Sinecure!

Today is officially The Closing. The respectable partners are somewhere off-site, signing papers and handing over mind-dazzling checks. It's the end of a fairly stressful thing, and we're all happy that it's over. Of course, there are problems.

There were two sides to this ordeal, of course, and the one thing that the losing side had going for it was the personnel purge. If they had gotten the company they were going to go through a fire everyone who was a liability. The downside, and the thing that lost them my support, was that they were then going to replace those people with family members. Right.

The upside would have been the removal of my coworker. He's an idiot, and he gets away with stuff only because he's the best friend of one of the owners. Oh, wait, it's closing day, now he's the best friend of the owner. Right.

I guess we're going to learn to live with it. I only bring it up because I just had to talk down one of the CSR's from quitting because this guy was being a dick. When this was all unwrapping, it was understood that ownerguy and I would sit down and have a talk about this fellow. I guess we better get to that talk.

A milestone, in the weeds

This is the one hundredth post on this blog. Epic. I should probably reminisce or something, but I'm not really in the mood. Forward, forward, forward.

I've been talking to people about steampunk, science fiction and fantasy. The relationships between. I've often said that I write fantasy as if it were science fiction, but when approaching something like the Veridon stories, there's no question in my mind that those are fantasy. But the thing that I'm writing right now, well, it's as if the fantasy world of Veridon extrapolated out into a science fictional world. And it's interesting. I have to say, I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

Let's think about steampunk for a minute. I'm still not comfortable with that term, but it's the common parlance, so we'll leave it alone. There's a very clear historical connotation with steampunk. Victoriana, yes? But most of what people think of as steampunk is really just the trappings of steampunk. You know, airships, cogwork arms...uh. Steam. More of a scientific fantasy though, isn't it? A fantasy of what science could be, rather than what it is, or ended up being. The postmillenium before the Titanic and mustard gas.


So what do you get if you take the trappings, the optimism, and then strain it through tragedy? What if you still have the big science and the airships and...uh...steam, but history has caught up to it and you're left with, I don't know. The Titanic.

It's just what I'm thinking about. The thing I'm working on now, it isn't pretty, and it isn't science. But it's something. Something I like quite a bit.

Standard Nonprofit Flats, Non-machinable. What's the tab situation on that?

Tired. It's been a busy couple weeks. The close date for the company is drawing nigh, and it's just nutz busy. Couple days there when I was pretty much running the place. I was worried when this all came up that I would suddenly be the person with the most postal knowledge, and whattya know that's exactly how it's going. But it's been a few weeks now, and I'm finding that I'm okay with it. Most questions I can answer. Those I can't, well, I'm getting comfortable with the DMM. It's like a giant rulebook for the world's dullest RPG.

Writing has been strange. Someone asked for a synopsis, then a clarification, and then after some talk another synopsis. I don't know where it's going. I'm not talking about it, right now. Point is, after much sitting and staring, I got the final synopsis off last night. Weight off my mind. Now it's just the Wait. Yeah.

Also. I have been up since 3am. No reason.