Question to Californians

I realized yesterday that during the entire campaign season, I hadn’t seen a single sign, commercial or mailer for the Senate race (unless you count the “Please make your entire ballot look like this” cards that various groups send out). Hadn’t heard a radio ad. Hadn’t even received a robocall. Nothing for Feinstein. Nothing for Mountjoy. Nothing opposing either of them. If I hadn’t read the sample ballot, I wouldn’t have even know who the challenger was.

I can only infer from this that, at least in the LA/OC area (since we get the same TV stations), the race was presumed to be a slam-dunk and both candidates decided to focus their campaigns elsewhere. Either that or I really wasn’t paying attention.

(Similarly, in our House district only the Democratic challenger posted campaign signs, and the incumbent Republican still won handily. But then, this district has run Republican since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.)

Did anyone else see any serious CA Senate campaigning?

Catching up

Friday night: mad dash through Nanowrimo. Still nebulous, not much in the way of direction. Still behind a day.

Saturday morning: laundry. (Yay fun.)

Saturday afternoon/evening: Went to katyakoshka and David’s wedding. Got to talk with the bride, got to finally meet the groom, got to hang out with sekl and non_seqvitvr. I heartily approve of a wedding where the bride marches down the aisle to the Masterpiece Theatre theme.

Sunday morning: Was going to work on Nano (now two days behind) but ended up reading Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon instead.

Sunday afternoon: Went to see The Prestige. v. good. As we walked in, we saw that they were running The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D. After the first movie, figured what the heck? Got tickets for later showing. Dropped by Jamba Juice, then Barnes & Noble (finally picked up our own copy of the Temeraire series), then a couple of clothing stores (alenxa found a dress). Re: movie: I was very impressed at how seamlessly they managed to match the look of the film. I couldn’t remember which eye got the original film, and which eye got the shifted CGI copy… and I couldn’t tell. Of course, after the first few minutes, I wasn’t looking! Afterward went to Cheesecake Factory for the first time in… well, years, come to think of it (unless you count take-out cheesecake). Dinner conversation was mostly about our respective stories, mostly in veiled references, though it actually helped me crystallize a number of things about my story… including where it was going!

Sunday night: Mad writing until way too late in the morning… and forgot to update my word count until after midnight, so it looks like I skipped two days. Grrr.

Work today, then most of the evening madly typing, with a break for Heroes. As of when I started this entry, I’m officially 126 words ahead of goal. Of course by the time I finish, it’ll be after midnight, so I’ll be 1500 words behind…

Edit: Realized that the numbers didn’t add up, and the progress gauge above doesn’t measure what I thought it did. I thought it measured your word count against the count you should reach by the end of the day to be on track to 50,000 at the end of the month. It actually measures the count you should have reached by the beginning of the day. So I hadn’t actually caught up, and I’m still ~1200 words behind. And I don’t think I’ll have time to write ~2900 words today.

Word count: 8922

Nano

I’ve decided to break nearly a decade of writer’s block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I’ve written quite a bit — 250 posts here on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I’ve finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.

Part of the problem is just getting started. I’ll have an idea but decide it’s not worth writing about, or I won’t have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.

I still didn’t have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I’d just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it’ll be total crap, maybe it’ll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I’m still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it’s set, the main character’s background. I have no idea where it’s going. But it’s two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That’s always been my Achilles heel with writing — I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)

Word count: 1150

Halloween Roundup

I think the time change drove people temporarily insane earlier this week. People unaccustomed to driving home in the dark clogged the streets in the evenings from Monday through Wednesday. As a result, alenxa and I didn’t get home until 6:40 on Halloween.

We walked in the door. I immediately turned on all the lights so that it was clear someone was home, then grabbed a large bowl and emptied bags of candy into it. Meanwhile Katie put the finishing touches on her vampire costume: the gloves, cape and fangs that she hadn’t worn on the drive home. We were hurrying, because we could hear a group of trick-or-treaters below, collecting candy from our downstairs neighbors.

Footsteps tromped up the stairs, and the Vampiress was ready. They knocked on the door next to us. No one answered. (Our next-door neighbors had moved out on Friday.) They knocked again. No answer. And they went back downstairs. We heard one of the kids suggest trying the other door, but they didn’t.

I wrote up a “Use Other Door →” sign and taped it on the empty apartment.

In the end, we got a grand total of two groups knocking on our door. Anyone want some extra Skittles and Tootsie Rolls? (Sorry, the Twix bars stay!)

Feng-shui Klotski

A good chunk of this weekend was taken up moving stuff around the apartment. Management has been rebuilding all the balconies. (This is probably a good thing, since the previous owners didn’t bother to use treated wood, and sap leaked out from the floorboards for several months.) On Thursday, we got the notice that they would start on our group on Monday. This means that we have to move everything off of the balcony.

Our next-door neighbors lucked out, since they just moved out on Friday. Though I suppose that meant they had to clear off the balcony anyway.

So Saturday afternoon was spent clearing space out of the storage section of the dining area so that we could move stuff out of the the living room so that we could make room for all the plants and the patio furniture. Then Sunday morning was spent hauling stuff inside. By the time we were done, a corner of our living room had been transformed into an indoor jungle:

Indoor Jungle

With any luck, they’ll be faster about it than the previous management was. The previous management warned us to clear everything off overnight, then changed their minds, and didn’t actually start work until two months later. Not that they told us they had postponed it indefinitely, so we went quite a while wondering when they would start, and assuming we couldn’t put things back, until we finally asked. Fortunately we had less stuff on the balcony back then.

Current Mood: accomplished

Ubiquitous Narration

I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon playing The Bard’s Tale (the new one, not the one in my icon) while alenxa was off at kayshabeast’s bridal shower. After a many months-long break. This time I figured out the combat system, so I was able to get past the starting dungeon.

Anyway, after Katie got home, we watched an episode of Teen Titans with dinner. It was structured as a fairy tale, complete with a narrator. The narrator sounded really familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d heard his voice before. The credits listed him has Tony Jay, which didn’t ring a bell, so Katie looked him up at IMDB.

Turns out he was the narrator on The Bard’s Tale, and I’d been hearing his voice all afternoon.

Weekend Report

Friday: Stuck at work trying frantically to finish a website redesign that had to be done by that evening. I honestly don’t remember anything about the evening, as the still-not-gone cold slammed into me full force once the adrenaline rush wore off.

Saturday: alenxa and I risked going out to lunch, and managed not to cough all over the restaurant. Watched a couple episodes of Justice League and finally saw The Bride of Frankenstein (which I suspect I saw when I was maybe 10, because I recognized the framing sequence — more about that later — but I don’t remember much more). It’s interesting to see just how much of the Frankenstein mythos not only isn’t in the book, but isn’t in the first movie. Much of the tearing around the countryside is in Bride, for instance, and Igor doesn’t even show up until the third movie, Son of Frankenstein (and he’s a far cry from the mad doctor’s faithful assistant!) Watched an episode of Crusade, “The Well of Forever,” which explores hyperspace and starts to hint at Galen’s backstory (told in much more detail in the Technomage novels.)

I also caught up on some graphic novels, including Sam Kieth’s Four Women (disturbing and creepy, but a good story) and The Sandwalk Adventures, a somewhat offbeat story that covers the basics of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Sort of the “Cartoon History of Evolution.”

Sunday: Ran some errands. Finished Black Powder War. Actually ran the air conditioner for a while, though the floorplan means it doesn’t actually accomplish much. Went to Orange’s International Street Fair for dinner.

Monday: More errands. Re-read the second round of Tangent Comics that DC put out in 1998. This was the series where they took the names of various heroes and villains and created entirely new characters. Overall, the first set was better, but it was still an interesting side universe that I would have liked to see more of. Caught up on a couple of items I’d been meaning to add to my website. Also read half of the first book of A Distant Soil, which I first heard about ~20 years go and have been meaning to check out for ~10 years. After several issues of setting up a major space epic, it’s suddenly shifted to an Arthurian battle. I assume the plotlines will converge by the end of the book. Watched about half of Grosse Point Blank. It wasn’t as good as I remembered, and when Katie said it just wasn’t grabbing her, I realized I was more interested in showing her the movie than re-watching it myself.

I’m finally getting over this #$!@ cold, though I’m still coughing from time to time. And with the heat and dehydration, it’s still leaving me feeling completely wiped out several times a day. Oddly enough, I found myself looking forward to going back to work because the AC (when it’s running, anyway) is more effective than what we have at home. At least my ears are finally getting unplugged. Lunch on Saturday was really odd, because voices were muffled, but the background music wasn’t. Of course now everything sounds oddly loud.