The Traveler

As I mentioned before, and relentlessly on Twitter, I was out of town last week. Doing my best version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Except, less funny, and more warm weather.

I was sent to sunny Orlando to do corporate type of stuff, attend a small conference, discuss business things, talk about projections, clientele portfolios, corporate bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, ugh. What did I learn?

I love warm weather.

This is what February is like! It sucks.

On the night of my arrival, I showed up checked in, and ended up deciding to eat at an outdoor restaurant that night along with some fellow travelers. There I was, in February, wearing  a T-Shirt and eating outdoors. It really doesn’t get any better than that.

I discovered that my TSA screeners leaving my home town were pretty darn nice. They smiled, laughed, and chit-chatted with the line of people being herded into the millimeter scanning device. I kept thinking that I’d been warned online recently that one of the see-through-my-clothes technologies that are currently being used has recently been discovered to emit a very high dose of radiation, much more than would normally be considered safe… I read it very recently, I recall that since it isn’t a medical device, it doesn’t fall under any oversight from a party that has standards for that sort of thing, so the manufacturers are pummeling us with X-Rays in much higher doses than we’d get from something in a doctor’s office to see if we’ve broken bones.

Scary stuff. All I needed was to remember if it was the millimeter scanning device or something else. Dammit. I couldn’t even recall where I’d read the article. I do remember thinking it was relatively well cited, and at least felt like it was researched appropriately.

So, I worried a bit about developing some horrid tumor as a result. But I let it go.

Also, Orlando has Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks already – but really, the whole city is like an amusement park. I live in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains. I know what those places are like. Locally, we’ve got Pigeon Forge, nothing but putt-putt courses and go cart tracks for 10 miles. Right next to that is Gatlinburg, a ski resort with 3 slopes, 4 malls, 155 restaurants and a few live shows.

This is what Orlando was like. Except without all the water... or sand.

Orlando is the same way, just a thousand times more of it. It’s weird to go to city that big that has no real industry aside from tourism. Great for a few days, but no character that I could discern from my hotel window – or from the short time I spent wondering the streets there.

I did however, manage to go to a Brazilian Steakhouse while there. A nice place in the Universal Studios bar/restaurant district. There was live music on a giant stage, some guy playing some sort of Latin American flamingo, actually, I was a bit confused by the mashup of cultures represented there, so despite it being a Brazilian steakhouse – it seemed to have a much more in common with the Mexican restaurants I’ve seen.

Not in the menu, but in the décor and music. I mean, ethnically, Brazil is Portuguese, there was no love lost with them and the Spaniards that settled over most of the continent. I suppose in the centuries since then things have been muddled somewhat. And of course I probably shouldn’t be looking for nuances in cultures to be represented at an amusement park restaurant.

But here’s the thing that actually bugged me: they come out and immediately begin talking up their signature dish - Skirt Steak.

I’m not a real foodie, but when I go to a place that is planning on charging me – er, the company I work for – upwards of a $100 for my meal, I’m not that thrilled with Skirt Steak being the main entrée.

The story I was told, and I have no idea of its validity, but I’d heard it since I was a kid spending my summers in Texas, was that skirt steak grew in popularity because it was so tough that butchers had a hard time selling it to customers and it was commonly thrown out.

So the hungry and poor residents of many towns would take this otherwise unwanted cut of meat for almost nothing, and work it relentlessly to soften it up so it could be used. It became used in fajitas and other meals where it could be cut into bit sized chunks and eaten thusly.

I’ve cooked with skirt steak, I found nothing in my dealings with that meat to dissuade me from believing that story. It’s like trying to soften up wood.

So, I watched as every single person in my group orders the skirt steak. I, having a very hard time thinking it would be good as a main course, ordered the chicken. Everyone ate in silence.  Eventually, once our plates were taken, I asked how it was.

“Not the best steak in the world,” seemed to be the consensus.

I raised my eyebrows, and folks began to clarify: “It was a bit tough. Tasty, but tough.”

Sometimes, you just have to take things on faith. I took it on faith that skirt steak should never be used as a main course in a meal. I really liked my chicken. I know this is stupid, but I like to think that if a big brained cow is going to have to die for me to have a meal, then I better damned well enjoy it. Otherwise, it died in vain. My level of guilt is somewhat less for a chicken.

That said, I’d love some fajitas.

Origins Blogfest!

The Origins blogfest (click for details) is today. It's an opportunity to talk about why I write, no, not exactly, it's about my origins, what led me down this path.

My origin story, like that of Peter Parker, is a mixture of the exotic and banal. I'm just a normal person, living a normal life, when one day - bam! - I've been bitten by a radioactive muse.

The truth be told. I didn't come to writing until I was well into my twenties. I did, however, always consider myself a storyteller. As I mentioned in my About Me page, I first dreamt of being a comic book artist when I was young. I would spend hours and hours in a small desk I kept in my closet, yes, closet, and toil away drawing all these comics. I recall doing this He-Man rip-off about a guy who was imprisoned by a skeleton headed guy in a cowl that said he kidnapped barbaric humans... AND SOLD THEM!

That's right, I was a pre-teen, writing stories with relevance, touching on big social issues, like enslaved barbarians (I came down on the side of it being wrong, FYI). At the risk of spoiling the tale for those who haven't read my early story, this young barbarian solved the problem by beating up everyone he came across until he made his way to Skeletor...er, I mean, the Skullhead, and punched him right in the face.

Story over.

Anyway, I did lots of those type comics. However, as I got older, my dream of drawing comics slowly passed by me as I got away from what I thought was childish stuff, and got into other things, like playing guitar, then later, doing television.

Not real television, but public access stuff. Friends and I discovered it by accident. Our local public access had  to air our stuff if we asked them to. It was the law. So we ran around and did all sorts of stupid stories, badly  acted, horribly conceived, and no matter how bad they were, they went on the air.

My favorite show at the time was Star Trek: TNG. Now, I've talked about that show so much that I'm getting tired of bringing it up, but I have to, it's important for me. Because, as we went along with our public access show, we were starting to do more Star Trek themed episodes. Generally, they would start with a far future band of human explorers getting sent back in time to do something... I think saving the Panda population was high on the list of tasks. So we were sent back to the early 90s to bring back specimens to the future.

Well, as I got further into the our own convoluted story, which made no sense, but carried on in spite of this, I was constantly trying to ret-con things said or done into some sort of something that made sense. Of course, I was actively watching Star Trek, reading the books, and otherwise living the dream.

The show, as we each kept wishing to do it better, began taking more time to produce, we were starting to buy props, film on locations, trying to come up with coherent stories, and were attracting a growing number of people that wanted to be a part.

It was beginning to take too much time, like, we were having to film several days a week, meet to discuss what we were going to film, and in our spare time, figure out how we could improve our technical skills for the show.

It quickly got too big for us. God forbid anyone in the group have a girl friend, play in a band, or worst of all, have a job. After an awesome summer things fell apart. We just couldn't do it. One of my friends decided that he wanted to be a real actor and got an agent and did bit parts in local productions and TV commercials. I got drawn in deeper and deeper into the behind the scenes aspects. And eventually discovered that TNG was open to story submissions.

Um, what?

That's right, during their run, I heard that they would solicit ideas for stories. Honestly, I don't know if that was even true, but I believed it, and was determined to get a story idea on the show.

As much as I loved the show, I was often frustrated that they had these amazing science fiction elements buried as back story that were never explored. They had that ancient super civilization that had artifacts littered across the galaxy, the Iconians, they ran across a Dyson's Sphere once, the first spacefaring race in the galaxy explored and found the universe a lonely and empty place, so they seeded it with life - bringing forth Humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and all the other humanoid races that were eventually became so familiar with.

But that wasn't what the show was about, instead it was always about the crew getting space drunk, or Riker having to teach the women of some new planet what good loving could do. Again, it was frustrating at times.

So, I started trying to come up with the greatest episode of TNG ever. The absolute best. I began working on a story that I thought would be just that.

I went epic with it, making it as big a story as I could envision. So big in fact, that naive as I was, I realized it was unfilmable. I had been reading the novels and thought it might serve better as a novelization. And once I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) I couldn't seem to turn it off.

I wanted to be a writer.

And there you have it, my origin story. Star Trek again. I'd consider creating a fictional origin story that involves me running away from home as a child and travelling across country with a hobo on a train, but I haven't got the details worked out yet. As it stands, that's all I've got for now.

Sigh, thanks for the opportunity to share.

Chronicle

I'm not around today... weird, I know. But I'm out of town and my internet access is not entirely reliable. Well, that and the last time I went out of town for work I ended up consuming way too much alcohol to try to write. So, I'm just tossing this out here.

I saw Chronicle last weekend, and I must say, I was stunned by how much I enjoyed the movie. Stunned. I went home after and checked it out on Boxofficemojo and saw that it's production budget was... are you ready for this?

$12 million.

Huh? That should have gone on Steven Tremp's list of low budget movies he did for Alex J Cavanaugh's blog on Monday. Because that was money very well spent. 

That's a lot of money, but when $200 million is more or less the new standard for a blockbuster, and some films getting way higher then I'm doubly impressed. Hell, I watched some movie a year or so ago and was wowed by it's use of fx for cheap and I found out later it was something like $40 million. That surprised me. 

So, making a movie like this on that kind of budget was incredibly impressive to me. However, passable fx isn't what made me enjoy the movie. I liked it because it was well done all round. I loved the found footage concept. I'm not a horror fan, so I've missed out on that huge slate of that type movie, Cloverfield was my only real frame of reference, and that flick made me feel like I'd just spent the day on a roller coaster. 

This one kept the shaky cam to a minimum and instead made the brilliant decision to have the story's main character more or less be a videographer. Carefully documenting his life as things go crazy. Later, when things get real crazy, we see lots of security cam footage and bystanders phone vids. Again loved how it was all put together. 

And the story was a pretty good one. It's not really a superhero movie, it's just people who can do crazy things.  Giving folks, especially troubled folks, godlike powers is probably not a good idea. This movie shows how a good kid can snap. I kept thinking how awesome it would have been if Anakin Skywalker's fall from grace had been son wonderfully done in the Star Wars prequels.

I'm impressed. I generally don't do movie reviews, but I liked this one a lot. Good, fun, and felt much more real that the subject matter would have suggested. 

Fish Tacos!

Fish Taco’s. I had some the other day at a restaurant here downtown. Now, I’m not a big fan of the Fish Taco, as I’m pretty sure that only beef, or maybe chicken, should be the only representatives of the animal kingdom to appear in the dish.

Well, I met my wife for a bit to eat and they were advertising the fish tacos on their outdoor chalkboard. Our waiter, a cheery fella that seemed really excited to tell us what we were ordering was awesome, was all over those fish tacos. She ordered them, I got a brisket grilled cheese.

Again, fish don't go in tacos, they just don't. 

My wife ordered them and they brought out something I did not expect. Something awesome. I asked for taste. Yum. I asked if she wanted to trade. She shrugged. My grilled cheese brisket thing wasn't real good, not bad, but not worth the money they were charging. She didn't really eat any of that.

You know, I’m not sure what my wife ate. I hate her food, I ate my food. I hope she didn't leave hungry. I know I didn't.

I've dutifully used my artistic skills to try to represent what was in my head when the waiter mentioned they served fish tacos.

See? Irresistible.

I was so surprised by the wonderful reality that I tried to compare it to other times in my life when I received surprising news that made me happy.

1)      The time I found a 20 dollar bill in the parking lot at Taco Bell.

2)      The time I went to watch a concert and after the show a fan of the group came up to me and said I played an awesome gig. I even signed an autograph. I hope he’s telling his kids about the time he met that one guy from that famous band.

3)      The time I got a FedEx from the Smithsonian telling me that my photo was going to be displayed in the museum and printed in their magazine.

4)      When I found out I was having a boy.

5)      I could never dunk a basketball, but that brief summer of my 20^th year when I could jump high enough to touch the rim of a basketball goal.

Anyway, I'm out of town today doing work things. I'm not sure what my schedule will look like for the next few days. I may not be as around as I want to be.

Ah, those were good times, add the fish taco thing to it and I’m feeling pretty good about life.

The Big Questions

Right now, actually, for the past several years, my absolute favorite author, no exceptions, has been Alastair Reynolds. He's a British (well, Welsh) science fiction author of notable popularity. In case all have forgotten, he signed a $1,000,000 deal a year or so ago (actually, I think that should be in British pounds, which is significantly more than USD right now) and generally writes great tales with very deep science fictional themes. The guy, in a word, is awesome.

He also was a speaker at TEDx, I don't know what the 'x' stands for, but whatever. Ted talks are one of the things that makes the internet awesome.The reason I find him so compelling is because all his fiction, or most of it anyway, deals with a lot of the same questions most of have asked when we're sitting around and pondering the universe in all of its vastness. Of course, he was a working scientist with the ESA for a number of years and was writing his first several novels while working on some pretty cool science at the same time.

If I were a master of my craft in my own mind, I would probably be churning out books quite similar to what he does. If you have 20 minutes or so to kill, please sit back, relax, and have your mind blown by my writing hero, discussing my philosophical hero, as he discusses my favorite conundrum of all: The Fermi Paradox.




Now, if that just got a bit 'too real' for you, then please enjoy a new feature I'm going to include from time to time, which I will call my comment of the week, or month, or year, whatever. Because let's all be honest. Most of us just blow into a blog, skim the post, make a short, sweet, comment and move on. I get it, I really do. I wish I could spend more time interacting with everyone, but there just isn't enough hours in the day. It usually makes me sad. But I do what I can, as we all do.

But every once in a while, something happens and that comment is beautiful in a way no one could have expected.

Unfortunately, my first comment of the week comes from an anonymous user. Too bad, as I'd like to meet this person and hear more of their thoughts. Check it out:

"Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your web site and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Anyway I will be subscribing to your feeds and even I achievement you access consistently rapidly. <link deleted>"

Wow. That's all I've got, wow. Thank you good sir, I'll be clicking those links you provided right away, just after I forward them to all my friends.

This Stupid Pineapple is...

... Finally beginning to understand where pineapple juice comes from.

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!"

As mentioned Wednesday, today is Briane Pagel's Stupid Pineapple blogfest. Not only does he host the thing, he is giving out prizes - choosing to do so in a manner so hopelessly complicated that he might as well just give it to whomever he feels like. Anyhow, if you want to know who's entered and all that I'd recommend you check out his twitter feed, because I'm not sure if there is an official list anywhere. It's kind of like a secret blogfest I suppose.

Anyhow, without any further delay, my completely fictional account of a the stupid pineapple which again, is not based on a true story. This did not happen to me at work yesterday, as I am a human, not a pineapple.

The Stupid Pineapple lost my his headphones yesterday at work. Now, he hates having nice things because he hates worrying about and being stressed over his nice things. But one area he decided not to skimp on was his earphones. He plunked down a cool hundred bucks for some nice earbuds that block out most noise when they're in, and produce quality sound. He listens to them a lot. He loves them. They complete him.

Yesterday, just as The Stupid Pineapple was getting ready to go for a walk somewhere on my his lunch hour, he realized his headphones were missing. He checked under some loose papers at his desk. Nothing. He checked in his junk drawer at work. Nothing. He checked his coat pockets. Nothing.

He tried to recap his morning: He came in, he had been wearing them when he got to work, he took them off once he got there and had an impromptu cleaning session. after which he threw away his cleaning materials.

Wait, had he seen my his headphones since then? No, no he had not. He looked in his wastebasket only to find it entirely empty. The custodian had already been by and taken the trash. The bastard.

He ran around the floor looking for him for a few minutes until he found him. He asked to see the trash the custodian had just picked up. "Sorry dude, I just took it to the basement to be put in the dumpster."

Well, shit. He made his way all the way down to the basement with the custodian and found that the items had been put in the 'pre-dumpster.' That is a word he just made up to describe what it is, they dump all the collected trash in these giant bins to wait for someone later in the day to haul them out to the compacter on the loading dock. The trash wasn't in a real dumpster, but whatever. It's a giant thing full of trash.

He had the custodian show him the bag. How he could tell which one was his out of all those bags was beyond the Stupid Pineapple, as they all looked identical to him. But he was stupid, so he figured the custodian knew. He tore open the bag he was told contained his trash it, was one of those giant lawn bags and he couldn't get it untied, so he just ripped it apart. He dug in with gusto. He found not one, but TWO pair of headphones in the bag - neither of them were his though - and found lots of food, pasta, tomato sauce, mustard, tons of used kleenex, lots and lots of paperwork.

The paperwork gave it away, It was all from a different department than the stupid Pineapple worked in. "Hey," the Stupid Pineapple said, "Do you pick up trash from any other departments?"

"Nope, just yours."

Well, m#^%^#&$ker. He ripped open the wrong effen bag. All that dried snot and half eaten food he'd been diving through was the wrong bag. "Why don't you just go? I think I'll rummage through the trash alone now," the Stupid Pineapple said.

He left, and the Stupid Pineapple dug into another bag. This one was paydirt. It had oatmeal all over it, yummy. He was so glad it was lunch time. There were all sorts of other things, he found a pair of shoes, a really nice lunchbox, and some more snotty kleenex, it was flu season. No headphones though.

Eventually, he gave up. he went to the bathroom and scrubbed up like a doctor going to surgery. He washed and washed and washed. He leaned over the bathroom sink and stared at myself himself as he washed away the filth. He was trying to think of how he could tell his wife that those ridiculously expensive headphones that he just had to have were now lost forever when he noticed a small bulge in his front shirt pocket.

Oh, there they are.

Dumbass. He was a truly, deeply, stupid pineapple.

The end.

Anyhow, if anyone is curious as to what I had for dinner on Tuesday evening. You can find that by clicking...HERE.

Insecure Writers - February Edition

There are several things going on today that I’d like to mention.

First! I mentioned on Monday that if anyone managed to sit through all those videos I posted I’d make a big deal about it today. Well, congrats to Gail who patronized me by watching them all. She was too pooped to really have thoughts about it. But hey, she was like a marathoner that wouldn’t quit.Alex emailed me later and mentioned that he watched them all (and that doesn’t mean he watched his own five times either, I asked). But beyond that I’m not sure anyone else was able to hang in there for all of them.

If I missed anyone please let me know, I didn’t leave anyone out on purpose. Some of the comments were a little dodgy on the topic.

Second, the legal whiz, Briane Pagel, came up with an idea for what is perhaps the greatest blogfest ever devised. Where he got the idea is beyond me, because it’s amazing. On Friday you need to write something about a pineapple, you can read about it here, I’m not actually sure about the details, as the rules read much like a calculus final, but I figure that if I post something about pineapples the rest will take care of itself.

And I signed up for the A-Z blogging challenge in April, it’s pretty much the greatest blogfest ever devised… wait, why does that sound familiar to me? Regardless, I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest. The day after it went live it already had several hundred folks signed up. Look, April is going to be a lonely month if you don’t plan on being a part of it. So hop in and go with it. You can sign up here.

What else? Oh, today is Insecure Writers group – February edition. Thanks again to Alex J Cavanaugh for creating the group.

And I've got so many insecurities I’m afraid some of them even contradict one another. You know, like suffering from agoraphobia and claustrophobia at the same time. I’m the kind of person that wants to do everything, and I mean everything, myself. Which is why I always feel vaguely ashamed if I have to ask for someone’s help on anything I produce.

How far does that go? Well, let’s just say that I do my digital painting in photoshop – I feel like I’m cheating because I didn’t write the code myself. When I draw on a piece of paper I’m always wondering if I should have made the paper myself, from a tree that I grew from a seedling.

Sigh. I know, it’s a problem. Ironically, I love collaborative efforts, I only get that way about things that will only have my name on them and no one else’s. Am I the only one who struggles with this? Have I invented a  disorder? This rears its ugly head in me when I get editing or critiquing help from others as well. Like, if I put a period at the end of that sentence then all of a sudden it's not really my work anymore. I recognize that it's ridiculous, but that doesn't change how it feels to me.

Oh well, thanks everyone.