Standing On Boxes

Someone seems to have found color movies from World War I (I didn’t know color was available that early). The History Channel seems to have enough of it to make a few shows.

They are showing us what these color cameras looked like. They must have been small enough to drag to a battle field.

A group of Tomb Raider fan sites and a fanzine are holding a fanfic contest. Not sure if I’ll write anything to enter in it…

It can’t be something that was posted/published anywhere previously. Not sure if the rules allow it to be posted elsewhere after it is entered into the contest…

We’ll see…

An old Kung-Fu movie on Showtime.

Master of Flying Guillotine from 1975. Lots of violence considering how long ago it was made. One of those ‘competition’ style movies, where everyone who loses dies in a gruesome way & even some of the ones who win are badly injured.

Seriously demented… the title comes from someone who has a hat that he throws like a frisbee/yo-yo and chops people’s heads off with it.

It apparently is a sequel of sorts to a series of movies about a one-armed hero (of the 60/70′s anti-establishment sort)

They run The Avengers on Friday evenings. There is something different about this show. I don’t think any modern show even comes close in tone.

And, of course, none of them have Emma Peel ( a young Diana Rigg who gives off a completely different ‘sexy’ ‘vibe’ than Uma Therman did in the Avengers movie.)

Just reread the Red Raider Prologue. While it isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever written, if you compared to later fics it is definitely very rough. It needs to be revised. Someday…

I’ve started putting together a character list for the stories in my “Red Raider” series. It’s going to take a while. All I have done so far is the Faith Cycle.

I’m fixing any errors and etc. as I do it… which adds to the time.

I seem to have 4 different types of characters:

• Regular characters – characters from canon (Buffy, Willow, Faith, etc)
• OC’s (Original Characters) – characters I’ve invented who exist for more than a sentence in a story.
• Extras – background characters – drivers, waiters, etc
• Mentioned – Characters who are mentioned by the active characters in the story, either to themselves or out loud.

I think I’ve figured out why I’m having a hard time with Tonks, Just Tonks. I’ve started rereading the earlier stories in the series… and Part II of TjT doesn’t feel like it’s part of the series. Not enough of the right sort of humour and it doesn’t feel like it belongs. Needs a lot of work… as soon as I finish reading the older stories.

I use a number of OC’s (Original characters) in the “Red Raider” series. Let’s see if I can name them all (where they first appear in the series):

In Girl in a Bar we have:

• Randall – Giles’ office assistant
• Izzy – a tall, shy, raven haired slayer in London
• Fred – a blonde slayer in London – the opposite of Izzy – ( a butch version of Buffy or a Faith-like version of Buffy)
• Jayne – Fred & Izzy’s Watcher (Official title: Field Watcher)
• Assistant Minister Dent – Hermione works for him in the (completely fictitious ) Committee of Muggle Magic Usage, in the Ministry’s Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures (Asst. Minister Dent is not really Arthur Dent – sorry. Even if it appears like he is. Think of it as a tribute to Douglas Adams)

There are other characters in the story (A driver, a chef, etc) that don’t rise to the level of OC.

In Rock-n-Roll Girl we have:

• Miss Greenwoode – a Wiccan with Willow’s coven (A tall gangly woman)
• Jenny and Bridgitte – two Wiccans who do newbie testing (very brief appearance – no last names)
• Percy’s unnamed rock-climbing buddy is mentioned
• An unnamed Pentagon bureaucrat who questions Riley Finn about the Council because of Ginny

Except for Miss Greenwoode they are mostly minor characters. Not fleshed out enough (yet) to be OC’s

In A Girl and Her Toys we have the following – none of which rise to OC levels:

• A young girl (unnamed slayer?) who shows Ginny to her room in Cleveland
• Unnamed slayer on door duty
• A mention of an unknown number of “geeky” slayers watching movies with Xander and Andrew
• Mention of a coven seer

In China Blonde we have the following:

• A Chinese slayer – Xia
• A Japanese slayer – Yumiko
• An Imperial Chinese dragon – Gong Fu (A water dragon)
• Monks who appear off-screen

In The Other Girl we have:

• An unnamed slayer on door duty in Part I
• Aimee – a slayer in the Cleveland office on door duty in Part II when Ginny was doing magic

In Tonks, Just Tonks we have (so far):

• A crowd of unnamed slayers when Tonks shows up in the lobby
• Two unnamed slayers on door duty – one takes Tonk’s wand, the other gives her a guest badge

In the Faith Cycle we don’t really have any OC’s:

• In The Envelope – a friend of Giles’ is mentioned – he explores the Paris catacombs

In the Red Raider Prologue there are no OC’s or even minor extras.

In Red Raider – Pilgrimage we have:

• The unnamed wiccan elders including the “Eldest” in Part I
• Agatha (no lastname given) – Willow’s Wiccan Guide (mentor)
• The young wiccan who meets Willow at the train station (unnamed)
• The two Wiccans who meet with Lara Croft in Part II – Wildewood (the elder) and Horne (shorter/younger) – no first names given
• A mention of unnamed coven seers in Part II

• Madeline – she owns the bookshop
• Tony – he owns the bar

Next time – let’s do a character chart for all of the characters – when and where they all show up in the stories they are in.

Take a chilled, ripe grapefruit (tart, not overly sweet). Cut it in half. Drizzle a small amount of cinnamon schnapps (the real stuff, imported even) on top. Enjoy.

I think I’ll have another…

I’m on the third version of the ending of the 2nd part of “Tonks, Just Tonks” (the part here is still the first part. The second part… didn’t quite make it online…). Haven’t quite decided what to do about this. It just doesn’t work the way I want it to…

I’ll probably have to discard the whole thing…

I need to finish off my Tonks, Just Tonks fic but it isn’t going anywhere. Argh! It just lies there making faces at me.

I’ve rewritten the Ginny/Buffy/Dawn exposition fest but it still just lies there. Needs more salt.

Gone was only a work in progress for a day. It can now be found on TtH and here in my list of completed fics. (The summary has a word with several letters transposed. Can’t believe I didn’t notice that. Eventually it’ll be correct. I’ve fixed it but that kind of thing seems to take a few hours to show up on TtH (Must have to do with how often the site renders its latest list).

I don’t read as much science fiction as I used to. There just isn’t much of the kind of fiction I like available anymore. I’m sure it is still being written but you won’t find it in the chain bookstores. If an author doesn’t have a 10 part series they don’t get much shelf space. There must be 20 authors who take up all of the meager space at the Knoxville Borders and Barns and Noble leaving little room for anyone else. At least that is how it feels.

One of my favorite authors is Charles de Lint. I haven’t read everything he’s written but I’m getting close enough that I check for a new book from him every time I visit a bookstore. There is something about his writing that I can connect with that I can’t find anywhere else. The first book of his that I read was “Moonheart”.

Right now I’m reading/savoring “The Wild Wood”. I try to stick to trade or regular paperbacks (much cheaper than hardcover) and this is out in trade paperback for the first time in over 10 years. “The Onion Girl” and “Waifs and Strays” are the only books written by him that I have in hardcover. There’s another of his books out in hardcover. Cheaper than some of his limited edition, illustrated reprints but still a lot. Haven’t decided if I’ll break down and get it before it is out in trade paperback at half the price.

• Posted the second part of my fic The Other Girl to TtH
• Posted the first part of a new 2 part fic Tonks, Just Tonks to TtH

Okay, I now have three of note for fanfic.

• My weblog fanfic category
• All of the fics I’ve posted to TtH
• All fics I’ve posted anywhere (To TtH, Ikoly, atbvs.creative, and here.

If you look at this with an RSS newsfeed-aggregator that doesn’t support html tags in some fashion in a description these might look odd because some text might appear to be missing.

Sage (An extension to Mozilla/Firefox) discards the tags but keeps the rest of it. At least one Mac program (Shrook) discards whatever is between the tags. Ouch. Firefox is much too slow on my iBook so Sage isn’t an option there though it is speedy enough on my ThinkPad. So the hunt begins for a Mac OS X aggregator (Other than Radio’s aggregator which I don’t like)

Fixed Figured it out – at least for Sage – don’t use actual html tags in the description, use literals to build the tags. Or stop doing the xml by hand.

[Dead Links - jacs/10/7/2009]