achieved?

On the plus side, I have once again produced a thousand word story for a week's homework. Sort of two of them, but the first time was the wrong thousand words so I went back and redid most of them. And next if I'm going to write the moment of epiphany and choice I intended to, I need yet a third story. Also I need a completely different story if I want to do like the homework actually asked us, and define a character by their setting. I had a room I've been getting to know, so I thought I'd be talking about three characters from an outsider point of view, but it takes too many words. Of course it's not the homework that has a word limit. I can take all the words I want. I just need to learn how to write short. A thousand words is nothing.

On the minus side, it is past five in the morning. On a Monday, when I have cleaner at lunch time. By Wednesday I have to be getting up for college at six. I don't know how I'll be doing that, just that I need to. *facepalm*

To write short I need to write simple. I knew that, but none of my ideas actually stay that way. So to write one thousand words I need to write about one character doing one thing.

All the stories in the reader are boring. They're about people who live stupid boring tiny lives, get a glimpse of something even a tiny bit bigger, and elect to stay in their rooms instead. Bugger that.

I shall write about a stupid small tiny room and someone wildly glad to get the chance to get out forever.

... on a meta level they are escaping the short story for a long running television series, but I don't need to mention that to the teacher.

random GURPS maths

Today my goal was to stay awake and not bite anything inappropriate.
Thus far I am winning.
I cannot go to bed before 10pm. Experience suggests I cannot get to sleep after 10pm. But I woke up for the middle bit with the cleaner, so that's okay.

Today I read some short stories. I'm meant to be reading them with an eye to genre features, borders crossed or not crossed, outsiders, and epiphanies, plus figuring out how to write them. I'm... mostly just reading them. Am not sure I'm learning how to write short at all. There was one called Snow about how the past gets full of snow even in films. It's poetic but stupids. There was also one by William Gibson, which had the usual effect of making me feel all wowed while I was reading it and then turning sort of tissue paper when I try and do anything with it in my head. Great language, but the ideas are kind of done. There were two other short stories; the one about time travellers from the future being totally amoral reductio ad absurdum...s of current American trends was kind of bollocks, as was the one about business people getting themselves turned into animals to get ahead and biting each others heads off for real. I mean, it's one possible use of technology, but it's a boring one that doesn't even tell you much about the here and now, let alone where it could go. Blah blah, we're all rubbish, blah blah. I don't like those stories. Show us what we can do that doesn't involve total destruction of humanity.

ANYway, then I got cranky. More cranky. One of those things.
So I've been playing with GURPS stats all afternoon instead.
A goa'uld is a seriously kick arse being. ( Read more... )

Capertillers were biotechnology, biogadgets, like hard drives. They were invented to be personality backups, boxes for uploads. That means the big one was probably first. The little ones, the internal ones, they're hard to lose, portable, always on, constantly backing up their hosts. If you got a clean empty one, put them in a single host, had the host die of something, cloned the host, and reinstalled the capertiller, you'd have what looks like the host still alive. Upload personality, download it again, and between times keep it in a handy box that has self preservation instincts and can crawl away from major damage.

Unfortunately, they had not anticipated what happens when you interface the box with two different minds. Or more. Of different species. And those crawl away boxes, they found nice warm host bodies to crawl into. And things got complicated.

That's why such unlikely beings exist. They were someone's idea of immortality, gone rather chaotic.

( Read more... )

So, anyway, inventing alien whatsits is fun, and now I know with more precision what they can do, I can... go on to ignore it completely if I have a better idea while actually writing, obviously.


In other news, my GURPS Characters book is disintegrating rapidly. I should just get a ring binder and transfer it all across. Or use the pdf versions I also own. But sometimes I don't want to be on the computer. ... not very often at all, but sometimes. The other GURPS books stay in one piece nicely, but then I mostly use the Characters anyways.