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Hoarding

23/4/2012

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No, this isn't a post about that sad, disturbing show, and this isn't a not-so-anonymous confession that I can't help myself when it comes to old newspapers and used pie tins and cats. (The used pie tins is a reference to my ex's late great-uncle, who was *loaded* yet kept piles of old--but rinsed out--aluminum pie tins. And the spell check on here insists it's aluminium. No, it's not. That extra 'i' ain't. gonna. happen.)

ANYWAY.

Words.
Silly old words.
That's what I collect (in addition to charms for a bracelet and random scraps of fabric. Which will so too end up as a quilt one day).

I got into a slight HULLABALOO over pints recently with a friend, who insisted that I couldn't collect old words if I don't actually then own them. He was FLUMMOXED by the concept. We nearly came to FISTICUFFS.

Ahem.

According to MW Dictionary:

Collect
transitive verb
a : to bring together into one body or place
b : to gather or exact from a number of persons or sources<collect taxes>
c : to gather an accumulation of (objects) especially as a hobby <collects stamps>
Nothing there says that the things have to be, well, things, or that they have to be all crammed together, CATAWAMPUS and dusty, on the top of a dresser or a bookshelf. Or folded up and kept in a BILL FOLD.

FYI: that last one makes me cringe. In 4th grade, I had a red wallet with navy blue piping on the edges. It was the 70s, so the damn thing had something like 'My first wallet' printed on it, in navy as well. One day we had a substitute teacher, older and not as cool as Mrs. Osborne. At the end of the day, I noticed my wallet (which likely held all of 30 cents) wasn't in my desk. The sub kept on calling it a 'bill fold' when asking the class if anyone had seen it. I didn't know what was worse: the attention or the fact that the sub kept using THAT word to describe my cool wallet, thereby equating me with someone my grandma's age.

Sure, you can do an internet search for 'old words' and find pages and pages of them, but the important ones are the ones that rattle around inside your head and have specific context. Even if that context reminds you that you wore flared SLACKS the first time they were in fashion.

What words have you collected?

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Eastercon: The Marathon

9/4/2012

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Picture
This past weekend I attended Eastercon.

It. Was. Exhausting.

In a good way and the falldowngoboom way.

The con was held near Heathrow airport from Thursday night through Monday afternoon, within commuting distance, which is good. That it was a 2-hour each way commute was not good. The trade-off was money/time/fun. Less money spent, but less time and less fun at the con. For those of you who have never attended one, often the most fun at a SF/F con is to be had in the bar, and if you have to leave at 10 pm to make your train home, you miss a LOT of the fun.

But I still met a lot of new peeps, caught up with several peeps I don't get to see very often, and attended some good--and some not-so-good--panels, on everything from pushing the boundaries of genre to youth and youthfulness in SF/F to what makes a hero in SF/F lit, among other topics.

Being at a con with so many published--and even famous--authors is both inspiring and soul-killing. It has made me long to be home, in front of my computer finishing a revision of a short story and working on the novel. It has also made me feel as if the world is rubbing my nose in the mess I have made of all of it, showing me how what I'm writing is WRONG. Perhaps I needed to stay and drink in the bar after all.

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    Tiffani Angus

    Mostly thoughts on writing and the creative life.

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