Prima Dumbass

I don't know how it is in your industry, but in mine, prima donnas are as prevalent as blades of grass in a lawn. This is interesting because one of the primary traits of the prima donna is this sense that they are the best and infalliable while those around them are idiots and a waste of space. At least that's the case with software prima donnas. However, if you do the math, n-1 of them are full of it. There can be only one. Haven't I used that quote before?

So anyway, for some reason, I end up being stuck working with these people more often than not and currently I've got a new one I'm partnered with for a project. I make mistakes. I'm not perfect (I realize this is a shocking admission) and I'm always learning new things. The constant acquisition of new information and skills is one of the things I've always loved about what I do for a living.

In general I readily admit these things to anyone and everyone who asks. I get excited about what I'm doing, and am more than willing to argue a point, but I also am ready to see the other side and admit when I've made a mistake. Evidently this is a very rare thing in my industry.

I really don't know what to do with these people though. They are condescending and rude at the very least and at the worst they attempt to actually undermine other people. This guy I'm dealing with is the latter sort.

What's the point of all this? Just getting it off my chest in a forum that I control, rather than exploding in anger and raging at him. He's not even really as great as he thinks he is, so if it came to that, putting him in his place would be rather easy.

But I guess I have to ask myself a hard question: maybe there's something...insufficient about me. Maybe it's me who has the issue, not these people. I mean, there are plenty of people that I DO work well with...usually they are polite, interested in doing what's best and discussing things rationally.

Eh, it's his fault. It's not my fault he's a moron and I'm perfect in every way. I shouldn't have to account for his shortcomings.

Drama! Stress!

So I've had my manuscript out in the hands of an agent the last two and a half months. Or so I thought. I finally decided it was time to see if she'd taken a look at it yet--just a gentle reminder/inquiry, etc. I agonized over the five sentence email, trying to combine just the right tone of respect, enthusiasm, and interest in knowing more. I also wanted to be careful not to sound aggressive or hostile. This is the kind of thing I get super neurotic about. I want this to work so much--probably too much.

Anyway, I sent the email and got back a response about an hour later saying that she didn't recognize the title of my manuscript and asked if I mailed it or emailed it. This was my second worst scenario. The first being rejection, of course. So we exchanged emails for a little while and I provided her with the name of the person who signed for it in her office, and a copy of the original email asking me for the manuscript so that she wouldn't think I was trying to scam my way in the backdoor.

She responded and asked me to attach the manuscript to an email, so I did and now it's actually in her hands. I can't decide if she's going to be positively motivated toward the manuscript out of some sense that her office lost it and was at fault, or if she's going to be annoyed at me for being such a pushy (albeit, polite and respectful) asshat.

The bottom line is that after almost three months of a strange mixture of excitement, desperation and terror, I didn't even have anything to worry about. NOW I do though, so I'm ramping up those emotions again at a frightening rate.

Yeesh.

Cry more, noob.

I apologize to anyone who reads this who is not a video game fan. I promise this doesn't signify a vast change in my content here.

Why is it that every single MMORPG since EQ is fundamentally the same? It's around 10 years after EQ and we're still dealing with the same basic issues. Sure, the sugar coating has gotten better: neato question mark graphics above the quest giving npc's head, a mail system, 'mounted' travel.

I'm playing Aion lately in a casual way and this game has all the new eye candy and convenient additions, plus some new ones that are cool. But when you peel all that stuff away it's really no different than anything that came before it. Here's a quick list.

a. static and insufficient quests. this results in boring leveling after the first toon. And grinding. crap loads of grinding.

b. endgame content designed to feed the obsessive and well connect players, and completely ignores the casual player.

c. a crafting system that is designed to be a time and money sink and results in items that are mediocre in most cases

d. combat systems that are basically unchanged from the first mmorpgs: chains, cooldown timers, etc

e. level based advancement. I know that at least one recent game has tried to get back to the skill advancement system that UO sported in the old days, but other than that we're still madly rushing to max-level and uber-gear so we can be even remotely competitive. This is especially painful for those of us that are gradually losing synaptic speed.

I can go on and on. Admittedly, graphics have gotten better, UIs have gotten more user friendly and configurable, and otherwise the games have improved in many ways, but fundamentally the underlying structure of the games are the same.

Freaking out!

Today I have decided, is the day that I write an email to the agent who is reading my manuscript and see where they are at. I have no real idea how long this part of the process should take, but it's been around 8 weeks or so, and I've begun to wonder if I just dreamed the whole thing.

My first draft was obsequious. Here's an approximation:

Dear So and so,

Please forgive me for intruding upon your day. I hope you are having a wonderful week. I wanted to make sure that my manuscript arrived in good shape. FedEx claimed it did but we all know what liarheads they can be. If you did get it, that's great and I hope you're enjoying it. I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience. If you want. I don't mean to sound pushy.

thanks,

jeremy

Emily told me that obsequious wasn't a good thing. So my next attempt was a bit more assertive:

Dear So and so,

WHERE THE #!&^ IS MY RESPONSE. I SENT THAT THING TO YOU MONTHS AGO.

looking forward to hearing back from you. Have a nice day!

jeremy

This is about where Emily smacked me on the back of the head. I finally settled on businesslike and calmly assertive without being rude or pushy. Along the lines of:

Dear So and so,

I'm writing to inquire as to the status of my manuscript, which you requested I send to you a while ago. I'm new to this entire process so I don't know what to expect in terms of a response or if I need to do anything further.

Please let me know,

thanks,

jeremy

I sent it and now I'm shaking and checking email every ten minutes or so. Do you think I might want this too much?

The coming Zombie apocalypse, with a little luck!

So I woke up this morning with an old broken bone aching rather sharply. It was almost like I'd slept on it funny or something. But I know better. It was that body trying to give me an important message about some upcoming event of Great Importance. A harbinger of sorts. So I decided to enumerate the possible events it was warning me about.

1. Rain. If this is the case then my old broken bone needs to go back to night school. Get its MBA or SOMETHING. It's rained six out of the last ten days here, and not a single peep out of the old injury. Suddenly it freaks out. I'm seriously doubting this is the message it is sending.

2. The Coming Apocalypse. I've never bought into this concept at all. It's just too well planned out. It's like a huge paranoid delusion that has no loose edges. Everything fits, and far too well. This is NOT how reality behaves. There is too much randomness in our day to day lives for something as stepwise ordered as the predicted apocalypse. Unless we're talking about...

3. The Coming Zombie Apocalypse. Anything that features zombies, high caliber weaponry and the possibility, however remote, of an appearance by Mila Jovovich or Kate Beckinsale...well, COUNT ME IN!

4. a Dire Warning that if I insist on having dreams that feature Mila Jovovich or Kate Beckinsale (or both???!!!) I should NOT say their names aloud. I'm really, really sorry, Emily. /grovels

I don't know about you, but I'm going down into the basement to clean my high caliber weaponry. After I take a shower, shave, put on my coolest clothes and that after shave I never use. Yes, I do own some cool clothes. I got them at Kohl's.

ZOMBIES!

Odds n ends

So I want everyone to breath a deep sigh of relief: I have successfully avoided a post concerning religion. I was considering it and then said to myself "WTF? RU RETARDED???!!! IDK WUT UR THINKING!!!11!!!ONE!"

So instead I'm going to just toss out a few odds and ends for your consideration:

I find myself annoyed by musicians who use their music as a forum for 'sharing' their political opinions. Yes, even when I am in agreement with them. Rationally I understand that they, like many people, want to share their opinions and thoughts with others. And I understand that their music is a natural method that they can use to communicate with us, the masses. So why do I still find it so hard to deal with. The band that flipped this switch for me is Filter. I've been listening to their last album and the entire thing is a huge political diatribe against the war in Iraq. Fundamentally I'm against the war too, and if the Filter guy and I were to sit down and share ideas we might be close to agreeing. That said, I really don't want to have that crap interfering with my enjoyment of the music. Discuss.

Anyway, that's number one.

Over the last 8 months or so, I've been averaging a few thousand words written each day. There have been periods where I am in between projects and doing editing or preparing query letters, etc, so the numbers aren't there. But there have also been days where I crank out in the 10k range. I feel really good about the whole thing: even if I never get published, I'll eventually die knowing that I pursued this dream hard core. I'm currently plowing into my third novel of the year. The second one is a rough draft, currently being read by my mother (God love her) and my first is being read and considered by an agent. If I fail, it won't be for lack of trying.

Finally, I find myself a Cub Scout Dad. How the HELL did this happen to me? Where did I go wrong? What crime did I commit that Karma has revisited this back on me?? In the last month, I've sold cub scout popcorn outside Jewel (grocery store), worked the concession stand at Bingo Night at the Moose Lodge (we get the proceeds from that for our yearly cubscout purse) and took Theo to a huge reenactment of pioneer days in America called The Trail of History (I wanted to rename it something more apt like The Day Where Grown Men Sit Around All Day Firing Off A Cannon).

I can't decide what was stranger: the bingo night, or the frontier days knockoff. They were both mega-freaky. Bingo night was EXACTLY like the stereotypes! I always thought that it was greatly exaggerated. For those who read this that actually go to bingo night somewhere, forgive me. I LOVE BINGO!! whew.

And the Trail of History. That was completely nutso. It was like Ren Faire for American settlers time. Everyone in costume, displays, things being sold and made. There were Red Coats and Minutemen walking all over the place. There was some guy who had set up his frontier days blacksmithy. There was a dentist from that time period (read: torture specialist). All kinds of other things like that.

Oh, and I go to a weekly pack or den meeting. Theo seems to love it, so I'll take the shot to my ever fading sense of coolness (which was tiny and pathetic to begin with...) on his behalf. The things we do for parenthood.

Anyone wanna buy some caramel popcorn? stop it me. now.

Glorified version of a pellet gun

So how the heck did Pearl Jam fall so far off my radar? I think it's because I go so freaking tired of Seattle grunge. But in my haste to distance myself from that entire musical movement, I did Pearl Jam a grave injustice. They're so much more than grunge.

I really love a band that grows over time. Nothing worse than a band releasing the same record over and over again with a thin veneer over it to fool you into thinking it's different. I've got a few Pearl Jam albums and each one has a completely different set of sounds and feels to it. After however many years it's been they still sound fresh and vital.

I saw them back in the mid 90s. They were part of a 3 band bill with Nirvana and the Red Hot Chillipeppers. Speaking of which, the Peppers sucked, and Nirvana was incomprehensible. But Eddie Vedder and the rest of the band kicked serious ass. Whereas the other two bands seemed to slouch through their sets, Pearl Jam was an explosion of energy. At one point Vedder scaled the thirty or forty foot tall lights scaffold and was hanging off upside down with his legs through the bars, singing. I think it was during Alive.

Oh, and I have to say that it helps that Vedder sings in a range that I can actually hit--so I can sing all the songs in the shower or the car and hit all the notes. How cool is that?

I'm pretty sure I'm about to freak out and buy all the albums I don't already have :)

Skin art

For the last few months I've been toying with the idea of getting a tattoo. I fluctuate between wanting a crow, a NiN tattoo or a bar code that actually translates to 'stop looking at me' or something like that. I'm actually getting close to going out and doing it. Unfortunately my kids beat me to the punch.

Recently they got little books that had 1001 tattoos or some other freakishly huge amount. We made the mistake this weekend of leaving them with the books unattended for a while. In theory they were watching TV. We don't let them do that very often, and when we do it's a chance to go hide from the monsters. Well, when we saw them next Riley was covered head to toe with very artistic, multicolored skin art. Theo has a bunch of single color black tribal tattoos on his chest and arms. He even has one of those armband ones on his bicep.

She looks like the Tattoo'd Lady at the fair/circus and he looks like a punk rocker, largely because he's as scrawny as I was at his age. Luckily we caught Riley before she managed to get them on her face--but that was clearly on her list of things to do.

I'm hoping that they don't decided to go for piercings...at least not until I've gotten mine...

musical revival

So until recently it's been over ten years since I touched my guitar with any kind of serious intent to play it. I've tried a few times over the years to get myself back into it, but it hasn't ever stuck.

I reached this point because shortly after "retiring" from the band I was in, and a few days before starting my first job in software development (an internship at the University of Arizona), I broke a finger on each hand. Imagine the sheer nerve of me showing up for my first paying job with each hand sporting a splint. My boss just stared at me for a few moments. I hunted and pecked for a few weeks.

Anyway, my guitar playing was put on hold during that time, and then the sheer pace of life kept me from returning to it.

A little over a month ago, on a whim I purchased Cakewalk's Music Creator. It's a software virtual musical studio. It's lightweight, easy to use and comes packed with virtual instruments ranging from the parts of an orchestra to a bunch of synthesizers. Since then I've been writing a song a night; I use the term 'song' a bit loosely. In some cases it's a complete song, and in other cases it's just a section of a song. As a side effect of this I pick my guitar up several times a day and it's been great fun.

I'm currently saving up for a usb audio interface so I can plug my guitar directly into the computer and record tracks with the software. And then I'd like to get a Gibson SG and a fender tube amp. And a wah pedal. Maybe a vocoder rig. And then I want to teach myself drums: it's been a blast creating drum lines on this software. Some of the lines I've written probably aren't actually possible for one drummer to play w/o grafting a third arm onto their torso. Good luck w/that.

Somewhere in this house, Emily is cringing. So I'll assure her that the only part I'm serious about is the audio interface. And the SG. And..and..

What the hell is this?

I forgot I had a blog!

Anyway, during the last year or so I've been working to change my career. I love being involved with designing and writing software, but I really don't enjoy doing it for other people, and having to do so has slowly but surely strangled my love of all things softwarish. So I decided to pursue a dream I've always had: to be a novelist, writing things I'd enjoy reading as opposed to things that can be considered 'literary fiction'.

For most of my life I considered creative writing to be an innate skill: either you have it or you don't. This has recently changed. I realized (and then felt quite foolish for not realizing it right up front) that writing is a craft that must be improved through practice. It's like playing the guitar: all the best guitarists spend a large part of their time practicing their craft. I read somewhere that Eric Clapton spent 5+ years basically locked in his house playing this guitar from morning to night with the obvious breaks during the day.

I guess that I still believe that an active imagination is still something that you have or don't have. I've always had that in spades. Most of the times I really value it and love it, and sometimes it's gotten me in trouble. I can't think of how many times I got myself in trouble in school by daydreaming. One such event was when I was in middle school and evidently the teacher had changed subjects to discussing Haiku. After a short silence when the students were paying attention, I was off in some dream world rescuing the damsel in distress and in general making a nuisance of myself to eViL everywhere. Suddenly the teacher asked me to share my feelings on baseball. I guess that was the topic we were supposed to be writing a quick Haiku about. So being completely out of touch with what was going on, I nervously started expounding on why I liked baseball. The entire class laughed and I still carry emotional baggage from that moment where my imagination got me in trouble. Let it go, Jeremy, let it go!

But other than the imagination, the technical aspects of writing, including learning to allow characters to drive the action, the ability to create and maintain a solid plot, and being able to allow what a character says and does give insight into who they are rather than freak out on adjectives and TELL the reader those things. Those are just a few of the things that I focus on every time I write, and over time I've gotten better at those things. Where I had to put a lot of conscious thought into doing the right thing, it's become more second nature. As my craft improves I find myself becoming more prolific. I'm sure that means I'm turning out a lot of complete shit, but the sheer enjoyment I find myself taking in telling a story is one of the things that makes me the happiest in life (kids & wife being others).

It's funny how writing used to be hard work: I always thought of it as the painful process of producing something that people will want to read. A story they'll find engrossing. But now, while it's still hard work and must be committed to entirely, it's not painful at all. It's joyous.

Anyway, I'm sure most, if not all of you, are sitting there saying 'Duh, Jeremy.' And if so, that's fine--it's well deserved. But this realization has dramatically improvement my relationship with my writing. Don't get me wrong--it's still immature and often I miss what I'm aiming for, but I'm taking a lot more joy in it these days and the dream feels much more attainable as a result.