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Getting My Groove Back

The biggest downside to returning from a vacation is trying to get back into your everyday rhythm. Case in point: starting to blog again after nearly two weeks without writing anything other than my travelogue aboard the Stennis. I kept a journal during the entirety of the trip, logging my experiences as my father and I traveled across the country together, but now I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing things for you. Fifty plus pages of journal about a ride across the ocean on an aircraft carrier? Totally doable. Five hundred words about what’s going on in my life and the literary world this week? That’s a little bit trickier. Nevertheless, I’m here to try.

Let’s see. I want these, first of all. Something about being surrounded by officers in their dress uniforms just makes military fashion seem right, even if the Nintendo version is a little silly.  Second, there’s this thing right here, one of many places I’m going to be submitting a short story. Got a microfiction piece that’s n0t been published elsewhere? Send it in. They’d be happy to see it. V tipped me off about it a few weeks ago, and I am quite grateful. On a related note, has anyone ever heard of The Rag? I’d not, at least until recently. It’s worth a shot, I suppose.

One of the things that I did miss while I was gone: Sonia M’s February challenge. I intend to make up for that with the March challenge, which seems far more targeted toward writers like me than the February challenge did. It’s the first one I’ve missed since I started doing them, and I’m a little sad that I didn’t get an entry written, but there has been a lot of progress elsewhere that more than makes up for it, at least as far as I’m concerned.

So, yeah, my writing projects continue. One of the best things about my recent trip was the opportunity to have a LOT of time to myself, for my writing. See, Arsus and Rime have been pretty quiet lately, so the progress on my working title, “Swords of the Ancients” has been stalled. As such, I have been venturing into the darker side of my imagination, contrary to the advice I got from my father last week. Dad told me that I should write a wholesome story, and be more of a Tolkien than a Stieg Larsson, for example. That’s all fine and dandy from the outside perspective, and I really do appreciate his concern for my writing, but if you pretend that the shadows never exist, you’ll never see what hides in them. The things that hide in the shadows of my own mind are what I find fascinating. Human nature isn’t as clear cut and good as we would like it to be, for whatever reason, but those bits of darkness are so compelling… Just imagine the stories we might learn from the things that go unseen in our world.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just the stories of the great writers of the past, but I feel like there’s got to be something more than just heartwarming tales of puppies and stuff to write about. Even Tolkien had to embrace a little of the darkness to create the depth of the villains in Middle Earth. I guess I’m just talking about not just a casual embrace, but making passionate love to the darkness and getting into a committed relationship with it, and maybe even moving in together, and getting a joint bank account, or at least a two-seater bicycle. Yeah. It’s exactly like that.

An Adventure, Summarized

“Let me ‘splain…No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

I’m back in Colorado, after a week and a half of travel that proved to be everything that I needed. Here’s a brief breakdown.

My oldest sister is married to a young man who pre-enlisted in the Navy when he was 17. After years of hard work and progress through the ranks of the enlisted men, he decided that he wanted to fly jets. To that end, he enrolled in the Naval Officer Candidate School and eventually became an aviator with a prominent fighter squadron which has even been featured in a TV miniseries, “Carrier.” Back in December, I received a phone call from my father asking me if I would like the opportunity to spend a week aboard an aircraft carrier with him and my brother-in-law as he and his squadron returned from deployment overseas. They call it a Tiger Cruise.

Now I’m not the biggest geek when it comes to military stuff, but I’ve built my share of fighter jets and things out of LEGO, and I figured that aside from my tour of the USS Midway back in 2005, this would be the best chance I would ever have to see this sort of thing up close. I said yes, and I don’t regret it in the least. I didn’t want to say too much about the trip beforehand, for security purposes and whatnot, but now that I’m home, I can tell you a little more about my experience.

Dad and I flew to Honolulu on the 19th of February, and I got to see my brother-in-law at work for the first time. After spending the afternoon of Presidents’ Day wandering the Pearl Harbor memorials with him and my father, we boarded the USS John C. Stennis.

I can hear Lonely Island and T. Pain warming up in the background...

The following week’s journey across the ocean to San Diego consisted of tours of the ship, incredible demonstrations of the power of the aircraft on board and the supporting ships that sailed with us, and meeting the amazing people who make this all possible. I got to see the ship’s jet engine shop, eat an otter pop that was frozen in liquid oxygen (SCIENCE!), see a close-up of the cockpit of an F-18, and even wander around the onboard library. That’s right. I got to hang out in a library that was floating across the Pacific Ocean. Beat that.

Okay, maybe not a very BIG library, but still...

During the trip, my father and I (along with two fellow Tigers) were quartered in my brother-in-law’s eight-man stateroom. As our sponsor was an officer, we were in considerably better accommodations than most of the other Tigers on board, but on an aircraft carrier, even the nicest of rooms is small and cramped. We had the eight racks in the room, plus four cots set up for sleeping. Some of the moms on the trip referred to our room as the prisoner of war camp, but we called it the twelve-man. Most of our free time was spent there (where the nearest “head” [bathroom] was just down the hall), or in my brother-in-law’s squadron’s ready room. Meals were taken in one of the three officers’ ward rooms, and according to the other guys, we had far better food while the Tigers were on board. Surprise! We essentially had free reign of most of the ship, aside from obviously secure areas (like, you know, nuclear reactors and things like that), and we never lacked something to do, even if it was just watching Layer Cake or The Right Stuff on the projector in the ready room, or playing Scrabble or another board game with one of the other members of the squadron.

Seriously? Wouldn't that be boring after playing it in real life?

On the second day, just as we rounded the southernmost point of Hawai’i, we were treated to an air power demo. This meant close flybys of the ship by the various aircraft (including one supersonic pass: BOOM!) and examples of some of their capabilities, like the helicopter hovering and fast-roping a team of soldiers to the deck of the ship. A naval power demo followed, with some of the small boys (other ships from the carrier group) showing their maneuverability and firepower.

Too cool for words...

The day before we arrived in San Diego, we said farewell to my brother-in-law and the rest of the air wing. His squadron was the last to depart the ship, bound for their land base and a reunion with the rest of their families. After saying goodbye, we made our way to Vulture’s Row, an outdoor portion of deck on the tower of the carrier that overlooks the flight deck. From our vantage point there, and thanks to two layers of hearing protection, watching the takeoff of my brother-in-law’s plane was only incredibly loud and deck-shaking. Any closer, or without the earplugs, could have been deafening or enough of a jolt to knock you off your feet. It was a sensation unlike any other, and it was incredible to get to be that close. I will be forever grateful to him for the opportunity to see all of these things, because it will likely never happen again.

Land at last

Dad and I got in to San Diego on the early morning almost a week after we’d left Colorado. It was truly spectacular to see the families gather on the pier to greet their wayward husbands and wives and sons and daughters and fathers and mothers. After saying farewell to our new friends, we made our way to the airport where we allowed a coin flip to decide that we were going to drive home instead of flying back to Colorado. Despite my initial misgivings (I was not relishing the thought of two days in a car with dad), it turned out to be a great experience. We drove from San Diego to Blythe, CA on the first night, and then across Arizona and into Socorro, NM on the second day. Upon reaching Santa Fe, Dad and I stopped by the Loretto Chapel, home of the Miraculous Staircase.

Sorry, random stranger. I can't be bothered to crop you out of this photo.

At long last, I made it back to Colorado. Dad dropped me off, we said our goodbyes, and he went on his way to return our rental car and finish the three hour drive home. I came inside and started to work on this blog post for all of you, and here you have it. Now I can get to writing on some of the ideas I came up with on the trip. It was good to get away, but it’s great to be back!

I’m Back

That’s right, folks, it’s Leap Day, and I’ve returned to the blogosphere. I’ll have a real entry for you tomorrow, but I wanted to say that I have missed you all over the last week and a half. I’ve got some awesome stories for you.

Repetition

Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Do you ever fear that, as a blogger or a writer, you’re repeating what you, or worse, what others have said? I do, and unlike other things, I consider this to be a perfectly rational fear. Wait… Anyway, the point is that mindless repetition can be a terrible thing. According to Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, hell is repetition. Imagine the worst thing that you can fear happening to you, and it happens to you over and over again, for eternity. That’s hell. That’s part of why we mix things up at my job, switching everyone from one duty-station to another every hour. For one thing, it means that everyone has to be pretty good at everything. For another, it means that we don’t get bored to death and decide that we have to go medieval on the next patron who asks for the location of the very clearly labeled return desk.

We take your questions very, VERY seriously.

When I’m not considering acting out D&D-based fantasies, I just worry that I’m going to run out of things to say on this blog, and my few readers will leave me, and I’ll be left talking to myself. After all, there’s not really a whole lot of structure to what I write about, other than that it’s sometimes writing and other times stories of library work. Honestly, though, I can’t really expect my blog to maintain any sort of rhyme or reason to topics when I can’t keep focused myself. Other times, I think that maybe going crazy would be the best thing that could happen to me. Repetition could be a form of writer’s block, I suppose. Maybe you can’t come up with any new ideas, and so you end up rehashing something that you wrote months  or years ago.

Don't worry, Stephen. I still love you.

I guess my biggest fear as far as repetition goes is that I want to write novels, and as my good friends at a favorite weekly webcomic like to say, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop calling them ‘novels.'” Are all the good ideas taken? Yes. No, seriously. They are. Every story is a retelling of an ancient story, when you get right down to it. The difficult task of crafting originality is based in the presentation. It’s the same with food, really. I mean, you can have ramen noodles every meal for a month, to the point where seeing them would make you physically ill (and likely violently so), but if someone hands you a silver platter with an ornate ceramic bowl filled with ramen that’s been topped with a slice or two of pork, some green onions, and whatnot, and you’re probably going to say “Hey, that looks delicious!” Moreso if you’re hungry. The point is, we’re stuck with repetition, whether we like it or not. The question is how we’re going to handle it.

Think back, oh writing ones. Think about your favorite influences, and what they wrote, and who or what inspired them. It’s a vicious circle, but that’s not really a bad thing. Popular stories resurface regularly. Sure, if you don’t want to work too hard, you can just jump on the bandwagon for whatever’s trendy right now. However, if you want to create at least some semblance of actual writing, you’re going to be better off to come up with something that hasn’t been done to death (hahaha, vampires) in the last ten years. Tell your own story. It might be incredibly similar to something someone else has done. Think of the poor bullfighters who tried to right autobiographies after The Sun Also Rises debuted. I’m not saying that writing The Sun Also Rises will get you anywhere now. Repetition, or at least perceived repetition, isn’t always the best thing you can have going for you. Now a modern story of a man wandering a European city and searching for meaning in his life, well, that could be something special.

Good luck, fellow writers. Off to the grand adventure that is life!

Time for an Adventure

By adventure, this time I don’t mean going grocery shopping at Wal-Mart at 2 AM because I want to drink, but I don’t want to drink without having a frozen pizza to snack on while I do so.

It’s not that those kind of adventures aren’t awesome. They are. They frequently involve NERF guns too, for whatever reason.

No, this is going to be a bigger adventure. I’m going to be going on a trip in a few days. I can’t say exactly where I’m going to be going, but I’ll be away for about a week and a half. I’ll have one hell of a story for you when I get back, too, I can promise you that. I’ll be able to share more details after my return. Until then, you’ll just have to be patient.

Literacy Demands Libraries

California has cut state funding to libraries. It’s an incredibly disheartening sign of the times. Libraries and other similar institutions are the unfortunate first victims of an economic downturn, despite the far too wise words of Eleanor Crumblehulme. She was absolutely right when she said that “Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague.”

It’s come to my attention during my time as a library clerk that very few people realize the extent of the services that are offered, for free, by their public libraries. Yes, we have books. We’re so much more, though. Need information on homeschooling? We’v got that. Need help finding a job? We’ve got that. Tax info? Yup. Literacy? Why are you even asking if we offer that? Seriously. And that’s just within the Pikes Peak region. Imagine what the bigger libraries around the country are able to provide. We are the heart of learning, the core of self-improvement. If we can’t afford to spend money to buy new books (or if we’re stopping the heartless corporate machines that create mindless entertainment for the sake of money), where can we go? The library. If we want to see the latest DVD releases, but don’t want to spend the dollar for RedBox, where can we go? The library. Need a computer? Wi-fi? Learn a foreign language! Have someone proofread your résumé (help you spell résumé, or learn how to type é on your computer!). Need a study room? A conference room? We have those. Libraries provide resources to help the economy move again, and when the economy falters, we cut library funding. What the hell?

Do you want future generations to be able to read? Do you want them to understand what’s going on in the world around them? Do you want them to have access to important historical and cultural information so that they don’t make the same mistakes that we’ve made? I sure as hell do. Invest in America’s future. Invest in your local library.

 

Off to a Good Start

I hit the ground running this morning, if getting out of bed at 10 AM can really count as a running start. You see, this is going to be a big week. After missing two days of work because of an amazing snow storm (and actually being snowed in for the first time in YEARS), I finally got things moving again. It seems that my repeated attempts to get a slight boost in hours at work have been noticed, and I’m getting a new schedule with more hours (okay, one more per week), and it’s enough to get me partial benefits and a work week that’s not completely insane.

Not pictured: the 45 minutes it took to dig her out.

Now that the weather has cleared up, though, and the creativity is going. And going strong. Maybe I’m just fueled by the Irish Car Bomb cake that I made the other day, but I woke up this morning after dreaming of Lovecraftian things. This means that I’ve now hit upon my next idea for a novel. Yes, the first one is still a work in progress, with around 32,000 words at present, but it’s not often that I’ve come up with ideas for something that I feel could be more than just a short story. In fact, if memory serves, this makes, well…two. So this is big. I’ve never had that feeling of “HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO GET OUT OF BED AND WRITE THIS ALL DOWN RIGHT NOW!” until this morning. It was glorious. Cue me running down the stairs, grabbing a Java Monster from the fridge, and hurling myself onto the couch to scribble out two full pages of random notes, details, and actual bits of dialogue that came out of something reminiscent of Rose Red meets Call of Cthulhu. Yeah. No more details at present. I’ve got characters to come up with soon.

So yeah, off to a good start, like I said. Jot down some notes, chug some coffee, eat some candy for breakfast, and jump on twitter to find this. That’s three major book retailers refusing flat-out to sell books published via amazon, which has been attempting to cut the middle man out of publishing in addition to book sales. This boycott started with independent booksellers, so bravo to those little guys who were brave enough to stand up to amazon in the first place. The online retailer seems to be in some danger now anyway, mostly due to rapid over-expansion. I’m intrigued to see how this plays out. Now, I’ve had it pointed out that some writers who had published through amazon would now be in trouble, but, well, “you dance with the devil…” I’m just glad that I didn’t go that route. I’m determined to stick by traditional publishing, despite the fact that it’s a long, difficult road. Maybe this whole situation just goes to prove that the easier path isn’t necessarily the best.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of tasks to accomplish about the house today, and then I’ll delve back into the madness that is building in the back of my mind. Cheers!

Black March

A few days ago, I found something spectacular on one of my favorite sites, and I had to share it with you, particularly after my earlier post on SOPA/PIPA. Here it is.

If this actually works, we can change the world drastically.

100+

A few years back, I took an advanced grammar course at my school. Being who I am, I absolutely loved it, and I found myself digging through old assignments on my computer this morning, and came across this. We were instructed to create a single, grammatically correct sentence that contained at least one hundred words, and I responded with a little character introduction.

“His elegant, beaklike nose and dark black oilskin raincoat dripping furiously, the large man drew the gazes of many as he burst suddenly through the heavy oaken door of the inn; out of the fiercely piercing rain and whipping wind and into the welcoming embrace that was the main dining hall; out of the inky blackness of the night and into the warm glow of the roaring fire; safe at last from the threat of the lurkers in the shadows and secure in the familiar confines of Georg’s tavern; free of the frantic chaos that enveloped the outside world and comforted by the sight of Georg pouring him a foaming tankard of ale.”

On eBooks

An idea came to me earlier today. Many film companies are now bundling downloads of digital copies of their movies along with the DVD and BluRay releases. They’ve been doing this for several years (since 2007), and it seems to be decently effective. If you can get a portable copy of your movie free with the physical copy, why not do so? I have digital copies of several movies, including perennial favorite, The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

What about this, publishing industry? What happens if you include an eBook copy of a text (or a download code for said copy) with every purchase of a physical book? Personally, it would make me more inclined to get the digital copy of a book, because I’d have a physical copy for my library and a digital version of it for portability. I could read on either format, and I wouldn’t have to buy my favorite books twice. Food for thought.