It Came From Outer Space…

Just a little short bit from a bit later on in ‘Too Deep’ than where I’m at right now.

“I can’t believe you brought me here,” Roy says, “These people are clearly in league with the same oppressive government that we fought to overthrow. How else would they have come through with so much.”
I’m done at this point. Roy and all his entitlement bullshit. How much did he actually deal with? Yet he acts like he had it so rough, and like he actually fought for anything, “Seriously?” I ask him, “I have friends who live in there. People who did a whole lot more than you ever did.”
“Excuse me?” he turns back hands still on the motorbike helmet, and puts it forcefully down on the bitch seat, “Are you saying I don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” I tell him, “Have you ever worried for anything in your life except if the spa was out of spa filters or if Daddy wouldn’t pay for your car to get charged? What did you actually do during the war? Paint a fallout shelter? Pay someone to paint a fallout shelter? That woman in there housed pilots, kept them hidden from the authorities, her husband worked his way up through the ranks of Magill by coming up with sneakier ways to supply the resistance with much needed medical supplies and ammunition…”
Roy is actually unable to talk for a moment, but then, “Bull. Shit,” he says, “You’re just trying to make me feel sorry for them. Look at where they’re living!”
“If you’re going to be a douchebag go back to school. I’ll find my own way home.”

I woke this morning from a blissful dream where the laptop miraculously started working again, and I was getting all the weight loss nutrition I needed, to the harsh reality that I’m still not sorting out my weight properly and the computer is being even weirder than it was yesterday.

I have to face facts on both counts, that I need to motivate myself. I thought I was doing okay, but the stress of the past few days and the laptop not working correctly, has me so freaked out that I’m not going to be able to keep up with my income, my writing, or my work that I’ve been not paying attention to what I’m doing with regards food. I’ve had days where I don’t eat until 1 p.m. and then, of course, I eat too much.

There was however some other useful things in my dream that pertain to the story I’m currently trying to work on. I’m a bit hesitant to try and type them up, but I think in part of my backing things up before the computer goes in for service. I will print out what I have of the story so far, and start handwriting on it.

I’m looking at certain stories and realizing there are some very gross and sensitive issues that might have to be addressed, STDs, incontinence, hemorrhoid relief, picking at scabs, the effects of meth abuse, vomiting; these are all things which gross me out to a certain degree, but at the same time I realize that you do a disservice to your potential readers if you shy away from covering certain things. While the detail doesn’t have to be excruciatingly graphic unless you’re really trying to hammer home a point, merely speaking of the effects of certain abuses on a person’s body is enough some times to say what you’re trying to say.

Certain characters while being heroes, in a sense, have tragic flaws, and those need to be emphasized otherwise the hero becomes too unbelievable. Just because you have an angelic soul attached to you doesn’t mean you get off free to abuse your body with no consequences. Meth rips apart a person’s body, aging them, changing their brain chemistry and while angelic nature might delay those affects, once the angel is gone the person would be screwed.

These are all things to take into account.

I’m a little worried about appropriately writing a certain character in ‘Too Deep’ who is more than a little nuts. I find the irony that in the future of a story with a multiple in it there would be a character who is schizophrenic, given the few get so often confused for each other when they’re as different as face moisturizer and washing up liquid (at least in my humble opinion).

However here is where I worry…I have an impression of who Rachel, the schizophrenic, would act, but then I am not schizophrenic and I don’t know anyone who actually is, at least personally. I have met someone who loudly claimed to be so, but they may have just been saying things to get attention. Admittedly they had some problems, but not necessarily that one specifically.

I’ve seen schizophrenics portrayed in the media, in TV shows and films, but given that most of the time those places portray a multiple it’s highly inaccurate. I do not wish to trust a TV show to give me the ‘back up’ to verify my own portrayal of something.

At this point I figure that I will just write her the way I feel she should be, her craziness is going to be amplified because a lot of it will be being told from the perspective of Sam who is more focussed on the fact that Rachel freaks him out and is a junkie (at least when he meets her) which gives him a freak on a higher level due to his family’s history with drugs. At the same time other times her craziness is portrayed will be from her friend Nick’s retelling and he will downplay it given he likes her and feels bad about the whole situation, so there will be two varied extremes and her actual “craziness” would be somewhere in the middle. Yes, there will be bad times, but at the same time she’s in an unmedicated situation as she and Nick were on the run and he wasn’t aware that she had schizophrenia so didn’t know she needed medication. Her assistant who had been making sure she took the dose each day had been arrested as a spy. One of those unfortunate things.

I wonder how many other people write about characters that have some sort of mental disorder or situation that they can’t relate to first hand. Consulting the DSM-IV can only give you a clinical comparison disorders, I imagine, manifest so much more differently from person to person. Just talking to others with multiplicity I see a widely varied manifestation than what I experience.

Once again the plot of the game has spurred insight into the story that I’m writing; in running the first session yesterday I had to go a lot further into the R&D department on the moon, working out who had come up with a genetic plague, assistants, heads of departments and the various different areas and their functions as well as a good chunk of the internal dynamics.

It also gave me opportunity to sort out more of the way that the colonies run in relation to each other; and more of what goes into certain things that are manufactured there clandestinely, like “juice”; which is a potent meth-like drug which doesn’t smell like cat piss when it’s cooking but is still pretty flammable. I’ve decided it smells like a combination of acne gel, rotten oranges and burning. I don’t know if cat piss would be better than that…but at least it’s not quite as deadly to be around the manufacturing process as it is to be near a meth lab.

It seems the first session of the game went well. I was a little worried, but then I always am when I’m doing something like this. There’s something about opening up your creative structure and letting others toy with it. I wonder if other authors feel the same when they run across fan-fiction.

Oh, my gosh! I can’t even begin to express how hilarious this post is that I just read. I’m browsing through my email bypassing all the viagra things and weight loss diet information, that’s what I get for signing up for certain news letters I suppose, and while I’m doing so something pops up on my twitter feed: Tween accuses Universal of ripping werewolves off from Twilight. I just had to read.

Here’s a short-ish excerpt:

To whom this may concern:

This movie was a complete waste and I feel that it offends ALL Twilight Fans around the world, that including myself. For one, it was a COMPLETE remaking of the Wolf Pack from the Twilight Saga: New Moon. It gives the werewolves a bad name and makes them look like some deformed mutation of a rabid dog. I actually started to like werewolves after seeing Jacob Black and all his awesomeness on the big screen at the movies. That was until I saw your crappy remake of what you call to be a “were wolf”. I don’t see how you live with yourself for making it the way you did. If I made this movie, I would be ashamed to even admit that I owned it. How can a werewolf be killed with a silver bullet? Better yet, have you saw the transformation of the man that is “supposed” to be the wolf? He sits in some chair and his entire body turns in to some mutated freak. If you would watch the transformation of Jacob Black, (Taylor Lautner) he doesn’t come close to looking as fake, cheap and or mutated as the wolf man. You tell me, who looks to be the better werewolf. Your stupid Wolf Movie didn’t even make the top Movie for the charts;

To read the rest click on the link above; seriously? Wow! I know I used to get all bent out of shape about rip-offs but that was usually when some idiot on the school bus was complaining that Sting stole Puff Daddy’s song or something equally stupid. I’m just…do your research!

I can’t help but be ruffled because Stephanie Meyer has ripped off a lot more things than others, I could go on for hours about her blatant “Mary-Sueing” and what little I understand of her imprinting said werewolf on a baby! But I haven’t actually read the books so it’s entirely possible I’ve got the wrong end of the stick. All I know is that I couldn’t watch the entire “Twilight” movie because it was so appalling. I did however enjoy the new Wolfman movie immensely, particularly because of the transformation and the fact that the wolves didn’t de-transform every time the moon went behind a cloud as they did in Van Helsing, which is another travesty I’m just not going to get into (and I love Hugh Jackman).

I wonder how bent out of shape Ms. Patterson will get if she ever reads any of my werewolf notations. One of the stories I have on the back burner involves a lineage of werewolves whose line have been involved in historical events such as interpretations of King Arthur and Robin Hood. They do have a wolf-man form and a wolf form and a man form. Oh, no am I ripping off Meyer? :p This is another story of mine which came about after running an RPG for some friends. There are some vampires in it too, but they certainly do NOT SPARKLE!

My room mate was watching “Wonder Boys” yesterday and at some point in there the main character Grady equated writing a story to giving birth. Some one was asking him what his book was about and he said he didn’t know. They chastised him for not knowing and he asked them what their child was going to be, and they said that they didn’t care as long as it looked like it’s mother. So, that illustrated the point. I find myself wishing at this point that there were prenatal vitamins for my story, given I’m stuck.

I’ve been looking for tips on ways to become unstuck given my normal things aren’t working at this point; and I ran across this site: Ten Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block and have been reading through those a few of them aren’t as feasible for me.

For example, the first tip suggests walking away from the keyboard. I’ve got a billion other things I need to do which involve the computer so instead of walking away I just switch tactics and work on those other things, catching up on blogs, reading things that are in my feed reader and the last and most useless one playing games on Facebook. However this morning I also have things to do which do not involve the computer, which is number 2 on the list. I have laundry to sort out, and washed dishes to put away. Later on today I have a massage booked that my Mum bought for me, so if nothing else that should give me a ton of time to clear my head and just be for a while and hopefully enable me to come back refreshed.

Just a little something I was inspired about given I’ve been drawing up plans for the biosphere and the Lunar colony.

There were subtle and also dramatic differences between the biosphere they had stayed in during training and the one here on Mars. Aside from the fact that the Martian sphere had to be a lot more finished before they saw it than the terrestrial one had given they couldn’t just pop outside in the frigid Martian atmosphere, there were many different things about the area she was now in.
They had been brought down to the Martian surface by shuttle and then had to carefully walk a few meters from the space shuttle bay doors to the airlock, passing as they did several domes with different environments in them. Kelsey couldn’t wait to see the rainforest dome first hand.
The airlock led to the central dome where the dorms and control center were. After they shed their space suits and put them in the airlock’s storage lockers they made there way into the dome. A blast of air which felt warm compared to the outside hit them once they stepped onto the soft grass. As she looked around there was the familiar site of a pond with trees around, and benches and tables dotted here and there to make a communal meal area; but then off in a shady little glade there were treadmills and weight benches and a stair climber device, and near there a flower bed was being dug. She could see the doorways leading to different domes, and as one of them opened and shut to let an employee in and out she heard a faint bleeting.
She felt her heart lift. She was home.

I have a hard time writing resumes, I do. I despise my resume. I dislike cover letters even more. I know there are quite a few of my friends who come to me for help with theirs and I do fine with that, but when it comes to writing about me and selling myself I suck. There are no two ways about it.

I think it comes from a lack of self-confidence.

The prospect of writing about myself for trying to sell a book fills me with dread also, selling myself, selling my stories, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that, but I need to practice and to learn because a story can’t publish itself, you have to be able to sell it to a publisher.

Feeling better and being able to write once again has me thinking about getting, or rather finishing my online degree. In 2005 I had to stop working on my masters degree online because there was just too much going on: work, wedding, moving twice in a few months. Even though I wasn’t enjoying that program much at all I still wonder about completing, or rather doing something else.

I know I would not want to go back to FSU, however I only have two years to make up my mind before I have to re-take the GRE which is several hundred dollars. I’d rather not do that again, considering I had to pay for it twice in the first place.

Someone pointed me in the direction of Western Governors University, which was founded in 1997 by 19 U.S. governors that impresses me right there. Their main focus was to expand access to education for working adults. The other thing that impresses me is that WGU is a non-profit university and they’re entirely online which would mean unlike Kore, my room mate, I wouldn’t have to take a portion on a campus somewhere, which, with a three year old at home, a shoddy car and horrendous health issues would be a plus.

The other thing that impresses me is that their tuition is set at a flat rate per term, so you get out what you make of it given you pay for the six months of schooling rather than per credit, so you pay $3000 for two or six courses, however much you can do which means that as well as being able to get scholarships if you work quickly, as I often do, and get ahead you can save even more money than just for the fact that the tuition is so low. I know at FSU I paid about $5000 for two courses in one semester, and that was five years ago. I dread to think what it would be now.

This is one of those that I’m considering a lot more seriously. I just have to see how I would manage it. My husband and I have had several disagreements about me going back to school. I know part of it is that he’s afraid of me biting off more than I can chew. I really need to get to a better point in my health before I add another thing on to my stress level which I understand.