life Archives | A.S. Akkalon

The endless cycle of my inbox

My inbox and my life have a natural cycle of growth and decay. Here I explain this cycle in all its glory. Killer hamsters included.

I want to talk about looking for a critique partner because that’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past few months.

(What do you mean it hasn’t been months since I blogged to say I was looking for a critique partner?)

But I haven’t locked in a critique partner yet and you don’t want to read that post twice, so I’m not going to talk about it today.

*screams into a cushion for a while, gets cat hair in her mouth*

Instead I thought I’d tell you about the endless cycle my inbox goes through. It’s more exciting than it sounds–there are killer hamsters.

Life is terrifying

No matter how old you are, life is terrifying for one reason or another. Here are some of mine.

When you’re young, you don’t know anything and that’s fine.

You get older and start to believe you know some things. But you look young so no one believes you know anything.

You get older some more and realise all those things you thought you knew–actually you have no idea about them. Or possibly they made the world more complicated while you were watching Red Dwarf.

At some point when you (again) don’t know anything you start to look old enough that people think you know things. They listen when you speak and assume you’re correct.

Then you’re in trouble.

I’m not putting numbers on the age when these things happen. When my sister looked old enough to know everything, she was six. For the average stranger, perhaps this happens around forty. Or twenty. Or sixty. Or a hundred.

I should have been lazier in school

No one thinks school prepares young people for life, and it certainly didn’t me. Instead, I learned all kinds of fascinating and currently useless facts there.

Did you know you get better quality fleece if you shear your sheep in winter, because the section of wool that grows in winter is thinner and more liable to break due to the poor feed? Cut it at this point and the weak part is at the ends, not in the middle. Magic!

Given I sold my sheep before I ever got around to shearing them, not so helpful.

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