided to keep it up because it's fun :-)

So the attempt to be less internet addicted rolls on as a non-resolution task and here I am, faced with a brand new year.

Hrrrmmm...

What to resolve...?
 OK, here we go.

• Resolution The First: Start Getting Into Gardening Properly
  I have gotten excited about gardening before here, here, here and here but despite my noble intentions I've mostly been doing maintenance fiddling rather than planting anything new or learning anything particularly advanced in the gardening skill set.
  So this year I'm going to buy some plants and then do my level best to keep them alive.
  As I'm doing this resolving in summer this means that there's some things I won't be able to plant until winter/spring but if I manage to plant anything at all I'm going to count that as a success.
  Even if it's a collection of herbs and a tomato plant in a pot grown on my balcony at the flat.
  
• Resolution The Second: Read A Book A Week
  I started recording what I was reading in 2009 and depending on what I was up to that year I got through a varying number of books.
  28 in 2009 (I started keeping the journal in June).
  73 in 2010 (By far the most successful year).
  34 in 2011 (Hey, woah, what happened there...?)
  21 in 2012 (WHAT!?)
  So yes, this year I want to ratchet the reading back up again.
  New stories, new knowledge, new writers to admire, more inspiration.
  I'm going to aim for 52 books, with the loose goal of a book a week and if I manage more than that then I'll just get to be smug about it.
  
• Resolution The Third: Start Sewing
  Remember The Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric I bought?
  This year it is becoming quilts.
  It is becoming at least three quilts and then depending on how obsessed I am with quilting by that stage I'll either make the rest of the material* up into quilts for later** or put the material aside to make the quilts when the time is right.
  I want to try making clothes as well. I've put myself off in the past by imagining getting the measurements wrong and making clothes that don't fit or just cocking up and ruining the material.
  I look at lovely material and hate the idea of screwing it up by cutting it out wrong or ruining it somehow but I'll never learn if I don't squash that aversion down and just let myself make some mistakes.
  

* I bought so much material. 2 m of each of the... maybe 7 patterns?

** Later = when people have babies

Sucked In

There are some books that just absorb you totally. You pick them up, fall into them and you can’t put them down.

Sometimes it’s the subject matter, sometimes it’s how they’ve been written, sometimes it’s the mood you’re in.

It can be a convergence of these elements.

Maybe a character or an event resonates with you.

This is a particular danger for me if I tear through a book in one sitting.

It can cause some very disorientating cognitive dissonance.

When I was a teenager, I curled up in an armchair one afternoon, my legs folded beneath me and read my way all the way through Wendy Orr’s Peeling The Onion.

Just as I was closing the book, the phone rang and I automatically leapt to my feet to go and answer it.

After wrapping myself so completely in a tale of serious injuries and a difficult rehabilitation, I was so amazed that I could actually walk that I almost forgot how and only just saved myself from face-planting.

There are a few books that have grabbed me like this.

At the end of each of the Lord of the Rings books I had to remind myself I wasn’t a hobbit.

At the end of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods I was relieved to find the fate of the world didn’t actually rest on my shoulders.

After Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns I was the most grateful I have ever been to find myself in a life where I am neither endangered or limited in my options by my gender.

As I finished up Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, I once again emerged with surprise into my own life.

I couldn’t identify with the challenges and the self-destructive behaviour that put her on her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail but once she was on it, I was sucked right in.

The exhaustion and fear and doubt and anger and wonder and moments of joy had me.

Even the moments of shocking honesty covering experiences that I didn’t connect with at all weren’t enough to shake me loose, they just drew me deeper into her story.
So when I turned that last page and found myself back in my home, I was surprised and pleased to find my feet were in good nick and I still had all of my toenails.

Like with some other absorbing books, I was also a little... not disappointed... but there's a sort of moment of sadness as you finish the book and step back.

While I don’t ever want to be in a car accident, have to oppose great evil, have to navigate a moral minefield, experience domestic violence and social repression, or lose a loved one or my sense of self so totally, I often envy the key characters the strength they’ve found and the challenges they’ve overcome.

Those victories weren’t without their suffering and loss but they are valuable.

With Wild, I envied Cheryl the sense of self-confidence and self-reliance she built over the course of her journey.

I know that following her trip she had plenty of other issues to work through, plenty of other things she had to achieve before she got to the place she is in now, the place she had to be in to write this book, but she’d already achieved so much.

She had somewhere to begin.

Books like these don’t just capture you for the duration of your reading experience, they also inspire you to look at your life, to try new things and sometimes just open your eyes to certain truths or possibilities.

They don’t come along at regular intervals but when these books turn up, they remind you what the real power of reading is and what it can do for you.

I hope everyone has the chance to experience this, to have their attention so thoroughly caught that disengaging at the end actually feels like a kind of surfacing.

If you have and feel like sharing, please let me know.

I’d love to see if your books can catch me up in the same way.
Even if they don't, just knowing that they've done that for someone else gives them a weight and power.

The Long Haul

This book is going to be the death of me.

This is the second time I've borrowed it out and both times I renewed it twice and this time it's overdue.

A month overdue.

Do you have any idea how much I hate having overdue books out from the library?

It's a lot.

But I cannot cannot CANNOT return this book until I've finished it.

Not this time!

And the really sad thing, the incredibly sad thing, is what the book is.

It's Australian Politics For Dummies.

How much of a dummy do you have to be for it to take you this long to read a book?

I keep picking it up at the end of the day and either I'm too tired and I start nodding off or it's making me tired.

The material is interesting enough but obviously it's very factual and a bit dry and you aren't really motivated to rush to the end and find out 'who did it' because it's politics, they all did it.

I would honestly have chucked it in the first time round except for three things:

1. I refuse to be defeated by any book with 'For Dummies' in the title.
2. This is stuff I really feel I should have a good handle on by now seeing as I'm an adult voting person.
3. I HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN IT DOWN IN MY READING JOURNAL AND ONCE I HAVE WRITTEN IT DOWN IN MY READING JOURNAL I HAVE TO FINISH IT.

The Reading Journal is a sacred trust.
I can't have unfinished entries in my Reading Journal.
It would be unthinkable.
I know a lot of people have rules about how much of their time they'll give a book before they give it up as a bad lot.

Wil Wheaton has said he has a '100 pages or 1 hour' rule and if it hasn't caught his interest by then, it's toast.

I can respect that.

Life is too short to waste it trudging through terrible books.

Normally I don't have that trouble because if a book is truly TRULY that heinous, I'll have noticed before I get around to jotting its details down in the Reading Journal.

Some cruddy books I'll finish out of a sort of perverse bloody-mindedness because I want to be able to tell other people in excruciating detail exactly how bad it was from one end to another.

But this book isn't bad, it's just dense because of its subject matter, and I'm just being weird and lazy about getting it read.

I've been avoiding reading it because I can't be arsed but this means I haven't been reading much else either, and I miss reading, proper reading.

So now I am rolling my sleeves up, taking myself by the ear and not putting up with any more of my rubbish.

I will finish this book in the next few days.

I will return it to the library.

I will apologise profusely and pay my fine.

Then I will get on with my life.

There are too many other books waiting for me out there to let this go on any longer.

And Then There Were Three

In the interest of organisation and simplicity I'm creating two complementary blogs to keep this one company in the cold dark waste of the internets.

Additional Blog #1

I tried formatting my Reading List as a page attached to this blog but after a certain amount of books, the page refused to show any more and either deleted entries from earlier in the piece or didn't show later additions.

After temporarily conceding defeat (i.e. ignoring it for a while), I've finally created a separate blog to list all the books I've read and what I thought about them.

It's as much a personal record as a way to share these books with other people.

I'm afraid my descriptions and reviews tend to run to superlatives and generalisations but I can promise you 'no spoilers' because I have a soul and some common decency.

So here I give you Ricochet's Reading List which I will be bringing up to date shortly.


Additional Blog #2

As one of my freshly made New Year's Resolutions, I vowed to make one comic for every day of this year.

As I've found public accountability a great personal motivator, I've decided to post them all online.

That and the fact that whilst art for art's sake is an excellent and worthwhile pursuit, it really is much more fun when you share it around.

So in order to avoid cluttering up my normal blog space with comics, or allowing myself the cheat of pretending that they pass as normal blog posts instead of writing normal blog posts, I hereby declare this corner of the internet Pinball Panels.

Once I've spent some quality time with my scanner and had a fiddle about with the template settings and whatnot, I hope they will be made welcome and that the elder sister of the three blogs won't feel jealous of the twins and start bullying them.

They're just little, Pinball Mind, they don't know any better!
And they're both kind of one trick ponies so you've really nothing to be worried about.

That's SIR Terry Pratchett, I'll Have You Know

There are some people whose work you just can't imagine your life without.

For me one of those people is definitely Terry Pratchett.

I have been losing myself in his books since I was about 14 and I often find it difficult to believe that so many varied characters, so many worlds could come out of one person's head.

I have trouble believing that some of those characters and places aren't in fact real, because who could have written something so complex and wonderful starting from scratch?

Well, he could.

And he does it in the same way as most of the people I truly admire do such things, by being genuinely and persistently interested in absolutely everything and filtering that interest in through their ears and eyes and then out through their fingers and into their work.

Hearing him speak was a fantastic experience.

I had been a little worried about how he would go as he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007 but apart from the occasional pause to try remember the word he was searching for, he didn't have too much difficulty.

Just hearing about some of the things he has researched for his own interest which may never find heir way into his books was fun, it made me feel like going out to a bookstore and picking up a handful of completely random books and seeing where they take me.

I'm not disappointed that I didn't get to meet him as I tend to believe that I'll make an arse of myself in front of my heroes and wouldn't be able to think of anything original to ask or say.

I might like to have a signed copy of one of my favourite books but apart from the fact I don't think he's really doing that any more, I think I'd be tempted to stop reading it as I would want it to stay pristine for as long as possible and that's not right.
Books are meant to be read.

Speaking of which, now I'm going to have to go home and re-read my entire collection.

It won't take as long as you might expect, familiar words move quickly past the eyes.


[Edit: Ooh look! In July they posted a video of his talk online!]



If you don't like embedded videos, here's the link to the Wheeler Centre webpage instead.

A Chronicle Of Chronicles Chronologically... Chronicled...

Some time ago... oh save me, it was July last year! My life is running through my hands like water and... *coff coff*...

Sorry about that...

Anyway, last year I wrote a post about having re-kickstarted reading properly.

New books!

Books that fired the imagination and stirred the emotions!

Books that scared me or inspired me or made me angry or ecstatic!

Anything except re-reading old favourites for comfort like a self-stunting numpty!

And since then I have read:

• 65 books
• 23 296 pages

I have fallen in love with roughly half the authors and am even more convinced than previously that I probably won't survive the apocalypse for long but that if I do I will more than likely end up a tasty snack for someone else rather than a mighty warlord presiding over a Thunderdome type arrangement in an old car-wrecker's yard.

I've been keeping notes on the books and my opinions of them which I've decided to post in a little separate page attached to this blog which you can find here and posted in the sidebar.

I'm afraid I am very bad at identifying genres so it'll be very much 'thing/other thing/adjacent thing'.

The reviews might not be the most edifying ever written - I'm pretty sure the first draft of one review simply read 'Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!' - but hopefully they'll point you in the direction of some new authors and titles if you care to give them a look-see.

Go forth and read!

The Call

I'm getting that urge again.

As reliable and inevitable as the tides and driven by the turn of the seasons.

It is time to read Dracula for the bajillionth time.

I think everyone has a book that makes very specific repeat appearances on their reading schedule and mine is Dracula by Bram Stoker.
Whatever that says about me.

I have several books that I read at least once a year - American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman amongst them - but Dracula is the only one prompted by weather rather than mood or memory.
The only one I can't say no to.

When the weather cools and a touch of frost enters the air I start thinking of grand old buildings, abandoned and decaying; formal language and a society built on and constricted by convention; strange happenings and otherworldly creatures driven by dark appetites that are only a magnification of our own; the kind of dread that only comes from the gothic classics, from a time when the world was still mysterious, the old world doubly so, when people believed in souls and that they could be lost; of courage and convictions.

And it's time to read Dracula again.

Unanticipated Anticipation

Next week for the very first time I am going to attend a book club.
This as far as I'm concerned is A Good Thing.
I have been very lazy with my reading for quite a while now and this is going to introduce me to new books and authors in a way that will probably snowball and completely decimate my free time.
That's all for the greater good as well. I waste the hell out of my free time.

As I know and quite like the people who are going to be there the only wankery and pseudo-intellectualism I'll have to look out for is my own*, so I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about My Turn.

The rules, as far as I remember them, are:

• We take it in turns to pick the book we're all going to read for that month's meeting
• It has to be something that none of us has read before
• Um... yeah, that's all I remember, that might be it.

The first book chosen was A Thousand Brilliant Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
I've just finished it and it was brilliant.
The pacing of the story and the presentation of the themes were both done in a very effective way and the manner in which the author describes things is deceptively simple and very stirring**.
I'm going to talk about the use of timing so hard on Thursday...
Ahem, excuse me.

Anyway, my concerns are as follows:

• Like I said, I've been fairly lazy with my reading lately so I'm going to have to go looking for new books. Usually I just go down to the library or the bookstore and wait for something to catch my eye.
• I hate, hate, hate recommending books that I haven't read before. What if they're terrible? What if I've just wasted your precious time and made you read something you can't unread? Like many things in life I'm perfectly willing to accept and forgive this sort of thing happening if somebody else does it and treat all knowledge and experiences as valuable in their own way, but if I do it...
• Nobody in the group is a genre-snob but I'm probably a bit more zombie/sci fi/crime fiction oriented than they are. If I pick something in my usual range I'm going to have to make sure it's well written and accessible to everyone rather than just hilarious and/or interesting to me.

But even now that I'm thinking about it on a Freak Outs register of 1 to 10 this is barely registering a 3.
Despite my reservations I am more excited than apprehensive.
Much more excited.
Oh my God I'm going to read so many books!
Deploying Glee in 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1!

Glee!!! ^_^



*I majored in literature in university, I only know one way to talk about books and that is pretentiously.
**See what I mean?

Is There A Problem Ossifer?

I tend to have realisations in cyclical patterns.

I realise something, am astounded, forget about it and realise it again a few months later when it comes up in the rota.

For instance, I am surprised at each change of the seasons by a vague sense of nostalgia, of dejá vu, that this all seems kind of familiar.

As the weather heats up I am amazed each night at how annoying the sheets are getting and how I need to remember to put the fan on before getting into bed.
I have this strange premonition that it’s going to get warmer before it gets colder, seeing as it isn’t even summer yet… but I’m getting off topic.

The astonishing revelation that I am re-experiencing at the moment is that I used to read far more books far more often.
I would knock over a book every day or two easily and have a stack ready and waiting to go on with.

I have no idea when I stopped hitting the library on a semi-regular basis but it coincides suspiciously with my last year of university when I had books being crammed in both of my eye sockets as literary theory was dribbled into each ear.

Determined to right this wrong, I rocked up to the local library, had a bit of a browse and came away with a stack of books. The first one I picked out was Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham which led to another epiphany.
I really need to stop reading crime fiction for about... 20 years.

Not because I don't like it. I think it's fantastic.
It's just all the impassioned, grizzled, principled detectives/policeman are all about 40+ as a rule and when I start getting all misty eyed about their angsty emotional problems and their bad luck with dames and how the system is always against them no matter how many people they save and how they suffer... *coff*

Tom Thorn, Sam Vimes, Salvo Montalbano, Adam Dagliesh* - and many others - all 40 to 50ish and all so very honorable**.

While many 40+ year old men would be A-OK with the idea of a 25 year old woman giving them the glad eye*** it just makes me feel a bit... reverse cradle-snatcher. There's a term for it... not grave-robber, something else... Anyway, back to my point.

The young fictional policeman just aren't that exciting. They're either wet behind the ears and still being taken under the wing of scruffy-but-ethical older detective or they're hot-headed and there to get stabbed up by some psycho for being too overzealous and going in without back-up and dammit, what are we going to tell the kid's mother?
By the time they've been on the job long enough to have an eye for the job and to have suffered enough to be attractively damaged they are getting into that age bracket and I just feel like I'd be taking advantage****.

So the best thing to do would to just put the crime fiction aside for about 10 to 20 years and by the time I came back to it we would be of an age and everything would be fine*****.

Actually probably the best thing to do would be to actually get some sleep once in a while and not get on the internets when in the grips of that out-the-other-side-of-exhaustion bug-eyed clarity. And a nice bottle of Merlot.
Damn Adam Dagliesh.



*Yes Adam Dagliesh is a bit of a ponce but I let him stay on the list as every time I read any P D James I end up making myself really fancy meals and drinking nice wine, P D James really loves talking about food. And clothes. Woolen clothes. Go figure.
**And cynical! And sometimes sarcastic! I really like cynical sarcasm...
***If they actually existed and all...
****If, y'know, they existed...
*****If they weren't fictional characters in books.