Nethermore

Just returned from some of the greatest trips I’ve ever been on. For anybody thinking about going to Scotland, I can’t recommend it enough. Sell everything you own, if you have to, and go!

New Picture Links Below

Paris
Scotland

For those who are interested in knowing, I’ll be returning home Wednesday and will move into my apartment in Utah on the 22nd. I can’t wait to be back!

It’s been awhile since I’ve given any updates. Life has been pretty exciting. We just got back from a trip to Munich a few weeks ago, during which we traveled to a bazillion different towns, saw a thousand really cool cathedrals, hiked in the Alps, and ate a lot of sausage.

Now, back at the apartment, I realize again that I’m tied to the bus schedule and feel a little secluded. Regardless of the isolation–if I was really outgoing I could go to discoteks or just go downtown and make friends–I’m going to miss Germany when I get home. The cheese, the yogurt, the bread, the gummy bears–all these things are really great. Not to mention the castles, the Roman battlefields, and deep history that this place has going on.

In the end, though, I’m an American and love my country. I can’t imagine living anywhere else permanently. I mean, true, Germany has castles. But we have the 4th of July.

The 4th
Speaking of the 4th, let me tell you what I did for that day. I watched Bruce Willis take out domestic terrorists in Stirb Langsam (Die Slowly) 4.0. Afterward, Matthias and I went to an ice cream parlor where I ordered a scoop each of red, white, and blue ice cream. We asked a Russian guy to take our picture, and he declined as he raced into the parlor as if getting his fix of ice cream RIGHT NOW was a matter of life and death. Man, he thinks he has it bad; the only blue ice cream they had was bubblegum flavor. Everything else was on the purple side.

I had to have red, white, and blue . . . so I took one for patriotism and ordered bubblegum. Afterward I ate a burger and fries at McDonalds and then wondered why I didn’t just settle for Pizza Hut.

Snow White
A few weeks ago I was in Hanover at a local Doner place. (Doners are a Middle-Eastern lamb-filled pita that Germany has adopted as their own.) I looked down from the second floor at the dinner guests eating at tables in the open. A woman dressed as Snow White caught my eye. She was placing dinners in front of seven of her friends, each wearing dwarf hats and t-shirts proclaiming which dwarf each was supposed to be. Something made Snow White very mad, and as she refused dinner to one of her dwarf pals, she let out a string of German expletives. Tally this one up there with Mickey Mouse beating up rowdy kids at Disneyland.

Grunt French
On the subway in Munich, I heard a girl speaking with a family a few seats in front of us. She wasn’t speaking German. Over the sound of the moving subway, all I could tell is that it sounded like French to me, except it wasn’t French. It was like, Grunt French, as if someone had taught a monkey to speak French and he couldn’t smoothly articulate all the syllables and can’t pronounce anything right.

When the subway stopped, the girl’s talking became clear. She was speaking English and was an American.

Skater Boi
A few days ago on my way to a young men’s activity, I was sitting on the bus reading China Mieville’s brilliant Perdido Street Station, when the bus stopped and let on a new passenger. A kid no older than twelve sat down in front of me and set two broken halves of a skateboard in his lap. He looked on the verge of tears, and I caught his eye and nodded a manly hello. He nodded back, looked out the window, determined not to let his emotions show. He couldn’t have looked more discouraged if the skateboard in his lap had been a dead puppy. This scene is one of the most heart-breaking ever.

Gummy Bears
I figured I’m going to run out of memory for my camera on my France and Scotland trips, so I ordered two 2gig SD cards from Amazon. They came in the mail yesterday from their affiliate partner. Included with the memory?: a mini bag of gummy bears. I’m going to order more stuff. I hope my Harry Potter book comes with Bertie Botts beans. So long as they’re not the rotten-fish flavor.

Cola Tigers
My coolest purchase lately has been a bag of Trolli gummy tigers called “Cola Tigers.” There are all sorts of cola candy here in Germany (no caffeine! so they don’t keep me up at night), and these little tigers are just another attempt to candyfy another German drink: the Spezi. Spezi is a mix of cola and orange juice. Cola tigers are a mix of gummy cola and gummy orange, which may or may not taste like their fruit counterparts. They taste good, and not at all like what tigers in the wild taste like. I don’t think.

Pizza Hut
Less greasy than the American counterpart. I ate myself silly last night and still had leftovers. Including cheezy crust!

Many of you know that I’ve moved to Germany for the summer and am utterly swamped with the animation I’m doing for a game coming up for the Nintendo Wii–Space Station Tycoon. Sorry for the inactivity of the blog, but I do need time to sleep and eat . . . and explore places like Hamburg and Frankfurt and the Netherlands on the weekends.

In Hamburg last weekend I developed a cough that has superpowers. I’ve successfully called three whooping cranes and one barking seal to our apartment. The former came to the balcony and beat against the glass doors. The latter climbed up three flights of stairs and slapped its fins together in the hall for a half hour, much to the annoyance of our Turkish neighbors. After that, the seal disappeared. But the cranes are still there, and they’re larger than pigeons, so needless to say, the mess I’ll have to clean up later is a fairly large one. Curse this stupid cough!

I checked online, and out of a list of 20 things, I think I narrowed it down to these three: 1) bronchitis, 2) exercise-induced asthma, or 3) Tuberculosis. I’m ruling out #3, and think I have a combo of 1 and 2, which means I’ll be better in 2-3 weeks. I don’t know if I can handle the cranes on the balcony for that long. I’ve already run out of fish.

This weekend we’re going to the Frankfurt Temple to do a few sessions. It’ll be nice to get out of the house. I literally sit in the apartment, staring out a window to the world that is Germany, and I animate monkeys and barfing whales. I could be animating how to count to 31, like I did at my last job. I’ll take the barfing whale, thank you very much.

Here’s today’s stupid happening. I’m doing animation stuff when I hear someone beating on the apartment wall next door. It continues and pretty soon somebody rings my door bell. There’s a 6 foot 5 German guy spouting German at me and looking at me like I must be the dumbest person alive. So I tell him I don’t speak German. By the look in his eyes, my response seals the deal. I AM the dumbest person on the planet. So he asks me this question, in English. “You, a hammer?” I’m not that dumb. Of course I’m not a hammer. But the neighbors might be. They’re the ones pounding on the wall. So I pointed to the neighbors and told him to try there.

In other news, I tried to give a lesson (in German!) to a group of youth about gratitude today. I was very grateful that they corrected all my grammar and vocabulary mistakes. Maybe next time they’ll actually understand what I was talking about.

You may have noticed fewer and fewer posts here in the past few weeks. I’m in the process of revamping the blog. It’s been going now for about nin months, and I’m beginning to realize which posts work and which posts don’t.

So expect something more substantive here soon, with a focus on how to write novels and stories. That’s what interests me most, and that’s what will show up here.

The occasional random post will crop up now and then, as well as news and updates. There will, however, be more focus.

For those of you who have come to love the Stinky Hobo, check out his new home on Phil Stewart’s Crazy Ramblings. This is an entertaining and humorous blog. I imagine there will be a sequal Hobo book in the future, for those of you who picked up the first one.

For those of you who didn’t, be sure to check it out at lulu.com.

Back in May I posted about how it was interesting how the novel was shaping up. The first scene of each viewpoint established the character in his society. The second scene of each viewpoint established how the character’s personal conflict related to the main conflict. I wasn’t sure how this was working at the time, but now I can report on it.

It wasn’t working. As I’ve been trying to get back into the novel, I’ve been reading what I wrote back in May and the first part of June (can you believe that I wrote 80k words in about a month?) In each case, each character’s first scene is expendable because I infodumped for however-many-thousand words. The second scene was almost always a better introduction–and more exciting too.

What’s more frustrating with the book is realizing how much I’m going to have to rewrite because I kept losing focus of the characters’ goals. The plotlines for some of the characters began to get uninteresting as I accidentally meandered in some of the chapters, seeking for the character’s purpose in the story.

All in all, the book is a trainwreck right now. I went home last night with a headache and a determination. Even though I’m going to have to cut at least half of what I wrote in May, I’m still trucking ahead. There’s still a lot in this book that I like and is spurring me on to finish it.

Associated Press, 23 minutes ago

It’s a strange world out there, and it’s about to get stranger as the Google pac-man has announced its intention to eat up multi-billion dollar corporation Wal-Mart, as if it were a magic cherry.

“I’m sure this will make us invulnerable to ghosts,” said co-founder Sergey Brin of California-based Google Inc. “I get more worried about them every year. Creeping around my house and stuff. Dead stuff seriously gets to me.”

The first change that will be implemented involves new ways to search and buy groceries and household items.

“It’s all going to be manual at first,” said Nicholas St.Ratnick, head liaison between Google and Wal-Mart. “You’ll walk up to a desk in Wal-Mart and ‘search’ for an item you’re looking for, say mayonnaise. An employee—most-likely underpaid and a bit disgruntled—will go to the shelf for you, bring back all the jars of mayo plus other things that we’ve found mayo-consumers are also likely to buy. We hope this will all be automated in the future. You know, like technofied and futuristic.”

When asked if the Wal-Mart name will be kept, Brin said, “We’re dropping both names in favor of a more resonant trademark. After several board meetings, we’ve settled on the name Goomart—I like the way it rolls off my tongue.”

Both Google and Wal-Mart stocks dropped after the announcement.

Been a few days since I’ve posted anything. Probably time to give some updates. I’ve been bogged down in a few art projects that I promised to do a few years ago, and they’ve been consuming my life. Add the current stress level of my job, and it’s a recipe to slide writing completely out of my life right now.

I’m sounding like a poster child for my own rants earlier this year. However, I honestly have to finish the art projects before I move back onto the book. The currently deadline/timeline has me being done with all the art stuff within the next two weeks.

So I’m crossing my fingers and dropping off the face of the planet for a while so I can get everything in order. This isn’t a good bye or anything like that. Nethermore.com will continue onward, but probably won’t have daily content for the next two weeks.

Look forward to Stinky Hobo tomorrow and a movie review of Open Season on Friday. I’ll get back on track with writing and writing posts here soon.

I was going to blog about how cool Evanescence’s new album is (I managed to find a few songs in advance of the release date; I pre-ordered the full album yesterday!)–however, I just received an email that I won a free copy of Infoquake by David Louis Edelman.

Now, here’s the cool thing about winning a signed copy of Infoquake. I heard a lot about this book at WorldCon this year–Lou Anders really talked it up too–and I promised myself I’d get myself a copy. I just didn’t have the room to buy all the books I wanted to buy at the Con.

Later, Spike the Surfdog comes over at work and says, “David Edelman’s got a contest going on over at his blog for copies of his book. We’ve got to enter it!” So I sat down, wrote a few things (Hugh Jackman was Spike’s idea) and sent it off.

Spike gets to read the book first since he showed me the contest. Anyway, as the Stinky Hobo would say, “What a good day!”

I placed honorable mention in the limerick contest–so I’m mentioned twice on the page there. Take a look at the limerick AND the letter I wrote to win a copy.

I wonder if my luck will carry over to the Writers of the Future contest, whose results are starting to trickle in. I’ve given up hope on being a finalist (word is that they’ve called them all)–but I’m still crossing my fingers for a quarterfinalist or maybe even a semifinalist. Unfortunately my story “Robes of the Gods” isn’t ready yet to send into Q4 of the contest.

Yesterday, I received this letter via snail mail:

Dear Isaac . . .

[Bank name] takes very seriously its responsibility to handle consumer information with confidentiality and discretion at all times. Unfortunately, we recently discovered that computer tapes that contained your name, address and . . . credit card account number were mistakenly identified as trash and thrown out. . . .

With the assistance of federal law enforcement authorities, we have conducted a thorough and extensive investigation of this incident and a search for the tapes. Although we have been unable to locate the tapes, we believe they were compacted, destroyed and taken to a landfill where they were buried. We have no reason to believe that anyone accessed or used your personal information as a result of this issue. Our continuing review of your account has not revealed any suspicious activity connected to this incident. You can continue to use your account as you normally would.

So I’m going to cancel the card. I appreciate them informing me of this strange incident. However, their only reimbursement for throwing out computer tapes deemed “trash” is to give me access to one free comprehensive disclosure of all information in my credit file.

I can get this for free once a year anyway.

They also said that I can have an initial free 90-day fraud alert added to my personal file.

Most credit card companies offer this service and you can continue paying after the 90-day trial period is up.

Then the letter states that I should monitor my account statements carefully over the next 12-24 months as a result of their fouling up and tossing out important computer records.

At least they apologize for the inconvenience.

And I will apologize for cancelling their service. As soon as I find out where I put that card.

Man, when Burger King messes up my order, at least I get free french fries.

My Nethermore progress bar has been stuck for a while now at around 40% done on the first draft of the novel. I’ve spent many a night staring at the ceiling while I tried to figure out what exactly has stopped me in my tracks.

Several ideas have come to mind, and I’m not sure if I’m addressing the real issues or am only seeing symptoms of a bigger problem. I think I’ve started the story incorrectly, or at least started some of the viewpoints in the wrong way. The book has been largely unfocused as far as what the characters are doing and what they want. This makes for bad fiction. Who wants to read about someone with no drive, or no discernable goals, or so many goals that the character can’t decide what to do? That’s way too much like real life.

I spent all my writing time this weekend–yes, I did find some!–reworking some plot points and the beginnings for two of the three main viewpoint characters. The outline that I’ve come up with will hopefully cure some of the problems that were holding me back. The beginnings are snappier now, and get into the meat of the conflicts that the characters are dealing with. One of the biggest changes I’m making is combining two major characters and one minor character into just one character. That’s change the plot considerably, but it’s trimmed it down and made the remaining character more interesting to me. This change will also make for a shorter book (meaning, I’ll probably hit the 200k mark instead of going considerably over that).

Man, this novel business is hard work.

In other news, take a look at our Ninja pictures from World Con. I’m on the far left, followed by Bryce, Dan, and Kimball. We had just arrived back from the Nippon 2007 party and were probably suffering from the effects of having eaten squid-sicles.