The Man Is Keepin’ Me Down

Posted on by
14

This just in from the parental news service:

Some of you are probably already aware of my penchant for stacking rocks upon each other when the opportunity presents itself. In Prague, although the streets and sidewalks are often made of stones, pulling them up and stacking them is discouraged. But this! This is an outrage! I think the photo was taken in Hawaii somewhere.
Apparently in Hawaii they don’t appreciate art. Sure, sure, they use rock piles to mark the trails and people would wander off, get lost, and fall into a volcano, but that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?

You see where this is heading, don’t you? First it’s public safety, just an isolated case, nothing to worry about. But then, once the anti-stackists have a foothold, they will work away, slowly eroding our God-given right to balance stones up one another, gradually stigmatizing the practice until rock-stacking will only be done in remote areas and well-protected compounds in the desert.

I am outraged!

Thanks!

The Museum, chapter one

Posted on by
6
I

woke to the sound of the cat puking.

With a groan I rolled over, pulling a sofa cushion over my head, tipping an ash tray over my chest. I don’t smoke. Cursing through a throat that felt like the Mojave I rolled over and brushed ineffectually at myself, squeezing my eyes open just enough to watch my shaking fingers move over a sweater that didn’t look familiar. My eyes felt like they were filled with kitty litter, and in my head was a junior high marching band on the first day of practice.

I closed my eyes and willed my heart to stop. For a moment I thought I had won, but after a second or so it thumped again, the pressure almost popping my eyeballs out of their sockets.

I took off the sweater and threw it across the room, along with the blanket and anything else that had ashes on it. I laid back, closed my eyes, and reflected on what I had just seen.

The sweater had hit a painting I’d never seen on a wall I didn’t remember. I opened my eyes and looked up at the popcorn stucco ceiling (could be anywhere) punctuated by a moose antler ceiling fan, wobbling slightly as the antlers lazily spun. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. No wonder I felt like crap; I had been sleeping under the thing while it blew a steady stream of antler-dust over my helpless form. God only knew what sort of sick mojo had been visited upon me in that sinister chamber. As soon as I could get off the sofa, I was out of there.

I didn’t chance another glance at the painting; if memory of my first brief glance served it might have induced vomiting no matter what condition I was in. Some genres should not be mixed, and impressionist/western nudes riding bulls was the new top of my list of Very Bad Ideas. Vargas, Renoir and Remington in a horrible collision that left no survivors.

At least, some perverse voice in my head said, it’s not on bleck velvet.

The cat began heaving again, a mighty sound for such a small creature, breaking the otherwise perfect silence of the place.

“You all right, bud?” I asked the cat. My voice sounded like I was the ogre under the bridge, but the cat took no notice of me, and kept right on heaving. “I feel for you, man,” I said. “I’ve been there.”

The cat. I rolled over and, careful not to look towards The Picture, or any wall, or the ceiling, I opened one eye and watched the tiger-striped cat cough up another load onto a Navajo rug. When it was done it turned to stare back at me. I had seen the cat before, I realized, recalling a dislocated image of the yellow eyes staring at me over a potted plant. “I told you not to eat those flowers,” I said. “Now you’ve yacked on the only thing in the entire room that’s not ugly as hell.”

The cat turned and left the room, tail high.

I summoned all my strength and sat up, putting both bare feet onto the cold saltillo floor. I put my elbows on my knees and hung my head, staring at the dark grout between the earth-color tiles. I ran my fingers through my hair and over my grizzled face. Somewhere in this house was a careless smoker with unspeakably bad taste. More important, somewhere in this house was bacon, eggs, and potatoes. And a toilet, I added as I stood. Most important of all.

My peripheral vision warned me of the monstrosities that surrounded me, so I was able to avoid looking directly at any of them. Some more resilient part of my wounded and cowering brain cataloged them, a mad collection from plastic to solid gold (and, yes, John Wayne staring out from black velvet), all somehow western, unified by the lack of any aesthetic whatsoever. It was almost brilliant in its awfulness. Blinders on, I plunged forward, through the portal the cat had used.

And stopped short, mouth hanging agape, my mind struggling to turn the messages my eyes were sending it into some sort of image. Gone was the western theme; I found myself in Van Gogh’s worst absinthe nightmare, art deco gone mad. I was not in a house, I was in a museum. An art museum with a blind curator.

The cat was watching me from across the room. “Where’s the litter box?” I asked. Tiger-stripe just watched me, unblinking. Something about the annoyed kink in her tail told me she was female. I continued my search, squinting my eyes now not because of the dry grit that still clogged them, but because after deco came primitive, and then the bathroom itself was almost as bad as the western. (If you guessed nautical, no points for you. Sports.) I stood before the shrine, trying not to be distracted by the baseball bat flusher, and NOT LOOKING UP at Kareem Abdul Jabaar staring down at me, a mild sneer on his face, his crotch at eye level.

Screw bacon. I wanted my shoes and a ride home. The shoes were optional.

I washed, splashed my face, and stepped from the Chamber of Manhood Diminishment. The cat was sitting tall, waiting for me, her tail wrapped around her front feet. I crouched down and she allowed me to rub her ears. “Listen, Tiger,” I said, “It’s not your fault, I know, but this is the most bug-ass crazy place I’ve ever seen.” She looked at me for a moment, then rubbed her head on my hand. “Whachya say, Tiger? Let’s bust outta here.”

Thanks!

A Night of Dark and Light

Posted on by
4

Let’s go backwards tonight. We’ll start with now, and see if I can move backward faster than time moves forward. If it’s a tie, you will be stuck reading about the same moment until my fingers fail.

Now: Listening to a cover of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” by Linoleum at volumes that may not be healthy. This is good. Got the nice headphones on, so the neighbors are safe. I went looking for the original, a spacy, ethereal bit from around 1980, but this cover does justice.

Just as it was starting, Soup Boy withdrew his head and closed the door to my room. He had just come back from a quest to a bar/archery range. Yes, you read that right. Alcohol and deadly weapons. Of course it is not their policy to put the bows and arrows into the hands of dangerously drunk people. (I wasn’t there, mind you, but someone I knew once went there, and while they were going through the formalities he sat down and missed the chair, and after reassurances from his comrades the manager put a lethal weapon in his hands. Tonight, however, Soup Boy reported that the archery range was closed (hours are notoriously erratic there), so they were shooting pool instead.

I got a response back from fuego – he was home. We fired up Skype and discovered our favorite three words. He sent me a really cool tune called “Belladonna”. We unraveled bits of life and poked the decaying corpse of civilization with a stick. Or maybe I just complained that someone had consumed 2/3 of my hard-earned beers.

Soup Boy’s phone chimed on the sofa where it lay, to indicate it had received a text message. I unpacked my computer, plugged it in, and checked up on the ol’ media empire.

When I got home tonight, the place was empty. I wondered where everyone had gone, so I sent a message to Soup Boy and fuego.

I got off the metro just a little after midnight, and knowing that my beer supply at home was severely compromised, I turned to a haven I have not sought in a long time – Hanka’s Herna Snack Bar. The door was locked. It seems the place closes at midnight on Sundays. There were still people inside, and I might be mistaken, but the bartender may even have seen me and headed for the door as I turned my feet up the street. It’s hard to see into the place. I tromped toward home; the only other bar I knew was open between me and the domocile was a glitzy sports bar that is not the kind of place you sit alone with only your pivo for company and mutter to yourself in a vaguely insane manner. I decided to head home.

After Belladonna got off the metro at JzP and the doors to the train slid shut, I wondered if I should have offered to walk her home. Prague is a pretty safe town, but she had definitely wanted me to ride with her on the metro.

The three of us retired to a nearby café/club to discuss the movie and to just hang out. It was a pleasant time; the caffeine from the tea I drank combining well with the beer to make me jolly and chatty. Belladonna continued to try to hide the hole in her sweater, but I never did get the chance to suggest duct tape. Neither was in a position to stay out late, which was OK by me, although the conversation was pleasant. We spent a lot of time comparing cultures, and I would smile and nod as they discussed various med school classes. I was disappointed to learn that Firenze intended to return to El Salvador – Europe’s just not for her. I tried to talk her into running away to Shanghai with me. I don’t think she thought I was serious. I got a message from fuego saying he was at my place and had drunk some of my beer.

We got out of the movie and spent a moment looking at each other, wondering, what the hell was that?. I think the reasons we disliked the movie were not all the same, but the overall we agreed. Hostel blows. The movie starts with breasts and moves on to dismemberment; it is a movie that you would expect a group of fourteen-year-olds to write as they sit around a table at the pizzeria whacked out on Mountain Dew, each one trying to outdo the others: “You know what would be really, really sick…” All would laugh at the fingers-on-the-floor gag and then move on to the next shock-for-shock’s sake schlock. The writing was bad, the acting was poor, the editing was shit. There were points where the dancing and the music were so disconnected that the audience laughed. Continuity was a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t disaster.

One bit player put in a very good performance.

We settled into our seats while the ever-longer sequence of advertisements played. I am not exaggerating to say that movies here start twenty minutes after the projectors roll. Belladonna smelled good. I thought about the garlic soup and wondered if maybe I didn’t. She was fiddling with her sweater to conceal a hole in a not-too-embarassing area on her upper chest. I began to compose a duct-tape joke about it.

Firenze showed up and we bid farewell to Sophie. I gave Sophie a hard time because each time I’ve met her she’s left almost immediately.

I put away Kundera’s essays on the art of the novel when Belladonna and Sophie arrived. They sat down and I finished my Pilsner as we waited for Firenze. We talked about this and that, nothing earth-shattering. I reflected on my good fortune to be there, then, in a movie theatre lobby, sipping a beer, sharing conversation with two pretty and intelligent girls.

I think that is where I will begin the story for tonight.

1

Thanks!

There’s a big milestone approaching…

Posted on by
28

I didn’t notice when episode 600 went on the air a few days back, and really, there’s no reason to get so excited about that. There is another milestone on the horizon, one that is, in my opinion, monumental.

Before too much longer, someone will post the 5,000th comment here at Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

The number speaks for itself, but that’s not going to stop me from rambling on for a bit about it anyway. Five thousand comments doesn’t happen on very many blogs, I bet. Here I am very proud that the comments have become an extra layer of interaction and communication. There is a whole discourse going on there, influenced but in no way bound by the topics of the episodes. It makes this place lively and rewarding even when I’m not.

There are regulars and others just passing through, those who lurk and those who post often. There are personalities who exist nowhere but in the comments here; we even have an avatar of the collective. People have exchanged travel plans here, announced life changes, and in general added to the feeling that this is not MY site, but OUR site; the place where Squirrely Joe can hang with Funkmaster G-Force, and Keith can suggest ways to find women from my past.

So, while I’m proud of this site, and a little surprised at what it has become, the credit is not mine alone. Not even close.

Take a moment, why don’t you, and vote on what the prize should be for comment 5000. I’m a little hesitant about offering a prize – I imagine Jerk McSweede posting two hundred messages reading “Did I win yet?” – but we’ll see what happens. Just… play nice.

Thanks!

I’m a trendsetter…

Posted on by
2

There are six tables in the little café near home. I was sitting in here, all alone, when suddenly the hordes descended. I was on a roll, word-wise, however, so I held my ground.

There is a very pretty girl who spends a lot of time here, and her boyfriend often brings his laptop when he eventually arrives. So I am no longer the only guy with technology who spends time here. I was pretty absorbed in my work, so I wasn’t monitoring the ebb and flow of humanity through the joint, but when I got up for a brief urine break I noticed a third laptop in action. Six tables, three laptops. Not bad for a place without WiFi.

But while the third laptop was interesting, the operator was arresting. Seated at the glowing screen she has the librarian look — blonde hair pulled back, glasses, printed material laid out next to the keyboard, a look of intense concentration on her face. And lips. Then she got up to select what tea she wanted, and, well, dang.

Amazingly, it has happened. Not to my benefit, I think, but I have seen someone who makes the computer an accessory that is downright sexy. There are some accouterments that not everyone can wear. I once saw a pretty girl, late at night, outside an all-night auto parts store, poking under the hood of her Mustang, face lit by the glow from the flashlight propped on the fender. (Honestly, I don’t remember if it was a Mustang, but if it wasn’t, it should have been.) While she remains the sexiest woman I have ever seen, laptop girl tonight was up there.

Lets face it. You’ve got your supermodels, who make a career of simply looking good, and then there are the truly sexy women. Granted, the most successful models are capable of exuding some intangible force of personality, but like a chain restaurant, they are constrained by the need to appeal to the widest possible audience. You are not going to see the woman I saw tonight in any fashion magazine. She wasn’t selling that. Women who fix cars, or work on laptops in cafés, women in the act of resourcefulness and creativity, thinking not about how they look but about how they’re going to get the job done, those are my kind of folks. On the right face, concentration can be very sexy.

She’s gone now – the time you are moving through reading this is much different than my time. Gone forever, probably. I’m not sure she did me any favors tonight raising the geek chic bar the way she did. Before I was an exotic foreign writer. Not bad. Now I’m a scruffy writer. I’m OK with that – it’s certainly true, after all, and my laptop, beat and battered, fits the look well.

Thanks!

Happy Ground Squirrel Day

Posted on by
6

Yes, It’s March 2th, the third twoth of the year, Ground Squirrel Day. We had a poll last year to determine how to celebrate this day, but I don’t even remember what the options were, let alone what won. I think there was something about using rockets to create home-made flying squirrels, but I may be wrong.

So, boys and girls, you will have to use your own imaginations to come up with an appropriate way to celebrate. Let us know what you come up with!

Thanks!

Things I’ve Learned About Japan

Posted on by
3

I have in the past months exposed myself to quite a bit of Japanese pop culture, an odd hodge-podge of western and eastern thought as expressed through entertainment. The Japanese, it seems, are accomplished hogde-podgists; even Shinto, the dominant religion (though it doesn’t really fit the Western definition of a religion) seems little more than a framework to hang together anything that comes along that seems like a good idea. Gods and demons aren’t so different from each other, really; it’s more about which side they’re on than whether what they want to do is good for the regular folk.

Japan, it seems, would be a terrible place to be a schoolgirl, unless you are the one girl at each school who is a master of everything (particularly fencing), is the semi-erotic idol of all the other schoolgirls, and can transform into a superhero by calling out the right phrase. The rest of the schoolgirls have it much worse. They are groped, raped, and generally sexually harassed by fellow students, teachers, and the occasional demon; they are cruel and abusive to one another; and they almost never have parents to speak of.

Technology and progressive ideals are just making things worse for little girls. There is a lot of weapons research going on in Japan, and unfortunately for the schoolgirls it seems entirely devoted to transforming humans into weapons, and schoolgirls seem to be ideal for that purpose. I’m not sure who’s funding all this research – it seems to me that if you can deveolop a gun that can shoot down an entire squadron of aircraft, you could find a way to deploy that weapon that didn’t require kidnapping a schoolgirl who just got her first boyfriend and surgically altering her so giant cannon erupt from her arms in times of stress, and then turning her loose again to see what happens. Now, I don’t want to start any cultural wars, but I think in America we would have found a more convenient way to deploy the weapon. And we would have made more than two (the prototype that didn’t work out quite right who becomes a Big Problem, and the second attempt who only might become a Big Problem, but whose humanity remains intact).

Still, one cruel project at a time, damn near every high school in Japan has one of these super-weapons meekly roaming its halls, although most don’t realize it until the school is reduced to rubble. There is a lot of rubble in Japan. Cities are destoryed and rebuilt, only to be destroyed again. The citizens take it in stride – another city destroyed, millions die, but after a couple of days they all agree that it’s time to move on. Often the destruction is visited upon the city by little girls who have been cruelly transformed or engineered up from scratch. Note to Little Girl Super-Weapon (LGSW) Engineers: be nice to the little girls. It’ll go better for you in the long run. Way better.

I’m not sure, actually, why Japan is developing all these LGSW’s; in general the greatest threats to the island nation are Runaway Research (LGSW’s turning on their creators), Evil Criminal Organizations (often abusing LGSW technology), Killer Robots From Space (against which LGSW’s are of limited use, instead Japan has developed its own fleet of Killer Robots), and Demonic Invasion (against which LGSW’s are simply cannon fodder – it takes a male to stop a demon, nine times out of ten. The only exception is the wicked hot female demons, who can be bested by super-popular sword-swinging high school girls.)

While we’re on the subject of wicked hot female demons, it is undeniably true that the amount of sex a Japanese male has is inversely proportional to the number of girls he knows. It is quite common in Japan for a teen-aged boy to find himself living with a whole bevy of hot young women, all of whom are fond of him, without an adult in sight. Not only will this unfortunate lad never get anything more than a fleeting kiss and the occasional accidental boob-grab, all the women will also fall under his anti-sex spell. Japanese cities are filled with abandoned Buddhist temples, unused hotels, and various guest houses occupied only by partially-clad teenage nymphs and the one guy in town who will never, ever, get any. (Japanese regulations require that there be at least one sexy but severe teenage Uber-Samuraiette, one devil-may-care buxom party girl, one ten-year-old who builds killer robots as a hobby, and one super-smart, super-sexy shy martial arts expert who can’t get in touch with her own feelings.) Not even demons, goddesses, or nymphomaniacs from other planets can penetrate the poor guy’s anti-sex aura, try as they might.

There is always something falling through the air in Japan: usually either rain, snow, or plum blossom petals, but occasionally there will be bombs, laser blasts, or killer robots. Most of the time it will be one of the first three, but I advise wearing a hard helmet when you visit, just in case, and if you have an LGSW who’s been brainwashed to adore you, you might want to take her along as well. Just make sure she thinks it’s a special trip just for her, and surprise her with a stuffed animal, while you’re at it. LGSW’s love stuffed animals.

Thanks!

See Spot Run

Posted on by
1

I know the names of five of the regular dogs at this café, and three of them are Dino.

Thanks!

And, here I am…

Posted on by
10

I’ve got Internet in the ol’ domocile now. Actually, I’ve had it for a few days. Why, then, the sudden silence in the Media Empire? The answer is surprisingly simple: I have Internet in my home now.

You see, the first few days of near-unlimited high-speed access to every one and zero the world has to offer are a heady time. Oh yes, there is a virtual world calling out, saying only ‘taste me, swim in my fantasy’, and that is what I have done. The ones, the zeroes, they have thrown themselves at my retinas and eardrums by the billions, sacrificed and lost now in the transience of flashing neurons. But that’s OK, they were just copies of other ones and zeroes. The supply, it seems, is limitless, and soon it appears the distribution of them will be virtually unlimited as well.

The digifest is wearing off now, as I have had my fill of ridiculous japanese animation and my brain is exploding from the information regarding moving Jer’s Novel Writer to the GCC 4.0 (Apple version) compiler, which I will have to do to get my programs onto the Intel Macs.

On a related note, as my productivity recovered in the last few days I released a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer (0.6.0.0), and wrote a hell of a lot of Pirates. Just got to get learning Czech back onto the schedule and I’m golden!

Thanks!

Arrgh!

Posted on by
2

Still no Internet at home (long story getting longer), and today they’re filming something (probably a commercial) at the bowling alley, and that seems to mean no Internet here, either. Of course I didn’t realize that until after I ordered food.

On the other hand, I do have a good view of the thoroughly uninteresting production in the lanes below. The one good part is that the dude is a really bad bowler, so time after time he’s rolling the ball, then turning and doing a high five with the pretty girl as his ball trundles off course. Rack ’em up and try again, sparky!

The owner of the place just came by to ask if I was using the WiFi, and when I explained that it wasn’t working today he was surprised. Maybe I’ll get some love here soon.

Thanks!

A bit of picture-taking

Posted on by
Reply

Another warm day here in the city of a thousand spires, although not as unashamedly sunny as yesterday. I stayed in bed a little extra, but started getting antsy. I got up and sat at the computer for a while, poking at one project, prodding another, but not feeling inspired. I had been lamenting not putting the camera to use more often, so I loaded up the gear and headed to one of the many graveyards nearby, one that has a large church in the middle of it. I had ideas of the bare winter branches framing the spire against the sky, while grave markers huddled like sheep beneath.

There’s a reason I call what I do picture-taking rather than photography. My first observation: when a I look at something, it is amazing how much I do not see. A shot that I think is going to be a picture of a spire behind some trees turns out to be a picture of trees. Where the heck did that evergreen come from – the one taking up a third of the frame? Granted, I do try to include a little extra in the shot, with the intention of cropping later, but sometimes it’s just ridiculous.

One important technique for separating foreground and background is depth of focus, making the object of the picture sharp while keeping the rest of the busy world indistinct. I have many, many pictures that, in retrospect, would have benefitted greatly from a judicious use of that tool. (I can’t tell you how many snowy angel carvings in the very cluttered Olšansky Hřbitovy are lost to the background.) So today I was standing in a much more orderly graveyard, scratching my noggin, trying to remember which way to adjust the aperture to reduce the depth of focus, so my object is sharp and the rest isn’t. I remembered incorrectly, and cranked the aperture far in the wrong direction. I now have lots of pictures displaying the surrounding noise with remarkable clarity.

Live and learn, I guess, though in my case the latter half of that axiom has yet to kick in.

Thanks!

At the Helm in Strašnice

Posted on by
Reply

U Kormidla is a new place (I think). It is a longer walk to come here than it is to go to Little Café Near Home, but if today is an indication, there are definitely times when the extra walk is worth it. The bar has a nautical theme, celebrating the Czech Republic’s long and highly regarded maritime tradition (‘Ahoy’ is, after all, the most common informal greeting.)

I made my way down the stairs from street level, and my immediate impression was highly favorable. Two pretty girls sat at the corner of the bar, not smoking. There was a large group filling the back of the place, all dressed in black (we’re in cemetary country, out here in StraÅ¡nice), also not smoking. I made myself comfortable, enjoyed the smoothness of a Kozel dark, and communicated easily with the waiter with his nice, slow diction.

It is not a big place (although it dwarfs Little Café Near Home), dim but not dark, filled with rich wood and occasional brass highlights. It tiptoes dangerously on the borderline of kitsch, but overall it works. All these non-smokers in here is probably a fluke, but even when someone does light up the fumes are whisked away from where I sit. There is a staircase that leads up to a few more tables and the kitchen. My Bora-Bora chicken was heavier than I would expect from an island delicacy, but hey, this is the Czech Republic.

It is time for me to mosey along, now, but I will be back.

Thanks!

Sunday Morning

Posted on by
19

It is a balmy morning, well above freezing, easily the warmest day of this year. The sun was shining brightly as I made my way through the quiet streets of Strašnice; the only others out at this time on a Sunday morning are the old men and their wiener dogs.

What is any right-thinking non-wiener-dog-owning person doing out on a Sunday morning, no matter how bright and shiny it may be? What Siren song drew me from my home, my fortress of solitude, my haven in the hurly-burly world that is Strašnice? Fast food.

It was late when I got home last night. Really late. I was at Roma with fuego, and we all know how that can go. It was a night of Pirates and hockey. Pirates of the White Sand, I’m happy to report, is making progress. The version fuego brought back from the secret underground laboratories of North America is good enough we can actually show it to people, and many of the tweaks to make it even better are quite simple. Last night we worked up a list of improvements, and except for one really stupid bit that fuego seems to find delightful we’re in good shape. The last hour of the evening was dedicated to me finding new ways to explain how stupid that bit is.

I staggered home as the wee hours of the morning were growing up. I mounted the stairs and when I opened the door I was not hit by the blast of tropical air that Soup Boy prefers. He was still awake. Well, moving, anyway; awake might be a bit of a stretch. “Heater’s not working,” he managed to mumble. “No hot water, either.” I tried pushing the reset button on the heater, just as Soup Boy had already done, but you never know. He might not have pushed the button correctly. In this case, my button-pushing was no more effective than his, so I shuffled into my room and flopped into bed, too tired even to plug in the electric heater in my room.

This morning I awoke, perhaps a little later than usual, but usual is difficult to define. I shuffled around a bit, found a valve on the water heater to allow more water into the radiator system, and groped my way to the kitchen for some tea. Ah, tea, the leaf that built an empire, where would I be without your magical alkaloid? As the kettle hissed and burbled I stood, semi-conscious, contemplating the paper bag on the counter. Slowly the friendly logo and happy marketing slogans sank in. McDonald’s. As I looked at that bag the craving started, the conditioned reflex born of forty years of exposure to relentless marketing. I wanted some of that.

And so now I sit, far from home, tired, muddled, sated, nibbling the last of my fries, watching parents struggle with children who are not yet finished crawling through the giant hamster tubes. Man, I wish they had those when I was a tot.

Thanks!

Changing gears

Posted on by
2

Two days ago I decided to turn my full attention to Novel #2, The Test, setting aside Novel #1 (again), putting short stories on the back burner, and biting the bullet for a major rewrite. There is a lot of Novel #2, and as it stands it’s not terribly well-constructed — although it does have some mighty fine bits. Jane, the protagonist, is a finely-crafted girl, if I do say so myself. The first draft was written without a solid plan, however, and it shows. The plot is intricate, with many overlapping things happening, but the threads are born and fade away rather haphazardly. So, reading over the 600 untamed pages, I came up with a plan of attack.

“This would be a lot easier,” I thought, “if Jer’s Novel Writer could…” and off I went into software design. Now is not the time to be making major upgrades to the software, however. Now is the time to be fixing bugs and getting a good release out, now that hundreds of people are using it anyway. I looked back at the story. Threads. The ability to view the story from different points of view. Those changes sure would make fixing the novel simpler.

Faced with that dilemma, I did what any rational writer/coder would do. I set Novel #2 aside to work on Novel #3 instead. No new JNW features required, just prose that goes beyond storytelling into the realm of literature. Yes, Novel #3 is my Great American Road Novel. I’ve been looking forward to diving in to it for a long time.

While I was in this intensive review process, I had my phone turned off. Some of you may have the impression that I spend my days locked away in my room, writing, never emerging. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most days I make it to the kitchen and beyond. On this day, however, I declined invitations from Graybeard, from my czech tutor, and from Belladonna. Pretty soon they’re all going to give up on me, and that would suck. So today I’m going to try to not quite spend so much time writing. When I woke I was going to try to go the whole day without writing anything except this, but that was just plain crazy. I am, however, going to try to catch up with people.

As soon as I finish the Las Vegas chapter…

1

Thanks!

Really, really, looking forward to having Internet in my home…

Posted on by
3

I’m sitting at the bowling alley, watching analysis of the last curling match, cursing the slow and unreliable connection I get here. Sure, before they had WiFi here I had to go much farther to get the sweet river of 1’s and 0’s, and I’ve been putting up without Internet at home for a year now. So what’s changed?

What’s different is that now I almost have Internet at home. It was supposed to be 5-10 business days, and yesterday was day 10. Arrgh! I have the hardware, and when I hook it up it connects successfully to the world outside (at a rate faster than what I’m paying for). All I need is my account ID and password and I’m back in the broadband, baby!

But not yet. In the words of Tom Petty, “the waiting is the hardest part.”

Thanks!