I also want that killer song list. But one question–how long before the RIAA demands a piece of the action so they can remotely shock you for ripping mp3s from your CDs?

Edited to add: The only drawback is if you load “Electric Slide”… IT shocks YOU!

But my ruby slippers are just fine, thanks.

Now where else have I been?  I’ve been hiding in my WIP.  I’ve been a Very Good Writer and made sure to plug away at three scenes a week (roughly–some weeks are more productive than others), producing content which does not suck.  Prior to that, I was hanging out in every other temporary location I could get to because my dear Ol’ Sparky croaked on me and I kid you not, it took me damn near a month to get it all sorted out and New Sparky up to speed.

But technical woes aside (and there were some damn awesome moments within the woe.  Imagine my glee when discovering New Sparky arrived just in time for the release of Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (I chose Cutting Edge over Rock Solid because I’m adventurous like that and KDE4 Plasma just rocks my socks right outta the box!), for the most part I’ve been playing Writer and not so much Author.  I’ve been creating, storyboarding, plotting, writing, revising, brainstorming, more revising, re-plotting, still more revising–you get the idea.  Now, I’m ready for a little break and to play Author again.  I’ll be doing it at Lori Foster’s Readers and Writer’s Get Together in West Chester, Ohio this weekend.   I’ll be signing print copies of Alien Communion and generally hanging out with a bunch of other authors and readers enjoying a relaxed, romance-oriented atmosphere.

So if you happen to be going (the six of you who read this blog, LOL), please feel free to stop by and say hi!

At the end of the process, though, lies the beginning.  Beginnings, inciting incidents, starting points–they’re where the story starts, and in them is held the promise of the ending, and a map of sorts to the journey to get there. Beginnings are the area where I need to focus the most, and they take the longest time and the most attempts to get right.  I go through several false starts–choosing inciting incidents or kickoff events that aren’t the most cohesive choices.

The aggravating thing is that this isn’t directly evident right away.  It takes me a while to try on the beginning and see how it fits.  And like cheap shoes, invariably what started out as a good idea and a great bargain ends up biting me in the ass.  Or rather, rubbing at my heels.  Which is why I’ve taken to buying better-quality shoes in fewer quantities, and wearing the suckers out when I find a pair I like.  Unfortunately, I can’t blow a bigger wad at the Story Beginnings outlet like I can at the shoe warehouse.  It’s an investment of words and time spent living into the idea.  I know it’s time well spent, but I’m not happy that I have to spend it.  I know it’s ruling out what doesn’t work, but I’d rather have that time and those words be devoted to something that does work and isn’t just something that doesn’t not work, the way “not bad” does not equate to “good.”

But like it or lump it, it’s what I do, what my brain needs to do, as part of my writing process.  Until I figure out a better way, and sell that better way to my brain, I’m stuck with what I’ve got.  On the whole, it could be worse, but it’s times like today when “worse” is relative.

A few years ago, when I realized that writing was actually my capital-D Dream–that  it was the force driving me, keeping me going through life’s ups and downs, and one of the reasons I wake up in the morning (the others are six and almost-three and have breakfast demands), I realized that if it wasn’t going to remain an unrecognized, unfulfilled, someday kind of dream, that I’d need to work at it.  To take the natural instincts that I have and understand them well enough to make them grow and refine them into the best manifestation they can be.  I’d have to prune the bad habits and encourage the tender shoots and hardy blossoms until they bore fruit, and then manage the growth to keep the harvest coming.

I have been glutting myself with the fertilizer of writing courses, techniques, articles, and lectures, and after a germination period that felt so long getting through, I’m emerging again to put what I’ve learned to pixels again.  It’s a daunting task, once you understand just how little you know.  But like any big step, sometimes you just have to close your eyes and do it.

Springtime Greetings to you and yours. May your chocolate bunnies not come to life and attempt to eat you before you bite their little heads off. May your peeps become appropriately and deliciously stale with a modest passage of time

Consequently, whenever two (unique and precious) snowflakes find themselves rubbing gently together, the friction from the quantum collision causes a ripple in the space-time continuum which causes the entire area to be blanketed in a fluffy white layer of pure panic.  The streets become clogged, the bottled water and toilet paper disappear from store shelves at speeds that defy everything we understand about physics.  Snowblowers mysteriously become fifty bucks more expensive, yet disappear the same way.  And inevitably, I will discover that in spite of my own defensive grocery stalking, I will have run out of something basic, like soup.

So even if you are a halfway decent driver in the snow (read: not from around here), your best bet is to stay indoors, or keep yourself in the cul-de-sac and do donuts all day, and for the love of Sister Mary Francis, stay the hell off the roads and out of the way of the trucks!  Me…I’m watching out the window as the white death from above falls down and the bluejays puff themselves up with affront because who the hell ordered this snow anyway, when it’s so close to spring.  And for once, I’m with the bluejays.

Right now, I’m working on something that my critique partner calls “Big-Time Sci-Fi.” It’s a story that takes place in a distant future, space opera setting. It goes beyond world-building and into universe-building, and the sheer volume of just–stuff–that I’ve created as background is kinda getting overwhelming. Not that it’s not fun, but it’s got to be bad when you could conceivably create a lexicon about the same size as the book, it’s kinda troubling to wonder just how you’re going to fit all that deliciously detailed information into a story. More than a little so when you realize you can’t stop the action to detail the intricacies of pricing on the galactic food markets.

I love my worldbuilding. Love it with the passion of a thousand burning suns. However, it’s my strong point (relatively speaking). But it can be distracting from the main building blocks of good story, epecially when you’re avoiding said building blocks because you don’t like seeing your hero and heroine fighting, or failing at what they’re trying to do. Yet conflict maketh the story.

It’s a pinched nerve, and it’s up near the top of my spine, so my neck and back have twisted in knots, and my vertebrae are out of whack. Long story short, it sucks to be me right now, because I’m doing things with bags of frozen peas that ought to be illegal–and not in a good way.

Now what’s aggravating the condition (which I really didn’t know I had until it started to really friggin’ hurt), or at least, not helping it, is my new toy. Our new family toy, ahem. We prowled and waited and checked prices and got a nice Xbox360 over the holiday. The Spawn drooled so much over Halo 3 that the move came partly to preserve the carpets, and Mr. Xandra found it in himself to embrace the 80’s in a way we never did when they were actually here via Rock Band. Yes, it’s like Guitar Hero only it’s more like…Guitar, Bass, Drums, and Vocals Hero all rolled into one. There is nothing more hysterical than watching your friends, one by one or maybe in twos if you’ve got an extra controller do their impersonations of Axl Rose on nerve stimulants…except gathering around the ol’ green ring to engage in arthritic finger contortions, smash on a practice pad of giant, color-coded circles, and screech into a microphone in a manic breed of mutant karaoke

In addition to the freakin’ cool songs you get to unlock on Easy setting (like Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper, which is made of win and more cowbell!), you get to create your own rawk gawd (or gawdess) and customize your pixelated self-insert into the music scene with hair, eye, and skin color (including all the eye-cramping shades found in the Manic Panic line), styles of head-hair and face-hair for the guys, and you can even pick your rocker’s attitude (I’m a little in love with the “goth” ‘tude because it makes your rocker do funny ‘woo-woo’ things with his or her hands). There’s also a stunning array of ink styles by some pretty big names in the tattoo world, and even face paint, if you don’t want the students at your day job knowing the vice principal rawks out on the weekends with groupies.

So besides the fact that I could get lost in picking out clothes, shoes, hair, and makeup for my rocker (I have a chick with white and blue anime buns for my primary rocker–she’s a cutie), standing hipshot with a guitar controller slung over one shoulder and hunching over it while twisting my fingers into knots is not helping my posture any.

But that’s what the groupies are there for.

In spite of knowing I’m going to probably drop them, I still make these things anyway. It takes 28 days to make a habit, and most resolutions end about seven days before that–so close to the goal, yet still so far away. I make the resolutions because even if they don’t stick, they still open pathways in my thinking that allow me to be receptive to the changes I hope to make. If I don’t manage to stick with the change, then at least I’m a step further along on the path to eventually doing so.

This year, my resolution is to not be terrified of losing my faculties. I’m starting to feel my age, and it’s scaring me. Having young kids means that my house gets visited by the germ fairy on a much more frequent basis, and all the little sniffles and coughs and fevers and yucks feel like they’re really taking their toll on my body. Aside from the illnesses, there’s the energy required to keep up with two active and mischievous little kids hell-bent on destruction and world domination (and dangerously close to their goals, I sometimes think).

Those of you out there who are mothers as well will know that Mom just doesn’t get sick, even when she does get sick. And Mom always comes after everyone else has been settled. Which leads into my next resolution–take better care of myself. With the frequency that I have been lately feeling that my mind is going (and a little bit of worrisome family history), I need to stay on top of the game. If my mind really is going, I need to fight that tooth and nail, and if it’s just a sad case of CRS by way of mental laziness, then it’s my job to kick myself in the ass until my brains work their way back up to the proper location.

Although this is my blog, I feel like some of this might be bordering on TMI. I always said I didn’t want my author blog to turn into my personal whine-fest, because it’s the wrong kind of whine with which to woo readers and/or connect with my community. But file this post under accountability, and to avoid breaking my personal taboo, I shall give you something amusing and/or thought-provoking.

Please enjoy my fondest wishes for you all for the New Year via the sentiments delivered at the Surrealist Compliment Generator.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.