Crazy World Burning Love

The NaNo front is sort of quiet.  I remember this time last year, with most people in a thanksgiving coma by about four PM (which, by the way, is not caused by the tryptophan in turkey meat, but by the amount of crap you pound down your gullet.  Just ask the Mythbusters), the few people who stumbled out to the NaNo group on Facebook were crying for sprinters, because they were behind.  As for me, I ended last Thanksgiving with a word count of 83,625, and finished the novel the next day–which would be, today!

Interesting thing is that I only wrote 1,476 words for last Thankgiving, meaning I didn’t make my daily total.  I sort of made up for it by writing 3,063 words on Black Friday, and putting the End on the last chapter.  I know that’s not going to happen today–I’m likely going to stick to my schedule and do my two thousand plus, and still finish up on Sunday or Monday, but it’s now a question of whether I’ll be sitting at sixty-five thousand words at the end, or hovering close to seventy thousand.  Right now the numbers tell me sixty-five, but we’ll see.

When I’m not nose-deep in the computer screen writing–and dealing with the pain in my neck-shoulder combination, which was brought on by all this writing–I’m thinking, and having strange dreams.  Last night was no different, because the sucker was all over the place.  At one point I went on stage with The Who, sometime in 1972, to sing Going Mobile with Pete–which, if you know your Who History, was never performed life.  Really, you had to be there:  it was pretty smokin’.

There was another point where I found myself reading minds, and one of the said mind readings was of a friend who apparently did a lot of his vertical fantasizing around female superheroes, and their . . . powers.  There were a lot of faces I recognized  because I do know more than a few female superheroes, but there was one that really surprised me, because when the image of the Phoenix came up, said person wasn’t Jean “I’m Always Coming Back From the Dead!” Grey; it was the image of one of my characters–

Who would probably like that comparison, were she a real person.

Audrey Dahl, from my Transporting series, is one of my favorite characters.  She’s crazy–and not always in a good way–she’s geeky, she’s bright . . . she’s got powers out the wazoo.  She and her Psychic Twin, Cytheria, are the two most powerful “Talents” in the world I created for the 32^nd Century, and they are well aware of this fact.  So do a lot of other people in their government, which is why if they ever decided to go rogue and start killing shit, someone might try nuking them from orbit–it’s something I point out in one chapter of the first book, where Cytheria indicates that The Ripley Solution would likely be the only way to take them out if the government decided they needed to shuck this mortal coil as soon as possible.

Isn’t all powerful, but the list of things she can do is impressive.  She is a telekinetic, which means she can throw very large things at you with her mind.  She can also levitate, which is sort of scary, because she’s afraid of heights.  She can not only read minds, but she can get right into your mind and do some pretty crazy thing.  Oh, and she’s a pyrokinetic, which means when all else fails, she can throw fire balls at you–or big ass streams of fire, for that matter.

Sounds very Phoenixy, right?  The only difference between Audrey and Jean is that Audrey isn’t a ginger, she’s blond, so she’s really more of a non-slutty looking Emma Frost.  Good thing Emma was never the Phoenix–oh, wait . . .

And there’s an unwritten story–yeah, I have those.  The plot is Cytheria and Audrey accompany a Home Office diplomatic team to a world that isn’t associated with their empire, so they can conduct trade negotiations.  Things go considerably sideways, and in order to get their people butts out of some serious shit, the Psychic Twins need to power up and lay some hurt on the bad guys.  (Oh, and Cytheria can do many of the things Audrey can, though she can heal herself very fast because she had biokinesis, and her primary offensive power is cyrokinesis, so you may begin the Fire and Ice jokes at any time . . .)

In face, they enter the big battle by floating down into the fight, and while hovering above the streets like super-heroines without boob windows, Audrey yells at the troops she’s facing, “Have a little Phoenix Force, motherfuckers,” and rains fire upon their screaming butts.

You may ask, how does she know these things?  How is it she knows about comic book characters from the 1970′s?  Because that’s where she’s from.  And she–well, sorta she–was also a devote of comics, so when she gets to the future and discovers she can read minds, and fly, and throw fire . . .  yeah, ends up digging the hell out of it.

Just imagine her at San Diego Comic Con.  Fan boys and girls would be dying–maybe literally.

What was my dream telling me?  That I’m in love with female superheroes?  That I ripped something off and I should be ashamed?  That I need to tell more of Audrey’s tale, and have people draw fan art of Cytheria and her whipping ass?

Let me get my Indonesian horror novel out of the way–

Then we’ll see.

But First, A Gaming Interlude

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ll know I’m a gamer.  So imagine my surprise when I found another blogging writing about her love of the game.  Head on over to The Tilting Windmills and give it a read.

No Remembrance of Things Past

No turkey today for me:  it’s duck all the way.  Not a big eater of the gobbler, but love a duck slow cooked on the grill, so that’s where it’s at today, taking advantage of what will likely be the last 60 degree day for some time.  Then eat, rest, computer time–I have some programs I want to check out–then writing.

Back to the NaNo, which is down to its last four chapters, and may inch over sixty thousand words tonight if I’m lucky.  The wordage tells me that I may, just may, hit seventy thousand words when this is over, which is a good thing, because that puts it in an area where I can shop it in a lot of places if I go that route.

So all is good there.  Just get through the holiday–or as Rocky called it, “Thursday”–and move to the next day, which will not involve shopping.  Stick your Black Friday where the sun is non-luminescent:  I’ll be here.

This is, so I’m told, the day to give thanks.  Okay, thanks.  There you go, I’ve done given them.  I know what I have thanks for, and what I don’t–

There are a number of people on social media–and you know what social media I’m talking about–who like to put up pictures of stuff from like the 1960′s and ’70′s, and ask, “Hey, Like if you remember this!” or “Like this if you remember how great your childhood was!” or “Like this if you weren’t stoned on heroin by the time you were in college.”  Okay, maybe not so much that last one, but you know what I’m talking about.

There always seems to be a rush to some nostalgic time in a person’s life where they talk about how cool it was to run around outside barefoot, or having your parent yell out the backdoor that it was time for dinner, and no one hovered over them while they played.  (Oh, and for the meme going around that the people born in the 1950′s and ’60′s were the last to play out in the street:  come to my neighborhood.  You’ll be surprised.)

One thing you should know about the past:  it wasn’t as great as you remembered.  There were a lot of interesting things that happened back in them days, but compared to today–naw, I’ll stay in the future.

Sure, you had hand cranked kitchen appliances, and rotary phones, and maybe a TV that was the size of a Buick–but the chances are also good that you probably grew up for a while without air conditioning (as I did), and if you lived in any part of the country that had brutal summers (in other words, everywhere), there were probably more than a few times when you couldn’t get to sleep because it was 80 degrees outside, and the humidity was 85 percent, and there wasn’t a breeze in sight, so you laid there and suffered, hoping you passed out from exhaustion very, very soon.

It wasn’t always easy to make a long distance call; I can still remember my mother having to get an operator if she wanted to call her parents in Florida, because those long distant direct dial systems weren’t always working.  And if you wanted to call someone overseas, you usually went through an operator, and then your call was routed through an undersea cable–as happened with the first international call I made in 1989.  The echo was fantastic, let me tell you.  These days, I can pretty much call seventy percent of the world while I’m driving down the road if I know the number.

As for that huge TV:  three networks, plus a couple of local shows if you happened to live near a city big enough to support them.  For the longest time in the Chicago area, it was CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN, WTTW, and WFLD–or, Channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 32.  You watched what they gave you, and you were happy–mostly.  And none of those stations ran twenty four hours; leave any station on long enough, and that damn Star Spangled Banner was gonna blast you awake at some point.

Oh, sure:  go ahead and bitch about there being nothing on TV, but I can get my favorite shows out of the UK six hours after they were broadcast there–or faster, if I hop on my computer and look for an upload of the episode.  If you can’t find something to watch across eight hundred channels, you’re not trying.

Speaking of computes . . . when I was growing up, they were either something you saw in science fiction, or they filled a room and pumped out enough heat to cook today’s dinner.  When I went to school to get my degree in computers, I was on of the first lab techs to rule the roost when we got out own computer–an IBM Series-1.  We had the Model 3, with 32 kilobytes of memory to run our COBOL and RPG programs.  Yeah, you heard me:  32k of memory.  Kept that a year, then moved up to an IBM System 34, with 64 kilobytes of memory, 128 megabytes of hard drive storage, and enough tools to make your programming experience a sweet one.  Yeah, baby:  we were cookin’ with gas!

Today I fire up my laptop, connect to my wireless router, and I’m working here, in the cloud–from whence this blog post cometh–and chatting with people all over the world.  I can take it with me and work just about anywhere.  I have access to as much information and as many cat pictures as I can handle, and if I want to see what the city I’m writing about looks like, I can call it up on a map and get ideas for a story–as I’m doing with my NaNo Novel this year.

Science and medicine . . . if you forget for a moment that you might not be able to pay for treatment, if you can, you’ll probably beat most most stuff that’s out to get you.  As a child I was often afflicted with parasites of the lower intestine, and it wasn’t pleasant.  My daughter has never had to worry about that.  Most of the time you can get something to help you with illness by going to the story and buying it over the counter.  If you have high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, or depression, you can get something to help with that.

When I was a kid, if you had something with one of your organs, you were gone.  Today, we have transplants.  I was still getting tuberculosis tests until the fourth grade, and since I always came up with a false positive, I’d have to go off and have a chest x-ray, just to be sure that my lungs weren’t bleeding out on me.  My daughter only knows of these things through school–the same with polio and smallpox.  We haven’t figured out how to cure everything these days, but in the 1960′s, a lot of things that could kill you back then are only bad memories today.

I am a huge geek when it comes to space, and the 1960′s was a good time to be alive if you followed anything in orbit.  But I also remember reading in school science books that, as far as anyone knew, it was possible there were canals on Mars, and those clouds covering Venus could hide a huge, planet-wide jungle filled with dinosaurs!  Then the Mariner space probes came along and spoiled it all . . .

Or did they?  We know that Venus is about as strange a world as they come, where the heat will kill ya if the air pressure didn’t–we won’t mention the acid rain.  And while Mars doesn’t have canals, there are cannons as big as the U.S., old volcanoes that rise twenty-seven kilometers above the plains upon which it sits,  And huge depressions that were likely sea beds at one time.  It is, for me, a world of wonder–

As are the other planets–and smaller bodies, too–in the solar system.  We’ve visited every planet and taken pictures of them and their moons, we’ve sent probes to comets and asteroids, and in a few years we’ll have our first look look at Pluto.  We’re discovering planets around other stars, sometimes with the help of amateurs who are given access to data collected by the larger scopes, or by data from orbiting satellites–or even using their own equipment.  To paraphrase a line from Goodfellas, “It’s a glorious time to look at the cosmos.”

Believe it or not, there are a lot of things that are far better for people in terms of how things are done socially these days, than they were when I was a kid.  In the 1950′s and 1960′s, it was hard to vote in some places if you were black; if you were a woman, getting an abortion or contraceptives were difficult, impossible, or illegal.  Some states didn’t allow people of different ethnicities to marry.  And if you were LGBT, you damn well had better stay in that closet–or else.

It’s not quite perfect, mostly because you’ve still got idiots roaming about who are scared of all the the stuff in that last paragraph, but it’s getting there.  Just about anyone can get married regardless skin color, and people are becoming far cooling with gays being allowed the same.  It’s going to happen everywhere, and in time the anti-marriage equality people will be a bad memory, just as were the people against people of different ethnicities getting married.

LGBT people are becoming far more a part of life than they ever were “back in my day”.  Neil Patrick Harris is pretty much a household name; Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow are all over TV; George Takei . . . oh, myyyyyyyy.  Enough said.

It’s not a perfect world for LGBT, but it’s a hell of a lot better than things were before Stonewall.  How many people my age remember Rock Hudson’s life, spelled out in the same fashion as  Neil Patrick Harris’?  No, you don’t.  People didn’t know about his life, because coming out as a gay man, in the 1960′s, would have destroyed him as an actor.  We don’t remember much of his life:  we only remember his death.

I don’t look back.  For me, there were a lot of interesting things that happened, too many to recount, so many that shaped me.  But I’ll never post something like the picture of a cassette tape and say, “Remember these?  Like them if they remind you of a better time!”, because all I remember was when the damn things were eaten by your tape player, turning Benny and the Jets or Bohemian Rhapsody into some gibbering, fever dream creature straight outta Lovecraft, and your normal reaction was to curse loudly, eject the sucker, and toss it in a bin or, as I often did, out the window of your car as you cruised down the highway going sixty.

Forward, I say.  Let the past collect dust, and keep it there to use as a reference–but don’t kid yourself that it was super fantastic adventure time . . .

That’s coming on in twenty minutes.  And if you’re busy on the computer, DVR it.

We can do those things today, you know?

Time Enough to Bring the Strangeness

The drive to The Undisclosed Location wasn’t without its moments.  Not only because everyone seemed to drive as if they were possessed by the spirits of old people from Arizona who were frightened to death by some non-white person they thought was coming to do them harm, but because I was able to think things out for a story.

No, not those stories:  another story.

I had time to think.  I had time because to not think would have done a lot to put me in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to be in a bad mood as I rolled into town.  The last thing I want to do is show up at my apartment at 8:30 PM, knowing I have things to do, but to do it all feeling like I should just take a two-pound mallet to my skull, so . . . story time thinking!

I revisited some territory I’d seem before–namely, my character Jeannette, from Her Demonic Majesty.  I’d like her to continue, to carry on, to have many adventure that I can write–and lay around for people to read.  It seems like I do that with most of my characters:  I seek out additional trouble for them to get into.

Jeannette is no different.  After diving back into the final edit of Demonic, I’ve found myself liking Jeannette a whole lot more.  She’s a great character, and I need to have her grow.  So I thought about her yesterday, while I was on the road–

There was a story I once talked about, taking a couple of character close to my heart, and pulling them into Jeannette’s world.  I decided to forget about that particular story, but yesterday I was wondering–what if only one of the characters showed up on Jeannette’s doorstep, and she knew this was wrong, because she knew there should be two, not one.

With that, I was off.

Yes, I had a story there.  I won’t say it’s a great story, or even a good one, but there’s a story there.  It’s all in the telling, as they say, and not by just throwing words out there for people to consume.  By the time I made it to my apartment, I had my cast of characters, I had schools, I had events.  I knew how I wanted things to go.  There was just one point near the end that was, shall we say, a bit sticky?  Yeah, sticky.  I’ll leave it at that and say I’ll need to think about what comes after, because I know it involves something that is likely to pop up in another story.

But, wait!  There’s more!

See, as I headed into work today, something else came to mind.  A line, spoken by Jeannette, as she was sitting in a restaurant:

“This place has always bugged me.  It’s full of people acting big time, and not having the faintest fucking clue what that means.  They’ve tried their damnedest to cover up their hick bullshit with a thin veneer of culture, but it’s a total fail.  What we got here is nothing more than Deliverance, without the mountains.”

I know where this story goes, but that was the line running about my imagination as I headed towards where I park ever morning before work.  It’s a good line–

It could end up being an even better story.

The Need For Make Believe

It may not look like it, but that’s Iceland and Hatsune Miku in the picture to the right.  Oh, sure, it looks like a couple of girls in funny, costumes, but trust me on who they are.  I know, because I spend the day with them, and I’m familiar with their back story.

Yesterday was a day spent at a local anime con, and while I wasn’t all that much in a hurry to go–mostly because I had a lot of editing to do, and being there was going to take away from that time–I went, mostly because my daughter wanted me to go.

While I walked around a bit, and mingled with the otaku crowds–and even spoke with a few old friends that I hadn’t seen in a few years–I mostly found a place to sit, plug in my computer, and chat a bit while I snapped pictures with my phone and uploaded said pictures to my Facebook page.  And I wasn’t being a creeper; the one time I snapped a picture of someone else, I asked if I could take her picture.  There is a certain decorum one should maintain when you are at a con, and people–particularly woman–are in costume.

Otherwise you should stay home and leave the people having fun alone.

There was a time when I had my own anime fandom.  I like to tell my daughter I’m “Old School,” which is a way of saying, “None of the stuff I watch has been around for decades.”  But I’ve worn by share of crazy tee shirts, and sat through my share of films that, back in the day–aka, twenty years ago–were subtitled by fans because that was the only way you could see that stuff that, at the time, wasn’t suppose to be seen outside of Japan.

The only time I’ve every gotten into costume goes back even farther:  1984, to be precise.  It was at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago, and I decided to dress up at the Forth Doctor, complete with a twenty-one foot scarf.  It’s unfortunate that no pictures of this event exist any longer–the ex-wife has them all, I believe–but somewhere there is a picture of me mugging to the camera while I stand next to a Dalek a couple of guys made in there high school auto shop.  Good times, let me tell you.

Since I don’t have that picture, I’ll have to give you something else, which is likely to be a bit frightening.  So here you go:  me as Hatsune Miku.  Kawaii!  You’re welcome.

I wish my earrings had been longer . . .

There is nothing wrong with getting up in costume–or, as the kids called it, cosplay–and having a good time.  Make believe is what I do for a part-time living, remember?  Maybe I’m not getting into a costume every time I write, but I am getting into there heads.  In a way, I have to be my characters so I can deal with them, deal with how they are suppose to be feeling, and help them figure out where they’re headed within the context of the story.

You have to get inside their skin, put on their clothes, and walk in their shoes.  When I read a story, I can tell when someone has gotten into the mind of their character, and when they are just “writing them out.”  And I’m not talking about Mary Sueing someone; I mean when you have sat and thought about what the character is suppose to do, how they are suppose to feel, knowing their dreams and aspirations, their fears and flaws.  Particularly those last two, because what is a real character if they have no fears, no flaws?  I’ll tell you who they are:  someone named Mary Sue.  Please, you may love the ground I walk upon.

Getting in touch with an inner child is important when you write.  Neil Gaiman said it best:  ”Growing up is highly
overrated.  Just be an author.”  Think about how much fun it was pretending you were someone else, and channel that feeling into something that brings a feeling of wonder to some place inside yourself that hasn’t been touched in a while.  Sometimes you gotta break out the imagination.  Some times you gotta remember what it was like trying to wear mom’s high heels.  As a famous doctor once said, “There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.“

As for getting the mind limber and going to different places . . . Miku-chan (not me, the one at the very top) had reddish hair under that wig, and she said she wanted people to call her Pepper Potts–who, as we know, is the only thing that allows that drunk Tony Stark to do the things a normal person does–though I’m sure a fifth of Crown Royal helps.  Thinking ahead, I told her she should keep her hair color, and come to the con next year as Rescue, wearing her own powered armor suit.

If you look at the picture to the right, you can see just how fetching an Iron Pepper would look.  Who cares if it’s gonna be a lot of work to put it together, because if you show up at a con looking like that, you’re going to rock.

So let that cosplay flag fly.  Use it in your daily life, because we don’t have as much fun as we should, and if you aren’t having fun day-to-day, then what’s the point.  And let it come out and play when you feel the need to create something that’s going to entertain others–even if that “other” is only you.

And you know what?  I look good in a wig.  I don’t know about the blue hair, though.  Maybe something in a red, then I can say, “I wear ginger now . . . gingers are cool.”

Catchy line.  I should use that more often.

Bridging Night Witches

Crazy night, let me tell you.  Went out, visited with a friend, watched TV, drove home under a clear, moonless night, then headed off to bed–

That’s where the craziness became epic.

Sleep alternated between laying in bed, tossing and turning, loving the cool air, and having some incredibly vivid dreams.  Of late my dreams have become brighter, more detailed, and filled with some low level insanity.  Here is a prime example:  I seemed to be in Asia, probably China, because most of the buildings I walked through with others looked like something right out of Kowloon Gate.  Having spent some time in China, I have some familiarity with the architecture of a few of the older buildings.

But I was surrounded by Japanese women.  I know how Japanese sounds, and whenever a woman came up to me, she was speaking Japanese.  Most of them were cursing me, for some reason:  one accused me of stealing her purse, which I didn’t, because the item she picked out was filled with pictures of me posing with other women.  I finally told her–well, the Japanese is, “Kusokurae!”  Look it up.

I was also there to check out all the long bridges.  I mean, huge suckers:  we’re talking miles-long suspension spans, much along the lines of the Gibraltar Bridge as described in The Fountains of Paradise.  It was like there was a huge display of them, where I could stand upon a beach and see them all at once.  Nice trick, since they were suppose to be all over the world.

Oh, and lastly–actually, it happened before my trip to the Land of Cussing Japanese Women and Bridge Viewing–I had lesbian sex with Hermione Granger.  She even brought me a wand and a pointy hat, and combed my long, ginger hair–which she loved, by the way–before we headed off to bed.  That was nice of her, don’t you think?

It’s been like this for a few weeks now, the return of the vivid dreaming, but it seems that I’m getting more and more interesting vision during the weekend.  I’m not complaining:  in fact, I find them extremely interesting.  There is something going on, I know this.  Perhaps my mind is finally breaking free from the stress I suffered throughout the summer, and it’s channeling a lot of suppressed ideas out of the basement of my mind.

Or it could be my Muse taking over, once more asserting her authority over my imagination.  The Hermione thing–yeah, that kind of sounds like her.  Sort of.  When I think about it, however, I think she’d be a little jealous, ’cause she doesn’t like to share . . .

Or it could be the chili dogs and coffee I’d had a few hours before.  That’s as good an explanation as any, right?

Having taken some time off from original writing–save the new chapter I wrote for my story Replacements this morning–it could be my imagination is feeling like it’s being ignored, and it’s coming on to me in my dreams, showing me what I should be doing, and not what I am doing.

Though I don’t think a Hermione Granger fan fic is in my future.

The hat was nice, though.  She probably wanted me to have it for my Halloween story . . .

The Factual Fiction

Among the genres I play with, science fiction is one I work in a lot.  Considering I have five stories set in a universe of my own creation–four novels and one short novella–it’s save to say that I’m most tat home when I’m writing about people living in a world that is far different than ours.

I like to give advice on world building as well.  One of the area where I think I’m pretty good is in building solar systems.  By far I’m no expert, but I do take some pride in the systems I’ve created using available software.  Yes, some people buy software to help them build scrap books:  I buy software to help build solar systems.  It’s a hobby, one that’s better than cooking meth in the Superlab.

Last night I was chatting with another writer who has asked, from time to time, on help for the systems he’s created for his own stories.  I like helping where I can, because it is fun, particularly when you see the bug you have has taken hold in another.  There was a comment I made, however.  When discussing something that might be just a little on the fantastical side, I said, “I don’t always do things that are fully scientific.  I cheat a little myself.”

It makes you wonder:  at what point do you cross the line from science fact into science bullshit?

When it comes to the systems in my Transporting universe, the majority of them are, I believe, factual.  There is one, however, that I know it pretty much bull, and I don’t mind saying so.  In my stories I have the center of government on a planet in orbit around the great summer star Altair, in the constellation Aquila.  While there is some great science fiction heritage in using Altair as a place to have a habitable planet–one with a green sky, I might add–it can’t happen if we follow the current theories about the creation of solar systems.

You see, Altair is a big star:  an A7 V class.  The “V” means it’s a main sequence star, but an A class means it’s far larger than the Sun.  As such, it should burn through it’s fuel a lot faster than the Sun, which means it’ll live a shorter life than the Sun.  This doesn’t mean that it can’t have planets:  A class stars have been found with Jupiter-sized planets in orbit.  But the likelihood of finding an earth-like planet is rare, if not almost impossible.

Still . . . it’s such an exotic location, you can’t pass it up.  The long year–about 3.65 Earth years for my world to make one trip around Altair–the long day–about thirty-three hours–and the bright star in the green sky . . . yeah, I like that.

It’s not so much science fiction as it is science fantasy, but there are times when you succumb to the desire to throw in a location that’s too good to pass up.  I should know better, but the kid in me can’t help but think that once one of my characters shows up on this world, the first thing he’ll do is crack jokes about looking for Krell.

At least he didn’t get there on the C-57D.  Otherwise he might have ended up on Miranda . . .

Is it Gaming, or is it Storytelling?

Yesterday I mentioned that I was thinking of a character that I’d created for a role playing game, and that I’d written a few chapters around them, sort of gave them a history.  I also made a comment sort of like, “Oh, I don’t do fan fiction.”

Except for that time when I sort of did.

Allow me to explain:

Back in the dark, dim days of the early 1990′s, I used to do a lot of gaming.  In fact, I pretty much gamed non-stop from about 1989 until 2003, or there about.  Yes, there was a little bit of gaming going on from 2005 to 2010, but not like I’d done in the prior decade.

I not only gamed, but I ran them.  I was The Gamemaster, and for a few years my games of choice were MechWarrior, and Cyberpunk.  MechWarrior was your “Giant Mechanical Things You Pilot so You Can Blow Shit to Hell!” game, and we had a blast with it because people loved blowing shit up.  Save when the shit being blown up was your mech–the gigantic robot-like thing your character piloted–then it wasn’t so much fun.  For the most part, however, it was a great game, and I put in a lot of time changing the “known history” of the game, just to put a twist on the game, and so people wouldn’t be going, “Oh, I know what happens next!”

The other game was Cyberpunk.  Now, if you want to know about that, read The Sprawl Trilogy, by William Gibson, and you’ll know a little about the game.  People were cybered up, hook into The Net, and loaded down with armor, guns, and drugs–and not always in that order.  Well, my players, the armor and guns always came first, and if you weren’t careful, you might take a shotgun blast to the face–or worse, Full Auto To THE HEAD!  People were killed just going to the ATM, and not always because they were a target.

Again, there was a lot of fun to be had, and I ran one particular game for about two and a half years of weekends.  I finally brought the game to a close, ended up killing a few player characters, and gave everyone–well, almost everyone–a good resolution.

However . . .

When I was in my writer’s group, I needed something to write about.  And lo and behold:  I came up with a set of character who existed in the world laid out within the game, and its supplements.  And, once–yeah, I wrote a story for them.  Said physical story is now lost to the ages, because it ended up on a hard drive I didn’t back up, and I never recovered, but it’s still in my head, and if I ever wanted to rewrite it, I could.  If memory serves me correctly, the story was probably thirty to thirty-five thousand words long, but it could have been longer.  To be honest, I just don’t remember.

But to show you how nutty I was, I not only wrote that story, but I figured out a whole HBO-type TV series for the characters, one that was about thirteen to fifteen episodes a season, with a full eight seasons planed.  No, really, that’s how I was rolling back in the early 1990′s.  I even had titles for some of the stories:  the first one would have been, “The Great American Nightmare,” and the last three would have been based upon the titles of famous movies.

Ah, another of those crazy ideas that never went anywhere.

So let that be a lesson to you:  no matter how crazy your ideas may be, act on them.

Because what’s worse than never having them come true?

At Home in the Darkness

Things are moving along, plans are coming into focus.  With a long weekend ahead–well, three days, which is almost long enough, especially since there are Daleks on Saturday–this is giving me some time to really get into my ideas.

Those ideas are kicking around now, coming from a lot of different directions.  I spent some time chatting with people yesterday afternoon and evening, but at the same time, I was running one idea through my mind . . . which is either an indication of how much it’s grabbing me, or that the conversation was sorely lacking.

The idea for one of the stories The Muse is pushing on me–if by “pushing on me”, you mean, “shoving a USB data stick in one ear while muttering, ‘What’s my name?  What’s my name?  Say it!’”–concerns an alternate past where there was never a space race–or, at least, it never got to the point where either side decided going to the Moon was a worthwhile endeavor.  Enter into the vacuum left by a lack of interest in flying into the Big Black a person who has dreams about rising above it all . . . well, you can guess the rest.

One of the things I was thinking over last night was how one would, if you had the sort of ships that I’d use for the story, go about establishing a permanent presence in Earth orbit.  Putting my mind to work, I sort of figured out what I would need to do, or my characters would need to do–or maybe I was bored with the conversation, and my mind mine was trying to conjure up images of my Muse dressed like Black Widow.

Funny how that happens.

It was a very gratifying exercise, because I spent about ninety minutes running numbers and ideas and concepts, and was even visualizing some of these things.  This is where I need to get a better understanding of using a modeling tool like Blender, because I could actually make these images become real, and perhaps even do a little movie of the events.

The flow of the scene, the imagery . . . it was great.  There wasn’t a sense of struggling as I’ve had in the last few months.  Rather, it was point, click, go:  I was off and running.  It felt good to know I was back in business.

Now, to do the same with my other stories . . .

The only issue I run into with this story I was thinking upon yesterday is that it will involve a lot of–here it comes, drum roll, please–research!  I already knew this, but it’s the sort of research I love.  It will likely drive me nuts, but I still love this.  But there it is; I’m setting myself up for some work.

I need to begin making notes; I need to get this stuff sorted.  I said that yesterday, but my Muse flashed me with visions of space ships and low Earth orbit, so I was distracted.  Blame her, the crazy wench!

It’s gonna be fun enjoying writing again.

Star Born Unicorn

I remember a time when no one walked on the moon, save in the science fiction stories I read, or movies I watched.  Hell, wanna get real, when I was born no one had even launched a satellite; I beat Sputnik I to the gate by five months and one day, and it would be another four years before a Russian went up for one orbit around the Earth, mostly because he was a very good parachutist–but that’s another story for another day.

I was big into science fiction as a kid, which meant I was big into space–’cause, we’re talking about reading stories that had been written during the Golden Age of Science Fiction–and that meant I was into everything that happened regarding space flight.  We had no internet, so everything came from papers, from radio and TV news, from Life Magazine–which used to print most of the pictures released to the public–and from the few books pertaining to the American efforts, as those wacky Soviets just didn’t want to talk about their stuff.  Hell, they even named their launch complex after a town that was hundreds of miles away, just so we’d get confused . . .

Whenever I had the chance I watched whatever was shown.  I tried to keep up; I tried to gather as much information as possible.  It’s not easy when you’re nine, ten, eleven years old to get your hands on stuff that wasn’t normally available to the public, or had limited accessibility.  That’s the 1960′s for you:  we just weren’t on the cutting edge of the future, you know.

I saw it all.  I watched every mission that went into orbit.  I watch every one that went to the moon.  And I watched, to the best of my abilities, every walk upon the moon.  Even saw a few cars drive around, saw three Lunar Modules take off, and once watched one of Galileo’s experiments get proven.  It was a great time for science, and an even better time if you were a geek.

Those times are long gone.  We haven’t walked on the Moon since December, 1972.  If you removed the trips to the Moon, we haven’t had anyone higher than a few hundred kilometers above the Earth since the last days of the Gemini Program.  While we’ve had a continuous presence in orbit for a long time, we’ve lost our will to explore.

There will come a time, probably within the next five years, that everyone who has ever walked on the moon will have died.  The youngest of the walkers is 76; the oldest 82.  After that, we might have to wait until the middle of the 21^st Century before someone does it again–unless people do start walking on the Moon in the late 2020′s, as some are saying.  And the chances are good those people who do the walking again are Chinese, because it seems like no one here gives much of a shit anymore.

In the U.S., there is a definite feel that science is for people who are just too damn smart for their own good, and who are pretty anti-religious as well.  That ignorance is just as good as intelligence, and in some ways better.  When you have people yelling at Bill Nye, as they did a few years back when he spoke in Texas, that the Moon gives off light like the Sun ’cause the Bible says so, one has to wonder where they hell we are going.  When you still have people saying they have “proof” that we never landed on the Moon, you have to wonder how we are ever going to continue.  And when you hear people state, as “fact”, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and they have “proof”, it makes you want to just end it all.

One day we, as a species, will get back out into The Black.  It might not be us as a country, but someone will go.  Someone is going to take more steps–on the Moon, maybe Mars, maybe somewhere else.

Say it won’t happen?  You’re surely wrong.  ’Cause one day I’m gonna hop on my unicorn and take my own trip . . .

And join those who can tell me what it was really like to skip along in the dirt of another world.

A Life Less Hackneyed

Speaking of the above title, how does it look like . . . that –>  

Did you ever wonder what A Life Less Hackneyed looks like in Gallifreyan?  Well, now you do.  The crazy-ass things I find on the Internet, huh?  What’s next?  We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?

Anywhere, where was I?  Oh, yeah:  stories and ideas.  They are still there, rumbling about in my head.  That’s not always a good idea, because, before you know it, I’m trying to do something with it.

The last couple of days I’ve run the story idea I wrote about yesterday around again and again.  I’m about this close to getting it into Scrivener, because there are things I need to keep straight about how one gets from place to place in the galaxy of the 28^th Century.

This is world building time, and though I don’t want to get distracted from other things I’m doing–I have one story I need to finish, and I was given an idea for one to write in October, and there’s that looming hell-bound train known as NaNoWriMo to tackle . . .

But this is one of those ideas that’s just hanging with me.  I can’t say why, but it’s there.  Probably because the story is a bit challenging.  It’s one of those science fiction ideas that’s been done before, but I like the idea of bringing it into my world, into something that could be real.

I love world building, and getting everything done for this one is nice.  I will admit, I’m nicking a few ideas here and there from other sources, but it’s not so much the tech and the sci-fiey things (is “sci-fiey” a word?  It is now), as it is the characters and the story.

However . . .

As I’ve stated from time to time, I like to have most everything thought out before I start writing.  I’m rarely one for sitting down and just going for it, because the characters don’t tell me jack.  I’m thinking through the plot, such as it is, and there’s a point where something just doesn’t make that much sense.

Now, I think is have the situation worked out; I feel that I have a reason for why one of the people in the story does what they do, but there was a moment when I was thinking out the story that I thought, “Wait . . . hasn’t this been done already?  And better?”

I won’t say what the “has been done already” was, because to do so will give something away.  It would also have geeks going, “You loser!  You’re doing that?”  So I had to change things around.  Just a little, but enough that it worried me.

Over lunch I figured it out.  I actually had it figured out before that, but lunch finalized it.  That’s me rolling like a writer again; I can finalize something over a cup of coffee and a burrito.  All hail my writing coolness–said phrase which I’ve also translated into Gallifreyan right over there . . .  –>

It’s easy to do something that’s been done before, and not realize you’re treading over worn ground until you’re half-way through the muck.  I guess I’m used to the way Australians used to clear minefields during WWI:  they’d drive a flock of sheep into the area, let them blow up, and follow the cleared path.

A story line can be as treacherous as a minefield, and you want to clear that sucker as much as possible before you head across.  Face it:  it’s either you or the sheep–

Wouldn’t you rather you not be the one getting blown to hell when you’re half way across?

Dreamers and Demons

So many strange things today.  Let me tell you, I didn’t want to get out of bed, because of the things my mind was showing me last night–

See, the last few weeks I’ve complained that I haven’t seen many of my dreams, that I can’t remember them.  So, as I was dozing off last night–or, I should say, trying to doze off–I was repeating a mantra that I was going to remember, going to remember . . .

Remember I did.  Oh, boy, did I.  Can’t tell you a lot of the detail, but it seemed to consist of (a) being with some woman I’d never seen before showing porn in a classroom full of middle school kids, (b) doing very detailed measurement of certain areas of her body, (c) finding out she was a cop, and lastly, (d) hooking up with her partner and riding shotgun with him as we took some suspect down to a river, left him belted in the car, then went full-on murderball on his ass as we drove the car into the river and let him drown.

Yes, good times had by all!

That was disturbing.  I mean, yeah, I helped smoke some guy in a rather horrible way, and even though it was in my dream, it seemed that, and the sex stuff, was a rather strange way for me subconscious to remind me of–what?  Just want the hell was it telling me?

So into work . . . and I discover, to my embarrassment, it’s the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft.  One of my favorite writers, and here I was completely forgetful that just over a hundred and twenty years ago he was born.  He and his demons, his racism, and his talent.  He was the first horror writer I read, and it was through him I eventually got into Stephen King.  Lovecraft also, in his own way, pushed me into role playing, as Call of Cthulhu, Second Edition, was the first role playing game I bought.

Lovecraft was a guy with a lot of demons.  It seems like anyone creative has some ifrit on their back, and that sucker is constantly flappin’ it wings so it can keep you wrapped up in bad mojo.  This guy laid it all out for everyone to see.  He was a crazy, misogynous, racist dude who wrote crazy fiction–and spent a hell of a lot of time encouraging other writers to keep at their craft.

I posted a happy birthday for him–like he’s going to see it, right?  Well, maybe a Deep One will see it when they check their wall; these days you can never tell.

No sooner do I get that posted that I learn Tony Scott, director and producer, brother of Ridley Scott, jumped to his death yesterday.  He drove out to the Vincent Thomas Bridge, climbed the ten foot fence that’s suppose to keep people from leaping, and went over the side.  They found a note in his office, so it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing: it was something he thought about, and planned.

And executed.

I’ve seen these demons as well; they are the darkness of your life that tries so hard to consume you.  Even today, after decades of fighting them, learning to keep them at bay, they are there, waiting, sort of watching with their yellow eyes, knowing that every so often I’ll slip up, and let them in.

This last time, I did the right thing; I spoke with people, I got help.  Too many don’t.  Too many are consumed.

Gotta fight the darkness.  Never let the demons win.  Gotta stay with your dreams, even when they are strange.

Strange beats dead any day of the week.