I was just napping and dreamed that I was staring at Duncan MacPhish (I still have him in a jar of alcohol, though he was in a liquid-filled bag in the dream). Somehow I'd forgotten that he is dead, so at first I was saddened to see him not moving. But then I remembered... and then he suddenly started swimming around! It was pretty weird -- he swam in circles and ghost images of him leapt off of the main body and faded away as they got farther from him -- but I was still quite glad to see him "alive" again.

I like to think he returned for my birthday.

Today is Kiddy Phenil's birthday!

Coincidentally, it is my birthday as well. 😉

I do not know how to move forward in a world where anyone can shed fake tears and accuse me of the most heinous offenses -- purely out of spite and malice -- and others will believe the lies without question. If anyone ever says anything kind about me, I cannot believe it -- not because I think the person is necessarily lying, but because I know that it would take very little for that person to retract the statement and brand me a murderer, rapist, stalker, et cetera: the speaker need only hear that opinion from another or listen to a particular 911 recording. And because the individuals who regard me so poorly are not in short supply -- and because 911 calls are public and accessible to everyone (for a $50 fee, you can get a CD recording of my own sister howling about how I've tried to kill her multiple times and am in the process of thrashing her fatally even as she makes the call; the recording will not include her laughing and gloating about said call afterwards) -- I am convinced that even a person who sincerely thinks well of me will not hold that opinion for long. (more...)

So, most of you know that I work -- ha, ha, ha... work -- as a freelance editor. I'm not going to talk about it at length here; I just mention it because it's part of the setup for what I do want to post! See, given that much of my work -- ha, ha, ha... work -- is done through a third-party service, I'm required to give brief critiques explaining my changes to the customer.

And I bloody hate writing these things, because they effectively consist of me saying, "I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER," in various different ways, for an entire page or more. Yes, I make specific changes -- lots of them -- but aside from grammatical fixes there's not a lot of explanation I can supply. "I adjusted the order of your paragraphs in the interest of improving the structure of your document." I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER. "I rearranged this sentence and removed this unnecessary clause in order to render the statement less awkward." I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER. Sometimes my changes have to do with stuff like readability and flow -- which really have no concrete or measurable basis** -- and meter, which I think should be somewhat observed in prose even though it's really more important for poetry. I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER. (more...)