(no subject)

[the_rck]

I’ve been cold brewing some fruity herbal teas that are too acidic for me when brewed normally. It really does cut down on the acidity. I still won’t buy those particular teas again, but at least this way, what I’ve bought already won’t go to waste.

Our internet is blipping in and out or was earlier this morning. I can’t actually tell if it’s steady now or if I’m just asking for things at moments when we have service.

I managed to drop the Girl Scout stuff off at the school yesterday. I put it off for quite a long time but finally made it out the door at 2:00. I went out the back door of the building so that I’d have a longer walk home and get a little more exercise. I overheated quite a lot, unfortunately, and really wanted a shower by the time I got home.

I couldn’t shower, however, because, while I was walking home, I got a call from the folks who do maintenance on our furnace. They were supposed to come do a tune up today and wanted to know if it was all right for them to come yesterday instead. I wasn’t sure when the technician would arrive (three hour window) and really didn’t want to have shampoo in my hair when he did.

I heard back from my psychiatrist. She’s puzzled by my reaction to Zoloft because most people have the opposite problem to the one I have. She endorsed the Benefiber option but added that I’m the one who has to make the call about when side effects are too much.

I woke with a headache again today, but it was gone by the time my tea was done steeping, so I don’t know what was going on with that. Sleep last night was okay but interrupted. Scott’s cell phone alarm went off at 2:30 which is when he needs it for days when he goes in early. Then his alarm failed to go off at 5:00. Fortunately, I woke only a few minutes after it should have gone off and was able to wake him.

I think I was quite accurate about the Amber fic I just posted being an audience of me story. That’s not a complaint. I knew it going in. I just wonder, given that, why I want to write a sequel. I do, though. I have no idea where it might go, but I want to find out. If the words come as fast as they did for The Fruit of Your Intents, it’s not even a huge time commitment.

Right now, I need to work on my UCon game scenario. I’m currently trying to come up with names I like for the player characters. I want all the characters to be playable male or female since I have no idea what sort of mix I’ll get in that direction, and it’ll be easier if I can use the same names either way. There’s one character I want to be female, so I’m poking at that one to see what changes if the character were played male instead. I’d have to rename the character, but that’s doable.

The scenario is a mystery, so I have to plan clues and red herrings and to write up the backstory since I’ll be throwing the characters in relatively late in the sequence of events. It’s just that the first few things that happened weren’t taken seriously and weren’t publicly obvious. The scenario starts after something that’s big enough that it can’t be hidden or waved away as trivial.

Comments

[jedibuttercup]

> I think I was quite accurate about the Amber fic I just posted being an audience of me story. That’s not a complaint. I knew it going in. I just wonder, given that, why I want to write a sequel. I do, though.

This is exactly how I ended up writing a 100,000 word sequel to a 45,000-ish word audience-of-me story. I've picked up a bunch of kudos on the original over time, but the sequel's still largely crickets. But I felt SO much satisfaction when it was done; I'd told the story I really wanted told. *shrug* If it's more of a joy to write than a chore, then it's always worth it.

[the_rck]

That's kind of what I'm figuring. It's just that, with a lot of projects, I write better/faster if I have someone to talk to about them. I'm not sure why that didn't happen this time.

[brunettepet.livejournal.com]

I cold brew coffee to cut down on the acidity and am delighted with the results. It's also nice to have it during the hot summer months (which linger into fall here in Texas).

The long windows of arrival for appointments really messes with your day.

Is Amber a book, movie, game or something else? I don't recognize it at all.

[the_rck]

The Chronicles of Amber are a ten volume series by Roger Zelazny that he started in the 1960s and finished in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The length sounds like more than it is because all ten books are short by current standards, probably 150-200 pages.

The first five books are the story of one character, and the second five the story of someone else entirely, all first person narrative. I like the first series better than the second because the second is fundamentally broken in terms of characterization and world building, but those same things lead me to write more for the second series.

Zelazny is an impressive stylist, IMO, but he's very much a love him or be completely puzzled by the appeal author. He's terrible at female characters, generally. There's often enough there that a fic writer could produce a fascinating human being, but it's kind of working against the text. Zelazny also created a culture of shapeshifters and had them gendered, male and female, with male primogeniture and women having only indirect power (I think that was a huge failure of imagination on his part, but by the time he got to that, he wasn't actually very interested in the series. He was writing it for the paycheck).

There's a tabletop RPG based on the books, Amber diceless, by Phage Press. It's out of print in paper but available as two PDFs for about $13 per PDF. I played and ran a lot of games with the system before Cordelia came along.

The books are heavy on backstabbing politics/scheming (but the POV characters are kind of on the outside of that. Sort of) and involve characters who are near immortal (can be killed but don't age or, most of the time, get sick) and who can both move between multiple (infinite) realities and shape reality around them. Many of them hate each other, and none of them can completely trust each other. In the first five books, these folks are all very closely related to each other with the same father. The second set of books opens things up a lot more.

[dancingdragon3.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you're having the same sleepy side effects I did on Zoloft. They leveled out, but came back when I upped my dosage. Taking B vitamins has helped a bunch. And also splitting the dosage, and taking it at night and in the morning.

You're working on a video game? That's incredible! Good luck! I'd love to read your ramblings about character design and plotting.

Good luck with everything :-)

[the_rck]

Not a videogame, a tabletop role playing game. UCon is a tabletop, board/card game convention here in town.

[luminations.livejournal.com]

I bookmarked your story to read later -- I suppose I don't count as a "real" reader as I don't know the canon but I liked the other stuff you posted :)

The muse wants to write what the muse wants to write, so go with it! Write what you want, and if someone else likes it, it's an added bonus.

[the_rck]

I would count you as a real reader.

The story is long, so it's not something to try in a fifteen minute break, so I can completely see waiting.