Lurking in the Fringe

Yes, yes, over-quoted line is over-quoted and all that, but it has.

NaNoWriMo has started and I have 1182 words down so I can go to bed. Less than 500 words to get down tomorrow between scrubbing walls in preparation of kitchen remodeling. Yeah, NaNo may be a bit of challenge for reasons other than writer's block (or writer's general whining) this year. On the other hand, even if I don't get my 50k this year I'm going to have new counter tops and a faucet that doesn't drip! And a dishwasher that is built in, and a garbage disposal, and new flooring, and a range hood.... *ah* :)

After due consideration, I think I need a name for a small starship. ( Writing stuff under here. )

On other subjects, I survived the summer trip to see the family, though I had the lovely adventure of having the exhaust drop on the Jeep while traveling the NY Thruway. Thankfully my AAA membership was current and I was able to get a tow to a muffler shop in Canandaigua that was able to get me a new midpipe and catalytic converter (ouch!) and have me back on the road with only two and a half hours of delay.

There's not really a whole lot to say about the last few months.

I read a lot and despaired for the amount of romance crammed into otherwise interesting books. I read a very good original fiction novel by a fan author I enjoy and wished she had written more in that universe. Tanya Huff got me hooked into another series of hers.

I knitted some, but nothing that interesting since I focused on finishing a pair of socks identical to the last pair I knit except for being half an inch shorter in the foot. I'm currently juggling a few doll projects. One is finished and needs to be dyed and blocked, the others are all still in progress. Since one of those is destined to travel to Utah with the one that needs to be dyed I'm trying to focus on that one. Unfortunately the last couple days have been very, very bad with my hands so the 00 needles aren't fun.

I got an awesome haircut that I need to go have trimmed . I should have about two weeks ago actually. Wish me luck in getting it cut the same way again by a different stylist since the one that did the original is back in Massachusetts. There is one stylist I am pretty sure can do the cut, but I can't remember her name (I only had her cut my hair once before) so hopefully she'll be working and I can get her.

I lost a bit more weight, just enough that the awesome jeans I bought on clearance for $3.60 require a belt. I'm very glad I didn't spend more on them or I would be ticked.

And I think that gets everything caught up. Get ready for the NaNoWriMo spike in postings. :)

Kris finally talked me into it. I loaded up my account quickly using the importer and my physical books entered at LibraryThing (those that had ISBNs anyway) and a list of my ebooks that I managed to figure out how to get Calibre to spit out for me (again, those with ISBNs). Between those and the account set up pages of "oh, you like this genre, have you read any of these?" which went on for ages I have a lot of books in there, and I know I'll probably be expanding that when I visit my family and browse the shelves there to remind me of all the books I've read and forgotten.

Before we get to my first review on the site (which is not impressive as reviews go, I'm not much for detail) here's a run down of the Goodreads rating system:
★☆☆☆☆ 1 star "I didn't like it"
★★☆☆☆ 2 stars "It was okay"
★★★☆☆ 3 stars "I liked it"
★★★★☆ 4 stars "I really liked it"
★★★★★ 5 stars "It was amazing"

As a result of this system most of what I read and like ends up with 3 stars. Things I re-read generally end up with 4, and only a very few things get 5 stars. So don't think a 3 star rating from me means it's a bad or even "just mediocre" story, it's something I liked but probably won't re-read any time soon.


The Chinese Maze Murders: A Judge Dee Mystery by Robert van Gulik

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Unlike modern western mysteries where the detective has one case to solve in the course of the story, Judge Dee solves several, mostly unrelated, cases. As a result the feel of the story is more "slice of life" than "dramatic event", which I enjoyed.

Potential readers should be aware that the story does reflect the culture of the times, both that of the writer and that of Judge Dee. There is a lot of casual violence in the day to day life of the characters, torture is a valid way to obtain confessions, and any executions will be detailed at the end. The violence is not glorified, it's just what happens, but if someone is flayed until their bones are exposed you will know it.

View all my reviews

1. Go to page 77 (or 7, or just hit page down 7 times) of your current manuscript.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
4. Tag 7 other authors. They've all done it already I think.

---

You are getting NaNo novels here. Yes, they are all "current", just some are more current than others. :D


NaNo'06 - By Destiny Stained

Synopsis: Read Nightfall? Now imagine that instead of a few hours of darkness that reveals all the stars you get decades of violent weather and dramatic climate change. Also, the most advanced technology in the known world is probably the tiny steam powered toys of that one foreign nation over there.


Nikkol watched Sierna settle into the sand, "You're going to nap? With everything we've heard today?"

"Seems to me that taking sleep where you can get it would be a good habit to develop these days."

The cave was silent for a while. The drone from the harps and the clatter of chimes seemed oddly muted. Sierna sighed softly, "I can't decide if I should tell you to go back north with your people or if I should ask you to stay here."

Nikkol sat up in surprise. "You want me to stay here?"



NaNo'07 - Dead Dolls

Synopsis: Cyberpunk, still without plot. (It's in world building hell stages.)


"It shouldn't take me long, but if the exploding grunts get to you, focus on the wall and the buildings rather than the killing field in between."

"Exploding grunts... great." Aeryn placed the pod and case on the table and settled into her datachair with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. "I'm tapped," she made a face and small sound of disgust, "in, and can things get any more revolting out there?"

Elyza chuckled, "If we knew what they were revolting against, maybe." She dodged Aeryn's blind swat at her as she passed her on the way to the table.



NaNo'08 - Escapement (Actively current! I was working on this a bit yesterday.)

Synopsis: Steampunk with too many plots. (I'm attempting to untangle them a bit so they make more chronological sense.)


Ian stepped through a door to the left of his desk, leaving Prudence and Sarah to study the strange instrument he had created.

"It looks a bit like an astrolabe," commented Sarah, "or rather, an armillary sphere, though I have never seen one quite so elaborate."

Prudence hummed a bit, "I suppose it's only reasonable, since it's a navigational instrument in some sense. I do hope Ian has written down how the use the thing, since I doubt it would be simple to read and I suspect he's unwilling to embark upon a journey of unknown duration just to read the thing for me."

"While traveling with you would be a delight, I'm certain; I doubt my business would survive my absence." Ian returned to the room with a suspiciously thick book, about twice the thickness of most pocket journals of the size, a small box, and a pair of keys.



NaNo'09 - [Still untitled]

Synopsis: I don't even know. This is the one that fractured and only stayed together long enough to get my 50k for NaNo. I have some ideas about fixing it, but they basically involve lifting out the characters, sweeping everything else away, and starting over.


Apollonia heaved a sigh. Right. Just wanting to be normal. "I hope you're wrong."

"Probably am. You and Abe, you like to ignore that people, any sort of people, can be downright stupid in their actions just because not being stupid is hard." Muriel, now stripped of scarf, cowl, and sweatshirt, sifted some loose tea into the mesh basket of her tea pot. "If I told you I thought something strong enough to hide a shroud from an agent had something to do with it, you would have latched onto that like a bear trap and you wouldn't have paid one iota to the possibility that the girl just didn't want to see it." She placed the now filled pot on the small table and plopped a felted cozy in the shape of a chicken over it. "Now that you have faced the idea that the girl looked the other way I can say I think something was meddling and the girl didn't know." She looked old and sad for a moment, "Well, didn't know for sure. She's pretty sharp that one, might have suspected."


NaNo'10 - Never on a Blue Moon

Synopsis: Well I started out with a problem on the moon base but we never seemed to get there....


She was dressed in business casual, charcoal grey slacks, cream top and a cardigan in a color he thought might be labeled 'old Victorian rose' or something. Her feet were covered in a pair of guest slippers that Kyle kept on hand to protect his floors from the horrors of outdoor shoes. "Doctor Samson-Greer, I presume?" she looked at him curiously, obviously expecting someone looking a bit more mainstream.

Most people expect someone with the title of doctor to wear a suit or look like a stereotypical academic wearing a sports coat and slacks, maybe a button down shirt and a sweater vest, or it if was particularly warm, a polo shirt. While Dan generally did wear slacks and polo shirts, occasionally even the sports jackets, and was not adverse to a nicely tailored suit, that was not what caught people's attention. The details tended to change frequently, but it was his hair that generally made people need to shift their mental gears on meeting him. For the moment he was sporting a mixture of thin synthetic dreadlocks, some were bright lime green, others sky blue, but most of them a shade of purple that looked nearly black. He'd left out the plastic tubing and was relatively sparkle free other than a few crystals sewn in here and there.



NaNo'11 - A Favour Owed

Synopsis: Tatsumi owed his old friend Bennu a favour. She didn't expect him to repay it with a small child.


Jaana blinked at the apparent change in topic. “Last I heard, yes. Complaining that more people call him Opa rather than Onkel these days.”

“You might want to have him over from time to time. If the twins see something then Nehi likely will as well. And of course Karen or myself can also confirm if we are here.”

“I had wondered why you were raising the girl, she has Power then?”

Bennu shrugged, “It’s less about her than it is about a favour owed an old friend.”

Apparently there is a kickstarter for a new steampunk RPG called Tephra. I found this out due to some freelance reporter not bothering to check that the account they were linking in their tweet actually belonged to the RPG.

I've been using the name Tephra online since.... hmm, I think 1996. It might have been '95 but I'm quite sure it was before '97.

Anyway, reading about the RPG is surreal since they just call it Tephra in their ad copy.

My standing in the Google search results for "tephra" have been falling for about a decade since I stopped doing my Paint Shop Pro tutorials and such. Maybe this will push me off the first page, that might be fun for change. XD

Remember how I pruned my bookmarks from 3500+ down to under 700? Well thanks to Firefox Sync being stupid they are all back. You see I fired up the laptop, which I forgot was set up to sync, and it put them all back in the version on the sync server, since it does that without asking you if it should even if there are huge discrepancies between the two files. So of course, when I booted up today my desktop synced and FUCK they're all back.

Really, is it so hard to make a sync service that designates one machine as the Master so when you tell it to use that machine's data to overwrite the sync data it then doesn't let the subordinate machines fuck it up?!

I need to go in on the laptop, delete the bookmark file there, and then redo all the bookmark clean up that took me weeks all over again.

Fuck you, Firefox Sync, with a porcupine, sideways.

I heard about it months ago, but at the time I didn't see much use for it. The person that showed it to me was using it as a collaborative idea board and, at that time, it wasn't very friendly to someone just looking around to see what it was all about.

Pinterest has gotten over that little problem. I've only had an account for about a day and a half and I have ten boards and sixty seven pins. I'm sure I will have more by the time I go to bed tonight.

See, I have had this huge bookmark file that I've moved from browser to browser and PC to PC for about fifteen years. It had more than 3500 bookmarks before I ran my latest "find me all the dead links so I can dump them" tool (Check Places add-on for Firefox). Sadly, an automated pruning program doesn't help as much these days as it did years ago, too many domains get parked and links redirect rather than nicely returning a 404 or other useful error codes. So I've been manually cleaning up after the first rough pass and dumping bookmarks left and right. I still have in excess of 2300 of them though.

What does this have to do with Pinterest and my obsession with it? Well that has to do with how I ended up with so many bookmarks in the first place. I wasn't just bookmarking interesting sites, I was bookmarking interesting pages, or even parts of pages. Basically one bookmark per idea rather than overall concept. I don't think I was the only one doing this.

Pinterest gives me a place to put all those "ooh, shiny!" moments without having to add a bookmark into an increasingly convoluted set of folders. Granted, at the moment I'm still sorting out my boards, which are enough like folders that I'm sure they'll multiply like proverbial rabbits, and some things I'd like to put on more than one board, which you can't do right now (maybe in the future... I can hope), but it does give me a nicely laid out visually oriented way to see all those neat things. So the bookmark file is shrinking to things I actually use and all those "hey, that's a cool use for an old light globe and a half burned out string of Christmas lights", "that recipe looks tasty", and "cool, living bridges!" bits are getting pinned.

Of course looking at what other people are pinning is also helping my boards fill... but at least they aren't adding more bookmarks because I just repin them to one of my boards.

Currently if you request an invitation at the site you'll probably get one in under 12 hours (I did). Or you can drop me your email and I can send one to you. If I'm online (which, lets face it, I usually am if I'm not sleeping) you'll get it faster, and you'll probably be linked up as my friend automatically rather than having to hunt me down (I'm Tephra there).

One downside, you are required to have a Facebook or Twitter account to sign up even if you have an invitation. They use that to give you a seed set of people to watch. You can remove those people, and disassociate your account, once your account is created.

On the off chance that someone on my reading/friends list on any of my journals has the answer....

I am looking for an image/photo gallery script/program I can install on my website that basically acts like Flickr for one person. I want to be able to upload images at full size and have a thumbnail and a medium (about 500px) size (at least) generated by the script. I should be able to tag the images at the very least but being able to group them into sets/albums/galleries would be handy. A comment area would be a plus. I, though not necessarily others, should be able to get direct links to any of the generated image sizes as well as the original image. A web interface for uploads would be handy, but not required, and it would be awesome if I could just dumped images into a directory by FTP even if I do have a web interface available.

As I recall my host has PHP4 by default but does allow me to force the use of PHP5 (this is how I got WordPress working there) and I can make SQL databases (MySQL I think, I haven't checked on the specifics there recently).

So, any suggestions?

Or 50,725 if you trust EditPad

I'm sure at least a third of those will be cut in editing, but for now my hands are tired and I don't want to look at it any more. XD

My program says 50,059
NaNo's site says 49,456

Writing more words, I am.

48,560 words down. :)

Alexis and Jordan drifted off but that's okay, Christian and Matt picked up the slack. I think I have another scene with the boys that might finish me off in terms of word count. The actual story needs heavy editing, but that's not surprising. NaNo is not for finishing a polished story, it's for getting a rough draft down.

Thanks to Lexie and Jordan I made it to 46055 tonight.

Paula had little to do with it, and Matt, Cory, and Christian even less, but they did their little parts and Christian and Matt may be taking over tomorrow if I get stuck again.

12/9/11: Disabling comments due to repeated spam.

My hands are really sore today, but I still managed to get to 41,812 words.

I also started a dog sweater. It's for a small dog and I'm already a couple inches into it. I think the pattern dramatically overestimated the yardage required, but I won't know until I finish it. If I don't need the second skein they over estimated.

And sadly, I know at least half of this will be ripped out in editing.

40,098 words

Today's segment brought to you by Sam's creepy stalker of a neighbor. I need to think of a way to keep that poor woman from going home because that guy is seriously creeping me out.

I totally forgot to update yesterday. I had a nice car trip and lunch out and still managed to write some and get to 36,686 words.

Today I reached 38,391 words. I'm still two days ahead and I hope to get to 40k tomorrow.

( Knitting catch up time. )

I think I am out of steam. I hope I think of something to write tomorrow.

33,581

Still two days ahead, no loss of buffer today either, but I really had hoped to be at 35k tonight. Oh well, if I do figure out what to write tomorrow I can try for 36k which will close enough to 36,667 that I might push for it if I have the time.

No matter what I do tomorrow though I must go out and take down the wind chimes outside my window. We have had snow and I've spotted ice forming on them this afternoon. That section where they hang is prone to becoming a very large icicle every winter so the chimes have to come in.

Sick today. Hands hurt. Wrote anyway.

1750 words, which is less than I have been but more than yesterday. My total is now 31,860 which is still two days ahead of schedule.

I'm still not feeling the love for this story, but I do like the characters at least. Except maybe Peyton, he's a prissy ass and doesn't get along with Vince.

I totally did not feel like writing today. I didn't knit either. Frankly I don't know what I did today other than talk to Mom on the phone and that wasn't a very long call (for us).

Anyway, only made it to 30,110 which was just 1084 words for the day, not even the NaNo standard of 1667. I'm still two days ahead though, but only 3443 words in the buffer now rather than 4026.

But! At the end of the last scene I wrote I pulled the names of four new characters out of the air. Yes, this means I have nine named characters to chase around, though I don't expect these new four to be major players. For one thing, other than Director Elizabeth Riedel I have no clue what they do, other than be generic federal level law enforcement types. Basil Ericson will probably need a good manly nickname if anyone needs to call him anything other than Ericson. Peyton Nibbe has me pulling my hair already and I at least think I have an idea of what he does. I think he's going to be a problem when I get him and Vince in the same room, competing professionals I suspect.

The one that has me most interested though, is Logan McGregor. When I was trying to find her given name she told me she was named after her grandmother's family (Logan was Grandma's maiden name). It was a ploy to curry favor with the rich relative and it worked, for Logan. She gets an allowance from her Grandmother, and has a fat trust fund waiting for her to turn thirty.

Logan is actively chatty at me, which is a pleasant change from the other characters. Well other than Vince, Vince sort of had a meltdown on me and got me ahead of schedule with his internal freak out.

29,026

4026 words ahead now.

The urge to take a day off is strong. However it's pretty nice to have a buffer of a couple days, and if I can keep this up for another day or two I'll be three days ahead.

Obviously 30k is close now, that's the goal for the 18th and I'll hit that tomorrow unless I totally flake out. I've been doing about 2k a day so 31k would be logical for tomorrow, however the goal for the 19th is 31,667 so I might try to push for that instead.

Assuming I can force myself to write. I just really don't want to write this year, I'd rather be knitting.

27,032 / 3698 words ahead

I'm getting burned out on this. I like each character individually. I like them together. Unfortunately at this point it feels like it would be more interesting to write about them going out for pizza beer, and bowling. Which, considering I don't bowl, would not be very interesting.

The story should be changing location tomorrow though, and the group is splitting up. One thing my other NaNo stories has taught me is that splitting a group and tracking the splinters makes the word count easier to reach. When I get bored with one group I can hop to the other. Here's hoping that trend continues this year.