I should write something here sometime.

The Crazies
Iowa town is destroyed by its own residents after they get infected by a govt. plague. While I always like to see Iowa get what's coming to it, there are no swamps! lol
Recommended only for horror fans.

Terminator Salvation
WTF was the point of that? No tension at all, considering the original has you on the edge of your seat the first time you see it. McG is a hack director. I will say I really liked the in-and-out helicopter crash at the beginning, but it's all downhill from there. What happened to the end of the world? It seemed a lot more bleak in previous Terminator films. The cameo at the end wasn't enough either.
Not Recommended.

The Lookout
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is my new favorite actor, and here he's a former high school hockey player that is injured in a car crash of his own fault. He suffers mostly mentally/emotionally, including problems with short term memory. He's recruited to help rob the bank he works in as the solo night shift cleaner in a podunk Kansas town near Kansas City. Since I'm from there, it was hard to overlook the fact everything screamed "Canada" where it was actually filmed and no one plays hockey. Most won't have that problem.
Recommended.

World's Greatest Dad
Black comedy from writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait. Robin Williams is a failed writer working as an English teacher at his son's high school. His son also happens to be a world class idiot douche. After finding his son dead from an autoerotic asphyxiation accident, he restages it as a suicide and writes a suicide letter. This suicide letter begins to get attention, and suddenly the teacher starts to get everything he wanted. Extra special surprise from Robin Williams at the end.
Recommended.

Watched a lot of movies on the weekend after we put the baby to bed... but I haven't written them up! Clearing out the back log. (copied from INTPc, so any references to something not here is actually referring to there)

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Same disclaimer applies

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Copied from INTPc, so if something doesn't make sense, blame them.

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Dear Kicky,

I kind of hope that will be your nickname. No one has any good nicknames anymore. Not even dull ones like "Lefty" or "Poncho". People come up with their own on the internet now, but that doesn't quite carry the cache as one bestowed upon you by another. A nickname people will actually use out in public. Maybe that's why people choose such moronic nicknames online. No one actually fears being introduced to anyone of consequence as "A55COCKBrah". Maybe they should.

You've been with us for nearly 4.5 months. I had hoped by now some of the pressures your mom and I are under would fade, but they only seem to have gown in strength. I try to appear at ease, but I'm an increasing bundle of nerves, it seems. Of course, you are not helping any. Just go to sleep! Or failing that, amuse yourself and let us sleep! Your mom is particularly weary. She can't get much done during the day, and cannot get a good night's sleep. And you're not even teething yet!

Summer is upon us. Quite a difference from the cold winter week you were born. After I got done working, I really had to bundle up and walk the handful of blocks to the hospital. We were concerned abut taking you home. Not only was it the first time we ever used the car seat, but we had to worry about the sharp cold that cuts into you like a knife. We didn't know how a newborn infant would handle it. I guess we didn't need to worry. You were on your own for six months, you could handle a little cold.

Now that same walk to the hospital would just make me sweat a little in the D.C. humidity. Oh yeah – summer here can be a bit much at times. I'm told it's not too different from the Midwestern summers I grew up with, but perhaps that is because here we walk a bit more and take public transportation. No driving from parking lot to parking lot in A/C cooled cars.

You won't notice much of this. You won't notice summer fading into autumn. Or the bleakness of the trees come winter. If you do notice, you won't remember. You'll learn to crawl, then walk, then run, then talk. All of it will be lost to you in the mists of childhood. I don't know whether you will get to know the summers here as you grow up, or summers in a place like I grew up, or even some place completely unknown to me yet. All I hope is that it is a good childhood, one that makes you smile with fondness after I am long dead and buried. That nothing that keeps me awake at night when you are asleep ever concerns you. That your childhood is everything all children deserve.



P.S. Can you keep the screeching down in the morning? Thanks!

Think we might be going friends-only soon, lol.

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I think I'm going to actually finish the story of which I posted part three yesterday. I wasn't sure I was going to, mostly because I wasn't sure I knew how.

I'm going to ask the opinions of other writers and artists and ask about their completed works. Do you plan it all out beforehand? Let what you are creating take you wherever?

When I started this 500 words per day project, I also promised myself I wouldn't force myself to write on days I didn't feel like it. I wanted to give myself a push on days I was ambivalent, but I didn't want to make this into an "eat your vegetables" exercise either.

That meant that things I wrote might just peter out and die on the vine. Or find life and live on, it didn't matter much to me. As long as I started writing again. This also meant the approach I was taking was the "find out where this was going" method. I might have a vague idea of what I wanted, but never all laid out. This fits with what I've read from many other fiction writers. They wrote of letting the characters take you place. If you tried to force them to do your bidding, the writing would be forced and fake. Then your characters became caricatures. As bad as I find my writing to be, I wanted to avoid making it worse. I suppose I will become more confident in any ability to let it all play out the more I write.

Or perhaps if you have your plot all planned out, the "correct" characters populate it, I don't know. Somehow I think this falls more into the Tom Clancy kind of storytelling, where the characters service the plot in ways that I don't find entirely natural.

In this case, I thought I might write a passionate little story. Former lovers, reuniting. A little bit of friction perhaps, but they would soon overcome it and ignite the bed. What I wrote instead, started bad, and then got ugly. What I see coming is even uglier. I stepped away from it for a couple of days, wondering if I should let it play out. I wasn't sure how it would all end either. This helps at times, go off and do something else for a while until you think of what to do next. An ending came to me, strangely enough, while I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink of all places. It was a bit surprising, but it... well I will either write it or tell about this ending later.

So I guess I come back to those reading this. How do you operate? What works for you? Do you go back and edit while writing/creating? Wait until you get it all out? Plan it? Wing it?

I am curious. Drop me a line here, or elsewhere if you know how to contact me. I'd like to know what you think.

My daughter is asleep on my chest right now, wrapped up in a sling. I got up to get a drink and her head rolled forward all the way. She did not wake up at all. She should be awake now for her feeding, but both her and my wife are asleep and I am loathe to wake either of them. They can use the sleep.

Parenting is both easier and harder than I expected. I haven't slept through the night since she was born, and it is only worse for my wife who has to breastfeed her. Changing diapers, giving her a bath, taking her to the doctor... none of this presents much challenge. The real challenge is in dealing with her while she is awake.

My daughter operates in three primary modes:
Sleeping
Eating
Crying

I'm not joking. This girl cries constantly! Our entire mode of operation is to get her to fall asleep after eating so she stops crying. Maybe 15% of the time she will be awake and not crying. I think I'm being generous with that percentage too. She'll look around a bit but usually start crying.

She loves being held. Or perhaps attached to a boob. Even in a dead sleep, if we put her down on her back, she will wake up within twenty minutes and start crying. She basically has not slept in her crib at all these six weeks. She falls asleep in her small positioner in bed with us. If we try to remove her from that without going directly to feeding = crying.

We can't set her down for more than a few minutes and do anything on our own or we are rewarded with a tantrum. One of us either holds her or has her in a sling (or my wife is breastfeeding her) while the other takes a shower or makes something to eat. This is the most spoiled baby ever!

Perhaps we could set her down and ignore her for longer periods while she cries, but living in a townhouse makes us quite sensitive to our neighbors. It's bad enough when she screams while changing her diaper in the middle of the night (and she screams with each change unless she has a belly full of milk). We can get a few minutes while she is "milk drunk", the condition she's in where she's done feeding. She acts drunk. Kinda half-awake with her eyes rolling back in her head and a stupid grin on her face. That doesn't last long as we have to burp her and she is soon alert and looking to cry.

She is soooo cute while asleep. The Wrath of Kicky Baby however, is a horror film that plays on a constant loop in our house.

Parenting her is pretty frustrating when you want to do something else (like even check your email) but she demands to be held and rocked into slumber. Life wasn't meant to be lived in twenty minute snatches!

I think this will get better when she gets older. When she gets more interested in her surroundings outside of nipples and how she is being held.

God, I hope so.

About nine years ago I got addicted to playing the PC game The Sims. I was one of the first people to get the game and I enjoyed playing it for several years. I'd get the expansion packs and the downloaded items. I loved designing new houses and filling them with the most expensive items my digital families could buy. I often had several families going at one time. Building up their skills and inviting over people so they could form enough friendships so they could advance in their careers.

That part of the game was easy to master. I just made sure my characters had enough free time outside their daily chores, and a big party on the weekend was enough to increase their social ratings. Never had to worry about losing a job (unless you skipped work, but a new job was easy to get if that happened). Up and up my characters went on the career ladder. The more money they made, the better stuff I could buy, the more I could expand the homes. If a relationship was in danger of breaking, I just scheduled some face time with the other person and everything was fine again.

Looking back now, I was probably playing that game in avoidance of my real life. My marriage had fallen apart, I didn't care about finding a real job that paid anything, any future I had envisioned no longer seemed in the cards. The digital lives of my characters were more satisfying. I could micromanage them to my heart's content. Making their lives and houses more and more grand. Ignoring how small and pitiful my life had become.

I'm not sure why I ever really stopped. My life and my marriage improved, but not greatly. Maybe it was I had figured the game out. I knew exactly what to do to get my digital family into into the life of my dreams. Maybe I was finally ready to start working on my own life. Maybe for all its flash, The Sims really wasn't a good simulation of life.

I'm supposed to write 500 words a day. Knock off the rust. In a way, it reminds me of that game. You'd talk into the mirror until the bar graphic filled up and your character gained a charisma point. Work out on the exercise machine and gain an athletic point. Except there are no bars in real life. I can write 500 words forever and still suck at writing. Even working out in real life doesn't bring the results of The Sims. You don't get tendinitis in the game like I've had for the last three months.

In the game, you had the option of whether your couple (if you had a couple) has a baby or not. We didn't get that option, we just found out we were going to have one. Real life can't be planned out with exacting detail. Any time you think you have life under control something will come along and wreck it. Life is more exciting and fantastic and scary and sad than any game can ever hope to approximate.

When I'm out shopping I will sometimes walk by the computer games and see the newest incarnation of The Sims. I think about buying it, remembering how I enjoyed it. I resist it every time. I'd rather write. Even if it never goes anywhere.