A couple brief ramblings

I would never be cut out for political office.  I hate pretending to be pleasant to unpleasant people, and the first time someone deliberately misinterpreted my words or took them out of context for reasons of hate . . . well, I'd start with the profane screaming, and I guess that'd be it.

Somebody recently said that "you don't get to choose whether what you say is offensive," because I'm in that evil cys-gendered patriarchal cabal of the vast majority.  And it bothered me . . . at least long enough to type this.  Now I'm over it.

I'm in between audiobook projects right now, and it's strange to have so much free time to work on my own things.  I've recorded between four and six episodes of my solo podcasts, and actually got one edited, so all I have to do is post it.  So, consider yourself warned: Rish Outfield is not quite done with podcasting just yet.

Similarly, I've been thinking (for about two years) of putting out a collection of audio recordings for sale, and made a list of everything I have ready to go.  I can't help but feel like I need some kind of unifying theme, even if it's just "stories involving children" or "stories where the third act falls apart."  I'll keep thinking.

There's a teenager at work they just hired, who is really sweet, and really good at her job.  The other night, we left work and her boyfriend was waiting for her in the parking lot.  They hadn't seen each other in, like, eight to ten hours, and he just wrapped his arms around her and held her while the rest of us old people got in our cars and drove home.  I realize the years and circumstance have made me cynical, but in watching that I had to wonder what young love might have been like, and if a couple of teenagers knew something that we grownups had forgotten . . . or never known.

Of course, those two will never use the Dewey Decimal System or go into a video store, so I guess into every life a little rain must fall.

I created a new YouTube page to upload an audiobook reading or two, figuring that if the 'Tube police take my performances down, it would affect the account I created for that purpose.  But when it asked for my email address, it recognized me as Rish Outfield, and insisted on calling the new account by that name.  I could not change it and even got my 14 year old niece to try and fix it for me, but to no avail.  I don't suppose I really even care--I intended to upload, I dunno, around a thousand Fake Sean Connery videos with that first account, and I never did.  Ah well.

In other news, only sixty-six days to Halloween.

Silver Shamrock.

There's a new manager at work who is young and handsome and so covered with tattoos that they make him wear long sleeves to hide them when anybody else is around.  He's pretty cool, and likes to talk to me about Fantasy novels whenever I see him.  Recently, he shared with me a list of the Top Ten Fantasy Series as voted by the readers of Spank.com or something, and I surprised him by only having read two on the list (and one was the [friggin'] "Lord of the Rings").  I told him we ought to pick up some Brandon Sanderson, to make up for the fact that his "Way of Kings" series was number one on the list and we'd never read it.

The manager, might, however, actually read his copy.*

Yesterday, he was sharing a new list with me from his phone, and it was Ten Things To Avoid When Writing A Fantasy novel.  One of them was pretty obvious ("Don't write just a one-off novel, but a whole series of books"), one was somewhat puzzling ("Don't make up your own curse words"), and one just flat-out pissed me off ("Avoid starting your book with a prologue").  For some reason, I kept thinking of good prologues, and why whoever wrote this article had a bias against them.  There were others on the list that I scratched my head over (one was "Don't invent your own languages"), but the prologue one was the only one that made me angry.

After I told him I disagreed, the manager said that the list had been compiled by polling editors, and that one editor said, "If I see a book begins with a prologue, I won't even read the manuscript."  For some reason, that made me even angrier than if it had just been the readers of Spank.com who had compiled the list.  I stewed for a while, then realized that, in all likelihood, I'm never going to write a Fantasy novel if I live to be a hundred, so again, I just let it go.

I think that's about it.

Oh, I won the Masters of the Macabre contest over at the Horror Addicts website and podcast.  It was for my story "Miss Fortune," which I had my niece and Renee Chambliss help me out on.  It was my fifth time entering the contest (sixth time on the show), and the story that came out the best in the contest's format.  You may recall that I had a distinct advantage on this one, since this year they wanted an audio drama instead of a story, and required at least two voices instead of just my own.  And I may have said on this blog that this was probably my year to win the thing.

Even so, it's nice to win something that isn't my own contest for a change.  I don't imagine it amounts to anything or will impress any of my fan, but after losing four years running, I suppose it's nice to--

Wait, no, it isn't.  Having won, I'm no longer eligible to enter the contest in the future.  And that's really too bad.  Of course, I could always enter again under a pseudonym, like Roy G. Biv or something.  Maybe the name I use when recording Erotica audiobooks.  So there's that.

Rich Oldfiend

*I was surprised to get to work the day I posted this to find out my manager bought two copies of "The Way of Kings," one for him and one for me.  It sort of touched me, like I had a friend or something.  Weird.