IT'S BEEN 4 YEARS NOW!!!

On this day 4 years ago, Gnomey agreed to be my RL girlfriend!!! :D

What do I mean by "RL girlfriend"?

If you weren't reading my blog 4 years ago, you may not know that my brother Brian and I spent 2005 in SecondLife. Before that, I had spent my non-working time writing, playing videogames, and watching movies.

Actually, the writing-thang has been my main avocation since 1998. I chose a job that allows me time to think and daydream and imagine during my shift and pays me little enough to keep me motivated to switch careers as soon as I figure out how to get into writing as a career. But the downside of devoting my life to writing is that I developed an acute lack of any actual LIFE. I couldn't afford to go out with friends, and I certainly couldn't afford to date (chicks, apparently, prefer not to eat Jack in the Box or Taco Bell when they're on a date), so my social interaction consisted of email/phone conversations with my friends, workplace interactions and my relationship with my brother/roommate.

Then we learned about SecondLife, and that changed things! The interface is like a First-Person Shooter, but everyone in-world is a REAL PERSON somewhere on the planet! PLUS, if you owned land, you could CREATE YOUR OWN ENVIRONMENT! So imagine you could create your own videogame for yourself! You want to be in a haunted ghost town? Then you make it! You want to be in the jungle? Go make it! Wild West? Get busy!

Or, you could just wander around the hundreds of environments others have created, meeting people or hanging out with friends.

I've published too many posts on the wonders of SL already, and this entry isn't about that.

The most important person I ever met, however, (aside from my daughter, when she was born) I met in SL: MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! :D I met this smart, funny, kind, caring, fun-loving, adventurous woman in SL and got to know her, then developed a crush on her, and then one day she told me she had a crush on ME! Then very quickly we became bf/gf in-world, then very quickly after that we began talking on the phone and emailing and video-chatting as RL (or "Real Life") bf/gf, and when SecondLife stopped working on her computer and she couldn't go in-world anymore, I re-joined the "real world".

It's been an interesting ride, so far! For a year or so we video-chatted or voice IM-ed every day, but then my life got crazy, then her life, and we don't get to chat daily anymore. But I love her as much as I ever have, and seems to still tolerate me, lol. ;P

And today we've been a couple for 4 YEARS!!! :D

We don't get to do anything particularly splashy to celebrate because she's busy taking care of stuff that isn't my story to tell. But she wished me a happy early-anniversary yesterday and then wished me happy anniversary today! :)

And I just want to say, God bless you, sweety, for continuing to put up with me this long! ;P

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'll give you a quick update on what I've been up to.

Um...there's work.

And writing.

Brian's & my mom has been recommending this TV show for a few years now: Two and a Half Men. We finally Netflix-ed it, and we've spent this weekend watching it. I literally started Friday morning, after I got off work, and have been watching it since. (It's 4:02pm Saturday afternoon as I type this.) We had already seen Season 1, so I started with Season 2 and am almost done with the 1st disc of Season 3 at the moment. (I took a break to sleep, then do some writing.)

On the writing front, I may have discovered the first (and perhaps ONLY) FREE online screenwriting course!!!

I had reached a wall in the development of the novel I'm working on, so i was looking for inspiration, and I came across Steven Barnes Free Writing Class! It's a 9-week course that he encourages you to download all at once, and then do the work week by week.

I read through the first 2 lessons in 30 minutes (each lesson is 3 or 4 pages long) and I did the assigned homework for Week 1 when I woke up a couple of hours ago.

I really dig it so far!

The lessons are short, but packed with concepts! If you've never studied writing or screenwriting before, you may want to do some additional reading in order to fully appreciate many of these concepts. But it's a simple and direct method (from what I've read so far, anyway) so the additional reading may not be necessary at all. (I started studying writing in 1992, so I don't really remember the questions I had back then or how much I could have or could not have comprehended.) I'm sure that taking his UCLA course would be much more instructive since you would be hearing his explain each of these concepts in detail, but who knows: If I had access to this free online course in 1992 (before the World Wide Web existed) I might have been working as a writer for well over a decade by now!

So anyway, I'm sort of starting back up from scratch with my novel. I'm not ignoring the work I've done, but I using it and adding to it as the class dictates.

And once I sell my novel (and probably a screenplay or a couple more novels, realistically) I will buy a house, then go get Gnomey and drag her over here to the States! And with luck, maybe we can celebrate our 5th anniversary TOGETHER!!! :D

I hope you are enjoying your weekend, and that your week is delightful, too!!!

:D

P.S. Did anyone catch the meteor shower? Friday morning, between 5:00am and 5:30am I climbed up onto the roof of the TV station I work at (my shift was done and there wasn't anything for me to do but ride out the clock) and saw 3!!!

The first I saw was this really fast-moving flash of gold that streaked across the sky and then vanished.

The second was and intensely bright white ball that appeared to cork-screw into the Earth's atmosphere and then disappear. But it left a sort of com trail that faded slowly from vision.

Then the third was what you think of when you imagine a meteor, the tiny falling star.

It was AWESOME!!! :D