Electricity, Angela Carter, Exposition, Pineapple Salsa

There’s an interesting post over on Lifehacker about the cost of electricity in Australia and why it’s unlikely to fall any time soon. I’m linking to it because how electricity is priced tends to one of those mysterious things that people blame political parties for, without truly understanding how it works, and it’s useful to occasionally get people thinking about such things.

Then again, my dream political party is the one who runs on a campaign of we’ll tax you so hard it fucking hurts, but we’ll spend it on public services and state-of-the-art infrastructure for the public good. I am destined to be disappointed every election, even if someone actually runs on such a platform.

Also, I am reminded that I really should be checking in on The Conversation (where the original post was sourced) much more often than I am. For example, this article about the characteristics shared by “happy city” Instagram pics regardless of which city is being photographed makes for an interesting resource when pondering the design features of various fictional settings. I’m going to try adding it to my RSS feed for a week, get a feel for how much daily content needs to be processed.

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Yesterday I wrote 921 words on a short story, Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. I walked 10,000 steps for the first time in weeks, ate some delicious cauliflower tacos with pineapple salsa my beloved made for dinner. I admired my beloved’s stompy, dinosaur-foot slippers as I am wont to do every day or so when it is cold enough that she wears them. We watched the first two episodes of Jane the Virgin’s fourth season before I took myself away from screens and did some reading before going to sleep.

A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jul 2, 2018 at 1:43am PDT

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One of the things I’m reading at the moment is Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop. It’s an interesting book to pick up right after doing a stack of marking, because is does exactly what writing instructors (including me) will usually warn people against, spending several pages engaged in prolonged exposition about protagonist and their situation and the world around them. It’s a goddamn beautiful bit of writing that breaks all sorts of “rules,” largely because Carter is so goddamn good that she can exposit for 20 pages and make it enthralling and beautiful.

I have thoughts about why this works, but they’re not fully developed yet. They may go into the newsletter, this week or next, if I can get them relatively cohesive.