Financially, this was not as good a year as last. Between the trips to Mum, an unusual amount of travel, the move (and some time lost from TYG’s surgery) that’s not really surprising.
While I didn’t make as much as I would have back at The Destin Log, I still wound up with more take-home pay (despite paying state NC tax as well as federal). The added costs of home-ownership are biting into that, though I look forward to taking expenses for my home office off the tax bill (it’s only about 7 or 8 percent, based on the percentage of the house it occupies, but it still counts).
For next year, barring disasters (and there’s no guarantee they’ll be barred, of course) I should make more. Demand Media articles have been a steady income stream since I moved up here. I must admit I would like to broaden it though. Just as a practical point, having more clients is a hedge against anything going wrong, and while Demand’s pay is good, some markets pay more. And having a variety of projects just makes things more fun.
Regrettably, none of the other stuff I’ve tried this year—Hyperink, a ghost-writing gig, my newspaper freelance pieces, one magazine article (the magazine asked for a quick turnaround, then apparently folded before ever publishing an issue. Which happened to me once before, but at least that time I got paid for it)—paid as well. Which is no reflection on them (okay, it’s a reflection on the defunct magazine, but otherwise). And in the newspaper stories, it’s mostly my fault—I’m working as if I were still an employee on the clock, when as a freelancer I need to be much more efficient.
This was enough of a problem that I actually turned down a shot at being one of About.com’s City Guides—it could have turned into a lot of work and ended with me not getting anything out of it if I wasn’t picked. I couldn’t afford that.
I have a variety of nonfiction, non-Demand Media projects I intend to work on this year, and I plan to be more aggressive about sending out queries for jobs, articles, etc. But I will have to structure my time so I don’t actually hurt my bottom line.
One way, as I’ve said before, is to do slightly less Demand stuff each week—about three hours a week should do for now. I can also try putting in more writing at lunch and saving nonwork stuff like cleaning until the evening (when as I’ve noted before, my interest in hanging with my wife tends to outweigh everything else). There are other dodges I can try; I may experiment a bit to see which works best.
Despite my frustrations, I’ve been supporting myself freelancing for three years now, and (again barring disasters) there’s no reason I can’t keep going. So if I’m not scaling stratospheric heights yet, that’s still pretty cool. Huzzah!
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Money, money, money: The year in financial review
Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals
And everything else
Ang Lee’s version of LIFE OF PI (2012) is beautiful to look at but didn’t work as well for me as I’d hoped. The story of an eccentric young “Catholic Hindu” (“I feel guilty before thousands of gods.”) trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger feels very different when I can actually see the tiger and the trackless ocean and that gave it a very different feel. Still worth seeing though. “My father was right—Richard Parker wasn’t my friend.”
AD INFINITUM: A Biography of Latin and the World It Created by Nicholas Ostler looks at how Latin rather than say, Etruscan or Gaelic became first the lingua fraca of Europe. Ostler unsurprisingly finds that the military power of Rome (and the Romans’ fondness for settling retired soldiers throughout the outlying provinces, giving Latin some speakers everywhere) and then of Christianity (which originally embraced Latin as a vernacular easy-to-understand alternative to Greek) gave Latin a standing that subsequent shifts in history couldn’t erase (with exceptions—an English plague may have wiped out enough Latin speakers that Anglo-Saxon moved in). Ostler shows how the same reverence that led to Latin surviving as a language for intellectuals had the side effect of freezing it in place so that the Latin of two millenia ago became the default setting (which led to glorifying Cicero as the Ultimate Latin Master). Dryer than Ostler’s Empires of the Word, but still interesting.
HARROWING THE DRAGON is a collection of Patricia McKillip short stories ranging from a look at what happened the morning after Romeo and Juliet ended (“Did he break into his tomb and stab her when she was already dead?”), a quest for wealth that encounters “The Lady of the Skulls” (which works even though anyone can see where it’s headed) to a reworking of Beauty and the Beast (“The Lion and the Lark”) among others. Not all successful, but as a McKillip fan, I was satisfied.
THE TRIALS OF FALLEN ANGELS by James Kimmel, Jr. has a dead lawyer learn her job in the afterlife will be to help defend the lives of the recently departed in Heaven’s courts, which forces her to question the nature of justice and the forgotten circumstances of her own death. This was the attorney author’s attempt to work out his own thoughts on the balance between Legal Justice and Christian Forgiveness, but the result fell flat for me. Admittedly lengthy, literary scrutiny of people’s day-to-day lives isn’t something that I go for, but some books, such as Fifth Business, have the flair to make it work. Not this one though (the deeper philosophical issues didn’t do it for me either—this was about as effective as Defending Your Life).
The last Christmas stuff
Actively looking for different Christmas movies/specials from my usual favorites was so much fun, I may try an all-new list next year (Family Stone, Love, Actually, Four Christmases for starters). But for now—
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947) was one old favorite I did catch, as Edmund Gwenn reluctantly steps in as Macy’s new Father Christmas (“I’m not in the habit of substituting for spurious Santas.”), whereupon his conviction he’s the real thing upturns the lives of struggling lawyer John Payne, rationalist store employee Maureen O’Hara, fatherless daughter Natalie Wood and even gets Macy’s and Gimbel’s department stores to team up (that must have been every bit as unbelievable back when their rivalry was legend). Always a charmer (avoid the two remakes like the plague) “Your honor, the state of New York concedes the existence of Santa Claus!”
BAH, HUMDUCK!: A Loonie Tunes Christmas (2006) on the other hand, doesn’t work at all—the story of ruthless corporate tycoon Daffy forcing his employees to work on Christmas Day spends way too much time showing his meanness (and not coincidentally, cameos of pretty much every Warner Brothers character on his staff) leaving for a very rushed redemption arc (and as Atomic Anxiety put it, what does it say that the Tasmanian devil is the least violent ghost?). Bugs has next to nothing to do but stand around kibitzing. A flop. “You look like you’ve been hit with a kitchen.”
MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) is, of course, the heartwarming story of a baby born in a manger and visited by three wise men (“Sorry. Wrong manger.”) that then goes on to satirize religion (“Forsake the sandal—follow the gourd!”), the radical left (“We are the People’s Front for Judea, not the People’s Judean Front.”) and Rome before coming to a very black-humored end. One that works even if you don’t get the underlying references (and I suspect some will slide right by people). “My wife’s name is Incontinenta Buttocks.”
A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983) was once again our Christmas-morning viewing, as a young boy dreams of getting a Red Ryder BB gun (“With a compass in the stock and the thing that tells time.”) for Christmas despite everyone insisting he’ll shoot his eye out. During the course of the film, Darren McGavin gets a major award, little Ralphie says fudge (“Only I didn’t say ‘fudge.’”), a tongue sticks to a lamp post and Little Orphan Annie tells Ralphie to eat his ovaltine. Delightfuly “You used up all the glue in the house—on purpose!”
While I haven’t seen the new Doctor Who season, I did catch DOCTOR WHO: The Snowmen Christmas Day to find the Doctor retreating into Victorian times to brood, only to have an adventurous governess, a Silurian detective (“You’re the one Mr. Doyle has based his short stories on.”) and a Sontaran take on a mysterious army of thinking snowmen plotting to conquer the world (guided by Ian McKellan’s voice no less). The monsters weren’t the most convincing (fanged snowmen are still just snowmen) but this worked for me, and turns out to have an unexpected tie to a past foe (I won’t say more for fear of spoilers). If nothing else, the Victorian-era characters are awesome. “I’m a reptile woman from the dawn of time and this is my wife.”
Rereading A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens for the first time in years, I was struck by Scrooge in the opening coming off more as an elemental force than a human being, one who drives off beggars and carollers by his mere presence, which makes his thawing, if anything, seem surprisingly fast (reflected, of course, in the Sim CAROL). Certainly gives me fresh appreciation for Dickens as a writer, describing Scrooge at one point as “Hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out a generous fire.” and for why the tale has endured so many years.
And while I’m online …
A few links.
•My new And column looks at the religious right’s response to Sandy Hook. Surprise! It’s all liberals’ fault for hating God.
•Digby points out that for a champion of freedom, NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre sure is willing to swell the numbers of police and create Big Brotherish databases. LGM observes that LaPierre to the contrary, it doesn’t take an armed man to stop an armed gunman. More links here.
•A pundit concludes that when it comes to saying horrible things about Sandy Hook, Both Sides Do It. FAIR disagrees. And Piers Morgan calling for gun control has led to right-wingers demanding Obama deport him for attacking the Constitution! And Ross Douthat gets confused about who’s making outrageous accusations.
•Slate points out that if guns made us safer, why are police and Homeland Security getting more oppressive as gun ownership swells.
•Yacht owners in Newport are outraged the city expects the owners who rent the most dockspace to contribute the most to a harbor renovation. This Ruthless World notes that these Galtian overlords are still sponging off the government for most of their dockspace, but claim their Christmas yacht display justifies a welfare subsidy. Speaking of Going Galt, Roy Edroso spots a rightblogger whose vision of Galtian withdrawal includes getting a government job, then goofing off.
•A women storeclerk gets raped and robbed. Police conclusion: She made up the rape to cover up her own theft.
•The death of right-wing pundit Robert Bork prompts LGM to mock his standing as a martyr to political correctness. For those too young to remember, Bork was a right-wing Supreme Court nominee who opposed the right to privacy, civil rights legislation and thought the First Amendment should be reserved for purely political speech (however you define that). He got flak for his positions, which outraged the right-wing, much the way Republicans squeal that anyone would suggest they’re waging a war on women.
•A man hits on his employee, then fires her because his wife is upset. The Iowa Supreme Court concludes it’s the employee’s fault for looking good.
•A European court finds the CIA guilty of torturing a German citizen.
•Paul Krugman reminds us that if the people predicting fiscal collapse if we don’t slash the deficit were right, we’d have already collapsed: “the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult.” CEPR adds some numbers. FAIR wonders on what parallel Earth Entitlement Reform and Closing Tax Loopholes represent radical political ideas.
•Pope Benedict and Saudi Arabian Muslim clergy worry women are getting uppity.
•The new movie Zero Dark Thirty has generated controversy for its depiction of torture as a necessary evil. I haven’t seen it, but here’s feedback from a couple people who have.
•Twelve months of batshit rightblogging.
•Here’s a very oddball evolutionary theory about how men’s sex drives have shaped our fists.
Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Undead sexist cliches: Men are supposed to be heroes, women should just cringe and cry
Back after the gunman started shooting in Aurora Colorado and three men died shielding their girlfriends, right-winger William Bennett wrote a long paean to their heroism. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he hoped the women were worth dying for (charming fellow, isn’t he?).
Fast forward to Sandy Hook, where the principal died trying to stop the shooter, and other female teachers risked themselves getting kids to safety. Charlotte Allen’s response? The school was too feminized! Nothing but a bunch of wimpy clingy women with no big strong men around to save them okay the women did some neat stuff but seriously girls.
An NYT piece concludes that what drives men like Lanza to kill is that women no longer defer to them and look up at them as shining knights in armor, champions to admire.
All of which, as I noted at the first link, reminds me a lot of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream. Enough that it’s worth re-discussing.
Faludi’s thesis is that after 9/11—an attack in which the majority of victims were men, and some responders were female—was overwhelmingly portrayed as a crisis in which heroic men save sobbing, terrified women. Faludi then looked at how the same images cropped up in the 19th century, when dealing with Indian wars and the abduction of white women: The facts some women fought off their captors while the men fled and that other women chose to stay with the tribe got airbrushed out in favor of women who suffer stoically until the men show up and save them (I think there’s a lot of this in the passive captive women of Burroughs’ Mars books).
Apparently the attitude that heroism is or should be a male province is still with us. Allen, for example, went on to claim “our culture that denies, dismisses, and denigrates the masculine traits—including size, strength, male aggression and a male facility for strategic thinking–that until recently have been viewed as essential for building a society and protecting its weaker members… Women are less aggressive by instinct, and they are typically trained to be nice.” (as noted at the link, Allen’s claim there were no men present that day was wrong, but her response was that No, That Proves I’m Right). No surprise that Allen doesn’t let the teachers’ heroism get in the way of her imagination; in a previous piece on how stupid women are, Allen dismissed all evidence that women are as intelligent as men as “outliers” so it didn’t count.
In a sense, the NYT piece goes a step further. It doesn’t dump on the women of Sandy Hook, but author Christy Wampole laments that Odysseus and the Round Table are no longer shining symbols of manhood, that while some men are heroes or “paragons of success,” men are falling behind. It’s mostly a Decline of Men piece about how men are traumatized by having to let women have equal rights, but the emphasis on heroism, on how men need to be women’s heroes (and how women should treat them more deferentially to snuff out the spark of rage that leads to killings) seems to fit with the other stuff above.
Frankly, I’m not sure there was ever a time when everyone looked up to men as heroes just by the accident of their gender. The 1950s images of masculinity included plenty of stuffed shirts and ineffective husbands. But the belief that the pre-feminist world presented the average man as a paragon is one that crops up a lot (as noted at the link).
The teachers of Newtown were heroes. Allen’s arrogant dismissal of their bravery is repulsive.
Filed under Undead sexist cliches
Zeitgeist again: War for the Oaks
Reading War For the Oaks almost 25 years after its publication, I wonder if it isn’t one of those works (like Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Boris the Bear) that won’t age well.
The 1987 Emma Bull novel is set in Minneapolis. The protagonist, Eddi is chosen as a human participant in a turf war between the Seelie and Unseelie courts of Faerie (a mortal champion’s presence negates faerie immortality, so without one, nobody dies and the battle never ends). She is less than enthused (they didn’t ask nicely) and has to balance her coerced obligations with her efforts to set up a new band.
The book was (I believe) one of the groundbreakers in urban fantasy with its depiction of faerie forces at play in a down-to-Earth Minneapolis. As with a lot of groundbreaking books, it suffers from reading it years later because what was once novel is now routine (although Charles DeLint’s Jack the Giant Killer came out at about the same time and I didn’t have that problem with it).
I also wonder if the very fact it’s so solidly set in what was once contemporary America hurts it. Eddi’s a musician, so we get lots of 1980s music and pop culture references. At the time, they’d have emphasized that all this eerie stuff was taking place now, in the real world; in the 21st century, it’s a period piece. I wonder if readers too young to even remember the 1980s will find that a drawback.
Maybe not. The decade’s music is still popular (it’s one of the few things that can get a crowd of Mensans to get up and dance) and the cultural gap between a struggling band in the 1980s and now isn’t as deep or foreign as the Cold War setting of Spy Who Came in From the Cold or say, a 1950s singing group (as I mentioned a while back, the pace of stylistic change seems to be slowing).
And as I said about Boris the Bear, worrying about whether your story will be relevant to the zeitgeist 20 years later isn’t usually the right tack to take. If I’d read it when it first came out, I think I’d have loved the contemporary references; if that dates it faster, maybe that’s a fair tradeoff.
Even allowing for all that, the book didn’t blow me away as much as I’d hoped. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it (I really like the phouka, and I generally love fae-based stories), but the musical stuff largely bored me. I’m not sure if that’s a flaw in Bull’s writing or that there’s just so much musical stuff and I’m not a music person (if Eddi had been an actor I’d probably have responded better). Still, I enjoyed it and I’m glad I finally read it.
Good enough is no longer good enough
Since moving in, I have noticed an annoying tendency. Faced with the countless interruptions to work time—repair-people, house guests (a fun interruption, honestly!), TYG’s operation and the sheer number of holidays in November/December (if TYG’s off, I’m going to take off too. Period)—I’ve sometimes had to throw up my hands, accept that I’ve made enough to cover my share of the bills and let that be good enough.
I’m tired of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted that even with all the guests and events and days off this month (and, of course, spending on presents), I’m covering my bills (including fun stuff), but I really want to be getting ahead. Rebuilding the savings buying the house sucked dry (though still not as dry as when I was an employee).
And starting next month, as I’ve mentioned, I intend to cut back my Demand Media work so that I can spend time on other projects I’m not getting done. And obviously, if I do 12 less Demand articles a month, I have a smaller margin of error if I then wind up wasting time.
So no more. Next month, even with fewer Demand articles, I still have enough to pay the bills and boost my savings, provided I meet my quota. So I must, one way or another. At least, that’s the plan: Wish me luck that nothing gets in the way (as life so often does).
Switching subjects: The author of King of Heists, which I reviewed yesterday, wrote in to answer some of my objections about the book. If my review had any effect on you, I recommend seeing his response. And no, I can’t actually prove it’s the real J. North Conway, but if it isn’t, he’s gone to an amazing amount of effort to fake it.
And on that, note Merry Christmas everyone (also Kickin’ Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, Fabulous Festivus, Awesome Eid, Cool Yule and Remarkable Raelian Cloning Day). No post tomorrow but I hope everyone has a blast.
Filed under Personal, Time management and goals, Writing
More books
As I’d heard, THE COMANCHE EMPIRE by Pekka Håmålåinen makes a good counterbalance to SC Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon, which portrayed the Comanche as more a natural force than a rival civilization (a longstanding view in Texas history). By contrast, Håmålåinen shows that the Comanche control of the Great Plains relied on diplomacy and trade rather than just violence (during the Texas-Comanche wars, they were also trading quite amicably with New Mexico), the combination resulting in raids as far away as Mexico and trade all the way to Louisiana (which they saw as a counterweight to Spanish influence further west), frequently using horses and slaves taken from one area as trade goods in another. A tribal power structure Gwynne finds largely anarchic (as did many of the Comanches’ American contemporaries) comes off here as simply alien to European style (heavily driven by consensus and personal standing rather than a strict hierarchical arrangement). The book concludes that while US triumph was probably inevitable, the Comanches overhunting of buffalo (on top of what they took in trade and the competition from their horses for pasture) crippled them well before the cavalry took them out. This is dry but very good nonetheless.
SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL by Marjorie Garber takes us chronologically from The Two Gentlemen of Verona through Henry VIII and the co-written Two Noble Kinsmen, looking at recurring Shakespearian elements such as the importance of good kingship (“The histories reflected what was a serious contemporary subject—what constituted a legitimate, effective monarchical government.”), the error of rejecting fun and joy (she argues persuasively that Shylock gets punished more for being a fun-hating figure like Malvolio than being Jewish—though I don’t agree with her that eliminates the anti-semitic issues) and the mourning of an Age of Epic Heroes now past (Garber points out how many dramas end with a political pragmatist as the Last Leader Standing). Garber does a very good job placing Shakespeare in his own cultural context, pointing out, for instance that Romeo’s poems to his pre-Juliet girlfriend in Romeo and Juliet would have been recognized as a then-hokey and hopelessly outmoded style. She also discusses the tendency to turn the Bard into “Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare” by turning lines from the play into moral insights, ignoring that they come from as unreliable a Moral Messenger as Polonius or Iago. A very good job.
THE CHESSMEN OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs resembles one of the countless Lost Race adventures Tarzan underwent, but much better: John Carter’s daughter and an unwanted suitor find themselves in first the Lost City of the freakish Kaldanes and then the city of Manator, where Jetan—Martian chess—is played by living warriors. One reason it works may be that John Carter is almost entirely offstage, which Tarzan never is. There are also some continuity touches such as Therns trying to revive their evil cult, though Burroughs never followed up on them (likewise, Ghek the Kaldane disappears from later books like the disembodied bowman fromThuvia Maid of Mars).
Filed under Reading
Books
WHISPERS UNDERGROUND by Ben Aaronovitch is an urban fantasy novel in which a black cop recruited to Scotland Yard’s magic-based department (“My mum’s delighted—she considers ‘witchfinder’ much more prestigious than ‘copper.’”) investigates someone stabbed to death by a piece of magical pottery, the secret of which lies in London’s subterranean web of sewers and abandoned train platforms. The London setting works better for me than the average urban fantasy (as does the relatively limited amount of magic around), and Aaronivitch writes well, but the ending fell flat as it shifts to a more mundane police drama and awkwardly works in elements from the big story arc. So I won’t go looking for the next one.
KING OF HEISTS: The Sensational Bank Robbery of 1878 That Shocked America by J. North Conway chronicles the career of George Leslie, a Midwestern aristocrat who moved to New York (buying his way out of the Civil War draft having made him persona non grata in Cincinnati) where he reinvented himself as a womanizing master criminal, using an invention for cracking combination locks to become both a successful bank robber and a planner for other hoods. A great story, but I’m not sure how much I trust Conway’s accuracy: His portrayal of suffragette Victoria Woodhull certainly doesn’t fit the books I’ve read about her and I don’t see where he gets his apparent insight into Leslie’s attitudes (as the man got killed before writing any memoirs or confessing to anything). So not quite recommended (Conway’s efforts to write a Big Picture book about the Gilded Age also feels more forced than say, Anthony Lukas’ Big Trouble).
DEMON HUNTING IN THE DEEP SOUTH by Lexi George is the second in a paranormal romance series set in a small Alabama town that’s become Ground Zero for a demon infestation, thereby drawing the attention of a pair of ET demon-hunters one of whom is flabbergasted to realize he’s overwhelmed with passion for one of the locals (they are apparently rather Vulcan). Reminiscent of writer Julie Kenner’s Demon Hunting Soccer Mom series but not as good. In fairness, George writes well and it’s not her fault I prefer the paranormal to the romance (the latter’s what she focuses on). However, the Vulcan/medieval dialogue she tries for the demon-hunters really doesn’t work.
FATHER GAETANO’S PUPPET CATECHISM by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola is a novelette about the new priest in a small Sicilian WW II Catholic school who attempts to use the old puppets in the school’s basement to Put On A Sunday School Play before discovering the puppets are alive. This needed much more development to work—as is, it’s only half formed.
Empowered by Adam Warren is a comic super-hero series in which the eponymous heroine discovers that despite her main claim to fame being how often villains tie her up, she’s been nominated for a “Capey” award much to the astonishment of teammates Thug, Sister Spooky and Ninjette. This is really funny—unfortunately I also found it really gratuitously sexploitative (and joking in-book about how sexploitative it is doesn’t help).
INCORRUPTIBLE Vol. 2 by Mark Waid and Jean Diaz continues the adventures of Max Damage, a super-villain who underwent an instant reform after the Plutonian went bad (think Superman suddenly going homicidal maniac) and in this volume trying to do right by his under-age sidekick Jailbait without selling out in other ways. Good—I like that they’re not making any bones about Max having an ugly past to redeem.
ENEMY ACE ARCHIVES by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert collects the stories of Hans Von Hammer, a WW I German ace who feels honor-bound to serve his country, yet tormented by having to kill—and by the fact even his own people see him as an inhuman killing machine. I’ve read this before, but this sets me up to enjoy Volume II. Plus, they’re great stories.
