Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Added to my DM resume: I problem-solved a story and wrote a published gaming author out of a corner last night. :)

What actually happened: triadruid and I met up with archway for pool and game-doctoring. I suck at pool. On the other hand, I rawk at game writing. We sorted out a huge part of the background story for archway's World of Darkness game, which I get huge minuses on because a) it's modern, and b) it's World of Darkness, and I don't play either. And yet, sewed up everything neatly and built in some plot hooks for later. And then got my ass handed to me at pool. Because I suck at pool. *grin*

Had some discussion with archway about the business of writing, as well. And I think it's just about time for me to figure out how to get paid for writing. I think I'm probably good enough at it now. Doesn't have to be gaming writing. It's just that, you know, I'm going to write *anyway*, I might as well get something out of it other than less words in my head.

My green hair is gone, alas. This was accomplished through no fault of my hair stylist's. Big drama at the hair salon about multi-stage processing and hours of work and how dare I put temporary color on and whether they would take liability for the condition of my hair and so on. Feh. I can do color at home in half the time and for 1/20th of the cost, and I already have liability for my hair. So I did. I'm back to something approximating my usual red now. I did manage to actually have my hair cut at the salon, which was nice. Apparently, I simply do not get along well with long hair.

Last night, we went to the movies and saw American Gangster. I wish more mob films were multi-cultural. It's way easier to tell the characters apart that way.

I'm 700-some words into the NaNoWriMo story. At this rate, I am informed that I will reach my 50000 word goal by the end of next November. I'll try to hack some more on it later (and hack is the word for it, oh yes).

LJ-Balderdash will get posted some time later today. Iffn ya wanna enter, you still have time.

EDIT: In other news, lolhistory is really, really funny today.

kittenpants was away at dance camp (this one time, at dance camp??) for the weekend, so triadruid and I consoled ourselves by playing D&D, going to the movies, eating stuff she doesn't like, shopping, and generally fucking around. And it was good!

The D&D group met on Friday, and finished Chapter 1 of their great adventure. Next time, they'll meet their new traveling companions (mwa ha ha) and head outside the boundaries of the Vitraen Empire to aid some of the Empire's allies. That means triadruid and I get to build a bunch of encounters that are much weirder than anything we've done so far, and we'll also be building the town of Freeport, which is controlled by a coalition that includes (among other interests) religious leaders, the military, and the mafia. Good times. I'm thinking that I'd like to build an LJ-filter for the campaign that will not include any of the players, and post some of the world-building and character-building stuff on it. For one thing, we've been writing little micro-fics about the PC's lives before the game, and handing them out to the players, and I'm pretty proud of some of the writing. I want people to appreciate our twisted genius, you know?

Saturday, we went shopping with the goal of buying triadruid some pants. This failed, but he did find a nice belt, and I picked up some pirate pajamas (size medium -- who knew?) and a nice red and grey wrap (I'm officially an old woman now, I've bought my first shawl). We also saw Shoot 'Em Up, which was simultaneously hilariously funny, wildly stupid, and amazingly well-choreographed. It also somehow managed to have a gun-control message mixed up in its hash of plot, which was like an extra layer of funny. Clive Owen was deadpan and bad ass, Paul Giamatti was creepy and pussy-whipped, and Monica Belluci was somehow creepy and warm-fuzzy at the same time, so that was all good.

Somewhere during the course of the weekend, I remembered that I can cook if I have to. I made fried catfish on Saturday, with these wildly interesting zucchini 'fries', and then on Sunday made chicken in a vinegar and herb pan sauce with crimini mushrooms, and served the rest of the zucchini (I always overbuy zucchini, for no good reason) in an Alfredo sauce. All of it was surprisingly tasty.

The rest of the weekend would more or less have to go on my TMI filter, if I had one. But I don't. :) Let's just say I'm extremely tired this morning.

Unfortunately, all the weekend goodness was marred by logging on to LJ last night and discovering that Robert Jordan had died, and that some folks that I thought were doing really quite well were actually not doing so well. Ah, life. But the story goes on, in both cases. Mr. Jordan allegedly had told the end of the Wheel of Time series to his wife and other family members, who were sworn to finish the project should he be unable to do so. So that continues (thank the gods - I've only been reading those things for ten years now, and the end is so, so close!). And for the rest of us, as long as we live the story's not over either. Somebody quoted something at me the other week which I find terribly appropriate, even though I can't remember who originally said it now (and I'm paraphrasing anyway) -- "Everything always turns out all right in the end, and if it's not all right, it's not the end." So I'm sending that kind of energy out to everybody today. If it's not all right, it's not the end.

Have a fine sort of Monday, everybody. :)

I dreamed last night that we went down to the shore, and met a sect of monks who were making ozone incense for their prayers. Somewhere between sleep and being really and truly awake, I decided that they were a small sect of monks who had dedicated their lives to the contemplation of the mysteries of electricity and its advancement. They recognize electricity as god, and Nikola Tesla as its chosen prophet. And, of course, they are mostly engineers and inventors in addition to their spiritual responsibilities.

Suddenly, I don't know if I want to write a novel, or run a d20 modern campaign. No time for either at the moment, though.

Here's a challenge to sharpen your brain on dull, grey Friday: Take a piece of literature, poetry, play, or other type, your choice, and re-write it (or a chunk of it), using only words of four letters or less.

This is not as easy as it sounds. If you are re-writing poetry, can you keep the sense of the thing and still keep the rhyme scheme and scansion (if any)? (Bonus game: once these get posted, can you tell what they are? Mine's pretty easy.)

( Here's mine )

The whole thing seemed pretty innocent at the time. I was just going to go over to Meetup.com, and put Gaia's Games Night on the list as a Board/Card Game Meetup. That was it. Of course, to do that, I had to get an account. And then, I thought, while I'm here, I'll just poke about and see if there's anything interesting going on in Kansas City...

Suddenly, without stopping to consider, I was signing up for all kinds of things. Pagan meetup, environmentalist meetup, neurolinguistic programming meetup (what does that even mean?). And then, in the next breath, Kansas City Speculative Fiction Writers' meetup. They meet regularly. They critique each others' work. They have a meeting this Thursday. One of them sent me a personal note explaining the process and asking me to come.

So I say to myself, "What the hell am I thinking? I do not need another regularly scheduled meeting, even if it would be fun and might help! I am on The Crack!". But I'm thinking of going anyway. I have this problem. I see things, I think "Oh, yes, that sounds like fun, I will do that!", and then, here I am, with no free time and seventy-twelve commitments still to fulfill. I have Helium Hand.

And then, last night, triadruid says to me, "We want you to serve on the Nominating Committee for Gaia next year." And I say, "Why? I don't want to be on the Nominating Committee, and besides, I suck at it." He says, "Because you've been around forever, you know everybody, and you've been on every committee we have, so you know what they need." I protest. "I have not been on every committee!" He says,"Name one that you haven't served on." I say, "Caring." For some reason, everybody laughs.

So that's my sad story. Also, while I was on the Meetup.com website, I noticed that Kansas City has a large number of people who say they are interested in a group about shyness and social anxiety. But nobody's called a meeting about it yet. Ha. I think if they did, I might go. Except, you know, I'm shy. :/

They say joy shared is joy doubled, and pain shared is pain halved. I'm going to share this with you, and you can decide which of the two categories it belongs in.

Worst conversation of the day, from the journal of ursulav. The original post is about how she's been reading a lot of fanfiction, and now has the urge to write some. The post details reasons why she thinks this is a Bad Idea. The comments thread is generally full of encouragement to write the fanfic, and includes this little gem (I'm paraphrasing, because I can't be arsed to look it up again to link):

First Commenter: If you're going to write fanfiction, write it for classic stories. That way it's almost respectable.
Second Commenter: Yeah, when you write a Sherlock Holmes story these days, they don't call it fanfiction, they call it a pastiche.
Third Commenter: Uh, not if Holmes and Watson end up doin' it. I'm just saying.

You know, I don't usually have a terribly visual imagination, and I'm utter shite with faces as a rule, but for some reason, I can now clearly see Basil Rathbone in a series of complicated positions... It's no good, I tell you. No good at all.

I dedicate this entry to labstar, who wanted more sex and less politics on LJ today.

niveus_tigris and I are going to write a romance novel about demonic possession. It's a story that pretty much writes itself, but in order to do this thing the right way, I think we're going to need some input from the VURD. Here's how you can help:

Please comment with a euphemism for genitalia of any flavor.

Archaeologists ten centuries from now will determine that this was a bad idea.

From the last post and other sources, a to-write list.

Non-fiction
- An article on Robert Anton Wilson pitched to the teeming masses.
- An essay/book chapter on personalizing myth.
- An essay/chapter on creating a policy on public ritual for pagan groups.
- Descriptions for kittenpants' pictures.

Fiction
- Tolkien noir.
- Gunslinger/Priscilla, Queen of the Desert fanfic.
- A letter to my daughter, who has recently converted to Christianity and stopped speaking to me.
- The pie-throwing incident of Macon County, 1918.
- A news story about an outbreak in the metro.
- Something about a quantum dandelion.
- A new take on faeries/Faerie.

Editing
- The Were-Children.

Fun times! Thanks everybody.

Jesus may have walked on ice, or: how we have no effing public dialogue at all about the you know, vague possibility that religion is, you know, myth rather than historical fact. The weather part of this is actually sort of nifty, but the reporting on it is rather crap.

Also, special bonus funtime poll: At the moment I happened to click on it, the poll attached to this story indicated that 35% of its respondents believed that every word of the Bible was literally true. Now, I understand that this sort of poll is much like a livejournal poll, which is to say, designed for the amusement of some of its readers rather than with the intention of producing any useful information, but still. That tells me that 35% of the people who bothered to click in either a)haven't read the Bible and are just bullshitting, or b)are simultaneously not very good at maths and also crap at critical reading.

Favorite line in the article: "Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found." Why, oh why, am I not in the journalism business? Even setting aside the fact that well, as far as I know anyway, there aren't any archeological findings related to Jesus that haven't been later determined to be frauds, um, well, it's thing with the findings being found.

The foundation of my personal irrational faith is that once upon a time, in a time now lost to history, there were copyeditors. I can't prove this, but hey. As the curator of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Archaeology, Israel Museum says in another story in the news today (which gives the implication that authentic finds from Jesus' life are being shown in museums while burying the little note that none of the items shown have any relation to Jesus way down in the last paragraph of the story), "But there is still a lot of archaeology going on, and new discoveries are being made all the time".