Two Months

So I took a two month blogging break. Shoot me.

After becoming unemployed, I decided to take a break from everything. Anything I felt was an obligation, I unplugged from it. I took the severance pay and took time to myself to purge the fixation. Simple as that.

I also did not blog. Why, you ask? The short answer was that for those two months pretty much nothing was going on. I sat around here and did nothing. I tried to work on my book but it jammed on me, no idea why. Pretty much I sat around and played video games for almost two months.

You might find that idea somewhat repulsive. Self-indulgence to the highest degree. You know what? I don't care. I needed it. I needed a nice, long break from the grind. Now that I've had it I can go back.

At first I thought I'd try something different. I contracted myself and my truck into a nightly delivery route of medication to nursing homes around Indiana. The work was enjoyable, though a bit on the humdrum side. It turned out that it wasn't for me, though; not only did the company take every chance it could to screw me out of money, I also hit a deer and destroyed my truck. I'd only been at the job for two weeks and I'd already obliterated my vehicle. The signs, as the eight ball say, pointed to no. So I quit that and am now returning to my office, which coincidentally developed an opening for me.

I feel that--and correct me if I'm wrong here--that my unplugging from everything may have accidentally disconnected me from my relationship with my friends as well. That I would also like to remedy, if you guys are still reading. Here's hoping you are.

Anyway, I will write more tomorrow. Time to start hooking back in to life.

Everybody else was doin' it...

I just wanted to feel popular.

Jason took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Intense, vital, and animated, taking a delight in ..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

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.