Guy on a Gate

My wife and I have our next roleplay collaborative creative writing project. It's in the works, which means at the moment we're mapping it out, deciding what plot elements to include, where the story will begin and end, how many people to involve, where we're going to host it, etc. It is to be based upon the Legend of Zelda universe, which has been a subject of great interest to the both of us lately.

Why do we do this? I cannot speak for my wife, though I have my guesses, but for me it can be summed up in one word: Practice. The more I write, the more I want to write, and vice versa. At the moment I haven't written anything for two months. I need a kick start. This sounds like fun, so we'll work with it first.

The character my writing will be observing is a Hylian gate guard. Yep. Just a guy watching a gate, making sure nobody steals it. I haven't worked out much about him except that I want him to be a fairly substantial nobody when this adventure begins. Just average Joe with a boring job.

What are your opinions, readers, about characters like that? Characters who begin their "adventuring lives" at a normal place? Personally, I like characters like this. People who are forged into heroes by extraordinary circumstance, circumstance that has nothing to do with their pasts. With these characters, there's no potential for anything corny later on (ie. Vader: "No! *I* am your father!"), and there exists amazing possibility for exploration of the human soul, the human condition.

Some people find this kind of thing boring, but I personally believe there is real storytelling potential in a regular guy/girl, living their regular life, with their regular parents and regular siblings, who is suddenly thrust into irregular circumstance and changed into something more by it. My book, should I ever manage to get it off the ground, will center on this concept.

I'd love to get this guy to do some character art. He was trying to get on with Marvel Comics but was rejected. I can see why; his style is just a *bit* on the cartoony side. While that worked against him there, it earned him my business because that style is what will be needed for this body of work. His official website can be found here and he does take commissions at fairly reasonable prices.

The debate table is officially open. Let's hear your opinions.

Scary Stuff

I have been having *weird dreams* over the last few days. Weird and violent. Nightmares in truth.

Yesterday I had one that involved a family of fifteen or so, all living in a ratty house in the middle of nowhere. People sleeping on couches, on rugs on the floor, and in rat-chewed armchairs. There were holes in the walls, filthy dishes stacked high, flies.. The living conditions were downright shabby and overcrowded. The scene finally culminated in the oldest member of the family--really old guy--ripping out a gun and mowing down most of the rest of them. There were a lot of other details, that's basically a summary.

Then this morning there was another dream that involved my boss, who in real life just left on maternity leave, giving birth to some kind of deformed goat rather than a human baby. Again, more details to that one, just presenting the key event.

I don't know what to make of this. On one hand I'm happy my dreams are back. I've been so depressed and exhausted lately that I haven't been having dreams. If I don't dream, my creative juices refuse to flow for the rest of the day and I can accomplish no inventive thinking, which means I can't write. Now I feel a little more creative, a little more connected to the world around me, and the typewriter doesn't look like such a fearful bit of metal anymore.

On the *other* hand, these dreams disturb me deeply. These aren't the kind of images I normally associate with my normal brand of thinking. The details are much more macabre than what I am used to, the subjects more gruesome.

It makes me wonder just what my subconscious mind has been working on in its absence.

249.8

I cannot accurately describe what it was like to see the scale report my weight last night, but I'm going to try with this post in my blog. The precise number given was 249.8, which is close enough to 250 for the government, but there is a difference. My friends and faithful readers, there is a large difference indeed. What, exactly, you may ask? Simply this: There's a 5 in one of those numbers, and a 4 in the other.

Seeing that number appear made my heart skip a beat. Two beats, once I'd weighed myself for the third time and discovered I hadn't just been standing wrong on the scale. I can't remember the last time I saw my weight land in the 240's, and to find myself there again--even if it is just by the barest thread under the line--is a real treat.

Let me get positively artsy on you. It's a marker, a post along the trail with my destination scrawled across it in black charcoal on a pointed board. The worn wood of this stereotypical "dusty path in the badlands" sign is still in good enough shape to point the way, and wouldn't you know it? It's pointing the way I've been going. The sun may be hot, the landscape may be bleak and unforgiving, and the road may be full of tumbleweeds and trail dirt, but by God, it is the *right road* and if I follow it I'll get where I'm going.

Need a Dream Analyst

This morning, I had a dream. It went like this:

I was back at my old job delivering drugs to nursing homes. Only now, I was doing the job on a white bicycle. I think this was a bike I owned when I was a young teen. Behind me I was pulling a cart full of the medications I was delivering. The cart was a rusty red one, again from my childhood that I would normally pull behind the lawnmower and throw yard skree in.

On my route, I landed a flat front tire. I wheeled around all over the place looking for someone to fix this flat, but it was 11:00pm and nothing was open. Finally I found this one place that was closing up for the night, but the girl there agreed to fix the tire real quick. She rode the bike into the back of her shop on its back wheel, kinda doing a wheelie the whole way because the front one was flat. I didn't get a good look at her. I think she was blond.

There was someone else there with me the whole time, telling me things that I can't remember. His voice was gibberish, and I only ever glanced at him. Never did get a good look. We walked around talking, but the conversation made no sense. Finally went back to pick up the bike and there it was. I remember being happy because the bike was fixed, but now the shop was closed and the blond was gone, so I didn't have to pay.

I went back along my way. The last thing I remember is getting a buzz on my pager. I don't recall the number, but it started with 1-900 and I remember knowing that it was my boss.

Then I woke up.

Take a crack at that one, all you would-be dream analyzers. Let's see what you come up with.

These Are My Confessors

There's something about being in a bookstore. To me, there is no other feeling quite like it. It is there that I want to be, in a building crammed left to right, top to bottom, corner to corner with tomes of various sizes, shapes, and thicknesses. Facts, fictions, opinions, ideals, mountains of it gathered in one place. The scent of the paper, ink, and binding glue wanders into my nostrils and I'm swept away.

The bookstore in question was Barnes & Noble in Greenwood. My wife and I visited there for the first time since it went up. There, among my paper peers, I was compelled--indeed, perhaps even possessed--into buying a book. I felt that to enter into that place and leave again without having made a purchase would be some kind of blasphemy.

So I bought Confessor by Terry Goodkind. The latest and, perhaps, last book in the Sword of Truth series.

I'm about halfway through it already, but I can definitely say that so far it's been a good yarn. The last couple books have waxed preachy in too many places and rehashed material from far too many predecessors, but this book doesn't seem to suffer this curse. It is a more compact, more streamlined work.

I want to hold my review until I've finished the piece. I just thought my readers (such as you are) might enjoy knowing I am once agan back in the literature saddle. I fully intend to begin writing again as well. But first, this book.