Writing and Black Leather

In between our voracious consumption of Doctor Who episodes (We just kind of skipped the whole first season since they don't have the vortex-haired David Tennant as the protagonist) and other British comedy outlets, Lexi informed me that self-publishing out here is really quite easy. To get a professionally bound, sexy looking soft cover of 400 pages costs approximately 10 lari per copy so long as you're willing to get 200. Now, that's a lot of money but its still an interesting idea (read: waste of money).

So I've given the whole fiction writing thing another go. Its a kind of cyberpunky thing without the wapanese-ness in an intensely libertarian (but not quite anarcho-capitalist) world centered around a petty information thief who gets in over his head and finds himself hunted by the British Government and Penguin Books at the same time. Also its set in Tbilisi, because why the hell not. Anyways, i've been able to stick with this one harder than most of my "write the first chapter and then oh my god its ass lets just move on", and i'm fairly convinced that Steampunk is like impossible to work with. But then again the stone they cast away shall become the cornerstone so maybe i'm being hasty. We'll see where this goes. I doubt i'm gonna drop the 2000 lari to get 200 copies of a book with no editor, but it looks damn good on the self assessment to say "yes i went to Tbilisi for 5 months to write my first novel" followed by the sound of puffing on pipes and the applause of awards ceremony goers.

As for the journalism thing, I have continued the process at a snails pace. There are two newspapers and two editors with whom i am personally fairly friendly. It breaks down like this:

A) Georgia Today: 20 lari per article, 5 lari per picture, will publish anything, and Byline.
B) The Messenger: Um? Lari per article. Heh? lari per picture. Will publish almost anything, and Byline.

So, i've been focusing on GT at the promise of filthy lucre and possible feature articles later if i can get my shit together. If i can get like 50 articles published I'm gonna put together a scrapbook portfolio type thing and then I can send it to the BBC and become a proper journalist (LOL YA RITE). This of course means that I am actively betraying the editor of The Messenger, which I should feel bad about but it's not like i'm writing for my health people come on.

English teaching is going fine, they are getting my work residency as we speak. A process which has required me to bring my passport in to work not one not two but three times as of tomorrow. I think its funny, because the Fulbright girls all had to bust ass to get one with no help from anyone. The advantage of having a J.O.B.

Finally, when I was out and about today I saw more black leather worn by more people than I thought humanly possible. It was like The Matrix was just sick all over the place, except (presumably) without the guns.

Anyways, the new objective is to get a Russian teacher so I can get food on my own. Also a haircut - I need a haircut.