Five Friday things

1. PBW pushed me off the fence I was sitting on, and I’ve downloaded Marjorie Liu’s Tiger Eye game. It’s very fun, cool music, great graphics, and fun puzzles. Given that the first computer game I ever bought started with “You are in a dark room” and the second one came with Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, this is right up my alley.

2. Oklahoma has gone insane. Check your news source and be amazed with me; doctors are now exempt from lawsuits for practicing irresponsible medicine on pregnant women not to mention committing fraud. Because it’s fraud to have women pay for expensive prenatal testing only to lie to them about the results. Women of OK, this is not OK. You need to be informed, because you need to know if your baby needs an NICU standing by when you give birth, or a specialist lined up for your baby’s care (it can take months to get an appointment), or if you will need to plan on not returning to work after the birth to care for a special needs child, or if you will need more help during your postpartum recovery. These are not minor issues. I would love to see every genius who voted for this handed a special needs baby to care for for a day and see how they like having it sprung on them, except that would be a cruel thing to do to a baby, hand it to somebody who had no idea how to meet their special needs and no time to learn before being faced with the job.

3. I did a mountain of laundry today. Probably at least Rushmore sized.

4. There is some amazing dirt that collects in gutters over the winter.

5. I’m still pissed at Oklahoma.

Lost email

I’ve been having issues with Gmail lately; I find legit emails in my spam folder. When I try to move them to my inbox, they go away. And if I don’t check spam often enough, the system deletes them. So I don’t know how many legit emails I may have missed. Since my business is mainly done via email, this isn’t good. I’ve had issues in the past, which led to my switch to gmail. Will try to get this resolved, but if I can’t, I’ll be looking for another solution. Eeek.

Meanwhile, the 5 messages I just tried to “unspam” from spam have vanished into an electronic void. If you haven’t heard back from me, please email again.

Editing to add: if you have Gmail and have had the same issue, here’s what the husband told me. When a message is moved out of spam, it loses its label, so it ends up in “all mail”. I did go searching through “all mail” and eventually found the messages I’d tried to liberate from Spam yesterday, but you really have to wade.

The humility/confidence paradox

In order to succeed as a writer (or really, in any area) you have to have a peculiar balance of confidence and humility. You have to know when you don’t know it all and be willing to learn from those who know more. But you have to have the confidence to know who you shouldn’t listen to, because somebody can be right and at the same time dead wrong for you.

It takes confidence to say that you disagree with input from a critique group, an agent, an editor because you know that it would be wrong for your story, your voice, your career. But this is not to be confused with arrogance, which doesn’t know when to listen to anybody.

Arrogance and lack of confidence put you in the same place; that of not knowing who to listen to and when. Arrogance never listens to anybody, lack of confidence listens to everybody. The result in both cases doesn’t lead to success.

The best way to avoid falling to either extreme is to know yourself well. Know your work, know why you want to do it, know when even good advice will lead you in a direction you don’t want to go. Know what you are trying to do, and you’ll recognize those who can help you do it better.

Movie season has begun!

So many movies coming up that look like a lot of fun!

Killers – true love is always more fun with guns!
Prince of Persia – yeah, it’s not historical, but it does look entertaining
The Losers – do I even need to comment?
The Last Airbender – I know I keep saying I’m quitting M Night Shyamalan, but I think this one’s going to be good no matter what he does to the ending
The Expendables – Jason Statham and Jet Li together? I’m so there.
The Other Guys – I love Will Ferrill
The A Team – Cheese with a side of cheddar
Salt – Ooo. Is she an innocent victim or does she have an evil agenda?

Yes, you can see why I wanted to contribute to an anthology of Special Ops Romance. What movies are you looking forward to?