Quasirandom: Blog

This came up in the comments to Together and Apart, but just for the record:

Demi is an expy (along with her parents) of a character from aroslav’s The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins. I didn’t use Desi herself because I needed my version to do something out of character for the original. So instead, Teri meets a cosplayer with a suspicious similarity to her inspiration.

While I’m on T&A, I should mention that I fixed the borked formatting of Mike’s sonnet, in chapters 11 and 18. And yes, it is a strict sonnet, with iambic pentameter and strict rhymes. He could use a little time away from e.e. cummings, though.

And while I’m on administrivia, I finally got around to creating a Hanging Out universe, with the two stories (so far) set in and around the club, They and They and Tangled Up, Halfway Between You Both.

And that's a wrap for Teri Florez and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Fucking Bad D/a/y/ Week -- and all I have for the triad, for now. I'm not ruling out further stories (especially since, near the end of the first draft, all three of them got squirrelly and instead of, yanno, trying to get out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into, started telling me what happens when Teri and Dana join Mike at UT-Austin) but first I need to reset my brain with something completely different. Something, maybe, more smutty. And weird. Weird-ass smut sounds good right now.

(Yeah, I should have realized that separating the three would mean long stretches of no sex. As would upping teh dramaz. My bad. I'll try to make their hypothetical next installment a sex comedy. Writin' to me strengths, and all that.)

True fact: I am almost exactly the same age as Alexander Viorst, and grew up a handful of blocks from his house.

Never met him, though -- different schools, different circles. My parents did once meet his mother, author Judith Viorst, at a cocktail party. I read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day as a kid, but didn't imprint on it the way I did The Monster at the End of This Book or Richard Scarry's Great Big Air Book -- and I certainly didn't know that he and his older brothers were real.

I love love LOVE reading that book aloud to littles, though. The cadences are just about perfect and the author never tries to redeem or minimize Alexander's experience. Some days are just bad, even in Australia. The sequels (which I didn't learn existed till I was a grownup) are okay, but none are as good as Very Bad Day.

A short shameful confession: I once gave Peter S. Beagle a silver origami unicorn at a comicon.

I didn't introduce myself at his booth, though, but rather pounced-and-escaped as he passed by my table in the author alley. I am, in person, as shy as Teri, though I cope differently. I spent more time folding paper, that con, than I did selling books.

(I'm assuming you all have, in fact, read The Last Unicorn and so know why this is a big deal. If you haven't, why are you wasting time on SOL instead of rectifying this crucial omission from your life experience already? Like, RIGHT FUCKING NOW?)

Truth in fiction: The Alternatives to Violence Program that Dana mentions is real, though she has heavily adapted the conceptual framework to a particular situation and dramatically compressed what is usually a three-day workshop into one. My local chapter has been successful with it in prisons, rehab centers, and high schools, and I've personally found AVP tools and concepts useful in many parts of my life. I've assisted in several workshops but am not yet an AVP trainer - we were trying to get trainer training scheduled for a couple of us when, ahem, the pandemic lockdown started.

(Gosh, that last phrase sounds familiar … )

Dana's difficulty explaining how the workshop experience is so powerful matches my own.