{"id":7924,"date":"2011-11-21T12:14:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T19:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=7924"},"modified":"2011-11-21T12:14:34","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T19:14:34","slug":"that-damned-joel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/that-damned-joel\/","title":{"rendered":"That damned Joel"},"content":{"rendered":"

That damned Joel. He’s done it again. He beat me to reviewing J.D. Tuccille’s new novel High Desert Barbecue<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

He has a habit of doing things like that.<\/p>\n

Years ago, when The Mental Militia forums<\/a> were still The Claire Files, I started noticing this person.<\/p>\n

He went by the handle “John DeWitt” then (an obscure literary reference, I gather). And the thing I noticed about him was this: Every time I felt the urge to make some particularly incisive and witty response to somebody else on the forum, I would scan further down the thread and discover that this “DeWitt” person had already said exactly<\/i> what I was going to say. Only better. <\/p>\n

I knew I just had<\/i> to meet this guy who had the seeming ability to extract thoughts from my brain and apply good editing skills to them. Eventually we did meet at a gathering in the desert. Turned out we had almost nothing in common. He had not a word to say when I was around. I got the impression he basically couldn’t stand me, and I considered him a cipher.<\/p>\n

Eventually, that worked out and we became trailer-neighbors for a time in the high desert. Good neighbors. But we remain very different people. He’s a crotchety, socially maladept hermit who lives alone by choice with dogs and a cat and I’m … Oh. Yeah. Um. Well, I’m female.<\/p>\n

Still, as writers, we tend to think alike. So go read Joel’s review<\/a> of High Desert Barbecue<\/i>. Because he says very much what I was about to say (good book, flawed but still one to buy and have fun with). And — as usual — he says it with the incisiveness and wit with which he has always had that annoying habit of pre-empting me.<\/p>\n

I’ll have more on the book tomorrow or Wednesday. Because I really do have a few more thoughts on the subject that Joel hasn’t already sneakily extracted from my brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That damned Joel. He’s done it again. He beat me to reviewing J.D. Tuccille’s new novel High Desert Barbecue. He has a habit of doing things like that. Years ago, when The Mental Militia forums were still The Claire Files, I started noticing this person. He went by the handle “John DeWitt” then (an obscure literary reference, I gather). And the thing I noticed about him was this: Every time I felt the urge to make some particularly incisive and witty response to somebody else on the forum, I would scan further down the thread and discover that this “DeWitt”…<\/p>\n

Continue readingThat damned Joel<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-and-movies","category-miscellaneous","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}