Entries tagged with writing

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Tower of the Wizard King

hey y'all, i made a zine for CGR this year and you can download it for free here: https://raxraxraxraxrax.itch.io/tower-of-the-wizard-king-a-zine

it's about plurality, differential consciousness, and a board game from 1993 that has been literally living in my head for almost thirty years.

i'd be tempted to post it to dreamwidth in its entirety but formatting with images here is a pain so instead here's a preview:

printed pieces of paper over a game manual saying "The Tower of the Wizard King: a fox to recognize traps, a lion to scare away wolves (a pangolin to protect, a coyote to scavenge, a snow leopard for some reason) comic by rax e. dillon

if you check it out, i hope you enjoy it!

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/119616.html

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One Way Of Becoming-Animal: Furriness and Abuse

This post discusses trauma, abuse, gender, furry, and theory. It's written kinda flowery-like, but fuck it, I feel flowery. Please read it if you'd like. <3

( I am become menagerie. )

( footnotes )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/83066.html

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weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek

I've listed my house for sale; I'm hoping to keep my losses under 10K. Ow. I'm very lucky to begin with to (a) own a house and (b) be able to soak a loss of 10K not happily but without serious suffering. I am totally in the first world problems zone here, maybe the 0.5th world problems zone. Nonetheless... Ow. Chances I will still be living here in three months? Vanishingly slim. I'm in touch with a realtor in Tucson; obviously I'm not picking a new place until I am For Sure Absolute Reals guaranteed a position there, but things look likely and I feel confident and so that's the plan I'm working with. I may even have a full house on arrival, but I don't want to jinx that too much, so I'll talk more about it later.
You may be unsurprised to hear that despite no longer being in classes at all, I am only a bit less busy than I was a month ago, thanks to work eating more of my time and having to deal with the house and Arizona stuff and all manner of nonsense and froofery. I'm way less stressed, though if you hadn't seen me a month ago you probably wouldn't believe that given how stressed I still am, but if you did, you know. :)
As part of being less stressed, and also as part of having a houseguest, I've been making more interesting food recently! I've done vegan pizza a couple of times, seitan lentil curry, vegan chicken fried steak (inspired by though different from this recipe), pancakes... we're talking about doing some kind of seitan in cherry-currant sauce over couscous tonight, though we have a bunch of oil left over from last night and we might just see what's left in the house that we can fry. :) We were mumbling about onion rings...
In the last few weeks I've learned that, upon re-reading my prose, I can usually take a few words out of every paragraph and improve the paragraph by so doing. I think this is a fine thing, as long as I remember to go and do this all the time. I suspect that some of my older writing may be hella wordy, unless using crazy long clauses is something I've picked up recently by reading crazy long-winded philosophers. Either way oh my god I keep catching myself using five words to say things like "to" or "and." ^^;; This may have something to do with why I always find myself struggling against the top edge of wordcount limits and not the bottom one... (see also last semester's 12000 word final paper, which was just ridiculous)
Speaking of which, that paper's been in submission --- revised, down to 8000 words --- to a journal for almost two and a half months. I suspect I am at least going to get a peer review back... This is exciting and also terrifying. Oh, I have a talk proposal out to a conference, too. I need to submit more of those this summer; I have a couple of papers that are some revision away from a reasonable conference talk, I think. And one paper that... man, I like the theoretical moves I was making, but I dunno about the paper as a whole. I may take one section out of it and build it into something else and let the rest go. I'm gonna sit on it for a while and then come back to it and see what I think.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/73756.html

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Weekly Week Post

It was supposed to be 36 today. Instead it is snowing again. I know I don't get to whine to the people in Boston, whose life literally is snow, but for ~everyone else: *whiiiiiiiiiine* There's this horrible layer of ice below everything and I don't know how I'm going to shovel and rrrf. And so much for my plan of going to Trader Joe's (a 90-minute drive away on a good day) this morning. I will have to make do with the food I have here for another day or two I guess. Maybe I will put on eight layers and trudge to the co-op later, except I am kind of worried I will slip and fall into traffic.
Had two dreams last night, one a horrible nightmare about something bad happening to my cat (turns out real-world-cat was out of food, and if this is what happens, I am feeding him before bed every night from now on), and the other a dream that I did an in-class exercise with my students on Tuesday that I woke up to and concluded actually that's a really good idea and penciled it into my lecture notes. Um, thanks, subconscious, I guess?
Speaking of cats, Selene has accepted Leo's smell at this point --- I can smell like him and still pet her, although other people are not yet afforded the same privilege because she is Selene --- but has not accepted Leo. This is OK. They each have two floors of house to themselves and spend plenty of time looking at each other without having to definitely interact. This is really good, no one is doing anything destructive, and hopefully in another month or two they will share space without it being a huge thing. (Although when Leo tries to come within five feet of Selene, she hisses and he runs to the basement. But this is like a zillion times better than Oolong's response, which was to run right up to Selene. I think it will be fine.)
Apparently I can still have outside interests while fulltime in both grad school and the tech industry; I wrote, revised, and submitted a story to an anthology in the last month. I don't know where I found the time either. (Well, I have some idea; I spent a lot of time in airports this month. Wasn't much else to do once I got tired of homework really.) Also, as a random writing-practice thing, the story I wrote was one continuous scene of around 6000 words. Those of you who have had the [mis]fortune of reading my writing in the past know that my fiction used to be broken up into discontinuous scenelets of 500-1000 words a piece, which was also cool but was not optimal in that I was doing it all the time as opposed to when the story called for it. Over the last couple of years (as pushed, gently, by a particular professor in my MA program) I've been working to write longer scenes and see what sort of different things I can do in that situation; at this point it's rather easy and two of the last three stories I've written (as well as the more recent novel chapters, not that anyone has seen those at all) have been a single sustained block of prose. The next thing on my list is decidedly not, but on purpose; it feels very nice to have developed this new skill and be putting it into practice. Hopefully the editor I submitted to will think so too. *fingers crossed*
People who know this sort of thing: ( talking about money which I guess is potentially rude? )
Also scwizard claimed I wasn't going to get my tax paperwork in order this weekend, and just to be contrary I think I have it all in one place already? :) Though I may be missing things I don't know I need, I at least have enough to take to the accountant and be like "uh hi help which things should I bring you, you clearly don't want the entirety of my filing cabinet." So that's another thing off my tasklist. Hooray.