Back to Midgard

Oh, so long ago there was a hand-moderated game called "Midgard". You mailed in your turns and they dealt with them and some weeks later the results came back and you knew if you had found the gold mine or walked into a trap. I have played in a handful of versions and variants of Midgard, usually as a minor character on the lawful side. The game had a major hiccup when the owner of one version died and the owner of the other was overwhelmed by technical issues and sold off the game.

But now Midgard is almost ready to go again. I have my turns for my two clans, and my computer wallpaper is a 30,000-foot view of the land and oceans of Midgard. I can't wait to go exploring again!

Too good to set aside

In the fall I went on a little sprint of writing short plays. Completed four; have as many as seven more in the pipeline. But I had to put that aside for the next few months while I work on a huge (8,000 pages or so) project with a tight deadline.

I have been worrying that when I finally get back to the short plays I will find that they have become dusty and uninteresting. But not so. I just visited one of the unfinished short plays, where it sits in my project space on Celtx. It is very funny, sort of crazy, and is either almost done (if it turns one way) or still in the opening scene (if it flowers a different way). I am so totally tempted to put the big project aside and work on this little baby. Must. resist. cute. script.

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

Really useful slaps upside the head for screenwriting:

The New 10 Commandments of Screenwriting.

Old Fogey

I have a bit of a reputation in my family for going to the video store (that's how long ago I developed this reputation) and bringing home what we came to call "Boffo European Comedies". As in, "they may be funny to the people who hate these people, but they sure ain't funny to us." The foundation stone of this series was I Even Met Happy Gypsies, of which the most memorable scenes were the repeated repossession of the family television and attempts to push the body of the dead man through a hole in the frozen river.

Well, I did it again today, although I was mine only victim, with a German romantic comedy which starts with a horrid German gentleman in Turkey running over a hitchhiker with a car that has a dead body in the trunk. A dead body which we begin to suspect is the body of the hitchhiker's true love. I can't say for sure, because my old fogey meter hit red and the movie is on its way back to Netflix.

I don't understand. And get off my lawn.

A tiring book

I just finished reading a brick-thick mystery novel set in the west of England. Had all the elements that should normally attract and entice me: interesting locale, feisty vicar, headstrong teen, slumbering mystery about to awaken.

Yet I only finished the thing because I am sick at home and was too weak to get it off my chest once I started reading it in bed. It was so relentlessly busy, so filled with collisions and unlikely discoveries, that I just had to dawdle along after each page rather than really keeping up with the plot. It didn't help that I have been a feisty vicar myself, back in the day, and I am pretty sure that no feisty vicar who wants to go on collecting paychecks would keep the proper authorities so in the dark as the main character does in this book.

A book like this makes me yearn for the novels of Patrick O'Brian, with their rich, glowing balance of event and introspection, tense drama and low comedy. Oh, and lots and lots of nautical tehnobabble. Double coaked sister-blocks forever!

Accentuated

I am on a conference call right now with a room-full of folks in India, plus some folks in North America. Can barely understand what is being said--I wonder how much is because I barely understand the topic, and how much because I am not all that used to pronounced Indian accents. Of course, I am afraid to ask.

My ear seems to be getting stiffer as I get older: I can't pick up very much at all from Radio Canada talk shows in Quebec French, and tried out a very frustrating first lesson in Mandarin where I just could not hear the difference between the essential four pronunciation tones. Maybe I should stick to printed text...

Jump rope

There is a long list of skills that I somehow overlooked learning as a young person. I don't think I ever hung by my knees from a parallel bar, or learned to make music, a la Bobby McFarrin, by thumping my chest and belly in various ways with my hands. I dance like an old white guy. Don't let me put a foot on a skateboard.

So, when I say that our new jumpropes arrived yesterday you will understand the trepidation I feel. Jumproping is good for the body in all sorts of ways, if not so good for the downstairs neighbor. And there is a gratifying skills progression you can set yourself to.

Or you can tangle your ankles every five or six passes of the rope (supposedly) under your feet, and stagger toward some sharp-edged piece of furniture, and try again with a mounting debit balance of dread.

This should be easier.

Bells and whistles

On my commute most weekdays I pass a Boston hotel on the edge of the Charles River. Well, separated from the river by a highway, and bordered by an access road that runs up onto the bridge across the river that takes the traffic, the trolley, and pedestrians like me to and from Cambridge.

It's a classy hotel, I guess. It has a doorman in a long coat, and this doorman gets taxis for hotel residents. Well, I guess he does, since he has a whistle and plies it at five second intervals while waving imperiously at the highway and the access road. But I have never seen a taxi swerve out of its course in response to his calls; in fact I have never seen a taxi in front of the hotel.

There is a subway stop just across the street, but maybe the visitors are too classy for that, or are going to odd locations. But as far as I can see, they aren't going anywhere.

I can ignore the gestures, but the whistle is very demanding. Maybe I should design him a little Android application for his smart phone that will summon taxis when he needs them. And another one to play the whistle noise so the residents will know he is hard at work.

This sort of thinking gets me across the bridge in spite of the stiff northern wind.

Pocket diaries

I used to keep a record of what I was up to in little pocket appointment books. My dad gave me one every Christmas for many years, and I filled up a fair number of them with summaries of my works and days in tiny mouse writing.

The surviving books live in a bureau drawer and nobody will attend much to them until and unless my fifteen minutes of fame become truly remarkable. However, when I turn the pages they evoke the rhythms and even the smells of those days very clearly, in a way that Twitter and Facebook entries do not do for me. I follow the diary entries of John Quincy Adams from 200 years ago that the Massachusetts Historical Society posts on Twitter every day, but I know these entries are just faint reminders of the diary volumes that I could go visit in the museum at Quincy, if I chose to.

I am going to try to be a more consistent blogger this year, even though my laptop does not have gilt edges or the faint smell of leather and sweat.