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[chipotle]

Notes from the field

It is 2:58 pm by the car's clock. After lunch at Pete & Shorty's (a fine temple to unhealthy food) I drove north in a rainstorm, for no obvious reason.

Now, really this isn't an unusual thing for me. Driving is a common way for me to deal with stress or just to relax in general. It's something I consciously avoided doing four out of five days of this little mini-vacation. Today, after writing a few more hundred words, I decided: why not? This, despite the rainstorm.

As of right now the rain has cleared. The sun is hot but the air is cool (barely over 60). I'm at the end of Follow That Dream Parkway, a road which runs through Inglis and Yankeetown, two barely-noticeable towns just off US 98 north of Homossassa Springs (50 miles or so north of Tampa). Apparently the dream I'm following is the shore of the Gulf of Mexico: that's literally where the road ends, driving right up into it. Not to it, into it, as a boat ramp. It's a beautiful afternoon despite the clouds filling the eastern half of the sky.

And a bit later...

I took a meandering path to a coffee shop, looking for something interesting but eventually only finding the Dunkin' Donuts in Ocala at the junction of SR 200 and I-75. Someone comes into the shop and asks the person behind the counter something I don't catch--evidently something about a computer ordering system or the like. She says, "We don't have anything like that." He says, "That's 'cause we're in the Stone Age here. Look, we're talking about the Stone Age and some guy is sitting over there with an Apple laptop."

I'm not working on this journal right then, though; I have another window open with nore notes for In Our Image. This one is modelled--sort of--after another one of Pat Murphy's observations in the writing workshop: looking at the story as a series of problems whose solutions lead into other problems. My paragraphs are starting with "Problem:" and "Solution:". In practice only adventure games are quite that linear, and indeed the problems are already overlapping.

Really, I got to the tooth-pulling stage fairly quickly in the writing of that file, but I'm going to keep hacking on it, reminding myself that I don't have to write notes--or even scenes--in the order they'll eventually appear. This has always been a bit of a block for me.

I may not work on it again until tomorrow, though. Why? Because tomorrow will be the first day I experiment with getting up early. I'd describe myself as "cautiously optimistic" about my ability to manage it; I've been rediscovering the transparently obvious: if you don't spend a lot of time passively watching TV or quasi-passively roleplaying online, you have a lot more time to actually do things. I've been finding myself feeling like I've had a full day and I'm about ready for bed in the evening--and looking at a clock and realizing it's only 8:00.

Granted, if I set my alarm clock for 5:30 in the morning it means that to get eight hours of sleep on a worknight I'd be going to be at 9:30. That's not likely to happen too often. But the 10:00-11:00 range? I could do that. I think.

Anyway, off to make a coffee drink Ben Mouse taught me, brewed espresso mixed with sweetened condensed milk. (I've dubbed it "pseudo con leche.")

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Actually, the espresso I used was decaf, which I suppose I should have mentioned. I had a lot of decaf over the last few days--if I'm going to make a resolution it should be to get some herbal teas again so I can vary my intake of flavored hot water. I haven't really gone off caffeine totally anyway, though; the goal is mostly to stop treating it like a required nutrient, and I seem to have pretty much succeeded in that.

I like 'Shattered Stone' although it'd have been nice to find something else to do with it than send it to YARF!. I doubt Ranea stories will have much of a "market" outside the fandom, although I suppose I could be wrong on that point. (Every once in a blue moon I've gotten positive comments from someone who obviously isn't involved in the fandom.)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Generally the stories I submit to the outside world aren't ones where that question is likely to come up. Presuming In Our Image ever gets finished in its new incarnation, people reading it aren't likely to think "talking funny animal," because the story simply isn't structured that way.

And I always do keep Michael Payne in mind. The Blood Jaguar would be considered obviously furry by any furry fan, and indeed the first story about the characters in it appeared in FurVersion. He just happens to be a really good writer. And it was published. In hardcover. And got a Nebula nomination.

My biggest concern about the media circus is, of course, that it narrows the definition of "furry" to something that was always, to my mind, at best peripheral--it's being looked at not as a fandom, but as a sexual fetish. I don't blame the media for this. The only people willing to talk to them are the ones who treat it like a sexual fetish. The rest of us just seem to whine about how awful the media is, and say, "but there's nothing we can do about it, so we're not going to bother talking." Anyone see the logic flaw? Anybody? ... Bueller?

The media attention that's been put on conventions when the cons reach out first has generally been good. Sure, there will be media people who only want to focus on the lurid. But even that could be potentially turned around; it'll just take a will on the part of most fans to say, "Hey, when those people say 'furry' they mean something completely different than what it's meant for twenty years." That'd turn the feature story into "War of the Geeks," more than likely, but at least that'd be funny!