Karen Traviss, New York Times best-selling author

Vitriol and Tonic

What peeves me at the moment is that there is no point my ranting about politics any longer. I'm a great believer in not doing something when someone else is already doing it so much better than I can, and I now have two purveyors of on-the-nail comment who beat me hands down. They're my first web port of call each day.

(Neither are suitable for work-based browsing or for younger folk, so don't click the links if you don't like strong language.)

One is The Daily Mash, of course, which says the same thing that I always want to say, only funnier. But that makes it no less true. Our Labour government is the most sorry bunch of incompetent and corrupt impacted colons that ever drew breath, not that colons do that, but you get the idea. It's the double-whammy of reasons for sticking them up against the wall and putting an end to the country's misery, but let the Mash tell the story better than I ever could:

Bribes: Illegal and immoral, but are they 'wrong'?  As the Sunday Times published details of four labour peers accepting money to try and influence legislation, the party said it was not often British politics was confronted with a such a spectacular absence of wrongdoing.

Then there's Bryan Lambert at You Are Dumb, who I find...well, transcendently wonderful. He should have an op-ed column on a major newspaper, except I don't know any section of the mainstream media that would have the testicular substance to run his stuff.  He combines crisp perspective (even when I disagree with his view) with a style and fluency that I can only envy.

When news satirists become more relevant than the so-called bona fide media, then you know we need to make some changes in society.

 

 

Back from the mountain

Wow, it's been a long time.

Stumbling down from my isolated cave on the mountainside, I thought of catching up with the weeks I've missed, and then thought - ahhh, bugger it. Why bother? You were getting on fine without me, and if you wanted to know what I was ranting about on any given day, you could have clicked through to The Daily Mash, which appears to mind-meld with me most days. Add in some weird moments - like today, when I swapped to a new purse (wallet, US folks) and found my old one contained a Roman coin, some silver threepenny pieces, and a credit card I never realized I had - and you're pretty much experiencing Being Traviss. Except for spending every waking hour at the keyboard, of course, which I assume you're too sensible to do.

Anyway, apart from writing one novel that has given me much satisfaction and professional pleasure, and nearly finishing another that hasn't, I've done little since the start of December except keep the economy going singlehanded. (God bless internet shopping and the proximity of Somerfield.) The fact that I had only put the key in the car's ignition once in two months told me that I'd been in some sort of purdah beyond the usual level required to get the current book-in-progress done. Whatever fermented over that time in the compost bin that makes up my subconscious is something I'm still unpicking, but last night it manifested itself with clarity, and I ended up making decisions about a stack of stuff that I should have either called endex on or started a long time ago.

I'm observationally challenged when it comes to spotting rigor mortis and even decomposition in dead horses - I come from a work-ethic no-quitting culture that believes all equine stiffs are just faking it and will respond eventually to hard work, a scrubbing brush, and persistence. Then, as you perform CPR on the carcass for the umpteenth time, yelling into its maggot-ridden ear that it's quite capable of running the Derby and you're not going to stop until it gets up again, some real live un-maggoty horses canter by and you finally accept how much breath and sweat you were wasting, not to mention getting a faceful of maggots. You knew it all along, but you didn't want anyone to think you'd let poor old Dobbin slip away without slapping the paddles on his chest and shocking the shit out of him until he started to smoulder. There's a fine line between tenacity and stupidity.

So I've taken on some new projects and cleared some time to do others that just can't wait any longer.  As long as I stick to my guns, I should have a far saner time of it in 2009 than last year.