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And Many Things He Hopes Not to Hear

I’m writing from a prompt I was to have written to for my writing group last month. So at least you know that I’m behind everywhere.

That prompt: you leave the baby’s occupied car seat on the hood of the car. When you drive away the car seat and the baby roll off the hood and bounce into the street. The baby’s fine but the next day you must fess up to your spouse. Write that scene.

I should note that two couples in our group are pending their first child–I’ve got four. Still.

“Um, so…when I took the baby…”

“Veronica.”

“Right. When I took Veronica to Loews yesterday while you were napping I kinda forgot something.”

“You want me to watch her while you go back to get it? What? The caulk?”

“Dammit now I forgot two things. Well, one thing still really.”

“I’ll watch her. You can go. I’m fine. I put the keys up on the hook and I think I saw your wallet in the door.”

“OK, cool, but this was different than that. I…ileftthebabyonthehoodanddroveaway.”

Everything in the room stands still. Then his wife carefully places the fork on the edge of the plate next to her eggs. It tinks. She’s clearly considering what to say next; he’s running down the list of things he expects to hear and many he hopes not to hear.

The husband wishes he’d admitted to fucking the receptionist at work instead.

“Thank you for telling me that. Now I should tell you something too.”

“…”

“Ididthesamethinglastweek.”

“OK then.”

“We should probably try not to do that again.”

“Yeah. Probably not.”

269 words on day 493

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Making the Germans Less Crucial

Eventually we had no other course but to accept we’d been built by German engineers.

I’d really hoped that one line would carry me on into something drastically interesting. I’ve even sort of saved it for a time when I could capture the outpouring that would certainly follow.

But it chokes me.

I get hung up on that fact that I don’t know the least bit about German engineers (nor Japanese scientists–who briefly held that creatorial slot while I was down on the Germans). Also, I kept using ‘recourse’ in my head as I was working the phrasing out. After a couple passes I couldn’t remember if recourse was even a word. Just now I typed ‘choice’ then edited it to ‘course’ and all seemed well. Or, at least, weller.

I was having trouble tying the knot between their realization that they’d been built and who might have built them, but then ‘accept’ just flowed right in so I was good. Which leaves me still sorting out the damn Germans.

Assuming this phrase of mine would lock down the first sentence of a longer work it loses all it’s heft when you make up an entity to replace the Germans. As readers, we all know what a German engineer stands for: quality, excellence, capability, and reality. We know that German engineers can’t build anything sentient–since no one can–but if they did that sentience would be premium grade. So the twist is in the conflict between reality and what I’m writing. As soon as I replace them with elven mages, dwarven smiths, or Atlantean crafters the soup thins to broth.

So now I’ve got to learn enough about German engineers to make this worth following up on or find a way to make the Germans less crucial.

300 words on day 492

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Email Woes

Day 491

Lets just say I spent more of my writing time investigating things than I should have. I’ve been considering running this blog through Posterous. Which means I first wanted to make sure that I was truly dissatisfied with the native email to WP functionality. Sadly, even the straight text I do here suffers just a bit when I try the email thing since it doesn’t handle HTML and since either have to click a special link or embed some code to do it for me or run a CHRON job. Sure I can do all these things but I’d lose tags and the minor bit of formatting I do with the day and word counts.

Also, no plugins for email to post? WTF? They’ve got WP plugins that’ll fuck my cat each time I post, but nothing for converting HTML email and attachments into a post?

So I guess Posterous is more groundbreaking than I thought. It’s just not clear what the deal is for importing an existing blog then whipping it back around into a owned domain. Subdomain. I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure the A record is for the whole enchilada. Not just the cheese.

In other news, I’ve also been trying to look for information about short URL sites. I found some roll-your-ownish tutorials that look to be better than the crap apps I’ve found for this. Not to rile up the Bit.ly pro folks, but who’s a guy gotta blow to get a slot in the beta? If you’re gonna be free be free. If you want me to pay then cobble me up a PayPal button. Don’t be free, but stingy and leave me no choice but to make your brand my brand.

294 words