Like Ahab, I limp and scowl.

I'm in a hurry to wait for something. I hobble with purpose, deaf to ringing telephones, insipid questions, pocket vibrational thingamajigs.

I check the render farm's virtual displays with a flurry of VNC. All is as it must be: poised on the brink of ruin. I nod and shamble on, mincing my fingers and muttering of occlusion maps, Coca-Cola and rosette-manifold texture terrains.

My wife wants to know when I'll be home. I tell her to check the weather forecast for Hell.

Roofing, termination, inspiration.

Sent a company-wide prank e-mail this morning. The punchline? Nobody thought it was a joke.

...And we enter resolution phase. Some conversations that really needed to happen have happened, people got to say some things they'd wanted to say for a long while, misunderstandings were untangled.

Inside: Cars | Job | Fiction | Boobs | Battlestar

I've been turning pretzels internally in preparation for the most complex shoot of my career, but in the end I needn't have: everything went so smoothly I kept having to pinch myself for reassurance that it wasn't some sweet, sweet rye and marijuana fantasy.

Now, here, safely on the far side of the experience, I think I can put my thumb on exactly what went so right this time: a near-total eschewing of collaboration.

We were playing pool. A lazy game, where no one is quite paying attention. We were chatting, taking random shots between bursts. A quiet Tuesday afternoon in the office, swigging beers and idly chewing the fat.

...Which is why it was so disconcerting when someone stood up from a bank of cubicles we'd assumed were abandoned, and declared:

"It's a fact: I have a clinically tight pussy."

This is the story of the worst production assistant ever.

For the last two and a half years I have done an inordinate amount of sitting. I am a professional sitter. I sit in my car, I sit at my desk, I sit on the can, and then I come home and feel so tired all I want to do is sit on the couch. And, while sitting oughtn't be knocked with too broad a brush (consider, for instance, the benefits sitting imparts on lap-dancing or a good game of duck-duck-goose), the net result has been that I'm becoming inflexible, soft, tired and fat.

Being unemployed would seem sweet right now (aside from the whole poverty/loss of dignity angle, that is).

Details below.

I'd like to get a few things off my chest with respect to the printing and distribution of my first novel by a small traditional publisher from the United States.

Be fairly warned: this rant contains a measure of vitriol.