Fast Fiction

For Christmas this year The Man gave me a new telephoto lens (1.9x) for my camera (Sony DSC-V1). This amps up my zoom to 7.6x from 4x.

The first real test of this came last night as I struggled to catch a few images of the Comet Machholz. It’s supposed to be visible (at 3.6-3.8 magnitude) during the early part of January near the Pleiades (just follow Orion’s belt pretty much straight until you hit the Seven Sisters).

The problem I had was two-fold. First, it was pretty bright out with the city lights last night. While I was able to find Orion easily, I had trouble seeing The Pleiades easily. Second, there’s no easy way to scope such a dim object with my camera. True, I’m doing this the old fashioned way - I just pointed the damn thing where I thought stuff was, fired off a shot and then checked it.

The cool part was that I actually managed to point and shoot The Pleiades dead center on the third try. Sadly, I know very little about the manual controls for my camera and just kept changing the pre-programmed settings to see which one would give me the best result. What happened was that whatever the default setting for one of the pre-sets had a nice long exposure, but I think a smidge too long, as the stars ended up as little streaks (probably because of that pesky earth rotation).

I’m hoping to try again tonight and I’m praying for clear weather. At the moment there’s a lovely high-altitude haze over the city.

The other real workout for the new lens will be this weekend when I do my first whale-watching trip!

As promoted a few days ago, I gathered up the two jars of change from the house and went to Ralph’s to pop them in the Coinstar machine to donate to charity for the tsunami relief. I chose the UNICEF Tsunami Relief fund. I think I might give some additional money to some other charities, to spread it around.

The total, as seen here amounted to:

Quarters: 143
Dimes: 272
Nickels: 183
Pennies: 624

That’s 8.62 pounds of change, if you’re keeping track. I was pretty pleased at the amount of silver in there too, which really helps amp up the value per pound.

Total Donation: $78.34 (that’s $9.09 per pound)

Things I did not donate that were in the change jar included two wheat pennies (one 1920 in pretty poor condition, a 1956 D wheat penny in good condition), five German coins totalling 165 pfennig, an old battery used for my glucometer, a barette, a Canadian penny, two Sacajawea dollars and a Susan B. Anthony dollar, and three pennies that were rejected by the counter because they were fused together with some sort of sticky substance.

As I hoped, they did not take out any fees for the donation. Unicef was the only charity listed on the system that had a specific fund for the tsunami relief, though I’m sure that the Red Cross is funnelling much of their current fundraising to the tsunami relief.

In other cool news, Viacom (and Paramount) are matching employee donations up to $500,000 dollar for dollar with money to the Red Cross. So, you might want to check with your employer to see if they have any matching donation system set up. (Viacom has also pledged $1,000,000 as well as other localized drives for donations within Asia with their networks there. They’ve also reformatted the MTV Asia Awards to be a huge relief fundraising effort in early February.)

This morning, I and probably quite a few other SoCal residents were woken by an earthquake. Not a large one, just a 4.4 about one mile north of Fontana (a city I know nothing about, except that they have an Ikea according to my latest catalog). It was not a bad quake, just a long smooth shaky thing. It woke the dog, and caused her to pace around the room until it was over (a mere 20 seconds or so). (The USGS site also showed that there were several smaller quakes in the hours and minutes before that one, which I did not feel.)

But here’s what’s cool. After quakes I usually go to the USGS quake site - Los Angeles/Caltech Seismic Net and check out where it was and how big. I try to figure where they are, based on the shaking and length and have gotten pretty good at it. I felt no P/S wave distinction, which usually says to me that it was far away, and the fact that it went on so long but not intensely said to me that it was bigger than a 4 but no more than a 4.8 or so and within 100 miles.

So I went to the site and there’s an option when you click on a quake that you can input your own details about the quake and it’ll generate a Shake Intensity Map based on eyewitness accounts. I’ve been doing this pretty faithfully for about five years (and even went back and put in my account for the Northridge quake).

I’ll have more about holiday recountings later.

But for now, here’s a tip about how to make your donation easily to aid those affected by the tsunami in Asia.

Coinstar (those green coin counting machines at the grocery store) accept coins as donation to charities (they reduce the handling fee for charities). For tsunami relief they have both the Red Cross and UNICEF listed (and possibly might be adding more as we speak).

So, while you’re debating who to give to, or maybe you’ve already given but happen to get going by Ralph’s or Food 4 Less, consider emptying out that change jar you have at home. They even issue receipts for tax purposes.

In case you forgot, I’ve been taking a class on Tuesday nights at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium down in San Pedro since October. It’s a class to be certified as a docent and be an on-board naturalist for whale watching tours.

Well, the test was last week and they have rather high standards. You can’t just pass the test, you have to get an A (95 right out of 105). Well, I did just fine, as I found out on Tuesday at the last meeting of the year. YaY for me!

I will say that even though I went in knowing a lot about the basics of whales and other marine mammals, I did learn quite a bit. And some of it was stupid stuff that you’d think I’d have known. I thought all whales used echolocation - but it turns out it’s only the toothed whales, not the baleen whales. So those blue whales, those largest animals ever on earth - they’ve just got their eyes to depend on down there in the depths. Kind of humbling.

Starting in the new year, I’ll be going out on weekends on whale watching tours. I’m a little nervous about getting the info right. After all, it’s one thing to learn all this stuff in a classroom, but another entirely to apply it out in the field.

What’s great about it, for you gentle readers, is that I’ll have lots to post about and maybe, just maybe, a few cool photos.

If I don’t get to post again soon, please have a safe holiday and keep those you love warm and close.

I’m in a blog slump. I think I was all written out after November.

But my best excuse at the moment for not blogging more is food poisoning. I think I got some bad fish at lunch on Thursday and by Thursday night my belly was not happy. I won’t go into the gory details, but lets just say that I had gone 12 and half years without throwing up - a damn good run if you ask me. Man, that’s unpleasant. Anyone who does that more often than every 12 years has my sincerest sympathies.

The fever broke on Saturday night/Sunday morning and I’m feeling much more like myself though I think I’ve lost about five pounds already.

I’m woefully behind at everything and this little respite has not helped in the slightest. I’m behind on the holiday plans, behind at work (even with the site launch pushed a week) and I am seriously lacking in enthusiasm.

I know, I’ll probably feel better with a bit more energy. A little food would probably be a good start.

Ooh, I’ve been playing with excel again (and maybe a little photoshop).

I mean, if I’ve been keeping copious records of my writing time and results, I may as well do something with it.

I don’t know what this chart tells up. Click on it for fullscreen goodness. I think it says that I consistently finish. And my novels are a different color each year. And I do less writing at the beginning of the month than at the end.

So maybe I can’t figure out how I do it, but at least I can show you how it was done.

So here’s the wrap-up I promised.

Every year I want to do something different for National Novel Writing Month.

This year I wanted the NaNoWriMo experience of writing crap. In the sense that I had not idea what I was going to do, I was just going to write. And of course, I did write crap. Probably more crap per paragraph than I’ve written before. I just sat down on November 7th with a scant notion of an idea and just wrote. With no plan and no expectations.

What’s good that came out of it? There’s a good idea there. It’s actually an idea that might make a good play, so I’ll try to work on that.

For those who don’t care to download the PDF (and who can blame you), here’s a brief synopsis of what the story might be:

Maddie Fairfax was born with the unfortunate name of Kendra Gross. Sure, it wasn’t Ima Pigg, but it was bad enough that she thought that it was holding her back. So she changed her name to something less offensive - Rachel Watson. A nice bland name and she became a nice bland girl. Not happy with the bland life she thought long and hard this time and changed her name to Maddie Fairfax.

Maddie Fairfax was a big hit. She became a top residential real estate agent in Los Angeles with her face on bus benches and money in the bank. What she didn’t consider was that this was a new era. She boarded a plane in Las Vegas and when she went to catch her connecting flight, she found that she was no only on the no-fly list, but of such interest that she was immediately taken into custody for questioning.
And she’s held in the basement in an interrogation room for 72 days. She was eventually released, but of course changed slightly from her long isolation on Christmas Day. She heads to her parent’s house, who of course try to get her to go to Washington, DC to testify before the Senate about abuses of power by the Patriot Act. She visits with the Senator and before she starts off on her long drive across the country, she decides to go back home and change her name back to Kendra Gross.

Okay, the plot could use some work. But that’s what I wrote.

Next year I think I’m going to do a bit more work, maybe start over again with a tried and true plot. Maybe an adaptation.

Equally interesting are the stats:

Maddie - 76 instances
Maddie Fairfax - 50 instances
Rachel Watson - 42 instances
Kendra Gross - 29 instances
Los Angeles - 44 instances
Las Vegas - 25 instances
I - 2802 instances
name - 115 instances
and - 1773
alphabet (all forms) - 3 instances

counts
50,236 words
212,839 characters
1,485 paragraphs
4,508 sentences

averages
sentence/paragraph - 3.0
words/sentence - 11.1
characters/word - 4.0

readability
passive sentences - 2%
Flesch Reading Ease - 79.7
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 4.8

Finally, amount of time to write: 30.5 hours. No wonder it reads at less than a fifth grade level!

This evening’s writing session was not really much about writing. After all, I needed a scant 994 words.

What I needed to do was find a way to bring the story to a close. Of course there’s the old standby where everyone dies. Which I’ve used in two different novels before (okay, well in one of them it was absolutely appropriate seeing how it was the story of a martyr). But this one needed to be somehow motivated.

So I motivated my character to stop what she was doing and take a different path.

The session took place in my bed upstairs, since it was close and comfy and away from the distraction of the TV. My brother called in the middle, so that explains the lousy count for that one block.

time…running tally…words…words/minute
7:15…...49,388….....382…..25.47
7:30…...49,409…......21…...1.40
7:45…...49,942….....533…..35.53
7:54…...50,236….....294…..19.60

I’ll have a better wrap up later, but there it is, the final tally.

The whole thing took 30 1/2 hours to complete. One of these days I’m gonna write a better novel in about the same amount of time. Maybe that’s one of these months.

Eek! So close to 50K, yet so far from the end of the novel. Well, the title “novel” is debatable as well.

I started my day where I started my novel. I started my first day of novel writing three weeks ago at Espresso Mi Cultura.

time…running tally…words…words/minute
11:00…...42,351…....243…...16.20
11:15…...42,570…....219…...14.60
11:30…...42,754…....184…...12.27
11:45…...43,179…....425…...28.33
12:15…...43,658…....479…...31.93
12:30…...44,304…....646…...43.07
12:45…...44,652…....348…...23.20
13:00…...45,123…....471…...31.40

Then I headed down for some mano-a-nano with Russ at Panera near the airport (I always think the sight of landing planes is so cool - the cross Sepulveda Blvd. there at a scant few hundred feet above the road).

time…running tally…words…words/minute
2:30…...45,619…....496…...33.07
2:45…...46,171…....552…...36.80
3:00…...46,623…....452…...30.13
3:45…...47,042…....419…...27.93
4:00…...47,468…....426…...28.40
4:15…...48,011…....543…...36.20
4:30…...48,451…....440…...29.33
4:45…...48,615…....164…...10.93
5:00…...49,006…....391…...26.07

So I’m two days away from the deadline and a scant 1,000 words. I’ll make it, probably sometime tomorrow evening my blue wordcount bar will never even turn green, but go straight to purple on the NaNoWriMo forums.

I have no idea about what to do about the fact that my novel is going nowhere. There is no plot. There’s a story, perhaps, but the themes aren’t heavy enough to carry it. Ah well, it’s another experiment for me.

Today I did a little writing warm-up before my writing out session. I headed over to The Coffee Table for about 90 minutes of writing before heading up to Vromans:

time..running tally..words…words/minute
12:15…..35,750…...575…..38.33
12:30…..36,285…...535…..35.67
12:45…..36,867…...582…..38.80
13:00…..37,387…...520…..34.67
13:15…..37,986…...599…..39.93
13:30…..38,205…...219…..14.60

I had a cup of coffee and a chocolate croissant. I didn’t really want the croissant. I wasn’t hungry. I had a nice breakfast of leftover baked yam with some spiced brown sugar butter.

Then at Vroman’s we sat as some sort of display of novel writing activity - like the people who pull taffy in the front window at the boardwalk or the donuts at Krispy Kreme. This is how novels are made:

time..running tally..words…words/minute
14:30…..38,486…...281…..18.73
14:45…..38,700…...214…..14.27
15:00…..39,275…...575…..38.33
15:15…..39,552…...277…..18.47
15:30…..39,841…...289…..19.27
15:45…..40,287…...446…..29.73
16:00…..40,556…...269…..17.93
16:15…..41,158…...602…..40.13
16:45…..41,456…...298…..19.87
17:00…..42,108…...652…..43.47

I had a cup of bad gunpowder green tea. And I also brought along a little baggie of chocolate which included some mixed milk and dark Wilbur buds and some organic chocolate that my sister-in-law brought for Thanksgiving.

The total for the day was 6,933. I should have gone for a squared off 7K, but I figured I got to 42,000 and it was raining and I only paid for four hours on the meter, so I headed home.

Today, instead of writing in one of those places made for drinking coffee, I went and wrote in one of those places designed to hold books (not a bookshelf). Fellow wrimo (and yinzer), Ron, set up a write-out at the Valley Plaza branch of the LA Public Library. It’s a brand spankin’ new building with a swell little meeting room where they let us have coffee (home-made).

I got about 4K in for the day, so I’m in a pretty good position. You can check the full status spreadsheet on the left if you’re really curious. I need 15K more and my calculations say that I need about 10 more hours of work in order to achieve that. I figure I’ll do about 3 or 4 hours on Saturday in Pasadena and then maybe sneak out on Sunday to write out by myself for a bit (not a public event) so I can knock back 5-8K. Then it’ll be a matter of tying up the story with a neat bow on Monday or Tuesday. My saving grace is that I don’t have class on Tuesday night.

time..running tally..words…words/minute
5:00…..31,451…....290…..19.33
5:15…..31,970…....519…..34.60
5:45…..32,428…....458…..30.53
6:15…..32,689…....261…..17.40
6:30…..33,383…....694…..46.27
6:45…..33,680…....297…..19.80
7:00…..34,340…....660…..44.00
7:15…..34,581…....241…..16.07
7:30…..35,055…....474…..31.60
7:45…..35,175…....120…...8.00

I admit, I start my Christmas shopping in the sale section. Today I was browsing Amazon apparel. I was not only suprised by what they carry, but also the excellent values!

I guess I hadn’t really considered looking at tacky lingere on Amazon, and further, checking out the reviews. But hey, where else are you going to get the straight poop about the comfort of Fishnet Suspender Pantyhose with 3 Openings - by Leg Avenue hailed by user A.N. Roman, “I wear these panties. Every day. And I’m a guy. Whenever I walk around with these on, I go up to a mirror, go “That’s hot”, and eat pumpkin pie while watching The Goonies. You should join me. But only if you wear these too.”

Of course if you like those stockings, you might also want to consider (as Amazon recommends) the Sexy Open Bust and Open Crotch Fishnet Bodystocking - by Leg Avenue. The reviews all hail the great access to the crotch and breasts.

It’s not all whore-wear in the sale section, of course, there is Lace Trim Plaid Flannel Gown which sadly has no reviews.

There’s no point in me racing other people. Because this is a personal challenge.

So, here’s how I was doing in the past:

November 21
2003 - 31,733
2002 - 33,239
2001 - 25,076

For the record, I’m at 31,161.

This morning was Downtown Day. We met up at Philippe’s down on Alameda and Ord.

If you live in LA (hell, even if you just visit here) you should probably go there at least once. I got a turkey dip, some apple pie and a nine cent cup of coffee. All good things. I didn’t each much of the sandwich, but my problem yesterday was that I didn’t have anything to eat all day, not until I got to Pasadena, and I do believe that Chris Baty is right to stress in his book that breakfast is a writer’s most important meal.

time..running tally..words…words/minute
12:00…..26,854…..739…..49.27
12:15…..27,069…..215…..14.33
12:45…..27,366…..297…..19.80
13:00…..27,885…..519…..34.60
13:15…..28,138…..253…..16.87
13:30…..28,587…..449…..29.93
13:45…..28,753…..166…..11.07
14:00…..28,963…..210…..14.00
14:15…..29,708…..745…..49.67
14:30…..30,356…..648…..43.20
14:45…..30,596…..240…..16.00
15:00…..31,161…..565…..37.67

It’s another 5K so I’m that much closer to the goal. Of course I still need another 19K and the trick is to figure out how to do that in the next nine days. I think I can do 5K on each day next weekend - so that leaves 9K left unattributed to any particular session. I’m planning to write on Wednesday afternoon/night. Then a couple of days of family goodness (menu to come). I suppose the rest will have to be done in the evenings as best I can manage. I hope I can figure how to bring my story to a close. I actually hadn’t really consider that before this moment.