In Which My Hands Hurt
Today was the first snow of the season. Oh, yeah. Admittedly, it was mostly just a fine dusting of white power, but it was more pleasant to walk through than the gale-force winds we had all weekend (which I avoided entirely by spending my weekend being sick and trying to drink enough tea to make my throat stop feeling like it was being scraped against a cheese grater). I think it hailed Friday night, but I was busy falling asleep and couldn't be bothered to get up and look.
And now for something completely different.
_feckless and I had an exciting Thanksgiving AIM conversation, which I share with you below (minus the asides and BRB-type stuff). Context is not terribly important here.
thebonelesspuppy: It's like the wacky, Engrishy guide to Japanese history I got at the last pan-ALT conference. Apparently, Aomori history begins with "1837: The apple came to Aomori."
icandriveatruck: You would think a giant fish should be involved
icandriveatruck: And capers.
icandriveatruck: The seasoning kind
thebonelesspuppy: Can't we have the madcap kind of capers, too?
icandriveatruck: Yes, as long as the seasoning kind are also telepathic
thebonelesspuppy: The apples might have arrived in the mouth of a giant tuna.
thebonelesspuppy: A giant, telepathic, caper-flavored tuna.
icandriveatruck: With socks on.
thebonelesspuppy: But the tuna lost his legs after he carved man from the apple.
icandriveatruck: And the leftover bits of apple became the mountains
thebonelesspuppy: And the juice became Lake Towada.
thebonelesspuppy: The fuzzy green mold became the plantlife.
icandriveatruck: The apple seeds were sentient
icandriveatruck: Responsible for birthing tsunami
thebonelesspuppy: Man worshipped the apple seeds.
icandriveatruck: And the apple seeds, in turn, granted man a limited version of the power of telepathy, which the apple seeds had learned from their distant cousins, the capers.
thebonelesspuppy: This led to a golden age, in which man built up a mighty kingdom and enslaved the legless tuna.
icandriveatruck: Until one day, the capers, which everyone had forgotten in their mindless and ardent worship of the apple seed, began a reign of Terr, in which the people's telepathic abilities were turned against them.
thebonelesspuppy: Seizing the opportunity, the tuna rose up against their oppressors. Chaos descended.
icandriveatruck: The people, reduced to mumbling, drooling heaps of flesh, huddled in makeshift huts and caves in the mountains, wishing to flee from the tuna
icandriveatruck: But there was no escape.
thebonelesspuppy: The last leaders of men, those lucky few whose brains were too simple to encompass telepathy, left the mountains to lead a final charge against the forces of tuna and capers. Alas, they were too stupid to plan effectively, but they brought low many of the greats. Mistletoe saw use as a projectile.
icandriveatruck: These woebegone heroes all perished save one
icandriveatruck: The unaware descendent of Terr, mighty warrior princess
thebonelesspuppy: This mighty warrior princess, who believed herself to be Shehulkra, daughter of King Dullwits the Lucky, stood alone amid the carnage, her leather-clad bosom heaving as she fought back the advancing tide of tuna. (Upon joining forces with the capers, the tuna were given mechanical legs in order to bring terror and vengeance to the hapless telepaths.) But lo!
icandriveatruck: Hark!
thebonelesspuppy: From the sky fell sharp fish-knives and small dishes of soy sauce and wasabi! Thinking quickly, which probably should have proven to her long ago that she was not her father's daughter, Shehulkra turned the entire army of fish into a fresh platter of sashimi.
The best part? I added two thousand words to my NaNo by randomly recounting this story as the creation myth of a small and highly eccentric island cult. Then I got back to the actual plot, which I am slowly realizing I should have frigging outlined before starting to write ('cause, man, I was flying through the earlier events that I had actually thought out ahead of time). We live and learn.
Unsurprisingly, the plot stalled again after that, so I made one character have dinner at an Italian restaurant with a completely unrelated character from another story and world, which also lacks an Italy, just to hammer out his characterization. He keeps getting less and less noble in his motivations, see, and I figured letting him converse with someone whose moral compass was never properly magnetized would be a good way to figure out exactly where he falls on a scale of one to iniquity. (Well, that, and I was hungry and craving spaghetti.) The conversation began to degenerate when the character in question broke down and poured out his extremely guilty conscience, whereupon his dinner partner blithely replied that he should hit the bar and come back when he's not so whiny.
I have 38,000 words. I am not giving up yet. But I am rescheduling my Tuesday night class and forcing myself to type while sick. Bleh. I should have done the forced writing earlier, when I felt less like sleeping all the time. On the bright side, my dedication to keeping my fingers moving regardless of what comes out of them has let me flesh out a little more of my world's political situation and provided me with huge, pulsating blocks of steam-of-consciousness. And, um, two thousand words' worth of giant tuna.
Back to writing.
And now for something completely different.
_feckless and I had an exciting Thanksgiving AIM conversation, which I share with you below (minus the asides and BRB-type stuff). Context is not terribly important here.
thebonelesspuppy: It's like the wacky, Engrishy guide to Japanese history I got at the last pan-ALT conference. Apparently, Aomori history begins with "1837: The apple came to Aomori."
icandriveatruck: You would think a giant fish should be involved
icandriveatruck: And capers.
icandriveatruck: The seasoning kind
thebonelesspuppy: Can't we have the madcap kind of capers, too?
icandriveatruck: Yes, as long as the seasoning kind are also telepathic
thebonelesspuppy: The apples might have arrived in the mouth of a giant tuna.
thebonelesspuppy: A giant, telepathic, caper-flavored tuna.
icandriveatruck: With socks on.
thebonelesspuppy: But the tuna lost his legs after he carved man from the apple.
icandriveatruck: And the leftover bits of apple became the mountains
thebonelesspuppy: And the juice became Lake Towada.
thebonelesspuppy: The fuzzy green mold became the plantlife.
icandriveatruck: The apple seeds were sentient
icandriveatruck: Responsible for birthing tsunami
thebonelesspuppy: Man worshipped the apple seeds.
icandriveatruck: And the apple seeds, in turn, granted man a limited version of the power of telepathy, which the apple seeds had learned from their distant cousins, the capers.
thebonelesspuppy: This led to a golden age, in which man built up a mighty kingdom and enslaved the legless tuna.
icandriveatruck: Until one day, the capers, which everyone had forgotten in their mindless and ardent worship of the apple seed, began a reign of Terr, in which the people's telepathic abilities were turned against them.
thebonelesspuppy: Seizing the opportunity, the tuna rose up against their oppressors. Chaos descended.
icandriveatruck: The people, reduced to mumbling, drooling heaps of flesh, huddled in makeshift huts and caves in the mountains, wishing to flee from the tuna
icandriveatruck: But there was no escape.
thebonelesspuppy: The last leaders of men, those lucky few whose brains were too simple to encompass telepathy, left the mountains to lead a final charge against the forces of tuna and capers. Alas, they were too stupid to plan effectively, but they brought low many of the greats. Mistletoe saw use as a projectile.
icandriveatruck: These woebegone heroes all perished save one
icandriveatruck: The unaware descendent of Terr, mighty warrior princess
thebonelesspuppy: This mighty warrior princess, who believed herself to be Shehulkra, daughter of King Dullwits the Lucky, stood alone amid the carnage, her leather-clad bosom heaving as she fought back the advancing tide of tuna. (Upon joining forces with the capers, the tuna were given mechanical legs in order to bring terror and vengeance to the hapless telepaths.) But lo!
icandriveatruck: Hark!
thebonelesspuppy: From the sky fell sharp fish-knives and small dishes of soy sauce and wasabi! Thinking quickly, which probably should have proven to her long ago that she was not her father's daughter, Shehulkra turned the entire army of fish into a fresh platter of sashimi.
The best part? I added two thousand words to my NaNo by randomly recounting this story as the creation myth of a small and highly eccentric island cult. Then I got back to the actual plot, which I am slowly realizing I should have frigging outlined before starting to write ('cause, man, I was flying through the earlier events that I had actually thought out ahead of time). We live and learn.
Unsurprisingly, the plot stalled again after that, so I made one character have dinner at an Italian restaurant with a completely unrelated character from another story and world, which also lacks an Italy, just to hammer out his characterization. He keeps getting less and less noble in his motivations, see, and I figured letting him converse with someone whose moral compass was never properly magnetized would be a good way to figure out exactly where he falls on a scale of one to iniquity. (Well, that, and I was hungry and craving spaghetti.) The conversation began to degenerate when the character in question broke down and poured out his extremely guilty conscience, whereupon his dinner partner blithely replied that he should hit the bar and come back when he's not so whiny.
I have 38,000 words. I am not giving up yet. But I am rescheduling my Tuesday night class and forcing myself to type while sick. Bleh. I should have done the forced writing earlier, when I felt less like sleeping all the time. On the bright side, my dedication to keeping my fingers moving regardless of what comes out of them has let me flesh out a little more of my world's political situation and provided me with huge, pulsating blocks of steam-of-consciousness. And, um, two thousand words' worth of giant tuna.
Back to writing.