LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Hi! Maybe it's time to write a few more notes in the old journal. Getting these first few words down kinda feels good. Kinda like the exercises I've been doing. I was doing great up until the Hawaii trip, then I slacked off a bit. I tried to pick it up again this week, and I'm glad I decided to do so. It's hard to like, but I feel better having done it - a little something to be proud of anyway. In a way, I'm a little disappointed to be taking a week off - I was starting to get on a roll here in many ways.

A couple quick little notes for tonight, since it's late.

I awoke from an odd, interesting dream this morning. I had gotten a packet of schoolwork papers back that had been graded. It was a bunch of little writing assignments, like a daily class journal. Assignments of a couple paragraphs up to maybe a page. The odd thing was that there were a large number of drawings I did in there too. It was mostly extra stuff I had added to the packet for fun and the teacher's amusement, but there were a bunch of them. I remember that they were very clearly done in my style, and there were a few guest sketches that were clearly done by somebody else. I was getting this packet back and I was flipping through it looking at the grades that had been given, written in thick red felt-tip pen. I remember a bunch of the writing assignments had C's (which is historically unusual for me) but I remeber not being too disappointed, because I had known they would be graded very toughly. However, most of the pictures had big A's on them. That was odd because they weren't required. What made all this interesting was that the A's were written right over top of the pictures! In the dream, this was very frustrating. How the heck was I going to scan them in and post them with these big letters scrawled right over the top of these good pictures I had drawn? (Maybe by tweaking the color curves in Paintshop? Doubtful...) If the teacher liked the pictures, it was rather thoughtless of her to mess them up! On waking up, I just wished I could remember what I had drawn pictures of. :) Then I could draw them for real. One of the parts I find hard about drawing is visualizing exactly what the heck it is I'm trying to draw. I'd have a bunch of ready-to-draw pictures, if only I could remember my dream. :)

OK, so I like sci-fi and fantasy, and I read a lot of amatuer stuff on the web (which can be pretty wacky), but in the book I am currently reading I hit upon one of the most off-the-wall scenes I've ever read. Get this: the main character just crawled up a dinosaur's ass and exploded. I kid you not! I laughed out loud in the middle of the airplane and had to put down the book for a moment. I'm only a third of the way into the book - now I'm really curious to find out what else is going to happen in this book. :)

Third item: I bought myself another toy ...? prize? treasure? There's got to be a good word for it. Anyway, it's another small press book called Best In Show. First, I have to say that I'm dang impressed by the delivery speed. I ordered it Sunday night, and it was here by the time I got home on Thursday. Spiff! Anyway, it is up for a 2003 Ursa Major award (they've been giving these awards for two years already and I only just found out? Dang!) It has a cover illustration by Ursula Vernon, stories by Brian Anthony and Watts Martin, and twenty four more stories purported to be of similar qaulity. And now it's in my hot little hands! Gleefulness!

The story of how I discovered it is vaguely interesting. Brian made an incidental comment on his web site that Best In Show had been published so he should make the stories accessible again. That was many months ago and I had no idea what he meant. Then a month or so ago, Ursula mentioned in her journal that she was pleasantly suprised to be up for an award for her cover art for Best In Show. I checked it out and realized this must be the same thing that Brian had been talking about! That puts it in my must-have list, but they were sold out. Boo! Then I saw in a posting on the Digger message board (I think) that said they were printing more, so I've been checking periodically. Then they finally had it in stock, and I ordered it, and now I'm reading it! And it's good so far. I'm only a few stories in, but of the new ones I've read, Crucible by Kim Liu is excellent. And there's lots more. I'm excited.

But I better go to bed now. :)