Particles, Possibilities and Progress

The word of the week is chapter.

July 2 - Novel progress

It's a new month and a new focus for me: my novel, naturally. The clock is ticking and I have all the pieces in place, now I have to assemble it into a working whole. With tons of backstory, a visual guide and a four-page synopsis, I am all set to turn everything into a series of linked chapters that will become the novel itself. I'm aiming to get as MANY chapters as I can done in the next 30-60 days, as I feel I should strike while the iron's hot, so to speak. Focusing ONLY on the writing will ensure that I get as close as possible to the core of the story and set it out in sequence as I see it in my head. Once I have most of a rough draft in place, I can finish it up this fall and then start the revision process.

 

By then, I'll most likely have run out of TIME to write, as I'll have been forced to find a day job. But I'll happily work during the day knowing that I can spend my evenings revising my novel, making it the best piece of work I can without obsessing over it. I hope that 2013 will see my novel make it out into the world in one form or another… but that's a subject for WELL after the first draft's completed.

July 3 - WE FOUND IT ???

I like science, moreso than most people think, despite my lack of skill beyond the simplest of mathematics. I used to collect Popular Science magazines years before the internet made pursuing science news much more interesting and efficient, though I know that PopSci barely scratched the surface of many discoveries. From my earliest days of reading, science fiction has been right at the top of my reading lists, so when today's news about the Higgs Boson leaked, I was quite excited - another of the building blocks of our universe may have been found! Well past midnight, I was hanging on the news from several sites… until the one chestnut showed up stating that the press conference had 'reduced' the news to 'just' 175 slides. At that point, I gave up and went to bed, to find THIS animated gem in the morning that neatly explained how important the Higgs Boson is to our understanding of Everything:

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

July 4 - Weird Waking Dream!!!

Whoa! I was bounced out of bed( mentally )by the kids above today, so I walked over to A&W at the Bay Center to calm myself with a coupon-cheap breakfast; ahhh, the taste of savings. I was still tired, so later in the day as I was up in the SkyLounge reading Stephen King's ON WRITING, I decided to take a nap.

Boy, did THAT take an unexpected turn!

 

I dreamt a waking dream, that I was napping on the couch, there in the SkyLounge in the sunshine. Everything LOOKED like it should: bright and sunlit and retro-60's grandparent furniture… AND I COULDN'T WAKE UP! Every time I swung my feet to the left to 'get up' off the couch, they reset, like one of those many time-loop scenes in movies where people repeat their actions. It was unbelievable - I vividly recall trying DOZENS of times to GET OFF THAT COUCH. I WANTED to wake up, to stand up and go downstairs and make some tea. I just couldn't do it. Maybe I was too tired( 5.5 hrs sleep )and my subconscious wouldn't let go easily, I'm not sure. Eventually my internal timer went off and I woke in time( for real )to groggily make my way downstairs to see Kung Fu Panda, feeling a slight touch of doubt  that maybe I hadn't woken and made it off that floral-print couch after all…

Thanks, Stephen King - now even my nap-times have a touch of horror to them.

July 5 - Time Traveling The Web

Having been using the internet since it's earliest consumer days of slow modems and small monitors, I recall seeing many websites blossom and grow. While many more vanished into the digital ether. While I enjoy the current crop of millions of complicated websites, I also find myself from time to time yearning for the simpler days when websites were all hand-coded and simpler to navigate. Thanks to The Wayback Machine and Screenshots.com, I can still take a visual time-travel tour of what many websites looked like almost back to their very beginnings. It's a nostalgic tour, to be sure, but it's also important to remember where all this digital congestion CAME from, how we went from simple to overload, from Celeron to cell phone and soon beyond. Go take a trip back; you'll be surprised at what you dig up!

July 6 - Robots are people too?

When will the Age Of Robots arrive, I wonder, and in what form? Most predictions had them cleaning our homes by now… yet all we really have are Roombas. Where are the tireless helpers and companions to ease our daily burdens so we can focus more on improving the world for everyone? And what are the implications of trying to create such a world? Filmmaker Spike Jonze took a unique look at this in his short film "I'm Here" released on YouTube, which is most emphatically worth it's 30-minute length:

July 7 - Perfect Dictation

Today was a productive day for my novel: with my mother's help typing, I was able to produce an entire chapter in a single day. Being able to visualize the scenes in my mind's eye and just dictate the words as they flowed from observing the scene is a marvelous method of writing . It's how using voice recognition SHOULD be, instead of having to pause every two or three sentences to correct incredibly bad grammatical errors, which takes you right OUT of the mental visualizations. 'Producing Mud' as it is called, should happen when you're in the FLOW( as I mentioned in last week's blog ). When various distractions keep poking at you, your mind can't focus on the task of writing and it becomes a grind that's nowhere near the potential you can reach while writing distraction-free. It was very freeing today to be able to write like that while sparing my arms, to simple have the words appear as I spoke them from the order that I set them in first in my mind. At this rate, I should be able to produce almost a chapter a day, following the outline that I've been revising for the last few months and adding to it as I go along. Having twenty or so chapters of my novel by month's end will be enormously freeing!

July 8 - Who or What is Mr. Breakfast?

If it's breakfast, it has bacon - at least in my eyes. I like unique breakfasts too… and what's more unique than an animated film short where breakfast comes to life? Or at least, a man's soul takes on the form of breakfast… or something. Watch it and decide for yourself - thanks to Mike for sharing this one!

Dr Breakfast from pizzaforeveryone on Vimeo.

After coming back to my apartment Sunday night, I was pleased to find it a cool 72F degrees even with the windows closed - boding well for the warmer days of summer to come with no A/C!Too bad there's still excessive noise above; combine that with my wonky arms and I'm still better off working at my parent's place for the majority of this month. Creative productivity has been happening in spades!

Storyboards, Space and Degrees of Stubborness

The word of the week is degree.

June 25 - I'm now a Graduate!

It's been a long road, but as of today I'm officially a university graduate!

Over a decade ago, I gave up on completing my degree for a variety of reasons, in the main time and money - I'd tried several times to finish a stubborn language requirement( in both Italian and French )but life kept poking me hard in the eye. And the wallet. Years passed and things didn't change much, so it was shelved 'for sometime in the future' as I saw it - it's been a nagging shame of mine all these years that I'd never graduated. This spring, I spoke to several people, both at UVic and Brock, about completing my degree. Imagine my surprise when the Brock contact advised me that she thought 'I already had the requirements' to have a Bachelor's Degree issued to me! As it turns out, the university eliminated the language requirement for many degrees in 2011, so it turns out that my waiting was not in vain after all. Heck, I've waited so long that Brock completely changed their logo:

 

The call today confirmed that the Dean has authorized my degree to be granted according to the credits I've earned, which satisfy all current degree requirements. All that I had to do was apply for Graduation( which I did a few weeks ago! )and now with the Dean's approval, I'll have my degree issued for the Fall 2012 convocation. I'm extremely happy, moreso than I've been in years, as I'd never thought I'd complete my degree. Turns out I already had; I just had to wait longer than most!

June 26 - AT LAST! THE ZONE!

FINALLY, I've found a solution to enable me to write creatively and ignore distractions from the noises that constantly batter at the fragile bubble of my writing Zone! While earplugs or headphones have not been enough to date on their own to block out the thunder of feet above my head nor the noise of the street thirty feet from my window, combining BOTH has proved successful! With the blissful tunes of Enya playing at non-migraine levels inside my audio cocoon, I dived HEADLONG into my writing today and didn't come up for air for close to eight hours to give my wrists a rest. I also spoke to a good friend on the phone today to explain my ENTIRE novel, which they kindly listened to for close to an hour non-stop! After that, I was inspired AGAIN to revise and expand my Novel Synopsis, as so MANY points clarified in my head after that call… that saw the rest of the evening vanish as I wrote again almost non-stop. My arms were a pair of burning sticks attached to my elbows and I went to bed utterly spent… but with such a wide grin that I thought my dimples would fall out. That, my friends, is what the Zone is all about!

June 27 - Bookshelf chairs?

Yes, I do tend to go on about small / tiny home design sometimes, but with good reason: design and architecture only advance through innovation, and what's innovative about bloated homes that are all cut from the same mold? Small spaces require creative solutions; this is where designers have to think outside the box, though in this case it's INSIDE the box. Putting functional chairs and a table inside a set of bookshelves speaks to many space problems in a unique form of answer - plus it just LOOKS cool:

June 28 - Storyboard Day!

Two days ago, I put into words the totally summary of my novel… over five pages of densely-packed ideas that spell out the story from start to finish, sparing no major plot detail. Though my arms were not rested fully, I dove in again today to complete my 'Visual Guide' which has been languishing half-finished for three months now. What I've done to aid my muse for the novel is to gather images that come close to matching the pictures in my mind's eye of what many scenes or characters look like, then put them into a 'storyboard' in an Excel file. Today I totally nailed the story from start to finish, adding in many more pictures and making the novel into a visual storyboard with many specific details noted for each picture, just like they do with movies. It was an entire day of fantastic mental puzzle-fitting hour after hour, as solutions I've been musing over came together like magic hour after hour. Nauseatingly happy at the end of the day, that was me!

Ironically, there IS a writing program out there that uses this exact storyboard concept called Scrivener, but it IS a pay program. So I saved money by doing it for 'free' … but after checking out Scrivener, I may end up shelling out the bucks and copy / pasting my info into it to take advantage of the many useful novel-building features. For the price, it looks reasonable and comes recommended by several author friends.

June 29 - Space Nostalgia

I'm not sure where this fits into this week's blog, but it made me smile all the same. I've spoken a few times over the years about an old game called Earth and Beyond which was one of the first space MMO's. It had several firsts, including the ability to customize( some aspects )of your character AND your spaceship! The graphics at the time seem crude by today's standards, but I loved it. I also loved the community that was present for most of the game: there were a LOT of roleplayers, who could spin amazing tales when on a space station or the few other social hubs in the rather cozy universe. I was sad to see it go, as it was the first place I developed the character basics that would later become Nichneven - a futuristic warrior / monk with crimson hair and a deadly electronic bo-staff. I was in heaven… for a few short months playing the free beta. By the time the game went live I now had NWN to enjoy and I never went back - sadly the EaB game was cancelled in 2004 after only two brief years.

June30 - Wiped Out Brain And Body Day

The week's writing exercises took their toll on me: today I felt completely exhausted, as well as nauseous, possibly from something I'd eaten yesterday disagreeing with my twitchy digestion. Though it was a gorgeous day, I didn't have a speck of energy and took several shorter naps as the day wore on, getting out only for a short walk around the block before coming back home all too soon.

Since it was a day in, I ended up checking out the new MMO Dungeons and Dragons Online which is free-to-play. It looked gorgeous on my PC( and large HDTV )thanks to my new video card, running smoothly with no glitches. I played for a good part of the afternoon, with minimal use of my arms as it's a PC game not dependent on twitch-reflexes, for the most part. I found the game to be interesting but not overly so, as it's obviously designed for multiple players and to take up a LOT of time, along the lines of Worlds Of Warcraft… which is not my thing. Also, the chat system seems to be disabled at low levels, as I saw nobody speaking to each other; again, not my thing as that makes roleplaying a lost cause. All in all, it was a good way to pass a day when I was feeling like crap apart from sleeping, reading or watching movies… I always like to check out new things and DnD has always had a soft place in my heart. But I'll still stick to NWN.

July 1 - HAPPY CANADA DAY!

I thought today as part of the celebrations for our nation's 145th anniversary, I'd talk about tolerance. Not to put it in the form of complaints, but to illustrate a uniquely Canadian trait: to abide others poor behaviour( to a point )without getting in their face, which perhaps makes us the well-known diplomats we are to the world. I'll pull out the example of motorcycles: I dislike them for their noise. I think many are works of art, they're amazing mechanical marvels and a great mode of transportation. Yet the noise they generate is imposed on everyone within earshot… and that's a LOT of people for some of these ear-blowing street-rattlers. I know the noise is purely cosmetic; motorcycles can( and some do )run just fine without announcing their arrival minutes ahead of time. What it comes down to is rights: everyone has the right to enjoy a relatively  peaceful day, hence the term 'disturbing the peace' in the law books. I'll also argue that people have the right to enjoy fresh air in their home… but when the prevailing wind blows in the smoke from a neighbour's balcony constantly, who is infringing on whose rights, I ask? Do I not have the right to have my windows open on a nice day to enjoy the fresh air, as much as other people have the right to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day out on their balcony?

It comes down to tolerance, in some ways. How much intolerance will you tolerate, before something is done? As much as I'd like to wish otherwise, I doubt very much that if the balcony-goers were aware they were forcing their downwind neighbours to keep their windows closed, they would change their ways. On a related note, the partiers upstairs managed to shatter the doorway to the stairs here not long after dinnertime, prompting a mass exodus from the apartment before blame could be brought to bear. Idiots; no way to spend a Canada Day, dropping in on friends only to cause them trouble through ignorance and making a spectacle of things on the front lawn of the building as people urge others to jump from the second-storey balcony. Yet we're all Canadians and it's all 'in good fun' as long as nobody's hurt.

Right?

I went out Canada Day evening with a couple of neighbours( the friendly ones )to see the fireworks down at the Inner Harbour. It was a big but fun crowd, with quite a few people not dressed for the chillier night( down to 13C degrees ). The fireworks were wonderful, with a finale of brilliant red flares set off against white sparks that made the gigantic crowd go wild with applause. Afterwards, we went up( literally )to Vista18, a restaurant I didn't know existed until tonight. We caught the end of a jazz solo and enjoyed the night views of the city from the 18th floor over a few drinks; I'll be back to see what the city will look like from the day. All in all a good way to start July and to celebrate the country I love to live in; Happy Birthday, Canada!

Art, Animation and Adjustment

The word of the week is musing. No 'a' prefix necessary...

June 18 - Crystal Caves

You have to admit it, Superman had the coolest hangout pad at his Fortress Of Solitude, though it could have used some more fireplaces and throw-rugs for warmth. In a strange case of life imitating science fiction, the following is not: a cave in Mexico that is FILLED with giant crystals, just like in Superman! They even got the heating bit correct… actually no, they overdid it, as it's over a hundred degrees inside( Celsius!!!! )so you'd boil to death in less than thirty seconds unprotected. Go have a virtual look at this wonder of nature that surprised scientists when it was discovered only a few short years ago and dream of what it'd be like to visit the Fortress Of Solitude for real…

June 19 - Life without microwaves

Believe it or not, I don't have a microwave at my new place. This was a conscious decision, as we( my sister and I )both wanted to move towards eating healthier and not 'nuking' our foods. While I'm certain that a half-century of use has shown us that microwaves won't make your insides glow with regular use, I'm less certain that it's the best thing for my health. After getting our first electric bill, I was pleasantly surprised to see how LITTLE power using our stove has consumed to date. It's also rather easy to reheat things with just the stove, so eliminating a lot of 'nuke-and-serve' dinners from our repertoire will contribute towards making simpler, healthier meals.

June 20 - You want HOW much for that doll?

It's fortunate that I'm not a collector in any serious way, as I'd be so poor I'd have to house my collection in cardboard boxes in an alley next to me. I suppose if I was collecting toothpicks it'd be another story, but in the main I like anything to do with science fiction, fantasy or other things that are Just Really Cool. Things like this Black Widow 'statue' from The Avengers - yes, it's a posable doll, but I still prefer the term 'action figure' for coolness purposes. Take a wild guess how much it is… then double that figure to around what a well-tricked-out laptop would cost. Unbelievable… and there's LOTS of these kinds of collectables out there! I think they call them 'collectables' so they can charge more money, because I know that if it was ME I'd NEVER spend that kind of money on a mere new TOY that wasn't really rare and made me think of my childhood.

 But still: she looks damned cool all the same. So does the Iron Man poseable figure. Ah well.

June 21 - Victoria in Paintings

Living here in Victoria, I tend to take some of the views for granted like a lot of people do for the cities and places they live in. Heck, I was born near Niagara Falls and didn't go on the Maid Of The Mist until only a few years ago! Which is why we need artists: they view the world around them as art and try to bring our attention to it via their talents. Such is the case with Robert Amos, who has painted some lovely local visions of Victoria - check them out. I've always liked these kinds of paintings growing up, as they make 'mundane' aspects of the local area stand out for all their unique qualities - as art.

June 22 -  Pets are alien spies?

Yes, I do enjoy watching the animated show Kit Vs. Kat, in the main because it's just fun and not too serious. Which is a good thing in a show about cat-like aliens trying to invade earth. Which led me to an odd internet find: a site that purports that earth's pets are actually spying on us for their alien masters. It's obviously tongue-in-cheek, but the discussion on the site is lively and quite amusing at times. Also, now that the thought's in your head you'll never quite look at pets in quite the same way again, will you?

June 23 - TRON: Uprising

Today I tuned into a new animated show, thanks to the Disney XD channel - TRON: Uprising. And it's wow… I mean, incredible! The character design, the story, the graphics - all top-notch and it hooked me immediately. The music is stirring, the computer world of TRON is incredibly detailed and, well… ALIEN. As it should be. While my other favorite CGI animated series Reboot took a different path over a decade ago, TRON: Uprising has taken nods from our world but goes it's own way, yet still allows viewers to relate to what's going on. It's really just amazing to watch, minute by minute, to see how the story develops. I'll be there for the rest of the season as it comes out, for certain, not the least because the show has the voice talents of Elijah Wood, Lance Henriksen and Bruce Boxleitner - who was TRON in the original film!

June 24 - Inspiration through exercise!

Today was a good day for my novel; not in terms of actual words produced due to my left arm still being gimpy but in terms of IDEAS falling into place neatly. I went for a LONG walk today to the A&W waaaay north on Douglas, almost 5km distant. On the way there I cleared my mind as I listened to music( Enya )and thought about a few things as I ate. It was on the way BACK home that my Muse responded and popped out a dozen GREAT ideas that tied a lot of the story, characters, setting and more together. I think it was the semi-hypnotic state I was in, watching just the sidewalk move in front of me and paying attention only to staying safe at lights and roads. It was similar to the state I used to get into while reading in the car: I'd totally ignore the outside world passing by and just dive mentally into my books. Needless to say, I am excited about the ideas today and am working hard to integrate them in a meaningful way into the novel - also NOT to forget them, which is also a challenge as the mental state I was in when they came along is extremely important as well. I saw scenes and characters visually and  emotionally both listening to the music as I walked, which was fantastic; my Muse was really on today!

However, I have to be careful to be original and not fall into using an SF cliché ( like these )overmuch in my work, while NOT falling prey to the "Hey, that's been done before…" syndrome. Heck, look at the SIZE of that cliché list! I'm reading through it a few lines at a time so I don't poison my own work… sheesh.

 

It's coming into the last week of June now. I have a solid basis for my novel, a few chapters under my belt and no job at this time while EI figuratively breathes down my neck. All while my wrists continue to plague me and prevent me from digging very deep into my novel each day. I have an appointment with a sports injury specialist after seeing my doctor this week, but it's not until August. *sigh* It's a challenging time for me, to say the least… but I'm still FAR happier than I was this time a year ago; just check the blog to see. Until next week, I'll be adjusting to things as usual, so: adios!