1. Taint
I wrote the first scene last week. Introduced three minor background characters, and now three more characters are about to arrive - including one of the two MCs. I'm debating whether I should switch POV to the MC, or leave it at the original guy.
2. Temple
I finished off one of the unfinished scenes. Started it back in February and then stalled out. Ran across it while I was looking something up for my Taint scene. As it stands now, the last 5 paragraphs will need some heavy revising later on, but I definitely have some idea of what direction to go next with it. I've pulled out my index cards again, too, to see what I still need to write to finish telling the whole story. There's about 5 major scenes still to be covered.
3. Freewriting
I'm working on another 25k word freewrite. I've decided to drop the bar to 25k. So far there's about 15k in it, and I have two more days to finish it up before May runs out.
It would be done by now except that I've been seriously sucked into Diablo 2 lately. It's kind of analogous to comfort food for my mind. Very long story short, I seem to have lost almost all of my friends at the same time. :( (See #4 for one of them.)
4. Roleplay
At the moment, almost at a standstill. Two active games. I'm a bit blocked for a post to one of them at the moment. The rest are dead because my favorite roleplay buddy has a brand new son. :) So he's kind of not around much for roleplaying right at the moment.
The major downside of this is that I severely lack my primary muse right now, and I can definitely feel his absence.
5. House stuff
I finished assembling the second new bookcase and arranged my electronics on it. This means that my other desk is now cleared off and ready for my new computer, when I have the funds to get it this summer. :)
Next up is to clear off the two tall shelves that are basically filled with mounds of random stuff. Paper sorting and filing is one of the next major steps. At a time like this, I definitely wish I could just fly in ellsea and get her to do it instead. ;)
After the paper storm, I'll finally be able to finish shelving the rest of my books. My textbooks are currently stacked against a corner, and the stack of hardbacks measures about 5 feet tall.
I'm going to need to buy something for my CDs/cassettes too. Guess that's next on the furniture purchases list.
6. Stranger on a Bus
That's gone back to the backburner for more rumination again. I bought a new road atlas last weekend, though, so I can get some idea of what exactly the bus route is going to be, and then try to invent fictional town names that sound like they are consistent with what's in the rest of the state. (Going the route of fictional towns because I don't have a clue what the bus stations look like at most of the real ones...).
7. Summer Fun Run at SFFMuse
I'm beginning to think that this might be just the right kind of kick in the pants I need to get going on Taint and finishing up Temple. 1k words a day should be fairly simple, compared to the average 2300/day that I did for Nano, right?
***
I think that pretty much covers what I've been up to lately. I know I've been quiet. Not really feeling all that sociable. Just been a bit down in the past week or so.
2005/05/30
2005/05/22
Stranger on a Bus
I figured it out. :)
Okay. So God is this average-looking guy on the bus, and he's trying to "go home" by taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Just now I figured out exactly why he's doing this (which helps solve what specifically he's doing). It goes something like this...
God is a computer programmer who created the universe. Unfortunately, he has inadvertently misplaced the root password. So the whole point of the bus ride is that he's trying to finagle it back out of the universe so that he can get back to being root. (This also has the side effect of answering the first question in the song: "If God had a name, what would it be?" ... Answer: "root." :p)
Somewhere near the end of the story, the Pope in Rome is going to call him on the phone and tell him what the root password is. Everything else that happens, leading up to it, is where he's trying to set up reality to cough up that bit of info for him. Meanwhile, the universe itself (aka "Nature") is not exactly willing to just hand it over... It'll be surreal and completely incomprehensible to the outside observer, meaning the MC, who is the bus driver.
Woot. :) This is going to be fun to write. I just have to figure out the details now. By the way, for anyone with strongly religious beliefs of any kind, please do tell me if anything I have planned is going to be offensive (or, well, moreso than the original song). This is supposed to be a comedy, not a blasphemy. ;)
***
In other news, Taint is still languishing in the first scene. I got through the first few paragraphs and don't like most of it, so now I have to rewrite them. This is going to take a while. :p Hopefully only the first scene will take so long to work out, though - once I get started, I don't usually have as much problem. It's just that this first scene has to introduce the reader to the world as a whole and hook them into wanting to keep reading. And it has to do it from scratch. Something out of nothing. Once I have the first scene down, I can build from it and it'll snowball its way along until I get to the end. But getting the initial seed down is hard.
Okay. So God is this average-looking guy on the bus, and he's trying to "go home" by taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Just now I figured out exactly why he's doing this (which helps solve what specifically he's doing). It goes something like this...
God is a computer programmer who created the universe. Unfortunately, he has inadvertently misplaced the root password. So the whole point of the bus ride is that he's trying to finagle it back out of the universe so that he can get back to being root. (This also has the side effect of answering the first question in the song: "If God had a name, what would it be?" ... Answer: "root." :p)
Somewhere near the end of the story, the Pope in Rome is going to call him on the phone and tell him what the root password is. Everything else that happens, leading up to it, is where he's trying to set up reality to cough up that bit of info for him. Meanwhile, the universe itself (aka "Nature") is not exactly willing to just hand it over... It'll be surreal and completely incomprehensible to the outside observer, meaning the MC, who is the bus driver.
Woot. :) This is going to be fun to write. I just have to figure out the details now. By the way, for anyone with strongly religious beliefs of any kind, please do tell me if anything I have planned is going to be offensive (or, well, moreso than the original song). This is supposed to be a comedy, not a blasphemy. ;)
***
In other news, Taint is still languishing in the first scene. I got through the first few paragraphs and don't like most of it, so now I have to rewrite them. This is going to take a while. :p Hopefully only the first scene will take so long to work out, though - once I get started, I don't usually have as much problem. It's just that this first scene has to introduce the reader to the world as a whole and hook them into wanting to keep reading. And it has to do it from scratch. Something out of nothing. Once I have the first scene down, I can build from it and it'll snowball its way along until I get to the end. But getting the initial seed down is hard.
2005/05/14
deep sea fishing
Just got back from another 2-day work cruise. The novelty is starting to wear off a bit, now that I've been on 3 of them in the past 2 months, but something new and different seems to happen on each one.
This time it was deep sea fishing.
On any normal cruise, there's always some small amount of fishing going on. At least a few members of the crew are out there with their fishing rods, working around the science to do their darndest to catch us some nice meals. On my institute's boat, this is mainly the ship's engineer, but the rest of them get into it too. They almost always have lines running when the boat is moving to try and catch fast swimmers, such as dolphinfish (mahi), mackerel, kingfish, etc.
This time we had one scientist on board who's job it was to go deep-sea fishing. (What a job, huh.) That is, she was supposed to collect 200 juvenile black sea bass. This is a fish that hangs out on the bottom, hiding under stuff, and are mainly found in reef areas. This means that you can't just get them en masse with some kind of net. The most common means of catching them, as far as I'm aware, is to set out traps (wire boxes with bait; fish swims in to eat the bait and can't get back out. Works for crabs, lobsters, and various and sundry other things as well).
So we had a number of fishing stops, where the moment the boat stopped, practically everyone on board was hanging a line over the side. There were plenty of fishing rods available and the chief engineer quickly taught me how exactly they work and what to do. I was fishing with the best of them and was soon screwing up in every major way possible. :)
The funniest story out of the whole thing, though, wasn't mine. It was when the engineer lost his rod. I was fishing along next to him (trying to get the reel to behave, mostly) when suddenly I heard a loud splash. I looked over, and he was standing there with a "doh!" type of grin on his face. His rod was completely missing. Evidently something had yanked so hard on the line that it had taken the entire thing overboard. (general note: when things fall overboard and it's not a hugely expensive piece of scientific equipment that you want to get back, it's gone for good. Getting stuff back usually requires divers.)
A few minutes later, the chief scientist (who was standing on the other side of the engineer) noticed that there seemed to be a lot of dead weight on his line. He reeled up ... sure enough, the engineer's rod was at the other end.
Anyway, we didn't catch very many black sea bass. Final count: 6. (I caught the last one of those just as we were wrapping up for the night :) ). Clearly the hook and line method isn't going to net 200 fish in a 2-day trip.
We caught a large number of other fish, too. The smallest of those got used as live bait by a couple of people out to cath us dinner, and they managed to get a couple of really nice-sized red snappers. Real red snappers, as in the kind from the Gulf. Not a fish that is red that is sold in markets as "red snapper." (This is especially confusing on the east coast, because there is another snapper called the vermilion snapper, which is also red, and is therefore marketed as "red snapper" because it IS red, and it IS a snapper... but it doesn't taste anywhere near as good.) The chief scientist hazarded a guess that those fish were probably worth $70 each. We happily ate them for lunch the next day. :)
So that's where I've been these past couple of days. That, combined with the usual sampling type things I'm normally helping with, made for a very exhausting cruise with very little sleep (most of it was limited to 20 minute naps in between the stations, which were around 40 minutes to an hour apart). I didn't even slightly have the worst of it, though. The guy who was processing all the water samples had to work nonstop for 10 hours. As in, on his feet in the wet lab the whole entire time. We kept getting to the next station before he was done with the last one. And he wouldn't let anyone help, because it wasn't set up in a way that anyone else really could. Needless to say, this cut down on whining from the rest of us. ;)
And like I mentioned last time I talked about cruises ... the mentality of doing the work is very reversed on a boat. Everybody wants to do lots of work. Midway through the stations, the chief scientist told me to take over on someone else's job, and the other guy was quite put out by the whole idea. He did show me what to do, and then after that he kept complaining about feeling useless. I kind of felt guilty, too, but before that point I was feeling kind of useless, so umm. :p It made logical sense too; the other guy was a visiting scientist, and the idea was that in future cruises, I would need to know how to do that particular task, so, might as well get trained on it while there's someone around to supervise.
Final note on the cruise: I developed an addiction to pistachios. They have all kinds of snack foods on board, which means lots of munching goes on around the clock, and I settled on the pistachios. On the grocery run I just did an hour ago, I bought myself a huge bag of them. Nuts sure are fun. :)
This time it was deep sea fishing.
On any normal cruise, there's always some small amount of fishing going on. At least a few members of the crew are out there with their fishing rods, working around the science to do their darndest to catch us some nice meals. On my institute's boat, this is mainly the ship's engineer, but the rest of them get into it too. They almost always have lines running when the boat is moving to try and catch fast swimmers, such as dolphinfish (mahi), mackerel, kingfish, etc.
This time we had one scientist on board who's job it was to go deep-sea fishing. (What a job, huh.) That is, she was supposed to collect 200 juvenile black sea bass. This is a fish that hangs out on the bottom, hiding under stuff, and are mainly found in reef areas. This means that you can't just get them en masse with some kind of net. The most common means of catching them, as far as I'm aware, is to set out traps (wire boxes with bait; fish swims in to eat the bait and can't get back out. Works for crabs, lobsters, and various and sundry other things as well).
So we had a number of fishing stops, where the moment the boat stopped, practically everyone on board was hanging a line over the side. There were plenty of fishing rods available and the chief engineer quickly taught me how exactly they work and what to do. I was fishing with the best of them and was soon screwing up in every major way possible. :)
The funniest story out of the whole thing, though, wasn't mine. It was when the engineer lost his rod. I was fishing along next to him (trying to get the reel to behave, mostly) when suddenly I heard a loud splash. I looked over, and he was standing there with a "doh!" type of grin on his face. His rod was completely missing. Evidently something had yanked so hard on the line that it had taken the entire thing overboard. (general note: when things fall overboard and it's not a hugely expensive piece of scientific equipment that you want to get back, it's gone for good. Getting stuff back usually requires divers.)
A few minutes later, the chief scientist (who was standing on the other side of the engineer) noticed that there seemed to be a lot of dead weight on his line. He reeled up ... sure enough, the engineer's rod was at the other end.
Anyway, we didn't catch very many black sea bass. Final count: 6. (I caught the last one of those just as we were wrapping up for the night :) ). Clearly the hook and line method isn't going to net 200 fish in a 2-day trip.
We caught a large number of other fish, too. The smallest of those got used as live bait by a couple of people out to cath us dinner, and they managed to get a couple of really nice-sized red snappers. Real red snappers, as in the kind from the Gulf. Not a fish that is red that is sold in markets as "red snapper." (This is especially confusing on the east coast, because there is another snapper called the vermilion snapper, which is also red, and is therefore marketed as "red snapper" because it IS red, and it IS a snapper... but it doesn't taste anywhere near as good.) The chief scientist hazarded a guess that those fish were probably worth $70 each. We happily ate them for lunch the next day. :)
So that's where I've been these past couple of days. That, combined with the usual sampling type things I'm normally helping with, made for a very exhausting cruise with very little sleep (most of it was limited to 20 minute naps in between the stations, which were around 40 minutes to an hour apart). I didn't even slightly have the worst of it, though. The guy who was processing all the water samples had to work nonstop for 10 hours. As in, on his feet in the wet lab the whole entire time. We kept getting to the next station before he was done with the last one. And he wouldn't let anyone help, because it wasn't set up in a way that anyone else really could. Needless to say, this cut down on whining from the rest of us. ;)
And like I mentioned last time I talked about cruises ... the mentality of doing the work is very reversed on a boat. Everybody wants to do lots of work. Midway through the stations, the chief scientist told me to take over on someone else's job, and the other guy was quite put out by the whole idea. He did show me what to do, and then after that he kept complaining about feeling useless. I kind of felt guilty, too, but before that point I was feeling kind of useless, so umm. :p It made logical sense too; the other guy was a visiting scientist, and the idea was that in future cruises, I would need to know how to do that particular task, so, might as well get trained on it while there's someone around to supervise.
Final note on the cruise: I developed an addiction to pistachios. They have all kinds of snack foods on board, which means lots of munching goes on around the clock, and I settled on the pistachios. On the grocery run I just did an hour ago, I bought myself a huge bag of them. Nuts sure are fun. :)
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