The word of the week is trepidation.
June 11 - Levity
June is looking to be another lean month; my sister hasn't been able to find steady work yet( and neither have I )so we're both relying on my generous EI - for now. Unfortunately, I was at a meeting last week( with a dozen other EI recipients )where I learned that EI will possibly audit me soon, in which they'll ask for tangible results from my search for jobs. So far, that's been pretty sparse: I do NOT want to go back into the financial world, nor do I want to work retail or in the food industry… which doesn't leave a lot for me to choose from. So this coming week I'm going to talk to one of the placement services here in town to see how they can help better direct my job search. To be honest, it's NOT something I want to do, as I desperately wanted the freedom to finish my novel over the next few months… but since my wrists have been making that dubious at best, I'll likely have to abandon the effort( at least as a primary chunk of each day )to focus instead on making ends meet for the rest of 2012.
That sucks.
June 12 - Jude Rocks!
With my wrists holding me back from my writing talents, I've been giving serious thought of late to voice acting: all I have to do is read my parts, not write them, so no wrist tendons are involved. I'm well-acquainted with the work of several dozen voice actors, having followed their careers from part to part with interest over the years. I've come to realize it's a serious business, like many other careers, and there's aspects to it that some might not find glamorous. But hey, if you can make a living from it, why not? I stumbled across a blog entry over at NT3R called "A Day In The Life" where the lucky writer gets to go in for a day at the studio with Christian Potenza, of 6Teen and Total Drama Island fame. It makes for some fascinating reading to get an inside look at the world of voice acting, where the emotional base of a character comes from for each episode of a show. Go Jude!
June 13 - Roll20
Well heck, I KNEW they'd come up with this eventually; I certainly didn't think it'd be as cool as it turned out to be. What am I talking about? Roll20, that's what: a simple bit of software to let ANY gamers playing ANY game do so online, with their pals, for FREE. Man, I wish I still had a gaming group to try this out with, but we've all moved on with things - no more Sundays At Simon's rolling dice and supping on salty snacks and beer. Though we did tend to play more Halo than DnD, as the years went by. Still, it would have been VERY easy for all of us to game, wherever we were, using this software… and I just love that it's FREE. Heck, that's always worth repeating!
June 14 - World Enough And Time
Incredible. Brilliant. Stunning. Those words and many more similar ones flew through my mind as I watched this fan-made episode of Star Trek; it was so well-done that I thought it was one of the OLD episodes that I'd somehow missed all these years! Seriously, it's really fantastic… AND it has George Takei in it PLUS his daughter! The acting in spots needs a little help and there's some MINOR plot twitches… but that's just me being picky. This episode ranks right up there with the best of the old Star Trek series, it's THAT good. The story alone had me taking notes; I'd LOVE to produce work of this caliber and see it make it to the screen intact! Bravo, Star Trek New Voyages - more, please!
June 15 - Novel Breakthroughs!
My writing was going nowhere all week, so today I had a brainstorm: why not try to set some scenes to music and see what happens? I have all these bits of scenes in my head, waiting to be blocked into place and written, but I'm having a VERY HARD time getting any sort of emotional attachment to the characters and the story in parts. So I went through my music collection today, listening to songs I knew and others I was less familiar with, trying to match songs with scenes… and succeeding! I came up with a few DOZEN songs to link to various scenes to play them properly in my head: I could visualize the action as I wanted to see it happen and so then was able to WRITE about it with the right emotional currents! At last, I have a handle on parts of the novel, far more than I had months ago. Getting a connection to the characters will be the next step as I keep fleshing out the plot points and working on their voices. Good news indeed!
June 11 - Levity
June is looking to be another lean month; my sister hasn't been able to find steady work yet( and neither have I )so we're both relying on my generous EI - for now. Unfortunately, I was at a meeting last week( with a dozen other EI recipients )where I learned that EI will possibly audit me soon, in which they'll ask for tangible results from my search for jobs. So far, that's been pretty sparse: I do NOT want to go back into the financial world, nor do I want to work retail or in the food industry… which doesn't leave a lot for me to choose from. So this coming week I'm going to talk to one of the placement services here in town to see how they can help better direct my job search. To be honest, it's NOT something I want to do, as I desperately wanted the freedom to finish my novel over the next few months… but since my wrists have been making that dubious at best, I'll likely have to abandon the effort( at least as a primary chunk of each day )to focus instead on making ends meet for the rest of 2012.
That sucks.
June 12 - Jude Rocks!
With my wrists holding me back from my writing talents, I've been giving serious thought of late to voice acting: all I have to do is read my parts, not write them, so no wrist tendons are involved. I'm well-acquainted with the work of several dozen voice actors, having followed their careers from part to part with interest over the years. I've come to realize it's a serious business, like many other careers, and there's aspects to it that some might not find glamorous. But hey, if you can make a living from it, why not? I stumbled across a blog entry over at NT3R called "A Day In The Life" where the lucky writer gets to go in for a day at the studio with Christian Potenza, of 6Teen and Total Drama Island fame. It makes for some fascinating reading to get an inside look at the world of voice acting, where the emotional base of a character comes from for each episode of a show. Go Jude!
June 13 - Roll20
Well heck, I KNEW they'd come up with this eventually; I certainly didn't think it'd be as cool as it turned out to be. What am I talking about? Roll20, that's what: a simple bit of software to let ANY gamers playing ANY game do so online, with their pals, for FREE. Man, I wish I still had a gaming group to try this out with, but we've all moved on with things - no more Sundays At Simon's rolling dice and supping on salty snacks and beer. Though we did tend to play more Halo than DnD, as the years went by. Still, it would have been VERY easy for all of us to game, wherever we were, using this software… and I just love that it's FREE. Heck, that's always worth repeating!
June 14 - World Enough And Time
Incredible. Brilliant. Stunning. Those words and many more similar ones flew through my mind as I watched this fan-made episode of Star Trek; it was so well-done that I thought it was one of the OLD episodes that I'd somehow missed all these years! Seriously, it's really fantastic… AND it has George Takei in it PLUS his daughter! The acting in spots needs a little help and there's some MINOR plot twitches… but that's just me being picky. This episode ranks right up there with the best of the old Star Trek series, it's THAT good. The story alone had me taking notes; I'd LOVE to produce work of this caliber and see it make it to the screen intact! Bravo, Star Trek New Voyages - more, please!
June 15 - Novel Breakthroughs!
My writing was going nowhere all week, so today I had a brainstorm: why not try to set some scenes to music and see what happens? I have all these bits of scenes in my head, waiting to be blocked into place and written, but I'm having a VERY HARD time getting any sort of emotional attachment to the characters and the story in parts. So I went through my music collection today, listening to songs I knew and others I was less familiar with, trying to match songs with scenes… and succeeding! I came up with a few DOZEN songs to link to various scenes to play them properly in my head: I could visualize the action as I wanted to see it happen and so then was able to WRITE about it with the right emotional currents! At last, I have a handle on parts of the novel, far more than I had months ago. Getting a connection to the characters will be the next step as I keep fleshing out the plot points and working on their voices. Good news indeed!
June 16 - Personal Space
Rainy, windy and cold: that's June in Victoria and today was a prime example. At the best of times today we had some back-lit clouds fighting the sun, on-again / off-again rain and general windy-blah-ness. I did get some good writing done up in the SkyLounge for a few hours, in the main trying to escape the pint-sized elephants that started trampling around 7am today and didn't stop all day - glad I have the SkyLounge to escape to! With some earplugs or music, it's VERY tranquil and relaxing up there. I'm alone with my thoughts with few distractions save some curious birds or the occasional siren or loud passing motorcycle. Definitely a blessing to be able to write up there, when my arms are co-operating.
A good portion of the evening was again spent fiddling with my computers. I installed quite a bit on my Linux box, which looks like it's going to co-operate to host most of my TV shows, movies and other media. I may even be able to get an old ATI wireless remote working, which would be sweet; there's a LOT you can do with a Linux box and I'm slowly going to add to it in the next few months. From what I can see, I can even add a TV tuner card to the thing( used / cheap, of course )and turn it into a PVR… but that presupposes that I have the time to WATCH the shows I record in the first place. As it is, I have hundreds of hours of shows on DVD that I have yet to convert to .mkv files for the 'Media Box' as I'm calling it - what's the sense of going to all that trouble if I'll never even watch 1/10th of the shows? Makes me wonder sometimes about what my brain wants to spend my time on…
June 17 - Thanks, Dad!
It was Father's Day today and we took my dad out to Venus Sophia here in town, an amazing place that can best be described as a boutique restaurant. It serves breakfast, lunch and tea sittings and is just the most elegantly relaxed place I can think of that doesn't feel pretentious or crazily expensive: both are right up my alley! It's also vegetarian and serves gluten-free foods, by staff who are quite obviously very happy and are very attentive to your needs; again, amazing for the prices they charge! It was a lovely relaxed lunch and my dad simply loves the place, which is located in Chinatown( but it's not Chinese, they have a rather multi-ethnic staff - very Canadian! )in the heart of downtown Victoria. After lunch we gave him a Father's Day gift: my sister's laptop, all freshened up and unloved now that she's latched onto the Blackberry Playbook I introduced her to a month ago, which is perfect for her needs and a LOT more portable than the laptop. Faster too, in many ways, but I digress. It was a lovely Father's Day, some of which we spent just sitting at Clover Point watching kite-surfers dodge whitecaps and seagulls making the wild winds look like child's play. The rest of the day was a blur of writing( novel and blog )topped off by watching Dodgeball with my sister AND the first episode of Arrested Development( she's never seen either before! )and that's about it. An early day tomorrow; maybe my alarm will wake me before the beasts above do.
Here's hoping.
I've a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning about my arms, to see what can be done to diagnose the continuing pain in my tendons. I can't go on like this, unable to lift more than a glass of water or to type a few dozen words pain-free. Crossing my fingers doesn't hurt, so that's what I'm doing tonight…
I've a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning about my arms, to see what can be done to diagnose the continuing pain in my tendons. I can't go on like this, unable to lift more than a glass of water or to type a few dozen words pain-free. Crossing my fingers doesn't hurt, so that's what I'm doing tonight…
