I Hate It

I'm on page 126 of 205 pages of The Blood Crown and I'm about to go insane from reading what I've written. I hate proofreading. I know it's necessary and I've changed some things that made no sense whatsoever in the manuscript, but I'm hating doing what I know I have to do. It's driving me up the freakin' wall and right back down again. I've lost track of how many pages I've read today, so I don't know how many more I need to read to reach my 50-page quota. I think it's 25 pages or so. Good enough.

I have a doctor's appointment at 1 today, so I won't have all day to read at my leisure. Gotta get it done!

Ideally, I'd like to reach page 170. That way, I'll finish up tomorrow and then gunslingaaahhh can do her magick after she's finished with booraven22's manuscript. I seriously don't see how she does it. She actually wants to do this for a living. The kid has more gumption than I'll ever have.

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I Love Doctors

...not...

I went to the orthopaedic doctor. He poked around my knee, told me I needed a knee replacement, then suggested I take Tylenol for my pain. He wrote me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, which I can't take.

He can suck my ass.

Mamma Mia Let Me Go

Before there was The Pit, there was a department at BMG Entertainment called Quality Assurance. We were a very small department, comprised of Rick (the Classic Rocker Dude), Timothy (one of my best friends of all time), and myself (weirdo Gothic chick). Both Rick and Timothy were proficient guitar players and knew a lot of the songs from the 70s. Rick was also keen on learning guitar licks from modern songs that he liked. One of these songs happened to be "More than Words" by Extreme. Rick could play that song and keep the beat just like the guy in the video. I was amazed.

Now the QA department was just that. We inspected records, tapes, cds and, later on, video games before BMG decided it wasn't keen on quality, just quantity. That's why it exists today and wasn't swallowed up by Sony, which is about to go kaput because of similar beliefs. To work in QA, you had to be experienced musically and have a very good ear in order to identify unwieldy pops, ticks, and other undesirable sounds behind the music. It was a gift and a skill all rolled into one. Since our department was the only one that required musical background, we were tapped to be the house band of sorts at the yearly horribleday party put on by Jerry Springer look-a-like Dan Stopfer (that's not an insult as I think Jerry Springer is a hunk-a hunk-a burnin' love).

For the majority of November and all of December, the three of us would have jam sessions in the QA room. They started out being really diaphanous, none of us really knowing what exactly we wanted to do until we honed it down to a few songs that would wow our coworkers. We were also tapped to perform one original song, basically an established song with different lyrics about the job. The only song I can remember from then is "DMI - Reject," based on the song "Cocaine." I was the one to whom it fell to write the filk lyrics since I'd gotten myself into trouble in the past writing songs about BMG/RCA. One was based on "Hotel California" and it was called "Warehouse RCA." The other was for "House of the Rising Son" and was entitled "House of the Broken Disc." I was in some serious trouble for that one.

Anyway, one of the songs we did really well was "Bohemian Rhapsody." It wasn't a practiced song either, it just sort of happened and we harmonised perfectly. Same thing for "More than Words," which will always have a special place in my heart. I sang the hell out of that song and the harmonies were absolute golden. I'll never forget those parties, one in particular where there were only 7 of us left, all of us sitting on the floor, 'cos we were too drunk to stand, microphones in our hands, singing like our hearts were gonna burst with joy. I often think of those days with great fondness and was reminded quite suddenly of those days gone by when "Bohemian Rhapsody" came on the radio.

It makes me want to call up Timothy and see if he wants to get together just to sing.