Wishes, Writers and Webs

The word of the week is perspicacity.

Jan 20 - Careful what you wish for

It looks like I'll have more time to write in February.

In the post holiday season, my day job is slowing down and because of that, they've cut hours rather severely. So much so, that I have been scaled back to a mere two shifts a week.

Two. Quite bluntly, that's not enough to live on.

Not that I was making a whole lot to begin with, but this is a whole new level of getting kicked in the wallet. To be fair, the managers are rather put out as well. They know that the staff have to eat and pay rent and don't do much beyond that as it is with what they're being paid with full-time hours. I don't know when things will pick up again, but I'm not sure I want to bet it will be only a few weeks. Besides, it's not like I'll be making a whole lot more even with full-time hours in the foreseeable future...

Thus, my plan is: job search like crazy - all over again. And write.

I should be able to find something within a month or so, I hope. It's not like I'm trading down from a high-paying job, after all, but unfortunately jobs are still not exactly falling out of trees around here. I'm hoping that some networking will help find me something, as trying to make ends meet on sixty hours pay a month is, quite simply, impossible. I knew that I'd have to move on eventually, but it may happen sooner than I'd thought.

My job can no longer sustain me, so I must leave.

Jan 21 - Struggling Self

Transitions are never easy things.

I feel as though I'm in the middle of one now, though where it will end is anyone's guess, including mine. Some people in midlife can see the end of their road, at retirement a few decades away. Others see a few more job-hops covering their bases, or perhaps they have different dreams.

Myself, I just want to write.

At the moment, that's only possible with my voice, as my arms continue to disappoint me by not keeping up with what my brain wants them to do. Creatively, that's just fine and less often of late I have to shove aside thought that I'm not really writing if I'm not using my hands to type what my mind comes up with.

Back to transitions. Here I am, stuck again between a rock and a hard-looking place, searching for a new path to leaping out of the maze I've wandered into somehow without my noticing. Perhaps I'll be able to find something better to sustain me financially for the next year or two, maybe even graduating to freelancing for living. Though I know through my research that writing for dollars alone will tax my creative spirit a great deal and may not leave a lot left over for what's needed to advance my Muse's desire to simply create.

But if there's one thing I do know, it's that I'm able to face adversity with a smile.

Jan 22 - Galactic Webs

Some cool space news this week!

For the first time, astronomers have been able to detect and image the cosmic web that connects all the galaxies of the universe together. Have a look:

This is very exciting news, as it shows that 'empty' space is hardly that. I find such discoveries thrilling, as they opened new avenues for the imagination right alongside scientific discovery. It's what science fiction is about, at its heart: dreaming the impossible and seeing it fulfilled in unexpected ways.

Myself, I thought the universe would look like the synapses of a giant brain, but then again who's to say?

Jan 23 - FREE houses?

While it's hard to believe, you can write your way into home ownership… in Detroit.

Yes, the same city that Robocop calls home, which has been in the news lately for pretty much imploding economically is looking towards urban renewal as a way of staving off total collapse.

Incredibly, community leaders decided that they need more( well-armed )writers - so much so that they're willing to give them a free house if they decide to make the city their permanent home:

Writers from all over the world, or living just a few miles away, are all encouraged to apply. If they win, they'll call Detroit home for at least the next two years. Writers will lease the homes from the nonprofit, a small amount to cover taxes and insurance. If they stay for 24 months, they'll be awarded the deed -- and Detroit will count another resident to its comeback.

I think it's a fascinating idea, to create a city where working writers are welcomed as integral parts of the community to the point where they are awarded homes. Given that the writing life isn't exactly a well-paying one, it's hard for a writer to make a meaningful impact will try to make a living and stay at it is a sign that words are far more important than the means to exist while scribing them.

That writers may help shape the future of Detroit, I think is worth writing about.

Jan 24 - Ryno vs. Copenhagen

A few months ago, I mentioned a new kind of electric wheel for my bike.

Obviously, with my work cutting back as it has for the near future, I'll have to put off any plans for getting such a device for a good while, at least. They'll just have to remain dreams and get even better as time marches on.

Yet, some people don't give up on turning their dreams into reality.

One such person is Chris Hoffmann, who has created the RYNO:

The RYNO is powered monowheel, meant to be used a low speed for getting around instead of walking or cycling. It's a new form of personal transportation, with the inevitable comparisons waiting to be made to the oft-maligned Segway. Based in Portland, RYNO Motors is poised to release their initial units in Asia, then around the world. Best guesstimate for the price is around $4000 USD, which isn't bad, though I have to say you can get a nice electric scooter for that price that's a LOT faster. But still…

Seeing as the Segway hasn't really caught on, I hope the RYNO does; it just looks too cool NOT to!

Jan 25 - Fortuitous Linkage

Speaking of segways…

I'm always interested in finding new ways of looking at the world learning from it.

This week, a friend of mine( who also possesses a gift for words )sent me a link for Brainpickings.org, a site  created to be a 'human-powered discovery engine for interestingness' - sounds like my kind of place!

The core ethos behind BrainPickings is that creativity is a combinatorial force: It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to culture, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will be.

Interestingly, Brainpickings has been around for seven years, only a little longer than I've been keeping my own blog. In that time, it looks like they've accumulated quite a lot of fascinating articles( all of them ad-free! )and I think I'll be spending a bit of my unasked-for free time each week perusing them.

Reading good writing's good for the brain, after all!

Jan 26 - Illusions

Let's close the week with an observation about people.

Last night, I was out at a coffee shop with a friend visiting from the mainland. A young man approached us( not that I'm all that old either, mind you.. ) and asked us for change to call a friend he'd been waiting for. My years of working at MMart told me that this fellow was somewhat sketchy, but there were no majorly bad vibes, so I indulged in a little forward karma and dug up the last of my change give to him.

After trying to call his friend with no success, the young man came back inside and chatted with us briefly, introduce himself as Miles. He made some observations about the popularity of android phones and how he's trying to start a business local to help people do more with their phones. He seemed to be sincere, so my friend and I wished him luck as we departed.

Today at work, Miles tried to casually steal a backpack.

He was spotted in time and staff monitored him until he finally left, empty-handed.

What does this mean, I asked myself? 

Am I to infer that my judgment of people is impaired, that I should have seen this coming? Should I be less trustful of people, presuming that they're going to disappoint me? Or did I see everything there was see about Miles, good and bad, in a nutshell of perhaps 30 min. total? Or, is there something else that I'm totally missing about this particular aspect of life?

I'm not sure what to tell you. All you know is that I met a young man who seemed to have some promising dreams and turned out to have chosen to take a darker path instead of pursuing the better choice.

While that's not a high note to end the week on, it's very definitively a human one.

I'm having a difficult time writing the blog this week; for some reason, my computer is glitchy and slow and so my voice recognition software is and miss translating like crazy. Dealing with it is rather trying and underscores the difficulties I have in getting exactly what's in my head out onto the page without the use of my hands. If it was simple, I'd be a lot happier and a lot less stressed: I could just speak my mind and let the words flow...

Luck, Letters and the Love of the Game

The word of the week is salacious.

Jan 13 - Baker's Dozen Day

Thirteen's become a good number for me.

The many variations of the number seem to be showing up more and more in my life. 2013 was the year I took up a new job, printed up copies of my novel's second draft and sent them out, entered a major contest held by Jim Henson Co. and had quite an experience at the Phoenix AZ Comicon.

Today being Monday the 13th, it didn't occur to me that it might be an odd or unlucky day; not at all. Instead, I choose to take each day as it is and make the best of it - anticipating worry or trouble is a sure way to find it on the road you're traveling.

Also, I just enjoy finding the number 13 here and there every day, reveling in the unraveling of negative assumptions that people tend to place on the number.

There's lots of boom in this picture!

My evening was a fantastic one, as I led our writer's group in talking about writing weaponry. We had a large turnout of over a dozen folks and it was quite a lively evening chatting about the topic. The information I'd researched was well-received, with the flow of the discussion going all sorts of interesting places before I managed to lead the banter back to the handout outline I'd prepared. 

Amazingly, I finished exactly at the time I planned on and people still lingered to chat afterwards, which doesn't usually happen. Most everyone there said they enjoyed themselves, which is all I can hope for... and one newcomer said it was an amazing introduction to the group.

A pretty good wrap-up for a Monday, I'd say!

Jan 14 - The Hobbit Pt. 2

I went to see a movie tonight, the first one in many months.

My choice de jour was the second installment of Peter Jackson's Hobbit film trilogy: The Desolation of Smaug. I had high hopes that this would be an improvement on the first film, for which I have rather mixed feelings and still maintain needs a good half-hour minimum trimmed from it, along with some other tweaks. SPOILER ALERT for the 2nd film, below!

A little side note here: even though I left for the theater a mere 20 min. before the film started, I made it in plenty of time, despite the large lines of the front… all thanks to technology. I purchased my ticket online while standing outside the theater, walked in past all the people to pick up my ticket and was on my way to my seat a mere handful of minutes after leaving my front door. I love mobile tech!!!

Back to the film, though. The acting was excellent, the scenery was wonderful, the costumes and CGI were all extremely well done - no complaints there. Even the addition of Evangeline Lily's character Tauriel to the story was acceptable, as she played the role with aplomb and just looks darn good as an elf - that's the one exception I'm willing to make.

The movie's biggest draw turned out to be its biggest flaw: Smaug.

The dragon's time on-screen was overplayed, a LOT. In the book, Bilbo's encounters with the dragon are brief, tension-filled battles of wit and the dwarves do not meet the dragon at all. In the movie however, there are long extended chase and combat scenes involving the dwarves and the dragon, not a moment of which appear in the book. I took it to indicate that it was simply Peter Jackson's way of extending the film to show off the marvelous CGI he'd paid for and to hear gravelly baritone of Benedict Cumberbach as Smaug.

Leaving the theater, I was seized by the urge to reread The Hobbit again when I got home, in part to cleanse my imagination of someone else's vision. While I still very much enjoy Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy of films, I will not be buying any of The Hobbit films until( if? )a much-needed director's cut surfaces somewhere. Considering that The Hobbit was one of the first fantasy books I ever read, I have to say that I'm extremely underwhelmed by what appeared on the screen, culminating in my rating it a simple 'Meh' overall - 3 out of 5.

Maybe the next reboot will change that; one can hope. 

Jan 15 - Spare Change?

Fear helped me write this small portion of this week's blog.

One thing I never saw when I was growing up in Niagara were street people; I can't recall running into any when I was growing up and only a very few in the decades afterwards. They simply weren't part of the local experience there and I associated a panhandling life with larger cities like Hamilton or Toronto.

Moving to Victoria, that all changed.

Street people are a fact of life here; you see them every day no matter where you go around the downtown core and quite often in busy areas outside of that main zone. Working for MMart, I quite often dealt with the less polite ones and those with more serious problems face-to-face, which educated me quickly on the difficulties that these challenged human beings endure every single day.

My fear was that I could all too easily become one of them.

Having lived so close to the edge financially and personally for so many years, I struggled inside every time I saw a street person here. I empathize deeply with them, knowing as a writer that behind every face was a story, choices made with consequences that resulted in the person I saw on the outside. Any major life failure on my part might have seen me sharing the streets with them all too easily. 

But what worried me far more would have been seeing my family in such a position.

That fear kept me up at night far too often here in Victoria, trying to make sense of things as I struggled with a soul-killing day job that could have seen me summarily fired for most any misstep. It was a huge source of stress for me, to keep my family cared for, while negotiating the corporate minefield and taking in a paycheck while searching for a way out of treading financial water and not being able to move forward with my own dreams.

Now that things are looking up both financially and personally, for myself and my family, I have to remind myself that it still comes down to the choices we make. Sometimes luck may factor into it, in terms of timing, but we still have to live with the consequences. Every time I see a street person here asking for spare change, I see myself so easily doing the same thing, had things gone only a little differently. I'm not sure that feeling will ever disappear completely.

I'm also not sure that it should.

Jan 16 - Well-Written!

After work today, I met a friend for coffee.

We hadn't caught up for quite some time in person, which is still my preferred way to do things in this day and age of instant social media. After a while, talk turned to my writing, talking about my Dark Crystal submission which I called up on my phone for them to read after a little while.

They read it in complete silence, totally absorbed.

This was a good sign, as nothing in the story seemed to jar them out of their fierce concentration and I took that as high praise. When they were done, we talked a little bit about what they liked about the story and as with quite a few other people, they praised my vivid descriptions along with the tight flow of the story. I was quite tickled to talk about the story, as I've had little feedback on it in general.

The other feedback I received was for my blog: huzzah!

It was fascinating to talk on that as well, given that few comments are ever left and I rarely - if ever - discuss my blog with people. As it turns out, my friend visits my blog regularly every week and said that of all the blogs they visit, they ONLY one they read every new entry on… is mine. Interestingly, they also find it hard to describe my blog. It's not a journal nor a diary, it's not a travelogue or a rant or a summary of my day to day activities - yet it still has a distinctive voice and gets people to read it. 

Incredibly, another friend told me this week by saying my blog was the ONLY piece of quality content they had found on Facebook this week - how cool is THAT to hear? Just to know that people enjoy reading my blog on a regular basis drives me to do the best job I can every single week to make it a good read. Some weeks, it's not as easy to be interesting… or even just to get the blog done. Other weeks, it's a joy to write.

I'll leave you, the reader, to decide which is which with each entry.

Jan 17 - Brave Letters

Today I wrote a letter I should've written six months ago.

It was to one of the stars of Babylon 5 that I had met in Phoenix last May. I don't write fan letters, or letters in general, so this was something rather special.

I had met this star the day after the B5 Reunion Evening, at which I had quite the life epiphany and so was feeling rather much on top of the world. When I got down to the main show floor and went to get their autograph - the ONLY autograph I got at the show - I was disappointed that we couldn't chat, even briefly, as they had lost their voice from talking so much over the weekend. 

How's that for timing?

All the same, the experience left me a little wanting for closure and during the entire time since, I've mulled over whether or not to write a letter. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure what to say.

Today, that letter just poured out of me. Of a sudden, the words finally coalesced in my mind and within half an hour - just like a similar experience for me in Phoenix - I had it finished, as perfect as I could have ever wished it to be. I'll be mailing it off this coming week... and so as not to tease you further, here's the last bit that I wrote:

PS - You may be wondering why am I including a $10 USD bill. On the last day of the Phoenix convention, I had just $20 USD left, despite having bought nothing from the vast Vendor's Hall as I was determined to get your autograph. It was the only one I wanted from the cast, so I went off to line up. Fortunately, there were not so many people waiting and I went up to meet you… only to discover I'd misread things: pictures were $30! Despite losing your voice, you obviously recognized my shamed confusion and graciously allowed me to still purchase a photo of my choice, for which I was immensely grateful. While I regretted being unable to speak with you, your actions spoke far more eloquently. For that simple kindness, again I thank you!

After writing the letter, I watched a movie I'd been putting off seeing.

Appropriately, it was Brave. I've been meaning to see this Disney film for some time, in the main because of the titular character, Meridia. Also because most everyone I've asked has said it's a fantastic film. I wasn't disappointed - it was excellent! Smart, sharply-written and with stunning CGI( the hair! ) It was a treat to watch and fairly moving in parts.

What had me grinning from ear to ear, though, was the uncanny similarities between the heroine and my own character, Nichneven. Both are strong-willed, capable women who don't fit into the moulds that their society has made for them… AND who set out to do something about it. To see the wonderful similarities between the two up on the screen was quite magical and in my mind, Nichneven may have found a sister she never knew she had.

That's a pretty cool thing to a storyteller like me.

Jan 18 - The Obvious

As a writer, I HAVE to be observant, for any good writing comes from noticing everything around you, big and small, to relate to your readers through your work. But sometimes things are right in front of you and you can't see them…

Case in point: my cycling jacket.

I've had the same jacket for over a decade. It's held up very well for a Canadian Tire special, with lots of features that were usually found on far more expensive jackets. Including two features that I've only recently discovered… well, actually discovered uses for, as I've never really wondered about them. Weird, that is.

On each of the wrists are little elastic loops, which I always thought you attached your gloves to keep them from falling off when you weren't wearing them. Lo and behold, I had a brainstorm a few weeks ago, oddly enough during a rainstorm: these loops actually went over your thumbs to keep the cuffs of the jacket tight up against your wrists and so keep out the rain.

Duh. I've no idea why didn't see that before. And the other thing: one of the zippers on the back actually opens up into a pocket, which you can place various things in - like wallets = to keep them dry. 

Kinda of obvious, that one as well. Yet until now, they've escaped my notice because I've not bothered to focus on them, just the jacket in general: put it on, take it off, keep it clean...

There's still some kind of clasp inside the pocket that I can't quite figure out. I'm determined to souse out its function now that I've reminded myself it's there again, without referring to the Internet. Figuring things out, however minor as they may be, is one of the purest pleasures in life.

As long as one actually notices them, of course.

Jan 19 - Fang33k Gaming

Seeing as I spent almost 12 hours at work today, more or less, I'll talk about something more interesting: fan-made games.

As some of you may be aware, many years ago I voiced a small part in a Babylon 5 videogame called I've Found Her. It was created by Space Dream Factory, a group of Russian programmers whose love of the television series was such that they devoted much of their own free time to creating a wonderful gaming experience.

Other fans have created amazing works as well in the videogame world. One such incredible creation comes from the mind of one bWWd, a huge fan of the Masters of The Universe. It's a fighting game, done with such incredible attention to detail that you'd think it was an official product from Hasbro, but you'd be wrong. Have a look at this amazing footage:

Downloading it and playing it is easy from this link - just be warned that if you play in full-screen there's no graceful way( yet )to exit the game, which I found out my amusement in my rush to experience the glory of battle in the He-Man universe.

In this connected world we live in, it's getting easier and easier to form communities of like-minded people. For g33ks, it's even easier, as we intimately understand the technology that is linking us all together on many levels. Being able to share one's passion, whatever the subject, is a very empowering thing, especially when it results in creations like the games I've mentioned above.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go battle a few evil creatures with my powersword…

In about six weeks, I'll find out about the Dark Crystal submission; I'm so excited! In the meantime, I have to buckle down and get other things done around here, including editing my novel's draft. I've managed to score a lot of cool tech toys this week by various strokes of luck, so that's kept me busy, but it's been worth it. Soon enough I'll update everyone on how the writing's going, along with the way Spring seems to be showing up early here; I love BC!