Author Archives: lytspeed

Dolphins for All Seasons

By lytspeed Posted in Writing Leave a reply

As promised, I did get some writing done at lunch. It wasn’t a lot, but I did get a few paragraphs of “Chesterfield Gray” down.

On the way to Stories for All Seasons, I noticed a wispy cloud being pushed over the jagged edge of a Flatirons peak by the wind. The cloud curled over the edge and followed the face of the rock a short way down before dissipating. I could see the wind swirl in the arch of the cloud, and I imagined the cloud was a dolphin jumping over the waves of rock. God, I love Colorado.

When I got close to the West Side Books Annex, where Stories for All Seasons is held, I had some extra time. I decided to stop off at Guitar Center and browse for a while, which is always a dangerous thing to do. This time was no different. Fortunately, I only left with one item, a book about guitar soloing in different modes and patterns. After hearing my clunky minor key solos against Dante Spumante’s major key music, I decided it was time to arm myself with some tools and do a little studying. I hope to find some time to go over the exercises in the next few days.

Lucy Taylor was the guest at Stories for All Seasons this month. Lucy writes horror and detective fiction, often with an erotic flavor. Lucy also happens to be a very pretty redhead. Both of the pieces she read were a bit erotic, one more so than the other, and I will admit that I felt a little uncomfortable watching and listening to this siren of a woman reading erotic fiction. I wasn’t uncomfortable in a bad way; it was just a turning of the tables that I wasn’t expecting. (I guess that means the erotica in the stories worked!)

Tired & WotC

By lytspeed Posted in Gaming, Writing Leave a reply

I am beat tonight. I will definitely be going to bed early. I won’t get any writing done tonight, but I will get some done tomorrow at lunch an also after Stories for All Seasons tomorrow night.

I did a little creative work tonight, though it was primarily tedious. If you look to your right, you should see that the scroll bar for this (and every page of this site) has turned an interesting shade of bluish-gray. I just figured the site could use a balancing effect for the spiral down the left side of the page. Whatever.

There is one more thing I want to cover before turning in. Today, my son got a letter from Wizards of the Coast, with his Magic: The Gathering DCI tournament card in it. He also claimed that a hand-written letter accompanied it. In this day of custom-printed mail merges, I figured he had just gotten a well done form letter written in some kind of cursive font. I asked to see the letter.

To my surprise, he actually got a hand written letter from someone named Dee Bleifield (sorry if I’m mutilating your name, Dee), a DCI tournament director that he had met while visiting his Mom in Texas. Dee took the time to hand write his letter, complete with her direct phone number and an offer to call her if he needed help finding local tournaments.

That’s pretty damn cool. Evidently WotC hasn’t lost all the small company feel that TSR used to have in its early days. I remember sending a query letter to Kim Mohan, who was then editing Dragon magazine, asking if he would be interested in an article submission about D & D druids and listing different specs for some possible animal forms that high-level druids could assume. I was only a couple of years older than my son is now. Kim responded to me with a personal letter, saying that he would be interested in seeing the article, though I’m sure he knew that the person behind the query letter was still very wet behind the ears. I’ve always remembered that, though I never got up the guts to send in the article.

It seems that Dee has tapped into that same importance in the youth market. Keith, my son, will always remember getting a personal letter from a Wizards of the Coast staff member, just as I remember getting the letter from Kim Mohan. If WotC ever revives Amazing Stories (please please please) I will definitely submit something to him this time.

(Update, 12/9/2014: Amazing Stories has indeed been revived, but not by WotC. It’s now being run by Steve Davidson.)

Jammed

By lytspeed Posted in Conventions, Fiction, Writing Leave a reply

I’m jammed right now.

I’m sitting in front of my computer, trying to work on “Chesterfield Gray,” and Pig Won’t (as Bruce Holland Rogers calls the inertia we have to overcome in order to write) is doing everything he can to get me to stop. He’s distracting me with e-mails, sounds, thirst, games, and a sore butt. Some of these are easy to combat; the e-mails don’t come if Outlook isn’t open, the thirst trick works only once, and the sore butt is less sore after getting up to get the drink.

It pisses me off that I have lots of energy to spend on writing and thinking about writing except when I’m in front of the screen. Just opening Front Page to work on this journal entry was a battle of laziness vs. stubbornness. In this case, Pig Will won out, and I’m at least writing something. Maybe if I write enough of this, it will kick start the desire to move ahead on the story, the first draft of which I want to have done by the end of Wednesday night.

I don’t want to talk about the story itself too much in this blog. The parasitic nature of the ‘Net keeps me from wanting to say too much about the stories I’m writing. That probably comes across as a tease to those of you reading, and I apologize. However, this open journal is still, first and foremost, for my learning purposes. Its entertainment value for you, unfortunately, is a side benefit.

I suppose I can say that I’m at a point in the construction of the story where I need to figure out what the characters are going to do next. I need to figure out how the female character is going to crack the shell of the main male character. Then I need to justify his brusque behavior by getting a bit into his history. A central event will involve all the characters toward the end, and I will need to show their reactions to it, but I will only be able to get inside the head of one of the characters.

It’s interesting how this is coming out, because the overall viewpoint is limited omniscient; we get in the head of only one character — a sideline character, in fact — but we know what the other characters are doing. So far, that seems to be working, but I may need to revise it as the story progresses.

Okay, it feels like the juices are flowing a bit, so I’m going to switch gears and leave the journal entry for now. One quick note; I found out today that I won’t be able to attend Mile Hi Con like I was hoping to this year. I will be in Key West that weekend on business.

Later — I was able to get some work done on the story. I cleared up a few fuzzy areas and wrote three more pages. I’m glad I was able to beat back Pig Won’t this time. I’ll have to remember that directly addressing the issue by writing about it seems to take some of Pig Won’t’s power away. (Believe it or not, that’s a correct construction of a possessive proper noun, in this case!)

Jammin’ With Jim

By lytspeed Posted in Music, Writing Leave a reply

I got to play music with my good friend Jim for the first time in a couple of years today. I showed him my finished Carvin Bolt Kit and my Fender Cyber-Twin, then we BSed for a while. Eventually, we sat down with our acoustic guitars and played for a couple of hours. It was refreshing to play acoustic with him, and we slipped back into some of our old tunes with no problems. He also taught me the chords to Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” which I had always wanted to learn, but never tried. I taught him “Ode to Billy Joe,” since I’ve been working on it for the Tem class on Thursday.

I also got an e-mail from another friend, Bill, who had written a powerful short-short that he wanted me to read. I won’t give away the story, but I was impressed with it. I hope he can find a home for it somewhere.

I had intended to write a review of Word Work tonight and write some more on “Chesterfield Gray,” but somehow a chunk of time vaporized between dinner and bedtime; it’s now after 11:00 PM and I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning. I’m going to listen to my body and sleep.

Right after I read Trey Barker’s Veil of the Soul. Honest.

Oh, the Broncos beat the 49ers to go 2-0 on the season. Good start, gentlemen! (No, that’s not where my chunk of time went. I sacrificed watching the Broncos game to spend time with Jim. I told you he was a good friend.)

Is Troubleshooting Creative? You bet!

By lytspeed Posted in Computers, Movies Leave a reply

The closest I got to creativity today was troubleshooting my Windows 2000 server. I received an old motherboard, processor and case from one of my coworkers as payment for upgrading him to a new system, and proceeded to move my Windows 2000 Server installation to this new machine. Rather than just move the disks over and hope for the best (I’ve had mixed results with this in the past on machines at work) I decided to format the drives and go with a clean install in the new system. The OS installed with no problems, but when I tried to set up Active Directory after the install, the machine locked up.

Ah! A challenge!

I tried swapping the network card out, thinking it was maybe a compatibility problem, but received the same result. I checked Google for the last message displayed (“Configuring the local server to host the Directory Service”) and found several posts from people having the same problems, but no solutions that fit my situation. I tried setting up DNS manually, and was successful, but the installation still hung. Finally, I decided to move ahead with installing Service Pack 3 and the Security Toolkit for Windows 2000 Server, and tried promoting the server to a DC after that. Lo and Behold, Active Directory installed with no errors or hangs. Problem solved.

Then after I had the usernames and properties set up, I attempted to install the new Western Digitial 40Gb drive I purchased a couple of weeks ago. The motherboard BIOS detected and installed the drive without coaxing, and I figured it would be smooth sailing to format and get the shared folders set up on the drive. However, when I opened the Disk Management container and attempted to write a signature to the drive, I got the following error after a long wait: “LDM Configuration Disk Write Error.” I was also informed that the Disk Management container had become unstable, and that I should restart the machine or close Disk Management.

Ah! Another challenge!

When I tried to format the drive with NTFS, I got a similar error. But the solution to this one was easy. I restarted the computer with a Windows 98 boot disk, ran FDISK to create a Primary DOS partition on the new drive, and restarted Windows 2000. Now the Disk Manager saw the partition as a healthy DOS partition of the appropriate size, and I was able to format it with NTFS.

Creative? Yes. Simple? Yes, but I still had to think creatively to get around the roadblocks.

Kim and I went to see S1M0NE today. I think John Shirley was very kind to this movie in his Locus Magazine review. Probably too kind. Even my wife, who is not a computer expert, picked up on the obvious computer-related flaws in this movie. I agree with Shirley that the movie has a pleasant taste, but if you know ANYTHING about computers — and if you’ve read this far in this log entry, you must — don’t take your brain to see this movie. Leave it at home, on the bookshelf, enjoying the company of Shakespeare and Conan Doyle.