2.28.2011

=( (= (Textual rendition of creepy grinning/weeping masks)

All right bloggie-poo, I realize I have been somewhat neglecting you. I will now minister to your vanity by updating you, although the further inflation of your fatheadedness will be somewhat tempered by the realization that I am only doing this to procrastinate on writing a paper for my music class.

How's that for a sadistic passive-agressive no-more Mr. Nice Guy quarter on a string screw you vending machine blow to the self-esteem?

No, I'm not angry. I'm pretty okay right now...just winding down after a day of work. They finally gave me something to do! This is good. The bad bit is, I am not at all familiar with the development environment, so I don't know how to figure out what I don't know. But I'm getting there, so hopefully that will resolve itself.

Oh, depravity. I have stooped to using Internet Explorer because I have two gmail accounts open at the same time, so if I stick to Firefox I can't edit this blog at the same time as checking my other email address. Ah, peste.

Meanwhile, I am not naming any names, but someone I am thinkig of right now needs to update her blog. You will know who you are, because the minute I write these words you will, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, think of a purple hippo with the word 'DESULTORY' painted in huge pink letters on her stomach. That is my telepathic mind-modifiying awesomeness in effect.

So. Lastly, a quick update on the writing front:

[insert snarky picture of tired animal making sardonic/sarcastic face]

I am on break. That's it. I am clearing my head before I start re-planning the dregs of what was once NaNo10. It has exploded in my face and I feel like I am making no progress even though I suppose I am. Curse my verbosity! That's why it takes me 3000 words (approximately ten pages, for my non-obsessively "page-from-word-count"ing friends) to write what was originally supposed to be a single to two or three page prologue. Now imagine what my pen/fingers do to a whole chapter. Yes. I have a deplorable habit of going off on thought or dialogue tangents, in order to explore an interesting idea.

I lied.

That is technically true, but if it was so easily defined I could just catch it right there, write it down for later, and continue writing. The truth is, I start from a single-sentence outline of a scene, and I start writing it, but then I find out that in order for the reader to understand what just happened, they have to know the context around it. Then I spend time writing the context (not simply exposition, but things that actually happen). Sometimes even the context spawns context. The end result is that I find that my initial scene was really somewhere in the middle. But then the problem is that I now have a whole bunch more of the beginning to write, plus I now have the rest of the original middle, and the end to write, and the new stuff disrupts the flow of the old stuff, because the original inception of the plot, the pivotal beginning event, must wait on some beginning scenes, which completely throws off the flow.

Dilemma: to write relevant beginning scenes, and completely replan the book, or jump right in, but no one understands why this is so important because knows what is going on?


Ugh.

2.13.2011

Evil Laugh and General Amusement

Oh, I am good. 

I just realized that Harry Potter resolves the inherent paradox that arises when trying to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. It's called magic. Basically it works by reproducing the crazy junk that goes on at the quantum level on a macroscopic scale, thus successfully using both theories. Further examination of the workings of this phenomenon can provide us with the final theory of everything!

Avada Kedavra.

2.09.2011

Read The Title To Understand the Significance of the Title.

There. With a bit of simple logical wordplay, I have obliterated the indecision and anxiety which plagued me upon seeing an empty box gazing at me with its blank lidless stare of guilt until I thought of a title that wasn't "Aaargh" or "Meh" and which also had something to do with the content of this post. I have now foiled this beast from hell which tried to unnerve me with its Sphinx-like implacability, by managing to write down a meaningful title that actually conveys nothing at all.

I am afraid this post will be a long and vague one, and about as diary-like (OMG!!! SQUEEEEE DAVID TENNANT!!! [1]) as my mind-splurges ever get. I will by turns be unashamedly brazen and arrogant, puffing off my self-worth by proclaiming it to the Internets, and whip-lashingly sensitive and vulnerable. Oh, joy. If this prospect fills you with terror (as it should), run away. Now.

My delicate emotional state is best summarized by a storm in a teacup. I don't even know what this expression means (at least, not yet. The Google will be hearing from me shortly), but the image thereby conjured up best summarizes the fluctuating fireworks show of electrical nerve impulses that plague the synapses of my centralized ganglia.

I am right on the borderline between whooping and hollering for joy and screaming and b!tching at everyone I meet. And to those who think that this averages out into general ambivalence or pessimistic apathy, you are wrong. It means, with the simultaneity paradox characteristic of the non-serial nature of human emotional definitions, that I am feeling both at the same time, and the resulting tension of conflicting streams of emotion is creating a feedback loop which forces me to think over the various things that have happened to me this week thereby intensifying the various emotional states which aforementioned events eventuated in me, thereby increasing the strength of the emotional feedback loop.

In order to eradicate any personal bias, and to preserve the impartiality necessary to psychoanalyze myself, it must be noted that my happiness level just increased infinitesimally when I wrote down that last sentence.

I can't do anything about it now, of course, because I am at work. But something, somewhere very far away, is exploding. The probability of an explosion of any type occurring in a given location is rare, but sum up the probability of an explosion happening ever, and you get a lot of things exploding. Broaden the given definition of now from the smallest possible division of time (planck-second) to something in human range...say, give or take two minutes before/after making this statement, so then whether by alien machinations, or the products of human technological development, it is almost certain that something somewhere is exploding, perhaps by unlikely spontaneous combustion or someone is doing fireworks, lighting gasoline, or, what is a lot more likely, the Mythbusters are blowing up a car...again [2]. Filtering out the issue of determining simultaneity in order to determine now-ness (thus mentally achieving the impossible by putting a star on it and ignoring it), my argument holds water like a blob of orange juice in space sucked out through a straw! Don't fail me, probability. So it is technically true that though I am at work and can't do anything, something somewhere is probably exploding. Well, I never said they had to be related events, did I? Correlation does not imply causation, so if you see me standing looking innocent by a ball of fire and ash that smells like kerosene, and I am quickly shoving matches into my pocket, this means you can't prove anything. [3]

So. The reasons for this ridiculous rambling (and, I think, utterly awesome awesomeness):

  • Rdio, I am utterly and completely in love with you. And even though I am still on my free trial period, I think it is just so great how I can listen to almost anything I want over the Internets for just $10 a month without having to decide whether to commit to buying an album that I might not like. Now I need have no compunctions about going ahead and listening to that interesting-sounding group who sounds similar to another group. I knew from the moment I met you that we had something special. You had me at "offline mobile syncing."
  • I got an internship. This is good. I will lose a large chunk of free time, and the ability to sleep in however late I want. This is a travesty. But the pay makes it just a little bit more worthwhile. Oh, and the job experience. :-D
  • I am concerned that I will no longer be able to keep up with my musical instrument practice and writing. Le Sigh.

 I haven't written for a while. I know I didn't do so yesterday. So to round off today's entry, here is a short mini-excerpt. (Again, DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fanfiction written purely for amusement. I am not making any money on this. Copyright on all Harry Potter characters (except Denga and Bode Righteous) and the world, etc. belongs to J.K. Rowling. Thanks for letting me borrow them, J.K.R., they're a barrel of laughs!)


Hedwig rolled her eyes. She recognized that dopey look. It meant that Harry was going to ask her something embarrassing.

“Go ahead,” she said, wearily, and muttered under her breath. You whiny little twerp. If you didn’t have the unlikely gift of preparing candied baby mice exactly as I like them, with cotton candy chocolate sprinkles studded in their soft little tiny pink eyes, I’d ditch your worthless carcass faster than Severus Snape confronted with a bubble bath.

Harry’s head swam. Hedwig’s voice was fading into her usual toots and whoos.

“Hedwig,” said Harry, carefully, albeit a bit thickly, for even with his senses disordered, a small part of him that remained sane (namely, his sense of self-preservation) told him to tread warily. “Hedwig…you’re a girl. Why do you sound like a man? Like…Professor Snape would sound while confessing his undying love for Professor Umbridge?”

“Remember,” said Hedwig, “I am merely (too whoo!) An extension of your subconscious, (hoot hoot hoot) made temporarily real under the influence of firewhiskey. (Whirrrrr) I sound like whatever you (whoo hoo whoo hoo) want me to sound like.” You sick bastard. Snape, indeed. Couldn’t your warped mentality have fixated on Julia Roberts instead? Whoo hoo.

“’Snice,” said Harry, and passed out, his head landing on a carpet that, had he been aware of it, now had the exact same pattern as Professor Minerva McGonagall’s tartan dressing gown.


Sayonara.

[1] David Tennant: The ONLY actor/famous person who is capable of eliciting such an over-the-top crazed fangirl-like response from me because he is just that awesome. With that statement, the famous-person-worshipping obsessive type of hormone-splurge obligatory to all "diary entries" is over for this post.

[2] Or, uhh...exploding frogs. Even more bizarrely, fruit.

[3] That was a joke, Internets. I am not going to blow anything up.

2.05.2011

HPFF Excerpt 1: I wasn't going to yet, but because you asked.

An excerpt from Harry Potter and the Color of Magic. (Working Title)

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fanfiction written purely for amusement. I am not making any money on this. Copyright on all Harry Potter characters (except Denga and Bode Righteous) and the world, etc. belongs to J.K. Rowling. Thanks for letting me borrow them, J.K.R., they're a barrel of laughs!


CRACK. 
 
It hurt even Lord Voldemort’s ears, after all this time. It was too quiet. The noise of his apparition reverberated strangely through the grasslands of the African plain, an oddly civilized noise at odd variance with its disturbingly calm wildness. Had anyone noticed? 

No. There were none here now to contest the will of Lord Voldemort. Even those ignorant tribal Muggle savages were miles away, grubbing in the dirt for worms, or whatever it was these creatures ate. Lord Voldemort did not care to waste his thoughts on analyzing the habits of the animals. No, he had come for a different purpose entirely. Wormtail had tracked the signs here, down to this very place. At first, Voldemort had refused to believe that such a powerful artifact would be found here, in this hole of a country. But when he had examined the signatures himself, he had had to accept it.

Someone, somewhere in this African plain, had found a way to defeat death. Here, in the most unlikely of places, a dirty filthy Mudblood had done what Lord Voldemort had failed to do.

Voldemort fingered his wand, and wordlessly uttered a general magical tracer spell. Golden sparks flew into the air, in a haze of brilliance, and lingered. They lit up a trail for him, which showed traces of magical use. It was not far now. Voldemort stalked after the golden trail. As he passed each point, he toyed with the idea of erasing it. No. That was boring. Just for fun, Lord Voldemort turned the haze behind him into invisible poisonous smoke that would turn any Muggle or Mudblood that passed through it into just the sort of delectable lizard which was the favorite comestible item of the tribal Muggles living here. Voldemort liked the delicious irony of this unsuspecting cannibalism. But whether these transfigured dead died by blowgun or not was a matter of indifference to him. There were plenty of other predators around.

And around him, it was unusually quiet. Too quiet, thought Lord Voldemort. His sharp eyes and ears could sense the movements of all the witches and wizards around him, and it was just as good for keeping track of small animals. There were none around. Voldemort decided that the nature of the grassland suited his humor. He knew well that the seeming peace was misleading. It was quiescent now, but beneath and behind it all, he knew that predators stalked. Numerous small animals died behind the placid face of it, slain by predators. It had a savage underside, this place; behind it, was a wall of carnage. Dog eat dog. Lion eat deer. Snake bite human.

Ah, yes. He liked the sound of that last one. This place was a parallel of his own ideals, he decided. Here, there was no room for the weak. The strong soon killed those who were…undeserving.

He did not have far to walk. The signals increased in intensity, finally puddling around a seemingly innocent looking boulder, in a haze of brilliance that almost rivaled the light of the hot, hard eye of the sun up above.

Ah. Here it was. His eyes piercing through the shadows, Lord Voldemort could see the huddled form of the little boy who was the source of the death magic. The boy’s body lay like something lifeless, and a dirty, grubby length of stick clutched in his hands. Even as he looked upon it, Voldemort could feel the magical enchantments placed upon the boulder. Voldemort sensed them with his mind, probing intently. Basic things: charms of invisibility, disguising of smell, of deflection of perception, distraction filters, and…one more. He smiled grimly to himself, though it was not a happy smile, but one of proud arrogance. A lesser wizard would have immediately whipped out his wand, and used it to attempt to break through the enchantments. But Voldemort was a highly skilled wizard, and he immediately recognized the principal charm that knitted together all the lesser charms of protection. It was a Ward of Magical Potential, and possibly the most powerful one he had seen to date. This spell was very specifically tailored. If it detected any sense of magic beyond the protective enchantments, it would immediately deactivate the wand of the marauding wizard. Even the Spirit Dreamers were only safe because they were, for the most part, Muggles.

But Voldemort knew how to circumvent this. The spell worked mainly by detecting the use of wands, after all, because almost every wizard under the sun needed to channel their magic through something. But Voldemort had learned the art of channeling his own magic through any implement. He rarely used it, for even he had to admit that the difficulty of the thing was almost beyond him, but it was a useful skill, and one that had served him well.

Like now.

Extending his hands, and feeling the curves of the universe under the rock in his palms, Voldemort closed his eyes and wordlessly concentrated on a single spell. And silently, like sheets falling from a washing line, he felt the spells dissolve around him and dissipate, leaving nothing behind but a lonely little rock baking in the sun, and a seemingly dead body.

Lord Voldemort no longer needed to eat, for he had early dispensed with that human function (and also other, less pleasant, but equally necessary human functions). He had dismissed them as being inefficient, and now used several spells of photosynthesis to gain energy directly from the sun. Being so, he no longer had salivary glands.

But if he had, he would have drooled.

Showing a rare sign of reverence for something other than himself, Voldemort bent over, and gently prized the ugly old stick out of the boy’s hands. It was his! Here it was: the thing that had separated this boy from the other Spirit Dreamers, the missing piece that would have enabled him to break the final link, and defeat death once and for all. Voldemort sneered down at the seeming corpse. Stupid, ignorant little fool that it was, not to know of it! The child had thought it was only a stick after all, or else it would not now have been so easy. Did this little Mudblood, this pitiful filth of humanity, even realize that it had been-for lack of a better word-a wizard? No! It never knew the power of the thing it held.

The power of the thing that would have saved him from what was about to happen.

Lord Voldemort fingered this new stick, and felt the power of it running through him like a river of lightning through the veins that he had long since replaced with plastic tubing and liquid nitrogen. Was it even worth it, he wondered, was it even worth it to kill the boy now? Here would he live for the rest of his life, never knowing what it was he had lost. He would return from the spirit world, and find the thing he had never known was a wand gone. He would not have a chance to obtain another, not here, where wizards were unknown.

No. Lord Voldemort never took chances. Besides, it had been at least five minutes since he had killed something, and he knew what Doctor Bellatrix said, with a long sigh, about repressing unfulfilled desires, although he hadn’t been sure then that she had been talking about killing things exactly. He flourished his powerful new weapon, and pointed it straight at the boy.

“Avada Kedavra.”

There was a bright flash of green light, but Lord Voldemort never saw it.

He was already gone.

FebNo Update

Soooooo. So yes, I just kept typing o's until my iPod stopped giving me autocorrect options.

Anyway. I should mention that I was not, after all, able to try my 6k in a day challenge on Sunday, which is sad. There were circumstances beyond my control. But hopefully I can try again this weekend, maybe tomorrow (read: today) or day after (read: tomorrow).

In other news. FebNoWriMo is now underway. It is to be noted that I will most certainly NOT be posting any excerpts of my work up there because those rascally scoundrels have it in their terms of service that they are basically allowed to steal whatever outpourings of our brain, blood, sweat, tears, and other various and sundry bodily secretions we choose to post up there, which they can then reuse whenever they want. Thank you, no. I think I will hold on to my own copyright! Any excerpts I post will most certainly be here or anywhere else but there!

Otherwise, I have started my Harry Potter fanfiction, complete with obligatory drunken Harry scenes, talking Hedwig, sketchy candy of less than desirable origins, and of course, the ineffable wand jokes. Miraculously, I met my Midnight Haunt Challenge, which is bodacious! (Explanation for the Unworthy--I mean, non-FebNos: we set ourselves a special word count goal for the first day, to kick things off. Mine was 3k!) Yay! And it's been chugging since then. I now have about 6k of it written out of my total 20k goal for the month. Unfortunately, this means that progress on The Amber Node has slowed down, although it hasn't stopped. I am doing about 300 words a day on it. It is slow, but refreshing, since I am now able to change gears every so often. I really have to get moving on it, though. I think it would help if I didn't keep putting it off until the end of the day. I really only write between 10:00 PM and 12:00 PM. That's not a lot, considering I am doing a fanfiction and another novel at the same time.

So yes. This is me for now. And since I am awake, I am going to try and make it to a round 1k words. The sooner I do, the sooner I get to sleep!

All right. I'm out.