Every Wednesday you can find me over at Adventures in Writing.

Today I talk about women, books and voice.

And I feel fine!

It was sixty years since the “big stop” happened, the day that everything ceased moving, the skies grew quiet.  In the interim life has gone on, changed but still continuing.  The Mad Max world envisioned by Hollywood never came to pass, there were no wild packs of roving gangs with guns, no turbocharged death machines filling the roads.  It was more of a return to a simpler time, with horses supplanting cars again, roads slowly losing their pavement, and man losing his place as the master of nature.

*The end of the world as we know it!

After my Dog Town game ended, I was looking around for something to engage me.  I thought about doing some rules-lite stuff, but suddenly I found that wasn’t quite “crunchy” enough.  Yes, I’m hooked on the crunch.  Somehow I hit on the idea of post-apocalyptic.  I have no idea where it came from, but it was fuled by a cheap modern pulp post-apocalyptic book and some episodes of “Life after people” on Discovery.  I was hooked.

I wanted to investigate the bones of society, so I started casting around for rules.  I initially thought of Savage Worlds with the Gamma World addition, or even original Gamma World, but they seemed either too combat-oriented, or too origial D&D.  I wanted something…crunchy…investigative.  I thought, something like Daredevils, the old FGU pulp game that’s one of my favorite systems I never played.  I thought of converting that, but then I remembered the sister product: Aftermath!  It too was FGU, and by Robert Charrette and Bob Hume.  I downloaded it from RPGNow for $8 and yup, it’s the same system, but crunchier!  I was in heaven.

I’ve been working on character creation, learning the system and how to build the people to populate the world of Aftermath!  The beauty of this system is that you can end the world any old way you feel like it.  Comet?  Sure.  Nukes?  Of course.  Dragons?  Heck yeah!  The GM has ultimate control over how to put an end to his world and what the world, how long it’s been and what’s happened in the meantime.  Of course all that has to be built, but that’s part of the fun.

For my setting I’ve posited that no one really knows exactly what happened on that day sixty years previous, all they do know is that everything collapsed after that.  Aftermath! suggests a 90% kill rate for the first go around and then a 50% rate on the “second kill”, the riots, plagues, and general collapse that comes about as a result of what happened in the first kill.  I’m taking the view that people will have been too busy surviving to really record and remember the details of what happened in those dark days.  And now sixty years later those first survivors are now almost all gone, and the ragged remains of government wants to find out what is known and how to rebuild.

I figure that the US government was pretty much whiped out.  I have water starting somewhere to the south of DC and continuing north, a bite out of the continent where the big eastern seaboard cities used to be.  The government, such as remains, is based somewhere in Arkansas or Georgia, leaders of a republic in name only.  The states haven’t been heard from in decades, but finally the feds feel it’s time to reestablish contact and piece the nation back together.

To do this, the impoverished President sends one man out to scout, investigate, record and connect.  He is Peter Stone, a survivor of the original collapse as a child, and in the meantime has become a historian of the broken future.  It was he who discovered the lack of land to the northeast.  N0w in his 60’s Peter travels the country looking for a country to rebuild.

In his travels he meets Jane, a near nameless girl of the present, born to who knows who, and from who knows where, Jane only knows that she’s in her late teens and is searching for the family she never had.  As a child she was handed from family to family, working for each, until she gained her independance.  Now she drifts from place to place, looking for things she recognizes or remembers, trying to find herself.

To follow, the characters…

This week Teach First,  a charity founded to encourage top graduates into teaching  and which places such graduates in ‘challenging’ secondary schools has contributed to a long-standing debate on setting in its latest report: Lessons from the Front 2009.

In this report the issue of setting is raised. 

Setting is a practice whereby pupils are taught in subjects according to their ability in a particular subject, and has been commonly used in secondary education, including in comprehensive schools despite the apparent ‘mixed ability’ characteristics of comprehensive schools.  The significance of setting is that it has been implicated in the continued under-attainment of working class pupils and fuels a differentiation and polarisation of school cultures.  Classic sociological studies which discuss and illustrate this include Hargreaves’s 1967 study: Social Relations in a Secondary School; Lacey’s 1970 work: Hightown Grammar: the school as a social system, and Ball’s 1981 study: Beachside Comprehensive.

Now, in the report conducted by Teach First, the graduate teachers working in schools have added to this with their observations that not only is setting damaging for pupils in lower sets in terms of motivation and low teacher expectations, but that setting is there for the convenience of teachers.

However, viewers of last week’s episode of Waterloo Road may have taken note of how Grantly Budgen reacted when the introduction of setting was proposed.  He clearly did not appear to be inconvenienced by the prospect of setting and was concerned about a teacher’s status being reflect by the ability group he or she taught.   In fact many of his colleagues shared a concern   introduction of setting, perhaps sharing some of the concern of the Teach First teachers?

It’s time to talk about the inhabitants of the Land of the Clans. As one could easily deduce, the humans from the various bloodlines of the Three Clans form the core of this setting, but they’re not alone. Like most fantasy settings, Ghost Song has its fantasy races. The strong difference, though, is that only humans are playable. You don’t pick a race at character creation, everybody is the same race, and bloodlines are not akin to races at all.

While they cannot be used as a player character option, creatures of legend are actually very common in the Land of the Clans. Every peasant has a tale about seeing one while walking through the woods at night. Not suited for playing doesn’t equal rare or inexistent; in the Land of the Clans, the contrary holds true. They are all around; as weird as they are strong. They are the Trolls.

Trolls are varied; they have their own ways on the material and spiritual world, and their power is unmatched by typical men. Given the right paths, which vary from the roots of a tree to the reflex of a mirror, a Troll can move freely between the two worlds, and their territorial nature commands them to try and hold sway over both.

Some trolls are very similar to elves, orcs or dwarves, and these traditional fantasy races do not exist in Ghost Song with all the traits they’re commonly associated to. Trolls are really much stronger than any beginning player character, and so alien in their own interests and objectives that they would deserve their own stories, with a ban on human characters.

In the Ghost Song setting, they’re the main antagonists, and usually carry a feeling for human people that varies from mild dislike to outright hate. In the Land of the Clans, people are taught from the early childhood to avoid the places were trolls make their homes, and the majority chooses to follow these teachings and avoid conflict with the ancient folk.

In the past, after the end of the Age of the Ghost Kings, but before people started counting the years of the Three Clans, a court of trolls managed to slave entire tribes of men, and ruled over the land with an iron grip. The trolls of the Bari Court were banished to the spiritual world by Gantharon and the scions of the Lion Clan, but they never forgot; six thousand years is not enough time for a troll to forget anything.

As the campaign of Ghost Song begins, the 1317th year of the Kingdom of Henithar unfolds with a war between the various houses of Bari tearing the court apart, and bringing some of the most powerful trolls in the spiritual lands back to the material world for the first time in two ages. One more time, as this campaign setting takes form, the fate of men and trolls is connected, and it’s too early to predict what will come from that.

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about writing lessons I learned from reading Ann Bishop.  While I was writing that post I realised that every book I read teaches me something about writing and I started to think about some of my other favourite writers.

Terry Pratchett writes the Discworld series and they are an incredible collection of books with some of the best fantasy characters, interesting plots and settings, and a hilariously satirical look at life.  Most readers of the series agree that they prefer some books over others.  For me, I like the stories that revolve around the witches, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.  These are two of my favourite characters.  Strangely enough neither actually appear in my favourite Pratchett story, The Truth.  One of my friends prefers the stories involving the night watch in Ank-Morpork and I find these the least interesting.

What I have I learned from reading Pratchett?

1. Just because it is a serious situation doesn’t mean you have to take it seriously.  With the number of times the discworld has almost ceased to exist and the perils that the characters are constantly placed in, if any of it was taken seriously this would be a very dark, very depressing series to read.  Instead, the more dire the situation, the more inexplicably ridiculous the solution is likely to be and yet it makes a certain kind of sense.
2. Creating diverse characters and developing them fully allows you to tap into diverse readership.  While I don’t like the guards so much, I read the stories because they are still well constructed characters, but I love the witches.  My friend isn’t a fan of the witches and prefers the guards.  Other people I know love the stories about Death and his grand-daughter.  We all read the same books but we are all reading for a different reason.
3. When creating a realistic fantasy world, all five senses have to be engaged.  If you ever read any discworld novel and read a description of Ank-Morpork you would know that Pratchett is brilliant at this.  He really brings the place to life, particularly the smell.  Some of his descriptions of smell leave you literally gagging.
4. If you aren’t Terry Pratchett, don’t try to write like Terry Pratchett.  This one I didn’t learn from Pratchett but I did learn from reading many poor imitations of his stories.  Very much like the Harry Potter phenomenon where suddenly there were dozens of knock-offs there are hundreds of want-to-be Pratchett’s.  I might learn a few things from reading Pratchett but I don’t intend to try to copy his style.  It is definitely his.

Winona is a ghost town again.  Sometimes it’s called “summer”.  It’s worse than summer now, though.  At least it’s green, warm, and the sun doesn’t go down at 4 in the afternoon.  A person just feels limited if they can’t go outside and enjoy the day past 4PM.

This Thanksgiving holiday will be plenty of time to definitely maybe start writing the movie again.  It’s priority number 5 behind researching stereotyping in advertising, finishing up my portfolio for advertising, painting some stuff I’m a bit behind on, and creating a webpage for my internet com class.

I’m looking forward to seeing some family members I haven’t seen in a long while.  You know, those family members you only see 2-4 times a year.  They’re the ones I actually look forward to seeing.  I highly doubt the family members I could care less about seeing know how to operate computers.

What’s that?  Bloody Mary’s you say?  Why yes, I believe I’ll have 3.  At twin cities prices though.  I just hope we don’t run into that prick of a bartender that looked like a skinnier Jon Gosselin, but was still just as big of a douche bag.  If you don’t want a 5% tip or less, then I suggest smiling at the very least, and not looking so deliberately disinterested.  And I wonder how those people are hired for jobs before me….?  Someone please tell me if my fly is down or if I, for some reason, have a swastika on my cheek next time I go in for an interview, please.

Word

openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora

Di notebook yang saya pakai sudah terinstall dua operating system linux, yaitu Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala dan Fedora 12. Kemudian saya ingin menambah satu operating system linux lagi, yaitu openSUSE versi terbaru 11.2, yang rilis tanggal 12 November lalu.

Pengalaman saya sejak openSUSE 11.0, Grub Loader Ubuntu selalu tidak dikenali oleh openSUSE, sehingga harus dikonfigurasi secara manual. Hal ini terjadi lagi ketika mencoba openSUSE 11.2, Grub dari Ubuntu 9.10 tidak dikenali, akan tetapi Fedora 12 sudah dikenali dengan baik sehingga tidak perlu setting lagi untuk Fedora-nya.

Berbicara sedikit tentang ubuntu 9.10 ini, Grub Loader dari versi Karmic Koala ini letaknya bukan di menu.lst lagi, namun terletak di /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Nah, dengan melihat contoh konfigurasi disitu kita bisa sedikit banyak akan tahu arah konfigurasi Boot Loader di openSUSE nanti.

Caranya cukup mudah, pertama tentu saja kita harus melakukan mount dulu partisi Ubuntu.

Yast -> System -> Partitioner -> Edit partisi -> mounting kedalam sebuah partisi, misalnya kita buat partisi /ubuntu
Dalam melakukan mounting, jangan sampai kita pilih Format, cukup pilih mount saja!

Setelah partisi Ubuntu ter-mount kedalam satu hardisk dan terbaca oleh system openSUSE, selanjutnya kita bisa konfigurasi Boot Loader dengan mudah melalui YAST.

Yast -> System -> Boot Loader -> Add -> Image Section

Boot Loader Settings : Section Management

Section Name : Nama yang akan kita pilih saat booting pertama kali
Kernel Image : /ubuntu/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic
Init RAM Disk : /ubuntu/boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
Root Device : UUID=578915af-f5bb-4489-8750-0cb668ab4901
Optional Kernel Command Line Parameter : ro quiet splash

Keterangan diatas bisa kita lihat pada Boot Loader Ubuntu di file grub.cfg yang letaknya di partisi /ubuntu/boot/grub

Boot Loader Setting Management openSUSE 11.2

Restart dan lihat apakah Setting yang sudah kita lakukan berhasil dengan baik .

As I near my graduation date, I am reminded of the importance of goal setting.  Goal setting has been an integral part of my life through all levels of studies and athletic endeavors, and as I have experienced life, the depth and breadth of my goals has changed dramatically.  As the quality and nature of my goals changed (winning first place at the conference track meet to creating study strategies for learning the nerves of the human body) I realized that they were really rungs on a ladder to my higher Purpose, the self I wanted to create and the world I wanted to influence around me. 

Goals and Purpose are not one and the same- your goals should reflect and strengthen your Purpose, and your Purpose should inspire your goals. If you are looking to define your life purpose to inspire your goals for success, start reading!  Albert E. N. Gray, who has passed away, served as an official of the Prudential Insurance Company of America and became an influential writer and speaker in the insurance world.  He has inspired and challenged me with his words and thoughts.  I wanted to share some of his insights on success, goals, and Purpose with you.

The secret of success of every man who has ever been successful—lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.  It is true, and just as simple as it sounds. This particular tenet, though not popular, particularly with people who are not succeeding as well as they would like, has stood the test of time and is almost universally true.

So what is it that failures don’t like to do?:  The same thing that successful men don’t like to do, but successful men do it anyway.  But if successful men don’t like to do these things, then why do they do them?  Because by doing the things they don’t like to do, they accomplish the things they want to accomplish.  Successful men are influenced by the desire for pleasing results.

Why are successful men able to do things they don’t like to do while failures are not?  Because successful men have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do in order to accomplish the Purpose they want to accomplish.

But what happens when I’m in a slump?  Even the most successful men get in a slump.  When it happens it simply means that he has reached a point at which, for the time being, the things he doesn’t like to do become more important than his Purpose.  Regroup, get centered, recall your Purpose and remember why your goals and hard work are important.

Before you decide to adopt these success habits, please strongly consider the importance of habit to your decision.  Any resolution or decision you make is simply a promise to yourself, which isn’t worth anything unless you have formed the habit of making it and keeping it.  Any resolution or decision you make today has to be made and kept again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on.

When habits are made you become the master of yourself and master of your likes and dislikes by surrendering to your Purpose in life.  That is why behind every success there must be a Purpose.  But as long as you live you will never succeed beyond the Purpose to which you are willing to surrender.

Live with Purpose–

Kristen Watts, Chiropractic Intern

Maine, digital photography, www.carolineallen.com

I have a client who came to me to coach her in the writing of a nonfiction book about kids in foster care, their trials and tribulations, our misunderstanding of at-risk youth.

I knew in my gut this client was also a writer of fiction. I’m not sure she knew it yet, though. People will often come to me with a soulful desire to write fiction that is so latent even they don’t know it’s there. So they will hire me as a coach for a nonfiction book, and before you know it we’re discussing fiction. It’s magical.

At any rate, months into our work together, this woman told me about a clairvoyant friend who ’saw’ one of my client’s past lives when they were in the theatre together more than a decade ago. This friend saw someone around my client, a man who had loved her in medieval Wales, when she was another person altogether. The clairvoyant reading drew up inexplicably strong emotions for my client.

So, we decided she should write this past life as a novel. There was a lot of information about the people to begin with, their names, where they lived, how they were separated, death and longing. The emotions around it for my client were intense. The emotions around writing fiction were intense. When your soul wants something, some creativity, some expression of it, the emotions around that artistic need are huge and should not be ignored. Just as you wouldn’t ignore a suspected illness, ignoring the soul’s creative needs, I believe, can take years off one’s life.

I started thinking about where our creativity comes from. What if every time I write a character in my novel I’m channeling a past-life? Who’s to say where inspiration comes from? Who’s to say I’m not channeling another dimension as I write? Could the very land upon which my building sits be dictating my creativity? What if the wide lugubrious river out my kitchen window is dictating to me as I pen Chapter 7?

Don’t try to analyze with your brain where inspiration comes from. It comes from myriad dimensions – past lives, other dimensions, trees, a television commercial, future lives…what a glorious mystery and one that makes me love being an artist.

I’m a writing coach. www.artofstorytellingonline.com

Cara Membuat Text/Link Bergerak (Marquee)

Bagi Kalian Yang Ingin Membuat Text Bergerak/Marquee
Caranya mudah tinggal copy kemudian paste kode html di bawah ini

jadi,kalian tinggal copy kemudian paste di sidebar milik kalian ok

catatan : 1.tag atau kode: direction=”up”
artinya tulisan/teks bergerak ke atas
seperti di blog ini, jadi kode “up”
bisa diganti dg “down” bila ingin link/teks bergerak ke bawah
dan ganti menjadi “left” supaya bergerak ke kiri dan “right” supaya bergerak ke kanan.
2.masukan kode <br /> adalah singkatan dari (line break)
atau ganti garis, supaya setiap link tidak numpuk dalam satu baris.
Bila jarak satu link dg link yg lain dianggap terlalu sempit, bisa ditambah dg kode <br />.

Thanksgiving may be only a few days away but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to decorate in a special way.  Use what you have on hand…or in the yard!

napkin

I love how simple this setting is.  If you can’t find printed ribbon, make your own with a permanent marker on plain ribbon.  I particularly love the simplicity of the leaf with a name written on it.

You can’t beat the aroma and simplicity of freshly cut rosemary.  Add a coordinated ribbon for an extra touch.

An extra cake stand topped with fresh greenery and berries looks special when a simple candle is included. 

As someone who grew up in the Pineywoods of East Texas, I like to include pinecones in my seasonal decor in the fall and winter. 

pinecone ideas

A gold-sprayed mini pinecone is so sweet nestled among kumquats and boxwood twigs. 

Cinnamon sticks and pinecones tied with textured ribbon would also make a great addition to a holiday table.  (I really love the wire basket as well!).

Use what you have…just use it in a new way with a little bit of nature’s help.

Code Sign Error
Check dependencies
[BEROR]Code Sign error: The identity ‘iPhone Developer’ doesn’t match any valid certificate/private key pair in the default keychain

=> install the private key exported from the original computer

Check dependencies
[BEROR]Code Sign error: Provisioning profile ‘XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX’ can’t be found

1. Project info -> Code Signing -> Code Signing Identity -> aspen*
   change it to "iPhone Developer"
2. Target info -> Code Signing -> Code Signing Identity -> Any iPhone OS Device
   change it to "iPhone Developer"

Sample Code 在 iPhone Simulator 會過, Device 上有 Code Sign Error 的時候("Code Sign error: Provisioning profile ‘XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX’ can’t be found")

1. 把 Targets -> Get Info 中的 Code Signing Identity 下的 Any iPhone OS Device 的值選成你的 Certificates
2. Build –> Clean
3. 重新 Build -> Build and Run 就可以了

The End Time Wars were devastating in their own right, fleets of untold power rained destruction down on unsuspecting worlds and the direct casualty toll was over two billion. The indirect however, was a lot higher, nearly three quarters of all humanity.

No one is quite sure what killed the AIs. Many suppose that it was an information super weapon gone wrong, others theorise it was produced by a small group of unaugmented scientists in an attempt to stem the blood flow. Either way, its remnants seem to be floating around the internet preventing the formation of any new AIs. Though if it was the scientists, they should be brought up on war crimes.

Imagine for a moment if the internal combustion engine stopped working suddenly, anarchy would reign within hours as the food ran out and no one had a way to replace it. A similar level of pervasion was true of the AIs and when they died everything went down, transport, power, banking and many of the higher level thinkers found themselves brain dead or at least missing huge chunks of their mind. In this case there was at least some level of manual overrides, but as the governments were almost universally lobotomised the implication of these systems was hit and miss at best.

People with skills became the most valued and therefore valuable members of society and new governments formed under the thumb of those who still knew how to work the most complicated technology. This lasted six months at best. Farming at it’s pinnacle had reached a level where one man could oversee the growth of enough food to feed ten thousand but with automation dead that went down to ten. Some planets didn’t realise this, and so starved, and even those that did were faced with the dilemma, their land had only a fraction of its old productivity and the industry was in tatters, ‘how do you build enough farms in time?’

There wasn’t an answer. Society fell on every world as over half the galactic population starved to death. Some collapsed as the rich lost the skills they needed to survive the next year, on some the starving mobs battered down the doors and spread the food so thinly that everyone died. But even those that lasted the long dark did so with terrible losses. Law failed, industry choked and information of humanities’ golden age was lost to the void as the cities shut down under the weight of the dead.

The remnants that rose from the ashes were mere shadows of former glory. Core worlds, Earth, Procyon, Altair, Arcturus and so on had lost hundreds of years of progress, but that was a lot better than the planets further out. It was later agreed that if your civilisation had stayed space faring, you were doing pretty well, fusion power, mag launchers, all meant that the new state was a power in the wider world. Others fell to pre-Derelict levels, computers and chemicals but not a lot else, they were ruthlessly exploited. The worst fell to mere industrial levels and some pre-industrial, scrabbling around their ruins of their cities. Unlucky people lived on a planet where the environment wasn’t stable and they suffocated.

The recovery is slow. The AIs are gone for ever, even attempts to follow known instructions, or plug isolated AIs into the web result in nothing but a box of malfunctioning qubits. Likewise we can no longer rely of augmented humans; they go mad or worse within days. But humanity will, nay, has survived and will overcome, and for the glory of our empire we will once again master the stars.

Comment on the forum

Mate Soulmate SPDP  

Short Fiction – A Tasty Story

By

VIKRAM KARVE

Pune. Fergusson College Road. Vaishali Restaurant. 5 PM on a Sunday evening.

Crowded. Crammed full. Jam-packed. All tables occupied chock-a-block. Aisles teeming with people waiting with watchful eyes for signs of someone finishing their refreshments.

Suddenly I see a woman waving to me, beckoning me with her hand. Her face seems familiar – oh yes, she is Ravi’s wife. She is sitting all alone on a table for two with a half eaten masala dosa in front of her.

I walk towards her and give her a smile.

“Sit down, sit down,” she says to me, gesturing with her hand towards the empty chair opposite her, “Sit down here with me, otherwise you will have to wait for hours.”

I sit down opposite her and say, “Thanks.”

She summons a waiter and orders peremptorily, “SPDP.”

“Two?” the waiter asks.

“No, one SPDP for Madam,” she says pointing to the empty plate in front of me without even bothering to ask me, then she pauses for a moment and tells the waiter, “and get one Kachori for me.”

Before I can recover my wits, she says, “You like SPDP don’t you? Ravi told me.”

“Yes, I love the SPDP at Vaishali. In fact I come all the way here every Sunday…”

“To spend the day reading in the library opposite followed by an SPDP at Vaishali,” she completes my sentence.

“Ravi told you all this?”

“Of course. He’s told me everything about you. Ravi admires you so much, he always talks about you.”

“Really? But he never tells me anything about you.”

“What’s there to tell? I am only his housewife, you are his office wife.”

“Come on. Please don’t say that. There is nothing like that between me and Ravi. We are just colleagues – workmates…”

“Workmates?” Ravi’s wife interrupts, and then says with a hint of sarcasm, “I think you are his true soulmate – and I am only his mate!”

I am struck dumb, feel a bit uneasy, but suddenly the plate of SPDP is kept in front of me, so I look down and begin to eat.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “Don’t get angry. I was just teasing. I want you to be Ravi’s friend. He likes you so much. That’s why he is so happy in office and doing so well in his work.”

I stop eating; look up at her vacuously, wondering what to say.

“Ravi appreciates you so much he even brings you home to me every evening in his thoughts and talks…that’s why I wanted to meet you.”

“We’ve met before…”

“Only once, that too only an introduction, at the Office Annual Day get-together…we are hardly married for three months, you know, and you all are so busy, with your targets and all, so I decided to meet you, talk to you, get to know you better, make a friendship…”

“You mean…”

“Yes, I contrived this coincidence. I came to the library also, but you were so busy browsing that I did not want to disturb you, so I waited here in Vaishali knowing you would surely come for your SPDP.”

“You’re not eating your Kachori,” I say, trying to change the direction of the conversation.

“Here, you eat,” she says pushing her untouched plate of Kachori and katori of whipped curds towards me, “I am all full – I ate an Uttapam, Idli-Vada Sambar, god-knows-what, waiting for you to come…”

She leans forward and casually picks up a Sev Potato Dahi Puri from my plate, pops into her mouth and says, “Wow. I love the chatpata flavour of SPDP – you call it Umami taste or something – that’s what you told Ravi, isn’t it?”

“I think I’ll go now,” I say, feeling distinctly uncomfortable, making up my mind to have a long talk with Ravi the moment I meet him in the morning at work.

“No, no, don’t go, I want to show you something.”

“Show me something?”

“Yes, that’s why I came all the way here to meet you.”

We finish the SPDP and Kachori, I insist on paying the bill, she doesn’t object too much, and then she takes me to the drapery section of the Shopping Mall nearby.

“We are furnishing our new house,” she says, pointing at the curtain cloth on display.

I look at her clueless.

“I like yellow, you like blue, and since you have told him about the aesthetic cool tranquil beauty of the blue colour, Ravi is besotted with everything blue – blue shirts, blue trousers, blue table-covers, blue bed-sheets, blue napkins, the sober blue everything that you make him buy…”

I look furtively and self-consciously at the blue dress I am wearing, and say, “Okay, tell me which curtains you like.”

She points to a bright yellow floral print and says, “I like that one, I love yellow, so lively and cheerful… I hate sober gloomy colours, especially blue, it depresses me.”

Next morning at the office, Ravi says to me, “Hey, keep yourself free in the evening. We’ll go to Deccan for some shopping. You’ve got to help me select curtains for our new home. Then we’ll have SPDP at Vaishali.”

“Sure, Ravi, I’ll love to come with you,” I say.

Now I’ve got till evening to decide one thing – which colour curtains should I tell Ravi to buy – Yellow Curtains or Blue Curtains?

VIKRAM KARVE

 Copyright © Vikram Karve 2009

Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com 

http://www.linkedin.com/in/karve 

Appetite for a Stroll

vikramkarve@sify.com

Weird thing happened today with the writing. I was working on a fairly pivotal scene that happens to take place on the shore of a pond. I have written, in the past, three scenes that take place at this location, although I don’t think all of them are going to be retained when I finalize a first draft. But anyway – in a writing sense, at least – I have been there a number of times.

So today while writing I was trying to think of new things about the setting that hadn’t been described yet, and I thought to myself, well, I can’t think of any so maybe I should just go down there and take a look, maybe some photos. This was followed by a very long moment in which I tried to place the pond in the actual geography of the area that I live; found that I couldn’t; and realized that I had somehow come to completely believe that this spot, invented by me, actually existed.

Ack! The book is coming to life! Or am I being sucked into it! One or the other. Soon I will be found to believe that my characters are real people, and have to be stopped from calling them up on the telephone for a quick chat.

Emotion is an essential element in good fiction. If I as a reader can’t get inside the POV character’s emotions, feel what they feel about the setting, for example, to go in and be that character at that moment in time, then there is no way I can connect with them. If the emotion of the character is missing, so is the character missing. If I can’t tell what a character feels, then the character isn’t there for me.

Writing through an emotional filter can be the most difficult part of a character to capture in words. It reminds me of my life before Lasik surgery. My vision had been 20/1000 for many years. The day the doctor finished my eye surgery and I sat up, I saw the doorknob on a door across the room—I mean, I SAW it! That is when a doorknob is more than a doorknob.

When a writer doesn’t use what author Nancy Conner calls the emotional filter, it’s like the character isn’t there.

Conner says when we apply an emotional filter rather than writing neutral descriptions of a setting, location, or character, for example, the author colors the description according to the character’s state of mind.

The emotional filter is a way to show how a character feels, thinks, judges, and interprets anything. For example, if I look out my window, I might observe, “Snow covered the ground.” That doesn’t say anything about my state of mind. But if I write, “Snow nestled around the trees and fence posts,” you get an idea of how I feel about the snow. If I said, “The snow imprisoned me inside the house,” you get a different sense of how I feel about the snow even though I didn’t say how I felt about it.

If your character doesn’t feel strongly enough about what she sees, hears, tastes, touches or smells to give some type of emotional reaction to it, the reader won’t either. This applies to everything in the story, whether it be action, dialogue, description or other characters.

Your story will have great impact on readers if you help them interpret it emotionally.

I get that the game is supposed to be super hard sci-fi, with Erector-set looking ships and such. Still, for me, I’m more into stuff like BSG, Mass Effect and Firefly ships- where they’re stylized, look cool, etc. (If I’m playing a game of the imagination, I might as well make things I’d rather imagine… you know?)

So with that in mind, some tech ideas to use when I get around to playing:

Artificial Gravity

AG can produce up to 2Gs, although after you turn it on, it takes about 24 hours to produce a G under normal microgravity conditions. More mass increases the energy costs exponentially, so generally AG is just for crew quarters, or for passenger ships. (so, no, you can’t make G-bombs, or gravity warps to deflect attacks, or tractor beams).

(Game thought: Unless you have gravity, melee weapons beyond knives become mostly useless. All of our weapons and biomechanics are based on using gravity and having anchored footing of some sort. Of course, you could have stuff like chainsaw weapons, contact lasers, etc.)

Heat Lances

A common method for quickly dumping heat is a Heat Lance (also known has a Thermal Harpoon or Temp Anchor). It’s a harpoon connected by tethers to the ship, with coolant tubes – usually not more than a few hundred meters reach. You launch it into something cold (like ice) and run the coolant out to dump the heat.

Most ships have 2-4 lances, and usually keep one in reserve, in case the others get damaged. Military ships which might need to dump heat quickly or special missions might be equipped with several.

Ships that regularly travel through space with cool gases or near atmospheres also have heat webs- long grid-like nets of coolant tubes you just splay out and dump heat quickly.

(Neat game thought- this also means that ships will be leaving a “trail” of hotspots where they’ve dumped heat, and it also means that spots where you can dump heat become strategically valuable spots in space.)

Slip Stations

Any system with regular travel will set up permanent space stations near the slipknots. Great in case ships jump through damaged, also to house regular patrols to prevent piracy. More anarchist systems will probably develop one as well, which might be getting great profit from the folks who escape pirates and haul their damaged ships to them for repairs…

Slip stations would probably use heated coolant from ships to produce turbine electricity, as well as having some level of manufacturing and possibly horticulture.

I’m not usually a big fan of book reviews because I think tastes are fairly subjective so even though I’ve called this a review it is more a discussion about a book.

Tomorrow, When The War Began by John Marsden

Cover

There are a few reasons why I decided to discuss this particular book.  Firstly, it is Australian, set in Australia, and while it is realistic in its portrayal of Australia and Australians it has enough fantastic elements to keep me interested.  Secondly, the main character and narrator is female and extremely interesting.  Thirdly, despite not liking having to read multiple books to get the whole story, this seven book series is well worth reading, multiple times for sheer enjoyment.

This series is about Australia being invaded by an unnamed enemy (though the description given at times would seem to indicate a few ideas about who the invaders may be).  The politicians have bailed out of Australia, flying to New Zealand and America to hide and none of Australia’s allies seem inclined to intervene.

Elle, our narrator, is a teenage girl who decides not to go to her town’s annual show and instead sets off with a group of her friends to go camping for the weekend.  By doing so, the group of them are not rounded up and captured when the invasion occurs.

The story recounts Elle’s initial fear and surprise and then determination as she and her friends learn what has happened and then set about attempting to disrupt the enemy, possibly free some of their friends, and to survive.  Things don’t all go Elle’s way and this story at no time assumes that untrained teenagers would run rings around armed soldiers.  Marsden was sensible in choosing a country town where the kids grew up on farms and had a slew of practical skills, working with machinery and minor explosives prior to the war.

I said initially that I like this story for three reasons.  The Australian setting is one of them.  The setting varies between extreme scrub, farmland, rocky valleys and small towns and each setting is described beautifully and they are all believable.  It really felt as though you could drive out to the town and walk into the mountains and actually find the rocky basin the teens nick-name ‘hell’.  This setting is used to great effect providing shelter for the teens and a means of  out smarting, and out hiding, the enemy when things get rough as well as isolating them and creating its own dangers.

The second reason is Elle.  She is an incredibly detailed character.  As a farm girl she is tough but she is emotional and loyal to her friends.  She is recounting the story (writing it down on behalf of the group) and she is brutally honest in her reflection.  As a reader you can forget at times that this isn’t a real recount, it is simply a story.  Elle is a phenomenal character and one I couldn’t get enough of when I first read this series.  If you get far enough along, you will genuinely cry at some of the things that befall her (trust me on this one).

Finally, the story is incredible.  The plot has been worked over until it feels completely seemless.  Maybe some people will have a hard time believing teenagers are actually capable of doing more than watching television, but if you get over this, the story is amazing.

Tomorrow, When The War Began – very much worth the read.

I’ve been more or less looking for something that could motivate me or give me some kind of idea of how to approach the second go round of writing this script better than the first time.

Music: helpful most of the time, but I guess you hear what you want to and I don’t know how much any of it really changes until you’re looking to find something it in.

Podcasts: I f’n love these things.  I always knew what they were, but never really gave much of a listen.  I’m a big fan of Bill Maher’s, even though his season is over for now, Bill Simmons of ESPN is usually good despite his sick love for the Celtics and Red Sox and Patriots.  Various news podcasts like NPR and others, and Alternative Press has a mass of good one if you listen to the music I do.

Subway: not really of any interest for inspiration, but my weekly diet is made of of 30% Subway.  I’m still waiting for an endorsement deal from them.

People and Public Figures: People watching always yields interesting events.  Public figures, meh, I was leaning towards the guy that keeps giving me parking tickets for parking in a lot that’s 15 feet away from where I sleep.  Seriously, you ass, knock that crap off.  I’m sorry the Winona PD can’t bust underage kids for drinking at 8 AM on a Tuesday morning.  In the event a real crime ever happens here, look out!

The weather: It’s been nice enough out to do a lot of things, but thinking about writing something while having fun in the outdoors don’t really happen well at the same time.

There is too much happening now to not enjoy anything, and maybe thats why I haven’t been able to, or felt like, start writing the script again.  I can’t concentrate on it at the moment.  COD MW 2 just came out, it’s ridiculous if you didn’t already know.  I guess cheap wine is good.  Some old woman at the liquor store said “there’s no such thing as bad wine” and then she gliqued through the empty tooth slot in her front teeth.

To glique is when you kinda shoot saliva from your tongue.  Bet you didn’t know that.

Walked around the lake tonight, it was dark, but a good walk nonetheless.

But yeah, the movie, as with many goals I have tried to set and follow, I get more done if I just don’t do that.  It will get done when I decide to finish it.

I’m a fan of liquor stores, but I’d be a bigger fan of them if they opened and closed more frequently in the same spots.  You can’t beat six bottles of an assortment of wine, shot stuff and extra dry vermouth for 28$.  That’s the America I want to live in. In moderation of course though.

As I posted last week, I was supposed to start writing the script again, but haven’t started up again.  There is a ton more to think about this time.  Factoring in the budget, locations to film, people I know or don’t know; it’s all weighing down on how I write the next part of the movie.  It’s very apparent this is a lot easier in tinsel town since they have A: Money, and B: resources.

I have a few goals with this movie, and I’ll tell you one of them: I fully expect this movie to be better than every Colin Farrell movie ever made, COMBINED.  Now, I understand your thinking, “But Erik, no one has ever attempted to out act, produce and direct anything Colin Farrell has ever done, how will you do it?”

Once you see the movie, you will know.

I was unable to start writing again this week, this explains where I’m at and what I need to do:

It’s from an interview with Dave Soloway, formerly a guitarist for Saves the Day.

Let me give you the advice that changed everything for us. It was the moment when, I don’t remember exactly who suggested it. I think Chris was reading, actually Chris was reading a book, I don’t know if it was a writer, well obviously it’s a writer that wrote the book. But it was some book about the writing process, I think it must have been a novelist or maybe a poet, I can’t remember if it was a he or she. But he or she said something to the effect of when you’re feeling like you don’t have anything good to write, the worst thing you can do is try to wait for something to come. You’ve got to be willing to write crap. You’ve got to be willing to write it and look at it and go “You know, that’s crap, but at least I wrote something.”

Yeah, I’m at crap level right now… or back to it I suppose.

This year, start with a theme that reflects both the beauty and the spirit of the Thanksgiving season. Bring out your best china, silver, linens, and crystal and dress the table with personality, striking the perfect balance between traditional and modern.  Link to article in Country Living.