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Why do cats love the crap around your house and not the cat toys you pay $7.99 for?

My cats, Jinx and Max Powers, aren’t so good for snuggling. Jinx is grumpy and bitey. Petting her is just a bloodletting. Max is a coward. You can’t get close enough to pet him 90% of the time.

But that doesn’t mean they leave me in peace.

If Max was a child, he would have Paranoid Hyperactive Attention Deficit Disorder. He runs around like a fucking maniac, and will tear himself in half trying to catch the lazer pointer. He can leap like 4 feet in the air and flip over in the process. But if you even LOOK at him, he runs like all the demons of the Core were after him.

If Jinx was a child, she would be a 13 year old goth chick who hates her parents because they are such an embarrassment to her, even as she craves their attention. Heaven forbid I try to sit and write instead of paying attention to her highness. She sits in the doorway of the library, howling for me to throw her a toy. If I ignore her, so comes over and swats at me, and when I turn, she runs and goes long for the pass.

So I keep a bunch of cat toys in a drawer by my desk to occupy the monkeys while I try to work. Dani loves to spend time at the pet store buying them toys. She gets catnip mice and little puffs and balls with bells in them and fruit and vegetables stuffed with catnip. Everything has catnip, and the toys cost a fortune.

But if I try and throw these ridiculously expensive toys to Jinx, she couldn’t care less. Same with Max.

On the other hand, Jinx has learned to work the foot-pedal on the bathroom garbage can, and will go rooting around in there for Q-tips, which she will run around the house with, flinging them into the air and chasing them until they are gnawed to shreds and there is cotton everywhere.

And tiny pieces of crumpled paper? Oh my goodness, how those are loved.

And you can’t put a bag (paper or plastic) or a cardboard box on the floor for a moment without a cat crawling into them. Sometimes they fight over who gets to sit in the damn box. What the heck is THAT about?

They say a cardboard box is the favorite toy of the creative child, but I think cats love them for the exact opposite reason, the same reason why they don’t give a shit about expensive cat toys. They utterly LACK creativity, and are creatures of instinct.

Cats can’t differentiate between colors and objects the way we can. They have no clue that the piece of cloth wrapped around the catnip is in the shape of a carrot, or a duck. It is meaningless to them. All they care about is if it’s light enough to bat around, small enough to carry in their mouth, soft enough to tear apart, or cozy enough to snuggle into.

Pet store toys are for humans, not cats. Save yourself the money and trouble and just put a marble on the hardwood floor. Your neighbors downstairs will hate you, but your cat will be occupied for as long as it takes to knock it under a piece of furniture that it can’t reach under.

Posted on December 1, 2007 at 9:42 am by PeatB
Filed under Musings
3 Comments »

Sometimes, when I am tired, I make myself a little concotion I call “wake-up juice”. In the vein of Coke Blak, it is a combination of 30% cold  coffee and 70% Diet Coke. No additional sweetner. Extra caffeine and none of the sugar!

But if I’m feeling REALLY crazy, I toss in a shot of Kaluha. 

It’s gross, I know, but bear with me. I am documenting a vital component of my artistic process, and any blog about said process would be incomplete without an homage to this Frankenstein abomination of a beverage not dared to be brewed even in Professor Snape’s potion dungeon at Howgarts.

For the record, I don’t usually drink it. Most of the time I drink one or the other, iced coffee or Diet Coke. If I want alcohol, I usually drink sake. 

I don’t really like hot coffee. I’ll drink it if I’m feeling chilly, or if it’s the only option, but like with my tea, I prefer it iced.  I have an awesome icemaker in my fridge. One of the ones where you just push your glass against the tab on the door to fill it with ice. God in Heaven, I love that icemaker. I imagine it’s how kings must feel, having an icemaker like that. It was pretty much the ONLY non-negotiable item for me when we remodeled the kitchen. None of the fridges with icemakers I liked fit through our narrow, pre-war doorway, but I was relentless in finding one no matter how much my contractor griped.

I make a mean iced coffee. For starters I take one part of Fresh Direct’s French Vanilla roast, and two parts of their Sinful Delight roast. I grind the beans together and use them to brew a pot of coffee to the brim. I use maybe 30% more bean than needed for hot coffee to offset the ice. Then I let it cool, and empty it into a pitcher I place in the fridge.

First thing each morning (around 6:45), I stumble from bed and make a glass of iced coffee, usually with 1.5 packets of Equal. No milk. Once that is prepared, I feed the howling cats, and drink it while I watch them to make sure the fat one eats her Wheaties and the skinny one eats his Captain Crunch. If I stop watching for an instant, they switch bowls. Seriously.

From then to about noon, that’s all I drink, then I usually have a glass of water or some Snapple white tea with lunch.

After lunch, when I get my afternoon slump, it’s on to soda. I’ve always been a big Coke drinker, but since I turned 30, I gain weight like a barrel in a rainstorm, so I switched to Diet Coke. Saved myself like 500 calories a day. I’m so used to it now that I prefer it to regular Coke.

But sometimes Coke’s not enough, and I don’t like straight coffee past noon. What’s a man to do?

Hence, my Frankenstein drink, which I have been known to sip thoughtfully at 2am when I am trying to finish a stubborn chapter or meet a writing quota.

And like now.

Yum.

Posted on November 30, 2007 at 7:23 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Musings
4 Comments »

Thanks to Deanna Hoak for this little bit of holiday cheer:

Posted on November 29, 2007 at 7:50 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life
3 Comments »

Which means I’m out of excuses not to work. Rats.

Dani and I have been together for 7 years now, and married for three, but our families remain unintegrated. This means two of every major holiday, including Christmas, and an endless tug-of-war over who gets the ACTUAL holiday, and who we have to spend the next available day with. Since I’m a goy and she’s a Jew, we usually can at least spend Easter and Passover without guilt over leaving someone out. I think they overlap once every few years, but so far, so good.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing the family, but it can be exhausting, running from Brooklyn to Jersey to Westchester and back in a long weekend. This year was especially tiring, because we worked a wedding in there, too. And I decided to take a yoga class while sore from chasing my 2.5 year old nephew and his cousins (4 and 1) around all day and still digesting 18 pounds of turkey and pie.

What was I thinking?

I’ve had a lot of excuses not to write since I quit the day job 3 weeks ago. There was the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga. That was 4 days of hard networking disguised as drinking (or was it hard drinking disguised as networking?). Some people announced pregnancies, and we had to run around to see them and celebrate, and there was the Science Fiction Writers of America party, and seeing Beowulf in IMAX 3D, and of couse I HAD to re-read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in preparation for the release of The Golden Compass in theaters next month.

(As an aside, my friend Myke rants about how HDM is anti-Christian, but I don’t agree. Expect a rant about that when I finish book 3. Of course, he thinks everything is anti-Christian, including Beowulf. With Thanksgiving over, I expect him to start forwarding me “War on Christmas” news articles any minute.)

But I got an e-mail on Monday from John Parker, my UK proxy agent, who says Voyager is keen to print the first book in my series in 2008, which may be sooner than the US release. What does this mean, apart from me jumping up and down with excitement? It means I need to get off my ass and start cranking out book II, The Desert Spear, in earnest.

Most of the groundwortk is done. The book is plotted out in meticulous detail, and maybe 30% of the prose is written in first draft, but I put it aside a few months ago to finish final edits on The Painted Man, which took longer than I expected, and have been having a hard time picking it back up. I think I just needed a break between books, and should have given myself one.

Anyway, I’m back on it, trying to break through resistance. Last week, ostensibly because of the holiday, I wrote a pathetic 996 words. The week before that, ostensibly because I was finishing PM, a whopping 1323. Even when I was writing in conjunction with a full-time job, I had a quota of 1,000 words a day, or 5,000 a week, and I am going to have to maintain that as a MINIMUM, if I want to finish the book by late May, when I am contracted to hand it in.

So this week is my highway ramp week, as I get back up to speed. I will get out at least 5,000 words this week, and try to increase that gradually to 10-15,000, depending where I realistically level out. Monday started poorly with a mere 521, but ironically, I had a root canal yesterday, and still managed to knock out 1870. Part of that was writing in the waiting room, but 1100 words of it was sitting at home with an aching jaw. I also went shopping, watched Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet (not as good as Equilibrium, but still breathtaking at times, if you like stunning martial arts and the hotness that is Milla Jovovich), and read a good 50 pages of HDM, so I guess I’m out of excuses. I can multitask when motivated. 

Today’s tasks are updating the blog (check), yoga (an hour from now), writing 1000 words, and finishing The Subtle Knife.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

Posted on November 28, 2007 at 8:33 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Writing
8 Comments »

I wrote The Painted Man, the first book in my soon-to-be-published fantasy series, on my phone. I have an HP Ipaq 6515 Pocket PC, which runs Windows Mobile 3.1. It’s a little outdated now, but it was the shiz-nit when I bought it a couple years ago.

I used to read a lot on the NYC subway, with my earphones in to block out all the surrounding noise. I would frequently become inspired to write, but I have never been one to write by hand, and my old Palm Pilot wasn’t designed for real writing. It ran MSWord, but you had to write in that stylized chicken-scratch Palm shorthand using the little stylus. I didn’t care for it, but it was nice when I had a good idea I needed to jot down.

But when texting became all the rage, I got a Nokia Musicphone, which had a full QWERTY keyboard, and I realized that with a tool like that, I could write for real.

Back then writing was more a hobby, since I never really expected anything to come of it. Still, it was something I felt I needed to do, and commit to, because novels aren’t like short stories that can come in a burst of inspiration. They require careful planning and long-term effort, even when inspiration is not striking.

But I also had a full-time job, and a new bride, and friends to see and other demands on my time. Giving up every evening to write was a big sacrifice. I needed a compromise.

Enter my daily commute. On a good day, I was on the subway an hour and a half. On a bad day, anyone who is familiar with the NYC subway system knows your commute  can grow exponentially. What if I started using that time constructively?

So I would get on the train, and look hard for a seat (it’s impossible to write more than a handful of words with your thumbs on a moving train if you’re standing). I was raised to always yield seats to women, but I got over that real quick. If you weren’t pregnant or stooped and gray, sorry. I had work to do.

Most days I could get a seat. Maybe 70% of the time. I would put my iPod on to drown out the background chatter, and start thumb-writing. I set a goal of 1,000 words a day for myself, and usually I could get at least 800 of those done on the commute. More if I wrote at lunch. At night, I would go home, sync the phone to my PC, and then clean up the file, fix typos, and finish off the quota (if needed).

The phone really changed my life, because it meant I could write anywhere, at any time. In a long line at the bank? Write. Waiting at the bar for a friend? Write. In a cab, or the passenger seat of a car? Write.

I would say 65% of The Painted Man was written thus, the rest done the old fashioned way at home. I don’t know that I could ever have done it without this tool to make my historically unproductive time so productive.

Earlier this week, I finished the final draft of The Painted Man and turned it in to Del Rey, meaning to get right to work on the sequel, The Desert Spear, before I developed any bad habits by being home all day.

But I was in a lot of pain the first day. I have what is called a syrinx, which is a little bubble in my spinal cord that presses on a nerve cluster, causing me constant phantom pain in my side. On a good day, it’s like someone is poking me in the ribs with a stick. On a bad, it’s like a knife in my ribs. Exercise aggravates it, and on Monday I walked 2 miles each way to a 90 minute yoga class. I am hoping the increased flexibility that comes from yoga will help me in the long run, but in the short run… ow.

So Tuesday was shot. The pain intensifies when I am sitting, so the computer chair would have been the equivalent of a medieval tortue device. Wednesday was a little better, and I got up with every intention of writing, but instead I started upgrading software on my computer, did dishes, read, napped with the cats, pretty much everything except writing.

I knew I was just procrastinating. I have written about 25% of DS already, but haven’t touched it in months because I was working on PM rewrites. I didn’t have my approach for re-insertion down. Should I start by editing what I have, or begin a new character and just write? Should I re-read the stepsheet and glossary to re-familiarize myself with it all or trust that I have it down? Should I go through all the comments from my test readers, or just read what I have cold and make my own opinions before looking at theirs? When you don’t have a game plan, it’s easy to just get nothing done at all.

So by the end of the day yesterday, I was pretty angry with myself for not accomplishing anything. I had plans to go see Southland Tales up by Union Square with some friends in the evening, so I decided to just put a chapter with a new character on my phone, in case I wanted to write on the train.

Which I did. Like the wind. My thumbs couldn’t move fast enough. In the 25 minutes I was on the train, I knocked out close to 300 words, and completely set myself up to go on and write the rest of that chapter decisively.

Could it be that writing on the subway offers more than a constructive use of downtime? Maybe I need to leave the house every day, separating myself from distractions and just cruise the subway lines, pecking away with my thumbs. 

Posted on November 15, 2007 at 9:53 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Writing
17 Comments »