Oh, tell me it ain’t so, Joe.
But according to the magic of calendars it seems that another week has flown by.
Honestly, boys and girls. Where do these days go and why cannot I capture them in golden nets and keep them locked up in my Shed of Unfortunate Happenings?
Anyways, not only does this week come to an end, but also the month comes to a stuttering halt, pistons blown, steam whistling out of popped screw holes, and a grim covered engineer beating his denim hat against the ruined engine.
What can I say about the last week and last month? 2010 so far is a real kicker in the manparts. Much in the way of work needs to be done and much in the way of organization needs to be accomplished, things I had already known before, but their barely comprehended lessons have come home to roost.
Slowly but surely, the lesson of “WORK, DAMN YOU, WORK!” is being learned. Far easier to work when you’re collecting a paycheck at the end of the two weeks, but hard as carbon steel when you’re not collecting anything monetarily, just warm fuzzies.’
Every bit of time matters, it seems. One never knows what’ll come up and when you’ll be dragged off from your work. Therefore a constant nose to the grindstone is needed, so when those unexpectedness appear, you’re ready to roll with the punches.
I had goals I put forth at the beginning of the month, the monthly Month By Month address.
I think I accomplished none of them.
Words written, less than 25k.
Missed several days of AMOB and titlecard drawing
Never finished Bitterwater 02 and 03.
Never finished an AH.com the series episode.
Butttt… I did begin writing my novel again. So, there’s that…
But I claim this was a test month. To see where I could put myself, see what I could handle and to see what occurrences occurred. Next month, I’ll be ready for it. I’ll be loose and bobbing, left and right, moving with the punches.
So the week’s over, the month’s over, the year’s begun. 1/12 of the way done…
Well, its going to be exciting.
Flash Fridays,
I think I’ll begin participating in this. Not the disrobing kind of flash, but the mega short story kind of flash.
Because as we all know, the more work you pile on yourself, the more pressure you heap on, the more likely you’ll crack, spray your innards on the floor in distress, and chew on door frames. I’m all about chewing on door frames, good in fiber.
I haven’t done jack in days.
I need to find my momentum again.
The only way to do that is to get back to work. Don’t mess deadlines and get your brain running and feed it yummy delicious information.
Steve Jobs unveils the iPad, Obama promises a chicken in very pot, Elizabeth & the Catapult play on the computer, I’ve turned another year older, and I’m going to start brewing my own beer.
Tap, tap…
Is this thing still on?
Well, in that case. It has been an oddly hectic first half of the week. Work has… been put on a momentary standstill, the updates for Bitterwater and the AH.com Series have had to be postponed due to the lack of time.
Hell, even this blog has suffered through some lonely nights of non updating, I’m sure you were all eagerly awaiting the intrepid tales of the wannabe writer… drawing instead of writing.
Either way, the wheels have become a bit warped under the strain, like those cheap plastic wheels you get when you buy a cheap plastic desk chair from a big box store, they strain, turn from black to a white color along the stress lines, and finally snap, like… cheap plastic.
That is the metaphor for my life at this moment. Cheap big box store plastic. Warping, but oddly still chugging along, not as fast and not as smoothly, veined with white stress lines.
I’ve begun thinking of priorities when it comes to working. I’ve got a bit too much on my plate and it looks like there will be says a head when updates might be lagging, the question is what is more important.
Currently:
- AH.com: The Series – New Episodes
- Writing Book “Absolute Power”
- Blog
- AH.com: The Series ‘remastered’ episodes with titlecards
- Bitterwater Tales story site
- All Manner of Bad webcomic
A lot to do, and seeing as time these days is short and the days are on the forward galloping momentum thing they do in the beginning of the year, I think I need to begin prioritizing.
Therefore:
- Absolute Power
- All Manner of Bad
- Bitterwater Tales
- AH.com: The Series – New Episodes
- AH.com the Series – titlecards/remastered episodes
- Blog
The book is important and I do need to add a lot more time to it. The webcomic, I’ve been doing it for over a year and I’m sort of tired of the weeks I take off from it, going from daily to five days a week, to not updating for long periods of time. Bitterwater Tales is a new addition and it falls along the lines of writing, writing is important. If you want to be good at something, you do it every day and that is writing.
So, with the candlelight dimming and my eyes turning to mush, I’ll leave this blog and head out into the dim recess of my workspace and plot my plottings and dwell on the state of things.
The week is over and I have no idea how that happened. One moment, Monday, the next its Sunday night. Not as much stuff done as I had hoped, directions were not followed, goals not met, and now blame and punishment will commence. Oh, how terrifying my taskmaster is (that’s me!).
So, now I’ll pour me some more stimulants and try to salvage the rest of the evening by drawing. The only thing I seem to be able to do consistently. Writing… bah, writing is for longhaired weirdos sitting in coffee shops making vague references to Demosthenes while sipping on a low fat chai latte.
Well, the hours aren’t utterly late yet, perhaps I’ll finish up some unfinished writing business.
Priorities, one must know them and keep to them. That and don’t nap so much between tasks. Guilty, there.
Therefore the records of this week shall be placed on a bonfire built upon a barge and set out to sea, where it will burn up and sink, lost forever to the ages.
Then we can begin again… in several hours.
Google has burned bridges in China, Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman are engaged, Haiti is devastated by a massive earthquake, Leno has stolen Conan’s spot on Late Night, supposedly fifty five million Americans had the H1N1 flu virus, and I’m alone in a house.
There is a silence in the room, only broken by the whirling blades of the fan that has been pretty much ‘on’ for ten years now.
They don’t make them like they used to. When I was a kid in the high school years, before finally leaving rural Arizona and heading to the big city of Phoenix, I got a semi taste of living off the rural-ness and into the semi large scale urban centers of learning and people being stuffed together in homes mere feet apart.
In that place, of learning and finding out who I was, I purchased a fan. New Hampshire in the summer is hot and humid, and rainy, even when everyone is claiming there was a drought going on. This was an ordinary fan, one that I put together and installed in my dorm room, there it stayed on until I managed to disassemble it and stuff it into my bags to take home.
I was seventeen at the time. Since then, that fan has been with me for over ten years. When I left home, I took it. When I went to college I took it. When I left college on bad terms, I took it. In my year of utter woe, I had it blowing air at me, when I finally began rebuilding the apocalyptic ruins that I had created; it was there, blowing away.
Now days, when it gets turned on, it make a sad scraping, whining noise, the possible sound of dying bearings, motors, and old plastic. It’s been active nearly since that moment I bought it, lugging the damn thing nearly two miles to my dorm.
A strange constant in my life for the last decade, one of those things you don’t really notice until it’s on its last leg, wobbling on toward its final end. I think I’ll dismantle it and have it recycled, maybe that’ll be a good end for it, when that end finally comes. Its plasticy remains reborn in some disposable container only created because the company wanted to be more ‘green’.
Well, this blog has been about a fan, odd.
Anyways,
Google’s move, although prefaced by freedom of speech, human rights, and apple pie, was really a business move, nothing more. Congrats to Amanda and Neil, two artists that have found artist love. Haiti, poor Haiti. I hope you the best and may the world gather around and lend you a hand. Leno… just fade to black already, and take frigging Jimmy Fallon with you. And the H1N1 virus, we never met and I am glad for that. Until next year, when you its H1N1 Part Two: Back With A Vengence! And I’m feeling hungry, therefore I shall stuff my gullet.
I wonder how well a techno-thriller style of storytelling would work for non modern day stories. As in, let’s say… a fantasy world or in Renaissance Era Europe? If that were the case would it simply be considered a fantasy novel? Or a science fiction novel, depending of the detail to technical knowledge of the tools and devices involved?
I would also assume that techno thrillers only work in a world where the technology is understood, if not by the user, then by the supposed engineers who built it. Whereas a Renaissance Era techno-thriller, the characters or the smiths and master craftsmen would only know a top layer of how their tools and weapons work. There wouldn’t be much in the way of physics or knowledge of metal working/engineering involved, just the old school historical tried and true method.
Put iron in forge this long, make sure the coals don’t do this, hammer redden steel, temper steel, etc. etc. It does make you wonder how much the people building the things back then actually knew of the things they made back then. Was a lot of it just simple tried and true method, how much of it was passed down knowledge, taken as a truth without question? How much resulted from empirical study and experimentation?
Though one could make the argument that today’s individuals don’t necessarily know how the technologies and tools they use actually work. From the computers, camera, cell phones, cars, and hairdryers that are used. But the main difference is that someone out there, a physicist, an engineer; a scientist would know how those things work. From the interaction of electrons at an atomic level, from the electromagnetic pulses that are going on inside the device, to how it stimulates whatever to produce color and visual effects.
But back in the long ago days, how many people actually understood the pressures involved when they touched a slowmatch to the primed pan of a matchlock rifle. They knew not to over prime it, they knew to keep off excess grains of black powder, they knew you had to stuff wadding down the muzzle and to compact it, but did they understand why?
I suppose that’s the main drive behind progress prior to the electronics age. They understood the mechanical aspect of it, without really understanding the engineering and science behind it.
Which also causes more food for thought on the real knowledge base needed in writing a techno-thriller, sure there might be some scientists in that world that know how those technologies work, but there might also not be any that do. Therefore one could possibly make the argument that a story written in detail about the going ons in matchlock pistols and rifles, along with ballista’s, catapults, and swords could be seen as techno-thrillerish, especially for technologies that are new to that era.
I’ll add this to my ‘One Day” list. A techo-thriller early gunpowder saga that incorporates all the things modern day techo-thrillers does. War, espionage, and a lot of detail about weapons.
The sky’s a hazy orange, the city lights reflected upon the clouds rolling in. The air’s chilled and the wind’s beginning to pick up and I’m feeling ill. The stories from when I was a kid said that spring began when the lightning came back, when you’d see its forked deadliness in the sky, then that’s when rebirth began. Lighting flashes within those distinct cloud, could this be spring coming?
Gossip is playing on the ipod and I’m hoping that something poppy will make things better, but I might have to delve deeper into the pit of Pop before I find my way out. Maybe it’s an Ida Maria night, or a Matt and Kim night, possibly the happiest sounding band in the world, there.
If spring is coming, what happened to winter? I remember the days when I used to have to pack on two shirts and two jackets just to make it through the day. There were days when the shop got so cold we would huddle around a cup of coffee, our breaths fogging out in front of us, the only heat coming from the exhaust of the forklift, a waft of delicious warmth tainted with the smell of propane. A fair trade off at the time.
Maybe something a bit low key, something deeper and sadder, the mournful sounding tones of the Heartless Bastards mixed with some Sarah Blasko. When you’re happy you listen to sad music, when you’re sad, you listen to happy music. Just like when you’re safe, you watch horror movies. Tease the emotion into being, perhaps.
As snow and ice hammer Europe and back home the temperature hovers just a hair over freezing, I sit here under umber skies and wonder if there’ll be days that are over 60 degrees in the sunlight and 55 in the wee hours in the morning. Days when it just doesn’t drop into the mid forties and suddenly everyone’s loosing their shit over how cold it is and preparing for incoming glacier sheets.
Though what does one play on a contemplative night? Classical? The scores of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner. There’s an awesome version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in techno that always is interesting to listen to, but it seems like such a horrible defamation of a classic. Although the song rises to a crazed frenzy toward the end that always makes me want to start jumping up and down and knock things over.
I’m oddly missing winter this year, although as fans of weather goes, I’m not one. But I think I miss the cold in the air, cold where you have to bundle up, briskly rub your hands together and wait five minutes before your windshields defrost. The kind of cold where you have to work that little bit faster to keep warm and the moment you stop, the chill sinks through your coat and into your skin.
I’ve decided on Sarah Balsko, she’s got this way of singing that appeals to me. The skies seem to be thinning out and the air is utterly still. It looks like they aren’t giving up anything tonight, no rain, no snow, no cold. But then again this is Arizona, there one part can be covered in snow, one part covered in ice, one area bathed in rain, and the other two parts perfect clear warm weather.
Indecisive, at best.
