12-18-03 @ 10:09 am EST

Sorry to two recent e-mailers...my anxiety flared again not long after I got them. :( I wish it would go away already. And wouldn't you know but of course today they are doing the e-mail thing and I'm leery of using it just now lest something get lost somewhere...knowing my luck, even though they say no loss of mail expected, I'll log on tomorrow to find it all gone. I lost 3/4 of it the last time "no loss" was expected...and when I complained I was rather made to feel I had no right to complain about it, so...

Anyway, apologies S. and NP (if he even reads this, I have no clue). To NP, I was just wondering about you the day before you wrote and realized I didn't have you on my author favorites so I could keep track of when your account was last modified (a sometimes useful, sometimes not function...sorry if I just made anybody feel paranoid, there are only eight "active" authors on there at the moment, and they're all people who read or used to read my work, though one of the active members apparently stopped reading long ago...no clue why :/ ...I got rid of everybody whose works I had vowed to read once, then decided I never would and no longer cared to. I won't bother going into it, I'm cynical.)

To S., I say thanks for the concerns about my upgrade...P. donated generously a while back, and I sent out a money order for the rest of the GPs and reupgraded not that long ago. So I'm set until December 2004. Though I can't help but keep thinking these "exciting new changes" they keep hinting at in the announcements will in fact mean "more limitations." That's what they usually mean; I was the first one to notice how journals had been changed to "books," and posted about it in the GD forum. A couple of others wondered aloud about it and Someone stepped in to quiet down the guessing with the cryptic notice that "exciting changes" were coming. That was when I went to Skew to try to post my "final" entry leaving the links to the backups...and found I could not post in it anymore. That entry became the new description. The only advance warning I'd gotten was the "exciting changes" comment. Like with the original item limitations, there was seen to be no need to inform the users affected because they were so few. (Never mind that at least some of them were paying users...I dunno, I guess I just think that should count for something. Probably just me though. Will I be demoted for stating this? :/ )

Add to that the fact that the book change was announced as a great new feature when in fact it was a new limitation...I will admit I do like some of the changes to what were once journals, but the limits were quite downplayed while the changes were hyped. Odd.

So now you see why whenever I see the words "exciting new changes" around here I tend to get leery...I've got 599 of my 1000 allotted (sic?) items at the moment and I just keep wondering when...

Well anyway, hopefully before I end up demoted...

I am flattered to be called a consistently productive writer (I might be getting the exact words wrong, I'm not in my inbox at the moment...). I'm often wondering, am I prolific? Sometimes I think I am, but then I think of professional writers, like King, who regularly spit out hundreds of pages a day or whatever...King wrote his book Wolves Of The Calla (a book I'll never read, I just read about it), some 700 pages or something, in five months, just over twice the amount of time it took me to write Horus, which would probably total about 300 pages printed. And Horus has always been the exception. I seem somewhat prolific compared to some popular users here, but I can't tell. I see people with slews of poems and wish I could do that, even if my poetry sucks. They make it look so easy but to me poetry is way harder than writing novellas. Spareness of words has always been a difficulty of mine. Which is why you don't see me enter contests, really. Plus, prolific doesn't necessarily mean "good." I apply everything I can to my writing, yet I seriously wonder if it's any good. Just seems like it would be more popular if it WERE good. People do read long things, I've seen it happen, so maybe that means my writing is dull or something. Add to that the fact that I seem to have lost almost all of my original readers for some reason. :/

I still wonder what became of the one person who followed me here from FanFiction.net because she loved the Chronicles...I know my slowness at updating them drove her off, but it seems like if she'd liked them as much as she'd said she would have returned. I remember how angry and frustrated (and offended) I felt when she actually commented that she was SKIPPING a chapter because it wasn't set in the Great Red Tribe and she didn't want to read about another tribe...never mind that the plot hinges on each chapter! >:/ She couldn't have liked it so much as a story if she was skipping parts...I guess she just liked the smut...

The haircutting decision probably wasn't as impulsive as it seemed; it's something Ma has been threatening, and I have been agonizing over, for ages. I guess I was just so tired of the doing over and over and over and over and getting into so many awful fights...I guess I just reached the breaking point. Would that I could reach a breaking point for all my other stupid compulsions so I could just get over them already. I recently realized it's not just my ADD but my OCD which has been affecting how poorly I read now. Remember how I thought it was my inability to pay attention which kept me from enjoying fiction (and nonfiction, yes) like I used to? That's only part of it. I CAN pay attention for a limited amount of time, but...as soon as my brain starts lapsing, I start repeating what I've read, over and over and over. Even if part of me feels I did thoroughly understand it, some part of my brain keeps thinking, "What if I DIDN'T?" I've even tried rephrasing what I've read to prove that I did in fact understand it, but that doesn't help. Maybe it's BECAUSE I start repeating what I've read that my attention wanders...? I can't say which causes which but it's still frustrating. I can read a few pages of Lovecraft, in my room, in silence, but I so wish I could read more things, with action blaring all around me. I hate that I can only read when I'm alone and in the middle of the night when everyone is in bed; I can't read when I WANT to. It's a good thing I'm no longer in college else I have no clue how I would be able to enjoy reading anything, what with all the people around.

Hm, this entry is not going much of anywhere.

Oh. Big Ben puzzles. I don't know what the deal is but Hasbro's quality control has really gone down the toilet! Two of my more recent puzzles had at least one DUPLICATE piece included, and one of them was actually MISSING a piece! MISSING! But that's not the kicker. The kicker is when I finally opened up their Bora Bora puzzle I bought this past summer. Is it missing one piece? Two? THREE?...no...it's missing...TWENTY-EIGHT PIECES!! Twenty-friggin-EIGHT! And it has FORTY duplicate pieces! Somehow, this puzzle must have gotten mixed up with a fellow puzzle and I just bet my forty duplicates are MISSING from that other puzzle, while it has TWENTY-EIGHT duplicates which are MY missing pieces. What the hell happened?? I never had any trouble at all with Big Ben puzzles before this, and it's even more confusing because while the other two defective puzzles are new, this really bad one is from months ago. I've put together plenty since then and until those other two had no problems whatsoever! I'm very dismayed that now whenever I open a "FACTORY SEALED TO PREVENT LOSS OF PIECES" puzzle I could very well be missing not only one or two but over TWENTY pieces! That is just stupid. Very stupid. As a frequent buyer of puzzles I expect better quality than this, seriously.

So, I went to Hasbro.com and tried to file a complaint...I realize I will not receive any action, since I bought the puzzles weeks (and months) ago and kept no receipts (hell, I thought I'd have no reason to!), but I hope they at least check them more thoroughly before packaging them. Cripes. Twenty-eight pieces. I feel even sorrier for the other Bora Bora puzzle owner who must have FORTY missing pieces. I'm putting together a Southern plantation house or something now and it had better have all pieces intact! A duplicate piece, I found odd but could handle. A duplicate AND a missing piece? Irritating, but oh well...it happens. TWENTY-EIGHT missing pieces? I'm sorry, but that should NOT happen.

Hasbro even made it difficult to contact them...I checked their FAQ/Ask A Question page and...it was blank! Nothing there! Gee, thanks. So I went to contact them...and it said I could send along an attachment if I wanted. Okay! I took a couple of pictures of the assembled puzzle and its box...don't ask why, I'm stupid sometimes...and tried to send them. I attached one and it said I could attach another. So I clicked that and...apparently it sent my e-mail through with only that one attachment! It didn't even take me to the right screen! I had said right in my e-mail I was sending TWO pictures and...UGH! So I sent a duplicate e-mail with the second picture and this time when it went through it brought me to a completely DIFFERENT screen. I tried to click back but then got an error screen! I finally got to the right page and...now they were telling me to REGISTER there! Password and everything! For Pete's sake, I just wanted to complain, not sign up at Hasbro.com. I signed up anyway, but the kicker to that was...they asked if they could contact me or not! About what? To reply to my complaint, or to send me junk offers?? Cripes!! You think they could clarify. I clicked yes. *sigh* So if I start getting crap mail from Hasbro, I am so going back there and trying to modify my e-mail settings...jerks. Never would've happened if they had bothered to package their puzzles properly. Grr.

Wow, that was a long rant. o_o

And get this, they say that here the most recently modified members will get their mail transferred first...so I went to modify my newest item and...didn't show up on the recently modified authors list! What the hell?? That always put me up there before! I'm showing up as most recently modified on my FAVORITE authors list on my account page, but not on the main authors list...how stupid! So now I have no clue--what do they mean, exactly, by "most recently modified"? Cripes.

Well, sorry this is so abrupt, and so damn bitchy (really didn't mean it that way, ugh), but I wanted to comment on my e-mail silence and...puzzles...and I guess I'll go now. Tar.