Stay still!

Truth/Fiction

Quite often, the line is about the width of that slash. Successful authors walk the line well. Timeless ones blur it. While a well-spun tale always regales, it's when the story makes you sort of go, "Hey! That's me!" that the enchantment is complete.

Well, for me, anyhow.

The preferred Goat-read is comic fantasy. Pratchett, Aspirin, Anthony and such. Not terribly useful stuff and a fair bit more divided from daily life. But even with trolls, goblins and the undead involved, chords still can be struck, and well.

Not-so-famous English writer Tom Holt does not make for smooth reading. "Ok, so Siegfried kills the dragon, gets the Tarnhelm and the ring of power and loses it to a Frost giant through a terribly complicated process of incest and deception. Four thousand years later, the hero of the story runs over a badger who turns out to be the Frost giant in hiding and then there's Rhinedaughters involved and..."

Well, I'm deliberately mucking it up a bit, but one does get lost in his twists.

In the Portable Door trilogy though, he phrased something really well. The protagonist, Paul Carpenter, is luckless, loveless and has been so all through his twenty-odd years.

...leave off. I won't deny that holds true for most of mine, but that's not the bit I'm talking about, alright?

Paul is unremarkably unremarkable. Not good at very much at all, broke and reticent in company (look, sod off. I'm getting to it alright?). Practically invisible to women. To top it off, he has a most distressing syndrome of falling in love.

It didn't take very much - they just had to be there. Tall, short, fat, slim...anything female with a pulse. Or not. Pulse negotiable. And he knew very well about it - he just couldn't do anything about it. Upon the third meeting or so, his pulse would race and he'd find himself stealing glances...well, robbing them, really. He fell in love with anything that'd stay still long enough.

That last was the quote, yes. Don't like them tadpole things at the tops of sentences that aren't dialogue. Tadpoles have their place. Ponds.

So it was that something I'd never been about to put a finger on was dragged screaming and kicking into the spotlight. I had that syndrome! Have, even.

Through the teenage diaries, I fixated myself on all sorts of women. Some of them didn't even resemble women. I'd go as far as to say human beings, but that would be going a little far. Though there was that one with the mustache...

Nevermind. Suppressed memory in time. So, yes. Explained all sorts of things, it did. My movie melancholia, for one. Yes, it just takes roughly an hour and a half of watching a character for it to sink in. Heck, for a bit I was even enamoured with Narusegawa. Naru of Love Hina fame. It's an anime. I did feel silly about that one. And that other one I went outstandingly psychotic on from reading her writing. If I weren't me, I'd scare me. Lots.

It's tough being an introverted nerd-geek that way. I'm hiding it better these days, but tennish years of cultivated instinct are hard to break completely. And I suspect all of us, besides the elite order of coke-bottle specced', acne-at-forty-five computer programmers are prone to it. Those blokes are just hardcore. Born to press Allllllt.

Sorry, best pun I could do on short notice.

So if you're female and have a nerd-geek friend, it's quite likely he's smitten with you. Do something about the poor boy. If you're not going to take him up on his uh, silent offer, do something to put him off. Nothing vicious, mind. We nerd-geeks are fragile that way. Many a broken-hearted sysadmin has been found dead in the morning, having hung himself with his mouse cord.

...I admit I'm at a loss for ideas, here. He's going to think everything you do is divine. If you squirt cola through your nose at him, he's not going to wash that shirt for the next week. Invite him over for dinner and serve up blackened bits on a plate. Watch in fascination as he crunches through what really is charcoal and asks for seconds.

So, sorry. Not much help. Don't worry, it wears off with time. But on no account show any kind of competence with a computer or inclination to play games on one. That rustling in the bushes at 3AM you'll hear for the next ten years will be him.

Quite happy I was, to have it suddenly cleared up for me. Not that it's a whole lot of help when you can't do anything about it. But it's nice to know, and all that.

Though, what Tom Holt didn't cover was what to do when, out of the wild blue, something all music and song and tinkly grace - what dreams may come - decides you somehow qualify.

I'm going with deer-in-headlights. If I figure it out, I'll do a book and retire off it.