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Posted on January 20th, 2010 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Sorry it’s been so long since I last put up a post. My LJ account just sort of swallowed it whole. Besides I’ve had a lot of real personal shit going on for the last few months that really shouldn’t be aired on a publicly accessible blog.
Well, I did it. I resigned my post as a moderator on OKC. And I’m going to do my darnedest to stay resigned. Though, we’ll see my resolve when the next drama arrives. Lol. The decision has made me incredibly sad. But, it’s either this or leave OKC altogether… so it’s the lesser of two evils. I just hope this works to ease my stress and upset. Because if it doesn’t and I still feel like this… I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know if I could turn my back on my friends, the community and Clody, Eternity, Yakshini and Loh. Could I just walk away? After all that I’ve experienced, learnt and done with OKC? I think it would completely break my heart if I did. If I do get the super dooper rich and famous sci fi dream I’ve been fighting to get for nearly twenty years I may still have to. A twenty year old dream unfortunately trumps a three year old family… or perhaps not… perhaps if I get it I can balance the two. Just as long as not too many people find out about my involvement in OKC… then we’d get inundated with fans and crap… or people’d think I’m fraking nuts and stop reading my shit. Neither would be good.
Though… the way I’ve been feeling lately… I wonder if anything I want in life is going to happen.. no matter how hard I work at it.
Anyway… just deleted a huge rant… now I’m going to bed. Feeling depressed, unloved and unwanted. Hopefully I wake up feeling better.
Posted on September 25th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
(Cloned from LJ)
Finally, it took me a very long time… but I’ve done the final edit for Book One … and first draft of the associated 14 page synopsis. It’s been a long time coming.. over a year of fidgeting because I didn’t know how to write a good synopsis (I still don’t know if it’s right)… and about six weeks of at least an hour a day of actual work… but it’s done! :D
So… next on the list of todos is to attempt to make the best damn synopsis that I can write. And it’s only 15 pages long… granted, that’s at single line spacing and I’ll have to condense it to double line spacing and 14 pages.. but.. the hard bit is over. Editing 30 pages of double line spaced synopsis has got to be easier than 230-odd pages of novel. Then, once that’s done to satisfaction I will have to write a brief covering letter, and then.. then the scary bit: Submission to Baen Publishing.
Once the submission is in I won’t be able to submit to any other publisher until I hear back from them. So I’ll have a long time to see if I can find an Agent, source other publishers that accept unsolicited submissions via the internet and finish all the blog stories and website data. But, after the submission I’ll start on the first history story for the blog stories and work on Book Two. Perhaps if my brain has room I might even finally start writing the first section of Book Three.. which currently doesn’t have a good catchy title yet.. I have a draft title.. but I don’t really like it too much because it sounds like it’s simply a book about what happens after book two.. which.. I guess it is.. but I write each of my books with the intention that they could hold their own as a single novel.. so here’s hoping that is the case when I start writing book three… anywho…
I is tired and worded out now… going to bed…
Posted on September 24th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
(Cloned from LJ)
I’m listening to Vivaldi… I’m sure all snobs would be appalled that such an unrefined person would be listening to Vivaldi… XD *cackle* j/k seriously though..
My dear friend Wraithy *huggles tight* introduced me to a couple of songs/tracks of Vivaldi.. and I’m hooked.. I managed to find a free download… on wikipedia no less for the entire Four Seasons… is it an album or concerto.. or some other word?… anyway… aside from two tracks that remind me first of English aristocracy and the other of the National bank…(It’s called Loyds Bank in the UK apparently)… I really like it. Its like… emotion in sound.. more so than many of the modern music I listen to… and at points I can close my eyes and the music forms amazing imagery in my head, like there’s one thats like a flock of humming birds and the camera in my head is flying with them as they flit in and out of view, and play tag and just… it’s so playful. :D I like having a visual mind… I believe the hummingbird song is one of the three summer songs.. There’s an autumn song thats like… a storm… kind of dark and moody.. and I was writing yesterday and it came on and I just stopped, closed my eyes and listened… it just.. jumped inside me and made me listen.
Many of the songs for Four Seasons kind of remind me of waltzing and Masked balls and beautiful flowing dresses and those silly wigs… it’s like… like a collection of movies in sound…
Anyway…
My inspection went ok. I was just leaving for my appointment when she arrived and she wizzed through and said something the effect that “it looks fine”, I’ll find out about Monday my time when I get the assessment in a letter.. though usually if there’s something wrong she’ll tell me.
And thankfully this time, going slowly preserved my back so I didn’t do in the nerve or anything else, I managed to do my morning walk at a good speed without very much pain.. so it was all good, I get to go to aerobics tonight, which I’m rather relieved about.
I finally managed to finish that blasted scene that I’ve been struggling with… the problem was that in order to make my story seem more real I create characters real enough in my head so that THEY tell me what they’d do and say in a particular scene… and Taelin, my blog story character… is a stubborn bitch… and kept wanting to rumble with my important book series character (which seriously would get him killed.. lol)… in the end bringing in a third party and setting him up in a particular way so that he doesn’t start off angry seems to have made the situation less volatile… I’m still not sure if I like it… and the series character ended up having to play games with him… but… I’m going to let it sit in the corner for a little while before reading through it again over the weekend. If I still don’t like it I’ll have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to resolve certain questions with Taelin in another way… it’s a bitch of a way to write and it can cause a lot of friction and frustration on my part to give characters a sort of autonomy in my head, but… the story is better for it in the long run…
I’m going to be editing today. The blog story has been an interesting distraction, and I’m glad that I finally got that scene remotely done, but I have to get back to editing book one and the synopsis for it. I wanted to get the Baen submission out by the end of this month… and that’s… like mid next week and I still have about 80 more pages to edit… I can’t wait to get this blasted edit finished so I can finally put book one aside. I want to get as much of the blog story done as I can before book one is published… I don’t know when that will be.. but that’s one of my main priorities… and then finish my extra edits to book two so I can give it to my wonderfully patient test readers… and then… perhaps… I can actually start on book three… because that’s very overdue.
Anyway… my breakfast is cooking.. I can smell it from here… probably enough of an update from me. :)
Posted on September 20th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
(Cloned from LJ)
So I had this amazingly detailed dream.
I part owned a halfway house or homeless shelter or hotel type thing with a guy who was always off working or doing stuff. I ran it with a few others and another person who wasn’t there often but when she came back she brought with her presents for everyone. Anyway, the guy who I co-owned the place with just suddenly went poof. Completely missing and I couldn’t find him, no one could. I went looking for him and tripped and fell down an odd little stairway that had been hidden. And underneath this huge hotel building was a whole hidden little area the same width as the building. It was sound proofed and insulated, there was running water and electricity from some groups of neat little inventions the place was completely self sufficient. And, conveniently enough something big happened just as I was running upstairs to tell the others what I’d found. Something happened, I don’t know what, and people who had died were able to haunt more, it was like everyone suddenly had the ability to see ghosts and the ghosts could touch things more. I got the adults to get all the kids and young ones downstairs in the neat little sheltery place I found (and realised that the co-owner had actually created it in all his time not being around). Then we started getting haunted by people we’d known. I was used to seeing ghosts so I knew how to deal with them, it was still a little scary because they could do more and were far more dangerous (thy could pick up a knife and hold it long enough to actually kill folks), but I got a bunch of us to go around to the corners and edge walls of the building and set up big wards that eventually kept them out. Then we moved the little kids upstairs again because there were more beds upstairs.
A day like that watching out of the windows of the building as the world fell apart because they didn’t know how to deal with these ghosts and people started turning up at our place. People who were obviously kin. Along with being able to see ghosts everyone could see phantom limbs and other things in peoples energy, and everyone was a afraid of these people with oddness attached to them, so they came to us because they had no where to go. I changed faces and I wasn’t me the co-owner of the place I was a young girl who had arrived near the beginning of it all. I had lots of wings but I could only hover with them. I was out in the garden, for some reason the ghosts didn’t bother me or want to bother me.. or perhaps couldn’t bother me.. so I was getting some vegies from the garden for the person who cooks. And I saw a man walk past the fence, he had a pair of the most beautiful white feathered wings you could imagine, they glowed and shimmered and I was utterly transfixed. I hovered to the edge of the fence and peaked over it at him. I said something like “wow, you have pretty wings are you coming to stay here?”, he turned to look at me with a broad smile and said something like, sometimes it’s the quality and not the quantity. I thought he was laughing at my bajillion little not-glowing wings and said something like but can you fly at all? I can hover.. see! And I tried to get over the fence but I could only hover at the height of an adult, and the fence was just a touch too high. The man smiled at me again and went into our building. Then I was the co-owner again.
Over a few days of people arriving we filled the entire building up from attic to basement to secret shelter. Kids and adults would just turn up on our doorstep cold, hungry and afraid. They somehow knew that place was the only safe place for them.
My friends and I went out at points to help those outside with the ghost problem, but our main priority was to keep our building working and keeping everyone inside safe. Anyway, one time when we were outside helping there was a house with an axe murdering ghost and after much trial and error we finally trapped him into a binding sigil and managed to send him elsewhere. The next evening the kid from that house turned up on our door. We already knew that he belonged in our building but he hadn’t wanted to go because of his family, but when he turned up he was pale and frightened and he told us that his family had been killed and he had nowhere else to go. We let him in and someone looked after him, I swapped faces, I was no long the co-owner I was just one of the lost ones who had arrived, any way I turned around to close the door and the boy was standing there again. I yelled out because it gave me a fright and the boy said “it’s not another me it’s my stepfather”, the stepfather being the axe murderer. I had a blessed scythe thingie so I thought that because other people could get rid of these ghosts so could I! So I went up to the door and told the guy to go away, and I swiped the blade of this thing through him. He shapeshifted from a mirror of the boy into something unrecognisable and swiped back at me with his bladed claws. I got a fright, stepped back and only then realised that the ghost couldn’t come in the house and that I couldn’t get rid of him because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I used my small scythe thing.. bigger than a sickle, smaller than a scythe.. I used my blade to hook onto each of the double doors and close them without putting my hands outside of the ward.
Then, for some reason I flicked back to myself again and I was behind the young one who had learnt that ghosts aren’t easy to get rid of. I told him not to try again with ghosts until he’d done some training with us but that he was very welcome to learn. Then I asked him he could please go up the building and close all the windows and pull all the curtains for me. I turned around after he left and discovered that there were five little ones sleeping in one bunk bed, they were adorable, but they were little toddlers all with their own manifested phantom limbs, but all had been abandoned at our place because people rejected them. One of the babies had curled up completely underneath the blankets and there was just a little green tail with a sort of heart shape on the end of his tail. I grabbed an extra blanket and put it over them and went out into the area where myself and the others who were helping me run the place stayed (we had a shared lounge that connected to our own private bedrooms). I told one of the people who was looking after the babies specifically that they were doing a great job, that although they didn’t have their own beds they were happy and I was glad. I also said that we’d better get no more people coming because we’re full up to the rafters.
At the end of the dream we were all woken up by someone knocking on the door, and then people were knocking on the windows and then all the windows. Everyone was too afraid to look because it had to be ghosts because no human being could knock on the windows above ground floor. I decided I would go and answer the door, that ghosts couldn’t come inside, and I could deal with humans any day of the week. I was walking to the door as I was waking up, I opened the door and there was just bright sunlight (even though I’m fairly sure it was still the middle of the night), and there was a figure standing in the doorway. He said something but I don’t remember what it was, and as he was speaking I woke up.
I could have sworn the the figure was David from my books.
——-
Odd dream no? A lot of themes there that are recognisable, like a dream version of OKC turned around on it’s head. It was just so complete. Though I should type it out.
Posted on August 26th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
So, I spent much of yesterday mentally immersed in the universe of my books… specifically the first generation of Agents in the Agency. Now… long story short, there’s a main character in that generation called Dobid Ahlan… he’s the original Enigma and was a double agent for the Agency and the early Psi Rebels… he’s also who David was named after… and his 2-or-3-great grand father/uncle. And… last night I dreampt I was Dobid Ahlan… but better…
So I was at university, under cover… but the Agency was monitoring.. not like.. killing folks. I was a computer nerd (as the original Dobid Ahlan character was), but I was also some kind of alien with “super powers”. Gravity wasn’t really an issue for me, I could float or fly, and I could change my body-phase and actually go through some things… I could walk through a paper or cloth screen, but not through metal, or thick wood. And I could see the future like David… with all those interweaving threads of events and people.
Anyway… story was I was watching the Rebels, and I’d met a woman… I presume in the real story it would have been Jean Malar (the first leader of the Psi Rebels - but in the dream she didn’t have a name), and her boyfriend (which would have been Jerna Ree, the second leader of the Psi Rebels), and I was really jealous of the boyfriend because she was magnificent and beautiful and powerful within herself. I was socially awkward.. like the original character…
Anyway, I worked in the library of the university when I wasn’t in classes and I’d hooked my laptop into the surveillance cameras of the university. The university Head’s didn’t know that I was under cover and somehow they found out that someone in the library and hacked into their security feed.. and they came into the library to look for whoever it was. I was warned within about ten seconds of them coming into the room. I unplugged my laptop and floated up into the ceiling with it to hide. But they kept searching. I had my handler/supervisor on a radio thingie in my ear and he was helping me to get out..while at the same time chewing my ear off about how careless I had been. At one point he said exactly: “I don’t care how awe inspiring your abilities are, if you get caught we’re both dead!” And he said that “ability did not adjust for complacency”. I had to float up into the ceiling away from the second level of the room I had been in, and into the air vents. I couldn’t go through the metal of the air vents, but the cover over the end of the vent leading outside was cloth or canvas or something similarly thin and not-metal.
The supervisor told me that the Agency hadn’t been given permission by the University Heads to work on campus under cover, so that if I got caught my cover would be blown, the Rebels would be lost from the Agency’s surveillance ability and I would likely be sent back to whatever basement I’d come from (I was an alien and had been under a sort of “house arrest” somewhere before the mission). He told me that my complacency would cost far more than my neck if I didn’t pull up my socks and be better at hiding myself. Anyway, I escaped the library and escaped from the security people, onto the roof with my laptop. I found a place on the roof that was accessible to doors so that if someone caught me up there I wouldn’t come under suspicion… you know.. if I was perched comfortably in a place on the roof impossible or difficult to get to it’d look dodgy. And I spent much of the morning re-writing the access systems to the surveillance systems so I could access it without setting off their alarms. I’d just finished and done a test run when the woman, Jean, found me on the roof.
She was surprised to find me up there but simply said “Oh, I didn’t know you liked heights, I’ve been looking for you all morning.” I replied with something like “I’ve been here all morning programming, it’s nice and quiet up here.”
She told me that the group needed some information that only I could give them and she handed me an envelope with details in it and turned around again. I asked her if she hadn’t known I was up here, what was she up there for? She replied that she was feeling crowded and needed some space to sort something out, but turned away as if to go again. I said that she was welcome to share my spot (I was sitting cross legged with the laptop in front of me on the wide ledge of the roof), she smiled and I sensed that she really needed to be alone. So I then said that in fact I had an assignment that needed handing in and she was welcome to have the space to herself. She realised then that I was an empath. She didn’t say anything, she just smiled and thanked me.
I left the roof in the more conventional way on foot and headed down to a small study room which the Agency had funded for me to rent as my office. I knew she’d had a vision (the original Jean Malar was a Time Psi), and I knew that she’d seen the conflict that was to come and that she’d have to leave the Rebels and her boyfriend to go into the Agency, and she was sad and wanted to find a way to stop it from happening. I went down to my “office” to read the note she’d given me, and I was shocked to discover they wanted me to hack into the Agency system and identify all of the current under cover Agents. Obviously, I couldn’t do that for her without risking my cover. At this point my supervisor called me and asked about my getting a new mission from the Rebels. I passed it on and he said something to the effect of “pack up, you’re done. Orders are we’re taking them all out, mission dissolved”.
When I disconnected from talking to him I left everything.. even my laptop.. in my office and went looking for Jean. I was intending on telling her to take her friends and run. I couldn’t escape the Agency, but they could… I was running through the Library out towards where she was walking to her next lecture.. I was intent on telling her that I’d intercepted some communication that said they were coming to kill all of the members of her group and to leave.. while keeping my cover and saying that they didn’t suspect me that I could hold them off by hacking the university security system to give them time to escape.. but I woke up as I was running towards her.
—
Very fun vivid dream. :3 I liked having super powers, and being male… and being an alien.. :3
Posted on August 16th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I woke up this morning with the overwhelming urge to write. I’m sorry I know this is normally my internet socialising day.. I just need to write and I can’t ignore it any more.
I will still have my gmail up.. and I will check it later in the day so you can spam me if you like… I’d probably like that actually <3
Anyway! On to rescuing Hawk! :3
Posted on August 15th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
So. For those who haven’t heard, I’ve asked for a leave of absence from OKC.. well, at least on the level of mod duty. Other people can do that for a little while.
Been feeling really lost recently and it’s been getting worse, not better. So it makes sense for me to have a break.
Will discuss it via journal when I’ve had a bit of time to digest free time. Anyway.. been online for nearly 7 hours. Going to unplug and make some dinner. Night folks.
Posted on August 13th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
BOOTS OF AWESOME! :D
http://keyanadrake.deviantart.com/art/BOOTS-OF-AWESOME-1-133184944
http://keyanadrake.deviantart.com/art/BOOTS-OF-AWESOME-2-133185408
So much awesome… :D
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
So… here’s a funny story…
I got home… absolutely frozen might I add after 3 hours of dodging trucks on the main roads between here and the city in temperatures of about 10C (50F) and that’s before the wind chill is taken into consideration. Once I defrosted I started to unpack… specifically I was in desperate need to check my emails and reconnect the internet to my scull… but… here’s the kicker… I had my laptop, but not my blasted power cable.
So, I’m home, and having to clean the house because of a flat inspection tomorrow… with about 4 hours total of battery power left to me. So, I will be back tomorrow… or as soon as Errol mails me the damn cord. I haven’t forgotten anyone, I’m not lying in a ditch somewhere after an accident or anything else… I just has no power in teh laptops. Hopefully Errol’s work currior company is same-day like he thinks because if I don’t get the laptop on full power soon I’m going to go into withdrawls and stupidly spend the last of this weeks money on buying a new one from the electronic store.
So… I’m fine, got home fine… had a blast… I’m just waiting on the ability to plug my computer in before being able to be online fully.
Posted on August 9th, 2009 by Nanara.
Categories: Uncategorized.
So.. the party was awesome… more pictures to come.. but look! I made a cameo on youtube!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK45JrO011U
I’m the lady on the left laughing her ass off. Borg is the birthday guy… french maid is actually Magenta from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Lots of awesome. Though I feel like a nut because I’d never done the Marcarina before.