2k10

Happy Thursday! It's the last Thursday of the year AND of the decade! Isn't that pretty cool. Without Thursday, this year would just go on forever. And who wants that?

I'm glad to report that Beatlemania is still in full effect. To the extent that yes, my poster did arrive yesterday! I would like to take a poll: who is your favorite Beatle?

Lol Firefox. "Beatlemania" is surely a word while its root, "Beatle" has that dreaded red underbar of misspelling. Incidentally, so does "underbar," but I never expected that one to pass.

Today at work was insane! I was at the register, with a line all the way back to the first row of shelves, for a full two hours straight. It's probably the busiest that store has ever been in its life. ('e's juss a liddle guy) I also had a creepy old man ask me out! Not a fan of that.

So 2009 was cool. I did a lot of nothing, and so many movies, and plenty of video games and I wrote a novel I got a fish tank and I lost 10 pounds and had to start paying health insurance and loans. :<

2010: What will you be? Not only a new year, but a new decade, full of unfulfilled promises. Haha, I mean, wondrous possibilities. What will the fads be? How will people dress, and what music will they listen to? How will people look back on it and what will they laugh at? No one knows yet!! Isn't that exciting.

Another poll: What was your favorite decade? Mine's the 40s.

This year I hope to move to LA and write a movie or two and see what the real world is like. I also want to beat all the Final Fantasies I've started. That would be nice.

Hokay, so I have dance parties to attend to, so I'll be off. I hope you all have a great night and a shiny new year!! Here goes nothin'.

-Steph

Merry Thursday Happy Christmas

Happy Thursday! And also Merry Christmas, to those of you who had to wait this long for it. We were super busy at the store today, although I was warned that tomorrow is the biggest refund day of the year. :<

So Christmas was good! We did shopping and baking and family Christmas things. Here's something you need to bake right now:

Golden Kolacky
Blend one stick butter (1/2 cup) with 4 oz. cream cheese. Add a cup of flour. Refrigerate an hour or so.

Roll it out and make squares one way or another. The recipe said 2 1/2 inch squares but I didn't measure. THEN. put a little jam or preserves on each square and fold over two corners. Like a broken taco. And then bake them for like 10 minutes at 375.

Don't bite them too soon, or the jam will burn your face. I used apricot. Tastes just like breakfast.

And my sister made some pretty good pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from the same book. I made Russian tea cakes with crushed up candy cane, but it would have been better with Andes or something less crunchy. We made dough for Finnish nut logs, but I didn't get around to baking them until like yesterday. They're alright.

I sewed my sister an apron that was sort of cute, but I forgot to take a picture. And I made my mom a pink fleece capish thing with brown fuzzy collar thing. And there's fringe! I did my first functional button holing on these projects.

Does anyone need an apron? I'll make you one. To order.

Also, come visit me, and I'll cook for you. These are things I love to do.

Something else I love is Ringo Starr. I got my dad a remastered DVD set of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, and we watched that. I sorta grew up with the Beatles, but not really, and just since the Rock Band came out am I learning about them for real. What a cool band. And Ringo is my fave.

Also, me and Carolyn beat Borderlands yesterday. The ending was a surprise. A large surprise.

Merry Christmas!

-Steph

Fake Christmas Ahoy!

Happy Thursday! For some of you, Christmas is only a week away! For some of you, and by that I mean my family, Christmas is the day after tomorrow!!!11!1!!!

My sister flew into town today, and had a very exciting day including going to a museum. I did not get to go to a museum, because I had to work. Sadface. But later we're gonna get our drink on and play Beatles Rockband Yeah!

We went to this Mexican place that has a bakery in the back, so I'm just a little sugared out right now.

What I forgot to tell you about Sarah Chronnorcles is that I got to the end. And by forgot I mean I hadn't watched it yet and by end I mean that horrible season three set-up and then they were canceled. Seriously, I'm glad they were stopped; season three would have been a bucket of ridiculous. BUT. Season two was actually reasonably good. The high points were the stand-alone episodes that felt free to be artistic and play with storytelling and time management. It may have been because they had no pressure from the audience? And by that of course I mean that there was no audience.

But no. There became a new robot who did even more wonderfully robotty things, and that was a major plus. My least favorite ever character from BSG started being on it, and that was a major minus but at least I could skip over those scenes without too much guilt. So, all in all, it ended up being a pretty decent show. It just took them too long to warm up.

Hmm now I feel like I have run out of news. Got all my shopping done in time for Fake Christmas, but still gotta go out tomorrow to drive my sister to get her shop on. Then we're gonna bake and sing and dance and have a merry time. I made a chocolate roll, like a cake rolled up with whipped cream inside, and it was like the best thing I ever made. I'll make you one. For real Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Next year.

Have a good one, everybody!

-Steph

The Future is Not Set

Happy Thursday! Last week I was too busy talking about something (NaNoWriMo?) to also tell you that that was the week I watched the second two (middle two?) TERMINATOR movies. Let's discuss.

Before BSG there was Matrix, and before the Matrix there was Terminator, and before Terminator there was the original BSG, but let's go back a step. Basically, you know how it goes: our incensed desire to build bigger and better and faster, our reliance and unthinking dependence on technology will be our doom. Because one day it'll be biggest and best and fastest, and the one thing the newly-awakened technology will invariably conclude is that humanity has no place in this universe (except in the Matrix, where it has a tiny place).

I told you about how I saw the first TERMINATOR a while back; its 80s veneer distracted me from being able to appreciate it. But without it you would have no T2, which, for all its equally cringe-worthy 90s-ness, is a really good movie.

And then of course they made the third, which was slightly more sophisticated than the first, but still a nonsense movie by any calculation. Haven't seen :Salvation, yet, but now that I've seen the original movies, the trailer really really makes me want to see it.

In the meantime (the two more weeks I have to wait), I rented TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES. Let's talk about this a moment, yes.

A) Unfortunate title. I usually just call it "the Sarah Cronnah Cronnacrles."
B) Misfortunate casting. If the idea is to return emphasis to Sarah Cronnah (from John Connor, who steals the show the minute he has the chance; but, hey, it's his fate and all), then it probably would have been a good idea to cast someone who could command your attention. Suffice it to say they did not.
C) Nonsense storytelling. To be fair to the above (and the others, who are clearly trying so hard to act), the performers are seriously handicapped by the ridiculous things they are expected to perform. Everything from dialogue to series plot is poor. Just out of the gate, and it's already worse than HEROES.
D) Television budget makes for a sad action movie. Every battle was carefully crafted and executed in the movies. They just don't have the capabilities to reproduce that scale of stunt on a weekly basis. It deflates the risk felt at each encounter, because you know they'll get away from the cops one way or another. The show doesn't particularly care how they do it.
E) FBI guy. Unnecessary.

All of this is a real tragedy, because after seeing the Terminator Trilogy, I can totally see why someone would want to resurrect this playground and have it available on a weekly basis. The Terminator story is Cool. Terminators are Cool. The Connors are Cool. Sarah Cronnacrles is not.

Things that make me sit through episodes while I would rather be hitting myself in the head with a hammer:

A) Summer Glau. And did you see her on DOLLHOUSE last week? She has an ability to become the character - an ability I had previously assumed she did not possess. Glad to be proven wrong.
B) Thomas Dekker. One of my favorite characters from HEROES. He was in like, maybe four episodes. Stupid HEROES.
C) Cameron the Terminator. This should actually be a subset under (A), but I'm struggling to come up with positive thoughts. I love this Terminator because she's ridiculous and gets to say ridiculous things that only robots can get away with saying. In conclusion, I love robots.
D) Bear McCreary. My man is going to get pigeonholed for only writing music for robots-who-look-human-destroyed-humanity-but-some-are-our-friends-sci-fi shows.

I guess that's it. It's silly that I'm only watching it because of the impact T2 had on me. THAT MOVIE. Whereas the first (and third. and fourth? TBD) movie only really wanted to be an action movie, T2 effortlessly combines real action with real drama and real stakes and real emotional impact. The two Connors are equally strong leads with equally strong character--if you thought Terminator was about Schwarzenegger, you're terribly mistaken.

I mean, I'm even willing to go along with their messed up timeline. It's so integral to what these characters believe, that you CAN change the future, that I don't even want to fight them on it. Guess I don't have the heart to tell them they're wrong. Or, as in the case of Terminator 3, they'll find out the hard way.

Anyway, all this to say that you need to see T2; I need to see :Salvation; I'm not sad Sarah Chronnorcles got canceled. I am still sad about DOLLHOUSE.

This week and next week at work is Employee Appreciation Week (they appreciate us so much a week is 13 days) and we have 10 free rentals instead of five. I'm open to suggestions.

-Steph

NaNoWriMo: A recap

Happy Thursday! How are you all liking your winter weather now? I mean, because ours just started and I can't deny that it's winter anymore. And wow, was Thursgiving only a week ago?! It was. Amazing.

So, National Novel Writing Month was the thirty days of November. Its purpose: encourage writers to "just do it." The task: write a novel-length project (identified as 50,000 words, more accurately a novella) over the course of the month. Mathematically, writing 1,667 words a day would enable a writer to finish right on schedule.

I'm happy to announce that as of November 29th, I logged 50,061 words. I won! This will prove my results. If you click on the "Nano Stats" tab, you'll be able to see the bar graph I spent half the month staring at. It came pre-loaded with the gray bars, marking the additional 1,667 words for each day, for you to compare your progress against.

I like that my results were more or less steadily rising, with the notable exception of the end of the second week where I stayed two days behind for three sets of days. As you might guess, that's when the reality of the project was hitting, a week where I said, "I did enough writing, I'm gonna go play video games and catch up later." Which I told myself was okay, because I knew I was going to catch up. I knew I was going to finish.

The biggest impact NaNoWriMo had on my month was that suddenly I had to write every day. Duh. You might think that that stipulation would not be as shocking to someone like myself, who you might imagine as someone who writes all the time. But my secret is that I rarely write, unless the mood strikes. But in November, regardless of mood--or availability of ideas--I had to sit down and write. And I couldn't play video games or watch movies, because I always had to write first, so I would make the quota for the day.

Sometimes I would stay up past the day cut-off, just matching the previous day's goal before I went to sleep. Then the next day it would feel like I would only have to do 1,667 more, even though, chronologically, I'd logged a couple hundred words that day already. But that plan wouldn't always work, like when I had to be up in the morning to work. Or if I knew I'd be at work until 10 or 11 at night, that wasn't enough time before midnight to slam out what needed to be slammed out. So I had to be mindful of the time I was spending on every activity, knowing at some point I had to fit in an hour or two of writing.

Not that I didn't spend a lot of time on other activities, though. You may remember the day I sewed an apron, for example. I have a natural aversion to required activity, and even though it was strictly for fun and no one was breathing down my neck, I found myself needing to avoid it and do something unproductive for a while. I think that was okay, though, like I was telling the writing, "I'm in control, and I will take care of you when I need to." Not like pulling an all nighter on some paper that you just end up hating. I think that if I had sat down and made myself write fiction in the way I've previously had to make myself write essays, it would have become an unpleasant experience.

So it was a fascinating experiment in regards to goal-setting (and achieving!), and time management and commitment. And I was very confident about the whole thing, because I didn't necessarily have to worry about the quality of my product--not that that isn't going to matter eventually, but as an exercise in training diligence, the act of writing superseded the need for simultaneous criticism. As in, you write a lot more if you don't spend half your time going back and trying to make every sentence perfect. There's time for editing later.

As for what I learned about writing, the most surprising thing I discovered was how large my story actually was. I've never really written anything substantial before, not something that covers a lot of ground and has a plot and stuff. Mostly what I write when I sit down and write are "one shots;" basically I write scenes and call them stories. But this story, this thing I'm calling "Epoch," is actually a story, following these two characters across years of their lives. But that wasn't even the long part!

Back in the spring, I wrote a scene, a story, about a fight between two people. Intercut between the present tense narrative were past tense flashbacks, each one informing the connection between the two characters, answering the question of why they were fighting, and what the fight meant. Over the summer, I sat on it, edited it a little, and then started seriously thinking about what would happen next.

But before I could think about where those people were going, I had to think about where they came from, or else there would be little emotional impact when you see what their current life is like. Because things used to be great, and then someone made a horrible mistake and now things are awful. Running with my flashback theme, I decided that the following narrative would have chapters that switch off from flashback to current timeline, creating a checkerboard of story lines from the past and the present.

With that in mind, I created an episode from the past to flesh out, as the first "chapter" following the initial story. And then the second chapter would be back in the present, carrying on from the end of the fight. Instead of actually writing this chapter, I thought about it a lot, wanting it to actually be plotted and have a mystery and clues and interlocking pieces, because that's not something I've ever done and it's hard for me to keep track of things like that. But it's the type of storytelling I admire the most--the tightly wound step-by-step plotty type stories. The ones that really come together in the end, and you're equal parts "I knew deep inside that was going to happen" and "I never expected that to happen!!"

So when my sister was all "do NaNoWriMo!!!!" I said, "I have other things I need to be writing." That excuse eventually turned into "I'll just write that thing I have planned, since I should be writing it anyway," with the goal to write 50k new words of the previous idea.

What happened was that plotted story, while surprising easy to slam out 16 hundred words of a day, ended up wrapping up at around 25k words. As in, instead of being the first chapter, it turned out to be half the book. And that's when I realized just how massive this idea was. Simultaneous realizations were: if I had known how much work this would be, I never would have started/if I hadn't just started, I never would have done it. So I'm infinitely indebted to NaNoWriMo for showing me what a real story looks like, even just in the physical page-count sense.

Oh, and the crazy thing, when I finished the "first chapter," and I had to strike out into literally uncharted territory, those first few days into the "second chapter" where fraught with anxiety and the sense of drowning in a deep and endless sea. I didn't know what to write! So I vomited up 1,667 words of pretty much irrelevant nonsense, thinking hard on the next step between times, and in a couple of days I was confident enough in my path to continue on and finish a day early. And I do think that if I didn't have a deadline, a reason to plot quickly, I would have thought and thought and never actually written the next thing until maybe one day I was really bored.

The other thing I learned is that I'm a big-picture story person. The actual act of writing isn't necessarily my favorite thing on earth, I mean. Putting words in order to convey narrative, that's not what I want to do. I don't want to be a novelist. But I want to create story; I want to come up with epic clashes and heartbreaking interpersonal conflicts and and I want this person to say this one thing that changes the world. I want to write, but I don't want to be the one to write it down. I think that's part of why I turned to screenwriting, because the script is not the end product. The script gets turned into something else more than the script, where the story is expressed in performance and lighting and camera movement and musical scoring. In literature, the art is all there on the page, and I don't feel comfortable enough in the crafting of the English language to concentrate on excelling in both content and format.

But yes! I've written a novella amount of words, no small feat! And I will continue to write this story, until it reaches its charted conclusion. And then I will spend a year or two editing it so that I do not offend English-literate people. Then you can read it! If you like vampires and magic-using and girls with swords and stuff. Or if you're a proponent of second chances and an opponent of prejudice, which is what the story is actually shaping up to be about. It's all good.

OKAY. I apologize for talking your ear off about this thing, but this is my formal debriefing on my experience, and it's an experience I'm glad I had. Here's to next November--and Script Frenzy in April! Write 100 pages of screenplay in one month! Yeah. You know I'm there.

Oh, I'll leave you with my playlist for my character's story arc. Maybe you can guess what it's about:

When the Day Met the Night - Panic at the Disco
Princess of the Universe - Queen
Runaway - Linkin Park
Can't Take It - The All-American Rejects
End of the World - Armor for Sleep
The Promised Land - Nobuo Uematsu
Pyramid - Wolfmother
The Show Must Go On - Queen
No Reply - Yoko Kanno
Easier to Run - Linkin Park
What I've Done - Linkin Park
My Suicide Your Homicide - Carter Burwell
Everything Changes - Staind
Leave Out All The Rest - Linkin Park
Savior - Rise Against
This is Not the End - The Bravery
Before It's Too Late - Goo Goo Dolls
The Adventure - Angels and Airwaves

Enjoy!

-Steph