Billions, Baggins and Befuddlement

The word of the week is belief.

September 24 - The Hobbit

Only a few months to go until the first half of The Hobbit is released in theaters! I was one of those folks who stood in line for the LOTR trilogy when the movies were released and I have a feeling I'll again be standing in the front ranks come December when the tale of Bilbo Baggins hits the big screen.

The Hobbit is the first fantasy story that fired my imagination as a child. We took it as a class project in Grade Six, having it tied in with the recently-released 1977 animated film along with a copy of the Deluxe Movie book that contained still images from the film:

For me, that film is a wonderful memory and my first step into Tolkien's world as well as the many others that awaited me as I discovered Fantasy literature. It ignited a passion that remains to this day and I'm glad to see others doing their best to pass on these treasures to new generations:

September 25 - Job? Nyet.

I'm feeling somewhat better today, but I still have no energy. I've been napping on and off as best I can, given the activities upstairs and outside. Earplugs, headphones and determination are the order of the day.

Jobs however, seem rather scarce. I've combed through the advertised ones and come up empty, save for the usual basic retail-sales-service jobs that pay a pittance and ask a lot of your soul. To find the jobs that aren't advertised and that I might actually find a better fit to my wants, it's going to be a grind. Networking will be the key, so I'm extending some more feelers this week and seeing what comes up.

Freelance work is always an option, though it won't work well if my wrists can't keep up. The burning pain in my left arm only returns if I type for too long or too often, so the specialist's prediction that it might take up to two years( or longer )to heal seems on the money. Learning to type with my voice means I'll have to find the time to practice more over the next few months and also means I'll be tied to my PC at home; the laptop doesn't have the power to run the voice-recognition software. I'm toying with the idea of recording articles and then having them translated after, but that doesn't work well with the writing process; nobody I know of does a perfect take the first time. It takes editing and time.

So we'll see where I am in a month's time.

September 26 - More Tiny Homes

The trend towards smaller homes continues, as designers and creative folk get on board the movement. One home by designer Jessica Helgerson is used as a weekend home by her family. It's simple and makes use of every bit of space inside as well as integrating a lot of outside space into the home's use.

There's quite a few tiny houses all around the world, but so far it's been hard to get images of more than a few at a time. However, I've found a site that seems to be collecting images of tiny homes from all over the globe: TinyhousesWoon.com. There's quite a few designs in there that I haven't seen; one and all, they look fairly comfortable for a few people to live in - large families excluded, of course.

September 27 - Mail-Order Monsters

You know, it's strange… I had a lot when I was a kid growing up in terms of video game systems, but I never had a computer. At least not until the Coleco ADAM, but that barely counts as such - which probably explains why I was so excited to get an AMIGA 500 in my teens, as it was my first 'real' home computer. My friends all had Commodore64's and Apple IIe's but neither made their way into our household.

So it's doubly strange that my favourite video game of all time( before I discovered NWN, that is! )is Mail Order Monsters for the C64. I loved that game, played it at my friend's houses as often as possible and saved my monsters on a floppy 5.25" disk that I toted with me, which was rare back then. Being able to design monsters and pit them against the creations of my friends was incredibly fun and I went at it with gusto. Which didn't last over a year as I just wasn't any good at it, aside from providing sport for my pals to pummel electronically. Yet the sheer sense of FUN from the game has stuck with me all these decades and I'm hoping that someone out there will update the game one of these days, maybe as a phone app.

I mean, what could be cooler than a dinosaur with a cybernetic brain and a pair of machine guns? C'mon!

September 28 - Fallout

The people upstairs and I have had a falling out, which I'm frankly surprised didn't happen before now. I'm tired of being involuntarily woken around dawn most days and they're tired of my leaving polite notes and / or texts about it. So today I was told not to leave any more notes, just to contact the landlord and / or the police - that's that. I had hoped that opening lines of communication would work, but it seems they can't control their kids well enough or just aren't willing to spend the energy. 

Which, having kids, they likely don't have a lot of; I understand.

Rather than try to sleep past when they usually start banging about, I'm doing the next best thing: modifying my own sleep schedule so that I'm up around the same time as them: 6am. It stinks, no: galls me that I have to cater to THEIR schedule due to THEIR inconsideration, but that's life. They're thinking of their family first and I can't blame them and who knows? By no longer fighting the inevitable, I may get rid of these dark circles under my eyes and start feeling human again. As well as proving the old adage "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" - now I truly know what that means. I might also order one of these to stick my head into and modify it with a lot more stuffing:

I just wonder how long I can hold off until making a noise report. I hope I don't have to, really; they're nice people, just under a lot of stress - same as me. Maybe they'll move soon, as they'd been saying… In the meantime, I'm editing my manuscript despite a lack of decent sleep or a quiet workspace. It's certainly causing me to focus and use what energy I have efficiently, especially in the quiet moments.

September 29 - Progress!

Whew! I managed to get a LOT done on my manuscript today, as for whatever reason the people upstairs were gone for most of the day. I've been using excellent feedback from several sources to comb through my text and correct many minor errors, completing a pass on the first half of the novel by dinnertime today.

It's just write, write, write for the next while. Once I've given the novel a full run through, I'll start to add in parts from my own notes, tighten things up and generally step beyond the technical bits into the 'make the story better and richer' part. I've set a deadline for myself a few days BEFORE the submission cutoff date by Harper-Voyager, to give myself a touch of breathing room. Which means it's heads-down, run-for-the-finish-line every day for the first half of October: I'll be working HARDER than I was at the end of August, to make this work.

I want it to be worth the effort. Here's hoping!

September 30 - A Billion-Year Plan?

I've often thought about the future of the human species, where we'll be in a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million… but a BILLION? That's… a little TOO far for me to conceptualize as any of our descendants bearing any resemblance to the word 'human' after so long.

Yet this was part of the discussion at the recent 100-Year Starship symposium. In truth, the discussion ranged all over the place but this topic caught the attention of more than a few folks, originating as it did on the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence Blog - a lot of smart banter there, also. Check out the highlights as posted on Centauri Dreams and wonder again at the wonder of our species, that we can look so far away AND so far ahead into our own future.

That's all I have for today, really. I thought about this a fair bit when I was much younger, but I didn't get very far as I didn't have the breadth of reading I do today. After reading through parts of the blog and the Centauri site, I realized yet again I'm still not as widely read as I could be. Maybe when I retire…

It's been a rough, rotten-at-times week that's drained a lot out of me. But I'm facing the new week with new determination, to plug ALL that I have into creating the best damn manuscript I can to submit in a few week's time. Once it leaves, it's literally out of my hands and I don't want to regret wasting a minute on such trivialities as a lack of sleep, no job prospects or a lack of a social life. 

Minor things, all, when it comes to being an author. Right?