Beosig's Rambling Thoughts

Oi vay!

Things for today:

Too many meetings.

Meetings too long.

Had to go to bank.

Had to get caffeine.

Had to fix a few bugs before a meeting, but didn’t get a chance to test them until after the meeting. That meeting was the longest of the day, and it sucked because all I could think about was my bugs.

Deadlines looming at work for large projects. I’m on course for hitting the deadlines, though.

Deadlines looming at school for final projects in my classes. Not sure where I’ll find the time to do them by Monday.

Deadlines looming for my writers’ group for doing reading/critiquing of work. Not sure where I’ll find the time to do them by Saturday.

Grassroots, Part Three

Two weeks ago, I made this post, and I followed up with this post last week.

My other senator, Ken Salazar, just got in touch with me via email a few days ago and sent the following:

Thank you for contacting me with your concerns about Section 220, a
provision included in the Senate lobbying and ethics reform bill that
would require organizations to disclose their expenditures on grass roots
lobbying efforts. An amendment was introduced on the floor to strike this
section from the bill altogether. I supported this amendment, and it was
accepted, 55-43.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,

Ken Salazar
United States Senator

I’m especially happy with our government now. I’m still not sure that my individual voice made a difference, but perhaps my voice, along with multitudes of others, made a difference. Had I remained silent, would my Senators voted the way that they did? I’m not sure, but I like to think that I had a little influence.

Cybernetics

If cybernetics existed now the way they do in the fictional futures, I would most certainly get cybernetic eyes with infrared vision, night vision, a digital camera, zoom vision, and flash protection. I would link the digital camera to a flash card that would be inserted into a slot in my skull just behind an ear. That would allow me to carry a plethora of files, knowledge, information, pictures, and other goodies with me at all times. I would also get my knees (maybe my whole legs!) replaced, so that they would no longer hurt me when I walked up stairs. Now that I think about it a little more, I would also try to get some form of wireless Internet access wired into my body, so that I could access the Internet from anywhere that I could find a hot-spot. That would totally rock. Of course, this would all have to run off of Linux, so that I could hack into it and make some personal improvements. No way I would let part of my body run off of some sort of Windows mobile operating system.

I probably wouldn’t stop with the eyes, legs, and wireless networking, either. For those of you that have played R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk role playing game, you know the rules about Cool and Humanity. I would probably start with a fairly high Cool, and whittle away at my Humanity until I was right on the verge of being Cyberpsycho. Yeah. I would have a hard time stopping the improvement on my physical form. My only limitation would be financial.

To Do List

Here are a few things that I would like to do before I die. They’re not in any particular order…

1) Go skydiving. Looks like a rush, and I would love to try it at least once.

2) Get a book published. Ever since I was in my early teens, I’ve wanted my name on the byline of a book. I’m not sure why I want to get published, but it’s an urge that is there. I don’t care if it’s a technical book, a role playing book, or a fiction novel. I have the skills to do any one (or all three!) of those. It’s just a matter of honing my skills to the point where they are good enough to be published, and actually finding the time to get something finished. Someday…

3) Go back to Europe. I would love to spend a week or two in Europe just traveling around and looking at the sights. Kiara has never been to Europe, so I would love to take her there someday.

4) Track down an old friend of mine. Last I heard from him was around 1999, and he was joining a seminary school with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. His eventual goals were to become a Franscician Monk, and tend to people in prison. I’m not sure if he ever met his goal or not. Shortly after talking to him when he was going to enter seminary school, he dropped off the face of the planet. I’ve tried to get in touch with him a few times, but I’ve always failed to actually talk to him.

5) Get a tattoo. Kiara will only let me get one that is “meaningful.” My idea of getting Tux (The Linux penguin mascot) is not “meaningful” enough, so I’ve decided to do a portrait of my sister on my arm. As you probably know, I lost her to a drunk driver 9 years ago. I think getting her portrait on my arm should qualify as “meaningful.”

6) Graduate college. I want to get at least a Bachelor’s degree. Maybe even a Masters. I already have all of the skills necessary to do my job, so this is more of a personal goal than a professional goal. Either way, it’ll be good to get that piece of paper in my hands. While I’m at it, I’m going to try to win The Lady Ada Lovelace Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer Information Systems, Computer Networking, Computer Science. Yeah. It’s a long title. It goes to the person in the graduating class in CIS, CN, or CS that has the highest GPA. My current GPA is 3.778 (Damn College Algebra and Philosophy killed me), but I hope that I can pull it up over the course of the next 2 years to earn the award. We’ll see how it goes.

7) Have a child. What better way is there to ensure that part of you continues to exist in the world? I would love to have a son or daughter to teach, rear, love, and watch grow. Sure, they’ll make mistakes, and I’ll be there to pick them up when they do mess up and put them back on their feet. I’ll also be there to hold their hand when they need it, or lift them up on my shoulders in celebration of their accomplishments. This is probably the most important one to me on this list.

There are probably a few more things that I would like to do before I die, but I’ve got to get back to what I was doing before I started to post.

Writing

With the help of Craing, I finally got my first short story polished. “The Hack” is a dark future, cyberpunk story with a great twist of irony at the end. I’m going to submit it to the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers’ Group when I’m finally a full-fledged member. I would submit a longer work (“The Hack” is a little over 2900 words,) but I don’t want to inflict my writing on someone else (or even a group of someone elses) if my writing is horrible.

I don’t know if my writing is good, bad, ugly, great, wonderful, or just plain average. I think that I’m a decent writer, but I’m not sure about it. I have a good grasp on grammar, spelling, flow of words, and the other technical details. It’s the creative side that I’m worried about.

I’ve already submitted “The Hack” to a publication, and they rejected it. I don’t blame them. The first draft wasn’t all that great. It flowed well, but had no point or real story line to it. Now that I’ve rewritten the ending (about a dozen times,) I hope that the story is good enough for the world at large to read it. I guess I’ll find out in a few months if its worthwhile.

The other project that I have going is a short story called “Tablet of Life” that really wasn’t all that good. I was trying to cram too much into 7,000 words, and I failed miserably. It’s 8,700 words, which is a little too long for a short story, and the descriptions that I have are lacking in detail. I assume that this is because I tried to be terse enough to fit it all in under 7,000 words. I’ve given up on “Table of Life” being a short story, but I’ve not abandoned the story. I’ve already chopped what I’ve written into 4 chapters. I’m going to go back through the chapters and add more detail to my descriptions. It will make it a better work of art, and will be the first novel that I’ve truly put effort into.

When I was younger (junior high and high school) I would read a great book, and that would inspire me to write. However, the writing was obviously a rip-off of what I had just read. I would get a few thousand words into my writing, and I would realize that I was just copy-catting what I had already read. I would scrap the writing for fear that someone would accuse me of stealing ideas.

Now that I’m older, I think I have the maturity necessary to write some well written works. We’ll see how it goes…

CSFWG Redux

I went to my first meeting of the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers’ Group this past Saturday. There were 12 of us there in total. The group is setup to max out at 20, and I was kind of expecting the max to be there. I’m actually kind of glad that it is a smaller group.

The setup of the meetings is that members submit stories to the group at the previous meeting. This gives the members a chance to read, markup, and write out ideas about the submissions during the intervening month. At the next meeting, the members sit around and discuss the papers that were submitted, and give the author ideas for improvement. It works out quite well.

There were four submissions for this month, but we didn’t talk about one of them because the author had to suddenly move to Oregon. Two of the papers were submitted by the same author. One was a rewrite of the first chapter of his book, and the second was new work that was set later on in the same book as the first chapter. I managed to get PDF versions of the works about a week before the meeting, so I had read those works. This allowed me to comment on them rather than just sit there and listen in for three hours.

The fourth work was one that I didn’t get a chance to read. It was about 105,000 words, which impressed me quite a bit. What impressed me more was that the author was a girl that is about 14 years old. Quite an impressive feat for someone so young. However, it could be a waste of 105,000 words. That remains to be seen. I did get her email address, so that I could email my comments to her once I had a chance to read it.

I have two more meetings to attend before I can officially join the group and get my work looked at. That’s a good thing. It gives me two more months to polish up some of my work, and get it ready for people to read.

I’m An Author!

It’s official! I’m an author!!! Don’t go run out and expect to see my byline on a magazine article or book just yet. How can I claim to be an author if I’m not published, you ask? Well…

I just got my first rejection letter from a publisher last week. Here is what she had to say:

Dear John,

Don’t be discouraged. This is only a rejection of this particular story, not of you as a writer. Keep working, and keep submitting. I’d love to see more of your stuff.

Even though my story (which I cranked out in all of an hour) was rejected, it somehow validates my efforts to get published. It means that someone out there (a busy someone, I imagine) actually took the time to read my 1,832 words. Then they took another few minutes out of their busy life to reply to my submission. Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist on this matter, but now I feel like I won’t be wasting a publisher’s time with my submissions. Now I just need to work out a few more ideas and get them down on paper.

Who knows? Maybe by the end of 2007, I’ll have my byline in a magazine? Maybe even a novel? Here’s to hoping that good things happen.

Colorado Springs Fiction Writers’ Group

I was in Poor Richard’s Restaurant a while back eating a good slice of pizza. I was sitting next to the cork board where people can announce concerts, book readings, property for sale, and other random stuff that may interest the community.

I was reading the various items while eating my pizza,and I came across a couple of bookmarks posted on the board. They were advertising the Colorado Springs Fiction Writer’s Group. I was in a similar group years and years ago back in Texas. It was quite fun! I have several stories in my head that I’ve been trying to get down “on paper”. Maybe joining this group will give me inspiration to get the stories done.

I’m going to try to make the meeting this month to see what it’s all about. Maybe it will be an open and friendly environment for writing fiction. That’s what my old group was like, so I hope to find that this group is the same way. Since the meetings are at the end of the month, this gives me time to finish and polish my short story for a potential reading. I should have it done by then.

Fiction

I’m in the middle of (amongst other things) writing a short story that I hope to get published. It’s also the seed of a longer story that I might try to turn into a novellette or novella. I’ve got almost 6,700 words written to setup the story. I expect to write another 2,000 to finish the story.

I was curious about how long short stories would be, so I did a little Googling on the matter, and found this page and this page. They seem to mostly agree with one another, so I stopped looking there. Heh. I could have found two pages that were totally off, but still agreed with each other. Oh well. I’ll research it more once I get closer to trying to get my story published.

According to the pages that I’ve found, I’m going to be about 1,700 over what is acceptable for a short story in a magazine. That’s pretty typical for my writing. I’m going to finish the story as I see fit, then go back and do some editing. I hope I don’t have to chop too much out of the story.

The first page talked about about “micro-fiction.” I’ve never heard the phrase before, but it explained what it was all about. As an example of micro-fiction, the author used this story: “For Sale: Baby shoes. Never Worn.”

I glanced at it, but it didn’t catch me. I figured it had a point, so I went back and read it again. It hit me the second time around. I went back and read it a third time just to make sure I got it right. It amazes me that those simple six words can tell such a profound story. Sure, most of it is left up the readers’ imaginations, but it’s such a spark of insight that one can’t feel something deep inside them by reading those words. The story is attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he was capable of expressing so much with so little.

Well, time to get back to my short story.

Tim Hildebrandt

A person that was greatly influential in my life passed away recently. There was an article in the September 2006 issue of Dragon Magazine about the passing of Tim Hildebrandt. I never met him, and I’m sure he never knew of my existence, but he changed my life forever. He was an artist that did fantasy works. I never knew his name, but in his obituary, the article mentioned that he had done (among other things) the cover of the book Sword of Shannara.

I remember seeing the cover of the book at a garage sale that I was at with my grandmother, and I instantly knew that I wanted the book. The cover depicted three men standing in a stone chamber around a glowing sword that was embedded in a block of stone. I was probably 8 or 9 years old at the time, and I had no idea what science fiction, fantasy, or anything of that nature was. I just knew that I was drawn to the book, and that I had to have it.

I managed to talk my grandmother out of a quarter (or maybe two), so that I could get the book. We spent the rest of the day driving from garage sale to garage sale, and I spent most of the time in the tan Buick station wagon reading the book, and falling in love with Terry Brook’s work.

As soon as I finished the book, I hit the local library in an attempt to find more books like it. At the time, the fantasy section of the library was woeful to the point of non-existence. I was greatly dissapointed, but there was a used bookstore called Miss B’s Books that had tons and tons of fantasy and science fiction novels. I begged a few dollars from my grandmother, so that I can could get more books. She was gracious enough to give me the coinage that I needed to indulge in my new-found love.

When I first saw the Dungeons and Dragons red basic box set in a magazine ad, I knew that I had to have it. I didn’t know what it was, or even that it was a game, but the cover made me desire it. It looked so much like the genre of fantasy books that I had fallen in love with. In order to get the box set, I had to collect 10 “points” from Captain Olympic Greeting Cards. Each set of cards that I sold earned me one point. I quickly sold enough cards to collect my 10 points, and I sent in my order, and eagerly awaited my prize.

It was a long two weeks, but I managed to wait it out until the box arrived for me. I opened it to find these strange dice, a crayon (for coloring the numbers on the dice), and two books. One was for players, and the other was for dungeon masters. I didn’t know what either one was, but I figured out that it was a game. I read the players’ book first, and loved every moment of it. I then went on to read the dungeon masters’ book, and I knew that I wanted to play this game.

I was in the Cub Scouts at the time, and I managed to get a few of my friends from the Cub Scouts involved in the game. Some stayed for just a single session, but I was lucky enough to snag a few people that had a passion for fantasy like I did. We’d play during Cub Scout meetings, during lunch at school, on camping trips, and every other chance that we could get. I was ten years old at the time, and I’ve been playing (almost) non-stop ever since that summer. That was 23 years ago, and I’ve made tons of friends, have thousands of wonderful memories and stories, and I’m very glad that one of my hobbies has brought such great joy to myself.

Without Mr. Hildebrandt’s artwork, I would have never found Sword of Shannara. Without Sword of Shannara, I would have probably never found the cover of the Dungeons and Dragons box set interesting. Without Dungeons and Dragons, I would not have the close-knit group of friends that I have now. It’s all one long chain of events that start with Tim Hildebrandt’s artwork back in my childhood.

Tim Hildebrandt, you didn’t know me, but I still thank you from the depths of my soul for your work. Without you, I may not have turned into the person that I am today. Your work has brought immense joy to my life, and I’m glad you were in this world for the short period of time that you were. God bless.