A Quick Health Question

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Three days a week I work out. It’s about 50-50 aerobic and resistance training, starting with thirty minutes of rowing machine and treadmill, followed by crunches and weights. It feels pretty good to have done it.

After working out we generally spend a few minutes with my sweetie’s folks, then we drive home. I’d estimate it’s at least half an hour between the end of the workout and our arrival home. Each time, on the way up the stairs to our apartment, I get a massive head rush.

Anyone know what’s causing it? Should I worry? When I was younger I had low blood pressure, but last time it was measured my blood pressure was on the high side. I haven’t lost a significant amount of weight, but I think I’m in better shape.

Any insight or wacky theories are welcome. Thanks!

Thanks!

A Job I’m Glad I Don’t Have

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As you might be able to tell from the paucity of episodes here at MR&HBI, I’ve rejoined the ranks of the employed. My writing has taken a real beating, so today I’m going to spend some time writing about work. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

I don’t mind writing software; I’m pretty good at it and I can make pretty decent money doing it. I would much rather write code than dig ditches, for instance, and luckily for me the world has decided that making Web sites is worth more than roadside drainage. (Before you go and say, “that’s because it takes skill and training to make a Web site, but anyone could dig a ditch’, ask yourself – could you dig ditches for a living? If the economy were turned upside-down, that ditch-digger living in his nice house would say, ‘anyone can make a living sitting on their ass in front of a computer, but I dig ditches. I’m glad things are the way they are, is all I’m saying.)

My current job sends me dangerously into territory I don’t much like, however, and that’s the area known as Information Technology. It’s not really a good name for the job, which is about setting up computers and keeping them running. It’s less about making things and more about making things work.

Last night, for instance, I moved the Web product I’m working on to a different server and it didn’t work. Naturally I assumed the problem was in my code (it had worked on that server in the past), so it was several hours later that I discovered that for reasons I still don’t know, the server failed when it tried to compress very large messages. Just *poof* no response beyond the number 500 (something went wrong). To make things more fun the server was specifically set up to not write out a lot of error messages to its log. I turned off the compression feature (with a hammer) and things worked again. Five hours or so spent to add seven characters to a PHP file, to make things work the same way they already did on other servers. Welcome to the world of IT.

I think the original intention of the phrase information technology referred to the the information that would be stored, manipulated, and distributed by machines. What the I really stands for is the vast store of arcane crap you have to know to do that job well. What line of the php.ini file to modify if you want zlib output buffering and utf-8 character encoding. How to set up all the computers in an office to use a local domain name server first. That’s the information in IT.

The worst thing about having an IT job is this, however: When you’re doing a good job, no one notices. When a company is running smoothly, that’s a sign that the IT department can be downsized. There are no problems! What are those guys doing all day? Having things not happen as part of your job description makes for tricky times when you do your job well. Of course, when something does go wrong people know just where to find you.

So if you work in a company that has people on payroll working to keep your technology humming along, cut them a little slack. Someone’s got to do that stuff; be glad it’s not you. I do enough IT now to know that I’d rather let someone else have the pleasure.

Thanks!

You Know it has to Happen

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I’m waiting for the commercial that has:

“I’m Steve Jobs, and Windows 7 was my idea.”

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An Important Science Question Investigated

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I give this to you without comment:

The Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow.

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MacPorts and GIMP

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Preamble for those here by the grace of Google: Yes, I do eventually get around to talking about Gimp in this episode. Short version: it works but takes hours. Anyway, on with the show!

Setting up a new computer can be a tedious task; there are all kinds of settings and programs and files and whatnot that need to be passed from old to new. When you work with Web development things can get even more cumbersome, as one finds oneself descending deep into the world of IT. There are programs to install that all have to talk to each other, and configuration files to be tweaked. Many of the applications that are required have no user interface of their own, they simply run in the background and answer requests from other applications.

I found myself facing (for the third time in three months) the need to install the latest Apache (and set up virtual hosts), PHP, Pear, MySQL server, PHP email addons, Propel, and on and on. For many of these items, the instructions for installations go something like:

1) Download the source code
2) Configure the build
3) Compile the application

And the instructions go on from there. For most of the above there are shortcuts, and probably-recent-enough versions of some things come built-in with the Mac OS, but when you install it yourself you can get everything where you want it and avoid conflicts. Still, this can be a long, tedious, pain in the butt to get going. And when you install something and it doesn’t play well with the others, finding that one line in the secret config file that’s causing the problem can be a real pain.

Enter MacPorts. MacPorts is a project that has developed a system that does all the steps of the installation for you, and puts everything in standard places so everything else installed with MacPorts can find it and talk to it. There’s still some configuration to do (tell PHP where the database server’s socket is, and set passwords for instance), but overall things are much simpler, and there are very good instructions out there for tweaking and troubleshooting MacPort installs. Since the person writing the instructions knows where all the files are in the standard install, instructions can be much more specific.

With MacPorts installing php 5.3.1 was a simple matter of typing “sudo port install php5” and letting the MacPort system do the rest. Hooray! Setting up a server is suddenly much simpler.

As an aside, MySQL didn’t work when I used MacPorts to install it on a previous machine. Don’t know why. Ran the install, followed the instructions, nothing. After a few hours banging my head against it, I went and got the excellent binary installer. It worked without a hitch. This time around I didn’t bother with the MacPorts version at all.

Anyway, thanks to MacPorts, I was able to get a complete development system up with nary a hitch, in a fraction of the time. Knowing where all the config files were this time around helped as well. I found several useful links on the Web, particularly from HiveLogic and my new buddy Danilo Stern-Sapad who took a little grammar rant from me with grace.

On that note, I read the phrase “How to setup…” so many times in so many places it’s amazing I still have teeth.

Edited to add: I have now written my own tutorial which does into greater detail than the above, and includes a works-every-time MySQL install.

Last night I realized I hadn’t installed GIMP on this computer yet. GIMP is an open-source graphics program that wishes it rivaled Photoshop but it doesn’t really. It’s free, however, and when you consider the incredible amount of work that went into it, you have to be impressed. I don’t do a whole lot with graphics, so GIMP is usually adequate for my needs.

When I went to the Web site for GIMP I found a couple of options for installation, including MacPorts. Just type “sudo port install gimp” into the terminal and that’s that. Pretty sweet.

One thing about a program like GIMP: it’s really a collection of a bazillion smaller parts. Many of those parts require other bits to work. When you run a traditional installer, all the parts are already there and they’re already tied together in a neat bundle. MacPorts does things a little differently; each part knows what parts it depends on to work, so when you say “install gimp” it first looks at the parts gimp needs, then at the parts those parts depend on, and so forth. You get to watch (if you choose to pay attention) the parade of all the little pieces as they’re installed, each the product of an individual or small group of people who have allowed their work to be exploited for free.

For GIMP, the list of dependencies goes very deep. I watched as X11 was installed. X11 is already on my computer, but ok, this is MacPorts and they keep their own realm and that way they can update parts without worrying about how that will affect non-MacPort installations. It’s redundant, but that’s why God made big hard drives.

Then I saw Python 2.6 install. Later, Python 2.5 went by. One of the little pieces seems to depend on an earlier version of Python. This probably means the person in charge of that bit just hasn’t updated it recently. On the installation went. After a while the Gnu Compiler Collection came down the pipe. gcc is a collection of compilers for building programs, and I watched as gcc was built… using the gcc already installed on my machine. Hm. And what’s this? Fortran! Yep, somewhere in the great tree of dependencies (maybe ‘root system’ would be a better term), someone decided that a Fortran compiler was necessary to run GIMP.

Actually, that’s not quite fair; the piece that loaded the Fortran compiler might need it for other tasks not related to GIMP. Just because GIMP uses a library doesn’t mean that’s the only use for it. Still, I ended up with a lot of stuff I don’t need. It’s all invisible and I’d never know it was there if I hadn’t watched the install (which took hours), so it’s not a disaster or anything. And next time I need Fortran I’m ahead of the curve!

Time slipped past, the install continued. I went to bed. When I got up this morning to check if the build was finished, I discovered there had been an error. Yep, the MacPort version of gimp-app doesn’t currently compile on 64-bit operating systems. All that other stuff that was installed? Python 2.6 and Python 2.5, the Gnu Compiler Collection (including Fortran), libgnome and libbonoboui and tkl and tk and gd2 and dozens of other things I don’t know what are, they’re still there, waiting to be useful in some way.

Edited to add: The compile bug has been fixed; I recently used MacPorts to install Gimp on my 64-bit laptop. It took a long, long, time, but now it works just fine.

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AiA: White Shadow – Episode 12

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Our story so far: Allison is an American high-school student who has transferred to a private prep school in Japan. She is a transfer student, and in this Japan, that means she will be the cause of upheaval and strife. Although she really doesn’t understand what’s going on around her most of the time, she is starting to understand White Shadow, a computer virus that can infect the human brain. Or something like that. It seems Allison is pretty good with computers, and may be the person to stop the scourge. Those around her sort of take this for granted. She’s a transfer student, after all.

Last night the virus got into the video system of a local dance club, and the results were horriffic. Allison has decided to investigate, and she has been joined by her friends. As soon as they entered the building, however, they were confronted by a man with a gun. While he was talking, Alice simply vanished.

If you would like to read from the beginning, the entire story is here.

“Damn! Find her! She must not escape!” The man with the gun gestured frantically. Spotlights stabbed through the darkness all around the group, and from the shadows men emerged slowly, menacingly, clad in the heavy rubberized suits of the Institute, faces invisible behind reflective glass. Each bore a wicked-looking rifle, raised and ready to fire as they swayed back and forth, sweeping their headlamps around the night club.

Ruchia fought down a rising sense of panic. She might have lost it completely but Seiji was holding on to her arm, his touch reassuring. He was standing completely still, staring at the man who had stopped them, his face a mask of pure rage. Yet he held himaelf, one hand on Ruchia’s arm, the other on Tasuke’s shoulder. It looked like Tasuke was about ready to attack the nearest Institute man, if Seiji wasn’t holding her back. Ruchia wished she had a little of her friend’s courage.

Kaneda was just standing there, looking around himself in confusion, as if he had just awakened out of a dream to find himself there.

The man who had first accosted them strode up to Ruchia and shouted down into her face. He was a big man, with broad shoulders, who wore his silk suit jacket like a military uniform, his tie knotted with absolute precision. His black hair was cut short. “Where’s the other one?” he screamed.

Ruchia cowered before the man’s anger, grateful for the support from Seiji. Her knees were shaking. “What other one?”

“The other girl, stupid! the one who was standing right next to you!” Ruchia could feel the man’s spittle on her face.

“T-t-tasuki? She’s right there.”

“Not her, stupid! The other one!”

Ruchia felt the tears welling up in her eyes. What was this crazy old man talking about?

“What the heck are you talking about?” challenged Seiji. “We’re all right here!”

“Don’t play stupid with me! There were five of you!”

Tasuke jumped into the fray. “What are you, stupid? Can’t you even count?”

One of the shambling hulks in the Institute suits stepped to the side of his leader. “Uh, sir?” His voice came through a tinny speaker on his chest. “We’ve double-checked the surveillance cams. There were only these four.”

“What?!”

“Just the four, sir.”

“Damn! That can’t be!”

“I’m sorry, sir, but…”

“Damn that White Shadow!”

What the heck is he talking about? Ruchia wondered. Anyone could see that there were four of us when we came in. She looked at her friends to see if they might have some idea what this guy’s problem was. She thought that Kaneda was about to say something, but then he thought better of it. He went back to looking confused.

Ruchia had a bad feeling as the man looked them over. He was deciding what to do with them, she was sure. She found herself wishing that Allison were there. This was definitely transfer-student sort of trouble. Ruchia wondered why they had even agreed to meet Allison here.

“Wrap ’em up,” the man said. “Let’s get them back to the institute. They might be contaminated.”

“Hey! You can’t do that!” Tasuke protested. “We’re fine!”

The big man smiled grimly as the institute men in their protective suits closed in around the four of them. “I will be the judge of that.”

Ruchia screamed, Tasuke struggled and kicked, Seiji shouted in defiance, but it made no difference.

“You can’t do this!” Seiji shouted. “Where are you taking us?”

As they pulled a heavy black hood over her head, Ruchia thought she heard Kaneda say, “To the room with no doors.” She heard a thud and Kaneda grunted.

“Kaneda!” Ruchia called. “Kaneda! Are you OK?” He didn’t answer. Hands were on her now, cold, impersonal, heavily gloved hands, grabbing her arms, her legs, her chest, wrapping aroung her middle and lifting her up as if she weighed nothing. She screamed, she kicked, to no effect. She had never felt so vulnerable as the hands moved over her body. “Help me,” she sobbed, but no one answered.

From a catwalk high above the floor of the discotheque Allison watched as her friends were bundled up. Her gut wrenched when she heard Ruchia’s piteous plea for help, and her blood boiled when they hit Kaneda over the head to silence him.

Allison had been wise to get there early, to slip in unnoticed and conceal herself. Had she even suspected that the institute would take her friends, however, she never would have done it. Now it was her fault they were in trouble, and it was going to be up to her to get them out.

But what was the institute? She had guessed that White Shadow came from there, but now it seemed like they were actually fighting against it. Did that make them her allies? Her gut replied with a resounding ‘no’. Perhaps they had a common enemy, but that didn’t make them friends.

Now the Institute had taken her friends. To the room with no doors, Kaneda had said, before they pummeled him into silence. What did that mean? Allison didn’t know, but she suspected White Shadow might.

The three men sat in the grass beneath a mighty tree. They wore their monk’s robes carelessly, exposing their knobby legs and sometime more, causing more than one passerby to avert their gaze with a stricken expression. They sat in order of height; on the lap of the middle monk there was a laptop computer. All three stared at the screen with rapt attention, the colors from the screen lighting up their faces in a steady progression through the spectrum.

“It’s terrible,” the tall one said.

“It’s wonderful,” the short one agreed.

“What are we looking at again?” the one in the middle asked.

“It’s a computer virus,” the short one said.

“It’s God,” the tall one said, nodding in agreement.

“Truth,” the short one said.

“Lies,” the tall one agreed.

“It’s making my lap sweaty,” the middle one said, lifting up the computer.

“That’s what she said!” the other two said in unison. The broke out laughing.

“Next time,” the one in the middle said, “we need to find someone else to be the straight man.”

“Next time…” the tall one said.

“Next time…” the short one said.

“That Seiji boy was fun,” the middle one said.

“Very serious young man.”

“Wouldn’t know a joke if it suffocated him in his sleep.”

“I hope they haven’t killed him yet.”

The three men nodded solemnly, then began to laugh.

Thanks!

Happy January 2th! Uh, whoops…

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January twoth is a holiday in the Muddled Calendar, first suggested by Mr7k a few years back. He pointed out that January first is hardly the time to be getting a start on the new year, what with the aftermath of New Year’s Eve to contend with, and all the sporting events on television to watch. No, much better to have January twoth, New Year’s Day (observed), set aside for all the getting-off-on-the-right-foot activities.

This morning I thought it would be nice to post a short episode here and to spend a little time getting my own year started on a positive note. Then I noticed that January twoth was yesterday. Huh.

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Making Truffles

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The insides and the outsides

The insides and the outsides

There is a thread in my life, a theme that plays out time and again. It is a small part of who I am, a constituent in the definition of ‘Jerry’. This bit of Jerryness is manifest often, and was apparent on the Night of Truffles. Simply put, there is a gap (sometimes quite large) between my image of what I want to achieve and my ability to achieve it.

Take drawing, for instance. On the occasions I have set drawing implement to paper, my mind has produced vast scapes of color and light, form and structure, of a depth that could stir the most jaded soul. What comes out on the paper is, well, not that.

Topping off the Truffles

Topping off the Truffles

And so we come to the task for the evening: painting melted chocolate into the molds, so that it can be filled with different chocolate stuff and then covered with chocolate. It is important to avoid thin spots in the chocolate, lest the structural integrity of the truffle be undermined. Too thick, and the ratio of crunchy outside to smooth inside is lost. The walls of chocolate must reach the top of the mold in even thickness.

Of course, getting the chocolate thickness exactly right isn’t really that big of a deal. It’s not that hard. Yet, as I stood there using a kitchen knife to distribute the chocolate, there was always the platonic ideal of the truffle, haunting me, rendering my sorry efforts inadequate. As a result, the light of my life produced about two truffle shells for every one I made.

That's a keeper!

That's a keeper!

Then came the measuring of the inside goop into the shells. “This is really easy,” the beacon who guides my heart said. “You just have to fill them almost to the top, but leave enough space so the chocolate on top can seal up with the sides.” Yes, but exactly how much wiggle room does that leave me? I was a little better with this task, and occasionally even recognized that the tiny amounts of filling I was adding and removing couldn’t possibly make the slightest difference. In my gut roiled the fear of producing a truffle that cracked or leaked or was otherwise unsightly. When you consider how yummy the thing was going to be no matter what happened, it might seem like a lot of worry over very little. Still, the Ideal Truffle loomed, superimposed by my imagination over each still-incomplete confection.

Not All the Truffles

Not All the Truffles

The next phase of production was best done by two people: the chocolate-topper and the sprinkler. I was elected sprinkler and happily so. My sweetie laid the molten chocolate over the tops of the truffles, then handed them off to me, and I sprinkled peppermint and toffee fragments into the still-soft chocolate. I managed to make this more difficult than necessary (each truffle had to have a good distribution of fragment sizes, and the peppermint looked better with red stripes showing), but not debilitatingly so. (Crushing the hard candy had it’s own uncertainties. Fragments too large? Too much dust?)

Eighty-eight truffles later, it was time to start again.

Ultimately, all the worry was for naught; the truffles came out quite lovely, and tasty like crazy. A few even approached the Ideal Truffle.

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Pfeffernüsse!

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It’s been a week since we made these lovely balls of yum, so I’m just going to let the pictures tell the story.

Rolling out the blobs

Rolling out the blobs

My main job: rolling the rough blobs of dough into little spheres and laying them out on the cooking-stones.

 

The kitchen smelled great!

The kitchen smelled great!

Looking lovely in the oven.

 

Keeping the assembly line moving

Keeping the assembly line moving

They bake quickly, so it’s important to keep the stones moving from station to station in a constant rotation. 44 Pfeffernüses per sheet.

 

Some (but not all) of the cookies.

Some (but not all) of the cookies.

We made rather a lot of them. It was a couple of days later when my sweetie applied the powdered sugar coating.

The best part: naturally we had to eat the ones that broke apart during powdered sugar application. It’s all about quality control, you know.

Thanks!

An open letter to the retard driving a white compact car on Highway 17 in dense fog with no lights

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You, sir, are a fucking retard.

Sincerely,
Jerry

Thanks!

Chocolate-Covered Date Balls

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Rolling the balls in the confectioner's sugar

Rolling the balls in the confectioner’s sugar


The theory seems pretty simple: chop dates and nuts into little pieces, add some brandy, chill the resulting muck. Later, form the goo into little spheres, roll them in powdered sugar, and coat them with chocolate. Voila! A yummy treat to share and enjoy.

Only, not so fast, there, Sparky. All those steps take time, especially if you don’t have a food processor. Our wonderfully-powerful blender just wasn’t up for date-chopping. Not at all. That left the head chef of the household to do the chopping the old-fashoined way, which is also the slow way.

Coating them with chocolate

Coating them with chocolate

My participation began the following night, and true to the theme of “give Jerry the jobs you would assign the ten-year-old”, I was put to work forming the mixture into little balls. After figuring out that when the ball seemed a little too small it was actually the right size my job got easier. Meanwhile my sweetie, the “adult” of our little operation, set to melting the dark chocolate.

slowly working through the batch

slowly working through the batch

Logistics were a bit tricky; in our little kitchen there is not room near the stove to work, so the chocolate had to be reheated periodically. (That also meant that the chocolate coating was a little thicker than it was supposed to be, but I’m counting that as a good thing.)

I rolled, my sweetie dipped, and slowly but surely we made our way through the double-batch of stuff. Chocolate-coating is a delicate process that takes time, and you have to pay attention to what you are dong the whole time. It becomes a mentally draining task.

Not all the balls came out perfect; sometimes, despite my sweetie’s best efforts, the sphere would break apart during dipping. Often the cause was a too-large chunk of pecan — obviously there couldn’t possibly have been any issues with the way the balls were rolled.

Some came out more aesthetically pleasing than others...

Some came out more aesthetically pleasing than others…

By the time we finished, the other project slated for the evening, cooking the pfeffernüsse, was regrettably postponed.

When we were finally finished, there were five date balls that did not pass Quality Assurance and regrettably were not pretty enough for holiday giving. The head chef and I relaxed and sampled a couple of the cast-offs. My sweetie took a bite and turned to me, her eyes round. I took a bite. “Holy crap!” I said. “These are good!”

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Fruitcake Night!

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Coook, my little pretties!

Coook, my little pretties!

The other night my sweetie and I sat down to plan which delectable treats we would be making this year. When she said “we” she really meant it; when fruitcake night rolled ’round I was given my tasks and I went at them with gusto.

My culinary skills do not match those of the light of my life, and the jobs I was given reflected that. No judgement required. I was a measurer and combiner of ingredients, the quantities dictated by the chef. There were several ingredient substitutions along the way. The head of the Operation Fruitcake prefers to use dried fruit rather than the candied fruits found in most fruitcakes. Then there’s the chocolate chips…

There were a couple of setbacks; fruitcake apparently calls for grape juice, and we had none. Not to be deterred, the woman in charge, showing the creative flair in the kitchen that I utterly lack, remembered juice boxes we had bought to drink on road trips. Not quite the same, but who knows? It might be a new secret recipe.

Some assembly required

Some assembly required


While I mixed the dry ingredients the chef concentrated on the wet bowl. (I was given the opportunity to break the eggs, but I declined. For all I talk about cooking eggs, this skill remains elusive for me.) Finally we worked together to combine wet and dry, and had approximately twelve pounds of sweet cakey goo. Mmm… goo.

Putting the goo into the cake pans required more finesse than I would have guessed, but finally we had ten little fruitcakes ready to go into the oven. Time required: fifty minutes. Time it usually takes my sweetie without my help: about an hour and fifteen minutes. Yes, my help was actually helpful, if only a bit.

Naturally, as the participant performing the tasks that one might delegate to a ten-year-old, it fell on me to lick the spoon. Sometimes this cooking business can be rough, but as a team player I had no choice.

And pretty cakes all in a row...

And pretty cakes all in a row…


A few hours later the cakes were finally done (long time at low heat is the way of the fruitcake), and we pulled out our lovely loaves. The finishing touch, the brandy, was lovingly applied by the chef, and the fruitcakes were done.

The following night the resident culinary genius made a batch of her signature white chocolate fruitcake, but alas she had to do so without my mixing-things skills. Somehow I don’t think the quality of the cakes suffered as a result. The cherry booze we got to anoint the white fruitcakes wasn’t very cherry-ful, so we added some Grand Marnier to fruit it up a bit. It’s this sort of improvisation that turns out great for my sweetie. I’m looking forward to tasting how it turned out this time.

Thanks!

A Sign of the Season

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I was sitting at my desk, working away, when my sweetie got back from the store. Being the heckuva guy I am, I offered to help carry supplies up to the apartment. I hauled a box up the stairs that contained, among other things, nine pounds of semi-sweet chocolate, ten pounds of sugar, twenty pounds of flour, and various dried fruit (including 4.5 pounds of raisins). Also included on this shopping trip was a few pounds of butter and some other yummy supplies.

Soon all this will be cookies!

Soon all this will be cookies!


Yep, there’s going to be some baking going on!

Thanks!

NaNoWriMo Wrapup

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Well, November’s in the books and another noveling adventure is over. On the strength of a 7000-word Saturday and an 8000-word Sunday, I flashed across the finish line in a blaze of mediocrity, with 22 hours to spare.

woo hoo!

woo hoo!

The first draft of almost every novel ever written is terrible, which is one of the reasons I like NaNoWriMo. I can spend a month and spew out a draft that is 81% crap, or I can spend months of hard work and craft a first draft that is 73% crap. (Of course that assumes that at the end of the month I have a complete draft, which I haven’t managed to pull off lately.)

So after that exercise in long-winded blathery, I’d like to give you a long-winded summary of the results. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.

Before I get to that, though, I would like to share a lesson I learned this year. It’s not the first time I’ve learned it, but it really hit home this time around. There I was, off on a tangent with a secondary character who didn’t like his job and wasn’t doing it well. Meanwhile I was recognizing that there was no way I was going to finish the story by the end of the month. I stopped right in the middle of the scene and told myself out loud, “Get to the action!” I had a lot of events mapped out in my mind, conflict and death and love and all-out vampire smackdown. Why was I writing about Troy being a whiny little jerk?

Get to the action. I really need to do that more, in everything I write. I think I will write a little program that will flash “GET TO THE ACTION” on my screen every hour whenever Jer’s Novel Writer is the front application.

I got to the action. Here then are some notes about the fruits of my labor.

**** Minor spoilers ahead! That probably doesn’t matter, unless you want to read a sloppy partial realization of the following. Much of the vampire world backstory is never explicitly stated. ****

The Vampire World

I borrowed from extant vampire literature, of course, and I took many of the ideas you guys supplied and ran with them. Should this book ever see the light of day, some of you will be able to point to bits and say, “that was my idea!”

Modern vampire culture is tightly regulated. Vampires must get a permit to hunt, and creation of new vampires is carefully regulated. There is a council of nine vampires that rules on the authority of the charter, a document that spells out the political structure of vampire society. Theoretically, the members of the council are also bound by the laws of the charter.

Since the council members are immortal, there’s not much room for advancement for younger, ambitious members of society. The council is isolated from humanity (many of them feel walking in a city the way we would in a stockyard), and some members are quick to abuse their power. This has led to a volatile situation.

There is a handful of old, powerful vampires who existed before the charter, who enjoy a degree of autonomy within their own territories. These vampires can hunt and convert new vampires without the blessing of the council, but they know that they cannot push things too far. Some members of the council wish to end their special status.

Vampires are truly immortal. Sunlight causes them enormous pain and harm, but given enough time even a vampire with a full ‘sunburn’ will recover completely.

Hunting permits specify a grade of human, from grade zero – drug addicts and bums, the equivalent of a human eating out of a dumpster – to grade five. Grade five humans are rare and tend to be missed when they are killed, so most vampires go their entire lives without tasting a grade-five human. Such delicacies are one of the perks of wealth and power in vampire society.

Throughout most of history, vampires were very selective concerning which humans they would bring into their ranks. This had benefits for both races, but vampires have always been more technologically advanced than humanity. There was a period, however, when many of the more powerful vampires assembled harems. Over the period of two centuries the population of vampires spiked, while the new vampires were selected for physical beauty and special skills (ahem) rather than intelligence of personality traits. Eventually the council cracked down on this practice (once they all had their own harems), and since that time it has been almost impossible for the council to agree on a new conversion.

As in the Ann Rice (with Buffy Extensions) World, there is a special bond between a vampire and their ‘parent’, the vampire that created them. However far apart they are physically, they can always feel the presence of the other. Also from the AR(wBE)W and earlier stories, vampires have the ability to mentally compel others, including other vampires. Most of the harem vampires are under compulsion of their masters.

That’s the world in a nutshell; of course there are far more details in my head that may or may not make it onto the page. Still, it’s a good setting for lots of conflict, especially with the sudden wild card that our friend Deek stumbles across…

The Charcters

Deek is a classic slacker, a nobody, a burden to society. He is also a grade-one meal, but he gets lucky and finds himself with a dismembered vampire under his bed. He knows he has to get rid of it somehow, but whatever he does the vampire will eventually reassemble and come for him. In desperation he eats a small portion of the vampire. It almost kills him, but as a result he absorbs a tiny portion of the vampire’s power. Deek has stumbled on a way to truly kill vampires. He also becomes addicted to vampire flesh. When he finishes the one, he must go find another.

What little Deek knows of the opposite sex he learned in Maxim magazine, and he’s frustrated that his new powers haven’t helped him get laid.

One side effect of his new-found mojo: The aura he radiates makes him appear to vampires as the most delicious-looking human they’ve ever met. He’s like super-concentrated life.

Agatha is one of the youngest vampires. As a human she was a genius without peer, and the vampires converted her. She’s a little odd, however, and no vampire can understand why. The identity of her parent is a secret closely guarded by the council; she has never met her parent and doesn’t feel the same connection that other vampires do. In fact, she is an orphan, a concept completely foreign to vampire thought. She never even considers the possibility, and no one else does either, except…

Igon is the senior member of the council, a wily and corrupt vampire whose power has been growing steadily over time. Igon also knows how to bring true death to a vampire, and has more than once resorted to cannibalism. He is a champion of Agatha, and he killed her ‘parent’ moments after she was converted so he would not be a rival for her attention.

Lumír would be Julius Caesar if this was ancient Rome. He is an ambitious young vampire with a mean streak, and he thinks it’s time for the council to be swept aside. Modern technology should allow vampires to control humanity like never before, turning the world into a giant food factory filled with ignorant, sated, masses following the vampires’ lead blindly. At the 48,000 word mark Lumír crosses his Rubicon, and he engineers a crisis in the council that leads to violence, while Lumír waits in the wings with his outsider friends. When I was telling myself ‘get to the action!’ I was telling myself that Lumír was ready to stir the pot.

Yvette was originally converted to be part of a harem, but her intelligence and personality were strong enough for her to carve her own life. She loves to play with her food. Filled with a lust for life, she is one of Agatha’s only friends. Yvette’s parent was Agatha’s lover for a while, but that didn’t end well at all. Yvette has angered a council member and as a result has not been granted a hunting license in a long time. She is starving.

Jody is a waitress at a local pizza joint, who is increasingly impressed by Deek’s maturation as he is forced to get a job, move out from his mom’s basement, and get his act together. He has risen in her estimation to the “good enough for my friend” status. Deek has a serious crush on her, and has come up with an idea for separating her from her boyfriend. His plan may have complications. I’m just saying is all.

So there you have it! A partially-realized partial idea for a novel. Not all the characters make it to the end, and others come in now and then to mix things up.

When you’re the leader of the vampire council and you’re on the wrong continent when conflict breaks out, time zones can be a real bitch.

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It’s six days to December. I have 29,000 words to go, few work responsibilities, it’s dark, and I’m drinking decaf.

Thanks!