Sleepypete's Pillow

happy birthday to you

Cheers Thumper 🙂

w00t! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! 🙂

Lol – I should write down a few of the ideas before they evaporate 🙂

Birthday today 🙂

And there’s an excellent tradition that we have at work for those. Cakes ! I took mine in yesterday because another tradition at work on a Fryday (deliberate typo) is to haunt the canteen for the fry up. As usual, I buy way too many cakes, to the point where I’ve brought the remains of a box of minidonuts (chocolate tipped) home. They’ll disappear over the weekend.

Watched “The Men Who Stare At Goats” last night with the Crazies. Truly strange film. Entertaining but very weird. The Mall was pretty nuts with traffic due to the Xmas lights going on, so we missed out on getting a decent meal in. I’d have missed out anyway due to being kept at work longer than I really wanted. Flexible working means I don’t miss out there, we’ll stay longer than 9 to 5 to finish things off because the flexi credit we get from that lets us leg it earlier on a day where we’d otherwise be clockwatching.

The people where I work have a habit of making that kind of thing worth it. I’ve been lucky to be involved for a while in a fun project with lots of great people. I got reminded of that this morning when I found a Happy Birthday card at my desk, signed by Ms Sunshine, the Snow Queen, WT and two other characters from that section that I’ve not mentioned before. That’s Mrs S (who still scares me due to how effective she was at poking the younger me into doing training!) and the diminutive Miss M who’s been keeping me honest with filing system stuff over the last few months 🙂

They’re a great bunch, complete with Superspy (you’d know where that codename comes from if I let slip his name 🙂 they’re the Unsung Heros (Heroines? 🙂 keeping a big team running smoothly. Often unappreciated and unduly hassled, they stick to their guns and keep smiling. Especially Ms Sunshine, who’s ever present grin brings brightness to dim, dismal days like today. (4pm and it’s almost pitch dark from cloud and we’re expecting lots of rain today) And our Snow Queen who gets to field all the IT questions about problems caused by the people who provide our IT. Every team needs a heart and that’s our BM girls, ably assisted by The Boss. We’re lucky to have them around. (Although we lose The Boss in a few months due to the impending arrival of a MiniBoss)

Right – that’s work – what else am I getting up to today ?

Picked up presents from the Crazies that had gone back to the Post Office 🙂 And did the traditional tearing into the Amazon boxes 🙂 I have new books and new dvds that will keep me happy for a while. Now it’s South Africa vs England in the cricket. Fully expecting England to get bashed but they’re doing ok at the moment.

Pizza later 🙂 Unless the rain makes me chicken out and do the walk to collect it another day. Stepping outside the house right now may lead to drowning. I’m not kidding !

Oh – I stopped off to drop off a couple of minidonuts with the canteen girls and had a chance to run possibly my favourite bit of birthday related entertainment … Most guesses have been scarily close, to within a couple of years (meh) but the Canteen Girl guess was 25 🙂 Which is 10 years younger than actual. Cue a Big Grin 🙂

But now – time to concentrate on a cricket match that’s happily warming up while contemplating how long the minidonuts will last …

keep at it kid

I have a few different books brewing, they come and go

I keep trying

… writing stuff again.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, I reckon there’s a book or two in me somewhere trying to sneak out. Trouble is, it’s daunting thinking of all the setting up that a book would need before you can crack on with telling the story. The best books are consistent with themselves and stay faithful to all the little things. Rules get set up that govern the world, if those rules get broken then the readers can quite rightly call you a fraud.

Pacing is critical as well, I’m picking that up from watching Stargate Universe. I’m still curious about this new series, although it seems very badly afflicted by StarTrek Syndrome. That’s an episode pacing style that has the cast fumbling to fix a problem, only to miraculously sort it at the end. SG Universe is similar, episodes tend to be slow-slow-slow until 5-10 minutes from the end when the pace goes ultra fast. And their problems get sorted out just in the nick of time. That pacing style seems rather jarring.

I’ve two options really for what I’d write in terms of the fictional setting. It would either be a Dungeons & Dragons style fantasy swords, sandals and magic world or it would be science fiction with starships. Worlds of magic are pretty easy, there’s a blank slate and the Rules that govern the world can be far simpler. You just make them up because you can ignore the laws of physics if you want to. Or bend them with that magic stuff 🙂 Just have to be careful not to plagiarise someone else’s world.

Science fiction on the other hand … That’s much tougher. This is where “being consistent with itself” bites really hard. You see it mainly with series that have grown and grown, with the backstory taking on a life of its own. David Weber’s Honor Harrington series is very good but is starting to suffer from “where do we go from here ?” On the other hand, Larry Niven’s Known Space books have a very strong theme running through because the Rules of that universe, while being quite tight, give a huge amount of scope allowing the stories to be about the characters.

Star Trek tied itself in hellish knots because of all the “Hey ! That looks cool, we’ll use it in an episode”. Plot devices that aren’t properly thought out come back to bite you later. There’s a quote in ST The Next Generation where the computer says “NCC 1701 D, the fifth Starfleet ship to bear the name Enterprise.” Which was fine when that episode was written but got broken with the series Star Trek Enterprise. Star Trek also suffers immensely from the demon of Time Travel, allowing this to happen in a series (unless incredibly carefully planned) opens up all sorts of cans of worms. Curiously, the fella who wrote this alternate non-Federation ST timeline avoids time travel completely. That’s a good read too, when you get around some of his phrasing 🙂

So – I’d like to start writing scifi but I’m a bit daunted by the amount of setting up that would be needed before getting down to the fun stuff of storytelling.

Things like :

Mechs or tanks ? (noone argues with a 100tonne Big Robot)
What type of guns ? (projectile or energy)
How much attention do you pay to physics ? (Star Trek and Star Wars are extremely badly behaved with respect to physics)
Military or civilian characters ? (Star Trek vs Firefly)
Socio-political situation (religion, wars, customs)

Choices made there define the whole world and the rules within which the stories must play out. “New technology” as a plot device can only go so far in changing or bending those rules. Stargate is a decent example of how new technology can change the rules but it has to make sense or the audience is lost.

Hey ! That’s enough about theory of writing fiction, why’s this come out again ?

There’s a few reasons, like reading some of the stories that come through the Eve alliance’s newsletter. I play sci-fi style games that have great stories, with Mass Effect being a great example. I also get scenes sparking through my head as well, there’s one running that involves a new spaceship in the yard having techs do inspections on it. Now there’s a scene where an author could lead a reader into how the ships are put together. Interesting for a techie, not likely to be much story there though.

Stuff I do with work occasionally kicks off ideas that, as is normal with me, lead off into tangents so lateral they’ve turned longitudinal.

For the fantasy world, I had the starting few chapters of a novel lined up which I reckon would have grabbed people. A fantasy setting is best with a party of characters to have fun with and the Monday night gaming gives plenty of ideas there. Question is though, how to carry it on. Novel’s gotta have a plot.

Riiight – that’s enough Wall of Text about writing a Wall of Text 🙂 Time to get back to listening to stuff while wondering if my blocking sinuses (and resulting slight sore head) will let me play that Internet Space Ship game 🙂

Desperate measures !

One of the things I’ve been watching again lately is Doctor Who. The repeats have just gotten to the end of season 4 and while I’ve been watching it on the telly off iPlayer through my cable box, the last episode just … isn’t … listing …

Grr !

Desperate measures time.

My newer laptop can’t help this time, as the TV output on it is Round Peg Square Hole and doesn’t fit the telly. So …

Old laptop gets resurrected (first time in a bunch of months)
Network cable is stretched across the room to give it internet
Telly hook up cables
And hoping for a decent video considering it’s old and tired

Here’s the result :

Picture’s a bit washed out from camera flash but there we have it, laptop beside telly feeding me Dr Who amidst a swath of cables.

Result 🙂

Not a bad picture too, although I think I’m getting a taster of the improvements HD telly makes with the two screens side by side. I think the laptop picture is doing HD while the telly is limited to normal definition. Yep, there’s a difference. Gotta be looking for it but there’s a difference.

Right – time to get back to Dr Who before I pack away the old laptop again for another 6 months.

PS There’s an impending crash, bang, wallop from when I trip over the network cable.

That Saturday's pizza – imagination hadn't turned back on after bugs so it was a Meat Feast

Wednesday's – Hawaiian

Last Saturday's pizza – Carne Mista from Bella Pasta. Really wanted something pasta-ish from the pasta place but I'm not a fan of their latest menu.

What kind of pizza did you get? 🙂