On the Verge

More dreams

2009-12-20T11:03:44Z

I can't decide if this morning's dreams were interesting or just depressing.

There's not that much to say... I woke up at 2:30, having dreamed about the world going dark because no plants would grow, and then someone managed to start a small forest. Then the dream fast-forwarded a couple millennia, and the forests had come back but the atmosphere was still thinned enough that you had to be very careful not to go out in the sun for too long. Then, when I tried to go back to sleep... well, I never actually did fall asleep after that, but my mind wandered in strange directions,and somehow settled on the theme of "if a new Messiah showed up now, his/her job would probably be cleaning up the world..." and then meandered about covering all the problems that person would have to deal with...

Seriously, brain. What the heck? I'm not even particularly religious, let alone Christian...

...COOL.

2009-12-13T12:39:51Z

Oh, man. My dreams apparently decided to make up for the fact that they've been slipping my fingers recently with a pure epic one this morning.

It's odd, though. My mind is definitely on a sci-fi kick. Much more so in this case...

It started off with me crossing a desolate plain with the ruins of some ancient titanic buildings rising out of shallow water - mostly broken columns. Whoever was with me was, I think, a member of some alien race, or perhaps a splinter group of humans? Someone from the world we'd landed on. We were talking about our childhoods; I was telling my companion (who actually seemed to be 'flickering' on me, by which I mean his/her identity wasn't stable - for one thing, it started out as an alien he, and by the end, was a human she) about how when I was a child, my father had told me that the world was a ship sailing on a black sea with jewels floating around, as an explanation for the stars. My companion asked me innocently if my parents were back with our ship, and I said no, they were gone. Her face - she'd shifted to "she" by that point - shadowed, and she asked if they'd been lost "then." I shook my head and said they'd both died in the battle, and then added rather bitterly that they hadn't even been on the same ship.

What I was reading between the lines: we were part of some sort of space-faring people who had been met and attacked by some kind of entity; most of our ships had been wiped out, and possibly most of our people. I'm wondering now if our homeworld was destroyed - that must have been the "then" she mentioned - and whoever/whatever destroyed it also wiped out most of our fleet. The survivors scattered and ran like hell. Our particular ship had encountered/crash-landed on another world, and we were in the process of negotiating with them.

My companion shook her head, saying she couldn't believe how strong I was to keep going, and then started crying, because we'd just received word that her father had died. Next thing I knew, I was busy comforting her.

The dream shifted, then, to the city where we were staying. It's interesting... space in this dream was very confined. There was the terraced city (a bit like Laputa), and then a lake bordered all about by cliffs. There were caves in those cliffs, and you did not want to go in them - I gather there was something hostile and more than a bit supernatural in there. (Don't ask how I was moving about, the dream took a very silly aside here, with me bouncing about with springs on my feet, that as long as I kept moving would even let me stay on top of the water.) I was busy searching for a way out, but couldn't find one, and had to return as night fell. Which I had to do anyway, because my mother (...this must have been a different Me...) was marrying the leader of the city, or something, and there was a lot of last-minute scrambling to get everything ready. I gathered that I approved of my mother being happy, but not of the marriage; I generally had a reputation as a problem child. Although interestingly, I got the sense that I'd been cultivating that reputation rather deliberately...

Then came the truly epic bit - a shift back in time to... either the catastrophe that shattered our civilization, or the lesser catastrophe that had brought our ship down. Essentially, our ship, which seemed to be this fairly narrow, confined space, and largely automated, had run amuck. People were being snatched up by UFO-catcher-style arms, and dropped into the mouth of this glowing gate or tunnel, never to be seen again. One after the other after the other. I didn't really have an "I" at that point of the dream; I was more an omniscient third person point of view, or perhaps "incorporeal narrator" would be more accurate, since I wasn't getting into anyone's heads. Eventually, though, my PoV shifted me into the tunnel - I think as the last of the ship's crew were drawn in.

We came out in a... semi-large (the size of the chapel of a smaller church? Not quite the size of a gymnasium?), oval chamber. Interestingly, despite the purely mechanical ship (...although there was something organic about it, never the less), this chamber was made of rough stone, with a sloping floor going down to a small pool of water at the end of it. When we gathered ourselves and looked around... Eesh. Well, we found out what had happened to the others. They were arranged on a ledge, all the way around the chamber, clothed in fantasy/medieval-style garments, at least for the women (not at all like the bodysuit-uniforms we were all wearing), smiling... and everything, from clothes to face, had this waxy gleam. And 'waxy' is rather appropriate, because the impression I got was that they'd been turned into wax, or coated in sealant...

...and, as we were recovering from the shock of this, one of the figures on the wall started laughing, and stepped down. Ugly fellow, too. This was the entity that had taken over the ship - or that had come out of our ship - and he was having ever so much fun. He said that he'd simply done his duty, but he was grinning nastily as he did it. And then he started coming after us.

By this point, I actually had an identity in the dream, of a fighter pilot/lone agent sort of woman. When the press of the panic got me too close to the fellow, who had some sort of harpoon, I just grabbed the end of it in an attempt to arm myself. He wouldn't let go, though, so I just hauled him about in a weird tug-of-war, figuring as long as he was after me, he wasn't after anyone else. (I seem to recall that he found this highly amusing; I think he was entertained by the attempt to fight back.)

My name was Ace, or something like that - someone shouted it at me, and I managed to catch a note someone shoved at me before I lost my grip. It said that one of our group had managed to make a Molotov cocktail, and that they needed me to bait this thing over to the center of the room, where they'd set up a trap that would close him in with it. I'd lost my grip, but he'd already gone most of the way back, so I and a few others - all of them hard, independent, determined sorts of women like myself - went back to some sort of metal sacrificial altar or something that was in the middle of the room. I separated from the group to stand next to that altar, and shouted for him to come back and deal with me.

As I said, I think he was amused by me for fighting back, so he actually played along. For several long, tense moments, we were actually bantering back and forth - I was trying to keep his attention on me, not the altar. Especially after something must have gone wrong and it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that we'd meddled with it. I was also trying to judge when I'd need to dodge away, and finally decided that I had to cut it as close as possible, that in the end, getting rid of this thing was more important than me getting away.

It worked; somehow, the thing got trapped inside the altar, and my companions rushed forward to roll the whole thing into a crevasse. Then there was nothing to do but wait. While we did that, the one who'd made the plan - she had 'leader' written all over her - turned to chew out another woman who'd been standing on the side to watch the explosions. Apparently she had tampered with the cocktail - to get a bigger boom? - and that was what had gone wrong and almost given our plan away. Leader snapped that at her - and I get the funny feeling that, at some point earlier, I'd actually had a dream where he had figured out the trap, and escaped. The woman just pouted a little, shrugging, and asked, "Don't you trust us?"

At which point, Leader said something along the lines of, "Pilot 3. Medic 9. Engineer 11. (And she actually grabbed that woman's shoulder as she said it.) Ace 7. (As she grabbed the collar of my vest.) They are the only ones I trust right now." (Don't ask me what the titles meant, I don't even remember them - only that I was one of a group of names she listed, and my title was Ace 7.)

Which might have turned into a fight - except we heard the explosives go off. Once. Twice. Three times, and that couldn't have been right...

Then the being came exploding up out of the chasm again, only now he was in the form of a giant snake-man, with his tail still caught in the chasm. And we had to rally and fight him again.

He'd dropped his harpoon at some point in the earlier fight, and I'd grabbed it - but this thing was a lot bigger now, and trying to fight with that harpoon would be like trying to fight with a needle. The spears he was swinging around this time were about the size of electric poles! But I managed to grab one, brace myself, and charge him with it. I didn't do much damage, but I was able to immobilize him.

Which he seemed to find delightful - he turned around and grinned at me. And the more time passed, the more his form changed. It was rapidly losing cohesion and color, turning into sort of this flattened, mold-yellow amoeba, although still limited by the trapped tail and my pinion. Only it was bending forward over the long pole-spear, and before long I was torn between either coming into contact with it (BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD IDEA), or throwing my spear aside, maybe going for another one (it only used each spear once, so there was a small pile of them behind it, where I was - a blow had thrown me into the little lake at the back of the room when it first exploded back up, so I was separated from the pack), which might or might not work and would free it up for mischief, since the only reason it hadn't reached me yet was because I did have it at the end of this long pole.

And just as I was waking up, I had this last, funny sense that what I actually needed to do to beat this thing was to run around, touching each of the waxified people on the wall, and open myself up to them, so that I could become a channel for their combined vengeance. Whether or not I'd survive such a stunt was another matter entirely...

Another dream

2009-12-12T12:44:29Z

I had another nifty dream last night.

I don't remember the beginning - more's the pity, because this was a fairly long and mostly coherent dream. It had to do with a small group of people being chased from place to place. The world they were living in had been torn to bits in a pretty impressive manner - all I can guess is that there had been a really big war. I know one location they - we - stayed in was my house, and another was the church we went to when I was small... although the dream made a point of noting that the chapel had been renovated since then.

The part where I really can start recalling the dream had to do with myself and a small group of others (who were really ciphers, I'm afraid, because my dream insisted that there were others with me and didn't bother fleshing them out for this part - I think that happened earlier), preparing to go up in a boss battle. Funny thing is, the 'boss' we were fighting, while very powerful, really came across as a little kid. Riding a dragon, mind you. And utterly, ruthlessly determined.

We won, barely, but somehow winning was going to bring about this huge catastrophe. So there was a lot of despair going around. One of the people in the group - the only one who really wasn't a cipher for this part, other than me - was an old woman, a shaman. (...Inuit?) She had an old magical artifact, and explained that it was a little piece of an ancient hero or god or something that had sacrificed himself to bring magic into the world. But the little pieces had slowly been destroyed, and now, only this charred old log covered in old cowrie shells (...so maybe she was from an African tribe...? Although for some reason, my mind still insists Inuit, maybe because she gave me the impression of a cold, rocky coastline) remained. And it was on the verge of destruction.

Mostly, I remember myself standing there (I'm not really certain who "I" was in the dream, save not-me), looking at her - then setting my jaw stubbornly, reaching down, breaking off a shell, and holding it in my fist as I told her and my companions that I was not giving up, dammit, and that there was enough magic still left to help. Then I turned and marched off to go find a way to stop the incoming disaster.

...although, given the non-linear/repeating quality of dreams, I'm wondering if the order was mixed up, and that actually, averting the disaster lead to that boss battle, in which case success stopped the catastrophe. That would explain why I was using magic (clumsily) in that battle.

I think that's the case; this dream seemed to be going in reverse chronological order after the sequence of different situations that got us to the boss fight. Especially because the scene with the relic then led to another flashback.

That one was... interesting. Mostly because it almost seemed to be a different genre entirely. There was a big war going on, and this time, "I" was a little girl whose father had gone off to war. I don't really recall the details, but at the end of the war, the surviving soldiers were supposed to come home... all save a few who had been altered into "Mechmen Soldiers." These were people who were now quite obviously half-human, half-machine. They would go and live in a facility for the rest of their lives - ostensibly because they needed constant maintenance to support, but also because no one really wanted them around now that the war was over. But the army did have them standing guard as announcements went out about the end of the war, blah blah blah...

...mostly, what I retained was of little-girl-me, while being chivvied by a caretaker (I think I was officially an orphan by that point), suddenly stopping and staring up at one of the Mechmen, and then saying, "...Daddy?" Because there was just enough left of him that wasn't swallowed up by machine that I could recognize him. He was startled - I don't think he recognized me until that moment, both because I'd grown up some since he'd left and because he'd been desperately trying not to see all the civilians gawking at him. Or maybe it was just the fact that I then attached myself to him with a death-glomp.

...and I'm fairly certain that the "me" of that dream then grew up to become the "me" of the first.

And on the off chance that any artistically inclined people are out there, I'd love to see a picture of that ending scene - this huge, massive man covered in armor plating and wires, maybe with one of his arms converted into a gun, and this little girl staring up at him, maybe holding a unicorn plushie toy or something, saying, "...Daddy?" Because that was one of the most vivid scenes of that dream...

Glad I managed to get this down. I've been having a lot of dreams lately - but I've also been sleeping in, and when I do that, I tend to lose them...

Random question

2009-12-08T14:15:26Z

Query: Anyone out there have any advice for getting a finicky cat to eat an herbal medicine she hates? I've tried mixing it with her regular cat food (bad idea: she just ignores it, and she really can't afford to keep losing weight), flavoring it with "Doritos" wet cat food (AKA stuff she probably shouldn't eat but really, really likes), mixing it with catnip, and combinations of all of the above.

Misty-kitty, I do love you, but keeping a twenty-year-old cat with failing kidneys healthy is nerve-wracking enough without you turning your nose up at anything good for you...

SNOW!

2009-12-08T14:11:36Z

We got snow yesterday! Yay!

Also: for those who are interested, I just completed the third of my grad school applications. Five more to go!

Final NaNo count!

2009-12-01T02:05:41Z

The last few days have been a little hectic, what with Thanksgiving, dealing with the last of my San Francisco head cold, and the like...

...but nevertheless, Ramparts has continued apace (despite losing a day of writing to a reading splurge and relatives - bah!), and I just... um... finally got through one of the major plot points that was supposed to kick off the main plot.

At about 67,000 words and counting. ^^;

I just remind myself that the same thing happened with the first book - and that, at this point, that "major plot point" is actually kicking off the main crisis - hence all the time devoted to setting it up...

WORD TALLY:
TOTAL
Official: 67,751 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 2,258 words/day
Unofficial: 16,901 words (14,570 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NaNo update

2009-11-27T03:44:11Z

Well, for a day spent reading from when I got up until I went to bed - a little early, thankfully - I'd say I didn't do too badly. And yikes, what a scene...

The reading... one of my usual 'splurge all day reading old favorites after not reading for too long' events. ^^;

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 2,572 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 0 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 58,701 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 2,257 words/day
Unofficial: 16,901 words (14,570 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NaNo update - yep, still at it.

2009-11-26T02:37:22Z

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 2,913 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 415 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 56,129 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 2,245 words/day
Unofficial: 16,901 words (14,570 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NANO COMPLETE!

2009-11-25T03:32:29Z

...not that this is any great surprise, considering that I had less than 200 words left to go. Still!

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 3,409 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 804 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 53,216 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 2,217 words/day
Unofficial: 16,486 words (14,155 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

50,000 WORD GOAL REACHED!

NaNo update

2009-11-24T04:28:15Z

Oh, so close - but my brain is flatlining, and tomorrow will be a long day anyway.

Why do I always get sick midway through NaNo? Well, "always" - two out of two at the moment.

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 6,583 words [Ramparts: Barbican] Including the Night of Writing Dangerously - although I deleted 1,400-odd of what I wrote there the next morning.
Unofficial: 3,248 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 49,807 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 2,165 words/day
Unofficial: 15,682 words (14,351 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])n

NaNo in SanFran!

2009-11-22T16:11:22Z

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 1,972 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 0 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 41,368 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,969 words/day
Unofficial: 12,434 words (11,103 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

...and about 13 miles and several hours of walking and talking over story ideas recent, new and old with pa_morningstar!

NaNo update

2009-11-21T05:54:12Z

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 4,463 words [Ramparts: Barbican] Plus some handwritten bits.
Unofficial: 2,306 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 39,396 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,969 words/day
Unofficial: 12,434 words (11,103 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications]) So I could claim 50,000 words now, if I had to!

Not bad at all, considering I only spent a few hours with my computer on. Sitting in a plane rather limits your power supply...

Dreams again!

2009-11-20T11:18:30Z

I don't remember the beginning - too bad. I do remember that it had a lot of running back and forth, and that - once again - I was a member of a small group that was trying to fix something dire. Only our numbers were dropping off rapidly - there was some kind of poison or wasting sickness going on. The part I really retained - I suspect because I was in the process of waking up by that point - was going down elevators into what seemed to be the basement of a school building. (Why you'd have the gym in the basement, though, I don't know. Somehow that doesn't strike me as very helpful for structural integrity...) We were down to just three people then - myself, one other, and a relatively new recruit. I think we'd all been bitten by the illness - there was something where we were slowly tearing our shirts off for bandages and things. The two senior ones were very hesitant to do that once they got to the final layer, but I, the new recruit, wasn't. Turns out that I wasn't nearly as wasted away as they were - and I remember making the comment that I'd actually come out of my bout with the illness healthier than when I'd started. (I think the implication was that I'd lost a lot of weight, but on me, that just brought me down to "slightly chubby.")

At some point, though, my point of view transferred to one of the older ones, the effective leader, as we made our way down the hall and went into the gymnasium. It wasn't a big one, but it was dark - the only light came from the exit signs. I don't remember seeing any bodies, but the dream was telling me they'd been there. There were, however, two girls there and lying on the floor, and acting...

*blinks* Sociopathic? Like their moral compasses had been completely turned off. One was insisting that we fight her to the death, or something, and laughing - completely unaware of the fact that she couldn't seem to get off the ground. I punched her in the stomach, which forced her to vomit out... something. A black-green long thing that might seemed to be a string of slime but felt like a malignant entity, somehow. I think this is what was the core of the illness/poison. I remember flash-freezing it the instant it came out (...not sure if dreaming-me even knew I could do that before then, although the dream-I wasn't at all surprised), so that we could seal it away. Only my young partner - the "I" from before - was still trying to figure out what made it - she actually broke off a piece and went to taste it, and I slapped it out of her hand just before she did and wanted to know what the hell she was doing.

Turns out that it had come about as a kind of party drink, packed in little hip-flask sized bottles, like the vitamin/energy drinks I saw in Japan. The people who'd been down in this basement had been drinking it as a... I'm not even sure. A power-me-up. I don't know what the effect was, but clearly at least part of it was a sense that you were on top of the world and didn't give a damn about anything.

We still wanted to find the one who'd designed the drink. There was one person left who didn't seem to have been effected; a girl (or woman... we were all probably in our late teens or early twenties) running a drinks bar. We thought she might have come up with it, as a vodka shot to put in the drinks. No, she said, when we found her - she had been mixing it into drinks, if people asked, but she hadn't sampled the stuff. (I'm not sure why they left her alone... maybe they didn't want to mess up their current source of the stuff.) We plunked a bottle of the stuff that hadn't been drained down in front of her and asked her if she could find out what was in it. I think I trusted her more than my younger partner, because I wasn't immediately alarmed when she took a small mouthful. After all, how else was she going to test it? But alarm bells went off when she didn't spit it out, and instead put it down and started adding other drinks to improve it - something I'd heard one of the girls lying on the floor rambling about. That was when I'd noticed that she'd somehow drunk much more than I'd realized. So, once again, step around and hit her so she vomited it back up, only it hadn't hit her system enough - she saw what came out of her mouth, and was horrified.
Apparently, the stuff worked so fast that just a taste addicted you. Nasty.

That's about the point that I woke up. I remember thinking "Wait... is this a continuation of Magical Apocalypse?" Because if you'll recall, that series of dreams decided to attach itself to a different dream I'd had much earlier, about two girls going to school in a 'recovering from apocalypse' world, and finding themselves coming up against evil cheerleaders. ^_~ Whatever this stuff was... it seems like the sort of thing "evil cheerleaders" would come up with, and matched the "suck the morality out of people" effect from that dream.

On the other hand, the dream wasn't quite done with me. I remember us sitting down - my two partners were going to dispose of our gathered flash-frozen ooze-worms, and I was calming the horrified bartender girl, who was now well and thoroughly on our side. And I distinctly remember telling her that I knew who had created and distributed the drink after all, and it was my own partner. And by "partner" in this case, I meant girlfriend - and yes, I was a girl, too. *blinks* Then again, that's consistent with Magical Apocalypse, too - just, it wouldn't work because the impression I got from that was that if any two girls were partners in the romantic sense, it would have been the good-guy team...

NaNo update - caught up at last!

2009-11-20T03:52:13Z

Oh, man. New ideas, plot twists, things that I've known about the world for years but are only now getting to come into play...

Today was a very, very good day.

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 5,271 words [Ramparts: Barbican] @_@
Unofficial: 873 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 34,933 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,838 words/day! I did it! \^o^/
Unofficial: 10,128 words (8,797 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

Which is a good thing, because I'm actually not anticipating accomplishing much during my trip to San Francisco - outside the Night of Writing Dangerously, of course!

NaNo update

2009-11-19T02:49:40Z

Not a huge writing day - but considering I spent most of it being in class (or sick), I think I did pretty well...

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 2,130 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 1,070 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 29,662 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,647 words/day
Unofficial: 9,255 words (7,924 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NaNo update

2009-11-18T03:17:39Z

Hear my keyboard smoking under the intensity of my typing. (What can I say? When I tell myself I'm going to do something, I prefer to do it!)

And to top it off, I managed a brainstorming flash or two that I think managed to put a few things into focus, and flesh out a number of how-things-happen areas. My goodness... I actually have a plot here!

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 4,324 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 1,785 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 27,532 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,619 words/day - oh, so close! Just about 1,500 short of catching up. If I can just pull off another day or two like this...
Unofficial: 8,185 words (6,854 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NaNo update

2009-11-17T02:24:06Z

...all right. Four thousand, one hundred twenty words. YARRR. I be badass writer!

*laughs* No, not really. Mostly I was throwing words at a few of my plot problems, waiting for someone to say the words that would break me through a few blocks, or at least give me material to work with. All things considered, though, I think it all turned out quite well.

I think my fifteen-minute timer really helps. First of all, it means that I have breaks for the story to percolate. But more importantly... I know I only have fifteen minutes to write, and I want to get as many words as possible. So I don't let myself get distracted - no telling myself, "Oh, I have half an hour..." and playing card games, for example. Just fifteen minutes of focus. And it really makes a difference...

WORD TALLY:
YESTERDAY
Official: 4,120 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 829 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 23,208 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,450 words/day
Unofficial: 6,400 words (5,069 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

PTD!

2009-11-16T23:27:48Z

ME: *playing World of Warcraft* *does a doubletake* Wha...? There's a level 27 character running around in Dalaran! For those who don't play: Dalaran is the hub zone for the level 80 crowd.

MOM: LOST!

ME: You don't get that lost by accident...

And my brain found this bit of dialogue utterly hilarious and wants to turn it into a potential scene:
PERSON-CAUGHT-SOMEWHERE-HE-REALLY-SHOULDN'T-HAVE-BEEN: Um. I got lost? ^^
GUARD-WHO-AIN'T-BUYIN'-IT: *raises eyebrow* You don't get that lost, not by accident...

NaNo update

2009-11-16T14:17:27Z

Well... I'm not quite to the halfway mark on the halfway day - a far, far cry from last year, where I was on the finishing stretch by this point! On the other hand, I am making progress. Considering all the other things I'm dealing with this year - coming back to the States, grad school applications, class reading assignments, papers - I think I'm doing pretty well!

WORD TALLY:
YESTERDAY
Official: 2,267 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 0 [Journal] Too busy filling out applications!

TOTAL
Official: 19,088 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,272 words/day
Unofficial: 5,571 words (4,240 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

NaNo update

2009-11-15T16:16:49Z

Progress for yesterday:

WORD TALLY:
TODAY
Official: 1,792 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 568 [Journal]

TOTAL
Official: 16,821 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,201 words/day
Unofficial: 5,571 words (4,240 words [Journal], 1,331 words [Grad school applications])

*makes a face* This story is significantly more bumpy than the first version - the overall plot feels a lot more attenuated. Mostly, it's a case of having multiple things that I know need to happen, and not really knowing how to get them all to work together.

Frankly, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have switched to a different story for a while - left Ramparts on simmer while I worked on, oh, Bartender or Fathoms or We All Fall Down...

NaNo - and a long, long week.

2009-11-14T12:21:55Z

Quick summary: Long week, several class assignments, and I got my application to Stanford finished and sent.

I'll do a proper update later - I've had several fun dreams this past week - but for now...

WORD TALLY:
THIS WEEK
Official: 9,218 words [Ramparts: Barbican]
Unofficial: 3,466 words [Journal], 110 words [Grad school applications]

TOTAL
Official: 14,809 words [Ramparts: Barbican] 1,139 words/day
Unofficial: 8,579 words (7,138 words [Journal], 1,441 words [Grad school applications])

Updates and NaNoWriMo

2009-11-02T02:23:21Z

My grandmother is the toughest eighty-eight year old I know.

Last Saturday, the doctors were giving her a life expectancy of twelve hours. Last Sunday, we thought she might last a few more days. Then they got her off the respirator and further testing showed that, far from cardiac failure, her heart was just fine, and the troubles had been caused by a buildup of toxins from failed kidneys.

The conclusion? Not only is she going to make it, but she's being discharged from the hospital tomorrow. She'll be on dialysis the rest of her life, but that 'rest of her life' could well stretch out for another year or two.

Assuming nothing else happens - knock on wood.

In other news...

Yep, it's November! Which means NaNoWriMo.

Mind you, I'm not really counting on completing it - not when I have a twenty-page paper to write this November, to say nothing of eight graduate school applications. But I'm going to try. The sequel to Ramparts has been waiting more than long enough - and better yet, I think I have a sense of where it's going, now...

RESULTS FOR TODAY: 2,231 words.

I don't think this has hit me yet.

2009-10-24T11:05:08Z

For those few people who keep track of me here:

My paternal grandmother's going to die. We guessed she had congestive heart failure when we visited last week; since then, she fell down, and we learned that her kidneys were also going. Then she was sedated and put on a respirator early Friday morning for what we thought was simply a reaction to insulin they gave her when she came in.

Turns out it was more serious than that, and my Dad is kicking himself for not letting her just go in her sleep; they'd discussed it and she'd specifically asked for no drastic measures. On the other hand, it might have bought enough time for the family to gather.

She might actually have died over the night; Dad thought she would, but he was too exhausted to stay any longer. Nevertheless, even in the most ideal world, she's not going to last long; her kidneys don't work any more, and she's too old and her heart is too weak for dialysis. The best we can hope for is that she lasts long enough to take her off the respirator and wake up from the sedative, so that we can actually talk to her. I hope she lives long enough for Charlie (a cousin) to come; the minute she heard she was absolutely desperate to get here, but there were logistical barriers.

...I'm still in "...huh" mode, even after going to see her last night. Although it wasn't really her; the one time she woke up, she clearly wasn't conscious, and she just... well, wasn't the person I know.

I think my brain may be bored.

2009-10-04T11:27:48Z

I will post something other than dreams, one of these days; I have several potential posts flitting around in my head. But I'm depressingly skilled at procrastination, and right now, job and university searches probably should take priority in the "when I get my tail moving" category...

With that said, I had a crazy dream this morning.

The really fun dream started with a sorceress. She was something of a loner, although she had a lot of would-be disciples, and sometimes she'd even take a student on. But that tended to go badly, because the students were careless and at the level of magic she worked with, precision meant life or death. I remember one part where she was setting up a magical circle of some sort, with the circle itself formed of smaller magical circles; she set it up by twirling around the edge of the larger circle, with each twirl creating one of the smaller ones. The fellow she was working with was impressed and wanted to show how quickly he could work... and so got sloppy; his circles looked more like scribbles, and one wasn't completely closed, but she didn't see that because then the marks in each circle were covered over. But when they tried to actually use the circle... boom. Boom on the sloppy fellow, to be exact, but suffice to say it was unpleasant all around.

I think, however, that she did eventually get a few students, because after a time she went to visit some sort or boarding school, and she took her students with her. And here's where the dream got particularly interesting; a strange mish-mash of Godmothers from Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms books, a magical whodunit mystery, and with my point-of-view character being something like Daine from Tamora Pierce's Wild Magic series. Yeah, at this point my point of view had switched to one of the sorceress's students, with the sorceress being the "Godmother" character.

We arrived at the school in time for we students to eat lunch with the other students, who were all very curious about us. It can't have been a very big school, the size of a large mansion maybe - perhaps it even was a former mansion, because the setting felt remarkably close and dark. As we ate, the sorceress's students, including me, were cautiously trying to fit into the usual joking and jockeying of the school's students - and then suddenly one of the students at the table who hadn't even been participating in the conversation went and complained about me to the people in charge. I'm not even entirely certain what the complaint was, save that A: it wasn't a rule that applied to me, as a guest, and B: it was something I hadn't done, anyway! Suffice to say that I was more than a little put out and bewildered - and the people in charge didn't even seem to realize the fact that I wasn't a student, and sent me to the kitchens "to learn better." I went, and I did not like the look of the fellow in charge of those kitchens. A distinctly cold, malicious feel to him all around. And when he flat-out ignored my calm explanation of the situation and just smirked and ordered me to start working, I lost my temper. Looked him right in the eye, said, "No," then turned on my heel and left.

Funny thing was, when I didn't hesitate just outside the kitchen door but kept going, and was out of sight when they recovered from their surprise and moved to come after me, I got the distinct and startling impression of, "That didn't go as planned" from them.

This is the point where the dream got extremely convoluted, and I'm afraid I've already lost track of the important twists and turns. But basically, people both within the school and in the local area were disappearing, and the major suspects were 'creatures of the night.' We'd come to the school because it had sent an SOS to the sorceress, and she'd known she'd need her students' help - particularly mine, since I could turn into just about any living thing (well, animal or sentient... I'm not sure I could do plants, although apparently in rare cases I could talk to them, because I remember wondering why the headmaster's garden was so very subdued, and helping out the sorceress as we tried to help nurse it to health because it was doing mysteriously poorly, although we weren't very successful). There were plenty of threats outside the school that would only attack humans, so I could go out relatively safely.

There was also a very strange area of forest that we'd passed on our way to the school, marked by a strawberry patch with strangely shaped, giant berries - they looked more like gummy strawberries than real berries. I'd spoken with it and realized that that particular section of the forest was a very, very old locus of power, 'personified' by the berry patch, and it took a liking to me and offered to help if I was ever in trouble in the vicinity.

To be honest, our starting assumption was that all this talk about creatures of the night was just the usual 'mysterious things are happening and we don't know what's going on!' panic... save that, once we started actually looking, it seemed like we were tripping over a new creature of the night every time we turned around. And none of them were doing anything wrong. The vampire had something of a shy romance (a kind of 'early dating' sort of thing; not even sure that it was something that could be qualified as romance, just those classic cute first steps of 'I like you, let's try holding hands and visiting each other') going with one of the older boarding students - it was kinda sweet, actually. The werewolf (although 'wolfman' might be more appropriate; I seem to recall that he was more like WoW's Wolvar)... I don't remember what was going on with him, he might have been assisting at the school, or maybe his mate worked there, or something. But all of them were just as scared as the local humans, because they were getting preyed upon, too. And every time we thought we had a new lead, that was how it would play out.

Eventually, I got disappeared as well - not intentionally, I think, so maybe I was picked up in disguise, although I'm not quite clear on how it happened. The wolfman was grabbed at the same time, and was already dead when I came around. We were in some kind of cellar, with lots of chains on the walls... and pumpkins everywhere, I might add.

And a whispering in the ceiling. Whispering that became vines, heavy with fruit (tomatoes?) coming down to talk to me. They wanted me to fix what was going on, and told me to look in the pumpkins. When I did... there were the skulls of the vanished people, only their eyes were still there. The backs of the skulls were missing, so you could put one on almost like a mask, and see through their eyes. I think what I saw was the last thing they had seen, although maybe it enabled me to see something else, as well. But that was how I finally discovered our culprit: the school headmaster, the one with the garden. Near as I can tell, these cellars/dungeons were right below the guarden, which he'd been using to power something or hide what he was doing - the plants hadn't been able to talk to me until I was inside, so it's almost like the garden itself had been turned upside down or inside out. (After all, the produce-bearing vines and such were all coming from the ceiling of the cellar - not roots.)

After that, things turned into something of a long, convoluted chase, where half the time I was the one chasing the headmaster and half the time he was chasing me. I had some help; the vampire's girlfriend had been killed at some point and he and I were working together, although he wasn't very powerful, so it became more of a game of teamwork and wits against the death-empowered headmaster. I think we were in something of a confined arena - on a ferry, perhaps, or a train, although that wouldn't quite fit the setting. (Then again... hm. I can actually see the dream as a kind of steam-age setting... that might work.) Up and down we'd go chasing him or dodging his pursuit, and he'd just about caught us when we arrived in the forest between the town and the sorceress's home.

Remember that weird strawberry patch? I called in that offer of help. I'm not sure what it did to the guy, but the problem was solved at that point.

After that, I'm fairly sure the sorceress took her students - and maybe some new ones - back to her own home, and that was the end of that adventure. It started into a new one - I think my I-identity shifted to another character (a somewhat more girly girl), who went out on her own (to visit the town/school again?) and met the vampire on the road, but I'm not entirely certain, because that's about the point where I really woke up.

Like I said. Long. Convoluted. Bizarre. But kinda cool!

More dreaming fun!

2009-09-26T11:11:29Z

I really should be going and pre-reading the Goshen articles I'll be recording this morning, but as it happens I had another crazy dream last night and I want to get it down before I start forgetting. And this one was crazy, because while the setting remained overall consistent, the stuff that was going on inside it...!

Overall, the dreams took place in a giant - and I do mean gigantic, here - cavern, filled with a pool of water. I don't think the water was that deep (given that the first part of it I remember was swimming around and periodically making dives in order to rescue people after an attack - and don't ask me why the people were all dressed like Santa impersonators!), at that point it can't have been too deep, because I remember thinking about the water pressure, and I was a bit concerned when I did the deeper dives but it wasn't that much of a problem.

Within this cavern, meanwhile, was... I'm not quite sure how to describe it. A floating city, perhaps, only it was all self-contained, so that you could only get in through a hatch in the top, and once inside it was a long series of corridors and chambers. High tech, clearly from a civilization or people not our own.

Although, I'm not sure the our applies here... I'm fairly certain an earlier dream featured how the group of people living there arrived, but the part that I remember featured me as a late-comer, albeit an anticipated one - perhaps part of a group of later refugees? Because we were definitely using that city to hide from something. After one battle, the city came back and pretty much crashed into one side of the cavern (because no one was quite clear how to steer it), and I and the others had to enter in a hurry. I - and this "I" was a girl - was the last one in, and... well, as I came through the hatch, the city did some sort of automated health scan and left two packets and some instructions in my hand. One of the packets I would swear was a sticker, and another was a gel capsule the size of an egg, and I was supposed to take the medicine capsule in order to reach what the city considered optimum health.

I didn't. I wasn't the sort to just pop unknown stuff in my mouth, and something about the city made me uneasy. Particularly when I looked around at some of the artworks lying about - and they were lying, most half-finished. It was all a kind of creepy take on Grecian art - three men holding up a face (and only a face, not a head) that was as tall as they were, half of it covered with blue paint simulating blood... actually, that "blue blood" theme turned up a lot, and it was seriously disturbing me.

Then there was the menagerie, which was peopled with odd animals that seemed to be sentient and animal-people who were tending them and would take us around like schoolchildren on a tour. There was something about how some past calamity had forced the original people of this city to hide, and many had turned themselves into these animals and stayed here all that time...

...I remember thinking about that gel capsule in my pocket very, very, very uneasily. Particularly when at some point I realized that what I'd taken for a sticker had actually been a second, much smaller capsule, and I'd unthinkingly popped it in my mouth when I was hungry.

Then one of the animals in the menagerie went mad and started attacking people, and I ended up being the one to lead the retreat. I also distinctly remember an odd moment where it was trying to get to the top of a portable staircase to drop down on someone and I got to the base of the stairs, found an odd hand-grip, grabbed it, and snapped, "Extend!" ...and the stairs did. Oddest thing was that it didn't occur to me how odd it was that I'd been able to do that, not until after the fact.

In the course of the escape from the menagerie, though, I and a few others got separated and into unfamiliar corridors... oh, forgot to mention. The corridors shifted - you really couldn't get lost in that city, because you just thought about where you wanted to be and walked down the nearest hall and hey-presto, there you were. Only, when I arrived? I kept getting lost, because the city kept shuffling me to odd places. Fortunately, never to an area where there weren't other humans around, but...

...anyway. We somehow ended up separated from the others, in unfamiliar corridors that we finally figured out led to the exit, or at least some sort of hangar bay. And it's a good thing that it was so big, because the minute I came in contact with the relatively open air of the cavern, I... changed.

The dream told me that the capsule I'd taken unthinkingly had unlocked something inside me, something that the bigger capsule was supposed to alter or suppress or reprogram. But since I'd taken only the one, that latent part kicked in. And what that meant was that I suddenly grew, until I stood about twenty feet tall or more. My clothing changed, too, to a sort of "Nordic warrior woman" appearance. And everything - my clothing, my skin, my hair - was a deep blue color. My eyes didn't have whites, irises or pupils, they just glowed a pale blue as well.

It would have been cool - if I hadn't been flipping out. And if the city hadn't flipped out in turn. Suddenly, guardians - guardian-statues? - were converging on me from all sides, with blood in their eyes. I get the impression that what I'd become was The Enemy, and that the City was bringing all defenses to bear to neutralize me.

And to make matters worse... remember when I said that we'd been fighting a battle, earlier? Well, those bad guys were back, and this time they knew what our city could do and were prepared.

In the chaos, one of the guardians who'd been attacking me nearly fell to her death from the hangar, and I managed to grab and save her - which is very odd, because they were titans even bigger than me. But I remember thinking, "That is enough" and focusing on the City itself, the way I had that extendable staircase... and the City responded to my mental request and picked itself up and flew. We couldn't get out of the cavern, but I pulled it back to the center of a broken walkway of ice - or stone? - that passed through the center of the lake.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what was on the other side of the lake, away from the entrance. The impression I got was of a giant gate, big enough for the whole city to go through - although I should point out that the size of the "city" seems to have been fairly negotiable - and the impression that beyond it was Something Very Bad That We Don't Want To Mess With.

Anyway. I pulled the city back and landed it in the center of the walkway. I remember the guardian I'd rescued - who was still dangling from my grip because I couldn't drop her until we'd landed - staring at me half in amazement, half in total affront. And it suddenly hit me... I was a descendent of the original builders of the city, whom the people we'd thought were the builders - the ones who'd made all that art, set up the manipulative "health scan," and moved into the menagerie - had usurped. So while all the defenses of the City were turned against me, because I had prior claim and the former inhabitants didn't like that, the City itself responded to me.

Once we landed, I dropped that guardian, then ran out from the city to investigate the walkway and see how much time I'd bought. That was when I discovered that the walkway was broken; it had looked solid as we flew over it, but only a few strides out I found a break in it that, even given my size, I couldn't jump. And it was slowly widening, as what I'd thought was stone turned out to be free-floating ice. In fact, all of the walkway was made of ice floes, and they were breaking apart and beginning to drift about.

Which wasn't good. Eventually, one of the floes that our enemies had gathered on was going to come at us.

I should mention that at this point, "I" changed over to a youth from the refugee group. Apparently he'd also been a bit suspicious of the City and its defenses, and while all the others had been patting themselves on the back for their ability to hide behind the City's defenses, he had gone into the deep, forgotten areas, found a weapon, and was training himself. Actually, that part is me retro-fitting the dream; what happened in the dream was that he was a character from some fanfiction I've read recently, an extrapolation of a character from a game, and thus he already had a magic weapon and knew how to use it. He spent a lot of time pulling people together from the drifting ice floes - don't ask me how they got outside the City when nearly everyone was supposedly cowering inside. Once everyone was gathered, he slipped down to the lake itself and swam out to take the fight, assassin/guerilla-style, to the bad guys.

Which is about the point where I woke up. My brain was still chewing on the dream, and it decided that the next step, once the youth had secured food supplies from the enemy, was that he was going out to find the previous I, the blue titan girl, and to convince her to come back and help - I get the impression that she'd kind of gotten overloaded by everything that was happening and had hidden.

Like I said. Crazy dream. Kinda cool, though. ...no pun intended, despite the ice.