Pizza

P is for…

I’m a big fan of pizza – with meat on it, thanks, and tomato sauce of course, and a nice helping of cheese.

Stuart McLean wrote that the secret to feeling rich beyond your wildest dreams is finding the feeling that you’re getting a deal on something, and slipping into excess with it. For him, it’s picking up 30 pairs of socks at a discount, for some reason. Apparently a freezer stuffed full of pizza does the trick for me.

The Little Caesar’s across the street from my apartment had Customer Appreciation days yesterday and today, so I appreciated five medium pepperoni pies for twenty bucks plus sales tax. One pizza got split into half for yesterday’s dinner and half for this morning’s breakfast, and the others got split up into little plastic bags, three or four slices at a time, and into the freezer. The only thing missing is Canadian bacon.

So, dare I ask it… what do you like to put on a pizza? And what makes you feel rich if you buy enough of it?

Outlines

O is for…

For a lot of years, I was very much a ‘Pantser’ in terms of my writing, and have the very long and rambling Roswell fanfic manuscripts to prove it. Recently, I’ve tried to outline in more formal ways, including trying the snowflake method with Nanowrimo last year, and the Blake Snyder beat board with Script Frenzy, which is working out quite well.

I used to think of my usual ‘writing by the seat of my pants’ approach as a way of taking a journey – whether walking or driving, but trying to get to a particular destination, and possibly visit certain landmarks along the way, but without a map or a planned out route, just a vague notion of which direction I’d find my goals in.

Outlining, so far, isn’t like scouting out the path ‘boots on the ground’ beforehand – it doesn’t have that same sense of immediacy that actually writing does. But, depending on how I approach the outline, it might be like working out a plan with a map, or on Google Maps, or even scouting out the territory in a helicopter ahead of time.

I haven’t made up my mind whether it’s always better to outline in a structured way, like with the snowflake method or the Blake Snyder approach, or more intuitively, just trying to write the storyline out in bullet points, (perhaps working back from the ending.) Maybe both approaches have their points, depending on the situation.

Either way, outlining is a pretty cool way to prepare for a writing trip, and I think that I’m going to keep experimenting with it, in more detail and trying out more approaches.

Netbooks

N is for…

I have two different netbook computers. The first one is the eeePC, which was one of the first netbooks to hit the market, and I got it around April of 2008, just as the model was getting started. It’s a wee little thing with a 7 inch screen and 4 gigabytes of onboard flash memory, which is the same size hard drive as the Compaq laptop I bought way back in 1999, and it came with this strange mutant version of Xandros linux pre-loaded, which really made it a bit hard to do anything but what the people who loaded it thought you’d want to be doing with a netbook, which apparently included using it in coffee-shops with free wi-fi a lot, since many of the applications they had loaded were ones that worked online.

‘My Alien Wife’ – and Critiquing Crusaders!

M is for…

Before I get to part 13 of the A-Z challenge… (halfway through, whoo-hoo!) I’d like to share a little crusader thing. It occured to me last weekend, that there are probably a lot of crusaders who’d like to form writer’s groups or do critique exchanges, and so I’m stepping up to volunteer as a facilitator/organizer, if anybody trusts me with something like that. Head over here to sign up if you have any interest.

Now… ‘My Alien Wife’ is one of my favorite Roswell fan fiction stories that I’ve ever written. It was inspired by a challenge from the Roswell Fanatics forum – ‘They did WHAT in Vegas? Pick one of the canon couples and write a story where they wake up and find out that they’ve gotten married in a Vegas wedding chapel.’

Lisa Winfield

L is for…

Lisa Winfield is probably the breakout main character of my 2008 Nano book, ‘Chatterboxes.’ (I also wrote over 50,000 words of one of my Firefly Kaylee fanfics during November 2008, but that’s another story, literally.) Chatterboxes was originally conceived of as an ensemble book, but Lisa was the one who I spent the most time on prep with, so she’s the most vividly characterized, and the book begins and ends with her point of view.

I drew a lot from myself and my family to flesh Lisa out. She lives in Stoney Creek, not that far from my own apartment on the East side of Hamilton, where she and her best friend Kay share half of a duplex. She works at a Pizza Pizza franchise, spends a lot of time in trivia chat rooms online, and wonders if she’ll ever get back together with her ex-fiancee, who cheated on her but who she still loves. Like me she’s an extreme introvert who tries tof force herself out of her shell in certain situations and is often dissatisfied with the success of her attempts. I also borrowed somewhat on the character of Meredith Grey, from ‘Grey’s anatomy’, particularly in connection to some of Lisa’s verbal tics and her sarcastic attitude.

I’m not quite sure what else to say about Lisa in a blog post, except possibly to share one of my favorite moments with her, which comes from a fairly intense scene near the end of the book, where she and her new friend Kelson have been captured by a villainness who is trying to find out their secret.

Kaylee

K is for…

Kaylee is my favorite character from ‘Firefly.’ Not just because she’s pretty, though she is. (Actually, in their own way, most of the Big Damn Heroes are pretty.) But also…

• She’s sweet and chipper without being stupid.
• She’s unlike any other spaceship engineer I’ve ever met before.
• She can’t make much account of herself in a shooting fight, and that’s okay.

Job

J is for…

Like a lot of other writers, I spend a lot of time at my day job – eight to four, five days a week. Week in and week out, I guess it’s the second thing that occupies most of my time, after sleeping – and not as much fun. But in general I have a good job, and I’m starting to value it more after listening to other writers talk about ‘Day Jobs for Creative Professionals’ at Ad Astra this past weekend.

I work as a web application developer. That is, I help to make websites that work as computer programs, instead of static displays of unchanging information, (and most websites are interactive programs on some level nowadays,) specifically to help companies with field technicians keep track of what’s going on in their business.

I’m not going to get too much into the technical details of my job today, but instead to focus on what it’s like in a more personal way. I work with a small team from day to day: six of us, including management, the development team, systems administration, and sales – and all of those areas overlap somewhat.

I’m never really sure what’s going to be filling up my days at work, as priorities change, but I think I’m a bit more comfortable with that than being stuck on a long and involved project for months at a time, and website programming is a creative challenge in a very different way than writing is, which means that each can help recharge my batteries for the other. The lead developer has been in that spot for less than a year at this point, (he was one of the programming team before,) and he’s been pushing us to do our projects in different ways recently, which means learning new skills, and often arguing about the best way of accomplishing a particular task, which is another way of keeping the mind sharp.

So, what’s your day job like?

Infinite Horizons

I is for…

Infinite Horizons was the name of a little website I put up years ago for some of my original science fiction writing. It started back when I was at York University, because I couldn’t think of much else to do with the website space I got as a computer science student.

It stayed with YorkU CS for a while, until my accounts got closed after I graduated, and then I used a couple of different free web hosts for the next two years. In the spring of 2001, when I moved into my own place and got cable internet, I put Infinite Horizons up on my ISP web space, but never gave out the link to it anywhere, so it’s just kind of an archive mirror on the dark web now.

The one complete project on Infinite Horizons was “Voyage: Triton”, which I finished before putting the site up, during my freshman year at York. All of the rest of the writing up there was related to the Star Patrol universe – a chapter and a half of a first novel, and a lot of other little snippets and unresolved drabbles. A lot of them were written in the summer of 1998, when I was taking an adult extension course in Creative Writing as an elective, where the curriculum was big on writing stream of consciousness, so when I was doing a class exercise I’d just start on one of the story ideas that I had running around in my head, and never really finish it. That was the same course that started my career in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction.

Hamilton

H is for…

I’m not sure if it’s irony or serendipity that the A-Z schedule has me on H for today, because I’d like to write a little about my Hometown of Hamilton, and I’m not there at the moment, nor will I be all day. (I’m up in Toronto for the Ad Astra convention, whoohoo! More about that some other day.)

I was born in Hamilton, grew up there, and through my life there hasn’t been a time where I didn’t have my permanent address there. Even in my university days, I might sleep most nights in a dorm room or rented room in North York, but every other weekend I’d be taking the trip back home.

Hamilton isn’t a really big city, or a small town – the population signs have slowly climbed up over the years to cross the half-million mark though. It has the reputation of being this really gritty blue-collar city, but I guess I’ve never really seen that, unless I’m taking the bus on the Bayshore route past the steel plants. Half of them are shut down now anyway.

Hamilton is a college town – my Dad taught for years at McMaster University, and we have Mohawk community College and a lot of smaller schools as well. It’s a popular filming town, (The train station scene in the X-men, anybody?) It’s a city with a small, but determined and stubborn artist community. It’s the biggest hockey town in Canada that will never ever get its own NHL team for real. (We’re just a bit too close to the Maple Leafs and the Sabres, alas.)

I suppose nearly any city or town has all of those different neighborhoods and places that can surprise you and jump-start your imagination. But Hamilton’s are the closest to me, and I’m satisfied with that. Well, again, except now, because Eglinton avenue is close to me now, and if that can’t jumpstart a story I don’t know what can.

So, what’s your hometown like? (Either where you live now, or where you grew up.)

Games

G is for…

I’m a big fan of a lot of games. Not so much the active sporty type games, and I’ve never really got into hard-core computer gaming, but card games, some board games, and a lot of other types of games. I’ve tried making my own text adventure computer games several times.

If I’m pantsing a story, (as in writing it by the seat of said pants,) having my characters play a game is one of my standard stock tricks. Often, the resulting scene isn’t something that should survive the first draft, but a lot of the time it helps me figure out something new about the characters. For instance, in Children of the Molecule, I had a game of alien hide and seek as one of the events at the Prince’s naming-day party. I was really just going through the motions, as were some of the characters, because they couldn’t leave that planet and go on to the climax of the story until the party was over. But after that game, in the final concert stage of the party, I realized that Aunt Shelda seemed to be fixated on her niece marrying the Prince, and that was a plot thread that I’m really glad I picked up.

“It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.  The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better.  It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are.  It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden.  The graphite’s not important.  It’s just the means of revealing their indentations.  It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”