It Came From Outer Space…

I’m debating if I should take my notebooks with me on vacation with the idea of working on the story while I’m there. I honestly don’t know if we’ll have the time and I really don’t want to lose the notebook because I haven’t had time to type up a lot of my notes yet.

I think I may just take an emptier notebook so that if I have any ideas I can jot them down without the risk of losing any of the lengthy prep work that we’ve done already.

I’ve been coming up with a lot of random story related details lately thanks to making Sims of my characters. I’ve got their house designed down to Ft Myers custom doors, bamboo gardens, greenhouse, curtains on the walls, bath tub and even the wallpaper and tile and carpeted areas of the house. Each of the characters has a wardrobe, and goals. It’s really helped me being able to visualize the characters like that and make them more concrete.

Given I’ve been researching various online schools lately I was interested to read about Lewis University. When I was at grad school before I was studying Information Sciences, but in looking to go back to school one of my main thoughts has been to study computers and internet related things, so I was interested to read about their MS in Information Security as it “meets the Committee on National Security Systems National Training standards for Information Systems Security Professionals, Senior Systems Managers” so that would be very good on a resume.

Like other schools I’ve been looking at they offer online courses which means I could go to school around my schedule and what I especially like is the offer for financial aid, that’s always nice. I’m going to have to revisit their program when we get back from the trip.

(and follow-up)
I was having way too much fun with this meme. I saw this on Divinest Sense and just had to have a go.

(Now that I’m less half-awake I’ve fixed the first one because I see that the photo was clearly credited to someone. Whoops. Apologies)

If you want to make your own:

The rules, if you want to make your own instant bestseller:

1 – Go to “Fake Name Generator. The name that appears is your author name.

2 – Go to “Random Word Generator” or click http://www.websitestyle.com/parser/randomword.shtml.
The word listed under “Random Verb” is your title.

3 – Go to “FlickrCC” or click http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php

Type your title into the search box. The first photo that contains a person is your cover.

4 – Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Be sure to crop and/or zoom in.

5 – Post it to your site along with this text.

Check out more at Debut Ya Covers. There’s an awesome showcase there.

I’m pleased to report that I’ve continued to work on prep for the latest story that I’m going to be doing for NaNoWriMo this November. For those who are curious NaNoWriMo is an informal competition for crazy writers such as myself who decide to torture themselves by committing to write at least 1600 words per day for the month of November with the idea of completing a 50′000 word novel before the end of the month.

I’ve competed in this for the past four years, however I’ve only won twice. I take gratification in at least writing during that time though because even if I only complete 12′000 words on a story it’s usually more than I write on a story in six months as busy as things are around here.

For this year it looks as though I’m going to be working on the story tentatively titled “Biosphere 6″ which is about people working on the colonization of Mars using a modification of a Biosphere to grow plants and be a self-sustaining endeavor.

I’m currently writing out background history for one of the main characters “Kelsey” who is a botanist and the girlfriend of the man who is spearheading the project an architect called Isaac. I’m excited. I really am. I’m so glad that my creativity is returning in this manner.

It’s a cliche, isn’t it? The idea that if you’re serious about being a writer you’re going to wind up with no money and therefore no food. Sadly, it’s actually very true. I barely make any money at all with the writing aspect of my income.

If I lived purely on my writing income it wouldn’t matter how cheap someone’s term life insurance rates were I wouldn’t be able to afford them. In fact we wouldn’t have an apartment let alone this house. It’s very hard to find work that focuses on that aspect of things. At my “day job” such as it is, the only time I write is when I write my boss notes asking her how to do a certain thing which came up or explaining that I had to void something because a customer’s credit card was declined.

So, my creative outlet has become my blogs, and now that things are getting better for me mentally also the story prep which may eventually, hopefully turn into something better income wise, but if you want to write you have to be prepared to do other things as well so that you don’t starve. It’s something I knew since I originally went to college and it definitely hasn’t changed.

I can tell that my creativity is definitely returning. The other night I wrote the first poem that I’ve written in several years.

I hear your words in my head
Picking away at my clarity
They have no place in me any more
For so long everything shadowed
Behind your diabtribe
Not even in the same country
And still you’re there

Never happy

I have to let you go
Move beyond this
or you will get louder
That’s what happens
When you ignore someone

I don’t want your words
Even an apology — what would that do?

When I was at work yesterday my boss’s granddaughter was there while my boss was doing some extra work because of some new protocols apparently she’s a budding writer. While I was on lunch break she was asking me to critique the start of a short story she was writing about a girl who discovered a robber while walking her dog and used the dog as distraction while she called the police. She was double-checking spelling with me and making sure that things sounded okay, and finished up the story just after I was done with my lunch and was wondering what else she should write about.

I asked her what sort of things she was interested in and she declared, “Princesses and fairies.”

I suggested she write a story about a girl who was walking in the woods and discovered a fairy lair and she excitedly ran off to write about that. I appear to have redeemed myself for not knowing who Dru Hill was and liking Rob Zombie rather than Beyonce.

I admit to being quite excited that she is a budding writer. I started similarly writing stories about girls befriending wild otters or friends discovering buried treasure or secret royalty and now I write about space exploration, colonization and psychic powers.

We were watching the last few episodes of the original “The Prisoner” series and at one point Number 6 gets a code from slides. It reminded me of all the slides that my Mum has from my childhood and I’m not sure we even have a way to look at those any more which is a shame because that’s a lot of my baby pictures.

It reminded me of the fact that as I prep to write a story set in the future that it’s going to be interesting to speculate what new ways of getting pictures and taking photographs that there’ll be by then, and then I stumbled across Slide Scanning Pros who will convert slides to digital format for just over a quarter: $0.26 or for $0.18 if you prefer.

What I really like about their service is not only do they scan the images at 4000 dpi, they’re able to color correct, and remove dust, fingerprints and other blemishes on the images (click here to see the clean up they can do) while they’re working on it and their technicians stay in touch with you every step of the way to make sure that the product is to your liking and they upload everything to a photo album and you only pay for the ones that you like, which is very generous I know how much work even correcting a photograph is I can’t imagine a slide which is so much smaller and potentially more fiddly.

I’ll have to keep them in mind for once we have some disposable income.

I’m having a lot of fun doing prep work for the story idea that I had the other night. I’m researching articles and information online from the scientists who originated the Biosphere 2 project. I actually remember hearing about the project originally on a TV show I watched as a child “Blue Peter”. One of the hosts actually went and talked to some of the scientists who were in the Biosphere in Arizona, and spoke of the plan then to make more biospheres in other areas, and the applications of them being used in space as part of colonization projects.

While those sorts of things appear to have been tabled for the time being. I’m gratified to see that Paragon Space Development is still working on technology to do with this, such as greenhouses for Mars. This definitely helps spark my brain.

I can remember a couple of names I had for characters in the story and I’m trying to come up with names for the other six people, and map out ideas as they come. I have about a page so far and I remind myself that’s really good. I’m going to jot some notes on character histories as well. I’m just going to sketch things out quickly, times before I’ve gotten so bogged down in the details even to the point of whether or not people took weight loss pills or parted their hair to the left or right that I would get stuck and give up before I even started. Detail is good, but not if it becomes clunky and detracts from the story.

I think I’ve spoken a bit about this sort of thing before, but I’ve never taken it to heart properly, or rather I’ve been thinking of it in too narrow a view.

In the vein of “write what you know” I’ve been trying and trying to choke out an autobiography, but it just won’t come. I’m not ready on some level to write about what happened to me and what made my brain function the way it did.

I’ve also been stuck on several other story ideas I have. I have things started where angels and demons inhabit people’s bodies trying to stop or cause the resurfacing of Lucifer, an alien racial alliance engaging in a war with another species who want them to turn over all their lands and colonies, a group of friends who are roped into a D&D-esque adventure when they discover a strange book which one of their families has supposed to have been guarding at the behest of some Gods, a group of supernatural creatures trying to process the fact that they were involved in the Arthurian Legends in a past life while dealing with more current threats to the world’s future…

With all of this you’d think I’d be able to write something, but each time I pick up a pen or sit down in front of the keyboard everything locks up. Even with my attempts to write a few paragraphs a day on anything and everything I’ve been grinding up.

However I had an idea the other night to merge a few things together, a bit the way I’ve been doing with various blogs. I had a plot idea a while ago which I wrote up a lot of research about (hence being frustrated I can’t find it right now) even to the point of mapping out the facility the characters were at, which was to be a biosphere on Mars. There were eight people, scientists with different specializations, four men, four women who would have been sent to this place for two years and have to deal with a variety of issues. My thought was to give one of these scientists multiplicity; and add that into the mix of things that are going on.

The idea being on a certain level to show that you can be functional with multiplicity if you have the correct tools. I have to work this through more fully. I’m hoping to find my original notes somewhere else in the house and that I haven’t thrown them out thinking the idea was complete crock.