Resolve

Epiphanies come in all places, usually when you least expect it, like when I'm on tour. Ready? Ok. I have discovered that I am lazy. No no, I can see you saying "Yeah we already knew that", this goes beyond my normal laziness. It is 13 years of slothful thinking that I must now, finally, blow up with a compact nuclear device.

KABOOM!!!!!!!

Ahem. I have never read the Lord of the Rings. *hides in shame* This is for two basic and simple reasons. 1: See the above paragraph. 2: I do worry that it will infect my writing. Ewe, the Frodo flu. It is such a landmark in a genre that I love and wish to participate in that well, lets just say that I've always been cautious around it. I've read other things by Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Silmarrillion, the Lay of Luthien and the Children of Hurin. Love them all, especially the Sil. And strangely buying the stupid books is and always has been a deeply important memory for me. Family vacation, used book store, I was 12, and when I opened the book it was right at the description of the Black Riders. My mind went blank for a second and I think I blinked alot after reading that. Pivitol (I wasn't 100% sold on fantasy at the time). And yet to this day, despite having two sets of the trilogy I've managed to get through 2 of the 3 books in, I say again, 13 years.

Well no more. Once my TBR falls to 20 I will start to read it from the beginning, (well I'll skim the Hobbit chapter, I know what a hobbit is) to end. No books in between and then maybe my lack of effort will stop bugging me. Plus I'm a bit more of a conscious person than I was at 12 or 20 when I picked up The Two Towers. It'll be interesting to see what I get out of it at 25.

Happy Labor Weekend

Happy End of Summer to all and to all a good...fire. That works. Last night was pretty sweet. Good company, funny stories, fire, absynthe. I thought you could only get it in France but I was wrong and being a big Poe and Wilde fan, I thought it was really cool. (Only drink it if you like black licorice.) Other than another fire tonight it will be a nice, quiet holiday weekend for me. Quiet is good. So is music. Hmm sadly no concert at Fiddler's Green tonight but next week is a completely different story. Hello resurgence in popularity of Irish folk music. Strangely, most of the people who play it are like my age. Not bad, mind you, just interesting.

Ack, tea is not working yet. Grrr. I go make more.

Yum Yum Yum Crunch

Woot. Happy Day. Two more days till my weekend! And until then I shall dream about...sushi. Yesterday I had the best sushi of my life. Spicy tuna roll, unagi, spider roll, why please sir...I want some more. It was the best sushi of my life. Yum.

It occurs to me that I have been very negligent in posting this week. Bad Blogger! Why you may ask? Well inspiration has been holding me prisoner (without any nice plums sadly) and making me a slave to my pen. '08 Stories is my poor abused notebook that is filling up nicely with my words. Yay words. It's good this way. It's been balancing my two obsessions out of my life. Well out of my consciousness anyways.

And so I leave you will this piece of Engrish wisdom until I am more awake to blog properly.

The New Commandments

Found this on one of my favorite forums ~Fantasy Bookspot Central~ and laughed my butt off.

It's titled "How to write the best fantasy"...

1. Prepare for your writing by exposing your mind to the right material. This means you absolutely must watch every Hollywood fantasy movie you can lay your hands on -- the ones from the 80s are especially helpful. Optionally, you can read Tolkien and Robert E. Howard's and L. Sprague DeCamp's Conan books. Don't bother reading any other old fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis, Charles Perrault, Howard Pyle, Sir Thomas Malory, or Lewis Carroll, and don't trouble yourself with modern fantasy writers like Gene Wolfe, Jonathon Carroll, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles De Lint, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman, or China Mieville. And whatever you do, don't read outside the fantasy genre, or else your work could be subject to all kinds of foreign literary influences that could destroy the purity of your high fantasy prose.

2. Develop your ideas carefully. Nothing helps you develop your storytelling like a few hundred hours of D&D! Make sure you write down everything that happens in your latest Dragonlance campaign; this will form the backbone of your first novel. If you feel you need help coming up with good dialog, try some live action roleplaying -- the quips and barbs you'll cast at each other when you're all running around the local science fiction convention hotel at 3 a.m. will be pure gold!

3. Research. Researching mythologies, legends, and history on your own is a complete waste of time -- real authors don't worry about that kind of thing. It's fantasy; they just make stuff up off the tops of their heads! And anyway, everybody knows that fantasy should be all about orcs, dwarves, elves, and dragons, with maybe a unicorn or a few fairies or demons thrown in for good measure. If you feel you need something more exotic, use a creature from the D&D Monster Manual. Take your settings directly from Tolkien or Dragonlance -- readers like to feel they're in familiar surroundings. You earn bonus points from readers if you lift scenes directly from the Lord of the Rings movies!

4. Set your story free. You might have heard writing instructors talking about stuff like "internal logic", "consistency", and "maintaining the reader's suspension of disbelief". Don't listen to them -- they're just trying to stifle your creativity! Fantasy is all about magic, and anything can happen in magic! Internal logic's so boring; keep the reader entertained with surprising and unprepared-for events!

5. Give your characters memorable names. You'll want your readers to know right away whether characters are good guys or bad guys; it's also helpful if the name describes the main feature that distinguishes that character from all the others. For instance, your lovely elfin princess could be named Arewynne Fairmaid. Your evil orc could be named Argh of the Skullkrusher Clan. The brave blacksmith could be named Hammerclang Strongheart. Don't confuse the reader with subtlety.

6. Write your dialog carefully. You don't want to spend too much time on characterization, so it will need to be conveyed in dialog. Make absolutely sure your reader knows what the characters are feeling: "I'm going to kill you, snivelling creature!" Argh shouted menacingly. "Please give me the ring, master!" wheedled Gorrum flinchingly. Be sure to add in the funny quips and sayings you picked up while you were gaming! Readers love it when you throw in hip, modern language to spice up that old style stuff: "Thou art troubling me!" growled Blackmane Stabmaster. "I shall run thee through with mine Sword of Stabbyness!" "Come and get some, beeyotch!" Puck replied defiantly.

7. Create a powerful opening. Make sure to ground your readers in your fantasy world with lots of description right away. Make sure to spend several paragraphs describing the room your main character has just awakened in; no detail is too insignificant to be dwelled upon. You shouldn't introduce any dialog or plot for several pages lest you break the spell you're weaving for the reader.

8. Use language skillfully. You've probably guessed that you should borrow terminology and descriptions from Tolkien and Dragonlance as much as possible. But what you might not realize is that adverbs are your friends -- you should use plenty of adverbs: slowly, quickly, menacingly, woundingly, etc. And! Use! Exclamation! Points! Wherever! Possible! For! Emphasis!!! And if you learned a particularly cool, long word (such as antidisestablishmentarianism or omphaloskepsis), figure out ways to use it as much as possible. Editors will be awed by your intelligence if you use the longest, most complex words possible to spice up simple actions. For instance, "said" is terribly overused; try using "enunciated" or "phonated" instead. Heck, while you're at it, invent some cool-sounding words, use them frequently, and don't leave any clues or context to let the reader know what they mean! Readers love a good mystery.

9. Titles are vital. Make sure your title is catchy, and includes words like "doom", "ring", "fellowship", "champion", "lord", "sword", "bane", "wyrm", "faery", or "blood". You get extra points if the title gives away the ending. "The Baneful Fellowship of the Sword Lord's Wyrm Ring of Doom" would make an excellent title. Also make sure it's subtitled as being Part One of a 12-part series (thanks to TenMinJoe for reminding me of this important element!)

10. Rewriting and proofreading. You, my friend, are an artist, a poet, and the best, truest stuff will come to you in the first draft. Don't tamper with it by rewriting it -- it's your Art! And don't bother checking your spelling -- real authors don't worry about that kind of mundane stuff. After all, the editor's got to have something to do!

11. Make sure your manuscript stands out. You might have heard about something called "standard manuscript format" -- that kind of thing is for chumps! Single-spacing saves paper, and you should always use the most exotic fantasy font you can find to put the reader in the right mood. And speaking of moods, white paper is so dull. Printing your opus on purple paper makes a powerful statement.

12. Handle rejection like a pro. If an editor sends you a rejection, don't despair! Instead, write her back immediately demanding an explanation. If she did give you reasons, just ignore them -- she's only trying to keep you down. Write her back and tell her what an idiot she is -- show her you can't be cowed! And then change the title of your tale, write a new opening paragraph, change the names of your characters, and send your manuscript right back to her. If you follow these simple steps, you'll have created a work that makes even the most black-hearted editor tremble ... and, if you're lucky, wish she could ask the court for a restraining order!

LOL. Best part of the whole thing is the "Sword of Stabbyness". Oh yeah, I'm stealing that one.

Reincarnation Time!

Scary People

Hmm my once very quiet and boring life is no more. Between my book club, raid progression nights, working out and hopefully getting a library internship for the fall, (well and school, forgot about that, umm and i guess work too) I have that hurried hectic feel that pervades most other people. This has led me to a serious consideration. Should I find another writer's circle, one that meets say once a month. There is one with a seemingly stable membership that meets at the library, has a website and seems like a good place. However, they appear to be nothing like the group I belong to now. That website is well, scary. And prejudice. We can sum up my current group as the happy fuzzy people. These new people are not that, they believe in 24 minute critique stints where the author must be silent and take it.

Ok I could handle that...I think. If not I could definitely learn, I know I could. But they are genre supremacists. And that kind of bothers me. They say no SF, Fantasy, Children's Lit. Two of those I couldn't care less about but my first novel, who's first draft is almost done, is fantasy. I write a good deal of gothic short stories and my next wrimo idea is along the same lines. True I do write everything from angsty pieces to westerns all the way over to the occasional modern fiction.

So to join I will have to write out of my element. But in doing so I will receive criticism that I could apply to the writings that mean the most to me. (Another thing that bothers me is why isn't Romance on that list of unworthy genres? That genre is basically dribble filled in with sex, but hey there's my prejudice coming out.) Plus I do feel like my writing is at a stalemate, where I cannot move forward and don't want to go back to the half hearted plotlines of my teen years.

I think I'll go visit these people and see what they're about. I'll even take my latest proofed short with me, (I call it gothic, they can't argue with that, otherwise throw Poe, Hawthorne, Bronte, and about a dozen others out the window), "Time Bleeds". The worst that can happen is I don't like them and leave. The best...well it could be something truly great.

I am the Caped Donut

Oh yes, mild mannered bibliomaniac by day, super hero donut by night. I'm sorry to have lied to you for so many years but the fate of the world was at stake and well, who would have thought you'd still want to be friends with an alien...donut.

Wormtown Seen Anew

It's colorful. It's new. Oh my God it has that blasted canal in it. Catching a glimpse and a shot of the finished side of the new mural I didn't really get a detailed look at it. True, I could have parked my car and walked to the intersection but well, it's Thursday. Meh. While I was downtown this morning I saw the banner, (it's really too big to miss) for Canalfest September 6 all day. Will I go? Probably, if for no other reason than to see if those crazy rich morons can change my mind about that hole in the ground where they want to hide millions of dollars from the evil school children who want to use that cash to, ugh, learn. Plus festival food, Woot! Mmmm food. Lunch time.

Blue water = happy naps.

And the Winner is

Mike, Steve and Marc. They caught stuff. In this case a monster, (but he said it tasted great). Fishing is one of those activities that my brain has to get accustomed to. Wait and see is kind of hard for me. The storms in the distance were awesome and the laughs just kept coming. Of course a bunch of nightowls being up so early only could have one possible outcome.

And it's a K.O.

Atlantic Ocean 1 vs Me 0

So I was outsmarted by a bunch of fish, it was a blast. Who would have thought fishing could be so much fun? It was a beautiful day. We were ready and (well after I got over my sea sickness) the fishing began!

Sing on Bon Jovi, Sing On

Woot less than 24 hours and I will be fishing!!!

(Something no one could have ever guessed I'd say)

Updates, pictures and sea tales echoing of Jack Sparrow will abound...tomorrow. Possibly even a Deadliest Catch worthy rescue video if my butt is unable to stay on board. *gasp* The excitement.

Ack! Clouds! Big, low, dark, menacing looking clouds. Hit me with your best shot! (While I'm at work) Cause I am
"Wanted
Wanted
Dead or Alive!"

This is my head meeting the wall

(Spoiler alert: This is a Wow centric post. My blog, my posts.)

Why, Why, Why can't people do as they are told. *Smash head against brick wall.* Ok, so the last raid I was on did not go so well. The Shade of Aran, I don't like him, in fact I object to his very existence and like to terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's just my thing. The fight is easy, huntsman easy with two warlocks. We had two warlocks. One moved in flame wreath and the other refused to run from Arcane blast. Hence they both died before the elementals arrived which were their entire purpose for being there. ARRRRRRRR!

*grumble grumble grumble.

Ok, yes it is a game. But in everything I do I try to be as good and knowledgable as I can. It's kind of an obsession to be competent. Ask my stories, they are never done. Reason? I can make them better. So I have researched about how to be a good hunter. I am reasonably sucessful according to my guild. Trapping, dpsing and kiting are no problem. All they had to do was live, then fear. Ugh, I could go on but right now it's just a waste of words.

So before you think, oh god not that game again, (and I play it less than the average American watches television, that means you) have you ever encountered someone who was too lazy to improve on something that you were both involved in. It could be a sports team, a band or in theater. In soccer it was the kid who kicked with their big toe, in hockey the people who refused to play defense and fall back to their own zone, I'm sure there's an equivalent in theater (never was into singing, it creeps me out), they made you want to scream. As a goalie I did, often, as any defenseman who has ever played with me. But here, I can't. I can't say a word or tell them the URL to a lock website, tell them to talk to the two guildies who are great locks, I can't say a thing.

This is one of those situations where hobby meets commitment I suppose. After sucking as a hunter for a very long time I did all that I could to learn about my class. (Half assing is not an option, so sayeth my unbringing). Eh, at the time I also couldn't walk so what else was I supposed to do? Not everyone will have the same commitment and that is....ok. Casual is what we are and ranting about it has made me feel a tiny bit better. Tiny. Like {} this much. ;)

Well, at least I got new boots.

My Decision

It's taken me mostly all summer to come up with this decision. I didn't come to it lightly and feel a bit of trepidation just putting it into print. There is so much I want to see and do, (my new digital camera just screams to be used) and it seems so little time to fit it all in. My writing is sporadic at best and even though I am getting better at short stories and plugging away at my novel I am not where I would like to be with it. My TBR pile will soon be up to the roof if I don't start reading more and I only have one more month of free time before the new semester starts. Then there is Japanese. I finally have found a textbook that works for me added to my other two I have vocab, writing and grammar covered for the beginning levels.

Woot for exercise! I feel great having walks nearly everyday and get a good cardio workout every day I work due to the excessive amount of stairs I get to climb. Jup and I ramble through our neighborhood at night meaning he is getting healthier too. To all this I add my other fun.

Wow. Some of my friends hate it, others are indifferent, a few see why I enjoy it so much. My hunter Kelsomar has come along very nicely, almost full epics and I am in the top 3 damage in every raid I attend, plus my trapping skills have stuck around long enough for me to not look like a complete huntard. (Thankfully.) But after nearly two years (has it been so long?) I am ready for a change. Without the option of going Survival (sadness, I want to!!!) I have chosen an alternate focus for my week nights. Lecanu, my dwarvian shadow priest. Up to level 50 and going strong I plan to have her at 60 by Friday and on her way to the Outlands. I will be a Shadow weave Tailor and DPS main spec. Of course I will gather up a healing set and will respec as needed but I don't think I would be happy being a holy priest full time. (Just not me). I am having a great time leveling her and along with Shep my trust rabbit companion, (lazy butt just watches and eats grass while i do all the work) I'm finding I want to play the game again. A priest....who would have guessed.

So after that wall of text about several different and very much unrelated topics what could my decision possibly be? One I should have come to years ago.

I want to go to Japan, and if I like it I want to live there for a bit.
I want to finish my novel (and find a semi appropriate title for it).
I want to learn how to keep my garden from trying to eat my flowers.
I want to learn how to make peanut butter brownies from scratch.
I want to finish the blanket I started to a couple of years ago and it will be in my living room when I'm cold.
I want to level Lecanu up to 70, craft my two epic sets and be a raider. I want to heal when I can so others can find a change of pace and not get burnt out.
I want to stand in line in a few months when Wrath of the Lich King comes out and revel in the excitement with my fellow nerds.
I want to learn to laugh when it rains.

Normally I don't usually say those words out loud, "I want". It seems wrong in some way to me and I try to not think about them. I have decided these are what I want and I'm going to go get them. Resolve is fun and strong and slightly addicting I think. It's a great feeling. Resolve FTW!

(By the way that handsome guy up atop the thread is Katen. He's a good raptor! Just keep your hands from his face, he hasn't eaten today. :)

Who would have thought?

Perhaps everyone feels that the place they grew up in is boring and that anywhere would be more interesting, exciting and fun. I know I did. Well, sometimes still do. That said I'm speechless to find that there are people out there trying to prove me wrong. All I can say is I wish them well.

First off is the youtube phenomenon that has caught fire to all the brush around the tracks. It's the one, the only Octocat! (Just kidding ;) that is a whole other topic. Seriously I laughed but Octocat = WTF? It deserves multiple viewings, just don't drink while you watch. Choking is bad.) It's "Worcester Love". Yes that's right our fair county has it's own travel tv show. A full season of travel shows. 0_0

They are not the only ones. Check out www.worcesterwonderland.blogspot.com
There you will find ramblings and musings of all sorts of home town related material. Boggle.

Now I will admit that I don't give my fair city a sporting chance, I never have. I think it is because of my deep seated dissatisfaction with the used book store down town. Anyways, I've decided to add Worcester Wonderland to my list of blogs I read each week, (those will be added under the blog heading near Scatterbrained Daydreams) and hopefully I can come to see what these people see and finally attain a sense excitement about our little spot on Earth.

And in the mean time I may just watch Octocat again. Seriously, it hasn't gotten old yet. WTF?!

Go Ahead, Make My...Day

I can't explain it. I can barely fathom it. All that can be said for it is that it made my day, my week, possibly even two weeks.

Short people shall rule the world! (Or at least their doors will.)