Shot Down My Hero

So my typical hour-long commute ran to an hour and a half today. Even after I made sure to leave the house a bit earlier than usual, and all that jazz. Some weeks you just can’t win, and I’m thinking this is one of them. Or at least today is. I did get a chance to listen to a few episodes on Stuff You Missed in History Class, so it wasn’t a total loss. “Don’t Cross the Dragon Lady” was especially interesting with a woman pirate who also had quite a head for business, and ended up not getting killed at the end of it all. “The Mystery of Saint-Ex” was talking about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of “The Little Prince”), and it was just sad to see how this awesome pilot/author eventually bit the dust, not to mention the poor guy that caused it. (This is by the way where the title of this blog post comes from.)

I had the best of intentions sitting down to lunch today, and was planning on reviewing the work I wrote on my project, but found I forgot to synch my files over when last I made updates. *sigh* Oh well, I guess it’ll have to wait until this evening. In other news I’ve been trying to read over what I have so far for Secrets of Leekston and continue the outline for this piece in preparation for NaNoWriMo next month. Unfortunately that just hasn’t happened yet. I need to focus on where I want to ultimately take this story, piece by piece. Right now I’m at point A, but only know what I want at point G, and have no clue how to get there from here. Guess I just need to take my time and plan it out. This is such a complex plot that I don’t want to lose any pieces. I’m usually not a big outliner and only need it for the beginning of a story, so it’s hard for me to do something that I feel “wastes my writing time” instead.

Parasites and a Moral Dilemma

Friday I got an announcement email reminding bloggers not only about the fact that NaNoWriMo was coming up at the beginning of November, but also a really neat idea about how to gear up for it. I wrote on my first NaNo last year, and simply fell in love with it. It not only gave me an excuse to devote time each day to writing, but also forced me to quite being so darn nit-picky about my word choices and simply get the ideas down on paper. Evidently that was really the impetus that forced me to action. I had written on a few Big Bangs last year, and being able to devote an entire month to writing original work simply seemed marvelous.

So naturally I’m planning on writing again this November. I’m settling in to do some outlining in just a few moments actually. But the part of the notice that really seemed clever was the idea to join Post a Day during the month of October to gear up for writing everyday in November. Well, I thought, I’ll be sure to do that! I post on my WordPress blog almost every day anyway!

Well… to make a long story short, that just didn’t happen yesterday. The first day and already my best intentions were fouled. Oh well, I’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose. So in true writer fashion I’ll begin this the second day of the month instead of the first, and try to give some updates as to my planning for next month. Maybe with a few ideas as well behind them. By the way, here is what prevented me from making said blog update yesterday.

When I woke up I was in the mood to bake. Now this is not in fact that strange for me. My fondness for baking is rather renowned among my friends and family (not that they’re complaining), and so I started in immediately. I made some orange rolls that had to rise twice before I could actually cook them. And I also volunteered to make pizza crusts for our D20 Future tabletop campaign we started last night. The bread machine made that so very easy too! (Between that and my mixer, it’s no wonder I bake so much!) Include the icing I made for the orange rolls and the marinara sauce for the pizza, and whoosh – time seemed to fly by. Then we piled all the goodies into my car to head over. As usual, the pizza was delish – not to mention so much more filling than your regular delivery pizza. Then it was on to the gaming.

Our campaign has a pretty fun setup. My character is a jazz lounge singer that’s taking her gig to Mars to try her hand at entertainment on another planet. She’s not exactly a fighter, but instead I’m turning her into an empath similar to Deanna Troi. Anyway one of the head leaders on the 1000+ passenger ship got a strange virus a week into the voyage. Upon further investigation of this passenger and five others, we learn that actually the infection is a parasite that turns into a huge black leech thing that pumps its dozens of babies into the host of the body and uses it as an incubator. To make matters worse, the leeches turn out to get loose on one of the decks and now we’re trying to decide if it’s salvageable. Do we kill the entire deck of people and parasites and write them off as a lost cause? Do we go through a slow and steady sweep and clean – risking the possible infection of our staff and crew? Do we notify the captain even though he could disconnect the passenger section of his ship and leave us all floating in space? Dang I love science fiction!

Anyway, that’s what was preoccupying my time yesterday. Don’t you love moral dilemmas?