I Love The Future! It Made Me a Zombie!

SO, I LIVE IN THE FUTURE NOW. It's 2013. It's true, I have access to better technology on my phone than existed in all the world just a few decades ago. That really astonishes me. Case in point. A couple of years ago I got the Bad Robot fx app for my phone. Which made me able to layer lots of canned fx shots over whatever I shot on my phone. Check out the video below as an example. When I uploaded the video YouTube even asked me if it wanted me to have it stabilize my shaky camera... what the hell? 

I told it no. I like the shaky camera look.

It might not look super real, but it's pretty darn good considering my total investment is a free app on my phone. It has falling rocks from the sky, car crashes, monsters, all of it looks pretty great and you can just point your phone, film something, and ta da!

ON A RELATED NOTE, The Walking Dead returns to televisions sometime in the next week or so. To celebrate, they released another free app for my phone... It turns photos of people into photos of ZOMBIE people. Not too long ago it would have taken me awhile in photoshop to produce a zombie version of myself. Now, I click a button and there it is... I can't say that either app is perfect, they both have severe limitations, but it's still pretty awesome.

I decided to too a series of self-portraits the other day with the app. Anyone who follows me on twitter might have seen a few of these then. I had a blast with it. Awesome stuff.

Also, I'm thinking of making one of these my new twitter avatar, at least for a few days. Any thoughts?

I remind myself of something... Oh yes, a zombie!

Oh, funny story, being a zombie makes all lenses get scratchy looking.

I ordered take out... I asked for extra brains

Getting ready for work. My first pic as a zombie

Ugh. Sometimes being a zombie is hard.

There She Be!

Wow. I blinked and it's been a week. What happened? Looking at my belly indicates food was involved, the rest was a blur.

I'm not sure if I got home earlier than 9 o'clock even once during the past week, and I was running to and fro all weekend on top of it. I think it has served to make this the teeniest online presence I've had in many months. The week to come looks to be more of the same, ugh. I may need to take a day off to sit back and relax. That said, I have  few items to discuss, all of them random and meaningless.

1) I'm still tinkering with both my novel and my recent short story. I thought I put the short story to bed but discovered a flaw or two that required a small change, which of course led to another necessary change, added a character that wasn't in a scene as I originally conceived, which meant said scene had to be rewritten. And that meant that my story was going off the rails due to the new changes I'd made. Looks like I'm sitting on around 10k word count now. That story isn't so short anymore.

Ever wondered what awesome looks like? Now you know.

2) Feed, by Mira Grant is all sorts of awesome. Definitely the best book I read in 2011. I'll be picking up the sequel the day it's released.

3) Reading the book mentioned in point number 2 reminded me of how much a problem I have writing when I'm reading a really good book.  I seem to get all depressed about what I'm writing because it looks so crappy in comparison. I mean. what I'm writing may well be crappy, but I can't actually create something that I think is crappy while I'm creating. I don't work that way. While it's coming out of my fingertips I'm convinced it's the greatest thing a human has ever produced, up there with Relativity or the Sistine Chapel. To realize it's really crap too early screws with my mind, I can't know that until later.

4) I accidentally started reading another book too, after reading a couple of books over the past four or five months that I was very disappointed in, I forgot how great a great novel can be.

5) I was given some blog awards during the past week, and featured on J.C. Martin's blog as part of her Friday Follower feature. I do intend to discuss in a separate post. But I'm like that naughty uncle that shows up at the family Thanksgiving dinner drunk, tells dirty jokes during the prayer, farts throughout the meal, and finishes by vomiting on the table and passing out in the bathtub. Or, in other words, pleasantly eccentric. So forgive me if I'm slow in passing along the good tidings, I just suck at etiquette.

I think that's it. My thoughts go with those that suffered in the disaster in Japan this week. Horrible.

See you soon.

At Death's Door Stand the Bold

It's with trembling hands that I type this. I'm not nervous, but ridiculously ill. My skin hurts, as do my bones. I cannot swallow without pain. My adam's apple feels like it has swollen to the size of an actual apple. Oh god, the horror.

An artist's impression of the battle going on inside my body

What's wrong? I have no idea, my general plan of action when I get sick is to lie in bed and let others tend to me. I've had the double whammy of having my wife be out of the country and my son get sick as well. All I got to help me is my stupid dog, whom I love, but totally sucks at nursing.

I ask her to bring me some medicine and she starts rummaging through the trash. I tell her that I don't need the used medicine and to get me the stuff from the medicine cabinet. She stares at me like I'm the dumb one. Sigh. She just doesn't get it.

It's funny to me that I recall bragging to someone at work just last week that I can't remember the last time I got really sick. I'm just too damn healthy for an infection, those little buggers pass me by for easier prey. That's what I get for talking smack to the microscopic biota nearby. I think they took it personal.

So I'm in bed, where I've been for the past few days. I'll try to get myself picked back up and go to work later this afternoon if I can, but I don't know how much I could expect to accomplish at the office the way I am right now. My ability to ramble incoherently seems to work independently of my overall heath, so co-workers might think I'm normal. But I can tell. And of course my superiors would be able to tell too. I'm pretty sure whimpering then falling asleep on my desk would raise some red flags.

The horrid thing for me is what could be next the next stage of this illness. I've petered around Google and Wikipedia this morning checking out my symptoms and all I can see for sure is that I may have something... frightening

That said, It may just be that I have read way too many zombie stories in the past few weeks. I think I'm nervous about what I'll be when I wake up. If my next blog is all about how good and tasty brains are then look out. I've already been changed.

Nano: Day 30... oh crap.

After slogging through 30 days of writing, thinking about writing, dreaming about writing, talking about writing and complaining about writing, the month is finally drawing to a close. Where did all that time go?

I managed to annoy my wife to no end, use up all my vacation at work (no Christmas time off now), and piss off my children by ignoring them. Hell, I'm pretty sure my dog is mad at me (I got her a rawhide last night, I think we're cool now). Was it worth it? Check this out:

I'm pretty sure my family would agree. It's awesome, and therefore I am awesome.

In case anyone is interested it the boring details: I think I've made it known so much in the past here that it does no good to bother repeating it, but I love science fiction. So when I start to write I always will have a science fiction(ish) story to tell. I don't think I'm capable of anything else.

A quick synopsis of this years Nano novel: A guy has no idea what is happening, but things just seem mysterious. So he wonders around the city commenting to himself about how mysteriously creepy everything is. Then aliens, zombies and sociopaths just start crawling out of the woodwork. He then proceeds to defeat them.

I know what you must be thinking. Wow. But believe me, if it were really as awesome as it sounds I would be living in a tropical paradise drinking the fruity alcohol of the natives and smoking cigars that were lit with my discarded one-hundred dollar bills.

I'm being written out of your novel? 

If my previous attempts at revising a novel hold true then by the time I'm through with a second draft the story will be about a homosexual alcoholic that moves to a country town and battles prejudice, all while mending his relationship with his estranged father.

Then, before it's over, the main character will become a 9 year-old girl who gets lost at the circus and befriends a chimpanzee. Together they track down a pair of jewel thieves and decide to open a detective agency.

The point being that in order to make this disaster I have in my hands now into a real story I still have a lot of work to do. I love writing a first draft. That part is fun. I can do whatever I want and not worry about it making sense, it's the 7 year-old in me that gets to come out and play.

I'll maintain my excitement for a few weeks and then I'll start that ugly process of trying to mold it into a real story. It'll sap my will to live and I'll give up.

But I don't want to give up this time. That stack of manuscripts in my closest has gotten big enough. Maybe it's time I finish something.