With no bad luck, I'll be going back to college in January. This'll mean some big changes, as I'll no longer be able to stay up till four in the morning anymore... I'm afraid that college will curtail my writing and my art, which is basically all I have in the real world these days. But not going is just stupid. Last time I basically missed the whole college experience, getting into online games, which I have sworn off since then.

Either way, this is a way in advance heads up. I don't know what'll happen, and honestly, have never, ever, felt so lost in my entire life. But them's the breaks.

Next month's WC Monthly is going to have a feature, no matter what theme we end up with, on NaNoWriMo. What I want from you is 'horror/success stories' from your previous attempts at completing the ilustrious month-novel. As always, we need all the help we can get!

In addition, we need

Questions for Ask Mister Saint
Poem nominations
articles (we'll wait on the theme for that, will choose the theme in a day or two)
reviews
opinion columns

and all that. 

Today's match results.

Tito Ortiz v. Ken Shamrock:

Ortiz, of course. Ken is in his forties, Ortiz in his thirties. Ken has been in MMA since UFC 1, there was no winning this match for him. Hopefully Ortiz will fight a real fight soon, instead of against reality show kids, businessmen (he has a match with Dana White, head of UFC, soon) and men who are far past their prime like Shamrock. In December he goes one on one with the lightweight champion, Chuck Liddell, and I'll be paying to see that just to watch Ortiz get decimated by someone who is actually in his age group.

T.M. Saint v. runaway pit bull:

T.M. Saint, but damn, that's a strong dog. He came into my house when my brother opened the back door for something, just charged in like he owned the place, and went for Jinx, who outraced him like the dog had six broken feet. Jinx then hid beside me. So I went in and snagged the dog by his collar (no tags) and held him fast until he calmed down. Then Iz and I dragged him, literally, out of the house. The neighbor woman (out of whose house he had just come) was there, and I asked her for a rope. I clipped the rope to his collar and we walked him home, where I knotted the rope onto a strong section of his broken chain (the end had snapped off). 

The neat thing is that the dog was much more classy than Ortiz, as it was just a big, freakishly strong teddy bear.

With the first issue of WC Monthly behind us, now I can concentrate on... the next, uh, issue... of WC Monthly. Yeah.

Actually I do have some thoughts. We got some support from the WC Masses, and though we are appreciative it wasn't nearly enough.

According to the nifty little buzzer button thingy down at the bottom of mainpage, there are about ninety active members at WC. That means that we ought to be seeing more activity! If you want WC to be of any help to anyone, get active. You don't have to join the crew or even run a wikipage, but you do have to participate! Ninety active members means I want to see ninety votes in the mainpage poll, for example. I want to see ninety nominations for featured writings. Small things like that can help a lot!

I also have something I want to suggest to everyone. If you want your stuff read, read someone else's! Beyond that, though, I urge every single writer here to place a link to the two or three pieces that you most want read at the top of your description, as I have. People can always click your writings page, but by now some of us have so much writing up that it's kind of a chore to sift through it all! So give it a shot, it's not hard, and can only help.

That's it. Bye!

Completed the first mock-interview for the e-zine today and it went swimmingly! Not a single snag or hitch, and it's entertaining all the way through. 

Progress on new WritersCo Monthly: slight! We still require the services of the masses. Allow me to display a list of tasks we still need filled.

Questions for Ask Mister Saint
Opinion columns (about whatever you want, as long as it's written well)
articles (about whatever!)
challenges (not necessarily contests)

In addition, this month of October will feature one poem! Members will be allowed to nominate ONE poem for the featured spot, and may nominate their own writing if they please.

This month's feature will be a fake interview session. We need between one and three volunteers to be interviewed for this position, so get in touch and let me see your interest! The interview will be similar to a brief roleplay, however, you will be playing as yourself with a random quirk. For example... you might conduct the interview as yourself as a rock star, or a poltergeist. It's October, it might as well be a ghoul or something.

We're also looking for the standard literary articles. 

We also plan to feature one CONTEST.

So get crackin'! We want to release this issue by OCTOBER 7th, so hurry quick like! I don't want to have to interview myself!

I thought about it, and the decision came to me fairly quickly. I spent the morning and afternoon working out, playing with my cat, and taking a nice, long, long, I almost qualify as a swimming pool long shower. I just needed to think about it without any distractions.

So I'm good now, and I want to make WC Monthly my priority... though it might turn into a quarterly, but we'll figure that out for sure later.

Attention: any and all members interested in contributing the soon to be revived WC e-zine, contact [Mister Saint] ASAP. I'm hoping to get out an issue for October before, say, the seventh of the month. We're playing catch up here, so the quicker, the better! Here's what we're looking for.

Book Reviews
Movie Reviews
Intelligent Commentary (preferably literature related, but ask if you have an idea you like.)
Homebrewed writing excercises/challenges.
Articles about writing and/or storytelling.

and that sort of thing. We're hoping to give WC something fun to check out and get involved in, try to put some community back into this community. Any takers, give me a message!

If you're tired of coming here and seeing nothing going on, raise your hand! Don't worry, my hidden cameras in all your houses let me know if you are or not. Some people ought to put on some pants about now.

Things have been muddled here for a bit. Everyone's been busy, bad stuff has happened, the cat came back, and so forth. But now it's time to put some spark back into this place and make it active again!

If you have any things you want to see implemented here, let someone know. Even if it sounds dumb, just let it out, we forgive you. 

I've been working a craft booth for the last two days at the "Burnside Catfish Festival", a local brouhaha where people get together and goof off, and sell stuff, and have live music and catfish to eat. This year, unlike last year, I participated in the 'biggest fish story contest'. If I may, a selection of a conversation I had with my Latina sister Divina, to illuminate how it went.

TM Saint says:
I also participated in a fish story contest
La Divina says:
oh?
La Divina says:
do tell
TM Saint says:
*nods*
TM Saint says:
the idea was to tell the biggest 'fish story'
TM Saint says:
or tall tale about fishing
TM Saint says:
my ten year old buddy Lance wanted to participate, but we found out right at the end that he had to be eighteen
TM Saint says:
so
TM Saint says:
I decided to do it, and take him on stage with me as a prop
La Divina says:
hee
TM Saint says:
I began my tale by telling everyone onstage how old we were, and our names
TM Saint says:
"I'm Travis Reynolds, and this is Lance. I'm 23 and he's 10."
TM Saint says:
"Now. The year was 1967."
TM Saint says:
"Off the coast of French Polynesia."
TM Saint says:
"Me and Lance were fishing for grouper, which are fish that travel in groups. What we failed to realize that the ocean where we were fishing, in fact, belonged to ninjas."
La Divina says:
o.o
TM Saint says:
"As we were fishing, sixteen ninjas in full gear leapt from the water and pulled us under!"
La Divina says:
O.o
TM Saint says:
"Lance paddled all three legs, swimming like a dog with three legs."
TM Saint says:
"We fought them all the way to the bottom of the ocean. And then, there was a giant squid who isn't actually in this story."
TM Saint says:
"In the end, we were all swallowed by groupers. None of us survived."

It was a lot of fun. You'll have to forgive the grammar, though. I am a hillbilly by most accounts and the way I speak in real life is a far cry from the way I write-speak.

Today I, along with my brother Iz, received an invitation to go to work for a small pro wrestling outfit working out of this area. Obviously I could not be an active wrestler, as my heart and lung health are less than optimal and I have an aversion to pain, but I will be able to work basically anywhere else I might want. The first options offered were as script writer (yeah, pro wrestling's scripted, everyone knows that these days), manager (not an actual talent manager, but a storyline manager solely there to get involved in matches), referee, or creative team member (writing theme music and such). It's actually not a 'dream' of mine, but it is something that I always thought might be fun. I've requested some tapes of the talent at work, so I can get a better idea of just what this independent promotion is all about, but if nothing else it'll be a hoot to help the guys with. Most of them turned out to people I've known my entire life.

*A note to members, new and seasoned, who would like to see more comments and critiques on your writings.*

Writersco members as a whole, including me, seem well intentioned to help the others with their work with reads and critiques. However, rather like giant literary sloths, we more or less have to poked with a stick to get moving. Basically, if you want critiques, make a habit of giving them occasionally! Just don't demand them in return, or even expect them necessarily. By giving a read, you are poking with a stick. ^^

Critique Swap and Comment Exchange are still around, and could use some attention, as focal points for this stick revival.

I finished playing N3: Ninety-Nine Nights for the Xbox 360 tonight. I dunno how many people play Xbox games without the online factor, but I found it to be a nice distraction for a week. It was fun, and I didn't have to research ancient Japanese history to understand the plot. (So that's why this guy was a samurai without any land! Cripes! It all makes sense! Samurai is a marketable term! -- reaction to Onimusha Dawn of Dreams) 

Plus you get to play as a goblin and lay waste to humans. New perspective are always fun.

... I'm actually pretty content. ^^ Things are hard, they always are, but that's no reason to be unpleasant about the whole mess. I had Chinese food today, I woke up with my hair, I have a cat... all good things.

They say it takes more muscles for your face to frown, than it does to smile. That's more work to make a sour face, but always remember that - even more importantly - it takes a lot more muscles to frown than it takes to have your dental work updated via high-speed hockey stick. It could be worse, you know.

Watched V today. Never again will I watch a movie that has the wachowski brothers' name attached to it. Not only was the ending a perfect rip off of the third Matrix movie, primarily in that it was totally counterintuitive to the rest of the film, but the middle of the movie dragged on, and on, and on, and on, and finally became irritating in its endless attempts to be clever and insightful. Of course, it's entirely possible that I went into it with the wrong expectations... I was expecting something in the vein of Batman with political overtones. What I got was an art flick that kicked just enough ass to keep me from munching down the movie disc. ^^  Not that I wouldn't recommend it to people, but I wouldn't recommend to people who don't like slow-paced self-conscious plotlines that exist above the heads of the stereotypical characters who play its endlessly predictable parts. With the exception of the V character himself, who occasionally managed to step off the beaten path, that is. Ugh.

The trend of trying to be thought-provoking is just too all consuming these days... just like when The Sixth Sense came out years ago, and then there was a flood of movies with 'surprise' endings afterwards, each growing more predictable than the last. It's just like the stereotypical 'goth/punk' (leave your judgments at the door, by the by) who tries so hard to be different that s/he actually fits perfectly into a widespread mold.

A couple of things. First off, as a writer who primarily uses the computer to type his work, I urge my fellow geekazoids to BACK UP YOUR WORK! Having lost loads of work to computer crashes and power failures and what not, including an eighty thousand word chunk from one story, I learned this the hard way.

My personal computer's hard drive burned up a few days ago. This time, however, I had backed up everything previously on my handly little jump drive, and hardly felt the loss. So however you have to do it... floppy disks if you can fit the work on them, CD-RW if you can't and don't have a zip drive or jump drive. Seriously, don't let your work be roadkill on the technological freeway.

In other news, everyone who doesn't know, needs to know what a Marmoset is. Observe. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmoset

As for me... I'm learning patience, at some great cost to my life span. I'm getting better, though. This whole personal improvement thing is not so hard once the impossible things are pushed aside and ignored. *whistles*

We rented "V for Vendetta" yesterday. Anybody seen it? I haven't watched it yet, but I'm wondering if it's any good. I have kind of a problem sitting through a movie if I'm not really interested, so if someone could say 'watch it, and your eyeballs will bleed' that'd be wrong, but accepted!

When every day is the same day as the day before, how does one change anything? I always dread going to sleep (not just because there are spiders in my bed, that's why I don't ride on planes. There could be spiders on the plane. You know. Specially bred assassin spiders, working for the yakuza). I dread going to sleep because I know that when I wake up it's going to be the same day again. I'll do meaningless housework, maybe put in job applications that won't earn me anything, get in a fight with someone in my house, play some game, get on the computer, and wait for the whole cycle to repeat again. I dunno how to get out of this, not even where to start.

On the bright side, I've discovered that I've lost about ten pounds. Turns out my boxing and cardio training has been doing some good, after all! What puzzled me is that I've been boxing for months now, and have only lost ten pounds... seemed kinda small. Except, I also noticed that I'm putting on quite a bit of muscle, too. So, on the health front, things are finally going a little better.

Today is my two-year anniversary with my girlfriend. She's really a wonderful young woman, very talented, very... lots of things. 'I love her' just doesn't cut it, but that's about the only way I can say it here without going into it for a thousand more words. 

So yeah. Stuff stuff.

I realized this today, and to me, its pretty profound.

I no longer prefer metal to other kinds of music. o.o

This is big, for me. Metal's been my fixation since I was about twelve years old. But now, it just... seems to have lost its edge. I will forever be a fan of rock and roll (AC/DC forever, it seems) but... now I find I prefer celtic, classical, and *gasp* even trance to most metal. o.o Scary.

Lovely experience this morning. I was lying in bed, abjectly waiting for sleep like I always do, when I felt a miller (medium sized moth) on my shoulder. This, while not common, is not terrible as sometimes they come in when the door is opened at night. So I brushed it off and closed my eyes again, not thinking anything of it.

Around 4:30am I was still lying there, then I heard a quick, successive tap tap tap tap tap on my pillow. Now, my house makes your typical groaning and creaking noises in the wind, but this was not one of those noises, not even close. So I jumped up and flicked on the light... and sure enough, racing around my pillow was a frickin' spider about the size of a half-dollar. It turned and looked at me, and lifted its front two legs in the air in typical spider-defense stance.

So I bitch-slapped him with a dinner plate.

Based on the spiders coloration, the marks on its back, body size, and type of legs, I believe that this spider was a brown recluse. Having recalled the "miller" on my shoulder earlier in the night, I decided that long pants and long sleeves would make good pajamas instead of a sleeveless shirt and shorts.

Now, in general I am not afraid of spiders. I'm far more afraid of parking lots. But this creeped me the hell out. So I went and got my cat, Jinx, so I could have something to concentrate on instead of worrying whether that creak was a giant frickin' spider or not.

Jinx is an unbelievably bad bedfellow. His first mode of action is to climb onto my shoulder and meow in my ear until I pet him. Then when he finally decides its time to sleep, he likes to try and sleep as close to my face as possible, which usually means at least part of him is on my nose. This morning it was his left front paw, reached out just for the occasion. 

This was after he'd broken my favorite drinking glass, knocked two keyboards in the floar, and half-ripped down one of the drawrings on my wall. Then, he proceeded to go into the corner, find some fake gold leaves that rattle when you touch them, and start licking himself on them so that they rattled over and over and over. Yup, Jinx is a bad bedfellow. Thankfully he has a cat bed in a nother room, so I tossed him in there for the night. And then he went to sleep! Good kitty. Maybe.

But yeah, it was an adventure and a half.

Gots my rejection letter from Asimov's today. With that out of the way, time to soldier on! I'm thinking of submitting my 79.Sashenka Snip to the Writers of the Future contest this term as soon as I get at least one more read-through to make sure I haven't missed anything. ^^ Thanks go to those who've supported me on this piece, it's probably my favorite of my short stories.