Deep Blue

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
E.L. Doctorow


The sports collumnest Walter Wellesly "Red" Smith once said writing is easy. All you have to do is "sit down and open a vein." (Emo sports writers ftw, right?) If that's the case, I've bled all over my book. Err...not like that, okay?

ANYWAY! I finaly got chapter eight done in my book, finisheing off part three with it. I'm really happy with the progress that I'm making lately. I've been trying to give myself regular time to write and review what I've done. I like how the plot is coming along although I wonder if I took to long to get to what *I* considered to be the central plot elements. On the other paw, from the standpoint of a reader, it might simply seem like what the book revolves around is different from what I think it's about. I've done a lot of reworkig over time on the outline that I work off of, and I feel like if I took anything out of the book it certainly wouldn't be the same story.

I'm glad to be back on making regular progress in this, because for a while it was feeling like the year my book takes place in (2035) would be long passed by the time the story is in print. 

I'm just down to the part of reading it myself, having someone else read it, and then making any changes I think that it needs. Then i can sit down with the outline for the next chapter and refine that as it works in. Then, down to part three, chapter nine.

*sharpens pencils*

Okay, so since foxxdamone is busy doing his daily rants I need to interject and put in a few of my own:

First one: TL;DR

I *HATE* people who do that shit! You're telling me you are so lazy that you can't read something? I actually saw this once posted below someone who had posted no more than three lines of text on a forum. What the hell?! These are the same people who proudly announce "i don't read books." I have a co-worker like that and he is really quite proud of the fact that he doesn’t read anything more than a single paragraph. Furthermore, if you can't bother to read what was written, then DON'T COMMENT. It's simple. There’s no reason to say "I don't bother to read things because it had more than five sentences in it." If that's too much for your brain to handle, then crawl back in your cave and go look at your coloring books.

I can understand the whole "wall o' text' thing, where people use no punctuation, line breaks or paragraphs to break up an article of three pages. That's fine. That gives me a headache to read.  But the ones where someone writes something that is easy to follow, and in many cases not more then one or two paragraphs, and you see below it, "tl;dr" makes me want to hit them with a dictionary.

Second one: The Large Hadron Collider

I'll keep this simple for the reason that I could otherwise be going into a lot of physics and I'd inevitably end up with a lot of confused critters.

THE WORLD IS NOT GOING TO END TOMORROW (at least not from the LHC) 

Just because some moron in the media who has no idea what is going on says that a black hole is going to suck up the earth, dose not mean that it's true. My suggestion: read up on physics, and what the LHC is and will be looking for and maybe people will stop text-screaming at me that the the world is going to be sucked into an alternate dimension, and we'll all be made into slaves for our alien overlords by next Monday.

Science. You're doin' it wrong.

Thank you, that is all for now. I'm going to go take an aspirin and relax for now.

Comments are screened.

It sounds like I'm going to be going back to College soon. I was originaly going to wait until I had my credit card debt paid off, but I was starting to come to the conclusion that it was just another in a long line of excuses as to why I wasn't back in school yet. 

One of my co-workers in going to be majoring in Nursing at the same school and we're going to try and take classes together so we can work on the course. I'm going to be trying to knock out about 2 of my coure requirements for spring semester of '09 (Earliest classes I can register for.) I'll probably do my Math and Chemistry ones first, since their my weakest subjects from when I was in school the last time. I'm afraind of what the Math class is going to be like, since I suck so hard at math. I'm one of those people that neds a calculator for 1+1=3. I have roughly 2 years of core work to handle befor I can apply for my formal nursing school, and I've got to make it look good so i can place well. I get the feeling that this second chance might be my last one.

I filled out my application for Georgia Perimeter College yesterday, and I'm going to see the guidance counsler tomorrow after work. I still need to get one of my parents to go to my old High School in Mighigan to have a copy opf my sealed transcripts sent down here, and a bunch of other fun stuff, including my immunization records and transcripts from when I was in paramedic school. Plus, all my forms for finacial aid. There's a few Grants I think I can get, but they're for when I actualy get into Nursing school. I know of one in particular for Georgia Paramedics trying to study Nursing, but I have to find out more about it. For now, I'm tryiong to figure out financing for general classes.

I'll have more updates probably once I talk to the counsler, and know wher I need to go from here.

"Kill; Break me down."
30 Seconds to Mars

I've been playing a bunch of Flash adventure games. You know the kind: The mouse-clickfest puzzle types. There's been some horror themed ones I stumbled across online. I've been doing them for some inspiration for my horror story collection Cairo and I have been putting together. I got a few ideas for what I could play with in a short story. Nothing that hasn't been done before, but that's kind of rare in the fiction world anyway. I do still think that we've got a good colelction going, focusing around the more "classic" horror, instead of this "psyco-killer-axe-murderer-rapist-is-in-my-house" kind of thing. We're going for mkore the true supernatural stuff. Demons, sprits and the like. I know we've both taken a lot of inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft. He's pretty well regarded as one of the great ancestors of modern day horror, and many great current authors of the genre have written things that have very heavy Lovecraftian themes. Stephen King did a few, Dean Koontz has several spots in his books that are Lovecraftian, and the Silent Hill series just reeks of his works. 

Anyway, if anyone likes Graphic adventure puzzle games here's some *really* good ones to play when the lights go out...

Exmortis

Exmortis 2

I was driving through Atlanta this weekend to go to see my friends Foxx and Lion. It was snowing. The first time I'd seen snow since I left Michigan. I couldn't help feeling like I was back in Detroit. The moment of thinking I was somehow back home, shattered then by the realization of where home is now. It was an odd feeling, but somehow not unplesent. It made me think a lot of how things were before I moved. Some good, some bad. Like everything else. Just me in the car, driving to the persistant rhythm of my own memories. I don't get enough time to think to myself any more.

Almost two years ago to the date I was driving on the interstate. I was on I-94 then instead of I-20. I was going to the Detroit Airport so I could catch a plane to Atlanta for a job interview with an ambulance company in a city I'd nevr heard of called "Conyers."  I'd never even been to Atlanta, much less this city, and I had to keep catching myself to think that I was considering moving there on nothing more then the reccomendation of some friends. 

After the interview I was goig to drive to Huntsville meet a friend by the nickname "WhiteLion" whom I'd talked to quite a bit with online. We were excited about meeting eachother for the first time, but I didn't know what to expect fromt here.

There was snow on the ground. I had a CD in my car, playing Pffandorf's "Be Cool" as I drove.

This weekend and that time were so much alike. Going to see the same friends, snow on the ground just like last time. The only thing that was diffrent this time was time itself.

And where I called home...

Okay, so as I mentioned briefly in last nights post, I was having trouble with the rich text editor for LJ, and wrote everything in HTML. Not sure how many people noticed the double spacing in the quote at the top of my post, but I went back today to look at my code to try and figure out why it did that. I can't seem to figure it out. LJ seems to be treating my <"br"> tags like they were <"p"> tags and adding the extra space. Here's the thing though. It's only on here. When i went back and loaded the code into a notepad document to troubleshoot it, it makes the line breaks work properly. Does anyone know why LJ does this? I thought I did the coding right. I even tried to make sure I was following the HTML 4.0 guidelines when doing that. Here's the code below. Replace the [ and ] with angle brackets where needed (Done so that LJ won't try to read the text below as HTML.)