On Writing

I'm thinking of becoming a writer.

"But dude," you might ask, if 'dude' is a term that you favor, "how can you hope to make a career out of the written word when you haven't update your blog in a year and a half?  Surely this does not bode well."

That is quite an astute observation!  Rest assured, I'm making no plans whatsoever to leave my day job behind and spend my days concocting vast reams of prose.  I'm going to stay a programmer just as long as they'll let me, because I'm not an irresponsible idiot.  (Although there are persuasive arguments against that... (Um, not the part about me being an irresponsible idiot))  When they stop letting me program for my current company, though---and god knows that's not unheard of, given these uncertain economic times, my company's history in particular, and my experience with my last job---all bets are off (except for the whole "needing money to live" part).

Good lord, just looking at all the parentheticals in that last paragraph makes me cringe; am I really cut out to be a storyteller?  In a way, writing's always been my job, since I already spend my days in front of a computer, creating worlds of the words, not-quite-words, numbers, and odd punctuation that constitute my Java code.  I'd argue that every program is a story, though usually not a linear one, and often not an interesting one.  The world of code has its good writers and its bad writers; I'd like to think that I'm one of the better ones, although I don't think that fact particularly qualifies me to write anything else.

No, I got into writing through NaNoWriMo, and as a result I now have over two hundred thousand words of (mostly rushed, non-publishable) fiction to my name.  I recently finished workshopping about a quarter of those words (heavily revised from their original form) with some of my best and most critical friends, and the results of the experience were encouraging enough to make me believe that I can turn the words into something resembling a book.  It's a tale of vampires versus zombies, so no, I certainly don't have any lofty artistic pretensions here, but it may actually be something that a good chunk of people will enjoy reading, even given how played-out both those races of creatures have become at this point.

Now the question is how quickly I can muster up the energy to revise the story at least one more time, fix a few awkward elements, and find a way to make it about 50% longer.  No big deal, right?  Now please excuse me while I go hyperventilate in that corner over there...

Fallout 3: My Life as a Tutorial

I'm still going through the training parts of Fallout 3, but I've got some early thoughts:

• Hey, Liam Neeson's my dad! And, um, his wife dies giving birth to me. Hmm... I didn't realize the uncomfortable (and completely unforeseeable) real-life parallel there until just now.
• Woah, that's some intense customization they let you do with your look. Favorite part: the half-million interestingly-titled facial hair options.
• The whole concept of teaching you how to play the game via flashes of your life from birth to adulthood is a pretty cool idea. What's not cool? Turret controls. Walking around like I'm driving a tank is something I've never been able to quite get the hang of. Can't we just assume that I want to face in the direction I'm moving unless I say otherwise? At least I can invert the up/down part...
• I'm also really digging the little kids' book that introduces your stats.
• My "G.O.A.T." (S.E.?) exam says that I have a future as the Vault's chaplain, which apparently makes me good with bartering, medicine and lock picking. Okay...
• Ooh, exciting things are happening, and it looks like I'm about to put those lock picking skills to good use!

To be continued...

Doin' Time on LittleBigPlanet

So the other night I finally set up the PlayStation 3 that I'd been using as a carrot to get me to finish NaNoWriMo (see my last post; yay, my slacker vampire vs. zombies story is complete!). After giving the controllers an extra day to charge, last night I finally jumped into the first of the two games that came with the thing: LittleBigPlanet (LBP).

My first two thoughts:

1. Maaan I wish I had as much time for playing video games as I did in the good old days.
2. Nintendo systems have been spoiling me with how fast they let me get into a game.

Okay, maybe that second point could stand a little explanation. Before I could start playing LBP, I was forced to download three updates for LBP. Now granted, this isn't something that's gonna happen every time I boot the game up, but geez... I'm somebody who grew up with cartridges, where you had to make damned sure that a game was 100% before it shipped and oh god I sound like an old geezer now I'll just shut up.

So I was a bit miffed, but when the plummy narration kicked in I started feeling all warm and fuzzy inside again. I love all the personality they crammed into these little "sackboy" characters, and the first level was a pretty refreshing way to get the credits sequence taken care of. Just one thing, guys: ease up a little on telling me how wonderful and creative your game world is. That's my job, okay? I'll get around to creating my own levels later; just let me explore a little first.

I customize my guy as a little penguin-mozarthair-mustache dude, and I'm off to the races. Ooh, pretty colors! I get to enact violence upon Humpty Dumpty for extra points! The tutorial stuff comes in a little hot and heavy (I'd like to play around with the concepts they teach me for a little while longer before learning new ones), but I can see how other people might be more impatient to get past the learning phase and into the wider world.

Oh, and there's stuff to collect! Lots of stuff! And it lets you customize stuff more! And... wow... that's quite a bit of stuff I've collected there already... It reminds me of Animal Crossing; I hope I don't end up with "stuff fatigue" like I did with that game.

I'm still getting the hang of the controls. Moving between the foreground and the background is an interesting twist, but having three different "depths" may have been a bit of a stretch: sometimes I move between them without meaning to, and it's hard to tell how far back some of the things floating in the air are.

All in all it's been a fun experience so far, although I wish there was a bit more of a story to keep the momentum going from one level to the next. I understand why that's not a huge priority, given that the whole "build your own level" aspect is one of the game's big selling points, but it would've been nice.

Next up: Fallout 3, which promises to eat up hundreds of hours of my time if I let it.

National Novel Writing Month

It took me a few days, but I'm finally got ahead of the day's word count for a change:

Watch this space to see my progress (or lack thereof)!

Edit: Now that I look at it, the word count on this widget is wrong (i.e. way lower than it should be). Oh well...

Edit 2: Hey, it's fixed again! (Or at least in is as I'm writing this) Still not 100% sure I trust it, but... we'll see.

Shouting Infinity?

I want to try a fairly ridiculous stunt this fall for NaNoWriMo, but first I want to talk about it in a way that should show if it's worth doing or not. My plan would shut out that popular fifth symbol that's so hard to work around, but I want to do it in a way that won't look as though I'm doing a bunch of cocky grammatical gymnastics to avoid it. Fifty thousand words is a damn gigantic goal to start with, but to do it this way runs toward downright insanity. How am I going to stop it all from sounding as though I'm straining to sound normal, and how am I going to do that for fifty thousand words if I'm not a particularly fast typist to start with?

I'm studying what I'm going up against right now, and it turns out that what I'm trying to do is known as a lipogram. A book known as Gadsby is what I'm trying to outdo with this particular kind of lipogram; it's also fifty thousand words long, but it it took far upwards of my thirty days to finish. So what I'd do would still qualify as a fairly significant thing.

But I don't know... It's taking a lot of work just to wrap my brain around what I'm doing right now, with this blog post, and this is just a microscopic dot of what I'd find my sorry ass staring down if I bound my hands this way for a full month of quick typing. Could it possibly work? Could I find a story that would sound okay in this format? Writing this way isn't as much fun as I thought, but I'm still just finding my way. It could smooth out if I just plug away at it for days and days, couldn't it? I still don't know if I can summon up that kind of gumption, though. What do you think? Is it worth it?

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

And so it comes to pass that resolutions fail, and fail quickly, no matter how lofty or open-ended they may be. I lasted all of three days, and what did it get me? A few words, a few search results, another blip in the annals of history adding to the clutter: unessential, unloved, unmourned.

Okay, so I guess it's no secret that I was feeling kinda down today. Granted, I had my reasons: the job search is as frustrating as ever, and it is (was) Monday after all. Earlier I couldn't stay awake, and now that night has come I find sleep nearly impossible. Thus the cycle is set to repeat itself, and I'll wake up feeling tired again tomorrow to prepare for another sleepless night. It's not that I dread falling asleep, really. I guess it's more that I dread getting up with so little to look forward to.

I don't think I'm the kind of guy who's defined by his job, but a job fills the time, gives it structure. In fact, I feel as though I could accomplish more here at home if I actually was working during the day. The trick is finding work that doesn't feel like a waste of time, which is harder than it sounds (though right now finding any job whatsoever is pretty darned hard to begin with).

Also keeping me up are thoughts of death, as usual. It's not that I fear the great unknowable of What Comes After, though. It's more that I'm terrified of leaving this earth without having exercised my true potential. But does that feeling really happen to people? That sudden etherial voice saying, “You did good, kid,” and making it all worthwhile? If it does, it can't possibly be the kind of thing that happens too often. So why should I expect it to happen to me? I guess deep down inside I have this compelling need to believe that life isn't arbitrary; it's the only thing that keeps me going, really.

But high standards are a good thing in the long run. They're no good without discipline and perseverance though, and that's where I need to start picking up the slack. How does that work? You can't just say to yourself “Self, be more disciplined!” and have that be the end of it. It needs a shift in perspective, a reason to hope. But I have plenty of good things in my life; shouldn't they be enough? Is this all just selfishness and vanity (which I guess would explain why it's appearing in a blog)?

All I know is that I can't depend on outside forces. That's a lesson I started learning a long time ago, but it's still sinking in. My biggest crutch is still the Internet. How truly unfortunate it is that my greatest source of productivity is also my greatest distraction! I've spent far too much of my days sitting right here, staring at this screen, but at the same time I can't see a practical way out of it. Computers are my world now, for better or for worse. Surely there are more destructive vices in the world, but it's still something I've got to overcome: the sooner, the better.

Running

And I run as fast as I can, but it's never fast enough. I'm not good at this. But I'm better now than I used to be, surely. Back in high school I couldn't even go a quarter of a mile without needing to slow down and now I've got two half marathons under my belt. Granted I still tend to finish towards the back of the pack, but not too far back. In fact it looks like I do better when compared just to other Staten Islanders; maybe it's the pollution, maybe it's all the smokers. Maybe we're fatter down here from all those big Italian meals like the ones that assaulted me during the holidays and which I'm back in the gym now to counteract. Not that it isn't great food, mind you.

The madness all started in the fall of 2007 when my on again off again love affair with the YMCA became on again... again. I was particularly drawn in this time by the notion of what they called a “fitness coach”. A fitness coach is something like a personal trainer, except he's not around all the time and instead is just responsible for setting you up on all the machines with programs that match your ability, then checking in every few weeks to see how it's going. This process repeats for about three or four months, and then you're on your own again. It wasn't very intensive, but it was enough, and it got me using the treadmills, which I hadn't really tried much before (I was more a fan of the elliptical machines, but since they've gotten in the newer models I've lost interest). Running on the treadmill led to running in the park, which in turn led to joining the New York Road Runners so that I could finally try my hand at some competitive racing. That's when I learned how far I had to go: those folks who do three miles an hour while they read a magazine in the workout room don't tend to sign up for this kind of stuff.

But still, it helped me build up my endurance. The real world is always harder than the treadmill, what with the wind resistance and the small but important shifts in the surface that end up slowing you down just enough to make you wonder what went wrong after coming from the perfectly flat and stationary simulation. The scenery changes though, which is nice, and the park is obviously a lot prettier than staring at a wall (or more specifically, at a window that looks out onto a wall).

One thing that changed since I started running is that I don't listen to music anymore. In the beginning it was the only thing that got me through my workouts, and I couldn't imagine going through the long, repetitive slog without it. But as I started to work myself harder I found that it was starting to become a distraction, making me dizzy at times, and it certainly didn't help that earbuds are phenomenally bad at staying in place while your body is constantly bouncing up and down and your arms keep threatening to snag on the wires and rip them out. My iPod also seemed to have a habit of turning itself upside down in the pocket of my shorts, and while I know that there are accessories that prevent this kind of situation I never had the desire to pursue them.

I overdo it sometimes, and it worries me. I've thrown up more times now from exercise than I have from drinking, and while the overall total is still pretty low it's a feeling that I can do without. When I've overdone it (and there doesn't seem to be any way to know when I've overdone it until it's too late), I start to feel about the closest I've ever felt to dying, save perhaps that one time at summer camp when I nearly drowned. It's like there's an intense pressure building up inside me, and I don't have a way to release it. Sitting down helps. Closing my eyes and pressing my palms against them to shut out all possible light helps. Vomiting definitely helps, if and when it finally comes around. I've never passed out from this sensation; in fact, I've never fainted in my life: I wonder now and then what it feels like. The sensation's only happened to me a handful of times, usually after using the weight machines, so I guess I should be glad that I need to wait for an appointment to set my FitLinxx account up again on the new machines now that they've been replaced.

In a way, I've always been a runner, or at least a sprinter. As a kid I had a tendency to break into a run at odd times, just because I found the energy for it building up inside of me; I especially loved to do it in crowded places like malls. I'll still catch myself doing it every so often, but now more because I'm in a hurry than just for the pleasure of feeling everything whipping past me. It's weird... normally I'm irrationally self-conscious about the opinions of strangers, but somehow that never seems to factor into the equation when I'm running (unless I'm around other people who are running, in which case they sometimes shame me into running faster).

As of right now I probably won't be running for a day or two. I think I twisted a calf muscle on the treadmill tonight, so even just normal old walking is a pain in the ass (a.k.a. leg). The strange thing is that it happened during the cool down phase, after I'd been running on it just fine for forty minutes. At least this time I was sane enough to end my workout and go home instead of just trying to work through the pain and probably screwing it up even worse. I've got to take care of this body... I'm finding out for the first time that it has hard and fast limitations that are probably only going to increase through the years. No complaints, though: it's had a good run.