All the Billion Other Moments

So I joined Bitstrips...

Family

My family was accustomed to me working in the home. They never bothered me during the work day (my office is separate enough that we have an intercom). But they were quite accustomed to me having lunch with them daily (as was I with them). Also, before if I had to watch one or more of the children while someone had an appointment I could walk downstairs and quite often keep working while the kids played.

The biggest change was the addition of a new family member, which is always an adjustment. She’s doing great by the way. I never imagined having three daughters, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. My wife is a great mother, and I try my hardest to be a good father. The kids are all damn smart, which can be tricky because you forget how old they are, and that while they can talk like adults they can’t understand things like adults.

My second daughter has changed dramatically. She started talking at six months old, but it really took off this time last year. She added about thirty new words in a month and never looked back. Soon she was referring to herself in third person, and after about two months she figured out how “I” works. By the time she turned two was speaking in full sentences. Now she talks better than I do sometimes. She’s generally very happy with an amazing sense of humor, although being two this is starting to change as she tries to find how far she can push things.

The roughest part was getting her to go to sleep in her own room. I spent many a night rocking her in a chair, singing to her in complete darkness. I actually got to the point where I could sing “Twinkle Twinkle” on autopilot, which let me listen to audiobooks at these times (hey, she didn’t care). Finally she got the hang of it, and has since moved into her older sisters room.

The oldest went to pre-school last year. She loved it and we were excited to see her doing so well on her own. She’s come a real long way in her swimming, and we even wrote a few stories together this year. I’ve started reading chapter books to her when I can. She really enjoys the Paddington books from the library (how did these go out of print?). Her drawing has really improved. The people she draws have distinguishing characteristics. At least half the time we can tell who the picture is of before she tells us.

She started school-school last week. I dropped her off for the first time this week. I found it quite stressful. My wife had gone to all the open-house type things while I watched the other kids. I didn’t quite understand how the drop-off line worked, and then the lady pulled the van door before I put the van in park. The automatic doors do not like this, and they pretty much stop after opening an inch. The van then proceeds to beep at you incessantly. You would think, since the thing can talk it would say, “Please put the vehicle in park and try to open the door again.” Nope. It just beeps away while you feel like an idiot in front of the Kindergarten teacher who is yelling something at you that you can’t make out over the beeping. Anyway, I’ll be dropping her off in my car from now on which doesn’t talk or have automatic doors, so that’s one thing off my mind.

My wife has had to deal with the brunt of these changes. She went from being home with two kids with a husband who was less than a minute away to having three kids with a husband off at work during the week. At times it seems to take it’s toll, but mostly she amazes me. I can’t imagine doing what she does and keeping my sanity. A lot of things have changed since we fell in love thirteen years ago, but not how we feel about each other.

I turned thirty-one yesterday, which means it’s been a year since I left Sun Microsystems (SUNWJAVA) for my current job. A lot of things happened, good and bad, expected and unexpected. Things started changing pretty quickly last September, and it hasn’t stopped yet (of course it never really does, but some of these were a bit bigger than I was used to).

Work

I’m starting with work because it was the most immediate change, starting the day after turning thirty. Besides working somewhere new I also went from a work-from-home 7:00am to 3:00pm job to a more standard 9-to-5 office setting. It’s still casual (which is good because so am I) and fairly flexible. The people are great, which is very important. Working in an office is quite a change. Firstly, I now need to shower before work instead of just before lunch. Also, with my vision is so poor I’m distracted by things out of the corner of my eye (which are all just different colored blurs). I’m pretty sure this is a hold over from getting the dodge ball in the side of the head because I couldn’t see it coming.

The work is interesting and often enjoyable. I hadn’t used Visual Studio since the mid 90s, so that was a change. I’d never touched C# or .NET before. The target browser was the polar opposite of everything I’d done to date. Once I got my head around ASP.NET I got the hang of things pretty fast (although I still have a tendency to code to the standard, then work around the browser bugs). I’m happy I made the jump, and I have no regrets (other than wishing I had been laid off from Sun).

I’m looking forward to the coming year. I’m working on some good projects and I’m excited about some of the new directions things are going in. My contributions seem well received and appreciated. My desk feels like my desk, and I look forward to seeing the people I work with. Not bad at all.

Born: July 12 04:02am EDT
Weight: 7 lbs 10 oz
Height: 20 inches

I missed the fact that yesterday was Zette Appreciation Day, but I’ll try and make up for it now.

In late 2003 I was convinced that writing a novel was much to hard a thing to try. I had it listed in my goals for something to work on by 2008. But then I saw Zette’s announcement at Forward Motion that she would be teaching an online class during which participants would write a novel over a period of two years. I signed up, not sure what to expect. Well it worked. I wrote a novel. It wasn’t polished and ready for submission by the end of the class due to some poor decisions on my part, but I had a completed first draft and some solid ideas for how to proceed. I also wasn’t afraid of writing novels anymore, which is a big one.

When I did start serious revisions I realized that I’d lost the detailed critique Zeete had sent me (which is what comes of replying to auto-generated forum emails without changing the subject). I emailed her in a panic explaining what had happened and what I believed the subject of the email to be and she went through the effort of digging it up and sending it again. It had probably been about a year since she first sent it, and it was a big help.

Zette always seems to want to help. I seem to remember her taking some flak on the NaNoWriMo boards for trying to offer good solid advice to folks about what is considered publication and scams to be wary of. You can’t really help people who don’t want to be helped, but it must be disheartening when they attack you for it. A quick check just now shows that she’s still there offering helpful advice to those who will listen.

If you’re willing, she’ll probably help you someday

To learn more about Zette:
Forward Motion — http://www.fmwriters.com
Vision — http://www.lazette.net/Vision/
Zette’s website — http://www.lazette.net

I got an early start yesterday hoping to make some good progress on my revisions. Then the kids decided to get up at 6:30. They were a bit of a handful most of the day (the family cold is not bringing out the best in people). Later when I tried again I only managed to squeeze in just under an hour before I was needed. Then I noticed the water dripping into our bedroom. So up to attic I go to find that the central air, which should drain outside, well, isn’t. Joy!

Oh, and I found at least six bee, hornet, or wasp nests on the house, and I only had three mostly empty cans of bee/hornet/wasp spray. Just enough to wake them up when I tried to get them last night.

Today we have a pretty busy day, and on top of it I need to get everything out of the way of the attic entrance. Not sure where I’m going to move stuff too… I’m going to try and get a bit more work on the revision done now, but I don’t have high hopes at this point.

I mentioned before that we were all not feeling very well. I’m mostly better, and so are the kids (Rachel a little more so, Vanessa a little less). Denise, on the other hand, is about the same, and it looks like she’ll stay that way for a while yet. So everything (including the writing) is on hold until things settle down. After having a crazy, exhausting week last week, this one is a lot closer to normal, but not quite there yet. I’m itching to get started on a number of things, but family comes first.

All four of us have some sort of cold. Rachel is probably doing the best, which is unfortunate because she can run circles around us when we’re all feeling great, so now she has all this excess energy because no one will run around with her, and jumping about makes her cough. I’m trying to pretend I’m not sick to take care of everyone else, but it’s not always working.

My boss was nice enough to drop off my work computer at my house today, so at least I can get work done without infecting my whole office. I’m hoping to return to something a bit more normal any day now, but who can tell.

One of the great life lessons my dad taught me was “You can’t win.” He taught me this every time he had a certain type of argument with my mother. Once it was over he would explain to me that he could not win these arguments, and that I would never win them either. I haven’t thought about this in a while, but just a moment ago, my wife came into my office to yell at me because when she came upstairs to go to bed she thought I might be hiding, ready to jump out and scare her. I wasn’t. I was checking my email before going to bed. Apparently she figured this out, and came to yell at me that it would have been horrible had I been planning on scaring her. In fact, she was scared that I might be doing something to scare her, even though I wasn’t. I asked for clarification that I was being yelled at for not scaring her. “No!”, she replied.

I’m so glad my dad prepared me for this. Thanks dad! Good night!

Holly Lisle posted the the introduction to Holly Lisle’s Create A Culture Clinic, the next volume in her Worldbuilding Course. Reading it really drove some things home for me. My wife often asks why I choose to write stories set in a fantasy world that I have to create, giving myself that much extra work to do (other people ask too, but she asks most often). There are two problems with that. Firstly, it’s not so much a choice so much as when I sit down to write, I write fantasy stories. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write fantasy stories. Secondly, I don’t think it is more work.

No one seems to believe me on either of those, but the second one seems to dwarf the first in peoples minds. How can I possibly believe such a thing? Because it’s true.

If I want to have a race of purple headed bird people in my world I have some work to do. How to they interact with other races? How are their lives different than humans? What’s their history? Do they speak their own language? Do they eat worms? That’s just the start, and perhaps these violet faced flying folk will only play a passing role in my story.

What’s that? I’m failing to prove my point? Be patient.

If I want to set a story in modern day Saginaw, Michigan, where I’ve never been, I still have quite a bit of work to do. What are the people like? What’s the economic and social structure? What local slang is in use, and by what age groups? What clothing lines are popular with high schoolers? What’s the ethnic makeup of the city? What color are the police cars? How many schools do they have? That too is just the start.

See, in the fantasy world, I make my own answers. Sure I have to make them work in a believable context, and I might make some stupid choices I have to later deal with in some way, but I can’t really be wrong. After all, I’m the world authority on those purple headed bird people. You might think people will be forgiving in the second scenario. It’s only fiction after all, right? Not that I’ve seen. Authors who take liberties with the world we live in get ripped apart. Maybe not all the time, but I’ve seen it happen about really stupid stuff.

So why not write about my hometown, or somewhere I know more about firsthand? I’ve always felt I had a lot of good reasons why I chose not to do that. But Holly’s introduction gave me another one by pointing out a big danger in writing about the world you live in. If you fail to capture the culture in the story, once the culture changes you’re story will no longer work. Yikes! It’s not that it can’t be done, and maybe I could do it, but it sounds like a lot of extra work.