TheZot

It was the Monday before vacation, and I'd decided to skip out on lunch and hit the weight room instead. With play practice starting up, even informally, Rick and I hadn't been spending all that much time together and I was kind of missing him. Yeah, we were still studying together, but Melanie was always with us when we did that, and it just wasn't the same. I kinda wanted to spend some time with him while I had the chance. My parents and I were going home for Christmas, and then right

Lunch had gotten to be a pleasant habit. Trevor, Paul and I would eat together, and so would Rick on the days he wasn't working out. Melanie would join us if Rick did, otherwise she ate with Rob and the jock crowd. It was kind of strange to watch, knowing what was going on with Rob, and between Melanie and Rick. Today it was just Trevor and I, since Paul was doing something with the school electrician and stage lights. The cafeteria was as busy and unappealing as ever, bright lights boun

I spent most of Sunday working out and thinking about what had gone on at the art show. Melanie had dropped me off at my house after the show with an apology, but that was it -- we hadn't actually spoken the whole drive home. I was mostly trying to figure out what was going on. I wasn't sure what Melanie was thinking. The one thing I did figure out was that Melanie did know Bobby was gay, and had tried to set us up. I think she was thinking I'd be flattered at Bobby's artwork and maybe m

It was Saturday, and I'd cut my normal morning run short because Melanie had told me she had an outing in mind for us. It was about nine thirty when she rolled in, and I was still a little wet from the shower. "C'mon," she said, dragging me out to her car, "time for our field trip." Melanie was nothing if not persistent. "What, won't Rick be jealous?" I teased as I grabbed a jacket from the pegs in the front hallway. "I mean, really, being seen alone with me!" "Why Justin

"Justin, could you be a dear? I've got homework for someone who's been out the past week that I need to drop off, but I'm tied up with Student Council business. Could you take it over for me?" Melanie had cornered me after class, put on her thickest southern charm and batted her eyes at me. She knew it wouldn't get her anywhere, bit it made us both laugh. She'd been flirting like this with me ever since we had our talk. It was fun, and it was casual, and if I screwed up it didn't much matter. I

"So, you and Melanie, huh?" It was lunchtime, and Rick and I were eating and working on trigonometry at the same time. We were lucky and managed to have two days a week together for lunch. Well, lucky for my trig grade, at least. "Yeah," he said softly with a real dopey grin on his face. I looked across the cafeteria to where Melanie was sitting with Bobby and a few other people. "So why isn't she over here eating lunch with you?" "She can't. You know." He said it

It was about six at night, I was up in my room, and I was working with my notecards when the phone rang. I let it go, since it wasn't ever for me and I always forget to give people messages. Mom would get it or it'd ring over to the answering machine, but either way I didn't have to deal with it, which was fine by me. That's why I was so surprised when I heard my mom yell. "Justin, phone!" I dropped all my notecards when she said that, and kind of sat there surprised for a second

The single nice thing I've found about moving to Georgia is the weather in the morning. It was October, and back in Massachusetts it would've been cold at six thirty, but here it wasn't bad. More than nice enough to be running in shorts and a t-shirt. While it had taken a few weeks, I'd finally settled on a route that worked for me. It was a little less than nine miles, and I could do it in the hour before breakfast. Yeah, it was a pretty good pace, but the roads were mostly flat, there

Tuesday morning things were a little bit closer to back to normal for me. Mom had a shift at the hospital different from Dad's, so she wanted her car back, and I didn't think I needed to put on the same show again anyway, so I didn't. My car's pretty nondescript, so I was pretty sure nobody'd notice me right off. I grabbed a few tennis balls out of the basement before I left too, just in case I needed a distraction. I got to school only a few minutes early, not enough to do a walk around

When I got to school Monday morning my stomach was in knots. I'd managed to borrow Mom's Prius for the day. I startled her when I walked into the kitchen, and she didn't protest. I figured that was a good sign. I took a couple of deep breaths, grabbed my new bag, pasted an unfamiliar smile on my face, and stepped out of the car. I'd timed my arrival to try and get the best impact. Early enough that people weren't racing the bell, but not so early that there wasn't anyone there yet. The l

On any day without rain I run in the morning. Saturday was nice, so even with the bruises from the beating I took on Thursday I was out on the road for most of an hour. I got back from my run to find a girl sitting on the front steps to my house. "I'm Steph," she said, standing up. Even on the steps she barely looked me in the eye. She was dressed sensibly enough for the weather -- t-shirt, denim skirt, and a patchwork quilt vest, a navy beret pulled down over her head with bits of red h

Wham! Some days I think lockers are made of some weird alien metal, since whenever they get hit really hard the noise they make seems to make all other sounds around them disappear, and the harder they're hit the faster things go silent. This time I hit hard enough to make the corridor go instantly dead quiet, with everyone looking at us. Us, in this case, was me, Justin Payne, and my personal antagonist, Bobby Phillips. In this school I was a nobody junior, since I'd just moved

Justin's a fish out of water no matter where he goes, and never more so than when this Boston kid has to move to rural Georgia. Sometimes things don't work out the way he expects, which isn't a bad thing.

In which Ben and William come to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and find that some things which can be done ought not be.

Ex Marks the Spot Bars. God, I hate bars. Hate 'em with a passion. Dark, crowded, and full of people I can't stand, acting like assholes. Still, here I was, sitting at one, working slowly on getting wasted. Why the hell not? Just got the brush-off from the guy I'd been dating. Bastard hadn't even had the guts to tell me to my face. He'd sent me a text message. Fucker. I dont thnk itll wrk He couldn't even be bothered with punctuation. But he said I couldn't be bothered to get serious, so

"Some bad days are better than others"

Heh. It thinks Soulmate was written by a man, and Ex was written by a woman. Which is funny, since Soulmate's my mushy romantic piece and Ex is my cranky, curse-filled, vicious one. Still, it's gotta be true -- would the internet lie to me?

Is up for your reading enjoyment over here.

The POV shift point is very well taken, and one I try hard to be careful with -- I plop the camera on one character's shoulder or another at the start of a chapter and leave it there. May not be the most sophisticated way to handle it, but it seems an un-jarring way to handle it. Maybe some day I'll get fancy, but for now this works for me. (Whether it works for everyone else is a separate question, of course...)

I always forget that, especially when writing about Ben and William. One of the cardinal sins of writing in the first person is switching points of view. You need to pick one character and stick with him or her -- no changing in the middle. Yes, I know a lot of 'net fiction does this, but it just doesn't work. (If it did you'd see it in commercial fiction, something I had pointed out to me once. I've read exactly two books that have done this, and it didn't work well in either. And if Dianna Wynne Jones can't pull it off, what hope does J. Random NetAuthor have?) I'm used to writing first person, even though I actually don't -- Yankee was first person, but that's it. Doesn't mean I don't think in the first person, which gets me in trouble. When I plot out Ben and William's stories, it's always from William's perspective. (I expect anyone who knows me reasonably well could offer appropriate pithy comments on my character about that, but we'll not go there right now) Except, of course, the stories aren't told from William's POV, they're told from over his shoulder. Which means I can tell them from over Ben's shoulder, too. Even if he is kinda reluctant to say much. That makes dealing with some of the bits of Wild Life a whole lot easier. Including some of the bits that Dio, once upon a time, rightly poked at and noted didn't work. Yes, this was something of a revelation. Go figure.

Urk. Well, combined with the cholesterol issues, you might want to check with your doctor and see if you can get your hypertension meds changed. (Though given the selection you're on there might not be an alternative, I dunno) That's got to suck, though. What're your serum vitamin D levels looking like? If you're staying out of the sun I'd bet they're pretty low, 'specially as most folks in the US are borderline deficient as it is.

While it's not anything like a 100% solution, get out and get as much sun as you can manage, as well as some exercise. Cholesterol is one of the precursor molecules used in the synthesis of Vitamin D and the steroid hormones including testosterone. Sunlight stimulates Vitamin D production (which most people are low on, especially in the winter) and exercise tends to increase testosterone production. Lack of sun exposure (because of lower intensity sun and less skin exposure) is probably the major reason cholesterol levels tend to be higher in the fall and winter for most people. Wikipedia's got a reasonably nice page on cholesterol, and while I don't have a link to the JAMA article on seasonal cholesterol levels, there's a readable summary at Medical News Today. Exercise tends to be good for mood (and there are some studies that indicate UV exposure is too), and has a pleasant side-effect of helping drop a few pounds, which is good. So, y'know, get out and walk in the sun for as much time as you can. Won't fix things all by itself, but it certainly will help.

Not productive, mind, but fun. Being a Computer Geek in real life, when I did up the new layout for Wild Life, I wanted it simple to splat out new chapters without me having to fiddle much with the generated HTML, while still having it look good. The looking good bit was tricky (and it turns out that IE7 has a busted CSS box model, so my outdented chapter tabs didn't work, dammit! No tabs for you, IE users!). I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I've never done any CSS work, so it was a bit of a challenge to get going. Luckily what I wanted was actually doable (well, except in IE) so I'm happy. That, of course, led to managing the actual content. Up until now I've been writing in Word, saving as HTML, and running the result through a perl program to strip out the crud. Then there was some hand-editing (with a 20% error rate, alas) to patch it up and send it out. Needless to say... yech. I didn't want that for Wild Life, so after the CSS got nailed I wrote some PHP to generate the boilerplate HTML, which led to some PHP to handle the overall page generation, which led to some more restructuring, which left me with a nicely data-driven set of pages. You can't see it, but the main PHP code for the Wild Life pages is entirely generic -- the body is in a separate data file, and there's a file with the chapter numbers in it, so uploading a new chapter's a matter of changing that chapter file, sending up the actual new page data file, and cloning the main php file to a new one. (I could do it with a single PHP file with a ?chapter=whatever tail, but I think that's icky looking) All the existing pages get the new chapter numbers on their side tabs, and it's good. It's all nicely automatic, and since the html that Scrivener generates is pretty clean, it doesn't even need much post-processing, and I can do all the post-processing with a little program. That's cool, fewer things for me to make whoopses with. Getting Wild Life spiffed up like this, of course, meant cleaning up the short stories, which meant more PHP fiddling (No easy grouping by filename), as well as a bit of messing around with redirects in meta tags so the old URLs still worked if anyone had them bookmarked. Simple enough. Since consistency is a nice thing, I did the same thing to Yankee, and after a few rounds of genericizing the code the actual PHP for Yankee and Wild Life chapters are identical. They share all the library files, all the main PHP pages are the same (just copies of one another with different filenames), with the only difference being the data -- stylesheets, chapter lists, and chapter contents. As it should be. The index page doesn't auto-generate yet, but I probably ought to tackle that, as soon as I figure out what its style should look like. That's where I should've stopped, of course. The trouble here is that to check things out I have to do a quick scan of the text to check for bad characters -- untranslated em dashes, smart quotes, elipses, and suchlike stuff. There was also some screwed-up parts of the text, words missing, bad punctuation, and mis-spellings. Scanning leads to reading, and reading leads to wincing, and, well... I should've stopped. Really. Yankee was my first novel, and while it isn't horrid, it has some issues. The style's inconsistent in spots, Justin's Asperger's isn't handled properly everywhere, the word choices are awkward some places, and the last two chapters are a bit phoned in. I'd leave it alone, but I'm supposed to write its sequel, so I feel the need to fiddle. So... now I have the whole thing, all sixteen chapters, pulled into Scrivener, ready for rewrite. It should, hopefully, be fast enough to do. Couple of weeks end to end, and I think I'll pull the old chapters down (or off the index page, at least) while I re-release the updated version. That should segue into Carpe Diem's release, though that won't be done nearly so fast. I am so going to owe Joe for web whacking above and beyond the call 'o duty when this is all done...

Never underestimate procrastination as a motivator. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're supposed to be doing something else entirely...

And of course it turns out that IE has a busted CSS box model so the spiffy layout (the one that worked nicely on WebKit and Gecko rendering engines) doesn't render quite so well in IE. Bah, computers suck, and so not in a good way. An updated version is off to Joe for fixing whenever he gets a chance.