Home
Like most things, life goes on.
As talismancer said, updating once a day, particularly for those of us who don't normally update all that often, is taxing. I'm not quite ready to give up yet, though.
Tonight was Deep Fryday. The Fencing Club decided we needed to promote team bonding, etc etc, by holding some kind of initiationy-type-thing, despite initiations in general being against the predominant spirit in the club, and questionable according to USSU guidelines. Thus, we decided to do something inadvisable (deep fry and eat as many odd things as possible) and invited the team. The evening went well: we deep fried Mars bars (yawn), bananas, apple pies, calamari and at one point an entire compressed fried breakfast (an egg, wrapped in strips of bacon, in the hollowed out end of a baguette, all Nicky's fiance's fault). Unfortunately, only about three new team-members turned up in a group of about twenty. Oh well. Fun was had.
I'm still flagging badly in terms of nano wordcount at the moment: only managed about 700 words today, but what can I do? Monday I played badminton, Tuesday I fenced, Wednesday I went to the gaming club to meet an old friend who's back in town, Thursday was Motorhead and today was ... well. I hope next week will have a slightly clearer timetable, or I see problems on the horizon.
I have three blog posts that could go up today, actually. One's angsty, one's vitriolic, and one's short. So guess which one wins, at twenty-to-one in the morning. Normally I'd smush them together into one uber-post and confuse the hell out of people by jumping topic at random, but since the short one and the vitriolic one actually have things to say, and I'm still taking part in NaBloPoMo on the sly, I'll just put this one up.
The quote in the title, incidentally, I recall from a blog post on the BBC site a few weeks back. It was posted by a roving reporter covering a Democratic rally in ... Montana, I think, one of the farming states. Anyway, the reporter was impressed by the level of support expressed at the rally: basically the whole town had turned out. "Ah, " said a local man when asked about it " all of the townsfolk are here, yes. You'll find different opinions out in the hills." So, the reporter and their crew went out into the hills, into the villages surrounding the town, and started asking the archetypal simple-farming-folk what they thought about the election. The story goes that an absolutely classic stereotype stood, leaning on his hoe in his garden, and responded with puzzled words to the effect of "well, I been a Republican all my life, like my daddy before me, and I'm thinking of voting for a black man". How much of the story is fortuitous editing, or the work of a reporter looking for a story, I couldn't say (not least because I've lost the relevant link). But there you have it.
Barack Obama became President-Elect of the United States today, at about 4AM GMT, if I've got the offsets right. This is potentially very cool, because he's a Democrat (a member of the Democratic party, although we assume the Republicans are also democratic, and the whole thing is actually a republic anyhow because democracy doesn't scale, but we don't talk about that), he's a black man and a professor of Constitutional law. No matter what happens, the next four years will be a wild ride, and different from the last eight. Assuming he lives to take office.
There has already been one foiled assassination attempt on Senator Obama - a pair of neo-Nazis were arrested with a long-rifle at a rally a couple of months back. He's potentially a very divisive figure in conservative and radical America, and I'd be surprised if he wasn't under significant threat from at least one nutjob. I really, really hope that nothing untoward happens t him and his family before they have the Secret Service between them and the world 24-7. If they don't already, I don't know how that bit works. I know he gave his acceptance speech from behind four inches of bullet-resistant glass...
The Democratic Party didn't get the super-majority a lot of people over here thought they might (a majority of 60+ in the Senate would mean the Republicans wouldn't be able to stop a bill going through, even if they voted against it to a man, because they don't have enough people to stack on the scales), but that's possibly a good thing. Super-majority would mean they could pass and repeal laws with impunity, which in a lot of cases would potentially mean they could get America back to some semblance of sanity with very little work. It would also mean they could pass and repeal laws with impunity, which means zero accountability. The checks and balances are important, even if they're sometimes abused by the underdogs.
Interesting Times...
NaNo today: under word-count again due to Little Big Planet coming in the mail (it's awesome, if you can run it, go get it, then gather friends for a hugely silly game that's actually all about simple physics and materials when you come down to it). I managed to include a nice little magick trick, though, which gave me a few hundred words of exposition. Ah, the tricks we use when we're up against the wire... What with the Motorhead gig tomorrow and my mother's birthday party on Saturday (happy birthday, Mum!), I rather suspect I'm going to be writing all of Sunday. That said, looking back on this post, I'm easily verbose enough...
Today, 443 words written. *woe* Since my daily target is 1667, I'll have to write extra hard tomorrow to make up.
Actually, this week really sucks in that respect, since I was fencing tonight and I'm going to a Motorhead gig on Thursday. Not that I'm sad about going to the gig, but it will eat into my writing time.
Eh, so long as I do better than last year (11314 words, for reference), I'll be happy. Hitting fifty-k would be awesome, but we'll see what happens.
Tonight at fencing, I actually kitted up for the first time in ages, and helped some of the beginners with their foil form. Since the best way to learn it is to do it, this meant I got to hit lots of beginners :) What with one thing and another, we seem to be shedding beginners to the point where the club can function. Need to lose a few more, but we're nearly there. It'll be nice when I can turn up and just fence again, instead of having to coach people through circle-parries and distance-gauging again...
I return, again. 5033 words today (in total, that is, not written in these 24 hours), and ... well, onward we go. Starting a completely new thread this morning, even if the two threads are scheduled to meet down the road, helped unblock my brain a bit, it seems.
It occurs to me that if I carry on like this, I'm at minor risk of accidentally participating in NaBloPoMo as well, and irritating a few readers into the bargain. Still, after such a long period of silence, I guess a little noise isn't so bad. If I even have "a few" readers to irritate, that is...
C'mon, validate me, you know you want to ;)
Today, I have once again failed to kill off any characters, and have instead introduced the crew of an airborne aircraft carrier (see here for precedent) called the Valiant (Who fans, yes, I know, sorry, accident... *begs forgiveness*). The scene in which we dock a wing of aerofighters is particularly epic, not least because despite being an aircraft carrier, the Valiant has no runway, per se... It was a fun scene to write, if a little technically dense, and if I ever put the text up ... well, you'll see.
Between work and badminton tonight (a fairly long time due to a couple of irritating scheduling conflicts), I took a little time out in the Falmer common room to write some more. One of the other writers at the uni met me there, and it was nice, to write in the company of someone you don't really know, despite their being apparently as cracked as you are.
Both of the above are true. I forget exactly how many stories there are supposed to be, but it's a scarily small number, something like seven or ten. There's "farmhand saves princess", there's "plucky nobody defeats evil empire", "boy finds girl, loses girl, wins girl back", and so on. Technically, if you reduce all stories down to their barest components, they fit into one of these categories. Note that Star Wars encompasses all of the above examples. A little more discussion can be found here, for the interested.
Equally, there are no new faces. I went to a NaNo write-in today, which turned out to be just me and one of the Municipal Liasons, at the Sanctuary Cafe in Hove, and the woman who served me at the counter was the absolute spitting image of Amy Hayes, someone I knew from Texas. Different hair-style, different dress sense, but physically almost identical. It's a peculiar experience, and as my social circle continues to expand with time, I'm having it more and more of late. This one, though, was particularly striking because I encountered this woman (whose name is Alice, apropos of nothing in particular) in a cafe very very similar in structure to Austin's Spider House cafe, to which Amy took me and a friend several times while we were out there. Setting and resemblance are enough to touch off old memories. I wonder how Amy is these days? Must get back in touch.
NaNo progresses, of course, and my body-count hasn't risen any higher, which is probably for the best. I have a couple of antagonists and a protagonist, which is a good start, but the plot is about to get interesting ahead of schedule due to my running out of words and having to introduce a turning-point event a good deal earlier than I intended. Or, I could jump tracks and tell someone else's story for a bit, and come back to that little cliffhanger. Decisions, decisions...