Wild-Eyed Early

This time there isn't a single excuse to be given at all. I just haven't fulfilled my obligation to blog. Plain and simple.

The National Games Week bonanza came to an end, not with a bang, or a thwak, just a whimper. That is not to say that the revised goal I set was not met, but you know, unmet expectations feel the same whether or not there is a logical reason, or the one who set them is to blame for their non-achievement.

I'd like to report vast strides in the completion of my first e-book but honestly I haven't had any time to work on the editing. Soon it's going to be crunch time and I'm going to work on it like a madman but so far not yet. Maybe today I can get some work done on it seeing how crazy early I'm up. I received the ISBN for the book, so soon I'll put up the pre-order, which pretty much just will amount to an email link that with some browsers and email clients will open a new email addressed to me, with the subject header filled in. Some software doesn't do the subject and that's because they're obviously not following the standards that they should be.

Now I feel like I should talk about something dark and scary. How about, not having the slightest clue what to get certain people for Christmas? Messing that up can be pretty scary. Visiting certain people for the holiday make for some pretty dark days. This reminds me, I don't have any scary holiday stories of my own written yet. The closest was a story about a scary movie coming out for the holiday season. It may be just as well I haven't drawn the ire yet of anyone looking out to bash anything not cheery and perfect for the approaching season. Nothing says controversy like Christmas-themed horror movies. People will jump all over them without the slightest clue about what they are about. Give Santa an axe and watch the slurs against the director and producers fly!

If you can find it check out a copy of Silent Night, Deadly Night. I describe it as the Carrie of slasher films which is pretty high praise. Need a review? Check out... Bob's Reviews: Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Mood: hyper
Music: Tsuki to Taiyou no Meguri by Hisakawa Aya-sama(!) and Flash's Theme by Queen

The Sound of Gunfire Resulting

The week is going not quite as I planned it. I started on Sunday by sending out the preliminary move for the game. There was a flurry of email of which I received the compiled version of from two of the players. The third player I caught up with on Tuesday. That was when I fizzled. Yesterday I did nothing to further the game. Thus far today I have nothing. Hopefully later tonight I can get back on track, but as far as weeks go I think this one is half over. Maybe I shouldn't have gone with a plot that required planning and forethought on the players part. They've been doing a bang up job, but its not a fast moving proposition by design essentially. Still, I guess I can't complain, at least doing the planning quickly has to count for a lot. It could take significantly longer doing it by the normal timing.

One of the things I have slowed for is getting some extra help toward marketing my fiction. I don't say much about it, but being part of an organisation with goals aligned with yours is a great boon. A job that requires pretty much only you and a computer is distinctly benefited by a network of people doing the same thing and taking a bit of their time to both commiserate about and celebrate the joy of it. The prestigious group that I am affiliated with is the venerable Horror Writers Association. I just realised it's been almost three years since I joined. My how time flies when...

Things are progressing on my own company's first e-book. I filled out the forms earlier in the week for the ISBN number. That's going to take a few days. I've also been working on the bookstore mini-site. There is a sales page obviously, links to the front cover and at this point undone back cover, and a page full of teasers for the stories. I may or may not provide a couple samples pages from one of the stories. On the other side of things I think I might include a short foreword in the book talking about where the stories came and why the book is divided into the two sections that is. Choices, choices!

Mood: winding down
Music: (We Were) Born to Rock by Quiet Riot and Metal Tears by Battlezone

Are You Receiving the Transmission?

Sorry for leaving such a dead spot in the blogosphere but first I wanted to let my little announcement/memorial stand for a bit longer than usual and then I ran into a connection problem. I have to make this quick I have no idea how much longer the browser will work.

First up I would like to announce that November 20th until 26th is the official National Games Week, at least in the state, but I like to think of it as international. Due to that little fact I am gearing up to run another massively scaled, incredibly wildly fun, special scenario for my play by email role playing game. If I can squeeze in the time I'd like to get my game site updated with the stories from last year's games week extravaganza. The impact of those encounters are far reaching and still reverberate through the game to the current time frame. They will continue to effect events into the far foreseeable future. We can only hope this year's scenario will be as influential and full of repercussions/significance.

Things are progressing slowly and surely on my company website, sadly most of the work is all but invisible. On a related note I think a design for my e-book selling pages are forming in my head. I hope to try some of them out very soon. The link to that area has been established but I have a rather pathetic coming soon page sitting there currently. I hope it doesn't turn people away. Certainly its no worse than any other coming soon page but just because its a consistent pathetic doesn't make it any more embarrassing. Oh well, at least it won't be sitting there as long as some pages like that that I've seen.

Mood: hurried
Music: Innuendo by Queen and Destiny by Stratovarius

The Day Michael Myers Cried

Today is a very sad day indeed. Moustapha Akkad has died of his injuries after being caught up in the recent terrorist bombings in Jordan. Moustapha was born in Syria and lived in Los Angeles. He was a producer in each and everyone of the “Halloween” movies, and was involved in trying to get out a ninth film in the franchise. He was 75 years old and still an obvious horror fan. He was the man behind Michael Myers, keeping him coming back again and again. Moustapha was meeting one of his children, his daughter Rima Akkad Monla, she too is dead. I don't know really what more to say other than for someone who was mostly behind the scenes I believe he will be sorely missed.

Mood: sad
Music: The Original Halloween theme.

What Darkness Trod These Halls?

Oh the horror! What a nightmare. If only there had been another way. If only if it was anything like the last three sentences. :) I went back to my old high school (graduate class of 1991) today for a community given flu shot. The place hasn't changed a whole lot. There was some sort of added on office in the one corner of the foyer along with a pair of soda and water vending machines. There was an elevator at the stairwell just before the cafeteria, and other than that what I saw was much the way I left it. Fortunately I didn't see a single person there that I knew. I did see the big picture frames with the recent graduating classes going back to a few years before mine even. So what could have been a total nightmare worked out just fine.

Too bad the weather wasn't nicer. When I got up it was dark and it never got much brighter all day if at all. It rained, and thundered and lightninged, and the wind whipped around. The wind wasn't as bad as elsewhere like say Hamilton where a road was closed because of debris on the road blown off of the hillside, and a school is closed tomorrow because its missing windows and bits of its roof, and lightning struck a church with a preschool in the back. So I guess I shouldn't complain about the weather I got. I also shouldn't speak or type this too loudly but I didn't have an appreciable blackout or an Internet disconnect as of yet.

I did reboot the computer to fix a dead browser but I won't complain about that either. I managed seven days without a reboot or a connection problem. The problem I was having seems to be pretty much fixed by maintaining a web page that constantly updates itself, like a web cam page. I guess it's been a couple weeks now that I've been watching a dentist's office in Japan. I haven't seen much of anything, just people coming and going and the staff doing its work. It's not big enough or tight enough for clear faces or anything, but its acceptable. Who know's what I'm doing to their bandwidth, but obviously they don't have a cap.

When I first tried this approach to my computer's web health I killed the first site, ate all of its daily bandwidth allowance. I'll smartly not say who's cam that was. This prompted me not to set up my own constantly (re)loading page because I know even a trickle of bandwidth over a month really racks up the numbers. I don't even recall offhand if my own site has a measure of the bandwidth or if I could just slam into the cap and start accruing additional cost because that's what mine does. So maybe it's a good thing that other person's site had a daily allotment and that was it.

Mood: chatty
Music: Walk Right Back by the Everly Brothers and Twist My Sister by Murderdolls

Laughing in the Hiding Bush

Isn't it fun when listening to something immediately makes you wish you were listening to something else, not because you dislike what is currently playing, but because it reminds you of something greater or more finely tuned to your style? I'm always pleasantly confused about how such things happen. Just what causes such episodes? Science-y people can probably tell you what happens when such an event is triggered, but what really precedes that moment when the chemicals move, and all brain activity is just chemicals moving, changing, what have you? It's almost as interesting as the things determined about seeing being almost as good as doing from the brain's standpoint. Reality is what you witness to a high degree. Dare it be said an almost frightening degree?

Things are progressing on the e-book selling front. I have sorted out several technical issues which would have definitely been detrimental to the process. There are still a couple more hurdles yet to be overcome. Editing began on the book itself and is progressing well enough. One story I intend to expand upon, it ended up missing a scene that I very much wanted in it, but didn't have time to sort out all of the details for because of the deadline it was written under. The final decision was also made that the book will include one brand new story so everybody gets a surprise.

This week I'll be experimenting with designs for the sales pages. A couple key points of Paypal use have come to light. First, now people with credit cards need not become a Paypal member to order items. The second is that Paypal also offers shopping cart functionality through their servers and don't require software on my end or pages designed by them to make use of the functionality. This is good news indeed. Onward and upward!

Mood: maudlin
Music: Tearing Down the World by Royal Hunt and Silver Wings by Bruce Dickinson

13 Days Mean Hitting the Day After

I hope everybody is okay after whatever bingeing occurred last night. I took it easy, myself. I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas in the afternoon, The Crow in the early evening, and after a touch of TV I watched another movie, which I will get to in a moment. My goodies involved a Snickers bar and some Doritoes. Wild party, I know.

I left a movie off of my list yesterday because I wanted to talk about it, and maybe more precisely the importance of where it came from. Out there in the blogosphere it can be hard to tell where everyone is blogging from. I live in lower Canuckia, err I mean Canada so of course I'm going to have some interest in Canadian horror movies. The missing one is pretty recent as far as these things go and it's called “Spliced” though some may find it available under the title “The Wisher”. A girl after seeing a horror movie discovers the story in the film, about a fantastical and violent creature called the Wisher, is true. It's no Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, but it's pretty good nonetheless.

Of course if we look back to my first suggestion days ago, well of course Scanners is a Canadian movie as well. Speaking of David Cronenberg, that bright fellow also does some acting. He was in another Canadian movie made by somebody else. He played something of a mobster, but not quite. That movie was called “Blood and Donuts”. Its a really offbeat story about a vampire woken from a long sleep, but he doesn't want to feed. He ends up visiting a donut shop regularly and becomes involved in the goings on there against the criminal element.

Now for the movie I watched last night, another of my nation's horror movies. It has a pair of sequels already so definitely it made its money. I watched, “Ginger Snaps”, which is a werewolf movie. The title is kind of funny, and as you might guess has nothing to do with the tasty cookies those two words bring to mind. It has a little bit of quirk to it, which is like a Canadian prerequisite for home-grown horror movies, but otherwise its pretty straightforward. The actress who plays Ginger later had the honour as one of the teens to be slaughtered, Gibb, in Freddy vs. Jason.

Thus ends thirteen days of suggestions. Back to my more or less regular blogging schedule.

Mood: satisfied
Music: Anything by Drama Rama and Kill or Be Killed by Twisted Sister