Random Chaos

I mean, it's a self started boot camp, with only one victim participant, but it's a boot camp.

I've been working on a few things lately. One of them is getting a schedule drilled into me again. I'm supposed to stay on it a minimum of three days a week--three updates a week. I'm going to go for more than that if I can because the more that I write, the more that I can write. It's been about a week on this new schedule and I already am starting to feel like my hands are getting back into the swing of things.

I'm also working on getting a gaming channel started. I have a FB presence, an avatar specifically made for it...I even have an app on my phone that'll let me stream mobile games. And the offerings for mobile games are good indeed lately.

I finally have everything I need on the new rig, christened Sheba.

I HAVE A DIAGNOSIS FOR MY BACK AND LEG PAIN. Turns out? Sciatica. It would appear that we've been missing it for YEARS. Physical therapy starts next Friday. It was supposed to start today but there was a snafu with getting a ride.

-crack- -pop-

OK, my hands are getting sore, and I've managed 1.2k words. I should rest.

• find the damn silver,
• find the damn towels, and
• get Pestilence Couch mk. 2 outta here.

So…I got something done.

And then.
( ENTER TROLLMAN )

If it wasn’t obvious by now, I love to write. I love putting words to paper—or screen, as the case may well be.

It wasn’t always this way.

Gimme a volleball. Even though my right spike is harder, it’s…well, I’ve seen scatterguns with higher accuracy. So I serve left.

Gimme a sabre. I’ll fence right until my arm gives out—which is kinda fast. Then I’ll switch left and be slower, but more accurate and last longer. …I guess that’s one we can validly call ambidextrous.

But overwhelmingly, if I have to do something I’m going to reach left first.

Which is why writing frustrated me at an early age. I’d thin left, but them Mom would walk by my little yellow worktable and ‘correct’ me—which probably explains the serial-killer slant I have to hold the paper at to even write on a straight line. It was a necessary evil.

It wasn’t until I was about seven, when we got cable, that I thought about writing for a reason that wasn’t a homework assignment. Nickelodeon introduced me to a cartoon called Doug, the main character of which regularly wrote in a journal—giving rise to my realization that writing things like that didn’t have to be a super girly “Dear Diary” moment, something I actively avoided being because—well, I liked videogames and cars, I simply couldn’t do that!

I saved my juice money from lunch for two weeks, then on a family trip to Family Dollar I bought a cute little journal. It had pretty lined paper and a picture of a kitten on its glossy cover. At around the same time, I bought my first ink pens—journaling didn’t seem like something that you took to as lightly as a silly homework assignment. I was coming at this with a pretty blue pen, just like Doug did in his show.

…of course that first entry was a goofy, jokey affair in which I introduced myself to my new journal, gave it an idea of what to expect, and then closed off with a signature.

For the first time I noticed that things around me were interesting sometimes. It was hard to keep to that clearly delineated two pages per entry after a while, and I developed my distinctive TINY handwriting.

I was still journaling when I lost my mother. Most of the following year and a half seems to have been an extended fugue state, and even though I’d think that the time just hadn’t happened, reading over those entries every few months was a reminder that time had simply not stopped, and I hadn’t just fallen out of the world at some point. At that point things were very straightforward accountings of what had happened that day. There were no associated feelings, just facts.

It wasn’t until fifth grade that I realized that writing could also be inventive and fun—hilarious in hindsight now that I think about it—when we get a homework assignment. We were to rewrite the ending to a story we read for class. I remember having the woman go insane, snap temporarily back to forgive her friend for something that hadn’t actually happened, then snap right back into madness (at one point I had her conversing fluent French to a tree). The third part got copied off of me and the turkey never got called for it—but I didn’t care. I’d started having fun doing little narratives.

Fast forward to seventh grade I’m twelve, in literature class, and BORED. I’ve pulled out a sheet of my good looseleaf—the narrow-rule paper—and have started writing down things that come to mind. Nothing I’ve committed to, just little snips of ideas.

Suddenly an assignment. Creative writing. Write whatever, as long as it has a clear plot, progression, et cetera. It must be based off of a legend.

I wrote my first short story for an assignment in class.

I didn’t know if it was well-received for a while…but then there was a thing in the school paper.

For one, suddenly we had a school paper.

For another, my story was in it.

Later that year, when our principal/lit teacher left the school, she flagged me down, holding a box. It had one thing on it: A note, reading “Never stop writing.” Inside was a Cross pen and pencil set.

I haven’t stopped since.

That’s when I get my idea...

 What's your WebStory today?

Well, it's going well for me. Lowell, on the other hand, is NOT amused: ( Under the cut )

From the first time I ever gave it a shot, every year that I’ve done NaNoWriMo, there has been something to come up and make things complicated. Every time, something bad happens that threatens to derail the entire plan. I thought that it was just bad luck the first time, but I soon discovered that I could almost set my clocks and calendars by it.

The first time, it was being basically booted out of where I was staying—a situation that I’m choosing to call a “constructive eviction” as I really was afraid for my safety. Exactly a year later, things got a little different and I wound up with a computer to work on!

…except it blew up. The hard drive went up in smoke and the smoke damage delicate stuff inside the refurbished machine, and I had to try something else. I didn’t get a darn thing done for Nano that year.

The following year, things seemed to be going well. I had a plan, I had an outline, I had the skeletal first zero-draft from the first place I’d been living, and I had my own apartment.

…I also had a catastrophic injury to my left knee—remember that series of rants and lawsuit? That one—and my computer was somehow lost by my now-ex (not why things ended, but I don’t feel like getting into it. Some of you know the deets already, and some of you don’t, but the burden of an ongoing investigation means that until further notice, my lips are sealed). He arranged for me to borrow a friend’s tiny netbook until he could pay off my PC (I hadn’t even finished paying it off when it happened) and then replace it outright. That year, I finished.

I thought the luck had improved by then, that it wouldn’t happen again, but then—this was last year—my battery crapped out. I had to replace my warranty and then replace the battery. I managed to pull it off—and I managed to win, though the draft wouldn’t be finished for another couple of months.

My third shot in a row comes up in a few weeks. The plan was to back everything up, find my notes, make sure that the batteries and things were working properly, and then get ready to get started by creating the Scrivener project .scrivx files. Nothing going wrong here—

A strange error message popped up and I asked a friend what tests I could do. I wasn’t seeing problems in any of the scans I did, so we went to these tests on a CD-ROM.

The first test didn’t detect my hard drive.

“What is that?” I ask with a face resembling this. –> (O_o)

“I don’t know! I’ve never seen that error code.” Delivered with a “the hell is this” awesomeface sort of look.

“How the HELL does this keep happening to me?” I laugh. The pattern was coming back.

“Okay, we’re gonna try something else then,” Seamus*^{of course the names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent} suggested, and we rebooted to the disc and tried something else.

This time we didn’t get an error message initially. We instead got system beeps. Like…loud, painful, I-actually-shouted-“HELL IS THAT NOISE?!”-beeps.

“I don’t know!”

My computer issues are kind of like patients in a teaching hospital: never a dull moment.

BEEP. Lag. Successful reboot. FREEZE.

“THAT could be the hard drive.”

Flash forward to now: I’m backing up my important data to Skydrive and an external enclosure. It’ll likely take days. A jar near my printer contains the money that I am saving for a new hard disk drive. The documents are currently safe, but backing up obsessively is the way to go. I’m not losing my work…again.

…if this seems obvious, just hang on a second and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t obvious to begin with. I didn’t begin blogging for a real reason. I was pressured into getting an account on LiveJournal a few weeks into my first semester of college, after having met my first new friends since grade school who liked to write and share things.

I remember being at one of the lounge computers, agonizing over what my username was going to be, and finally resorting to numerology to come up with something. In fact my first entry was sort of a rant about that activity.

It wasn’t for another month that I began to see why people blogged in the first place: having a place to vent a while is useful; and, as I was between computers at the time, I couldn’t keep a diary as I usually did. (Not to mention that the place where I was living at the time didn’t really have a place where I could safely hide a traditional diary without being caught.) So my blog became a refuge for my mind as well as a place to show off my writing.

Three months in or so, I’d begun to really get into it, even if I didn’t have the comments or the reader stats to back up my thrice-weekly (sometimes more) rambles about things going on in my life, my head, and the world at large. It’d become more than just a case of “do it because everyone else is” by then, and I couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t keep doing it.

After some time, it became second nature. Blogging became a way to determine who actually gave a fuck about me and who didn’t. If someone didn’t understand what the point of blogging was and tried to make me feel like an idiot if I kept doing it, I had to get them out of my life and right away at that. But I’m still amazed that the one person who I thought would give a shit about it never did, ridiculed it as a waste of time, and consistently called me things like ‘eccentric’ for doing it. …honestly, I don’t know why I stayed on so long with him.

…actually, that’s a lie. I DO know why I did it, and it was stupid. But we’re not here to dredge up such things. Especially with me out of nerve pills.

As things have gone, this has become a way to keep myself sane. While I love greeting new readers and sharing things I know (or think), a lot of times, this is mostly me yelling at me, pointing out what I’ve done that could be done better and making sure to drill that point home.

Then there are the times where I really do have something shareworthy, and my closest (in location) friends either don’t get it or don’t care, and I know that there’s at least one or two other people out there who don’t mind listening to a strange woman with a fascination with food ramble about things.

I love that.

And that’s why no one’s going to stop me from blogging even more.

Intended to be a flash fiction challenge prompted by the BG of Ommwriter, wound up being a little longer than I intended. Entirely off the top of my head, written in the span of about a half hour or so. I didn't know where it was going until the punch bowl--which became a running gag of sorts. I'd intended on warming up for Camp NaNoWriMo with this and suddenly...WEIRD.

I don't have a topic for said event but am considering expanding this somehow. I'd better come up with something!

( (weird fiction below!) )