A is for Andrew

Okay, it's day one of the A-Z Challenge and I'm raring to go. Actually, I'm ready to quit. To repeat for something like, the 12th time in the past week, I decided to chuck my previous theme at the last minute and go with something new.

So I decided Friday night to go with a sketch-a-day. And after an hour piddling around I came up with today's image. I was going to do something astronomy related, then I decided to do a pretty complicated scene with an old man staring at the stars... astronomy was the theme. But I did a quick sketch and realized I would have to work on it for too long to actually make it look cool. So after half an hour I chucked that too.

Sigh, that's going to be problem for me. Anyway, I decided that the old man I was drawing reminded me just a bit of an aging Andrew Leon... wait, Andrew starts with an 'A'... I drew Andrew Leon, aged an additional 40 years.

Eventually, he will turn into a Wizard

Speaking of Andrew Leon, he's killing me at the Star Wars trivia challenge over at The Best of Everything blog. I couldn't help but notice there is a 500 point bonus for anyone who can get Alex Cavanaugh or Michael Offut to comment (and mention who sent them) in the challenge.

So, *ahem* sorry to anyone who'd hoped I'd do the astronomy based posts for the challenge, it looks like sketches are my thing.

What Am I Going to Do?

IT'S ONLY TWO DAYS before the beginning of the A-Z challenge and as I’ve mentioned several times in the past week or two, I’m chucking my previous A-Z posts. What am I going to do in its stead?

Yes, it's true, and I hope everyone is ready for this epic 11^th hour ditching of a month’s worth of posts. Now I can tell you what I was going to post about, since I’m not doing that anymore. 

The Alphabet.

Yes, I was going to start ‘A’ by talking about the letter ‘A.’ My first post talked about Arsenio Hall and how he would stand just like an A at the beginning of each show.

Really.

‘B,’ well, it was going to be about how the capital letter looked like both a butt, and boobs. Yes, by day two I was already jumping the shark and going for cheap titillation. By the time I got to the mid letters it was just like how much an ‘I’ looks like a lower case ‘L’ and about then I ranted about our lack of creativity and predicted eventually all letters will just be a simple tic mark. Then I think I ended the month with a plea for us all to ban together to get rid of redundant letters.

So, it was for the good for us all that I decided to go for something new. Here are my thoughts about what I might do.

Option A: A sketch a day. My old blogger buddy Les used to have a whole blog dedicated to doing just that. He doesn't really do that anymore, but I figure I can whip up something daily for a month. If I get desperate I can just start sketching letters.

Sunday I could sketch of an Apple, Apollonia, Apollo Creed, Ants… wow, the possibilities are only limited to the letter ‘A!’.

Option B: I could do a star a day. I don’t talk about Astronomy much here, probably because I seriously doubt very many people want to hear me wax poetic about Acturus, Betelgeuse, etc. But my love of the cosmos means I’ve got a pretty good working knowledge of the night sky. The real question… who cares besides me? Again, I’d guess, not many.

Option C: Book titles (or authors) that begin with each letter. It might get tough with some of the less popular letters, but I think it would be fun.

I’ll probably do one of the three. Actually, by the time this post goes live I will probably know already, and hopefully have already begun work. Ooh, the excitement.

Looks Like I Became a TV Snob

THE OTHER DAY my son was all freaked out because he said he had to have this show DVR’d and he wasn’t going to be around to do it. He asked if I would pretty please take care of it for him. No problem.

I whipped out he ‘ol remote and started thumbing the menu options and I noticed something: None of the menus looked right. The font was wrong, the little icons were wrong, the colors of the little boxes were wrong. Was this even my TV?

Technically, it was the cable company that made the changes, not my television, but whatever, I saw the changes through my TV, which makes it my TV that changed… Just, don’t argue with me about it, it’s a minor point.

So, I was there with the control and my hand and I was absolutely flummoxed. Not that I couldn’t figure out what the buttons did, I could still actually work the thing, but it was strange that everything was so different. “When did this happen?” I asked.

My son, who hadn’t been paying any attention to me after I told him I would record his show looked up. I had to explain my whole experience to him again, about how the icons looked weird, about how the fonts and colors were different, the whole thing. His answer?

“A few months ago.”

“You’re telling me,” I said, “that they changed these doobibblies on the TV months ago and I didn’t notice?”

He nodded. “You haven’t been watching TV.”

Was that possible? "I have too!" I might have shouted it. I can't remember. But then I thought for a moment and I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd watched anything.

I used to think that I never wanted to be one of those people that didn’t watch TV, I like TV, I like lots of things about it, it makes me feel warm, it keeps me from feeling sad when I’m alone, it comforts me when I’m scared. Have I been neglecting it for that long?

I don’t think it’s been that long. I watched the Super Bowl on my TV, that wasn’t that long ago. Have I turned my back on my lifelong companion? It makes me want to give it a hug. My perception of people who didn’t watch television are of men that smoke pipes and women who don’t believe in hygiene (oh god, did I just write that?). I’m not either one of those.

So, the new me is going to try to etch out a new bloc of time to watch some TV. Anybody know if anything good is on? And don’t say Game of Thrones, because I don’t have HBO and I can’t watch it.

My Dog Will Eat You!

My wife wanted to give any would be criminals or trespassers fair warning.

The attack dog would have come closer... but  he's scared of the sign.

Guster, the dog of doom, will devour your toes in a fit of fury should you dare to pass through into his domain.

I hope everyone had a pleasant weekend. I suppose I did. Although it was filled with missed opportunities.

However, now that it's Monday, I'm anxious to touch on the Comment Of The Week from last week. I don't have travel too far back in time to look. Turns out Friday's post had lots of great comments to choose from.

I think within a few seconds of the post going live (well, 32 minutes) I had someone expressing their displeasure with my portrayal of Esperanto. Then, a little while later I got this beaut:

After the first poster made his comment I started to backpedal some from my original point, but after I thought about it for awhile I decided I think I will stand by my assessment. If calling it a noble failure makes me ignorant, well, then people don't have wings, or something.

It's beauties like that that make me happy I put up without 1000 spam emails a day that I get (well, maybe 5) with folks trying to sell me coffee beans or porn. I thought I would get tons of people upset over the Chiropractor stuff, not Esperanto.

THIS IS THE LAST WEEK before the A-Z challenge begins. I'm still considering scrapping my whole month's worth of stuff and starting over. If so, I'll have a busy weekend next weekend writing new posts.

Witches, Chiropractors, and Esperanto.. How Can It Not Be Good?

I often play dumb here on my blog, I also tend to take stances on issues that I don’t really support because I want people to like me. It’s part of a great effort on my part not to come off as a jerk. People don’t like know-it-alls. I want people to like me, so I play dumb. Sometimes I write something that is really intended more for comedic effect and may not necessarily reflect my true views on a subject… the real me is still a mystery. So, I figured I’d post about some things and how I really feel about them.

Yes, this does happen sometimes

1)      Ouija Boards: 

My opinion? Crap.

Confidence level? High

Look, how Hasbro keeps conning people into buying them is a miracle of the marketing age. It’s like the Pet Rock craze that overwhelmed America in the 70’s. Seriously. Demons (or ghosts) aren’t speaking to us from the other world. How do I know? Because I used to play with one, for months in fact, alone (movies have taught me since that was a bad idea) and in groups, I actually wrote down the answers to my questions.

After much investigation, let’s just say that I have reason to believe that they know a lot about baseball, like, a whole lot. Coincidentally, their encyclopedic knowledge of baseball seemed to end about where mine did. Yes, it (they, whatever) knew how many games the Tigers won in 1984, so did I, but it couldn’t tell me the lifetime slugging percentage of Roberto Clemente… wait, I might have been confusing the Ouija board with the internet. It probably isn’t supposed to know that stuff – still, if it serves as a conduit to the otherworld, then its populated with a bunch of people who sit around and read baseball statistics in their spare time.

The bottom line? It didn’t know anything that I, or the people I was with, didn’t. It gave crap answers and didn’t know how to spell. I’m guessing that has more to do with the people involved, the ideomotor effect, etc. I’m not alone in this opinion, and controlled experiments have demonstrated time and time and again that there is no unexplainable phenomena happening.

2)      Chiropractors:

My Opinion? Crap

Confidence level? Moderate

I hope I don’t get sued (I hear they’re litigious).  How can a group with the lowest efficacy rate of any health organization on the planet also have the highest level of customer satisfaction? I think it’s because they’ve convinced insurance companies into paying for back massages.

No, that isn’t true, I think it has to do with the psychological effects of having a person actually do something when you visit. Giving me a prescription for something isn’t the same as getting a backrub. Chiropractors tend to be much more engaged with their patients too, again, I think that’s a big deal.

Medicine is not a hard science, sometimes even people who don’t know what they’re doing can hit upon something that works, however, Chiropractic medicine simply does not work when compared to traditional medicine (beyond the placebo effect). Lots of data on this too, however, the data is muddied somewhat and it tends to overwhelmed by positive personal testimonies, huge lobbyist groups and a well-organized campaigns to win over people distrustful of traditional medical practices.

Well, that proves... something.

3)      Numerology: 

My Opinion? Crap

Confidence level? Through the roof.

It’s total crap, but it feels like it should mean something. I have a lot of sympathy for practitioners… but that doesn’t make it not be crap. Case in point, I write this on 3/22/12 at 1:12 p.m. (on my lunch break). Those numbers again, are 32212112. That happens to be a color in the RGB Decimal – a very pretty blue. Blue happens to be an interesting color. Blue symbolizes the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary is probably pretty unhappy with Michael Offut’s post about Atheism that he put up today (or yesterday, but today when I wrote this)…. Coincidence? Probably not. Wait, I mean, yes, its total crap. It was a coincidence. Anyhow, I hope you get my point.

4)      Esperanto:

My Opinion? Noble failure

Confidence level? Middle of the road

Unlike the other things I talked about, this isn’t something that has actual data to back up or dismiss the claims made. Esperanto isn’t something that really makes a claim. Esperanto is a language that was invented something like 130 years ago. All sorts of people have invented all sorts of entirely novel languages for a long time. They have conferences and everything, I heard one that was made up of pops and whistles that I thought was amazing. Doubly amazing because people can actually converse in it.

Just what the world needed - another language

Esperanto is different because it was intended to be a common language that people from all over the world could use, it was supposed to be easy to learn, easy to speak, and free from all the baggage that languages tend to pick up over centuries. There are universities that teach it, businesses that conduct their international affairs in it, and it has lots of people fluent in it.

Why is it a failure, well? It has just enough adherents to keep it from dying, but it’s no one’s first language, and there aren’t any places you can go and find yourself surrounded by it. It’s intention – to be the default language international persons would speak when conducting business – already has a language to fill that niche. English.

And there you have it, a window into my soul. Now you can start to really know me. You may disagree with me, but I'm just throwing out what I really believe. 

I Bought BOOKS!

I MADE MENTION in Monday’s post that I was back in the writing saddle now. All geared up and ready to roll with that fantasy novel I was working on last fall. I whipped out all these notes I made before I started writing, world building notes, my outline, even a synopsis of events leading up to the story.

None of that matched what I wrote.

I’m not sure what the point of an outline is if I don’t actually use it. But I apparently found some use for it. So, I went back and reread my 50k or so of stuff to see where I left off. Something jumped out at me right away.

I’m not as good as I thought I was.

Granted, I am not coming at this from a great background in fantasy, I’ve only been reading the genre in the past couple of years, and only been reading Epic Fantasy (what my novel is) for the past year. I read Martin’s Game of Thrones books, Sanderson’s Mistborn books, Peter V Brett’s The Warded Man, and maybe one or two more that I’m just drawing a blank on. 

What I have not done, is read much involving Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Orcs, etc. I have a book or two in my tbr pile that have dwarves and Goblins each with their own covers, so I presume that I’ll be taking a gander at those tropes soon enough.

It’s a well-known truism of science that innovators in certain disciplines are either very young, or are new to that particular branch of science.  The prevailing wisdom is that they have not been beaten to death with history of the greats that came before them and feel free (or naïve) enough to plunge headfirst without that baggage keeping them back.

I have peeked my head into the genre enough to know that my concept, which I thought was unique, isn’t so fresh as I once thought. That’s okay though, it’s all about execution. So I thought when I started I'd take my fresh concept and innovate the genre. So imagine my surprise when I go back over what I've written and I find out that it has one little flaw... it's not very good. 

Ah dammit. If there is some consolation, I was at Brandon Sanderson's site looking at what he had to say about his Mistborn books that I read recently, and he mentioned he went through seven drafts of his first novel (over about 6 years I think) before he had it in its final form. 

He also mentioned he's written thirteen novels before he sold his first one. Doubly impressive since his tend to be 250,000 word epics, not the 70k lightweights I've turned out in the past.

Maybe, just maybe. There is hope. I'll just need a whole bunch of work I guess.

SOMETHING FUNNY, I suppose, if anyone recalls, I did a post about Robert Wadlow recently, the poor soul that was about 9 feet tall when he passed away. Turns out, after running this blog for nearly 3 years that around a fifth of the page views I’ve gotten, ever, are from that single post last week. I assumed there was some sort of hacker related event that skewed my numbers, that sort of thing has happened before, although not on this scale. I checked and it looks like nothing more than a lot of people Googling Robert Wadlow led them to my post. That and my short critique of the Harry Potter films I did last December have brought in tons of traffic. I find the whole thing bizarre – especially since I had no idea that thousands of folks have been stopping by to see the giant man. If I’d known it would have generated that kind of traffic I would have A) found a way to tie it into my novelette, and B) spent a bit more time writing the post, you know, making sure it was actually good.

I can’t be expected to put that sort of effort into every post. I feel pretty satisfied if I manage to use there/their/they’re correctly through an entire entry.

FINALLY, my wife has had boxes and boxes of crappy cute romance novels in the back of her vehicle for almost a year. It has taken up the back and I can almost never use it when I need to (it's one of those crossover things, looks like an SUV, really its a car) and I finally told her I was getting rid of them, she thanked me profusely and I went to the used bookstore.

They gave me over a hundred bucks in trade for them! 

I picked up that haul to the right there and still had more than $40 left to use later. I was pleased to find the first two installments in the Thrawn Trilogy, which has been recommended by Andrew and Grumpy both (I could have gotten all three, but they had only one copy, and some other guy was there and wanted the same book... and he found it with me standing right there holding the other two - what a jerk) and I found two Daryl Gregory books, which made my day, as well as a stack of other books I've either wanted, or just realized I wanted after I saw them.

I feel like I've gotten away with something, like I should be in trouble. Combined with the Borders haul I got last year I have enough books to keep me busy for the rest of 2012 if I don't buy anything else. That won't happen, and there will be some of these books that I may not get to, 

Monday News... And PinkyHell 2012

Way back in January I mentioned some writing goals I had put on myself to complete this year. So far I've done the minimum amount required - but nothing really beyond that. I still have these big, nebulous goals I've not even worked on concerning novel writing. Stupid reality, it keeps dragging me down. 

BUT, I am so about to get right back at it. 

One of those goals was the completion of the first draft of my previous November’s fantasy novel. A more daunting task than it might seem because it’s got many viewpoint characters, an entirely created fantasy world, and a plot that is more intricate than anything I’ve ever written before.

And now, almost four months after I stopped working on it, I’m halfway through the first draft and can’t exactly remember where I was going with it. So I’ve been going back to my notes, notes about the story, about the world I’d made, about the characters, etc.

I can see why it takes George R.R. Martin a decade or so to write a novel. The damn thing can get to be this sprawling epic that is hard to keep a handle on. Of course, his are actually good. But aside from that, I think I have an appreciation for all the work he has to put in. It's really complicated.

Comment of the Week:

Angela won my heart with her mention of Wookies on Friday. Thank you Angela!

Let's see here, what else?I forget sometimes that there is a point to blogging, that it’s not just an excuse for me to express my awesomenity in written form. It’s actually a tool to raise awareness of not only my work, but that of others.

Brinda Berry, who kindly offers encouragement and pearls of wisdom when she comments here, as well as introducing me to the awesome digital painting videos on her blog recently, has released her second novel in her Whispering Woods series. Writing is hard, and I always want to hang on to stuff to do just one more pass, I'm impressed with her for plugging through, it shows real professionalism to be able to write till completion on her stories. I hope it does well. 

I feel like a warrior from a bygone era

Also, PinkyHell 2012 continues to plague me. It’s now been 2 weeks since that fateful day when putting on my t-shirt turned into a tale of overcoming adversity and overwhelming pain. Yes, I still manage to get dressed on my own, but I self diagnose as having some nerve damage, as it tingles still when I try to use it. It makes me happy that it’s pretty much only used for semi-colons on the keyboard, I use it for a few other things, but it can almost be ignored when typing.

And remember - It’s less than two weeks until the A-Z blogging challenge begins!