A Medley of Extemporanea

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And done

Dec01
by berry on December 1, 2016 at 8:50 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

So, I managed it again. I sat down on November 1st, and wrote out a story until November 30th, starting with Once upon a Time and ending with The End. It was relatively easy this year (as far as writing 50k in 30 days can be considered easy), mostly because I spent about six months honing my ideas and plans into an outline that made sense, held together logically, and yet still gave me some wiggle room for when something came up that I just had to add.

The story is aimed at the middle-grade reader, and is full of pranks, mistaken identities, time travel, steampunk-society sentient dinosaurs (and no, I didn’t forget a comma there, some of the characters are dinosaurs living in a steam-powered, highly advanced society in the late Cretaceous), rockets, and historical celebrity cameos. One of the things I changed on the fly, for instance, is that the heroine, a Maker girl called Elisa has to go on a quest to find a dinosaur that escaped into modern times; I originally had her mother helping her, but opted instead for Mark Twain to come help out and crack wise throughout the helping. I think his character really made the story jump.

It’s also not finished yet. While I wrote “The End” on November 30th, and I passed the fifty thousand word mark, I have many areas where I stubbed out the action, because I “wasn’t feeling it” for that part, and I wanted to make sure that I kept moving forward. Nota Bene: None of these parts were boring parts that I wanted to skip, but more that they were parts that needed a lot of care to get just right, or I found that I needed a bit more research to get the information correct (part of that whole describe something in detail so that when you gloss over the next thing, you’ve already shown that you could have described it if you wanted to, but just decided against it…). I still need to go back and take care of those things, and to fix the names of some of the characters. I also changed my mind in a couple of places about who would be accompanying Elisa at a certain point or another in the story, but rather than going back and rewriting, I merely left myself a note to fix it up in post. I also need to get my dinos to be from at least a modicum of the same era. Currently, they are from all over the dinosaur age, Jurassic, Triassic, Cretaceous, you name it, I’ve got a dinosaur from it.

One of the most important things about NaNoWriMo, I think, is the normalization of the writing process. I already write every day, sometimes just little pieces, sometimes parts of bigger wholes. But I tend to let things drop. The laser focus that the thirty days of November requires really helps me get my rhythm, and while I usually complain about a lack of regular writing hours, I managed to find a schedule and rhythm that really worked for me. I’d write on the bus in the morning, at lunch at a write-in, and on the bus home. That would get me almost 2000 words every weekday. The weekends were tough, since I had chock-a-block activities, but the solid outline and the constant eating away at the word pile got me through to the end. I have to use this momentum to finish off the stubbed out bits, and then edit this manuscript into a sellable condition, and then I think I’m going to be good. I think I can sell this one. Fingers crossed!

PS: I have to thank the MLs of the Ottawa Region for putting on such good write-ins, and my writing group at work for being such awesome boosters. Maybe I could have done it without you, but it would not have been half as satisfying or a quarter as fun. Thanks all!

└ Tags: amwriting, nanowrimo
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Still not there!

Jan16
by berry on January 16, 2015 at 9:44 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Another checkin. There are new people on this page, but alas, none of them are me. Next year, next year.

(NB: I actually almost forgot to grab the page this year. Caught it with minutes to spare. Phew!)

The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

Authors Born On This Day: Authors Who Died On This Day:
  • Charles Perrault (1628-1703)
  • Jean Beraud (1849-1935)
  • Robert Underwood Johnson (1853-1937)
  • Charles F. Horne, Ph.D. (1870-1942)
  • Jack London (1876-1916)
  • Franz Molnár (1878-1952)
  • Milt Youngren (1899-1969)
  • Clement Hurd (1908-1988)
  • Tadeusz Twarogowski (1915-1989)
  • Jan Józef Szczepanski (1919-2003)
  • Pierre Versins (1923-2001)
  • Arthur Wise (1923-1983)
  • Gene Baro (1924-1982)
  • Marc Behm (1925-2007)
  • T. R. Fehrenbach (1925-2013)
  • Zach Hughes (1928)
  • Jacques Hamelink (1939)
  • Thomas A. Endrey (1940)
  • Geoffrey Hoyle (1941)
  • Sandy Frances Duncan (1942)
  • Alan Passes (1943)
  • Sandra Salvaressa Burton (1945-2010)
  • Henrietta Branford (1946-1999)
  • William Nicholson (1948)
  • Tim Underwood (1948)
  • Haruki Murakami (1949)
  • Kirker E. Kranz (1949)
  • D. J. Savage (1950)
  • Rush Limbaugh (1951)
  • Walter Mosley (1952)
  • David Brooks (1953)
  • Donald Tyson (1954)
  • C. S. Friedman (1957)
  • Steve Fiorilla (1961-2009)
  • Rob Zombie (1965)
  • Nicolas Cluzeau (1968)
  • Van Allen Plexico (1968)
  • John Jackson Miller (1968)
  • David Mitchell (1969)
  • Kaja Foglio (1970)
  • Ian Thomas Healy (1972)
  • A. Lee Martinez (1973)
  • Johanna Frappier (1973)
  • Kim Vandervort (1974)
  • Laurel Snyder (1974)
  • Siobhan Vivian (1979)
  • Professor von Kramer (1752-1819)
  • Grace King (1852-1932)
  • Thomas Le Breton (1854-1932)
  • John McCoy (1857-1924)
  • Victor-Émile Michelet (1861-1938)
  • Pierre Mille (1864-1941)
  • Michel Corday (1869-1937)
  • Rudolf Těsnohlídek (1882-1928)
  • Lyllian Huntley Harris (1883-1939)
  • Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
  • Nevil Shute (1899-1960)
  • M. Zakaria Goneim (1905-1959)
  • Antony Trew (1906-1996)
  • Elizabeth Sewell (1919-2001)
  • Meriol Trevor (1919-2000)
  • Bruce Cassiday (1920-2005)
  • Kenneth Sterling (1920-1995)
  • Margaret B. Kreig (1922-1998)
  • March Laumer (1923-2000)
  • Anthony Di Giannurio (1925-2008)
  • Neal Barrett, Jr. (1929-2014)
  • Kenn Davis (1932-2010)
  • Reginald Hill (1936-2012)
  • Richard Kearns (1951-2012)
  • Janrae Frank (1954-2014)
  • Howard Hopkins (1961-2012)
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Dinner conversations, a play in 2 acts

Nov17
by berry on November 17, 2014 at 9:29 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Act 1

Scene: A suburban kitchen table. A family of five sits eating, discussing the day’s events. Mother has been speaking about a book she’s currently reading

Mother: I don’t know about this book. It’s bugging me on a fundamental level.

Father: How do you mean?

M: Well, it’s the whole Chekov’s gun on the mantlepiece. Only in this book, the guy has this really tiny gun, and he’s spent months learning the intricacies of it, and how to hide it from the bad guy he’s going to use it on, all that. Then one day he accidentally flushes it down the toilet.

Kid 1: Seriously?

Kid 2: Mommy, you said a toilet word at the table!

Kid 3: Toilet! Hahahahahahahahaha!

F: Man, that does sound pretty pointless.

K1: (diagramming a bathroom on the kitchen table with his finger) I don’t understand. How can he have flushed the gun down the toilet? Did he maybe put it on the counter right on the edge here (pointing) and then bumped it when he reached for the toilet paper and didn’t notice? Could you explain it again?

K3: Toilet paper! Hahahahahahahahahaha!

M: Daddy, you’re the writer, explain about the gun.

F: (with a puzzled look on his face) Um, sure. The guy dropped his tiny gun in the toilet. I don’t know what else there is to say. Maybe he just didn’t want to put his hand in there.

K2: Because of the poop!

M: No potty words at the table.

K2: You started it!

K3: Poop! HAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!!!!!!

Act 2

Later that night, in a suburban bedroom.

F: You know, that book does sound pretty bad.

M: I know. It’s really irritating the way the author builds up characters only to have them die.

F: And that thing with the tiny gun. It seems so ridiculous.

M: Um, the gun was a metaphor.

(Fade, as M laughs on and on).

 

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On taking breaks

Nov03
by berry on November 3, 2014 at 9:42 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I’m a writer. One of the things that writers do — the most important, really — is write. To that end, I had mulled the idea of getting into a daily writing habit for several years. I had several false starts, if you can call writing every day for three months a false start, but I finally found a tool that could motivate me to get my butt into the chair and spit words onto the page. The tool? The Magic Spreadsheet, created by Tony Pisculli and popularized by Mur Lafferty. It’s worked well for me: since I started using it, I’ve written the first draft of a novel, twenty-one short stories, a thirty page outline for a trilogy, and countless opinion pieces (which I’ve mostly kept to myself, but I’ve put some up here).

While slapping down the words required to continue my streak on the spreadsheet comes easily, I find that I want to concentrate on getting a second draft of the novel done. The spreadsheet accommodates editing phases, but I found that it just wasn’t working for me so I’ve decided to take a break.

Today is my five-hundredth day of writing, and I think that’s a good milestone at which to pause and take stock. I’m not quitting, just taking a breather. I admit it’s a funny time to do it, but I think that the impeding start of NaNoWriMo helped push me into this decision; I didn’t want to start something new with my other novel still bouncing around in my head.

It’s been fun, it’s been trying. I’ve met great people through the spreadsheet, and I look forward to being back on it, just not before December, maybe.

(In a similar vein, I’m taking a social media holiday too so you won’t see my witticisms on Twitter/Facebook for the month either. I still have notifications on, so if you want to get in touch with me, I’ll be … surprised?)

└ Tags: amNotWriting, MagicSpreadsheet
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On Arterial Transplants

Oct26
by berry on October 26, 2014 at 10:09 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

A few days ago, the Ottawa Citizen ran the opinion piece “Demolish the Queensway” by Jonathan McLeod. In it, he posits that once we have a working LRT and have finished connecting the bits in the south to create a usable ring road, we should tear down the Queensway and make the space more people-friendly. When I first read the piece, it was with skepticism; where would all those cars go? But I began to see the beauty of it.

Think about Phase 2 of the LRT: It doesn’t satisfy Kanata, as one of our electoral hopefuls can’t help himself but point out at every opportunity, but it covers much of the rest of the city. The Confederation Line website states that the trip from Tunney’s to Blair will take less than 24 minutes and covers 12.5 km and thirteen stations. If we extrapolate those numbers to the rest of the system, the 7 km trip from Bayshore to Tunney’s would take 13 minutes. Place D’Orleans is another 10 km from Blair, so another 18 minutes, but there’s only four stops so let’s make that 13 minutes as well. So, 50 minutes from one end of town to the other, rush hour or not, snowing or not. In comparison, Google Maps claims 28 minutes by car from my place with no traffic. Last time I went to Place D’Orleans to see a show at 8pm, it took me almost an hour.

Sure, getting rid of the Queensway would be a shock, but the negative pressure would send people on other routes, including mass transit. Add the ring road. Make a viable connection to the Quebec highways so transport trucks don’t have unnecessarily drive into town. Complete Phase 2 of the LRT. Make Phase 3 replace the Queensway from Stittsville to Lees, and extend from Bowesville station to Baseline via Barrhaven. Other roads still exist. I have friends in the west end that already won’t touch the highway during rush hour since it’s a crapshoot when they’re going to get into the office, so they drive down Baseline, Carling, Hunt Club, anything. These roads will still exist for those that absolutely cannot fathom not having their car, and a smaller road can still exist beside the LRT, along, of course, with cycle tracks. But the point is that taking public transit, walking, and cycling should become the default when the highway is no longer there. It’ll be easier. It’ll be faster.

“What about all the work that’s been put into the Queensway lately?” you ask. I’m not suggesting we tear it down tomorrow. The infrastructure isn’t there. This is a Phase 3 task. Phase 3, if you listen to anyone who isn’t Matt Muirhead, is 2031. The highway will need work again by then, but we can reuse some of the bits that have been put in recently, like the bridges that have been replaced, if we don’t want everything at grade. Personally, I don’t think we should do this, as it would limit the possibilities of what could be done with the space.

The Queensway currently sees (by currently, of course, I mean in 2010 since those are the numbers that are available) roughly 160k cars a day in both directions. Split that in two for east and west, and two again for morning and evening rush hour as we all know that there’s never any traffic after rush hour is done, and we have the need to move 40k cars in each direction. Some of those will go on the ring road, since it’d be more convenient, some will throw their arms up in the air and actually move to a neighbourhood closer to their job. Let’s say we don’t, or the number of cars we shunt off brings us back to the 2010 numbers. Over a two-hour rush, we’d have 20k per hour, or roughly 21k people. Look around you next rush hour. Not a lot of car pooling going on. The Calgary LRT, which operates in similar conditions to which ours will, states that its 4-car trains, with the same capacities the O-Train have been touting, will practicably carry roughly 20k per hour. That’s almost everybody. And that’s not the only train running. With this third line, almost everyone in the city would be served.

Having a reliable transit option is a real game changer. I grew up with car culture in the West Island of Montreal, mostly because the bus service out in “the boonies” where I lived was laughable. Heaven forbid you had to stay late at school, that meant one milk-run followed by a missed connection followed by another milk-run. Band practice until 4pm meant I was home at 6pm some nights. So I took my driving exam as soon as I could and pretty much took over driving responsibilities from my mum, mostly so I could have her car whenever I needed it. When I moved to Cote-des-Neiges, I took it with me, since she had given up her license.  Driving in town was aggravating. I could never find parking. If we took it out for some reason or another, I’d sometimes have to park it two blocks away, but I’d have to move it before rush hour, lest it get towed. It was a liability. I had to move it when the snow plow came, lest it get towed. I had to make sure it was still not broken into. I had to use it every once in a while to make sure it didn’t rot on the street. And, on top of all of this, I didn’t need it anymore. The buses worked. The metro was a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. If I didn’t want to take the blue line, I could hop on a bus that would take me to the green line in ten minutes. From there I could get anywhere in the city, fast as you like.

This is what I imagine the future of commuting in this city could be as well, but with the suburbs reaping the benefits as well as the core. With stations covering most of the population, a well-used LRT could pay for itself, and allow the bus network to thrive with the added transit funds. Any LRT stop would be a ten minute bus ride or less. Ottawa would be ready to face the future (hint: oil), get people where they want to get to conveniently and easily, and reap the benefits of reasonable rush-hour commutes.


One thing I think the article got wrong: The Queensway didn’t cut neighbourhoods in half, the railroad did. The highway follows an old CNR right of way that was operational from at least the 1870’s pretty much up until they poured the concrete in the early 60’s. There used to be a rail-yard between Bronson and Bank, separating, as McLeod says in the opinion piece, the downtown core from its neighbours. I say put the tracks back, with a Complete Street beside them, and I think you might make everyone happy. Everyone except, of course, all the “your stupid” commenters on the Citizen page. They’ll never be happy.

Bank St. Yard

View from Bank Street towards Bronson taken in June 1910. Catherine St. just visible on the right. From Colin Churcher’s Railway Pages. Click photo for more information.

└ Tags: LRT, ottcity
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