Lazy Writer Cooks: Cup Mama

Abandon All Hope. Just do it now and get it over with...

For some reason, somebody actually asked me to do a sequel post to Lazy Writer Cooks: Boiled Chicken, and she declared herself unsatisfied with Lazy Writer Drinks: Thaiball. So, I says, if I've got a blog I've got to have a series and I tried to think of something else to cook.

I abruptly realized that I don't actually cook anything else, because my Boiled Chicken is so damn delicious and I'm so damn lazy.


Hence the title, lady.

What follows is thus the absolute only other thing I ever make for myself: Cup Mama, which is the fancy Thai way of saying Cup Ramen. Here's what you'll need:
One(1) Cup Mama
One(1) Bottle of Beer
Some(Some) Boiled Water
Zero(0) Dignity
Total Cost: 40 baht. One dollar.

Not Pictured: Hope

Open the cup of ramen. Remove the plastic fork. Now, place the cup delicately beneath the water boiler spout. Be careful, the water might be hot!

It could burn your soul...

Wait three minutes or until bored. Perhaps you could write something in this time, but this is more appropriate as a break from writing to regain all that sodium and all those calories you're not burning while you sit still and move your fingers.

It's extremely spicy, which masks your dull life.

After three minutes, open the cup lid and discard. Use the included plastic fork to eat the noodles, then drink the soup. Drink the beer. If you're still hungry, make another cup.

Drink more beer.

You know who to blame for this.

Now I'm going to get back to writing.

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2000 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
Short Story "Science Up Some Love"
- - - -
Reading - Passive Aggressive Notes

*157

Rethink Everything

My latest stab at increasing my productivity is much more advanced than previous attempts. I've literally split my netbook (name: "Annette". ...Har?) into two Worlds. There's the Windows partition, AKA the World of Fun and the GNU/Linux partition, AKA the World of Work. The only connection between the two worlds is World Snake, the 1GB transfer drive. Great advertisement for GNU/Linux there, I know, but still...it works.

In the World of Work, YouTube is disabled and I can't access any of the videos, games, books or other entertainment on the World of Fun's partition. World Snake is only used for transferring text files, documents and images. When I'm not doing cover art or word processing, I mostly hang out in a full-screen environment (Emacs or the Terminal) and tap away without distraction.

I do allow myself background music as long as it doesn't have any lyrics in a language I can understand. Anyways, so far so good. We'll see how well it works in the next month as I go for 10 short stories in January, whoo.

By the by, a pretty cool learning resource for Free software (i.e. if you wanted to learn more about GIMP than my Cover Art can teach you) is FLOSS Manuals

So yeah. Looks like I've got it figured out.

And then somebody does this:


What.

FairerScience

#

On another branch of Rethink Everything, I often forget amidst all the cool Science! of "Contact" (Carl Sagan) that it starts out as a book about Ellie Arroway, female scientist who struggles to be taken seriously, gets taken seriously, then gets screwed over by the universe (in a good way).

I guess it's just as hard for me to imagine Scientists being sexist as it is for non-geeks to image Scientists being sexy. I touch on avoiding sexism (etc.) in Writing Women, Part 1; Part 2, which were rather popular.

Speaking of popular: Along with great character Cool Science Girl Ellie, Contact also had Cool Rich Guy S.R.Haddon and Cool Religious Guy Palmer Joss. A smorgasbord of characterization it was.

----

250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

- - - -

Reading - The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

*156

Throw It All Together

Being almost exclusively a Discovery Writer and a Writes-a-Lot, I have the glorious liberty to run with any idea that comes up in the certain knowledge that I'll always have more and that I can always make it work with enough hammering. One of my favorite methods is to decide one aspect of the story [setting, character, plot (ending, beginning, cool scene), "message"] first and then free associate until I've got the three or four images that I need to start writing a good short story. Sometimes it even works for writing a daily blog post.

Let's say that I want to write a story set in the 80s. I was born in 1984 (and lived in Japan for all but my first year of the decade anyways), so I have no real memories of the 80s, yet cultural osmosis has imparted unto me three key images about the 80s:

1. Ronald Reagan
2. Karma Chameleon
3. Cocaine

With this massive store of knowledge, I'm ready to roll into the story, but I need an opening scene. I recall the movie Annie Hall (1977) of a sudden, and (because doing basic research before starting to write the story is counterproductive to Discovery Writing) I assume it was made in or around the 80s. Bam! and we're off.

The great thing about such stories is that the cover art pretty much makes itself...

Coked Up Ronald Reagan Sings Karma Chameleon

by David Barron

Almost certainly based on a true story.

----

250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

Short Story "City Muse, Country Muse"
Short Story "A Blot on the Escutcheon"
Short Story "Bitsy Pollo Save Us!: A Love Story"
Short Story "When What Why?"
- - - -

Reading - ?

*155