Snow day!

In case you haven't heard we've had a bit of a blizzard over the past couple of days.

For people in some areas it would barely be newsworthy, but this is the Deep South--we barely get an inch of snow a year. So, getting about two-and-a-half inches in a few hours is an event.

Our office closed yesterday afternoon and I thought I could drive home--nope. I finally gave up and parked the truck in a parking lot and walked the rest of the way. Fortunately, it's only a mile or so. I used to walk a lot further than that all the time. There are those who had to walk a lot farther. Some of my co-workers in our other office couldn't leave at all and wound up spending the night at work.

In other words, this is a snowpacolypse.

The temperatures not rising above freezing today isn't helping. Even though the snow has long since stopped, it'll melt a little then refreeze. The resulting sludge is not conducive to walking, driving, or anything.

Of course, the disruption to my schedule, even though it's sort of an extra vacation day for me, makes it really hard to focus. I've done some writing--and it wasn't bad if I do say so--but it's kind of hard to concentrate..

I did get everything I needed to file my income taxes yesterday so I went ahead and did that today. So it's not a total loss.

So, if you live in my area (Georgia, USA), you do not want to go out and go anywhere unless you absolutely have to. Really. Alabama, too.

I'm sure my Scandinavian, Canadian, and Northern US friends are having a hearty belly-laugh at our expense. If you find out plight amusing, just you wait until summer gets here . . .

The problem with stupid characters . . .

I really needed a character in this thing I'm working on to do something stupid.

The problem is there are entire constellations of stupid things that stupid people can do. I needed to decide on what particular stupid thing this idiot would do. Fortunately, what I decided advanced the story in multiple ways, and what another character--not quite as stupid--does in reaction to it sort of gives the plot a nice little twist that it desperately needed. Basically, you think the story is going one way when suddenly it heads off in another direction.

Let's hope it's a good direction. I think it is. It feels right, to me.

This is Act III of this little thing I was hired to write. I've still got a long way to go on it--it needs to weigh in at around 120 pages and I'm at 80 or so now. Still a lot of story to tell, though I'm seeing the ending now.

And this is just the first draft. I'll have a lot of rewriting to do on it--but, for me, the first draft is the hard part. Once the words are on the (virtual) page, it's a helluva lot easier to go in and change them.

I think for any project--novel, screenplay, what-have-you--the first draft is probably the most important step. Most writers I know approach it incorrectly. They want their first draft to be producible, or publishable, and it won't be. And it shouldn't be. There are a lot of things in this screenplay that I'm going to have to redo, rethink, rewrite, delete, replace,, what-have-you, when I do the rewrite. Not to mention the notes I'm going to get from my collaborator, when she reads it.

You know what? I'm not worrying about it. That's relegated to the rewrite. Worrying about that stuff now would be inappropriate. I will worry about that stuff--and fix the problems I know this thing has--down the road. Right now I just need to tell the story.

Okay, lecture over. For now.

Projects, ho!

I've been obsessing over this screenplay I've been hired to co-write over the past couple of weeks. It's coming along nicely, I think--we'll see what my collaborator thinks when I send it to her. She's the producer, too, so making her happy is priority number 1 right now. My guess is she'll really like parts of it, and other parts she'll want to kill me after she reads them.

That's what rewrites are for. It's part of the process.

I also had an idea for another movie--or maybe a novel or something like that. I'm putting it on the back burner--the movie thing has to take priority now, and this is new thing is going to take an awful lot of research. It's sort of a legal thriller, and since I'm not a lawyer and don't have easy access to one anymore I'll have to find one to use as a source for help with the technical details.

It's a long weekend for me--MLK Day is a holiday for our company--and my plan is to work on this movie thing pretty much exclusively. I'll toy around with this new thing a little bit, when I need a break, but for the most part I'm going to get as much done on the first draft of this screenplay as I can. I've got a couple days off in February and my goal is to finish the first draft by then and begin the rewrite.

It's good to have goals. It's even better to make a serious effort to meet them. The pressure you put on yourself sort of acts as a goad for the creative parts of the personality, forces you to stay on schedule so you get things done. Of course, you shouldn't put too much pressure on yourself or you'll either produce crappy work or not be able to produce anything at all. But you do have to put some emphasis on meeting self-imposed deadlines or there would be no benefit and no point.

I hope that previous paragraph doesn't read as if I'm just talking to hear myself talk.

So, the plan for the weekend--writing, writing, writing, laundry, making a little art maybe, and writing.

The Sorcerer's Daughter . . . redoing the redone redo

I think I'm going to take another stab at writing The Sorcerer's Daughter.

I've decided instead of making it five books I'll just make it one. One big one. That feels like the right decision to me.

Of course, I need to reconfigure the plot, but that will actually be easier now, I think. I can jettison some stuff that I wasn't wild about in the first place.

So, that's the project for this weekend, plotting that out and maybe starting the first draft. That, and working on my art.

I'm going to stop attempting to paint anything for a while--my last few attempts have been less than successful. To put it mildly. I think I'm going to play around with pastels and just work on my sketching, which is coming along pretty well.

I know I'd get better at painting if I took some classes or something, and I probably will at some point. But not right now. Right now I need to work on writing.

2014, at least so far, has been pretty good to me. It started out poorly but has picked up quite a bit over the past couple of weeks--lots of good stuff going on, not just with me, but with people who are important to me, too. I think good things are in store for us.

I just wish at least some of these good things would hurry up and get here!

Stone cold randomocity

I've been drawing my ass off over the past few days.

It's nothing I'd like to post for anyone to see--it's mostly just doodling. Mostly practicing drawing things like animals (birds, frogs, toads, etc.) and faery faces, that sort of thing. I'd like to get to the point where I can sketch this stuff quickly.

So far, so good, on that front.

As to painting--not so much. I've attempted several paintings over the past few days and they all sucked. Oh, well. I'll keep working on that.

I've made some decisions about some prose work, changing some story ideas around so that they appeal to me. I may revisit The Sorcerer's Daughter series and plot it out a little more--I've identified a couple of problems with it I need to address. I may also revisit The Harvester of Faces--or, rather, the milieu in which it is set.

I don't know. Eventually something will speak up.

I also have a film project I need to be working on. I'm going to start looking at that again today.

I did get some good news about a personal situation involving a good friend--this was something that I was really worried about, and have been for months now. It's now resolved, in the best possible way, so that is one thing I can stop worrying about.

If you live in the US you've probably noticed the weather here. Temps here are supposed to be in the single digits Tuesday morning. While some parts of the country expect winter temps like that, here it never gets that cold. So, weatherwise, it's going to be interesting this week.

See, I'm talking about the weather. I must be out of things to say.

Logic has nothing to do with it--what the Left doesn't get

I keep hearing, from other Lefties, that it befuddles them that so many people here in the United States continue to vote Republican, and, therefore, against their own interests. They present arguments about how trickle-down economics doesn't work, how cutting the social safety nets is a bad idea, and how taxes on the wealthiest people need to be increased and loopholes closed.

All to no avail. There's a reason for that.

If you talk to these neo-Conservatives you'll find the overwhelming majority of them are Evangelical Christians. Back when Ronald Regan ran he reached out to that particular demographic, promising them that they would have a strong voice in his government. These people started hearing in their Sunday morning sermons about how they needed to vote Republican. The GOP became the GOD party in their minds.

Forget that Regan pretty much ignored these people once he was elected. To these people, that doesn't matter. All they hear is "Vote Republican." So, that's what they do. These people do what they're told and they aren't going to spend much time thinking about it.

You have to have that mindset or you wouldn't be a Conservative Christian in the first place.

So, that's the problem. You can lay out your position, logically, giving real-world examples that anybody would understand. Hell, they may even agree with you.

But they'll still vote Republican. Doing otherwise is now inconceivable.

Fortunately, most of this crowd is getting old and dying off. Younger people are growing up with the Internet and finding out that there is a big world out there--they're making friends with gay people, people of other or no faith, people of other nationalities, and discovering that they are, in fact, people, just like them. They're seeing the faces of the people who are harmed by cuts to Food Stamps, to other programs designed to benefit the less fortunate. It becomes harder, then, to support more cuts, and to support the politicians who keep trying to implement them.

In the meantime, though, we still have to put up with the backwards, racist, Christian-centric idiots who are just going to vote Republican no matter what. Hopefully it won't be much longer.

That's why I don't argue. When it comes to religion, arguments are pointless.