2011-12-11:
Knew it had to happen sooner or later, it's cold now. Just a tiny bit of snow has come down, just a warm up, so to speak, for the unspeakable amounts yet to come.
So everyone's weekend went well, I hope? Didn't actually write on Thursday, did I? Well, I did three jobs, a cleanout, the one 40 minutes away in Holley setting up network stuff, and telling a guy his 700mhz machine was inadequate for running Dragon Naturally Speaking. When cell phones have faster processors then your PC, you know it's time for a new machine.
Friday I didn't actually have any jobs, so I mostly remember writing. Then went to see grandma, who had fallen that morning and hurt herself. So most of our conversation was "Oh. Ow. Oh it hurts. Oh I'm in so much pain. Oh." It was pretty fun.
Saturday, more writing, then off to see Boris and get his files for this project he wanted me to look into. Basically it's a book of saying in I guess Yiddish, along with english translations. Of course, Yiddish reads right to left, and has non-English characters, so trying to paste the files from textedit to InDesign requires:
Reformatting the text when pasted, as InDesign doesn't keep the bolding for some reason, plus it didn't fit in the box right so I had to delete spaces before the lines after the first to make it fit.
Then the left to right characters had to be pasted in, the font chosen (it sometimes keeps the same as the above and sometimes not, I couldn't figure out why.)
Then I had to select it and reverse it, using a script I downloaded randomly off the internet, because it pastes in the wrong way.Repeat all that for each entry.
So one page took me about 8 minutes. Because he has 181 separate documents each with at least a page of text to do, I estimated a full 24 hours to complete the job, at a cost of about $1000. He was willing to pay $100. So I guess that's not getting done. Did all that this morning, by the way, finding that out.
Anyway, after that I went over to Sean's, where I saw total recall for the first time, talked about what went wrong in the last Shadowrun game, talked briefly about the new spirit setting (because we aren't running enough games right now) had yummy food (thanks Mizzy) and played some Gears 3. Oh, and I won Cosmic Wimpout, by the narrowest of narrow margins. He was quite surprised to find there were only two more weeks until Christmas. Silly guy. Oh, and Mizzy got a car, now all she needs is a job to drive to, and she's all set! I thought it was Stan/Sean's car, but then they were not in the house, so I said, "whoa?" to myself, and then they told me, and everything was right in the world.
Then this afternoon I wrote more, and played a little Skyrim. Watched a random NPC necromancer shoot ice spikes at a named dragon and kill him. Not an NPC wimp dragon. A named dragon. Okay. He was even find at the end of it. What do they need me for, if some single random dude can take down a dragon? Of course after he killed the dragon for me I thanked him by shooting lighting bolts at him until he died and then looted his corpse. It was really a win-win situation, but only for me.
The story I'm working on is the continuation of Dean's Tale, the character I next wanted to play in Demongate. As I am now convinced we will never again do a Demongate High game, I have created a story that smooches [sic] together my Demongate game we'll also never play again, some new material I thought up, (relating to dreamers and where their power comes from) and the next generation coming into the school after the events of Shao'tikka. So Albert is still around, I may bring in Juno I'm not sure, and events are talked about but not in detail. The plan, if I ever finish this one, is to have it lead into the other books, so like when Albert says "Long story short, the blade was very powerful, and Shao'tikka, who wanted to bring the universe back to chaos, kind of stole it from him in order to help with that goal." they read book 3 of the Carlita tale and think, "Oh, so that's what Albert was talking about."
See how sneaky I am? No? Oh, well, never mind.
See, there was this writing "thing" last month, a challenge to write 50,000 words in a month. Well, I was working on the Paragon Database that month and it took up all my time, so I didn't participate. With the Database nearly complete, just bug fixes I hope at this point, I went back to writing. I'm up to 31,000 words so far, so I think I could have easily done the challenge last month. Considering I started with only one chapter and am now up to 9 in one week.
Of course publishing it and selling it are very, very distant dreams at this point.
Three calls, and My Buddy Bruce, I didn't actually reach but one, so that was weird. So I just have the one job for tomorrow afternoon.