Synova

It's an hour or so until midnight and I wonder if I should stay up and write... following the rules of course! Got to wait until Nov. 1. I had a wee bit too much caffeine today so I may be up if I want to be or not. I need to get my stuff organized, open a new file to start fresh, and that's about it. The project seems to want to be multi-book, though I will definitely need each to be complete in itself including the first one. I really hate books that don't have a satisfying ending and then you're supposed to wait a year or more for the next one! Ugh! Yuck! The villain for the first part had been eluding me and I realized today who it probably needs to be. The problem now is that I know that these people are not the ultimate villain at all, but will become the "good guys" later on. So how do I keep that fresh and not let on that they aren't bad? I mean, they *are* bad by a whole lot of standards... but what I know happens later might co...

And I'm going to do it again. :-) Last year I went with the "give yourself permission to write total crap" theory of circumventing the internal editor. It worked like a dream until I got to 20K words (the month long goal is 50K), looked at the story I had and thought, "Hey, this isn't half bad." I didn't write another word. This time I have a plan and most of a novel length plot, including the end. I expect it to be a first draft, but decent, and intend to finish and *market* this book. Sure, it will be my first ever time getting to the end of even a first draft of a novel, but that's what the participation in NaNo is about. The average novel in science fiction is generally between 80 and 100K words, so 50K isn't very long, really. If I have to I'll write summaries of what happens with the intent of going back and fleshing it out later. I'm really excited about this story. I'm shooting for a planet hopping shoot'...

I had the worst time with the auto-focus trying to take these pictures. They're in scale to the D&D miniatures we use... about an inch tall. I made the kobolds for my son. The blue goblins were a gift for my game DM. If I make any more I'll put a smidge of orange in the blue to dull it. I think the scraps of salvaged chain mail came out fabulous.

At least... I think that's what kind it was. We found this right under my daughter's window next to the house. At first glance I thought it was a gopher snake... at second glance I knew better. It was obviously a rattle snake. It didn't rattle, though, until after I'd got it all the way into a bucket. Where was the warning rattle? That was more nervous making than anything. Would a young snake like this rattle before striking? The picture was taken after we released it in the park.

(What is it about bald men?) In the Name of the King Bad and good, in odd ways, I think. Some good acting some bad, some good cinematic choices, some dire... my husband and I both cracked up toward the end when "Farmer" and the others who were going to sneak into the evil fortress walked through one grand landscape after another, after another, after another... but while I don't think anyone would argue it was a *good* movie, there were elements of the plot that were refreshing to see. Not everyone we expected to die, did. Some of the explaining about why to fight, and the King explaining that he was very like a farmer... that was very nice. The various people not waiting around helplessly, even when helpless, that was nice, too. It suffered from trying to get too many sub-plots in, from trying to make too many of the secondary characters have their own stories and character growth. But mostly it suffered from the evil magus's Larry the Lounge Lizard hair. That...