The WAL

I’m lucky enough that the break room at work has satellite TV.  Although many days I’m not sure if it’s good luck or bad.  On those seemingly rare occassions the TV isn’t tuned to sports (And why does hockey have to be so loud?), it seems to be tuned to Headline News.

I like the news.  Living in Canada, I’d prefer news with a Canadian viewpoint - give me Newsworld or Newsnet any day - but if it has to be American, CNN is the best I can hope for.  Headline News, while technically part of the CNN group of networks, seems to specialize in sensationalism.

Before anyone calls me out on that, I’m just going by the couple of shows that seem to be on several times each day or at least every time the channel is on at work.

Even more specifically, I’m thinking of Nancy Grace.  I’m not impugning her skills as a journalist, exactly… no, wait.  Yes, I am or would be if I thought she had any.  I don’t get this woman.  I don’t get why she’s on television.  Her show seems to take a sequence of unrelated news tragedies from across the United States to report on.  Only she doesn’t actually report on them.  We get a few basic facts and some video footage, then a whole lot of time with her taking righteous indignation to a new level.  It’s horrible what society has done to such and such downtrodden person.  This guy over here needs to be strung up by his nuts for what he did.  Why can’t the incompetent police find the evil monster who killed this poor innocent?

Why do we need her personal opinion on the news story?  What happened to presenting the news to your audience and letting them decide how to feel about it instead of telling them how they should feel?  Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?  My understanding of which, by the way, has six words linked to it:  accuracy, fairness, impartiality, objectivity, truthfulness, and accountability.  How many of those apply to Nancy Grace’s broadcast?

Picture me trying to decide if I can hold one finger up by giving the show half a mark for accuracy and half a mark for truthfulness.  No.  I’m not sure I can even give half marks.

Incredibly, I’m approaching the supposed half way point.  Have I mentioned that I just made up the 90,000 word count?  If it’s 75, so what?  If it’s 110, that’s fine too.  Guaging what I’ve plotted to what I’ve written, 90k feels about right for the first draft.  That said, there are a couple of small scenes, action away from the main character, that I want to go back and put in.  Not sure if these will make up a couple of short chapters or if they can just be squeezed in at the beginning or end of existing chapters.  Either way, I’ve made the notes and they’re not going to get written until I’ve first written the rest of the novel.

Does anyone else out there have a cat who throws up in his own food bowl on a regular basis?

Anecdotally, from friends and several vets, vomitting is less a hobby and more a passion for orange cats.  As one of my current felines is orange, I’ve more than gotten used to this.  Anti-hairball food limits this to a certain degree, so I only have to clean up cat puke three or four times per week.  But one of those is usually in the kibble bowl and that’s just damned inconsiderate, if you ask me.  Another cat has to eat out of that bowl.

I should probably mention that this same cat, cute and lovable as he is, also suffers from either Mad Cat Disease or Catzheimer’s.  The poor furball has no short term memory and I’m not sure about the long term, either.  He’ll come in from a raging snowstorm that he demanded to be let out into thirty seconds before, then turn around and face the sliding door before you’ve got it completely shut.  When the lock clicks, he’ll look up at you to see if you’re going to open the door to let him out because he hasn’t left the house in days.

He’ll stand at the kibble bowl and eat for ten minutes, take two steps away and stop, wondering if he’s hungry.  Deciding he might be, it’s back to the bowl.  Does it surprise me he regurtitates so often?  Not really, but he keeps eating even as he gags and doesn’t seem to be able to turn his head away from the bowl.  Fortunately, the sight of the puke he’s just deposited will turn off his appetite for a while.  At least for as long as it takes me to notice it and replace the bowl.

He’s also the only cat I’ve ever seen fall out of a window from a motionless start.

And yet he hunts.  Anything smaller than he is.  And he’s quite good at it - a rodent entering our house has a life span measurable in minuntes.  Things in the yard last a little longer.  Last summer, he tried to bring a live chipmunk into the house.  I don’t know what he thought he’d do with it inside.  Fortunately, he got tired of waiting for me to let him in and lazy about the grip he kept on it with his jaws.  Seizing the opportunity, the ground squirrel escaped, and is probably still warning his grandchildren to stay away from our yard.

He’s a wonderful, affectionate cat, but my youngest child didn’t vomit this much as an infant.

I’m just about to start writing for today.  It’s a weekend day for me, early in the eveneing on my Saturday, so I’m also going to put some effort in on the novella I’ve been working on.  The end is in sight on this one: finishing the climactic scene and a couple of short wrap ups beyond that.  Probably not much more than 1500 words to go.

Since I started working on the novel on Christmas Day last year, most of my “new words” of fiction have gone into it. Not all of them - I put a thousand or so words per week into a story that’s recently crossed over into novella length. The first draft of that will probably be finished in another 2000 words or so. Plus I’m writing a short story long hand one or two hundred words at a time as a wind down when I get into bed in the morning and before I pick up a book to read myself to sleep.

So, the novel is going well and I’m also working on a novella a couple of days each week. And every day I’m spending a few minutes editing, slowly working through all of the stories I pounded out in the fall. Probably should have been doing more of that all the way along, but it’s going fairly smoothly now even if I likely won’t be caught up unti lthe end of the year.

But if everything is going so well, why do I want to mess with it?

Because apparently I do want to mess with it. Some part of my brain has decided that I’ve done enough research and plotting on the novel I want to write after this one that it’s time to start writing it. I’ve tried to explain to myself that I’d really like to finish this one first, but it doesn’t seem to help. It also doesn’t seem to matter that I haven’t named any of the main characters yet or even decided on backgrounds for most of them. Most of the major plot points are clear in my head. So are the beginning and ending. Obviously, it’s time to write the story.

So I’m going to start writing the story. But not until after I’ve finished the short story I’m writing long hand right now, and that’s how I’m going to start working on “Skip to My Luu”. Yes, that’s a really bad working title, and it’s even worse if you know who Luu is, but it’s what I’ve got right now. It’s going to be a shorter novel than “Dragon Summer” - my guess is in the vicinity of 60,000 words, but you never know.

And I’m setting an April 1st deadline for submissions. Three submissions out by April Fool’s Day. There, I’ve committed it to the Internet. It’s public and therefore should keep me honest.

Wish me luck.  Please.

Is there anything more futile than filling in potholes with those crumbs of black crap that look like they might be bits of recycled road? I mean, I’m all for recycling nearly any material but dumping stuff into the hole, patting it down a bit and then driving on to the next hole doesn’t really seem like it accomplishes much, does it? Certainly I’d agree with actually repairing the hole unless the road in question is already so patched that it really does make more sense to resurface the whole thing, but filling the hole doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And yet you may ask, is there a way to make this stupid activity even more sutpid, or at least more expensive?

Why yes, there is. This evening, driving my offspring home from the weekly family swim at our local pool, I witnessed this activity taking place on one of the almost main streets of our town. Wearing dark clothes, in the rain, at night, on a holiday Monday. I suppose it’s possible that the two-man team was working overtime to get the job done, too.

But really, I’m so completely unsurprised that I can’t muster the strength to be more than irritated. A tip of the hat to whatever evil government mastermind is behind the plot. Well played.

Resisting the urge to go back and put in a couple of short scenes that occured to me after the fact. The middle is in sight and I don’t want to get side tracked. Time enough for bonus scenes during the first edit.

Do you ever get the feelling that all politicians are vitriol spewing ridiculously partisan professional idiots?

I’ve been listening to too much political commentary and audio recordings done in the House lately, perhaps, and far too many interviews.  Canada’s parliamentarians are rarely as well-behaved as a class of unruly kindergartners the day after Halloween.  This irritates me at the best of times.  I wonder if they could stop all of the finger pointing and blame calling for one day to actually discuss the issues, would parliament implode from the lack of hot air keeping it inflated?  They can’t even let members of their own party speak without cheering them on after (and often during) every sentence.  And it’s even more difficult for them to let a member of another party speak at all.  My advice to them all: if you’re not talking, sit down and shut up; if you are talking, spit it out and then shut up.

It’s even worse when you get two or three together in a room for an interview or panel discussion.  Half of every posturing response is to tell you how stupid/incompetent the other parties are.  Interview one on his/her own, and that’s nearly all you get.

I sometimes wonder if I should think about politics as a third career.  Then I remember that I’m honest and don’t tolerate bullshit that well (which has gotten me into trouble sometimes in the past).  BUt I do okay at customer service - talking to people has gotten a lot easier for me in the last few years, and isn’t that the most important thing in politics?

Spending a few seconds crunching writing related numbers, I find that if I only hit the exact minimum wordcount for the novel for the rest of its length, I’ll hit the 90,000 word mark on June 4th, almost four weeks ahead of my Canada Day deadline.  Yay, me!

I’ve played video games as long as there have been video games.  All different genres in all different places.  Early console systems, far too many quarters in arcades, home computers, more modern consoles, portable games, you name it.

The original Civilization helped me to not study very much in the latter half of university and it remained one of my favourite games for a couple of years after I finished.  I’ve played both II and III as well, but neither of them held me as well as the first.  A friend loaned me their copy of Civilization IV recently and on one of my days off this week, I installed it intending to give it a quick try.

I installed it, and while two of my children played Lego Star Wars in the next room, ran through the tutorial to refresh myself in the genre and check out the game.  Great graphics, an apparently intelligent engine to drive the computer players, good soundtrack, and as many details as I could possibly want.  It looked great, fun even.

After I put the kids to bed and my wife had gone to sleep (I’m working nights right now), I came back to the computer intending to start a game and play for a little while before moving on to writing and the chore list I’d set myself for the night.

Four and a half hours later, after four and a half hours of straight playing, I shut the game down.  I hadn’t written a single word or even looked at the list of things I wanted to get done.  After a couple of minutes reflection, I deleted Civ IV from my hard drive and put everything back in the package.

It’s too addictive.  I need to be able to play a game for a half hour or so and then put it away and I’m not going to be able to do that with this one.  It looks like a great game that I’d really enjoy playing, but it will suck up far too much of my life if I let it.  Sure, that initial fascination might only last for a couple of weeks, but it might not, and how much time would I lose in those couple of weeks, anyway?  No, this one will have to leave the house.  I can play Lego Star Wars with the kids.

Chapter 8 complete.  My new problem with the novel is not moving the story forward, but thinking of things I want to go back and put in.  It’s hard to convince myself that they can wait until I’ve got round one done and go back to start editing.  I’m trying to make myself be happy with just sticking notes into the text and into the outline of what I want to do.  If I go back and start adding things in, the temptation will be to edit what’s already there and I need to finish the story first.

<sigh>  Itunes just downloaded the last episode of Playing for Keeps.  I’d really like to know how things turn out, but if I listen to it, the story will be over.  Yet all good stories must end.  This plus the latest Morevi episode (not the last, fortunately - having two end at the same time would be too much - but the last for a couple of weeks), and I’m going to have a great commute tonight.

Into chapter 8 and still going strong.  Wish I could have found this level of focus years ago.

I’ve also been doing a lot of editing so far this year with thirteen stories finished a second draft and working on a fourteenth.  Sounds like a lot, but most of them are fairly short, in the 3-4k word range with one significant exception.  I’m working my way up into the longer stories.  The shortest of what I’ve got left for a second run is about 6k and they range up to 24.  One thing I have noticed about second drafts is that they seem to be invariably longer than first drafts.  I think it’s because with the first draft I’m just trying to get the story out of my head and into the computer.  With the second, I’m trying to make it read well.  Third might be for finishing touches, but each story is different.  I’ve got one that’s had three drafts so far and will take one more at least before I’m done with it

Submissions start soon, I think.

I grew up on Star Trek. The original series and later The Next Generation. Later series haven’t thrilled me as much but I’ve given all of them a chance (Enterprise, unfortunately, was cancelled just when the writing started to become adequate). Star Trek is one of the main reasons that I became a science fiction fan and wannabe writer. I have seen every single Star Trek movie in the theatre. Sometimes I’ve been happy, sometimes I’ve walked away saying, “Boy did that suck.” Too often, actually, but the good has mostly outweighed the bad.

When I heard that the new movie is going to be a “re-imagining” of the original series, I didn’t bother to suppress the shudder. To my mind, the problem with the idea of re-imagining something is that it usually throws out the original imagination completely, the good with the bad. Yes, there was certainly bad (Hey, can I borrow those Roman costumes you’re not using?), but there was a lot more good. Any time something is “re-imagined”, I’m wary of the potential results.

Against the recommendation of a very good friend of mine, I just watched the teaser for the new Star Trek movie. It tells me very, very little – which is what a teaser is supposed to do. But it seems to show that, contrary to everything we’ve ever been shown in the past in the ST universe, the Enterprise is being built on the ground. Disregarding that, the teaser looked good.

Is canon important? Yes, but it’s not the only thing that matters, but by a long shot. Writing, casting, acting, visuals, but ultimately the vision is the critical thing. Show me the vision, JJ. Consider me teased, but show me the vision.

Re-imagining Trek concerns me. The teaser teased me. Am I going to see this movie in the theatre? Sure, and I’m going to take my son, who’ll be just a bit over ten by then. Good or bad, we’ll see it together. Kind of a family tradition. And I’ll be sitting on the fence until I’ve actually seen the film.

Still cranking along. Just finished a really fun action scene and now I have to write the clean up and fall out. I’ve started the basics of plotting that next big story and done a lot of editing on some shorter pieces, several of which might actually be ready for submission, maybe. A shorter piece that I’m only really working on during “weekends” is currently sitting at a touch of 17k words and will probably finish up at 19 to 20. I’m feeling pretty productive.