3 Green Fish

And in today’s installment of weird math anomalies, my total goes up by almost 1 page when I barely add half a page of content. Huh.

I took a few days off, which I think helped a little. I’m kind of in a low spot in terms of plot and action and I don’t know what really needs to go here. So it’s kind of slow going. Blah.

Tomorrow I mean to work harder, and get back up to steam. Gotta hurry up if I want to add new content!

I was happy with my old mouse, but after close to seven years of use, the scroll wheel finally busted. After much deliberation, mostly due to an inability to find any stores nearby that carry a wide selection of mice, I ordered a Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical Elite online. My hope was that, being a Kensington mouse, the Optical Elite would be a similar size and shape to my last Kensington mouse.

It’s actually a little larger, but it still fits well in my hand. While rounded like all sensible mice, the peak of the Optical Elite is centered rather than toward the wrist, and it’s a little wide up front, so it might not be quite as ergonomic as my old mouse — however, these are minor quibbles, and I have to say that it’s still an excellent piece of hardware for twenty bucks. The optical sensor seems to work very well, even on my ancient grey mouse pad.

The Optical Elite comes with 5 buttons, but one of these is the scroll wheel button, which by default switches the direction of scrolling. If you use scroll wheels on mice a lot, this could be a handy feature. Two of the buttons are the standard left- and right-click buttons, and the last two are on the sides. I find my thumb rests near one of them, making it potentially very useful, while the other is harder to reach. Since the mouse is symmetrical, this is more an issue of hand shape than design. MouseWorks software, included in the box, allows you to program each button in a variety of ways, from various clicks to key combinations, and even set specific commands for multiple buttons pressed simultaneously.

The Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical Elite costs about $20, and can be purchased directly from Kensington, from Amazon, or from any number of online stores. Supposedly, you should be able to find it at stores in your neighborhood too!

I had another off day. This revision is starting to drag a little, but the good news is that after the new section that’s coming up I can probably skim through most of the rest and plan on doing more revising later. That’s about the point where Adrianna found her voice in the first draft, so I won’t need to change much, for the moment at least.

On the whole though, I took the day off. Nothing to see here, move along…

If there’s one thing that can be said for movies based off of video games, it’s that they almost always suck. What might be an extremely fun game often makes a horrible movie. With this in mind, I watched DOA: Dead or Alive with such low expectations that I was almost guaranteed to be pleasantly surprised. After all, it crashed and burned at the box office. However, I was indeed pleasantly surprised.

The plot of the movie is incredibly flimsy, revolving around a fighting championship run by a shady dude on his own island. The prize? 10 Million dollars. The catch: oh yeah, like you never saw it coming, it’s all a ruse for some secret plan to become an unstoppable master of combat, and make even more money. For an action movie, it’s got just enough plot to hold it together, barely, which still amounts to more plot in the first fifteen minutes than the games have in their entirety.

On the whole, though, I enjoyed the movie. There are no angst-ridden, Oscar-worthy performances, and a lot of it seems like a flimsy excuse to get attractive babes in bikinis fighting, but the action is actually quite good. To top it off, all the actresses and actors seemed to do their own stunts, which always earns my respect. If you can get past the sketchy plot and just enjoy the action, it’s a fun film. Jaime Pressly stands out as American wrestler Tina Armstrong, and there’s a cute sideplot with a nerdy guy named Weatherby.

If you’re going to watch this one, you’ll probably want to rent it. For some reason it’s only available at Blockbuster, but if you’re the type to forgo physical stores entirely, you can also find it on Netflix.

I had a busy day with friends today — not as productive as it could have been, but I had a lot of fun. I’m down to pretty much one scene before I have to add some new content, and I’m really looking forward to that. I want to be done with this revision so I can move on.

After I add this bit, the rest is mostly just an issue of patching things together in the right place. That’s good, because it means I can kind of skim a little as I go, and hopefully wrap up revision of part one by the end of next week (or earlier! That would be nice).

Just how do you deal with a sentient, evil tongue, anyway?

“It’s a tongue,” Adrianna said.
The sorcerer nodded. “Aye, that it be.”
“How hard can it be to destroy a tongue?”
“As thou hast seen, ’tis a tongue with a wrathful will. ’Twould not succumb lightly to harm, nor any magic I might devise.” He looked down at the bread in his left hand. He’d crushed it into a solid lump. “As much I might desire to end its life, ’tis not an easy task.”

Wow, it sure looks like I wrote a huge amount today, doesn’t it? Well, I did make progress, but a lot of that was due to some pretty good writing that I’m willing to let be for now. I’ve moved a couple chapters up in the story so I can introduce the Tongue of Erskavit sooner, and then complicate matters vaguely related to it. That introduction, I think, works really well — it pisses Bandolor off and I think I managed to capture that.

Also, the farther I get in revision the more the characters seem to be what they ended up as at the end of the first draft. Big surprise there, huh? Anyway, it makes things easier to deal with revising for the moment. I have about 3 more pages to revise before I start working on the new section (which is sandwiched between old sections, rearranged). Making progress!

Today I revised Chapter 6. The important part of this was towards the end, as Bandolor and Iggsle discuss what to do about Adrianna. I needed to move around motives a little and complicate intentions, and I’m not quite sure it’s exactly where it needs to be. However, it’s suitable for now, and I can always go back later and adjust it further.

The big issue I had here was subtlety. I’m trying to add in a certain amount of conflict to one of these characters, and I’m not sure when it’s going to come to the fore. Heck, it might not even be in this book. Actually, no, it’ll probably show up at the end of this book. Regardless, I want that revelation to kind of put things in perspective, without having everything out of perspective beforehand. Do I even know what I mean? Maybe not. Anyway, it’s difficult.

Revising Chapter 7 might not be too difficult, by contrast. It’s another Adrianna chapter, so I need to pay attention to her characterization throughout, but overall it’s mostly a fun little interlude with Finkerner. I enjoy Fink, even though his dialogue takes forever to write, as it’s completely incomprehensible to everyone but Chaucerian scholars. Even I don’t understand it, but that’s kind of the point. The end of Chapter 7 is where I start snipping everything up and completely rearranging them, like some sort of literary collage that’s supposed to be end up looking like a photograph. I expect a major headache.

Wooo! My revised second draft of Part 1 has reached almost 20 pages! I’m moving along at a healthy clip. Of course, it helps that I’m not changing Iggsle and Bandolor as much as I am Adrianna, and she isn’t the perspective character of Chapters 4 and 5. I kept a lot of stuff from my first draft of both of those, and did some rewriting and revision here and there throughout. On the whole, it all evened out to a rather small increase in total length of about half a page.

(Math Fun Time! I “added” 9 pages to my previous draft 2 total (that’s the +9 in the title), but my revised pages only went up by 8.5, and my complete total by .5. That adds up to 9! This concludes Math Fun Time.)

Today I worked primarily on Chapters 4 and 5, as I mentioned above. Chapter 4 introduces Iggsle, and I worked a bit on rewriting some of the backstory I included in my first draft. Honestly, though, I’m thinking of cutting most of that out and revealing it gradually in later chapters (or a sequel), much like the way that I let Adrianna’s traumas take a backseat to other more immediate concerns — they’ll come out stronger when the time is right (or wrong, for her). Chapter 5 is partially just some necessary explanation, but also a way to establish how Bandolor and Adrianna are going to work together (not well). Bandolor’s a bit pushy, and Adrianna doesn’t like to be pushed.

Here’s a clip from Iggsle’s intro (yes, his surname is Potter — that’s what his father was):

Iggsle Potter was a man of patience, born as wild of a child as ever there was. As a youth, he railed against his father’s authority at the slightest provocation, blundered his way in and out of trouble, ended up in a gang of highway bandits, and generally disappointed his father in every way possible. His father fancied himself a man of the upper classes though only a poor potter, claimed literacy despite barely knowing half the alphabet, and imagined himself cultured when he had no ear for music and poetry, no eye for art, and no tongue for delicacies.

Imagine the smartest, most creative guy you know. Give that guy a brain-boost that doubles his wit and imagination, then lock him in a room and force-feed him pure sugar and caffeine until he’s vibrating so quickly you think he’ll drill through the floor. Now ask him to write the script for a comic book. That’s the image I have of how Joss Whedon wrote Sugarshock, a comic available for free online, with fabulous art by Fábio Moon.

Okay, there’s this band, right? One guy’s a robot, another girl claims to work for a secret government agency and has a thing against … vikings. Other characters are, uh, other things. And then this dead alien dude lands on their car with an announcement about a battle of the bands on an alien world. Or something. My head is still swirling from the awesomeness of it all.

Each issue is 8 pages long, and full of clever dialogue and complete randomity. Joss Whedon is a master of dialogue and a fountain of creativity, and in this case it seems he pulled out all the stops. I’m always impressed with Whedon’s work, and these little episodes, while short, pack more entertainment than a week of the newspaper’s funny pages.

Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 here, and you can also visit the Dark Horse Presents page for new issues and some other comics.

Well, I almost made it to the end of New Chapter 3. And then I suddenly got really really sleepy. So no more writing for me tonight!

I’m definitely liking this draft better. Even working Wallace the radio-obsessive crazy person in the early chapters works better… which is odd because I kept most of his dialogue the same. Context is everything, I guess.

So, I got a request that I note total pages as I revise (hey sis!). Currently I’m at 68 pages. You’ll note that’s less than my last full count plus the amount I’ve added since I started this second draft. There’s several factors here: some of what I do is new stuff (especially chapter 1); some of my old draft is left more or less intact; and some stuff I cut or alter. So I might make 3 pages of progress but only get through 1 page of revision (thus, at least theoretically, adding 2 pages). In theory, the exact opposite might well occur — I might end up cutting more than I put in, thus lowering my overall page count while raising my revision fraction!

Ow. 3:30 AM is not math time.

We’ll see how well these metrics hold up when I start getting to the main divergence between drafts 1 and 2, plotwise. I’m going to add some stuff and move some other stuff completely around. All in all, though, I’m actually trying to reduce exposition and portray more in conversation. We’ll see how that goes…

‘Night all.