Dear Diary

So I got this email just now:

By the time you read this, your manuscripts will have already been rejected.

There's no sense in asking me why or what you could have done differently, because I've already moved on to other stories.

It wasn't you. It was me. I — Awww, who'm I kidding… it was partly you. You didn't make me feel like you were really interested in making this relationship work. I didn't feel any sparks between us. You didn't make me laugh.

This story wasn't a match made in heaven, but the next one may be. Submit again. If you don't, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. And for the rest of your life.

Sincerely,

On the Brighter Side [the magazine I submitted to --Ed.]

PS: I'm keeping the ring.

I like when I get amusing rejection letters*. But nothing has yet topped being called "Ms. Johanneson" by the now-defunct scifi.com.

____

* By which I mean, if I must be rejected, I prefer to be rejected by someone with a sense of humour. (Though I must say that constructive criticism trumps laughs.)

…or "What I had to do for a silver medal".

I'm the one being thrown.

Enjoy!

The throws are, in order:

Uki-otoshi ("floating drop")
Seoi-nage ("shoulder throw")
Kata-guruma ("shoulder wheel")*

Uki-goshi ("floating hip throw")
Harai-goshi ("sweeping hip throw")
Tsurikomi-goshi ("lifting-pulling hip throw")

Okuri-ashi-harai ("sideways foot sweep")
Sasae-tsurikomi-ashi ("blocking lifting-pulling foot throw")
Uchi-mata ("inner thigh throw")

Each one is performed right-handed and left-handed.

__________

* Which impresses everyone, but really isn't that bad of a landing, if you know what you're doing.

I should keep my phone's hands-free speaker away from my credit cards.

So I got a silver in the kata competition. Video will come later, once I've youtubered it.

Tomorrow, sometime, I'll be doing something very much like this:

at a tournament. (Except I only have to do the first nine throws.) Wish me luck!

"Margaret?"

"Yes, luv?"

"Next time you buy tissues, would you be so kind as to buy the kind with the lotion in 'em?"

"And why's that then?"

"See, luv, when I get a cold, usin' them regular tissues is kind of like usin' sandpaper to blow my nose."

"Oh Hubert, you exaggerate so."

"I ask you, wife of mine, do I look like I'm exaggeratin'?"


"Oh my."

IMG_0463.JPG discovered in Elliott les yeux grands fermés's Flickr photostream.

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Flickrblogging explained.

Written today, the 29th of February:

She planted the seed and waited. After a while rain came down from the sky, pelting her skin, chilling her. She shivered but didn't leave, not yet.

The Sun came out, warming the soil, driving the cold from her bones. She waited. Clouds scudded by overhead, in a hurry for some reason. The moon rose, stars wheeled, and then the Sun rose again.

She didn't just wait, of course. She prayed, she sang, she read the old stories, the myths and the legends. On the seventh day she snoozed under a cloudless sky, waking only briefly when a dragonfly happened to touch down on her nose. She observed its cathedral-window wings, irridescent with refracted sunlight, and drowsed once more after it left her.

Rain, Sun, moon, stars: she endured them all. The seedling broke the soil with a questing green curlicue, looking for all the world like a question mark in the Old Tongue. She sat on it and waited more: days, months, decades.

A boy came along and asked her why she’d climbed to the top of the tree.

"I didn't," she said.

TV: Coming up next on NBC: Amnesia, the game show that tests the memory — of you!
Me: Should I trust the writers of a program that couldn't come up with a tagline that scans better, like, say, "the game show that tests your memory!"?

That, by the way, is a rhetorical question.

IMG_3206
Discovered in * MAGNE's Flickr photostream.

She said, "Just a little more helium, if you please," and then she slipped away into the sky. Two days later she touched down in Old Dan's meadow, ankle-deep in wildflowers and foxtail. Something had turned her eyes from drab brown to silver, the colour of sun-kissed clouds, and for her nothing was ever the same again.

She was free now, and she damn well knew it.

______

Flickrblogging explained.

So I changed my little blog header the other day, to read "Specializing in treckle lansing disputes". This is, if you don't know, a nod to Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep, wherein a posting to the Galactic Net (also known as the Net of a Million Lies) from Arbitration Arts Corporation at Firecloud Nebula contains the following:

Arbitration Arts specializes in treckle lansing disputes. As such, we
have few common business interests with natural races or Threats Group.

Now, three or four days later, when I do a Google search for "treckle lansing", this blog is the first hit. Right above all the Russian copies of A Fire Upon the Deep hosted, one suspects illicitly, on the web.

Well, it amused me, anyways.