Sure, my heads gonna get away from me sometimes.  That’s- you gotta expect that.  If I’m trying to lose weight, if I’m watching my calories of course there’s some sick part of me which is going to want to turn it into something- into something way bigger than it really is.  That’s- it’s normal.  It doesn’t really mean I’m actually doing anything.

So maybe I miss being tiny, maybe some sick part of me misses feeling my ribs and hip bones in the bed at night.  The smile I’d get, the secret triumphant comfort of that smile.  But that’s not what this is about.  This is about a perfectly ordinary, even healthy, desire to regain control of my weight.  Any doctor would advise the same thing.  Any doctor, anyone, any normal woman wouldn’t want to be overweight and neither do I.

So maybe my head goes off, goes into places which are a little darker than a normal dieter.  That doesn’t make what I’m doing, what I’m actually doing rather than what I imagine I might do later- that doesn’t make any of it unhealthy.  It’s not out of control, I know the difference between what I’ve done and what kinds of things I’d do if I was sick again.  I’m going to draw the line, I know I will.  I don’t really want all that sickness back again.

I’m over reacting.  Stop over reacting.  Act normal.  You’re normal now, this is silly, this is hysteria, just act normal.  If you act like it’s a big deal you’ll make it a big deal.  It isn’t a big deal.  IT ISN’T A BIG FUCKING DEAL.  Okay?

I just want to lose a little weight, that’s all.  Like a heroin addict just wants to get a little high. Like any normal overweight woman.  That’s what I am.  That’s all I am, now.

Breakfast with the Flipper

The word breakfast, outflanked on its left by pre-heated-egg-muffin-sandwiches and on its right by Special K-plus-bowl-add-milk and enjoy, surrendered at last to diet coke plus nothing and retreated into fantasies of the 19th century where it had been told words still retained some semblance of their meaning. Miss with the Flipper advanced, filling her cup with soda as she went.

Coke, Diet 2.6 calories. That would be if she still cared about something as nonsensical as the calories in diet soda, which she didn’t. Two point six would have been rounded up to five and noted carefully down under the category: breakfast in her daily journal. Two point six (rounded to five) would then reoccur throughout the day on scraps of paper or in the margins of school notebooks as she re-counted everything starting again from breakfast, just to be super certain. A total projected daily caloric intake would be there too, below a line of tiny penciled figures, and it would be gradually revised downward as the day progressed until it reached about five hundred. Perhaps eight, if she was really trying.

Breakfast for the anorectic is not so much a meal but a condition entered into upon waking which lasts until, approximately, two-thirty in the afternoon. Or four pee em, if one is making a proper effort. Miss with the Flipper has not made such an effort for a wearyingly long time now. She could not tell you to the decimal how many calories she had for breakfast. She doesn’t count such things or keep a running total in her journal. Really the best she could do would be to estimate roughly that yesterday she ate approximately sixteen hundred calories.

Anyway, that’s breakfast sorted. An objection could be entered into the record on behalf of the word “with” as well. A modest preposition, with would not ordinarily be the sort of word to quibble. However there is a question of proximity (not to mention propriety) in applying the word “with” to the case of writing an email response to someone who is not, has never been, and never will be in the physical presence of the emailer.

Miss withthe Flipper rolls her eyes at this. Only a pedant would argue grammar. Flipper might like to argue with her grammar. It reminded her of the way the mole-faced Mrs. Fowe, her third grade teacher, used to insist on parts of speech while she embellished eyes and faces in the voids of Os and zeros in her spelling book. It hardly made a difference what games she played to make the time go faster. Miss Flip always knew all the answers anyway.

If there is a similarity between the child-girl and the adult it must be the way both of them always had the answers. Miss Flip can argue breakfast, with, and even “The Flipper”; which isn’t a name at all but rather the an alias for a nonexistent person. A marvel of this electronic age, she thinks, that one can argue with nonexistent people and have them answer you in the glowing rectangle of your laptop computer. Non-breakfast would be a sad affair indeed without its company.

Perhaps the Flipper would pronounce it a sad affair regardless. Diet coke and email is an acquired taste as breakfast. Flipper had a whole freezer full of bison meat, or so he claimed. If that was true he’d hardly be the type to enjoy sugar-free fizzy water in the morning.

Most likely that claim had to be true, she thought. Who would make up a freezer full of Bison? Well, but who would pretend to be a Nigerian bank manager who needed to deposit a certain amount of money into the bank account of a sufficiently trustworthy American? For that matter, who would claim to be a lesbian science fiction writer? Of the three unlikely email presences at least your average Nigerian had a clear and perfectly understandable motive. No doubt he needs the money too, poor skinny African bugger. Do they have the internet in Africa? Do they have things like banks and telephones and electricity? Surely they just lay about all day starving to death, waiting for rich Europeans to take their picture like some ghastly Parisian fashion models.

Really, Flipper can’t stand accused of having ulterior motives in showing such an interest in our heroine. She’s just so dazzlingly brilliant and witty; anyone making her acquaintance, electronic or otherwise couldn’t keep from being drawn to her. He claims that he’ll stop drinking again after the Holidays. Miss Flip quietly suspects the word of a drunk to be somewhat unreliable on this topic.

Anorectics are more like drunks than the drunks might be comfortable acknowledging. Self-obsessed, highly strung, terrified of nothing so much as the content of their own heads which they’ll do anything to silence temporarily. If they can damage their grey matter permanently so much the better. Miss Flip remembers all the times she seriously considered the prospect of permanent IQ loss as one of the upsides of restricting calories. And alkies may put on a better show with their punched walls and broken furniture but for sheer unrelenting anger and resentment no one beats an anorectic.

Another point: you shouldn’t put odds on either of them remaining too long in recovery.

Drunks have a good deal, in recovery, when you think about it. Church basements, a jovial atmosphere, a guarantee of something which works- if they work it. Put a group of anorectics together and they’ll race each other to the feeding tube. They’ll fill the internet with sticky traps to ensnare a new generation of junior highschool dieters. Anorectics aren’t very nice people at all, really. Miss Flip hates them with a passion when she isn’t wishing she could just go back again. Just once more, for all the marbles. She’d really show those bitches how it’s done, this time. If only she thought that she could handle it.

That’s why the single most important fact for her to keep in mind is that she can not handle it. However gigantic her ego, regardless of whether she’s always has the answers. She. Can’t. Handle. It. Not for a few pounds, not for a few months, not just until the holidays or until all her best clothes start fitting. Once she starts that way she’ll keep on going until she’s in a hospital, or ought to be at any rate. She can’t handle it. Not again. In fact she’s not so Flip now, when she thinks about it that way. Odds are she might not make it back next time. Odds are her luck’s been pushed. Best she take care lest she push too far, while thinking she can handle it.

if you’ve read this entire monstrous thing please visit my more lighthearted site, threenewstories.wordpress.com trust me, you need to laugh more often

This is new, something I wrote today in my workshop.  But why don’t you check out http://threenewstories.wordpress.com to see the brand new blog I’m starting?

She didn’t need new clothes.  Not really.  Or a new coat, either, because she had the old one her mom had given her from last year.  Need is a funny thing.  Not something she was comfortable admitting to.

Her two pairs of jeans were size 14- but with a big oversized sweatshirt no one could see the cord she threaded through her belt holes to keep them falling off, so that was fine.  Okay, maybe the fabic was a little thin for winter but she could always wear them over her black stretch leggings if it was cold out.  Maybe even do without the cord that way, a string really, which she’d whipped out with a snap of breaking stitches from one of the hooded sweatshirts.

So clearly there was no actual need to stand under florescent lighting hoping the fitting room attendant would be neither young nor thin nor stylish.  No need to be cold and decked out in goosepimples as she shivered the jeans on and tried to find a sweater which wasn’t itchy.  Even less need for the dress.  It’s just that it looked so frickin cute there on the hanger.  Like it was saying “Hiya cutie, why don’t we get to know each other better?”

The moment in the mirror, though, now that was necessary.  Everyone needs to look at themselves once in a while and think “Yeah, okay, I’d do her.”

Did a reading in front of people yesterday, very scary but went okay I hope.  Also had a workshop in the morning, and one of the exercises was to take your favorite novel and write about what happened before it started.  I chose Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, and wrote the following:

Before I was Timequake I was Kurt Vonnegut.  No, wait.  Go back you fraud!  Vanessa Vitiello is trying to say something about Kurt Vonnegut.  Sure she is.

Kilgore Trout, the famous alter-ego of Kurt Vonnegut, the famous alter-ego of Vanessa Vitiello, woke up one morning and decided he was tired of having all the shots called for him.  Instead of being written by Kurt Vonnegut he came up with an insane idea to have Kurt Vonnegut as a character in a science fiction story of his own devising.  Also Vonnegut’s sister, who committed suicide.  So Kilgore Trout came up with a contraption, half-typewriter, half-time machine, half-zombie, to trap Vonnegut as a character in one of his own novels.

Before Vonnegut was Kurt Vonnegut in the not-as-appreciated-as-it-should-have-been novel Timequake, he was a guy called Kurt.  Vonnegut, as it happened.  But you don’t really believe that, do you?

The zombie/type-writer/time-machine tried to say something deep about the character of human existence.  Being a machine it got it wrong, of course, but since the character of human existence is to get things wrong nobody minded.

Also, World War II.  Just so you know how serious this is.

Right, that’s it then.  Gosh I wish I’d been Kurt Vonnegut, a a writer!  I never try to actually write like him because that’s just pathetic, but when I had an excuse I was pathetically eager to try my hand at it.

Geek Tragedy mentioned my blog on their podcast, which was awful nice and made me think I ought to put some sort of recent sci-fi up, on the off chance that someone will expect this blog to contain that sort of thing after they said it did.

So, here’s something I wrote a couple days ago, just a fragment I’m afraid because I’m hoping someone will publish the real work I’ve been doing.

It takes two minutes journey through the snowplain from Antarcticae to Arctica Uno.  Two minutes via magway, and the magway doesn’t mind the cold but even for two minutes I sure do.

The only thing more frozen than the snowplain is the sky above it.  That sky could suck the warm from anything.  It tries to do it too, believe me.  By the second minute you’re just about sure your toes and fingers will never move again, and you entertain fantasies about your soul itself condensing and sublimating to join the whiteness of the sky and plain around you.  Then finally two minutes is finished and you’ve made it at least as far as to the forest which surrounds Arctica Uno, where there are trees enough to keep a pocket atmosphere, and the atmosphere is sufficient for the magway to be heated.

It’s not a pleasant journey.  But if the doctors say the human body can heat itself enough to last two minutes who am I to argue?

Thank you, Geek Tragedy podcast.  You sure have good taste in SGOTI science fiction writers if I do say so myself.  Also, when discussing sci-fi westerns I was waiting for a Trigun reference, or maybe Cowboy Bebop?

“Excuse me, do you by any chance have cat food, kitty litter?”

“There.” I said, and pointed. I said “there” with as heavy accent as I could inject into a single syllable to make her think that I could not speak English.

“Oh thank you. I just moved down the street. The street, you know, Lawrence Avenue?” She pointed. I said nothing.

“I have a little black and white cat, you see, and I realized that I hadn’t brought his food or anything else for my itsy-kitty-cat.”

I continued to say nothing. This became a victory when the foolish middle aged woman with the frizzy hair turned at last in the direction I had pointed. She came back without another word and put the items on the counter.

“Cash. You see?” I told her, pointing at the number which had lit up on my register. She handed me a $20. I made change and then I put the cat food in a bag and let the silence explain to her that I expected her to leave now.

I only talk to parrots. Eager-eyed American women fail to interest me.

Well, you may have noticed this poor blog may be dying. It served me well, until it didn’t. Like all such internet wonders it may one day rise again, as nothing really dies in the age of everything, but perhaps it will just fade away until one day consumed within a singularity.

I thought for those that still check in on me, though, I might as well give you an update. I’m focusing all my energy on writing the sorts of things which might one day be deemed worthy enough for publication somewhere. Writing on the blog was a great crutch, and one I’ll use again if I stop being able to write without an audience, but I’ve learned to work without it.

My new project is the longest thing I’ve tackled yet. Definitely headed for novella length at least, which I have mixed feelings about. I like the story enough to commit more time to it, though, and I have a few more ideas on the back burner which I’ll turn to if my interest fades.

The new thing is about a culture built on an asteroid wired throughout with explosives. Every citizen wears around their neck a detonator which would allow them to blow their entire little world to pieces, killing themselves and everybody else. I find the idea fascinating, if everyone had the ability to destroy everyone else if they were treated poorly or unfairly how would that change peoples behavior? And would it all go horribly wrong? (lol, of course it would!) Thus making it an excellent setting for a story.

The Folly of Revelation

With this volume we seek primarily to instruct and advise, and not direct, our student deities. Alas, in the special circumstance of Revelation or telling the truth about one’s nature to one’s more sentient creations, we must advise against it in the strongest terms possible. We warn the consequences are unlikely to be pleasant ones. The plain truth of there being a creator is a dangerous one to have too plainly put to those created.

Why this is so seems obvious, but too many young gods have, out of the noblest of intentions or in simple curiosity, designed to place themselves before their people in simple honest terms and come later to think better of it. The likely outcome is that the apocalypse will have to be moved up and a fresh world begun the damage is so irrevocable.

In the purer more ignorant corners of reality a god or a creator is theory only, to be written and preached about, contemplated, argued over, and ultimately each man or woman can for themselves create a god which most suits their own innermost desires. The created become the creators and the equations balance.

In the unnatural instance of god appearing in unambiguous glory for all to see and then repeating this upon request so that no question of the nature of creation can remain unanswered there is an odd effect of the benighted deity, however great in actuality, not quite living up to the imagination of a deity. Accusations of being not god but technologically superior alien or computer programmer running creation as a simulation are thrown about and the world as created begins to seem a poorer place for being all at once less mystical.

Remember, the root of the mystical is the mysterious. When the mysterious is cruelly translated into a set of facts it loses everything and gains nothing.

I do not venture out in light, and dark has terrors far more fearsome than myself. Light is a cruel tale-teller. Better to go out in the rain when her sweet whispers can cover and conceal my faces. In rain the people on the street look down and look away, eyes blinded by the tears of angels, so they cannot see me. The rain is my cloak of invisibility. It hides their eyes so I can pace the sidewalk in the open without a glance or word of scorn in my direction.

The rain is my cloak of many colors. When I awake to hear a downpour on my windowpanes I dress and take my black umbrella with me to the store where I immediately make a purchase of another black umbrella. I make the the old one dry as best I can and hang it from my wrist as off I go under my new one looking for a worthy soul to pass the old one on to. Somewhere trying to avoid a puddle while holding a shirt or newspaper ineffectually above her head I find her and I tell her I’ve just bought a new umbrella so look here, it seems I have a spare. It’s not nearly so nice as this new one I’ve got but it might do some good for you, young lady.

I stay just long enough to see her grateful smile but not so long until it turns to hatred when she sees who she’s been thanking so profusely.

The rain is of course also my enemy, and I curse its wetness and the impossibility of keeping trouser legs completely out of puddles. I am one with a thousand choruses of curses echoing throughout the city and our common enemy, the rain, brings us a sort of closeness. The rain is my shield, for you would not seek to embrace a dripping mass of flesh and cloth and anyway our umbrellas project force fields to the ground preventing us from brushing up against each other accidentally. When I am safe from you I can be one of you after the rain has made us brothers.

Another rejection today, with comments that clearly showed the editor had read the story. It was the same guy or the same publication who did the same last time.

It’s hard to feel good about rejection. I know, I KNOW that persistence is 90% of success in this game. I know I’m happier as an unpublished writer than a failed social worker or even back before the dawn of time when I was still an on-track social worker. I know that trying and failing puts me in with all the writers who I count as heroes, who had to try and fail and try again a hundred times before they started making progress.

It’s just hard not to see rejection as… rejection. Not good enough. Nothing special. Wasting my time, wasting the time of the poor editors forced to read my story alongside a hundred or a thousand other hopeful selfish grasping writers wanting their name, their story, their idea to be the one that finally attracts attention.

Intriguing setting, but the story never caught fire for me. So goes my hanging city, and on to the next editor who likely will not be so kind as to give me even that much of a comment.

I want my ideas to echo through the collective consciousness. I want money, damnit, and respect and pity. Not self pity, I’ve got plenty of that already, thank you.

I want to be Vonnegut. I want to be Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Charles Dickens. I want to be Homer but all I am is just one more Odysseus.