Journal Entry: Wednesday, June 20th

Strangely busy night last night. I’d go so far as to say hectic.

Work was mostly uninteresting. I was late getting in, and then over lunch I wrote an SK post that introduced a scene I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Then Xanga was down for the rest of the day, so I didn’t get it posted until this morning.

D–‘s mom stopped by shortly after I got home from work, on her way back to Wichita from someplace Texasy. That was not unexpected. We had an Ed’s Massive Burger, which was delicious, and then she hit the road to get home at a reasonable hour. I loaded up Civ 4, honestly thinking that would be the end of my day (with, y’know, pleasant coasting as I wasted the next three hours playing video games).

Oh, right. “D–‘s mom.” I’ve decided, as a very flimsy sort of privacy protection, to truncate everybody’s name. I almost did the same thing with Wichita, but it could eventually get a little silly. I realize I’m not just documenting my own life here, though, but those of everyone I interact with, to one degree or another, and a surprising number of those people have serious secrecy concerns. Here’s hoping not-spelling-out-their-names every time will sufficiently soothe their anxious little hearts.

Obviously, it’s a thin disguise, but it’ll thwart Google, at the very least.

Also, using the dashes….that’s a really old convention. Lots of novels used to use first-letter-dash-dash in place of a full name for pretty much any proper nouns, especially ones existing in the real world. It still kinda throws me off when I’m reading through a Dumas or Scott and hit a word like that, but I thought it’d be fun to throw it into my blog.

Anyhow, D–‘s mom left around 7:30, and just as I was settling down to play some Civ, T– got a call from N– (isn’t this going to be fun?) saying she and K– wanted to stop by on their way home from church and borrow a couple books. A few minutes after they showed up, we were all talking, playing social, and then I got a call from B– saying their water was off, and could I come help them turn it back on. I just happened to have the right tool for that, so I hung around until K– and N– left, and then headed over to B–‘s place, and fixed his water.

It’s nice to have the right tool for the job. Easiest plumbing project I’ve ever done. We got their water back on, and then I hung around to talk a little. Lots of new complications in the home-buying project. Ugh.

I got back home around 9:30, and found T–‘s friend R–‘s car in the driveway. Oh, and D– was still there building his new computer. Yeesh, busy night at the Pogue house.

And as I’m going to be gone all weekend, and my Friday night’s already accounted for (and I was wearing the right type of shoes for the job), I talked myself into going ahead and mowing the back yard, which badly needed it. I have this to say of mowing at night: there are a lot more bugs out, when it’s dark out. You don’t see many of them, but that’s as much a curse as it is a blessing. Yuck.

Anyway, I got done around 10:00, and but didn’t get to sleep until a couple hours later. So, short night, and it’s been a very long day today at work. Still, I did half the diner scene for SK over lunch, and I’m in a pretty good mood about that.

Journal Entry: Tuesday, June 19th

See how I’m doing that? Posting every morning concerning the day before? It looks funny with the headlines, but I think it’s a better way to do things than trying to remember to post something just before bed.

Yesterday ended up with kind of a rough evening, but up until then it was a pretty cool day. As most of you will have noticed, I got Sleeping Kings updated during the day yesterday. I have one more scene (roughly 3 posts’ worth) before going into the big montage, followed by the climactic Great Battle, followed by the You-Have-to-See-it-to-Believe-It season-ending cliff-hanger. I’ve decided to go ahead and post this next scene, in spite of what I’d said before. It’s got clean breaks, and should make for good posts, and it’s a better stopping spot to tide people over while I take a month or two to write the end. Yeah, yeah, I should’ve thought about better stopping spots for any of my previous several-month hiati, too. But none of those was intentional….

Anyway, got some major huge news at work (regarding organizational structure above me, not me personally), but it’s too early to guess exactly what impact it’ll have. I suppose it could still turn out to be a false rumor, too, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Then I got home, and we ran to Blockbuster for some movies (I got Reno 911 against my better judgment — I’ll let you know how it turns out), and dropped by B– and E–‘s place, too. The new house is a lot cooler with their stuff in it. I can’t wait until they’ve had a chance to settle in. Should be a lot of fun.

When we got back home, A–b– was having trouble eating and that generates a lot of frustration (in her and us), so there was that to deal with. Kind of a long evening, really, but everything’s good now. It’s lunch time, now, and I’m going to see about getting a couple pages written for SK.

Journal Entry: Monday, June 18th

A long day at work yesterday. Mondays always are. I’m working on the Air Conditioner mod Technical Issuance (TI, which is a maintenance manual, really), and will be at least until the middle of July. It’s really a lot of work. I’ve been spending all my time in Section 3, so far, and it’s well over 100 pages. Most of the others won’t be that long.

I think what I want to do on Sleeping Kings is post up the last scene I have written out longhand, and then stop trying to do the daily, 1000-word posts. Instead, I want to just get the novel finished, in a traditional style. I’m sick of it being this close to the end, and unfinished. Still, as any writer will tell you, ending a book is the hardest part. Have you ever read The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny? If not, you should. But writing a book or story is a lot like the way he describes walking the Pattern. With each page you finish, it gets harder to write the next one, until the ending is just a monumental task to put down each paragraph. There’s Great Arcs, too, but I don’t want to belabor this too long.

I think I’ve decided not to kill off Carlos. I’m not making any promises for the finished version, but I’m going to leave it out of the rough draft, and see how it goes. Before I killed Adrian, I didn’t intend for that to be an emotionally significant death, but it became one within the narrative, so maybe that’ll serve the purpose Carlos’s death was supposed to. We’ll see.

Last night I got home and mostly crashed. T– made tacos, I played with A–b– on the floor (and watched her scoot, which is almost like a crawl, except lamer), and then N– invited us over for Texas Yumyum, which is a sort of dessert. And while we were there, we Guitar Heroed on K–‘s new XBox. Apparently, I did pretty well for my first time. I can see how it would be very challenging at harder difficulty levels, though.

All in all, a really fun evening. We got home at ten, and I went to bed as soon as I was done feeding the kittens.

Journal Entry: June 18, 2007

Hmm…okay, I’m only four days behind, so far. So today’s will be a long one.

Friday, June 15th
I took off work last Friday, because I get one day per pay period, and my regular day off (this coming Friday, the 22nd) I’m going to be busy with work, so I took it early.

Thursday night, I agreed to spend my Friday keeping an eye on K– (who’d just had surgery), but I got a call from N– early early Friday morning saying she could take care of it, so I could just stay in bed. Unfortunately, by the time I learned this, I was already out of bed. Alas.

T– and I went to Sears, and I finally got repair parts for my week-dead lawnmower (that died mid-mow, so my front yard had been weird looking). I also did go over to K–‘s for a few hours in the afternoon, and we beat Gears of War on his new XBox 360. Sweet.

‘Round about 4:00, “B and E” (as they like to be known) were closing on their house, so we threw a housewarming party for them. D– brought the wine, I ordered pizza, and toward the end of the evening K– and N– bought us all gellato. Oh, and we watched Ghost Rider and ridiculed it without mercy. Again, alas for what might have been.

Saturday, June 16th
Saturday was awful. B– kept insisting he would need no help moving their boxes to the new house (and I was getting the feeling he wouldn’t accept any, anyway), so after I repaired my lawnmower (I say “repaired” because it sounds a lot more impressive than “replaced the air filter and spark plug for the first time in five years”), I decided to go ahead and mow. And while I was at that, I pulled out the ol’ power hedge trimmers to clean up the overgrown clutter along our front fence, and to chop down the unpleasant shrubs growing along our front walk. Chainsaw work, but I did it with hedge trimmers. In the hot and humid. For a couple hours.

What I’m getting at, is I fully wore myself out working on the yard, then went inside and crashed on the couch, only to have D– call me lazy and instruct me to go help him start loading up B–‘s stuff. Which I did, because I don’t like being called lazy in spite of the fact that I’m amazingly lazy. Kinda like Back to the Future 2, when you think about it….

Anyway, D–‘s a vicious taskmaster anyway, so we sprinted through getting B–‘s stuff loaded, then sprinted through getting it unloaded so I could be back at the house in time for T– to leave for an evening of scrapbooking. I’d promised to watch A–b–. Daniel was kind enough to watch her for a couple hours while I went to dinner with T– and K– and N– mid-crop, and other than that she slept for most of the evening, so that was a relief. I played a pretty amazing game of Civ, and then went to bed when I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, around 2:30.

Sunday, June 17th
Okay, Saturday morning and midday I used myself up, and then spent the whole evening and night folded into an extremely soft couch, so my options for Sunday were extremely limited before it ever began. I woke with an extraordinarily sore back. In addition, all A–b–‘s good sleep Saturday evening meant that she wasn’t as tired as she should’ve been during the night, so she kept T– awake late and woke her up early. Between the two of us, we were a pretty sad sight for most of the day.

It was my first Father’s Day, though, and T– gave me an awesome book of pictures of A–b–. She made the book, and picked such cute pictures. I brought it to work this morning, and naturally it was a big hit.

We managed to make a trip to the grocery store, and T– made some delicious Amish Friendship Bread. I fiddled around with stuff on my computer (some WoW, some Civ, lots of just fiddling). T– watched half a dozen episodes of Numb3rs. We’d intended to go over to B– and E–‘s new place sometime in the afternoon, but they were overcome with the many demands of new homeownership, and so that was postponed. We ended up meeting K– and N– for dinner at Jersey Mike’s Subs, and then crashing for the evening.

All told, we accomplished very little. I finished Saturday’s Civ game with the option of winning in any of 4 different victory paths within the last 5 turns. That was pretty cool. We went to bed early and I slept the sleep of the dead.

Journaling

I think I’m going to start posting on this blog as a blog. Well, more like a journal, or diary. I first started it with the intention of putting down on paper all my many diatribes, in essay form, but that didn’t take as long as I thought it would, and wasn’t nearly as interesting as I hoped.

I’m not exactly done with that, but as I haven’t posted an essay in about a year, I’m clearly not sticking to it consistently.

One thing I think I’d like to do, is start writing more mundanely, posting daily-ish what’s going on in my life, what I’m working on, that sort of thing. From some stuff I’ve read, it’s extremely valuable to have that sort of a record, to look back on years later. I recently went through all my old scribble books, and got sort of that effect.

So, y’know, most of the stuff I’ll post up here won’t be very interesting. I’ll try to include details whenever interesting things happen, for friends and family to keep up, but mostly I’m hoping to track on my major projects, and self-improvement-type goals.

Here’s a quick list of the big projects I’m working on now:
Publishing:
Taming Fire was rejected a couple months ago. I’d like to get a new submission sent out before July.

From a personal publishing point of view, I think I’m going to let the NewMyth project die.

Writing:
Sleeping Kings and King Jason’s War are both nearly finished, but completely stalled. I hope to get back in gear on SK, at least.

Dan and I are also cooking up a fascinating fantasy series, based on the conventions of old comic books. To my knowledge, we don’t have a name for the series yet, but we’ve done two or three months of prewriting work so far, and I think we’ll start on the first pages of the first novel sometime late summer or early fall.

Programming:
Toby suggested reviving our old Magic: The Gathering project as something more manageable, based on a game he’d recently played. I’m excited about this project, too. Around the same time he suggested it, I was reading a series of articles about adding compelling storyline to video games, so I decided to put that in practice, in what could easily have been a story-less game.

I think the story I’ve come up with is pretty cool. As I was trying to develop a very rudimentary model of the map that would allow for symmetrical gameplay (no matter which starting character you choose), I ended up developing the board game I listed below.

One thing I think is really cool about that: I’ve always wanted to make up a game for characters within a fantasy story to play (in the same sort of way that we play Chess or Monopoly), that would make sense within the fantasy world’s history. Every time I tried, though (and most of the times I’ve read other writers who tried), it comes off either as way too close to a real-world equivalent, or completely cheesy (or both). So generally I gave up on the idea.

In this case, it makes perfect sense. The game board is based on the real map simplified, and the abstracted gameplay represents a historical challenge that fits within the culture. Woohoo!

Other:
I really want to start teaching/leading a college-level Creative Writing class, modeled after the ones I had, for friends and family. Obviously, it wouldn’t be good for any credit, but it seems like I know half a dozen people who really want to start writing, and basically what they need is a good CW class.

I’ve been making plans for this for the last month, that all revolved around using intended (but not yet implemented) functionality within the NewMyth project. Now, I’m starting to make the decision to cancel the NewMyth project, and I’m not sure what impact that will have on the writing classes. We’ll have to see.

My Boardgame

Okay, it’s basically a pentagon-shaped game of Risk, mixed with Othello (or, if you’re Japanese, Go), mixed with Pente, mixed with, I dunno, Chinese Checkers and darts.

It’s for 1-5 players. It can be played with flat-sided beads (like the ones used as counters by many Magic players, but I’m sure they’re sold for some more common purpose), or marbles, but would require a special tabletop or board to play marbles, since otherwise they’d roll off. It could probably be played with Risk tokens. I believe there are 53 infantry.

Okay, having written out an overview of the game (which is probably called Tirnoval, but maybe I’ll come up with something else…like “Pentagon”), it turns out it’s a very long and complicated walkthrough of the game and its rules. If you’ve already heard most of that info, or if you don’t care that much but are mildly interested, here are the 3 pictures I’ll be using as illustrations. You can skip everything else.

Empty game board: Game board ready to play: Green player quick win:

The Very Long and Complicated Walkthrough of the Game and its Rules
The basic board is a pentagon divided into concentric…pentagons. You start at one of the outside corners, and the goal of the game is to be the first player to reach the center. If you’re playing solitaire,you’re playing for points (which are scored based on the number of marbles you own, the number of marbles you’ve displaced, and the number of turns it took to get to the center).

Here’s a completely empty game board:

As I said, you start at one of the corners. You can see the starting tokens at each of the corners. When you first start the game, you choose which color you want to play. As you can see, every tile on the board is marked with small notches (3-7 notches per tile, increasing as you approach the center) of various colors. These notches indicate the initial marble value of the tile. At the beginning of the game, each tile gets one marble of the appropriate color per notch on it (for a total of 53 marbles of each color, not counting player tokens).

Here’s a table that has been set up, with all of the marbles in place. In the rest of this post, I’m going to describe a playthrough as the green player, which starts at the big green token on the left side of the image.

In the first turn, you can choose to move into one of the two tiles that touch your corner. You goal for the turn is to capture the tile, which requires eliminating all the marbles on that tile that aren’t your color. There are 2 ways to play the game. The method I’m going to describe here uses a single 6-sided die.

In your first turn, you have no marbles (the starter token doesn’t count), and you’re trying to move into a tile that has 3. You first choose which tile you want to move into (in this case, you either take top-left or bottom-left — for our example, we’ll go bottom-left). If there are any marbles of your color in that tile, you immediately capture them (this is a military simulation game, so generally it’s said that they join your army). Then you roll the die to find out your score.

Your score on the die determines how well you do. Ideally, it should be greater than the number of marbles left in the tile you’re moving into. Whatever your roll, you can immediately remove up to that number of marbles from the tile (they go to the starter area for their respective colors). After that, you can (and must) remove one marble from the tile for every marble in your army (on the first turn, there are no marbles in your army). If there are STILL marbles in the tile, then you can choose to remove one more (but you don’t have to) and your player token returns to the starting spot.

That’s a little complicated, so I’ll list it out in bullet points.

Tile Capture Process:
———————–
1. Choose a target tile
2. Any same-color marbles in that tile join your army (move to your currently occupied tile)
3. Proceed through the following steps until there are no more marbles on the target tile:
A. Roll the die, and remove up to that number of marbles from the target tile.
B. Sacrifice marbles in your army (marbles in the same tile as your player token) to remove marbles from the target tile.
C. Sacrifice your own token to remove one more token from the target tile. You may choose not to remove the token, but if you have not already captured the tile, you MUST return your token to the starting tile.
4. If you have successfully emptied the target tile (without sacrificing your player token), move your token into the new tile. Take with you as many marbles as you want from the tile you’re leaving (it’s recommended to leave one in each tile except the starting spot).

Every turn, you repeat this process until you reach the center of the map. As you can see, there are some tiles that have a LOT of your color tokens(which would increase the size of your army, which increases your odds of capturing the next tile). Usually, you have to move a significant distance to reach these tiles, though, so you must choose whether you want to build up your army, or rush toward the center.

At the center, there will be a significant stack of marbles (not shown on any of the pictures). I’m not sure how many, but I’m thinking 10-20, and none of them join you. Generally, you either have to take multiple attempts, or spend time building up your army (or, in multiplayer, get lucky timing) to capture the center.

I mentioned multiplayer.The game is designed for multiplayer. In a multiplayer contest, your goal is to be the first to capture the center tile, but there are various ways to do this. Any player can move into an empty tile, but once a tile has been captured by a player if that player leaves even one marble to claim it, another player cannot move through that tile UNLESS the tile’s starting colors match the invading player’s color. Does that make sense? In our example, we’re playing through as green.Well, if Blue had already captured a tile, then instead of the starting marbles on it, it would just have one blue marble. But we couldn’t move into that tile (and displace the blue marble) unless one of the colored notches on the tile was green.

So, one of the ways of winning(like Othello or Go) is to create a path that makes it impossible for your opponent to reach the center. Given the number of tiles that match each color, this will be a pretty rare victory condition, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Another way is to be the first to capture the center tile. As I said, this will usually require multiple attempts (and after a failed attempt, your token moves all the way back to the starting area, which takes a minimum of 6 turns to return). If you are the first to attack the center and you don’t win, you will leave it considerably weakened, which only helps your opponent. In the same way, if another player tries to take the center and fails (but, say, gets a really lucky roll of the die), he may leave it weak enough that you can easily take it in one attempt.

This image shows a quick win (that is, a fairly direct charge from the starting spot to the center) for a Green player playing solitaire. It’s safe to assume that he lost his first attempt to take the center, which sent him back to the start where he was able to take all of the green marbles he’d lost along the way with him as he followed his own path back to the center, and then won this time (although still taking some losses).

(It may also be possible to win by moving into the same tile an opponent is occupying, in which case you would play it out the same way as normal,but if you win, your opponent is removed from the game. Of course, if you lose that fight, you probably lose the game, too.)

I think that sums up everything you need to know to play. Some additional rules I’m considering:

*With the exception of the very first move (out of the starter spot), you can only capture tiles that share a SIDE with your current tile,not a corner (or, in other words, you can’t move diagonally).
* Each turn, if you have an unbroken chain of occupied tiles that leads from your current tile back to the starting point, you can add one marble from anywhere in the chain (including the starting area) to your current army.
* If an opponent chooses to enter a tile you posses (which, remember, he can only do if that tile is his color), you may choose to defend that tile, in which case you move your player token and as many marbles as you want from your current tile back to the tile he’s attacking.This would play out just like the attacking-to-win battle described earlier.
*Possibly, instead of direct player-vs-player encounters resolving the game, it just sends the losing player back to his starting spot. Or, possibly, that is only true for the attacking player (the defending player must defend successfully or he is completely destroyed).

Additional notes:
*I mentioned two ways to play, and described using a 6-sided die in this description. The other would involve direct comparisons of army size, rather than including an initial set of free points (the roll of the die). In this case, the game would probably start with the outside ring(the 3-point tiles) empty, and each starting token would have its 3 marbles already available in its army.
* For reference purposes, I’m naming each of the tiles in clockwise sequence, from outside in, using a numeral to indicate which ring, and a letter to indicate the tile’s position within its ring. Clockwise, as I said, starting at the 12 o’clock position. Given that, the win path in the above image would be described as 1D-2N-2M-2L-3I-4F-4E-5C-6(center).

Story Idea

As the result of several weeks of work on a collaborative writing effort with Daniel, I was thinking about a Bible passage this morning:

You will be hearing
of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those
things must take place, but that is not yet the end.”

Matthew 24:6. And what I was thinking, specifically, was how valuable that specific anti-prophecy was, because pretty much all of our end-times myths, from every culture, culminate in a final battle style of thing. Armageddon, Ragnarok, wars of that nature.

But then, even as I was congratulating Jesus on predicting that particular misunderstanding and setting his followers straight, my thoughts jumped to another passage, which sort of does the opposite.

I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor
does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the
trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When
the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

I Corinthians 15:50-54. Okay, well, I’m not one of those who remembers every verse of the Bible in perfect numerical order, so I got the wording mixed up a little. I was actually thinking of only the second verse in that selection, the “not all of us shall sleep” bit, and I sort of mixed it up with some other verse where Jesus was speaking, saying something to the effect of, “it could be any minute now.”

Anyway, anyway. I was mainly thinking of the wording from Corinthians, “not all of us shall sleep,” taking it in the literal sense (and, as I said, thinking that it was Jesus saying, “not all of you shall sleep,” implying the second coming within one generation.

And, y’know, clearly that wasn’t what the prophecy meant, and the “us” was a bigger crowd than just those present at the sermon’s initial delivery, but I thought another fun interpretation would be if, in that pronouncement, Jesus had made the Apostles immortal (or, since it was Corinthians, Paul admitted that Jesus had previously made the Apostles immortal) .

So, then, the story idea was for a superhero-type story about the immortal Apostles. I’m thinking probably not as Christian missionaries, because they got that business taken care of a long time ago (and it doesn’t make for a very interesting story). Also, both of those passages I referenced had context before or after talking about lawlessness as a bad thing, so I’m thinking typical superhero as defender of law and order fits within the demand of the characters….

I was also thinking maybe this one group of immortals made up the clusters of genius that we see throughout history (Renaissance artists, for one example).

Also, for the actual mechanism of their immortality, I was thinking a cool way to write it would be to take the vampire theme — not for their behavior day-to-day, but just in the temporary death sense. Then, from temporary death (and this already being a Jesus-story inspired idea, I think a fun way to handle it would be to just have them never stay dead for more than 3 days. They all rise on the third day, always. And, over time, this could get pretty inconvenient with mausoleums and vaults and whatnot, so they get in the habit of checking up on each other from time to time, and performing prison-break style rescues when one or another of them ends up getting buried somewhere he can’t escape from.

I dunno. Could be fun. Maybe for a lark sometime.

Her Name is Lola

I have a new niece, to add to the already-impressive collection. She was born a couple weeks ago, but I just now got around to posting it. Here’s Shannon’s new daughter (I’ve rotated it 20 degrees clockwise, dropped out the background, cropped the picture and changed it to black and white just to save on bandwidth, because I believe in conservationism):

She sure is a cutie! I’ve spent a little bit of time around her in the last couple weeks. Mostly she just sleeps, but man, her big sister loves having a baby around all the time! Shannon’s doing well, and has had lots of visitors to help her out.

Also, on a completely unrelated note, here’s a picture of China’s Communist Chairman Mao (completely unaltered):

Journal Entry: April 12, 2007

This afternoon, I got a rejection letter from Tor. They don’t want King Jason’s War. I didn’t say here, but I got a rejection letter three weeks ago for Sleeping Kings. That just leaves Taming Fire, but they’ve already rejected that one four times, so I don’t have a ton of hope left….

Sigh. Sad sigh. Anybody know anyone in publishing?