bus story, roleplaying, moves, new computer! :)

I'm psyching myself up for writing the last 3 chapters of the bus story. Tomorrow shall be the official day for it. :)

I might end up combining chapters 10 and 11, or moving events around between 10, 11, and 12. The rockfall chapter (the next one), it occurred to me last night that it would make sense if I took the standard formula for most of the previous chapters, only twist it around to be completely backwards. ;) That is, Alan will save the day - but he will be doing it right at the very beginning of the chapter, and then he will get into a heap of trouble for doing it. The goal of the whole journey will be in jeopardy and he might have to start over completely from scratch if Nature wins. It will then be up to Ned (the bus driver) to rescue him, save all their efforts, and keep things moving along to the goal.

The chapter after that will then be the phone call from the Pope, which is the whole payoff for the entire story (for Alan). After that point, I really don't see why Alan would hang around, so this might actually make more sense to occur in Eugene. (In which case, the rockfall chapter will also be the Clarkston, Idaho chapter.)

I've got an awesome set of pics of the area around the Greyhound station in Eugene, courtesy of a friend over at SFFMuse who lives in Oregon and went there with his digital camera. 479 shots plus an annotated map with comments. I spent all last night engrossed in pics of parking lots. :) Not sure whether I'll manage to work in all of the details I now have, but it was neat to see a step-by-step street tour of the area. Thanks Spiff! :D

Other random thoughts ... Alan's mysterious book will probably get left with Ned. What will it actually say to him? My best thought at the moment is that it will be an account of the bus trip from Alan's point of view, so that Ned knows what really happened. (Even though the readers never will. ;) ) (The way more obvious choice was to have the book be equivalent to a 'bible' - but ... I don't really wanna go there. :p And it wouldn't be very fitting anyhow.)

And somewhere in there I need more character development for Ned, too. Stuff about his own family that he's about to visit in Eugene, that sort of thing. He's really not that complex ... he's a bus driver who enjoys driving. A bit on the dense side when it comes to not recognizing what Alan is (but that might be on purpose on his part too).

Roleplaying is still pretty dead. My favorite roleplay buddy has been missing for two weeks now. :( My own game has kind of come to a halt because we're waiting on him for two out of three threads. If he doesn't post by the end of the weekend, I'll resort to calling him. I do have his number, because we traded numbers to arrange that dinner meeting in Macon. I just don't really want to bother him if he's got major Real Life issues...

In other news ... I'm moving into my new office on Monday. My boss has been moving into his all last week, while they were renovating the space I'm going into. There's a bit of work I need to get done over the weekend before the move, and I'll probably wander over there later today.

Much more importantly, I have my new computer! :) It's a G5 iMac with a 20 inch screen. All the components for my new setup arrived last week, and I got it all set up yesterday. I now have a wireless network, wireless keyboard and mouse, and way more disk space than I know what to do with (the old comp has 5 gigs total space, with less than 200 megs left available). And the ability to burn things to CDs and DVDs! (The old comp has a CD-ROM.) And an iPod Nano! Finally I can get sucked into the whole downloading craze for music and videos. :) And I have expensive APC UPS's so now I never have to worry about power surges again.

Next month's credit card bill is going to be horrendous. Oh well. ;)

And then two or three months down the road when I'm back in the black again, I'll get the printer/copier/scanner that I've got my eye on. Then it'll be off to looking at digital cameras. :)

Life is looking pretty good overall. Anyway, I better get going and get stuff done.