It Came From Outer Space…

For a few days I will be without a computer. I’m able to use my room mate’s computer for a few days and then she goes on vacation, and right about then is also when Toshiba should send the box to take the laptop to their repair center. Except it’s really at the point where I can’t use it at all, the near constant scrolling is just crazy-making.

I was talking to an associate who said that he might be able to fix the desktop, and spoke about the possibility of connecting it to a Samsung HDTV, but the monitor itself and all the peripherals work fine, it’s just the desktop which is dead. I have some prospects which are very heartening, that I will write more about when I’m not sneaking time on Kore’s computer, but if my various blogs are rather quiet right now, that is why; but it’s giving me a nice break from the hussle of the internet and really helping me kick the Facebook app addiction, so that’s a good thing to come out of this. I think.

Also I have 19 hand-written pages of the story I’ve been working on and more knocking their way around my brain, so that’s good too. I’ll have a ton to write up once I have a functioning keyboard again.

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.”

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.

It’s funny how things come to you after you hear something from a caller or see something online.

“I’m gonna tell Turner about the tm-t88iv,” Steve was persisting in saying. Dane was having a hard time tuning him out, “it’s so much better, all this color, faster, the customers will love it.”
“I don’t think the customers give a shit about color. They just want their receipts, and they don’t want to have to come inside for them. They want to get them out there,” she pointed to the pumps, “not in here, and that doesn’t look like it’ll fit out there,” she pointed again.
“What are you saying?” Steve asked.
“I’m saying you need to get your ass out there and change the tape in the pumps.” She chewed on the end of the lollipop stick in her mouth, getting the last possible iota of flavor off the little stump.
Steve looked at her. She looked back. His eyes slid away from hers, and he slunk around the counter picking up the keys he would need and tromped outside into the cold. She sighed.
That was mean!
She jumped, the stump of lollipop stick dropped to the floor, “Stop doing that!” she hissed.
Why? her eternal tormentor inquired. It’s such FUN.

I’m trying to establish Dane’s angel as being playful despite the severity with which it acts in the prologue that I have written so far. I need to work a little better on the attitude, and get across the energy and spunk with which it engages in it’s very depressing job.

I remember another of my step-father’s brilliant career ideas for me was writing greeting cards. He came up with this after I did our personalized photo graduation invitations on my step-sister’s computer so that he didn’t have to order them through the school and pay extra money.

He also thought I should be writing books for children instead of the stories that I normally write. That I would be a great children’s book author. I don’t know why he thought that considering most of the stories that he ever heard me read sections of involved war-torn alien landscapes, people being taken prisoner and their families dying (though that would be appropriate for Disney); but that’s not appropriate for children. He kept saying I could take the things I write and tone them down, make them educational and all these other things which would have meant diminishing my creativity.

As I get older I’m not saying that I couldn’t write children’s books, it’s just not something I’m interested in. My husband has often joked that I should make a book series called “Helpful Declan” about our son and all his attempts to assist me with household tasks that end in comedy, and maybe that would be something, but I have a lot of other crazy stories that have to get out of me first.

Some times words are hard to come by. I don’t get writer’s block quite as much recently while working on the story. However, I’ve been trying to come up with some personalized gifts for my family and that is where it gets a bit tricky.

I really just need to write what comes to me, but it gets hard some times to write what I want to when it’s coming from the heart. I feel strange putting such deep emotion out. I’m not sure why it gets so difficult. It’s like I lock up, freeze, I think it comes from a nervousness at expressing my feelings.

I should employ the same routines I use when I’m writing a story but that always seems to go out the window when I’m not writing stories.

The previous post about editing mad me thinking about fanfiction.net and how long it’s been since I’ve been there. I got my original account when I was a young proactiv-smearing college student. I, actually, deleted that account after saving anything I thought might be viable and restarted in the hopes I would actually perfect and finish some of the stories that I’d been writing.

Except it didn’t happen, partially due to the depression, and a lot due to the fact that my tastes have changed. I feel strange writing and getting comments from people who are in some cases less than half my age. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

For the most part the content on there is…strange, twisted, drivel. There are some gems, but a lot of it is just not good at all. It’s the same way with places like deviantart. They attract anyone who wants to showcase their work whether or not it’s good. A bit like an American Idol audition.

I decided just to do a little mini-blurb based on some of the planning I’ve been doing for “Too Deep”. It’s when he’s telling Brad about the time that he gets re-recruited, after a resistance member overhears him having an argument with a gang member, and then tracks him down in time to prevent him successfully committing suicide.

Brad let go of his hand, so that he could reach up and wipe his own eyes, “Sorry,” he murmured.
Sam gave a shrug, “Shit happens, I guess.”
Brad shook his head, “No, I mean…most of the people I grew up around they were the sort of shallow like your ex, Roy, where they would want to kill themselves if their family didn’t buy them the best best acne cleanser, so they had to go to school with blemishes, or they’d find some other vapid way to manipulate their parents…it’s not like I haven’t seen the scars before, and there has to be more than one time, based on those…” he hesitated reaching a hand out towards Sam’s sleeve, to roll it back and trace the lines, “Of course most of them would have the scars cosmetically removed after a certain time when it was no longer cool. Us poor Earthers with our terrible problems,” he laughed sarcastically.
Sam gave a slight smile, “It’s still kinda stupid,” he said, “here I was on the one hand wanting to help make things better, and then I did that, but I was completely lost. I knew the father had connections, but everything was so mysterious, I hadn’t had time to find anything he had written. I was terrified that my leaving the orphanage so quickly meant the idiot military police had found that information and torn apart the entire resistance. Not logical thought I know, but still…”

I’m having an issue deciding on tense. I had to go back through and edit the blurb a little because it started out past tense, shifted to present somewhere in there and then back to past. My issue with the tense is based on the fact that he’s telling the story of his past in his present, so I feel as though it should be in present tense, except for the flashbacks being in the past; but I don’t know if that will be too jarring.

Or should I say that I reached my goal?
As of an hour or so ago my wordcount is at 25212, which means I beat the goal I set of 25000.
I wanted to make sure I did a good stretch of writing today because I work tomorrow from 7 a.m to 3 p.m. so I doubt I’ll get much done tomorrow, if anything at all. I ended at the end of a chapter, and am hoping to work on the story some more at a later date. There’s a lot of work that has to be done on it. A lot of things that I thought would work while planning really don’t work as I’m trying to write things out; and certain elements or rather character perspectives were a lot harder to write from than I thought.

Still I’ve written the most this month since I did this time last year, and that’s saying a lot. A friend of mine has put together a community on LJ for “Nanoing all year round” Nanowrimo_ayr and I just requested to join in the hopes that I can keep going with motivation of fellow writers all year rather than just in November and get some writing done on other stories that I’ve been trying to get to work over the years. I think the first one I might tackle is “The Ledger” which is about a group of D&D players who get to experience what is a lot of players dreams fighting monsters in real life but, of course, it’s nothing like the game and a lot more dangerous.

I’m stalled with NaNoWriMo once again. The past few days I’ve not been feeling so great, and haven’t been up to much in the way of writing, and so other than a few hundred words that I wrote last night I’ve been around 14000 for the past few days, current goals indicate that it’s supposed to be around 28K by now, so I’m halfway behind again and I’m not sure what I’d be doing as far as catch up because I seem to have lost the thread of where I was going somewhere along the line.

I’m trying to skip ahead a little in the hopes of picking things up, perhaps I can talk about one of Kelsey’s alters being interested in carolina designs, something, anything to actually get the words going again. I think part of my problem is that I already know that I’m going to be scrapping half of what’s been written or at least moving it to later in the story to try and salvage it, because the way things are being written right now there’s nothing much in the way of actual action going on compared to what I was hoping for when I originally decided on the plot, some times that’s not a bad thing, but in this case I feel as though things are dragging a lot in certain ways, where I’ve been writing pages about things that aren’t entirely relevant just to keep writing.