ishte

So, if you don't know this about me... I don't really spend a lot of time on my computer in Summer anymore. Generally speaking, I have other things that I want to do than sit on my ass in front of a computer. What this ends up meaning is that I don't write much in Summer either.

My activities have been different this year, because I haven't been feeling exactly stellar most of the year due to (probably stress induced) GERD. I'm doing better now. I had an upper endoscopy in which the doctor stretched a stricture. After the procedure I was really sick for two weeks and missed three weeks of work because it took me another week to get my strength back. GI doc thinks that I probably had a GI tract infection, backed up by the fact that the morning of the procedure I had some low belly pain which I mentioned to them, but I though it was just a little IBS due to being pretty nervous about my procedure. She said if that was the case, probably being inflated for the procedure might have just aggravated an already unpleasant bug. Also, my meds had recently been changed and turned out to be less effective so I was feeling worse instead of better. Went back to the original med, got the infection resolved and now things are going better and I feel more like myself except I still have to take a damned pill every morning, which I don't like. >_<

The good news is that as unwell as I have felt for the last 9 or 10 months, tests have verified that there is nothing seriously wrong. Just uncomfortable, and nerve wracking (and the nerve wracking part has probably contributed to how bad I've felt, and having those fears laid to rest is probably also going a long way towards me feeling more like myself, since this was probably stress induced in the first place.

Now Summer is almost over and I haven't accomplished much that I wanted to, but at least I'm feeling like myself the majority of my days. YAY! I didn't get the house painted. Can't really afford it right now. Next year for sure. My brother's estate will settle from probate pretty soon, and I'll have a little inheritance most likely so next year I'll probably just some of it to hire professionals instead of us doing it ourselves. Wanted to fix the gutters as well, which I could normally do myself, but haven't felt well enough to invest myself in a project like that. I wanted to start building my tiny house on the trailer I inherited from my brother. I totally planned to do that this summer, but I really didn't start feeling like myself again until maybe 3 weeks ago, so I'll make plans to start that as soon as the weather is nice enough next spring rather than start now, and have it sit half finished through Winter. Nope. Seems stupid to do that.

This weekend I'm going to go see Duran Duran. I'm excited about that, and also about getting to go with my friend who lives too far away to visit often, so I haven't seen him in quite a few months now. YAY! Music Festival type thing.

I managed to get the Irish Session going again at our local Irish Pub which is also awesome, but it's slow going because it's been two years, and now it's on a different day, and some of the original gang aren't as available as they would have been if I'd managed to get it on the same day we always played. But it's happening. Slowly but surely we're getting a group of regulars to come and play with us, and relearning the songs and tunes based on who knows what.

Now I think I'll try to spend a little time writing, since I'm up here in the Creation Room, windows open, and pleasant weather, cicadas singing outside. I'll try to speak more regularly now. We'll see. I do go long stretches. lol

Given I was reminded yesterday morning by FxcxBook that I had a dream a year ago in which I was searching for a starship named The Vaporous Oceanus, it occurred to me (again) that my brain has a story in it that it wants to tell about this ship.  A long time ago (and I mean LO-O-O-ONG time ago) I started writing a story or play. I feel like I started to write it as a play at a time when my friends and I were still making up stories to act out.  It was a little more advanced than 'playing pretend'. We were older than that, but probably early on in High School. So this is a while back for sure.  But the story was about a starship captain and her crew, but I don't think I ever decided on a name for her ship.  So the reminder of the dream of which I remember NOTHING except the name of the ship which I wrote down, and at the time if I'd remembered anything else other than that I was searching for it, and what it's name was I would have written that down too.  So I wonder now if The Vaporous Oceanus was Raelyn Centurian's ship.  Hmm... I'll have to explore that further when I have some time to jot some notes and dig through my old writing journals to see if I can find the sketch I was writing at the time.

So Chapter 18 - What If?  It's finally taking shape.  It's 4 scenes (really 3, but the first one has a shift in PoV and a small amount of napping, that I split into two scenes. 


I finished Scene 1 last night. (Just barely) It's a lot of conversation. lol. It's not really much of anything in the way of consequential conversation. I think I'm just trying to give a feel of the comfort these two have with each other when there are no outside mitigating factors to interfere with their interactions. The idea that they can poke fun at each other, laugh and joke in a very casual way appeals to me on many levels.  So that took severals days of kind of mapping it out, acting it out in my head to get a feel for it... Funny thing is, I found that once I could get myself settled to actually write it, It came along pretty easily.  So last night I finished it. Adjusted the passage of time, and figured out the lead in to scene two.

Tonight, I finished Scene 2.  That was supposed to be about a 10 minute scene, and I think it was. Ed gets a couple of minutes to spend in his head space by himself and mull over a couple of things that he already knew about his feelings, and also something he is just discovering, and maybe something Audey said to him earlier just sank in pretty thoroughly.  I kind of picture it like a bead of water sitting on top of some dry soil, it's surface tension as yet holding it together and keeping it sitting on the surface. That's the seed Audey planted, and Ed's brain is the soil.  So something crossed his mind, and the surface tension on that water broke and it sank into the soil.

So Scene 3 is mapped out... sketched.  But I haven't written much of it. The sketch has a few snatches of conversation.  It's intent is mostly to introduce Al's girlfriend, Molly.  Now... Al says Molly looks like a movie star. lol... and in my head, she has a certain hairstyle and look, and so the other night while allegedly writing in my head, I searched the web for someone with that hairstyle. When  finally started zeroing in on it, a girl with that exact style and curling in that exact way, I realized that a lot of the photos I was clipping looked like the same girl... and that not only her hairstyle resembled Molly's, but her face too.  so I dug a little deeper into the photo that had first caught my eye, and it turns out she WAS a movie star back in the 1920s. So  it turns out that Molly looks like Marion Davies did when she was Molly's age.  But I'm told by both of them that Molly's brows are styled more naturally, that she is a dark brunette (and Mx. Davies was often a blonde) and that she doesn't wear her lipstick quite that pointed. lol.


Scene 4 has been sketched out for a while. (really they have all been sketched out) and has been mostly written for a week or two. This is the scene with the most meat in it. lol. You'll see.  I just need to decide how exactly to square it off and finish it to my satisfaction. It's been a long time coming. It also has some implied tie backs to One Kiss: Goodbye, which My!Ed and My!Winry both agree happened, and Ed probably thinks that's why he's feeling so awkward now.

Now it's bedtime. Time to go to bed.

So... I got this big monitor and now it's possible to watch stuff on one side and do stuff on the other.  So I was watching FMA 2003 Episode 38 a little while ago. The episode is mostly filler even to the alternate story that was told in 2003 to be honest. Only a few references of any importance occur. So in this episode Ed and Al arrive in some rando town after their vehicle breaks down, and the two of them get into a fight.  Eventually, towards the end of the episode at sundown, Ed goes looking for Al. Al is sitting down by the river just like he would do in Resembool when they were little kids.  Next to him are three small toys he has transmuted out of the riverbank clay.  1) a horse (initially shown to be fancy and detailed in full tack) 2) a simple touring style car of the time period.  3) (I assume this is the first one he made) looks to me like a poop emoji. Lol

Now I'm wondering if I ever noticed that before, and if not, why didn't I? and if I did, why didn't I remember it?

I hope so, because I've spent a good part of my evening researching stuff. lol

No. I didn't. I'm a big fat liar. 

However, I'm in the process of drawing it for Chasing the Trail because I realized that now that Ed's more mobile, I need to understand more clearly how Roy's house works.  I still haven't got it figured out completely. I realized that the way I had it pictured when I first started writing it, did not match the way I initially drew it. AT ALL. So I started thinking about how it was shaped and how things fit together, and since Roy has said at least a couple of times that his house is actually connected to the building he works in, I have to work out how that works too.  Obviously, the house was at one time the house of some official or another. Now it's Roy's, but his house is a private residence that is somehow directly attached to an official building. So now I think it is attached, but it is not directly attached exactly.  Roy has a finished basement.  That's established in story, as he has some kind of workshop down there, and I think his house also has a garage under it.  So it must sit into a hill where part of the house is more underground than another part. That MORE underground part is where a long hallway runs completely below ground from the private home, to the office building attached to it.  I haven't sorted out what official would have used the house before.  I probably won't unless some other official mentions it in passing. It's not important to the story in any way anyway. (snicker).

Okay...  So anyway, (snicker) I have been working on the floor plan of his house for a couple of weeks in the scant spare time I have because HOLIDAYS YO! I do work retail after all.  I need to understand how the house works before I can get my head around the next chapter. I know what is going to happen. It's outlined in my head. I've  been writing this chapter in my own head for YEARS now.  I'm excited to finally be to this point.  I can't wait for Winry to say "Is that for me?" lol.  I just hope she actually says it!

The point here is: I built a house.  No... I'm lying. I didn't built it. I just took my first floor plan which is more or less complete now, and played the Sims 3 all day making the floor plan into a kind of stupid looking version of the house in my head.  However, I'll share it with you. I'll draw the house later on now that I am starting to understand it. I can't really draw for very long on the computer or do it for days in a row like I want to, or my shoulder will ache, so I have to pace myself. (Plus working retail during the holidays! lol) but since I did this thing. I'll share it with you all.  It's a big house, but probably not as big as it looks. It's bigger than Ed's house though for sure.  Probably twice as big.  I made some comparisons, and I'm drawing to the same scale. Ed's house has a two car garage on the  back half of which is converted to living space, but his basement is only under half the house I think. It only contains the mechanicals for his house and doesn't have any finishing. Also, Ed's house is a story and a half with no attic space at all. All the upstairs rooms are right under the roof and dormers.  Roy has two full stories plus a pretty big walk up attic.  Still trying to understand the upstairs and how/if the attic stairs are stacked.  The main stairs are stacked over the basement stairs, but I"m not sure if the attic stairs are stacked. or not. I'm not sure I want to loose the aesthetic of the stair rail in the wide upstairs hallway by stacking the attic stairs on top, but I know that architecturally speaking that's probably the best way to have them run. I'll look at it some more when I can.  In the mean time. Look at the house I built (not! Honestly I hardly ever actually play this game. I just use it to build houses. Also, I don't care for the dynamics of Sims 3 gameplay with the characters. Sims 2 was better for that.)

Roy's House

Thanks for reading my ramble. Oh yeah. the front fences are incomplete because I was being petty about there not being any gates wide enough for a driveway or even the wide walkway that would work if I decided to actually USE the house in actual game play, so I just left big gaps.  I also wasn't able to capture the concept of the garage being under the house on the low end of the yard because DERP I chose a flat lot! lol  But I made the driveway out of MARBLE. LOLOL.  It's probably not really made of marble.

I have had a busy couple of weeks... Stupid work schedule.  But here is something I needed to share because of how often I see these kinds of things.  Due to reading MegaTokyo I can read |_337 in several dialects quite well, but I agree with this whole thing, especially in my intense dislike of things like letters and numbers used in place of words.  (though I may occasionally say things like OIC... does that make me a hypocrite? I just hate things like "I am here 4u" and especially "I this Ur's?"

So anyway, unfortunately today my boss has pretty much confirmed that ARC is pretty well gone forever. It's a real shame too. It was a good job. Best job I have ever had even though the pay was not stupendous. This will be the second time a job I really liked has disappeared out from under me through no fault of my own. In this case, the blame falls squarely on the City of Dayton for leading us on a merry chase after our contracts. In 2011 we had a roughly 70 house contract and we were able to train and maintain on staff 25 disadvantaged workers, many of the, ex-offenders. Recidivism in Ohio is something like 44%, so there is no question such an enterprise is needed. By training workers not only with physical job skills that they can carry forward into other jobs, we also helped them learn important traits to keeping in good standing with their job. Work ethic, punctuality, compatibility with coworkers, leadership and various other skills. It makes sense to help these people empower themselves to become contributing members of their communities as they reenter society. We thought that Dayton agreed, however it has become clear that they don't care about that at all. In early 2012, Boss was working with our state Attorney General to help develop the Moving Ohio Forward Grant which would use some of the money that the banks had to pay states in settlement for the immense fraud they perpetrated on new home buyers just prior to the collapse of the housing market. Unfortuanately for us, in this case, our Attorney General is a Republican and every city commissioner except our departing Mayor is a Democrat. Oh heaven forfend that we should talk to anyone who is not politically aligned with all the City Commissioners. They got mad and started dragging their feet on our next contract (already promised from NSP3 funding).

There is no lack of work in our field. None at all. Dayton has 7000+ blighted houses that need to be removed. They are being removed. Our particular contract was taken off the table and not voted on several times until in mid 2012, we laid off 25 workers and the last two (myself included) went down to part time hours while we continued to scrounge for work since Dayton had let us run dry and had not delivered their promises to us. ARC was aground. It was almost 2 months before a different contract was offered to us after Boss was chastised for his (OMG) fraternization with a (OMFG) Republican politician at the state level to try to get our company more work so we could train and employ more workers. Imagine that. We wanted to TRAIN and HIRE more WORKERS. Aren't Democrats supposed to be in favor of the little guy? the common man? the downtrodden? the WORKER? Anyway, our paltry contract was for less than a 10th the amount of the previous one. And each house was released like it was a precious commodity. The end result was that we could only bring back one team of workers at a time, and we did not at any time have enough work to bring back a third team. As Summer 2012 crept by, we desperately tried to negotiate with the City about our contracts. They promised us that we needn't worry that they would have work for us. Dayton issued 6 bid packets for 60 houses each. They required such outrageously high performance bonds that only one contractor could qualify, and he because he's so wealthy now that he can self bond, has his own landfill and can hardly even be considered local any more because he's spread through several states. Well Kudos to him for being successful. that's great, but he doesn't help Dayton meet any of the green or social goals they purport to want to meet. So he's not getting ALL the work available in Dayton. We bid on two of the packets, after negotiating about the performance bond.

Anyway, this dragged on and we understand that 4 of the 6 packs of demolitions were awarded. Our two were removed from consideration. permanently apparently. Then the city ran us around for a while, and finally issued a 'request for qualifications' which we spent time and energy working on, and turned in... and waited. And waited. And waited all through the winter into spring they said they were assessing it. Then the funding for our current project ran out and the City pulled two houses off our board, one of them already under permit and starting deconstruction. We laid off 4 of our 9 remaining disadvantaged workers. Each week, Dayton promised that they almost had our next work ready. Then about three weeks before the end, we were told that the only thing holding up the works was 16 properties that we had open permits on. of those 16, about 10 had new homes built on them and the City of Dayton had never closed the permits even when they issued new ones. the other six were either waiting for adequate grass to grow on the new clear lots to be inspected, or were the most recent ones we'd deconstructed and were still in excavation. So I toured them, asked for inspections on the ones that could have them, and gave updates on the rest. By the end of the week, all but 3 had finals. Still no contract. When I came in on Tuesday the 11th, Boss told me that he'd decided to close ARC. At the time, he just said there was no work, which was a true statement.

What I learned a couple days later by reading on esrati.com (David Esrati is a local politician and who owns a marketing firm. He's very outspoken about the problems in our city and he tells it like it is) about his feelings about ARC closing was that while they were stringing us along, the city was awarding work to another contractor by using what is called a 'change order'. It means an existing contract has extra funding added to it and extra work. This company is not in the City of Dayton, and their contract apparently was extended twice by more than twice the contract they strung us along on all summer of 2012, and we just found out about it. There was no reason for Dayton to make us bid on the same set of work over and over and over and still never give us anything while promising they would have work for us. So my question is "What gives Dayton? Why'd you screw your own local contractor and cost the city a total of 28 jobs while giving work to two companies out in the suburbs, not even IN Dayton, one of which did not even have to bid for the work as is supposedly required.

So today was the day that Boss told me he didn't intend to bring ARC back at this point even if the city does come back and tell him to come and sign a contract and here's 60 houses to deconstruct this year. I think he's lost heart, and I don't blame him. It's a real crappy situation and Dayton treated a very decent man trying to do something good in the world and an extremely shoddy way. Meanwhile, I have no job, and I really liked my job. I'm really quite angry about this. I want to march down to city hall and have a few sharp words with some people. people who pretty much lied in MY face as well, since the last two visits for consultations were made by ME as I tried to get all the information together for the Community Development Block Grant that we were also trying to get so that we could offer better pay to our workers, but which Boss never turned in, because he became convinced that we wouldn't get any work to use the money one and it would go to waste. I'm really livid about this and I want to chew some heads. I want to mouth of in the way that Esrati does. I'm going to ask Esrati what I can do to help him the next time he runs for office.

In the mean time, I haven't decided what to do yet. I have unemployment for a while. Last summer I got by on half pay for several months. I can this summer too. I can step up my Mary Kay Business to make more money. I had said that if it became clear that my job was not coming back that I might consider going back to school for real. Full time, and have that be my job. I'm pretty much on the verge of making that decision now. I can get started with school while I'm not working and still have an income. My grants will cover my classes and then some extra most quarters. So I'd be pretty well set until my unemployment runs out. Then I can decide if I want to hack pizza or something while I'm in school, or if I want to go ahead and go the student loans route and take out enough to live on too. I don't have to cross that bridge yet. I just need to decide what I want to do, and what path of studies to take. Linguistics, or prosthetics? Or architecture? I was very interested in architecture in high school. I loved drafting classes, but I know I applied a lot of my drafting knowledge to design artificial limb structures. I wanted to find ways to make them move in the most natural way possible. Back then, the technology wasn't really there to make them work in that complex way, but now? Yah... now the technology is moving. It's interesting. I don't really have to declare right away either. I'll still need a language, so I can study both at the same time while i get my gen eds out of the way. I think I'd better fill out my Fasfa pretty soon though. I don't know the deadline date for this year.

Wow, this took forever to whine about. I better go to bed. *grumble* Unemployed and STILL don't have enough damned hours in my day!

Oh I did forget thought that I'm working out a schedule, and that I'm going to get back to writing while i have time to get my brain back on it. I have had Chasing the Trail chapter 15 open and have worked on it. Right now I'm looking for a reference. If anyone remembers what chapter it was that Winry promised Ed he could get up and use his crutch once he showed her he was going to be able to do it (or something like that) I'd appreciate knowing, as I'm trying to find it.

Anyway, night all.

You know. Recently I've been looking over Gaias Song.  A few years back, I was a part of a critique group, and I submitted the drafts of Gaia's Song to that group.  I gained a lot of knowledge about writing, and in particular what's stylish, much of which I didn't particularly agree with. Apparently the reading public is now credited with such a short attention span that it is necessary to leap right into an action scene immediately at the start of a story without setting any sense of the surroundings or history or anything at all about the area in which the story takes place.  So I completely savaged my original first chapter in favor of style. My beautifully written passages showing the ancient heavy city of Ceta Prime in which Daniel has been forced to live were for the most part completely eradicated.  Apparently, it is no longer stylish to describe anything outside the field of vision or thought of the main character.  Though I am not telling the story first person, I may as well be since I'm required to be 100% inside his head even if I'm only reading the story from his brain as a complete bystander with no power at all to see beyond his own eyes and ideas. Let me just state here, that I absolutely despise this method of story telling. Rereading my completely raped first chapter, I hate what I have done with it.  Let me explain why.

Since the entire first chapter is from Daniel's point of view, and I may not give any description of him unless he looks in the mirror, which btw he does not, and having him do so would be so contrived at this point that it makes no sense for me to do so. It would seem so cliché to have him wake from a nightmare and run to the bathroom to splash water on his face and then spend five minutes studying his appearance in the mirror so I can describe what he sees.  He's not going to brush his hair, so he can't see that... has no reason to describe any thought of his own appearance because he is not in a condition to have any reason to think of it at all. What he wants, what motivates him is that his heart is pounding from the dream, and he desperately wants to smoke and shake off that heavy fear and sense of impending doom.

Now having said that, the next chapter has a similar problem. It's not as badly raped, because Sou actually does think about his appearance at least in a negative way... but that's a whole 'nother chapter that we don't know what the main character looks like, nor much about the surrounding area.  Chapter three, Daniel's point of view again, very little reason for Daniel to have any reason to describe himself.  I can spend more time describing that house he lives in, but even then, he's in a rush, so he's not going to lovingly linger over the details of this beat up old house or the three or four rooms that he has made livable.  The douji he has found is not getting a point of view in this chapter, even if he did, he is far too ill and frightened to learn anything about Daniel, or his appearance or anything else around him. So three chapters go by without knowing what our Main Character even looks like.

Chapter Four -- The Douji and the Dynamo: Well, some ways into the chapter we finally get to learn what Daniel looks like, because Dyana actually gets to his house in her own point of view and LOOKS at him. Now how is that fair? how is anyone even interested at that point? by then, I feel like people will have already formed their own opinions about what Daniel looks like, so why is it so VERY WRONG now for me to show what he looks like within my narrative during the first graphs of the first chapter.  So, I'm considering completely breaking with "Current Style", and rewriting chapter one so that my readers know who they are looking at before Chapter 4.  Why can't he push a yellow streaked strand of his dark brown hair behind an ear to show his hair color? Because he wouldn't see it? Unless I also show it streaming in front of his eyes or something?  I at least get to mention that he's not all that big in chapter 3, but that seems very late too and we don't get a very good description of how not big he is, only that he struggles with carrying the douji who he figures is a teen, but who is taller and stockier than he is. The end result really could be that my readers may think that Daniel is tiny when he's really not, or that the douji is huge, which he also is not. They're actually about the same height, and the douji is built heavier. Ugh.

So, the end result is that I'm very very against writing in Third Person Limited/Intimate for this story as was recommended to me very strongly.  I distinctly recall being told that it was the only style that would sell these days, however, I have more recently read that it is not appropriate for an epic story like this, and this is an epic. Also, I have to wonder at why people believe that everyone should write in the exact same style. That seems excruciatingly boring to me.  It seems to me that what people usually want is something 'fresh', and that if everyone is writing in TPI, then that's not exactly the fresh product.  The end result is, that I think I'm going to tear through Chapter 1 again, and restore some of the scene setting.

I understand more about showing and not telling than I did when I started, however, there are certain things that I don't WANT to introduce bit by bit as the story progresses. I want my readers to have an understanding right away of the oppressive impressive nature of the great city of Ceta Prime. I want them to understand that Daniel does not wish to be here. I want them to know what he looks like. How can they identify with him if they don't even know what he looks like? I even had a friend read the first chapter and complain of that very thing... that she couldn't care about Daniel. Why? Because he didn't have any reason to describe himself, or even his surroundings to much of a degree.  So I want to show his surroundings and where he is within those surroundings.  I don't want the readers to form their own image of Daniel for three and a quarter chapters and then have him described by Dyana when she looks at him, and realize that they've formed an incorrect impression.

Am I wrong to feel this way?