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You may henceforth address me as Signore Pastabelli.

I did a silly thing...

Okay, I stayed up well too late this morning reading this AWESOME book -- which I'll tell you about in a second. Because I knew I was only going to get maybe 5 or 6 hours of sleep, I set my alarm to wake me up 1 hour before I'm supposed to be at work, instead of the usual 2 hours. Which means I'm going to have to jump in the shower immediately after waking up, then head straight to work. That doesn't give me time to (1) wake up or (2) cook something for breakfast/lunch. I don't even have time to slap a sandwich together on my way out the door, even if we actually had some sandwich meat in the apartment.

So I figure I'll splurge and pick something up on the way.

Now, I don't really have any money left from my paycheck, but I do -- well, did -- have a $10-bill in my wallet. I could be frugal and buy 3 Jr. Whoppers for $3 and have some money left over from the ten, but I've done that too recently. I want something TASTEY. I want to spoil myself a little.

I want some FAZOLI'S. :)

They've got this combo called a Classic Sampler Platter.



Fettuccine Alfredo, Lasagna, Spaghetti w/Meat Sauce and 2 Garlic Breadsticks... Mama mia!

But I'm hungry! I've been fighting off a cold or something since last Saturday and my body needs some fuel! So I add a slice of pizza to my order.



Okay, insane?

Sure.

But OH, so tastey!!! :D

Holy schnikies!!!

Just a moment... I need to sit and digest a bit...


...

...

...


Okay, I'm better.

So this book I was reading all night...

It started with an episode of Paranormal Podcast featuring Dannion Brinkley. Dannion's story is amazing: He was (more or less by his own admission) a redneck bastard who was struck by lightning in 1975 and died.

For 28 minutes.

In that time he visited Heaven for the first time. (The first of 3 so far.) In that time he learned some really astounding stuff about the nature of Reality.

I could try to tell you his story, but I'm not going to do it nearly as well as he will. So I highly reccommend you click on the links I'm providing and actually listen to the podcasts yourself. It's time well-spent. I think you'll really be glad you did.

I say "podcasts," plural, because after hearing the Paranormal Podcast episode I immediately had to track down more podcasts with Dannion!

I found a podcast called WOTU's Podcast, which calls itself "conservative paranormal". Listening to their intro and their bumpers I thought I was going to really hate this show. Apparently, the "conservative" part means that their perspective is Christian, and if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior you're going to burn in hell.

I'm always leery of people who feel comfortable condemning others to eternal damnation.

But the hosts seemed to be smart and open to what Dannion had to say. And the reason I was listening, anyway, was tp hear more of what he had to say. So I enjoyed the podcast immensely!

But it wasn't enough.

I had also found a podcast called Merlian News (still don't know what the name means) that had more of an open-minded and International bent.

All 3 podcasts were great, but they still weren't enough!

So I broke down and bought the new book -- the one he's promoting on these podcasts -- Secrets of the Light: Lessons From Heaven yesterday on my way to work. I started reading it as soon as I had some down-time during my shift, and I finally forced myself to put it down around 1:00 pm. I tore through 123 pages in about 13 hours I plan to finish the rest tonight. My friend Lisa is waiting to borrow it tomorrow.

This is an AMAZING read!!!

It's about spirituality vs. phisicality, but Dannnion's coming from a "Wtf?!" perspective. He's been studying How and Why.

He's a paranormal investigator who's actually been to the Other Side a few times, lol. I mean, he's actually not a ghost hunter at all: He's all about how we live while we're on this side. But the way his mind works, he's able to answer questions for us. This book should totally become a mainstay in the libraries of all paranormal investigators, I believe!

But it's more important than a mere tome on paranormal or spiritual theory. This really does provide a practical way of thinking about how we live and do stuff while we're here.

Blah.

If you're into this, give the podcasts a listen, grab the book as soon as you can.

If you're not into it, what the hell are you doing reading this blog?! lol :P

Okay, off to finish the book and maybe get some work done on my novel. (Dannion's book has actually given me a few things to think about for this story I'm working on now!)

To my Gnomey: I LOVE YOU, SWEETY!!! xoxox :D

And to anyone else reading this: I love you, too!!! (Just... you know... not in quite the same way as I love my Gnomey... you know.)

And if I don't write before then...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! :D

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!!!

My the time this posts, it will, technically, be the day AFTER Christmas... But...

I worked both Christmas Eve and Christmas. Which is okay. I can use the money. PLUS, I got Thanksgiving off and may very well have New Year's Eve New Year's Day off, so no complaints.

My favorite Christmas gift is probably a call from Gnomey! :D

She called me at 6:00 pm Christmas Eve, which would be midnight Christmas for her! THE MOMENT is turned Christmas she called me! (hee-hee) Also, she's feeling better!!! Yay! :D And when we talked she said she felt like a kid again because she just couldn't wait until Christmas morning proper, lol. (OMG, could she be MORE lovable?! I think not!)

Also, I got to spend Monday with Tisha! She was in town, so I got to do a sort of family dinner thing with Tisha and many of my ex-in-laws. It was cool! We played some Liar's Dice/Pirate Dice and chatted and ate AMAZING food. It was all very, very groovy! Tisha & I even got to sort of slip away and just catch up with each other away from the rest of the family.

Tuesday, I had to cancel a visit to the Trail of Lights because my body's acting weird -- I have the symptoms of a chest cold or head cold (runny nose & cough) but without the headache and energy drain that let's me know I'm actually sick. So that was a bummer.

HOWEVER, Brian took that opportunity to cook a traditional Christmas dinner. So we watched Christmas movies and pigged-out and generally we of good cheer, celebrating the season the best we can.

Then Wednesday, Christmas Eve, I wake up to a call from my sweetheart! I do the work-thang and it's groovy enough. I visit NORAD Tracks Santa org once, but Santa's already in full swing so I figure I'll give my virtual Santa-tracking a miss this year. But I did take the time to check out this year's Homestar Runner toon! :)

I get home and Brian & I gamble in the virtual (PS2) Hard Rock Casino while listening to Christmas Carols. (That was particularly fun because Lewis Black has a bit about spending Christmas in Vegas.)

I woke up to a slew of wonderful text messages wishing us a Merry Christmas (the 1st or 2nd one was from Gnomey), and even Happy New Year. And Brian was still playing Christmas movies/specials, so I got some Frosty the Snowman and The Muppet Christmas Carol before coming into work.

And now it's time for me to get to work in earnest. I've got a lot to do between now and the end of my shift. However, as I work I'll be milking the last drop of Christmas I can: I'll be listening to The Adventures of Superman (OTR show), specifically the "Looking For Kryptonite" run (which, for OTR or Superman nerds out there, immediately follows "The Atom Man" and "The Atom Man In Metropolis" runs, back in 1945). The reason I consider this extending the Christmas Spirit is because the show ran through Christmas Eve and Christmas and the characters acknowlege this within the show. So... You get it, right?

But I wanted to check in and wish everyone a Merry Yule-tide!!! I hope you receive more blessings than you can count!!!

:D

OMG...

I just watched a really, really bad movie: Bad Girls From Mars! I mean this was a STINKER, lol!

There were a few funny things about this viewing, though...

First, it took me backward in Time. It's one of those "comedies" that isn't funny, but doesn't want to make the effort to be actually good. But what gets you to pick up the flick in the video rental store is the cover art. The premise seems kind of fun, the freeze-frames from the movie that they use on the back of the cover seem to be reasonably well shot, and you know there's going to be nudity in it. (This is assuming, of course, you're a male living in the era before free Internet porn.) I've rented more videos than I care to innumerate because of this marketing formula.

But this was when I was a horny teen and didn't have any other outlet for my... less noble urges...

And, in fact, as I watched this flick I estimated that it was probably made around 1980 or 1981. This would have put it right around the time that Betamax and VHS videotapes began to sell and video rentals began to come into being. (If memory serves.)

I was therefor shocked (SHOCKED, I tells ya) when I IMDb-ed this flick and discovered it was actually made a full decade later!

I mean, people should really have known better by then, lol.

Still, it was kind of a blast from the Past to squirm through bad dialogue, cringe-worthy acting, non-existent cinematography and direction and truly abysmal "jokes" with the only brief reprieve being the occasional flash of flesh, lol. (There is a running gag wherein the murderer leaves clues behind on his latest victim in the form of a poem. The last line of each poem completely fails to rhyme, even though you -- the viewer -- think you know what the rhyming final word will be. When I thought this movie was made in 1979 or 1980 I thought this was rather a good on-going joke. Knowing, however, that it was made 18 years ago I'm less impressed. The Muppets utilized more sophisticated comedic construction back when Jim Henson was still in charge.)

Another amusing thing about watching this was some of the responses of some of the Hulu viewers. For the most part, Hulu seems to house TV shows and movies that are too old to be offensive in any way. As a result, the response posted by some of the Puritans who stumbled onto this flick seemed well disproportionate.

I mean, Hulu states flat-out, very clearly, before the movie starts that this is an R-rated movie and some material will likely be inappropriate for anyone under 18.

So where was the surprise?

Besides, the different logline descriptions Hulu uses clearly tells you that the movie is centered around sexuality: specifically, the gratutitous sexuality of a low-budget film-within-a-film. I mean, I watched the flick and it is exactly what the description says it will be: It's a bad movie about low-budget (exploitation) "film-makers" who are making a sex movie. It is therefor not much of a mental stretch to assume the the movie itself is probably low-budget (exploitative), probably poorly made, and probably has unnecessary nudity and sexuality.

But a few post-ers accused the flick of being a porn -- I know porn (like, biblically), and this was NO porn! -- and one even proudly announced that they could only watch the first 37 minutes and some-odd seconds of the movie.

(Between you and me, I was tempted to bale on this flick way before that, like around the 10-minute mark. There wasn't much story or acting going on to hold this cat's attention, and there were quite a few nude scenes during that time -- like, more than enough to send a sexulally-repressed person running to confessional. So I'm kind of wondering if maybe this individual wasn't deriving... some other... "usefulness" from staying with the movie that long.)

So anyway, the reason this reaction from some of the more vocal Hulu community amuses me is this: Has it been THAT long that nudity and sexuality has been out of vogue?! I mean, I know we're selling stuff with sex just as much as ever (during this viewing I watched a couple of really funny commercials that were using half-naked hot chick speaking sensually to sell shaving gel; but it was done quite cleverly, I thought) while we condemn sexuality in any non-procreational form in mixed company. But I thought we were getting to the point where we could all admit that even though we're supposed to feel bad about sex and sexuality, we really all enjoy it.

Is it just me? I mean how prude are we as a society? And seriously, how could we possibly decieve ourselves into believing that anyone else is buying that "sex is bad and nasty and dirty" and all that?

And just who are we trying to convince anyway?! Who is it that we think wants us to think that sex is bad?

Blah.

Too confusing for me.

Then again... I've been awake since 2:00 pm today.

Let's say you wake up at 5:00 am to be at work at 7:00 am. This would be like you waking up at 1:00 am on your Thursday (when Wednesday is really a bi-otch, generally speaking) so you can get to work at 3:00 am.

Ha! You'd almost be working my shift then, hee-hee! ;P

Anyway, I may be a little punchy at this point. I can REALLY use the extra money and, for the most part, this work day has been very, very genrous to me! But 1 hour away from the end of a14-hour shift, I believe I may be forgiven if my powers of reason are less than sound.

Plus, you know... I've been corrupting my mind with bad movies during some of that time, lol. ;P

GUESS WHAT!!!

I've made it out of Egypt in Tomb Raider Anniversary and have only 3 more levels to go!!! :D I'm running around Natla's Mines at the moment.

That's, of course, when I'm not writing.

...which is kind of a lot, sorta, lol...

Nah, actually I'm doing fine.

I pretend to give myself a hard time about procrastinating, but right now I think I'm doing well. It's not the speed of the creation, but the quality.

I've whipped outlines out production-line style and on a schedule, and the resultant story -- after months of typing day after day -- is just as weak as I (deep down) feared it would be.

Conversely, when I have waited until I knew an outline was working to sit down and bang out the pages, the result was always just a little more special than I had hoped.

So I'm not actually feeling guilty about how quickly or slowly the outline is coming along. I won't be able to finish it until I know my characters and situations inside and out, and until I finish the outline I can bet that I don't know my characters and situations inside and out. (Years of failure serve as a FANTASTICLY EFFECTIVE teacher.)

There a Q&A with a remarkably talented writer/director/animator here at Creative Screenwriting Magazine's blog. This cat has a really great, really productive attitude about writing!

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Please do not listen to the above-linked Q&A if you have not yet seen, but plan to see PIXAR's Wall-E. The Q&A contains spoilers for Wall-E, Monster's Inc. and maybe Toy Story (if you haven't seen that, either).

Now, if you're reading this blog entry, I'm guessing (a) you've seen Wall-E by now or (b) have no interest in watching it (in which case the spoilers wouldn't really ruin anything for you). But I don't want to accidentally ruin any movie for you, so I thought I'd slip the Spoiler Alert in, just to be safe.

Oops!

Gotta get to work. It's the point in my shift (hard days or easy days) wherein I have, like, 5 things that have to happen all at once.

Hope you enjoy your weekend and have an easy-breezy day!!!

:D

LOVE TO MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!!

xoxoxo

I haven't heard from her in a couple of days, so I'm going to assume that means she's healing and getting better. (Simply because I hate to think that maybe she's feeling so crappy she can't get in touch. It HAS TO be the "healing" thing! ;P )

Goin' Ghost Huntin'!

No, for reals! I'm scheduled to go on my first official paranormal investigation in January! :D

I hooked up with a meet-up group here in Austin I've reserved a slot for myself and my li'l bro.

I'm SO STOKED!!! :D

We're going from paranormal enthusiasts (like, since the early 80s when we were both kids) to actual investigators!

Well... you know, nooby investigators. We've got plenty of real-world experience to learn, naturally.

Still... Every journey begins with a first step!

AND... Brian and I still haven't haunted (Get it? "Haunted"?) a local cemetery to try to get our first EVPs, but I held a little impromptu EVP session in our apartment with some surprising results:

It sounds like I actually got some EVPs!

I used 2 recorders, and both got some different EVPs and they also bot captured at least one of the same!

I'm still in the process of isolating the EVPs from the rest of the very boring session, but I hope to get them up on the Net -- probably right here on this blog -- for everyone to analyze and debunk and all that.

Now, our apartment isn't actually haunted. It's not like we have paranormal stuff happening in our place. (You know, nothing paranormal that we don't do to ourselves or each other, at least.) And that's why I was, frankly, surprised to get any EVPs. Also, it changed the very nature of what EVPs are (or seem to be) in my mind. I've heard a couple of acclaimed EVP experts statte that EVPs are everywhere (in other words, not only where hauntings are), but hearing EVPs capture at mi casa really sort of turns my understanding of the very nature of what EVPs are -- or might be -- on its head.

I'll go into detail after I've analyzed what I've captured a bit more. It seems that maybe EVPs aren't merely the voices of "trapped spirits" in a certain location, but perhaps layers of communication from different "dimensions", if you will, of the Other Side.

Like I said, I need to look into it more -- A LOT more! -- before I can claim to have a theory.

Anyway...

Blah.

HOWEVER...!

Brian and I have discussed the possibility of recording audio sketches that we would post as an irregular podcast. And now that we have a couple of digital recorders, that really seems like something we probably should do.

AND... Now that I'm actively pursuing EVPs I figure I'll need a place that will host those sound files.

To that end, I've set-up an accoutn at OurMedia.org! This site is free and it hosts video, audio, images, just name it! :D

I may even post an entirely aural blog entry, just because I can. Not the comedy sketched I mentioned earlier (at least, not at first) but just a plain old, boring me-talking-for-probably-too-long audio blog entry.

Who knows... Maybe it won't be boring.

Hey, if you're the praying sort, my sweet-thang is in bed with a bug of some sort! She called me Monday and her voice was so scratchy and weak! :( I mean, she still sounded like an angel, but an angle that needs warm Chicken Soup and lots of cuddles and snuggles (and probably a few boxes of tissues, too). So think positive, healing thoughts about my Gnomey if you have a moment. I'll personally owe you a favor if you do! :)

Um...

Watched another disc from Season 2 of Ghost Hunters this weekend.

Also, we watched 3 episodes of MonsterQuest. That was kind of interesting. So far, I haven't found another paranormal info-tainment show that matches Ghost Hunters or GHI. I'm kind of glad I don't have cable and a DVR because I would probably spend WAY too much time watching mediocre TV shows. As it is, watching TV shows that are on DVD available from Netflix, the number DVDs I can have at my home at one time helps ensure that I can't spend too much time watching TV shows.

I mean, more than I probably should, sure. But not as much as maybe other people do.

Blah.

OOH!!!

Last night I finally saw Get Smart and it was AWESOME!!! I laughed out loud! A lot! I thought it was really faithful to the original Don Adams version and still brought its own contemporary sensibility to the comedy and storytelling! :D GENIUS!!!

The DVD (from Netflix, natch) had the theatrical version, then an alternate-/deleted-takes version where the movie pauses while you're watching it and allows you to view the alternate takes and/or deleted scenes to get a better sense of the production process and even the editing process!

So, effectively, I watched the movie twice, back-to-back before going to bed, lol.

GOOD flick!

Finally, I managed to get a little writing done, but not nearly as much as I had hoped.

Writing is always more difficult at the beginning of the process, because that's when you're figuring everything out. I write from an outline, so I struggle to figure out what's going to happen and how and why, but then when I start pumping out pages it's just sheer fun.

So I guess tha hassle at the beginning is worth it... I just wish it didn't take quite so long.

Anyway, this pops into my mind because I have a few more hours here at work tonight where I can actually get some good writing done before I need to devote 100% of my attention to work.

So I'm going away for now.

PEACE!!! :D

OMG!!! I was introduced to the FUNNIEST web comic!!!

It's called Garfield Minus Garfield!!!

I aired Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (at work) tonight and my friend Dominic asked me if I had seen it, then he pulled it up for me. I laughed my ass off!!! Check it out!

Brian & I saw the first Garfield flick, but I have yet to watch the second one. I didn't watch it tonight because I was on the phone for a few hours.

I MEAN... :O

...erm...

I was working diligently, doing my job with earnest enthusiasm.

So what have I been doing lately...

Umm...

Rereading emails from Gnomey. :)

But I do that frequently. Umm...

OH! Dark Knight is out on DVD, finally, so Brian & I have been watching that.

I've been reading something, but I can't think just what at the moment...

I'd like to say I've been writing, and I have, but... not really as much as I'd like.

I hooked up with a ghost-hunting group here in Austin! This just happened tonight, so I haven't gone on an investigation yet. But I've already asked for the night off in January, so maybe, possibly, hopefully I'll have some interesting experiences that I can blog about next month!

I'll keep you posted.

This month, though, my focus is on getting a strong outline roughed out so I can get started on my novel. To that end, I re-watched Casino Royale this morning before bed and surprised myself by deconstructing the structure of it! If you've watched the movie, you know that it's an amazingly unpredictable movie that doesn't paint by numbers. But there IS a strong structure and strong theme in there, one that you sort of sense internally even though it's not beat-you-over-the-head overt!

So that was cool.

I've seen the flick many, many times and this was the first time I spotted it. It gave me a couple of tips that might help me with my story.

AND...

I've heard that Quantum of Solace is a good, solid Bond flick, but not quite as great as Casino Royale. But now that I've spotted the sort of thematic underpinnings of Casino I'm really curious to see how the writers progressed it in Quantum.

Then, also, watching any Bond film will be cool now because I can apply my theory of what makes the character fun, thematically speaking, and observe how it was handled in that particular flick. 'Cause, you know, there are great Bond flicks and just flat-out bad Bond flicks. So it will be neat to compare how each set of filmmakers handled the character, and see if -- perhaps -- the bad flicks are bad because they ignored Bond's eternal thematic conflicts.

Blah.

Okay, so I'm back to work for now. Brian & I are temporarily without Net at home, so I'll try to blog again next week when I have Net access again.

PEACE!!! :D

Hola!

Just checking in.

Had a fairly fruitful weekend.

I actually got out of the apartment this weekend. Very unusual for me, lol. I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was hysterical, with a friend. I'm a HUGE Kristen Bell fan from her work on Veronica Mars, and it's really funny to see the roll she plays in this flick!

This coming weekend I'm meant to visit the Trail of Lights with some friends, then FINALLY see Twilight! So that should be fun.

I'm still trying to talk Brian into going on our first ghost hunt, too... We sort of came close, but he chose not to at the (more or less) last moment. Since we don't know anyone with an allegedly haunted location, we have to go to public places. But we'd have to do so in the middle of the night, and he didn't like the thought of us, you know, getting mugged or something, lol. As it turns out, minutes after he talked me out of going it actually STARTED SNOWING! It wasn't cold enough to stick -- the snow melted the moment it hit the ground -- but it stayed on the roofs of the cars outside for most of the rest of the night. So Brian was proven right on that call.

Still... I've got a digital audio recorder and I'm itching to try my hand at capturing EVPs. I've read and heard that you're not supposed to go ghost hunting alone... but... Not sure how much longer I can remain paient...

I also advanced 2 1/2 levels on Tomber Raider Anniversary!!! :D I'm not on the last level in Egypt, Level 11: Sancturary of the Scion! So I'm excited about that!

Also, Brian & I watched most of the Cinematic Titanic flicks! We had already seen The Oozing Skull and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. So we watched The Doomsday Machine and Legacy of Blood, which were hysterical! Brian crashed-out during The Wasp Woman and I made it a little past the half-way point. So we've still got that one to revisit in the future. Plus, you know, with Christmas in the air, I'll probably need to watch Santa Clause Conquers the Martians a few more time. :)

Oh! Also, our DVD player died and we were looking for some entertainment, so Brian busted out my old VHS copied of Star Trek: The Next Generation! That was really cool because watching Next Gen always takes me back to my teenage years and making short films with my Theatre buddies, and it just sort of rekindles that sense of FUN in story telling. So that inspired me to get some writing done. (919 words... not as much as I would like, but I'm still working on my outline; when that's done I'll be able to pound out much larger wordcounts much more quickly.)

But rewatching the first couple of seasons of Next Gen got me in the mood to reread Star Trek Memories and Star Trek Movie Memories by William Shatner. Don't know why, but it just did, lol. That's useful, too, because listening to Shatner recount the writing and shooting of both the Classic Trek series and the flicks makes me want to write, also!

Of course, the time I spent listening to those audiobooks could have been spent writing on mine... but... Inspiration is a good thing, right?! ;P

Speaking of writing, I don't have much time left in my shift before I'm going to get busy again, so I should probably see if I can do a bit of creating before work intervenes. (Darn that work... Always getting in the way when I'm here... you know, here at work, lol.)

LOVE TO MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! xoxoxo

Hope you all have a GUCKING' FROOVY DAY!!! :D

Beautiful Day So Far!

Okay, okay, times are sort of tight at the moment, financially speaking, and food is a bit on the scarce side...

So after I wake up and play a couple hours of Tomb Raider Anniversary I come to work and GUESS WHAT! Free chili! :D Jason's Deli, too: the good stuff!

Which means that the food I brought for dinner tonight will be there tomorrow! :) THAT'S FREE FOOD!

Plus, a coworker brought pastries and ice cream sandwiches! She gave me 2!

Tomb Raider and free food... EXCELLENT start to ANY day!

And I thought I'd take a stab at brightening your day a bit...

If you don't know Cinematic Titanic, I thought I'd share some trailers with you. Give you a taste and maybe a giggle! :) So here goes:

This is their debut, The Oozing Skull. It came out this past April.



Number Two is The Doomsday Machine released in June. Haven't seen this one, but I can't wait to!



Then in August they released The Wasp Woman. Again, haven't sen this one yet, but it looks fun. I have a couple of DVDs that sort of reproduce the experience of a drive-in double-feature, with movie trailers and that "Let's All Go to the Lobby" cartoon and stuff, and one of the trailers is for this flick. So I'm stoked to see their riff on it. (I have a sickness, you see... I actually watch old, bad Sci-Fi/Horror flicks by myself, with no one around to laugh with me. I just enjoy (some) schlocky movies when the mood takes me.)



And just in time for Halloween they released Legacy of Blood!(!!)



And now, for our Yule Tide enjoyment, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians!!! I watched this one with Brian yesterday and it's a hoot! ;P (Of course, you can watch it without the riffing and still laugh yourself silly.)



Hope you enjoy! And if you get a chance, I don't think you can go wrong buying a couple for yourself! You can order the actual DVDs or download the flicks for a reduced price and burn your own DVD! (I burn my own DVDs... I'm frugal that way.)

Here's hoping you have THE BEST day!!! :D

"Poker After Dark?"

Why, I barely met her this morning!

Ha-ha! Get it?

I'm back at work and basically procrastinating doing some writing as my programming goes automated for most of the rest of my shift.

(If you don't know, Poker After Dark is an NBC show that airs after Carson Daly.)

So, I didn't get any writing done yesterday as I spent my last day off rereading Michael Crichton's TIMELINE for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time. GREAT friggin' novel! I swear! And if you've only seen the movie, you have NO idea what you're missing! The flick Jurassic Park managed to get a lot of the DNA info and dinosaur info from the book into the movie (though they could only squeeze, like, a third of the action into it) but, say, Sphere was able to fit almost all the story and suspence into the flick while losing the one aspect that makes the novel so incredible! So TIMELINE is more like the movie version of Sphere than JP in that it does a pretty darned good job of squeezing most of the action into the film, but it leaves out the science stuff (quantum mechanics and actual history about Medievil times) that really makes the novel mind-blowing.

So if you get a chance, read the novel! It's one of Crichton's thicker works, but it is sooooooo worth it!

I sort of threw my sleep-schedule off finishing the novel, though... Or, you know, failed to get it back on track... I finished the novel around midnight Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, rather) and had nothing left to do until 7:00 am.

So I started watching a Romero zombie trilogy of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead... And fell asleep before Night was over, lol. :( I woke up somewhere toward the end of Dawn and promtply fell back asleep, and slept right through Land.

I know, you're like, "Um... Couldn't you have done some writing unstead of falling alseep to old zombie flicks?" But I just didn't have any rocket sauce in me, I swear! The creative well was dry. I find that when I'm physically tired I just can't muster the mojo.

So anyway, I woke up around 11:00 am and tried to fall asleep to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but I ended up watching it all the way through.

THEN I remembered that Cenimatic Titanic just released their riff on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and I suddenly had to download it. Then I burned it, then I watched it with Brian and we had a great time.

And by this time, naturally, I was well awake.

So later tonight I'll most likely be struggling to keep my eyes open here at work. :( Oh well.

OOH! OOH!!

AND...!!!

Okay, for the LONGEST time I've been stuck on Level 8 of Tomb Raider: Anniversary... The Big Boss(es) of this level are these two centaurs who are nigh-impossible to defeat! Now, I'm not a hard-core Gamer in that I have NO problem buying a game, playing most of it, and when I get stuck before the last level or three just going back and replaying the levels I can get through over and over again for years and years to come. I haven't finished a Resident Evil game since Resident Evil 2 and, really, Tomb Raider games are the only ones I've completed. (All but Chronicles which I've never owned, Last Revelation which I only own on Sega Saturn and the Saturn doesn't work anymore, and Angel of Darkness which looks pretty great but maneuvers like a lead brick.) So Tomb Raider games are really the only ones I sort of feel compelled to -- eventually -- finish.

However, there was a point when I was playing Legend where I couldn't get any further and just replayed the levels I was already familiar with whenever the need for some TR took me.

Then, not long after Anniversary was released (or perhaps just before; I'm not quite sure), I picked up the last level I had left off and actually struggled through the rest of the game.

So for several months, this has been the case with Anniversary. These centaur guys are right bastards, and the game programmers were obviously feeling REALLY insecure about gamers maybe being able to complete the game too easily. (This is evident not just with the end of this level, but also the beginning of the next level, too!)

HOWEVER...

There is sometimes this thing that happens when I'm playing a difficult game and my li'l bro is watching, cheering me on... I don't know if it's his will power, or maybe just his moral support, but several times I have been able to push through an impossible level or Boss with him there that had seemed insurmountable when I was playing all by myself.

And today was no different! The juju was workin' and I NAILED those centaur bastards, and even proceeded to press on most of the way through Level 9!!!

This is WAY-significant, because completing Level 8 also completed the Greece section of the game, giving me 4 MORE LEVELS ("St. Francis' Folly," "Coliseum," "Midas's Palace" and "Tomb of Tihocan") that I can replay at will!!! :D Earlier this weak I found myself in a Tomb Raider Anniversary sort of mood and I could only replay "Peru - Mountain Caves," "Peru - City of Vilcabamba," "Peru - The Lost Valley" (which kind of sucks when you get to the T-Rex because he's one of those insecure-programmers-making-a-Boss-unecessarily-invincible type foes, so I rarely bother replaying the last half of the level) and "Peru - Tomb of Qualopec". But even if I don't finish these next 3 Egypt levels, I still have 8 LEVELS I can play through when I'm just in a jumping around, solving puzzles, killing vicious animals kind of mood! :)

Geez! Three and a half hours until I get off work and I am SO jonesing to climb back into TR Anniversary now, lol!

Anyway... I'd say that my Thnksgiving vacation has been great up until, and including, coming back to work!

How badass is THAT! :D

Okay, I should get back to work for now.

SHOUT-OUT TO MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! xoxoxo

And to everyone else:

PEACE, LOVE & HAPPINESS!!! :D

How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation

Actually, as I write this it's 10:17 pm on Monday, so I still have another day-and-a-half or so of Thanksgiving Vacation left, hee-hee. :)

But the Thanksgiving part of it is over, so I'll share that with you in excruciating detail.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Brian & I left Austin around 11:30 am and had a nice drive. We drove past every color of tree you can imagine! I'm talking green and brown, sure, but also yellow and red and orange, and some really groovy combinations of those color pattens! Really gorgeous!

We rolled into Shreveport around 6:30 pm, where Mom put us up at the Fairfield Marriott. (She & her hubby are renovating the guest room at their pad, so she prang for a room in town.)

After we checked in, Mom & Step-dad picked us up and took us out to eat at an Outback Steakhouse, and I had some Shrimp & Fettuccine that made me weep! OMG!!! The shrimp, somehow, tasted like steak, and the fettuccine was simply heavenly! I swear that they must have made the past by hand, right there in the restaurant or something, because I have never had tastier pasta!!!

The conversation was good, also, naturally. It's been a while since we've seen Erminio (Step-Pops), though Mom & I have been keeping in touch via email.

Afterward, they dropped us back at the hotel around 9:00 pm, where we found the beds to be possibly the most comfortable, relaxation-inducing beds EVER!

Okay, that might be a bit of exaggeration.

But I wasn't exaggerating about the Shrimp & Fettuccine!

At All!

Brian & I don't have cable, and therefor don't get Cartoon Network at home, so it was a really pleasant surprise to fall asleep to a show called Total Drama Island! Very funny show! I need to Netflix it when it comes out on dvd.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

When I woke up, C.N. was playing a Tom & Jerry marathon. (Not my cup of tea, but it was cool to wake up to toons, none the less.)

The hotel served a complimentary breakfast that was nice. I usually think of huge bowls of scrambled eggs and stacks of sausage patties and bacon and maybe a vat of gravy when I think "complimentary breakfast", but what they served was a bit more sensible and healthy than that, lol. There were piles of fruit and single-serving cereals and oatmeal and bagels and muffins and the like.

And, they did have biscuits and gravy, though!

They also had a nuke-able bacon/egg/cheese sandwich, so I got my eggs & bacon that way.

It was good.

8:21 pm - Just got back from the Horseshoe Casino!!!

No, wait! This was AFTER the traditional family Thanksgiving!

It was cool! We got to Mom's & Erminio's around 9:30 am and hung out as she cooked & stuff. Gan-Gan has a little house on their land, and Brian & I hung out with her on her porch for a lot of the time, chatting with Gan-Gan and just digging on all the nature around us!

Sometimes family Thanksgivings can be super stress-filled, but today was super-chill. I even got a chance to check my email! And waiting in my Inbox was a Thanksgiving greeting from Her Hotness, my Gnomey Goddess, wishing us all a happy Thanksgiving!!! :D (I mean, how SWEET is she! They don't do Turkey-Day up UK-way!)

I think it was around 3:00 pm or so when we all sat down to give thanks -- by way of stuffing ourselves with tasty, tasty food and grunting and groaning at each other about how delicious the meal is and how we really shouldn't have another helping, but we're going to anyway -- and then we all sat around for a while, bloated and deliriously contented.

Then Mom & Brian & I walked a little of the meal off as she gave us the tour of their land. It's a huge patch, and I can't think of a better place for Mom to do her retirement-thang! Had Brian & I become rich and famous already, I don't know if either of us could have picked out a better spot to set her & Gan-Gan up in.

THEN...

...around 5:00 pm (after what felt like an already long and well-rounded day) Mom got jiggy wit it!

She lives in Louisiana, and yet she doesn't get to go gambling very often. So she took Brian & me to the Horseshoe, where we three proceeded to hit the slots.

I thought about joining a Texas Hold 'Em game, but chickened out at the last minute. I've been playing it on the computer for fake dollars, but I wasn't sure how long could hold my own against real folks. I would hate to have blown my gambling money in fifteen minutes, then spent the rest of the time following Brian around the slot machines.

Wrapping up Thanksgiving Day with some gambling is probably not what our Puritanical forefathers had in mind when they created the holiday, but I've got to say: I am THANKFUL on this day! :)

This has been an unbelievable day of abundance (and some excess, hee-hee) and family and ENJOYING family!

OH, YEAH!!! Entering the casino, I GOT CARDED! This is SO GROOVY to me because I'm pushing 40 and I'm STILL getting carded, lol! My li'l bro -- 4 years younger than me -- and he just strolls in with Mom. Me, they stop and ask to see my I.D.!

How is that possible? NO idea! But it's flattering! ;P

Brian & I fall asleep to a House marathon, which is cool because it was random episodes -- some we've already seen and some from this season, with characters that Brian hadn't met yet.

Then Friday Mom fixed us breakfast and we said our good-byes to Ermino and Mom and Gan-Gan and hit the road.

I spent Saturday vegging, spent yesterday with Stephen King's newest book of short stories, Just After Sunset, and I watched Hancock and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian tonight before hunkering down to work on my current story.

I'm taking a break now, sort of rebooting the gray matter before I get back to my work.

And I kind of can't believe I've still got 8 more hours or so left in this day, as well as all of tomorrow before I have to get back to my "day job"!

A very nice vacation, indeed! :)

Blissmas Day Update...

Just checking in to let you know that since Brian woke up he has well embraced the concept of Blissmas, and we're currently laughing and dancing about to '90s dance music as I play Buffy the Vampire Slayer on PS2.

It's crazy, lol! :D

It's one thing for me to experience this cool-ness, but it's another to have my li'l bro so thoroughly embrace the Blissmas spirit, lol!

IT'S A BLISSMAS MIRACLE!!!

I hope that whatever you're doing, you're enjoying a Blissmas of your own!

PEACE!!!

:D

Happy Blissmas!!! :D

Today feels like an actual holiday to me, so I'm giving it a name.

Brian & I drank and watched a marathon of House yesterday (disc 4 of Season 2) and then I crashed and woke up around 5:00 am, while it was still dark outside. Before I went to bed I talked him into sticking Peter Jackson's King Kong in the player, and when I woke up the movie was still playing. (Usually, Brian goes to sleep with a DVD playing, and when he wakes up in the middle of the night he'll press "Play" and roll over and go back to sleep. But sometimes before he goes to sleep he'll change the disc out with one of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that he hadn't switched the King Kong disc out.)

I don't know how or why, but it felt like waking up on Christmas morning. Brian & I are both off work for several days, so no responsibilities pressing down on us and our only obligation is to enjoy ourselves. When you hear or read the word "contentment" this is the feeling described by that word.

So I grabbed my comforter from my bed and hunkered down in the comfy chair and watched me some King Kong. :)

Then Brian woke up and we started chatting and enjoying the genius of Peter Jackson's film, and the holiday feeling just grew and grew!

So I decided that since we sort of create our reality, this actually is a holiday for me. So I decided it needs a name.

Hence, Blissmas.

The neat thing about Blissmas is that it doesn't have to happen on a certain day of the year, AND it can come more than once a year! So if you have a day without responsibility, and you have someone cool to share it with, and you get that groovy vibe like you got when you were a kid on Christmas morning or Halloween night, that is your Blissmas.

The only thing I wish is that my Gnomey-Goddess were here with us to share this with me. I can just imagine waking up before her, watching her sleep next to me for a couple of minutes before I wander into the living room and see that King Kong is still playing. Then, after I grab the comforter and hunker down to watch the flick, she wakes up and wanders into the living room and snuggles in next to me. I imagine she dozes for a bit, her head against my neck, and as I watch the film in near-silence, I can feel her breathing against my body. Then when she finally wakes up, and she and Brian & I are all watching the end of the movie, the day begins in earnest and the 3 of us laugh and joke and chat and enjoy this day of perfect leisure together.

Mmmm... :)

Okay, so I've got some PS2 King Kong to play, so I'll leave you to ponder your own Blissmas day.

PEACE, LOVE & HAPPINESS!!!

:D

Ghost Trackin'...

G'Morning! :)

It's just about 9:30 am as I write this, and I've already had a full night's sleep. That's because I decided to go ahead and flip my sleep schedule to Normal Folk Time. Lately I've been having trouble getting to sleep on Sunday morning when I get home from work, so since I'll be spending Thanksgiving with normal people on a normal sleep schedule, I decided to go ahead and stay up as late as possible last night. I went to be a little before 8:00 pm and woke up a little after 4:00 am.

Fascinating, isn't it?

Anyway... My bro wanted to research the towns we're going to be driving by/through on our way to and from Mom's house. He wants to know where the hauntings are. (Not that we're planning on stopping and investigating on either trip -- we've yet to actually go on an investigation so far -- but just to know.)

Well...

Obsessively looking things up on the Net happens to be something I do regularly, so I volunteered to write up a report on which towns are supposed to be haunted and what's supposed to be haunting them. We don't have printers that work, so I can make text files out of them and upload them to my iPod for convenient travel and reference.

3 HOURS LATER...

My shoulders are tense and my vision is blurring, but I've got the best superficial notes available! :)

(Ideally, one would actually visit the libraries and local newspaper and hall of records and so forth of the individual towns, if one were doing real research. But since we may not even be stopping in any of these towns, superficial -- i.e. Internet-only -- research suffices fine.)

I haven't created the text files and uploaded them to the 'Pod yet. I wanted to rest my brain for a moment.

So, here's why you should be impressed with me. Besides Google-ing each town, I went to Ghost Village.com and searched through a decade worth of Personal Experiences archives, we're talking 1999 to 2008, scanning each year for 18 different cities.

I also took notes on 4 towns from so-called reports on Ghosts of America.com before realizing that these accounts are COMPLETELY FABRICATED! Probably using a computer program! I came to this conclusion when, on the 4th town, I noticed that certain aspects of the excounters were identical to other encounters in other towns.

For instance: Austin might have "reports" of skeletons sipping blood from a jar, and a girl with a machete sticking out of her head throwing throwing into Town lake. Then Houston might have a sighting of a girl with a huge knife sticking out of her head sipping a jar of blood, and a coal miner throwing bricks into Lake Houston!

I boggled at the revelation!

Then I read the About Us page, on which the webmaster(s) states that they "believe that everybody has the right to read about ghost sightings in their own towns or cities. So for the towns and cities around the country that are not lucky enough to have their own sightings we have made up fictional sightings as a public service. As a city or town gets more and more sightings submitted the fictional sightings are automatically dropped."

Okay, so I have to give them props for that. Had the Net been around when I was a kid, I would have dug reading about a scary skeleton with a clever sticking out of its head throwing jars of blood into Buffalo Wallow, lol. Though, interestingly, Odessa (where I grew up) actually has real sightings there. So they wouldn't have had to create fictitious encounters for my home town.

Still, before I read that I was pretty annoyed. The fictitious accounts are written with hair-curling-ly poor grammar that is not merely an aesthetic pain to read, but also a logistical nightmare to wrap your brain around! Like this little nugget of prose gold:

"The ghost of a coal-miner is rumored to have been witnessed on frequent instances being carried by a bicycle on a murky highway near Franklin (Texas)."

Did your head explode?

I mean, the fact that the entire thing is in the passive voice is enough to make you want to vomit prepositions. But exactly HOW can a highway be "murky" and did the bicycle in question possess arms?!

But if the folks at Ghosts of America are using a computer program to randomly generate
these stories, that explains the sense-bending grammar, lol.

I was helped a bit in my research by Texas Ghost Hunters.com. They didn't have reports on many of the towns we'll be driving through, but the shed some light on a couple.

I started out with Shadowlands.net. Most of their info seems to be culled from other web sites, but it's a decent place to get started. It's easy to navigate, and if you find reports there you at least have some ideas to follow up on. If you don't find anything in their index, you know you've got more intense searching ahead of you, and you're braced for the possibility you may turn up nothing.

Like I said, though, Brian & I haven't even performed a single investigation here in town, yet. We're still piecing together the equipment and reading up on the subject and whatnot. We just want the info for this trip to amuse/educate ourselves on the drive.

Okay, so I'm going to get this info onto my iPod and then rest my brain for a few hours.

Hope you have a spooktacular day!!!

:D

Gearin' Up For Turkey Day!!!

Sorry I haven't been around for a while. I spent last weekend in bed. (And not in the sexy way, either, lol.)

It's 60° outside and it's sprinkling, and I just could NOT be in more of a Holiday Spirit!!! :D

Which is really cool, because I JUST STARTED MY VACATION!!! I'm off work for the next 10 days!

Brian & I are going to Louisiana to hang with Mom, her hubby, Gan-Gan and our new "sister" Daisy. (She's Mom's new dog.)

That's going to be cool! :) It'll be the second time we've been in Louisiana (though we've driven through it twice before).

Also, I'm on a bit of a mission:

I was listening to a back episode of Jason Hawes & Grant Wilson's radio show Beyond Reality Radio that featured a guest named Charles J Adams III who informed me that telling ghost stories during Christmas is an age-old tradition, and A Christmas Carol isn't Dickens' only Christmas ghost story!!! :O

This thrills me to no end!

I've always had trouble deciding if my favorite holiday was Halloween (with goblins & ghosties & all things spooky) or Christmas (the time of year that folks agree to band together as a human community and treat each other with love). Even though I enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas -- the whole Yule season, if you will -- I always feel a bit resentful when the Halloween decorations come down and the Christmas decorations go up. (I don't really have a problem with the Thanksgiving decorations because they tend to be brown and orange and yellow and have pumpkins and stuff, so they still remind me of Halloween. But Christmas decor is just 180° different to Halloween decor.)

BUT NOW...

I can continue enjoying my goblins and ghosties, even as I'm celebrating peace on Earth and good will toward men! :D

But here's my problem: I can only track down 6 of Dickens' known 10 (thought there may be more) Christmas Ghost Stories.

Hmph.

The way I got the number 10 was by doing a quick Google search for "charles dickens christmas ghost stories" which turned up this discontinued book on Amazon.com, cleverly titled Charles Dickens' Christmas Ghost Stories. Now, if you read the product description, it says the book is:

A anthology featuring ten seasonal ghost stories written by Dickens includes ""The Signal Man,"" ""The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain,"" ""The Haunted House,"" and A Christmas Carol...

So that gives tells me that at least 10 of the 22 books/short stories Dickens wrote about Christmas are ghost stories. And that tells me that 4 of those are "The Signal-Man," "The Haunted House," The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain and (naturally) A Christmas Carol.

Further poking around reveals that Dickens wrote 5 Christmas novels, starting out with A Christmas Carol in 1843 and wrapping up with The Haunted Man in 1848. Of those novels, only one wasn't supernatural: The Battle of Life (1846).

So that gives me the titles of 2 more of Dickens' Christmas ghost stories.

Then I also discovered that "A Christmas Tree" is another one of the short stories.

So that's 7 of the (known) Dickens Christmas ghost stories:

1. A Christmas Carol (1843)
2. The Chimes (1844)
3. The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
4. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
5. "The Haunted House" (1859)
6. "The Signal Man" (1866)
7. "A Christmas Tree" (18??)

But that's where the trail goes cold. (No pun intended.)

I mean, I know that's pretty damn good, and that I really shouldn't obsess over it.

But...

My curiosity is up now, lol. I'd love to discover the titles of the remaining 3.

Okay, now somebody has to be wondering "Why don't you just buy a used copy of the silly book?! Then you will not only know, you'll also have them for yourself!" But the answer is that I don't have any money, so I'll be reading them free online. Like at Online-Literature.com or Dickens-Literature.com.

And I've already tracked down text copies of all of them, as well as free audiobook copies of The Cricket on the Hearth, "The Haunted House" and "The Signal Man" thanks to Librivox.org! :)

(You can also score a few different readings of A Christmas Carol, but I have one read by Patrick Stewart (back in 1992), so I'm good on that one. ;P)

Still... I'm obsessive, lol. Even if I couldn't read ever one of them, I'd like to at least know which ones are the ghost ones.

I mean, yeah, I could simply read all of them -- which I will probably end up doing eventually -- and then I'll know for myself which ones are the ghost ones and which ones aren't. But for the time being, I'm too impatient for that, lol.

Okay, blah.

I figure I've bored you long enough with this, lol.

Okay: Vacation time! I've got me some Tomb Raider Legend to replay, hee-hee.

Thanksgiving is 4 days away: I hope you find plenty to be thankful for!!! :D

OMFG!!! :D

I just finished Breaking Dawn and IT IS AMAZING!!! :D

As I've said before, I read the Twilight saga because my daughter said it was great and I wanted to have yet another level on which to relate to her, but I ended up ADORING this PERFECT series of novels!!!

Any astute writer could tell you that you have power when you tell a good story well, but only the serial stroyteller can relate HOW MUCH power you possess when you carry characters and situations beyond a single story into many. And Stephenie Meyer utilizes that power with ASTOUNDING SKILL! Each novel is excellent by itself, but when you sign on to the saga as a whole and go from start to finish, she rewards you with a Happily Ever After that you never dreamed possible!!! :D Stephenie Meyer REINVENTS the phrase "Happily Ever After"!!!

If you're into the supernatural -- namely, vampires and werewolves -- and into romance and the concept of family, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this series!!! These novels are SO worth your time and emotional investment!!! :D

Btw, if you -- like many fans of the Harry Potter screen series -- prefer simply to watch the movies (unconcerned with experiencing the depth and breadth of the series available through the novels) be sure to be in theaters BE SURE to see the flick in theaters on November 21st!!! A strong performance for the first flick will help ensure that you get to eventually watch the 4th (and 5th, as they're planning to break the last book into 2 movies) which will ROCK YOUR WORLD!!! :D

If you're not that patient (like me, hee-hee) then rush out and buy the novels and read them all immediately!

Surf's Up!!!

I just wacthed Surf's Up here at work, thanks to Netflix's "Watch Instantly" feature, and I REALLY DUG IT!!! :D

Very fun flick! The ads when the movie came out looked like just another CGI feature, but it's SO NOT that! This is a really sweet little flick with fun characters, a great world and EXCELLENT acting!!! The cast is all world-class character actors, the types of actors you don't expect to be in a CG animated feature, lol!

Now, granted, I watched the movie at work, and it was kind of free (sort of), and I had absolutely zero expectations, so...

Still, I look forward to watching it again soon! I dug it that much! If I had some money I'd rush out and buy the dvd on my way home from work! I really liked it! :)

Just thought I'd pop online and share that with ya.

PEACE!!!

I Ate Goat Cheese!!! :D

Brian had this Starbuck's Goat Cheese & Mushroom sandwich that he hadn't gotten around to eating, and he reasoned that it would probably go bad before he got around to it, so he offered it to me. And I ate it. Pretty groovy! :)

I believe that was the first time I ever ate Goat Cheese.

Now, I realize that health-conscious people and/or people who spend more than $5 a meal have probably had goat cheese several times. But that was my first.

Very exotic for me. ;P

I'm on Chapter 9 of Breaking Dawn, the last book of the Twilight Saga. I really enjoyed Eclipse, but Breaking Dawn, but they all start off with so much tension and angst that you kind of want to put the book down and do something else. But for 3 books so far, by the time the novel is over you're just in love with the world and characters and can't wait for the next one, lol.

One bummer about trying to catch up to my daughter with the Twilight Saga is that I'm not writing as much as I should be. :( More than that, I'm not the slightest bit bored. See, boredom is a creative person's best friend. When you're bored, your imagination does interesting things. But reading a great novel (or novels) is not really conducive to creation.

I mean, I learn stuff -- I see how one author tweaks a story point or conveys character in an engaging way and other technical stuff -- but I'm not creating my own stuff in that time.

So I feel this sort of dual joy/guilt thing when I'm engaged like this in some one else's genius.

Blah.

But my Gnomey-Goddess still believes in me!!! :D That sort of adds to the guilt a little, but it mostly reassures me that my career as a writer will begin when it's supposed to.

Okay, I need food now.

PEACE!!!

:D

How Was Your Halloween?

Mine was fine.

I worked, but I also found time to watch this year's Homestar Runner toon!!! :D In fact, there were a couple that were fun to watch, one of which was a funny costume commercial! (It's funnier if you're old, like me, and remember what store-bought Halloween costumes were like in the '70s.)

I don't remember if I had yet when I last checked in, but I finally got around to listening to several episodes of Jason Hawes' and Grant Wilson's Beyond Reality Radio!!! It's absolutely as awesome as Ghost Hunters is, but for different reasons! :) In fact, I listened to the last 10 or 12 episodes they broadcast a couple of times each, then had to go back and snag the last 10 available at Planet Paranormal.com because I was still jonesin', lol.

Then I get this text message from my daughter, like, Monday asking me how I was coming with the Twilight saga, and I had to inform her that I hadn't picked up the next book yet because of my script.

However...

On Thursday nights/Friday mornings I'm just workin', workin', workin' and I have no time to even think about any project I'm writing... So... I figured I could pass the time by listening!!! :D

So I started Eclipse (Book 3 of 4 (so far)) last night! I'm only on Chapter 6, but I'm diggin' it so far.

I really enjoy being back in that world again. It's a bit like reading the Harry Potter series in that you grow to know and love the characters so much that you're anxious to see what they're up to now, and the previous book always left you wondering how the world would be changed when you rejoined it.

I really hope the movie adaptation for Twilight does well, because I'd like to see the whole series (what I've read of it so far, anyway) on film! I'm diggin' on the actors they've cast to play these characters, and the source material is just golden!

I do sooooooo which I could see Twilight with my Gnomey-Goddess when it comes out, though! It's totally gay, I know, but the relationship between Bella and Edward just keeps on reminding me of Gnomey!!! The way the author describes what it feels like to both appreciate and long for another human being like that... If you've ever been TRULY in love, you can so relate!

Okay, I'm gonna unwind from my workday and listen to some more of Eclipse, so PEACE, Y'ALL!!!

:D

HAPPY Nigh-HALLOWEEN!!!

It's All Hallow's Eve EVE now! I'm workin' Halloween, so I won't be enjoying it in any wild-n-crazy way, but a bad Halloween is still better than just about any other day of the year! :D

If you're like me and you don't have any super-groovy plans, please allow me to suggest some free entertainment options:

First off, you can't go wrong with some Homestar Runner on All Hallow's Eve!!! If you've tuned into www.homestarrunner.com during Halloweens past you know what I mean. But if not, you simply MUST check it out! Scroll down (within the "Holiday" sections of "Toons") to the very, very bottom and start with "Homestarloween Party" (2002) and then keep going up to the present. (Not certain exactly when the Brothers Chaps post the new episode, so no idea excatly when this year's episode will pop up.)

Next: HULU!!! They have a pretty decent "Huluween" section that includes whole, unedited editions of classics like Atomic Age Vampire and Night of the Living Dead to contemporary entries such as Underworld: Evolution and 28 Days Later to some classics from my youth like The Island of Dr. Moreau (when I was WAY-young) and John Carpenter's The Thing. I almost wish I had absolutely NOTHING to do Halloween night just so I could get bored wnough to watch Hulu.com all night, lol. (That's one part of my personality. Another part of me would rather be at a Halloween party with dear friends, and still another would prefer to be wandering haunted cemeteries with a camera and digital recorder, hee-hee.)

AND... It being Halloween and all, don't forget that Hulu hosts new episodes of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International! (That's only 4 eps per show, but that's just under 8 hours of ghost-huntin' GOODNESS!) Which is a useful segue way to my next free Halloween celebration suggestion...

I've just recently discovered Beyond Reality Radio, which is the 3-hour talk radio show about the paranormal hosted by Jason hawes and Grant Wilson, and it's A BLAST to listen to!!! Seriously genius! The above link takes you to their show archives on Planet Paranormal. I dropped 11 episodes into my iPod and am close to halfway through the 9th episode, lol.

But I can't represent the mighty Ghost Hunters (as brilliant and funny as they are) without reminding everyone about my first paranormal love: SPOOKY SOUTHCOAST!!! :D That's a 2-hour radio show that focuses on the paranormal, located in a virtual Hellmouth of every kind of activity imaginable! Plus, the guys -- Tim Weisberg, Matt Costa and Science Advisor Matt Moniz -- are just a blast to listen to! Not to sound gay, but this show sort of broke my paranormal cherry. I've been into the paranormal since I was, like, 10 years old but this show got me reading books again and looking into this current paranormal boom. ACTUALLY... if I'm honest... The reason I finally broke down and checked out GH and GHI is because Spooky Southcoast kept having TAPS members on their show!

And if we're talking podcasts, I can't overlook Paranormal Podcast, which has been producing a ton of eps this month, since it is Halloween month. These episodes are more sort of "bites-sized" in that last around 45 minutes per ep. But with so many episodes out this month alone, and the mind-boggling variety of topics covered promise hours and hours and hours of listening nirvana! :) And if you're not already a Paranormal Podcast listener, then you've got years' worth of episodes to enjoy!

So these are a few inexpernsive suggestions, should you lack stuff to do tomorrow night, there ya go. :)

Of course, if I could enjoy this Halloween in any manner possible, I wish I could you a Halloween party with my Gnomey-Goddess (who would, in my imagination, be dressed in some super-sexy Naughty Nurse costume or Tempting Vampiress or some such)!!! xoxoxo :D

Whatever you do, though, I hope you have a BLAST this Halloween!!! (Have extra fun for me, okay?)

:D

NEW MOON by Stephenie Meyer

Okay, I am SO hooked on the Twilight Saga now!!!

I finished the first book, Twilight and I was so enchanted I had to watch the trailer for the movie (Tish told me there is a movie coming out) just to see if it looked like it would do the source material justice.

IT LOOKS GOOD!!!

So then I launched into the second novel in the series, New Moon...

...and I was less enchanted by that! :(

It starts off fine, but then plunges you into this place you SO don't want to go!

Except...

Okay, I'm not reading the text of the Twilight Saga... I, um... found a way to score the entire series (including Meyer's "adult horror" novel The Host) for free in audiobook form.

Here's my thing: I didn't know if I would enjoy the series, but I definitely wanted to give it a shot, because I dig exploring things Tish is into. And the easiest way to enjoy a novel, for me, is audiobook. You can listen while you're driving, playing videogames, even working! Sometimes you miss a few details, but you get the entire experience: It's like speed reading. (I'm a VERY slow and thorough reader, but I actually do know how to speed read... I just never do it, lol.)

But when you get something super-cool for free, you sometimes get what you pay for. (What I mean by "sometimes" is that, to date, I usually get a great deal MORE than I pay for. But sometimes the quality of the product reflects the fact that you got it free.) (Btw, I didn't steal the audiobooks, just in case my vagueness leads you to wonder, lol. I'm not that guy!) (P.P.S. The Internet is our friend, and it truly, really loves us! *wink, wink*)

This dictum ("you get what you pay for") proved true while listening to Twilight in that the chapters sometimes clipped. The end of one chapter would be missing, as well as the very beginning of another. But the phenomenon was tolerable because I still got the whole story... I just got jerked out of the moment for a sentence or two, then slid right back into the riveting narrative.

New Moon, however, suffers from a more significant problem: Some of the chapters are well out of order, lol!

So I begin New Moon and it's cool because it returns me to the world I've grown to love.

THEN...

Nothing significant happens, but the world I love is shattered into a bazillion pieces and Bella Swan is miserable! (And, therefor, I am miserable!) And there's no acceptable reason why!

The reason is that 2 whole chapters have been skipped, and I just knew that X happened without any real explanation, other than "this is what the author made to happen."

So I drop the book for a day and enjoy a few chapters of Ghosts of Austin, Texas: Who They Are And Where To Find Them -- more research for my screenplay.

And this turns out to be a positive thing for me, because last night was a relaxed night, and I ended up writing several pages on the screnplay because of the free time! :D

But tonight was ALL WORK.

And I am dead-set on experiencing everything Ms. Meyer has written so far, if only to have some fodder for conversation with my Tisha! So I returned to New Moon as I worked.

AND I FELL BACK IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD! :)

I won't go into any specifics, as I have no desire to spoil the experience should you happen to get curious and read the saga yourself. But things progressed and got more interesting, and then...

...the chapters jumped back to the missing 2 chapters from the beginning of the book!

And Stephenie Meyer set everything up, and let everything play out, in such a way that even though you HATE where the story is going, you're still hypnotized by the journey!

What happens at the first of the second book -- the thing you NEVER would believe COULD happen by the end of the first book -- is no longer a function of a sadistic author, but a necessary step in an obviously well-thought-out progression of life events that will evolve Bella into a well-rounded and powerful woman (eventually).

I was in the hands of a master storyteller, but for a day and a half I didn't realize it!

This experience in disjointed narrative has convinced me that Stephenie Meyer is a writer that I can trust! I CAN NOT WAIT to experience the whole of the Twilight Saga!!! Not just the novels written, but the novels to come! And I'm excited to watch the sage unfold on the Big Screen, as the screenwriter and director seem to really have a strong hold on what made the novel such an amazing experience! :D I think the best comparison (this is before the movie has been released, please note) would probably be the translation of the Harry Potter novels to the Big Screen! I honestly believe it may be that kind of experience for fan-boys/fan-girls!

So now I'm on Track 20 of 60, and I'm loving the ride, even though I've leaped backward in story-time once again to fill in some gaps that -- at this point -- I hadn't really missed, lol! But discovering what lead from X to Y is just as entrancing as the events of Y, if not more so! ;P

Um...

It occurs to me that this might all sound like drivel.

If so, I can clear it up thusly: Go buy Twilight and read it. Then buy the rest of the series -- New Moon, Elcipse, Breaking Dawn (because once you've read the first you'll want to read them all) -- and READ THEM!!! :D

Don't simply wait for the movie to come out, GO READ!

If you're a romantic and you have a dark side, you will SO enjoy this journey!!! :D

Or, let me rephrase that: If you've ever experienced what you believe is True Love, experienced what felt like true loss, and you also enjoy more mythic, Gothic stories, you WILL ENJOY THIS JOURNEY! :D

Now, back to the book for me. :)

I LOVE YOU, MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! :D xoxoxo

More Marathons...

Heyya!

In case you're curious, my daughter text-ed me about a series called the Twilight Saga by author Stephenie Meyer. She called it a Forbidden Romance series with vampires and werewolves.

Sounds cool!

So I spent much of this morning/today listening to the first 14 chapters of the audiobook version of the first novel: Twilight. I'm diggin' it! :) (Btw: The links I provide contain SPOILERS, so if you click on them, be careful not to ruin anything for yourself.)

And Brian's off tomorrow, so when I woke up we jumped into a marathon of a show My Genius Friend Dave recommended, Torchwood -- a spin-off series from Dr. Who -- and then we wrapped up Season 1 of House.

VERY COOL VIEWING!!! :D

If you want to watch Torchwood for yourself, follow the above link and find the "Videos" button. That's the only online way I know to watch it right now.

If you want a House fix, I don't know of a way to view it online for free, but you can watch the 4 most recent episodes at Hulu.com.

Also, before I started on Twilight last night/this morning I watched Episode 3 of Fringe -- J. J. Abram's latest masterpiece! :)

Finally. I, very irresponsibly, haven't written a single word on my script, lol. But watching shows like Fringe, House and Torchwood do have the benefit of making me think about writing, as they're all written so brilliantly! (That may sound like a cop-out, but it actually is true.)

After hours and hours of being entertained, however, I needed a break. I needed some Quiet Time to let my mind settle a bit.

No idea what I'm gonna do after I post this.

It's late/early enough that I could go to bed, but I'm not really sleepy. I've got some 3-5 episodes of Season 2 of Monk to finish watching. I'm also excited to finish Twilight -- and the other 4 Stephenie Meyer books, for that matter -- as well.

Then, also, my Hulu queue is backed-up and I should probably watch some of those shows, too.

I truly have an embarassment of riches in the Entertinment department. Too bad I don't have, like, another 2 weeks off to enjoy them all, lol.

Still... If I have to have a problem, this isn't a bad problem to have! ;P

Here's hoping YOUR life gives you more fun than you know what to do with!!!

:D

W&R...

I'm in Writing and Research mode right now.

I'm not blogging much because I'm working on a screenplay, and my free time is spent mostly writing and reading and watching TV shows and movies.

Not a bad fuckin' life, I must admit, lol! :P

In fact, it's pretty much the life I imagined having when I was a teen! Except, in my fantasies I was also married to a super model and had millions of dollars in the bank.

BUT...

My Gnomey Goddess is DEFINITELY super-model HOT... I just need to work on that bank account thang, lol. ;)

Btw, my poor Sweety...! In addition to her normal family drama, she's had to endure some torture from the dentist's office! Disregard the 30-year-old stereotypes about Brits and their dental hygiene: They have dentists, too, and their dentists are -- apparently -- just as masochistic as ours. :( She called me a couple of days ago and related her rather harrowing dealings with this misanthrope, lol. (I jest: I'm sure he's a lovely man, but he made my baby hurt, so I have a grudge against him!)

Usually in my blog entries I say "I''ve been up to more of the same" and leave it at that, but I realized that that really doesn't accurately cover it. spend many, MANY hours on the Net, and I could so easily relate what I've been up to by sharing the links with you!

So here's the past couple of days:

I'm researching the paranormal for my current movie, so I'm watching episodes of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International at Hulu.com. And naturally, I've been listening to Spooky Southcoast and also Oprah's Spirit Chanel and Jim Harold's Paranormal Podcast and Tim Sheet's The Nightwatch Show. I've learned that the TAPS members have a radio show calle Beyond Reality and I hope to listen to some Beyond Reality soon.

This is just a cross-section of what I've been doing, and when I have more time I may relate in a more entertaining fashion. ;P

PEACE!!!

LOVE TO MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! :D

I DID IT!!! I BROKE MY MOVIE'S SPINE!!! :D

I just experienced, like, a half-hour long writer's orgasm! Like, a story-gasam!

A STORGASM!!! :D

Here's why:

Writing (fiction) is about story and character. You could say Story, Character and World, because I believe that a strong factor in why we watch movies and TV shows over and over again is because we enjoy hanging out in that fictitious world that the storyteller has created. Take Seasons 5 and 6 of Buffy for example: Those weren't the best stories that they told then, but we still liked hanging with the Scooby Gang.

But the world doesn't exist without the characters there. Imagine 2-minute shots of the empty halls of Sunnydale High or the quad, or empty shots of the Bronze. After about 35 seconds you'll want someone -- anyone, at that point -- to step into frame (character) and do anything (story).

So for practical purposes, I consider the world part of the characters, because it really reflects upon and is reflected by the characters that live there.

Blah.

So, when you're a novelist you can just set some characters loose in a world and sort of see what they do. I've read some MAGNIFICENT novels where there was very, very little story. But I didn't care! I really enjoyed the characters (and world) and the ideas the writer wanted to get off his/her chest through these characters.

However, in screenwriting -- where structure is god -- the writer falls into the opposite trap. Characters and their world sort of feel stiff and fake, and you really don't care about what happens to these people; you're just waiting to see if the way the movie ends justifies the time you're spending watching this piece of... um, celluloid.

This is the problem I have often suffered from in my writing. The screenplays I've been working on all summer feel like a bunch of "...and then this happened and then this happened and then..." with no real character, nothing that REALLY made you particularly concerned about what happened next.

(I may exaggerate... I'm a bit harsh on my own work, I've been told...)

But a week or two ago this miraculous thing happened...

Three ideas for scripts that I felt really had something fused together to create... something NEW! Two of these ideas, I felt, were my "winning lottery ticket", only when I went to write them they... somehow didn't live up to expectations...

BUT THEN...

For the last week or 2 I've been running around in this rich, textured world, getting to know these people who do interesting things for interesting reasons! They were excellent tour guides, and I've been really enjoying getting to know them and their world!!!

However...

Like getting drunk at a party on Christmas Eve, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that there was something else I really should be taking into consideration.

That something else was story. Plot. Screenplay structure.

You can't really structure a screenplay until you know the entire story. I know others will enjoy hanging out with these folks as much as I do, but I have to give people a reason to come in and meet these characters in the first place!

Imagine a friend telling you she has this friend who is just so funny and you have to meet her! You go, "Cool. I can't wait!"

But then nothing happens.

However, if she tells you she and her friend are going out to dinner Wednesday night, do you want to come? then you go, "Yeah! Love to!"

So the story is the reason to hang with these characters, and I would poke around and try to figure out what that story could be (this should be a ridiculously easy process, easier than most writers would lead you to believe -- particularly considering that it's one of my most-developed skills as a screenwriter) but I kept drawing up a blank!

Coming off a weekend (Sun-Tues) without any real advance in cracking this figurative egg, I was determined that I would find this bugger Wednesday, when my "work day" had hours that I could spend pondering the problem.

But nothing.

Thursday rolls around... This is a bugger of a day in the best of circumstances, and this Thursday was actually quite do-able... up until the time my shift was supposed to be over and I discovered there was an issue about my replacement's schedule: I didn't have a scheduled replacement.

Still, I get off work a mere hour late (I though it might be as much as 4 hours late!) and get home, go right to sleep... but that's not unusual after a Thursday shift.

Friday I go to work, and I really hope I'll figure this out. I've had some interesting story ideas on the way to work, and I get a few interesting ideas over the course of my shift...

However...

Now, realize that in my mind, being able to write this screenplay soon means that I'll be able to rewrite it before long. After a rewrite or 2 (or 3 or 7) it will be in shape to send off to Hollywood, where someone will pay me money for it. When paid that money, I won't merely get out of debt and be able to breath a sigh of relief in a time when the American economy is circling the drain, I will then be able to be with the love of my life, and provide for her, and raise babies with her!!! (No pressure there, lol.)

So every once in a while I get these teentsy, tiny little anxiety pangs when I realize that I can't start the real work on my script just yet. Now, I'm largely Buddhist in my philosophy, so when I get those pangs I go to my breath and look around at the life surrounding me and remember to live in this moment, rather than get lost in "what could be", and lose my mind in the ruin that my life could possibly become.

But still...

I would really like to get started, in earnest, on this screenplay as soon as humanly possible.

So tonight (last night, really, Saturday night) I have the lightest shift of my work week. Plenty of time to figure out this Story-thang...

So I set about the problem.

I work it this way, I work it that way... to no avail. I mean, at some points I'm actually talking to my characters out loud (during smoke breaks, when I was alone, and also I was more whispering just in case someone was around that I didn't know about) and my characters really don't know what their story is. THEY'RE CHARACTERS. They can't see the Big Picture. That's God's territory.

As Saturday night wears into Sunday morning, and my shift wears closer and closer to being over -- when I'll begin my weekend and have 3 days to write... IF I have something to write -- I even email a collaborator of mine (on whom one of the characters is loosely based) begging for help.

But here's my experience with collaborators:

They DO NOT give you what you need.

That's no poor reflection on them. It's just that the folks in my life (a) aren't writers, or if they are (b) they write different genres than I do. My buddy Kelly, for instance, is an amazing writer/director, but he's more Drama-oriented. He can give me an idea, but it won't really fit easily into a Horror/Action type of movie.

So I reminded myself that this writing thing is probably one of the aspects of my life that (at least, judging by past experience) is something I have to do alone.

Which means, though, that I already have been given, or have already earned whatever tools I need to solve the problem. (Everything is "spiritual practice" with me; that's just how I experience this life.)

So I look at the problem:

If this is the problem, then this character walks in and fuckin' solves it. No muss, no fuss.

No frickin' STORY, either!!!

Robert McKee very astutely defines Story as the gap between what a character expects to have happen as a result of an action he takes, and the world not responding the way he expects it to.

I think, "I haven't talked to my friend Aaron in a long time, but I don't have his number. I'll just call Tommy at work and get it from him." So I call Tommy, but unbeknownst to me Tommy has just been bawled-out by his boss for not fixing a mistake that Tommy didn't even make or know about, and now Tommy is struggling to fix this problem before he can even get on with his already problem-laiden day! So I call and I'm all, "Hey, Tom-bo, how's it hangi--" but then Tommy explodes at me about interrupting his work day, and not everyone works overnight and he doesn't call me when he knows I'm at work so why am I being such a selfish bitch and calling him when I know he's going to be busy?!!

Now a gap has opened up between what I hope to accomplish and actually accomplishing it.

(By the way, my friend Tommy REALLY IS that mean! He beats me often! And forces me to call him "Lord Tight-buns" as I cry like a little girl and beg him to let me get back to my meditating. It's pretty messy.)

So if I've got a problem that a character can solve easily, THERE IS NO STORY.

BUT THEN IT HIT ME...!!!

Reverse Engineering!

That's part of the beauty of being God: Time has no meaning!

There is always a temptation for the writer to take a situation and move forward through Time/Space with it and see how it plays out. I mean, that's how Life works, right?!

But when you pray for something, for instance, there are a lot of variables that have to fall into place at the exact right time for that to happen; folks have Free Will and stuff, and we're always making erratic decisions at weird times; so for an event to occur by divine intervention, we have to believe that God can move backward and forward through Time/Space AFTER we pray to make all the puzzle pieces fall into place in time for us to go "Wow! Thanks for making that happen, God!"

And the writer, being the Story-God, has that power!!!

(This all didn't really go through my head at the moment; I'm just adding this as a bit of a dramatic flourish.)

So I realize that if a character can solve the problem that easily, there might be something that happens to PREVENT the character from understanding the TRUE NATURE of the problem!!! :D

It's like the Logical Hemisphere of my brain (be that Left or Right, I really can't remember)
took the problem and said "Well here's what your problem really is. What you need is this." And my Creative Hemisphere goes "Oh, that's EASY! You just need this!" And then my Logical Hemisphere goes "Hey, that's a story beat you got there, let me write that down!" And then my Creative Hemisphere goes "And if that happens, then this would happen right after that." And my Logical Hemisphere goes, " Hey! That's ANOTHER story beat! I'll just... No wait! That's TWO story beats! I'll just write those down..." And as that's going on, my Creative Hemisphere is going, "And then THIS would happen, and then this, and then this..." and my Logical Hemisphere is typing as fast as it can, catching and categorizing all this story until...

I DID IT!!! :D

I fuckin' broke the spine of this screenplay!!! :D

Btw, "spine" is also called, in screenwriting jargon, the "throughline" which is the single line of story that runs through a movie like a roller-coaster rail: Stay on-track and the audience gets one hell of a ride; go off the track and everyone's fucked. (Including the track designer.)

So why does this excite me so much I feel the need to blog about it?

Because having an interesting world filled with interesting characters doesn't allow me to write pages. If I were a novelist, I could do that. But for a screenwriter, I need that throughline, that spine, before I can figure out what goes on Page 1. (In a screenplay, you actually have to grab the reader with the first line, then peak their interest AGAIN before they turn the first page!!! It's not dissimilar to being a songwriter in some ways.) Then I need to be able to structure the most interesting points of the story along a page-by-page layout to ensure that a Reader (a studio executive, development executive, producer, director, actor, anyone in the industry) feels fulfilled by the experience of reading my screenplay and wants to pay me money to shoot it.

Also, as I sort of stated above, I've had a few ideas that I knew had the characters/worlds that people would pay to see. And I've written some screenplays that I knew would keep the pages turning in an excited, breathless pace.

Now, however... with THIS movie...

I believe I have the balance RIGHT. :)

And that is one storgasmic feeling, my friend!!! :D