Emma Jane Powell

You Are Not Alone in Trying to Be.

2012-04-17T15:53:00.001-04:00

He asked me to visit and talk. He'd show me around so I could see, This is where studio A is, This is the production suite. And in exchange he asked if I'd sit and talk with him for a little while. Not about anything in particular, he just liked to talk to new people he thought were interesting, and get their points of view. Something about expanding his circles of existence, or some transcendental spirit quest thing like that. I said sure.

So I walked out of the dusty motel room overlooking the dullest highway in existence. Being from the East and all, this exact center of the country's idea of a highway was laughable. It was midmorning and the sun was staring too intensely, the wind was hot and ragged, and I stood there staring out across a great flat nothing. Sure, to my right, there were buildings and people, but straight out ahead, I could see miles towards a shimmering horizon. I slid on my shoes and started scuffing along the half mile to the address he had given me. I didn't feel like telling him I didn't have a car; he asked me to come and visit, I wasn't about to impose for a ride.

When I got there the front door was glassy and gleaming, and my eyes welled up from the reflection of the sun. It got worse the closer I got, till I was reaching out blindly with tears coming down, fingers clawing at the air the height a door handle should be. Even though my eyes were closed, I could see through the lids when the angle of the glass changed and the sun's penetrating gaze was diverted, and I heard a scratchy sort of Hey. It sounded rough around the edges, like that favorite piece of furniture with all those scratches and dings, that gets loved and passed down for generations. Why are you crying, it said.

The sun, I said, blinking; it's too bright. I know what you mean, said the face I could now see in detail. It was studying me, half solid and half unsure. Now that I was through the door, I wiped away the sun's invasion of my privacy, taking in the sales counter and the racks of tee shirts. Thanks for holding the door, I said. He nodded and gestured for me to follow him through the door to the side of the counter; as I passed, I smiled at the girl standing there. She looked sort of smug, like she coveted this job with unhealthy obsession.

We walked past doorways and then turned into one. The room was large and comfortable, glass on one side that was mirrored now, because all the lights were off on the other side. He stepped ahead of me, and looked around for somewhere to begin. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and breathed in the magic of this place, feeling immediately the time and energy spent in here. The emotions lingered in the floorboards and the coiled cords snaking around its edges. He was saying something but I'm not sure that I heard it; I was too busy hearing the past of this space. I said, You've changed a lot. He gave me an odd look then, and with a faint chuckle he said, I’ve tried. We walked to the next door in the hallway, and found ourselves on the other side of the glass wall, in front of hundreds of buttons and dials. The chairs were comfortable, and said that they needed to be, for this was the room of harsh things. Beauty and pain were kept behind the glass; this was the place for critique.

We walked and walked and I was lost the entire time, listening to him tell me things about the rooms we saw; interesting things, and things I imagine he doesn’t usually say on these tours. I spent a night lying on this floor feeling like I was dying, he said. And, Once I had a girl here, yeah right on that chair there, she kissed me and undid my pants, it was like seven in the morning and I'd been up all night, and then she left, and half an hour later this little Chinese boy showed up on a bicycle with eggs and hash browns and a lipstick print on the paid receipt; it was the best damn breakfast I'd had in a long while.

I heard these stories disjointed and without a frame of time, but they all fit in perfectly with the history of the place. The chair remembered him sitting slouched and her kneeling before him. The floor offered a stoic, terse Yes, I did cradle him that night. Each story he told of his life was echoed in the architecture. I probably looked really far away, but he didn't mind or didn't notice, because he just kept talking in that stilted awkward croak of a voice. It reached out to my ears the way a shy child reaches for a hand to hold, and I wondered why he was telling me these things. Was it the comment I’d made about him changing? Had I revealed something by accident?

And then we came to a room like a studio apartment, and time slowed to a standstill. There were piles of papers and notebooks everywhere, and a guitar there next to an old upright piano, a small fridge and some chairs and a rusted daybed. This room screamed. There were words in everything, spilling over the edges of the furniture and floating through the air; strains of music were stuffed into corners, abandoned ideas and old drafts of misery. I watched him, a few steps ahead of me, turn around and spread his arms slightly with an awkward smile. The soft glow of a full body halo emerged around him, as he sloughed off his shell. Its edges were chaotic and messy, and every twitch and jerked movement made it sway and shift, but was about as successful in calming it as an attempt to comb through a knotted head of hair charged with static electricity.

If you don't mind, he started, I'd like to record this. I asked why absently, because my eyes were too busy reading scratched out lines in the air, recognizing them enough to be old versions of ones I knew. He said, No real reason; sometimes it's meditative to hear what people say over and over and over again. Like spelling out a word too many times in a row, it starts to look funny, doesn't it? Like it isn't right. Conversations can be like that too. Some offhand comment really isn't, when you hear it for the eighth time. Everything's got weight, and sometimes poking it enough lets you into someone's mind a little.

I blinked and tried to focus on his face. Is that where all these songs came from, I asked, from poking at yourself? He gave me that same look as he did in the first room, and I had a moment’s panic. But there was more of a smile behind it this time; he had confirmed his suspicions and it had poked his curiosity the right way. The tiny center of his eyes filled with sadness and truth, but he still smiled when he said, And sometimes they poke back. We stood for a moment, before he picked up a tape recorder and raised his eyebrows to repeat the question. I said, Sure, go ahead and record; I’d be honored.

So we sat and talked for a long time, about everything and then some. It was like having a private conversation at a cocktail party. A hundred other people were around us, having their own conversations, and little quips from theirs kept drifting into ours. Except, of course, the other guests were the notebooks and bric-a-brac, and as far as I could tell, only I could hear them. But the spot in his eye told me he knew, or at least suspected, that I was picking up on something that is normally unseen. He tried to hide the voraciousness of his interest, keeping his questions polite and reserved. I held myself back as well, out of fear. So rarely do I get the opportunity to discuss it, and I didn’t want to drive him away.

My fears, of course, were unfounded; just a practiced habit by that point. He was as courteous and gentle as I somehow knew he would be. When I asked him to play something on the peeling piano for me, he smiled and obliged, and I let myself rock in the waves that rushed out; he seemed happy, and I wondered vaguely if he could sense how the notes carried me. It’s funny, almost, how I can’t remember a word of what we said that whole time, but I remember exactly how he played. The intake of breath, the striking of the keys, the vastness and the depth that he created. The wholesome silence that followed. Excuse me, he said in his stilted croak, I have to change the tape.

A Glooming of Ketchup

2012-04-11T14:21:00.000-04:00

Chicken strips are one of the only reliable things offered by my day job’s cafeteria. They aren’t any good, but they’re the same each time I get them, so they’re reliable, and they always require ketchup. I’ve come to collect the packets in my desk. Well, 'collection' implies that I've been doing it purposefully, and this isn't so much a willing collection as it is a perpetual motion brain machine hiccup. I overestimate how many I will need, throw the unused ones in a drawer because it feels wrong to toss them, and promptly forget I’ve done so. Then, next time, I get some more. And I overestimate how many I will need. Rinse, repeat.

Once it became apparent that I have a small colony of ketchup packets living in my desk drawer, it crossed my mind that I should call it something. Not Ketchupville, or anything like that. It needed to be quantified, because it had grown past the point of simply being “a handful of packets” and I am too stubborn to thrown any of them, unopened, into the trash. My brain tried to process this, starting with the basics.

Firstly, why did I feel the need to have word for this? That one’s easy: I need a word because I have a lot of ketchup packets, I don’t want to throw them out, and the bizarre inanimate-object-empathizer part of me demands that I make it so… which leads me right into question two. Aren’t “a lot” or even “several” good enough? I just called it a colony a few lines up, didn’t I? Can’t it be that? This is the one I’m having the most trouble with, and after three days of unproductive deliberation, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s simply more fun to come up with some egregious term for a cluster (another perfectly good word that won’t do) of ketchup packets.

Because, I realize, it’s just that. It’s ketchup. It’s one of the most innocuous things out there, as condiments go. It’s everywhere. It’s been around forever. It deserves a really odd word.

So, where to begin? I had a pocket full of the latest additions to the cluster-colony of Ketchupville and my mind was off in the animal kingdom. A pride of lions. A school of fish. A flock of birds. “Flock of Ketchup” sounds pretty good, but also too much like a middle school garage band on a Disney Channel program.

Then I started going for the weirder ones, like a bike of ants, which is a real thing that I did not make up. There are the ones that seem almost redundant – a glaring of cats, for instance, which is one of the most appropriate collective nouns I’ve ever read, and which gets upgraded to a Destruction if they’re feral. There are the array of hedgehogs, the scourge of mosquitoes, and then, of course, the murder of crows and the unkindness of ravens. I tested all of them and more. And finally, after pattering around and imagining ants riding bicycles, I found it: a Glooming of ketchup.

Doesn’t it sound nice? Not as malicious as a Murder or Unkindness, but gives an appropriately foreboding air to something as bland as packets of ketchup. Beware, it says, of my blandness. Beware my love affair with your clothing. Beware the glooming of ketchup.

While I sat back, smiling to myself and adding more packets to my glooming, I realized there was one inherent flaw in my thinking. It wasn’t, surprisingly, “Why am I putting so much energy into something so utterly ridiculous?” No, it was “Well, now that that’s settled, what do I call a pile/cluster/colony/flock of mustard packets?”

I went through a similar thought process for these, so I’ll spare you. To quantify them, as that was my original goal, I define these terms as being “any number of packets that are more than a comfortable handful and less than the carton, tray, box, or bin from whence they came.”

So, I present, for your consideration:

A glooming of ketchup,

A shrewdness of mustard,

A flight of mayonnaise, and finally,

A brood of relish.

I did cursory searches of all of these terms; as whole units, they do not seem to exist yet, until I hit Publish, of course.

People of the Internet, you know what to do.

-Emma

A Name Came By Night

2012-03-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

A familiar feeling crept over me – it was that of the stagnant, sleepless tiredness that settles in nearly every night. It was twelve-thirty, maybe one. This was sort of normal. I turned over onto my side with a sigh and pulled out my phone, browsing random images and amusingly drunken texts from other people to quell the last energies of the day.

And then, I started to feel… I’d call it “lightheaded” if it weren’t happening from my knees down. It wasn’t the pins and needles feeling – it was of lightness, weightlessness. It tingled slightly, the way it always does. Once I realized it was there, and my brain focused on it instead of the vague haze it had been occupying, it spread quickly up to the bottom of my ribcage. I was expecting it to go farther than that, and encompass my body entirely, but it stopped. I felt it orient towards the edge of the bed… or the space between the bed and the window… or the cross I’d tacked up above it on the wall. I’m not sure – somewhere in that direction, in front of me, as I was lying on my side. Someone was sitting at my bedside, or standing watch over me.

I said, very quietly, so as not to disturb my bed partner, “Brigid?”

Nothing.

But, the feeling didn’t leave – I still tingled and felt like airy static. I still felt the presence beside me. That was something.

I could say I was recalling memories, but I didn’t think of them willingly – the images and sounds were brought to my mental attention from the outside. I know how I recall things normally – and there is nearly always a “fade in” effect. It is never a sharp, instant recollection, from beginning to end. My memories and the way I think about them have a glaze of Vaseline, like the old movies. This? This was instant. That’s how I know it wasn’t my willing these memories to the front of my mind. It was a splice-cut highlight reel of the evening’s ritual. I saw the circle; I saw parts of the ritual. To a certain extent, I could see the airy static energies winging around the room – ones I could only feel when I was there.

I asked, this time silently in my head, “Is that you? Have you come to visit me?”

In an instant, the images in my head changed.

They’re fuzzy now, and get fuzzier the more I think back on them, but they were of faces I did not recognize, of voices that were unfamiliar. They were not the designs or costumes or actors that have been assigned courtesy of Hollywood. But I saw them, sitting around a table, drinking and feasting and carousing. I saw them in battle, armor shining out, the glory of their strength radiating with each swing of hammer and sword and shield. I felt a swelling of pride in me, a wide grin split my lips, and the kind of happiness I have a hard time assigning a word to, as “joy,” “elation,” “ecstasy,” “euphoria,” and even “happiness” itself never really seem to cover it enough, or correctly. And there was a name.

It came into my head in the instant before the tingling lightness in my body left, before I became aware again of the normal nocturnal soundtrack. The name was Thor.

I wish I could say I've been writing.

2012-01-23T14:30:00.000-05:00

The truth is, I haven't done much in the last few weeks. My day job has been stressful and full to bursting with daily tasks, so I haven't had much time to collect my thoughts, sit down, and write. I have tried, mind you, but I've gotten nowhere. Maybe a sentence here, a slight revision there. Overall, nothing. It's frustrating, as I managed to find the enthusiasm for it back in November, which was an equally stressful and work-demanding month.

However, two new prospects have arisen: one is a freelance opportunity for which I am awaiting a reply. The other is a new gaming-based adventure story. A friend of mine that I have known for five or six years now has come out of "retirement" from running role playing games in order to run a new fantasy adventure. He met with us potential players last Wednesday to discuss it, and we spent an hour or so brainstorming ideas for the world in which we'll play.

The mistake I made when deciding to write the Laurent saga was choosing to do so well after I had begun to live it on a weekly basis. Many of the early adventures and character nuances were lost on me, and I had to reinvent them, now being more familiar with their further-developed selves. It was liberating in a way, to revisit the early, merciless days of my primary character, but even as I was guiding him through the trials and tribulations that contributed to his change of heart, there was a nagging at the back of my head. I had already gone through it once, and attempting to achieve that fresh, raw exhilaration again was trying. I wanted to do him justice on the page, and give the same sense of world-stopping, heart-changing clarity to his epiphanies that I'd experienced with him firsthand. Many times I rewrote entire passages because they were cozying up to cheesiness rather than the epic justice I was striving toward.

This time, I am prepared. The world is yet unformed, save for the ideas we bandied about last Wednesday. I have a character idea and received feedback for her, and I like where she has the potential to go. We are beginning this epic tale at the beginning - level 1, with barely the clothes on our backs to call our own. Oh, and since our faithful GM is the owner of an internet radio station, we'll be recording all of the gaming sessions, so I can always go back and refresh myself on what happened.

Since the world is a branch of one he has already created, and I am but one of nine people collaborating to create this story, I cannot in good faith take full credit for the plot, nor can I endeavor to publish it traditionally. Instead, it will be the main source of fiction for this blog. Tentatively, I will call it as weekly updates on Thursdays, though that may change as we get into the swing of the games.

You can look forward to many sword-and-board encounters, puzzles, traps, political intrigue among ruling families, and a long, winding adventure.

Stay tuned!

-Em

Hello 2012!

2012-01-06T11:33:00.000-05:00

Hello again, all! Glad to see you've survived another New Year's.

I like the holiday a lot, personally. It brings out the weird in people, as they desperately try to compose and then complete last minute, temporary bucket lists that might otherwise not see the light of day. While I myself revel and imbibe, I try to take the time to study whomever I'm with - and usually it's a whole mess of people drunkenly trying to make the night memorable. They, and I as well, cling to the words that everyone says, hoping that for once the world will behave like the movies, and some witty one-line catchphrase will escape someone's mouth.

This year's festivities, while memorable on their own, offered me a few snippets here and there that will work their way into my writings. I finally decided on a name for my protagonist for 3.0 (after getting through almost the entirety of chapter one, and a handful of later scenes written out of order, all the while dodging her name), and a few quirks are weaving themselves into her personality.

That said, my outline is still full of question marks after the Big Reveal. I know the choice she has, and the consequences of both (and the subsequent plot lines that could follow), but I have absolutely no idea which she should choose. I suppose I shouldn't worry about it until I get there, but it's the sort of thing that nags at the back of my head when I'm writing. Most of the time, I don't use a formal outline, but almost always do I have an idea of where the story will go, beginning to end, with the really important plot points marking the way. So the fact that I haven't yet decided on an ending is somewhat unusual, and bothersome.

I suppose as I get to know the characters better, things will fall into place. It's an interesting exercise so far, at the least, as I'm writing it in a first person historical present tense. Thus far it has proven itself to be a fun challenge, but I think it effectively gets across the way my protagonist thinks, as I imagine her to be a little stilted, and nearsighted as well.

Yet Another SOPA Post

2011-12-20T12:54:00.003-05:00

Right off the bat: I think piracy is terrible, and I am one of those old farts who still goes out and buys albums and movies to support the artists and performers I like. However. When someone (a lot of someones, in this case) is proud of his technological illiteracy, refuses to acknowledge someone who has the knowledge and is willing to explain it, and decides to levy legislative power, I am appalled.

This is what I see - a salt-and-pepper haired, slightly overweight man in a suit, standing with a nailbat in his hand, while another, fatter and greasier man, ties a blindfold over his eyes. The man with the bat is spun around in circles and let loose, to bludgeon whatever he comes across, with the greasy man guiding his dizzy feet in cries of "warmer/colder." Oh, and the blindfolded man is surrounded by paper bags and boxes suspended on strings, and they're all full of kittens.

SOPA is a sick, sick round of piñata.

I encourage you to contact your representative if you value your internet and first amendment rights. This stretches beyond the US borders, and would have international repercussions for decades to come, if passed.

Find your representative, and how to contact him/her here.

A very useful infographic explaining SOPA and its effects.

Surviving The World - Besides being an ingenious and thought-provoking "photocomic" that I enjoy immensely, it is where I found the above infographic, so my hat's off to Dante for that one.

I'll get off my soapbox now - I hate getting up there at all, but as someone who has an interest in both the Internet and intellectual property rights, I felt I must say something.

From a non-political standpoint, the fact that this bill has come up at all, fills in a hole in the sci-fi book I'm working on, Three Point Oh. It will be set about fifty to seventy-five years in the future, and the events leading up to the plot could hinge on the passing of SOPA. To clarify, I sincerely hope it does not pass, but I cannot help but feel a little giddy about it. The happiness, I assure you, is only in that "puzzle pieces falling together" sense.

Cheers,
Em

A Poem for Christmas Time

2011-12-15T00:58:00.003-05:00

A bit of holiday cheer for you. I've always admired the quaintness of Gorey's poems, which I've tried to emulate. I wish I had some semblance of artistic skill to accompany this, but no matter.

Christmas is a week from Sunday, and so I present to you a poem:

"Christmastime With Mother"

When I was younger, Mother

would often take us out

during the winter holidays

to see all the snow about.

She taught us to make snowballs,

and angels in the drifts,

and not to ever walk beneath

the nearby skiers' lifts.

That was many years ago

I am sorry to tell,

but I am reminded of it now

as it's Christmas time and, well...

Mother has been gone, you see

a long time, which is nice,

but it really was unpleasant

to see her sink beneath the ice.

Come April and the thawing,

we pulled dear Mother out

and dressed her up in Sunday's best,

though she wears an awful pout.

Now at Christmas, when we ride

out to the frozen lake,

we're sure to take her with us

though she never wants to skate.

She won't do much of anything,

my sis and I have found,

but with Ma around, it is more fun

than if she were in the ground.

A very happy Christmas and New Year's to all of you and yours. If the stress gets to be too much, or you have become desensitized with the commercialization of it, I recommend giving this a listen: Tom Lehrer's "A Christmas Carol"

I may post something else before the new year, but if not, I'll see you on the other side. :)

Happy Holidays,
Love,
Emma

Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

2011-12-08T14:57:00.003-05:00

Evidently, today is Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day.

It's as good a day as any to extrapolate on an old theory I had growing up, one which will explain a lot about me, I think. I don't remember how old I was when I first thought this up, because the oldest memory I have about it dates back to middle school, and that memory is a privately excited realization that a dusty old theory I'd had was true. It happened during gym class while they were taking attendance.

Gym - sorry, Physical Education - at that point was 3/4 the entire class. The other quarter was off in the bowels of an unused classroom, trapped in what was known as Health Class, which was usually accompanied by dramatic chords and terrifyingly bad photocopies of genitalia. Gym class meant there were fifty-odd middle schoolers to wrangle into some semblance of physical activity. They took attendance by having us sit alphabetically by last name, in long rows with ten feet between each kid.

Class periods were only about 45 minutes long, and we were given five minutes at the beginning and end of the period to change into and out of our gym clothes. That brings us down to 35. Fifteen minutes were spent taking attendance and making us all do "warm up" exercises. These warm-ups were Do Quad Stretches, Run In Place, Do Arm Circles, Do Jumping Jacks, Do Push Ups, Stop Complaining, Run In Place. That leaves twenty minutes to do the activity of the day, but that's not important.

In any event, I was sitting there, one day, waiting to get the infernal warm-ups over with, when I spaced out. This was more or less a common occurrence, as I'd realized much earlier in my life that I'm a little off, and it would make my life that much easier if I kept certain things to myself. So there I was, staring into space, when I suddenly came back into awareness with the thought in my head, "Wow! I was right! We CAN travel through time!" This was immediately followed by, "Crap! I have no one to tell about this!"

This was before personal blogging really picked up steam in general, and also during the under-a-rock part of my life, so, many years later, I can finally explain this idea/theory to people. Hopefully, you will appreciate my naive wonderment.

The theory went like this:

You have both a mind and a brain. Your mind is the conscious thought, that top layer, inner monologue that that mainstream media telepaths can hear. Your brain is the subconscious, automatic stuff - regulating your heartbeat and breathing, and things like that.

Your brain is attached to the body, and without it, will die. However, your mind can wander, as the expression goes. It can travel through time. When you are staring into space, your mind has vacated and leapt forward a short distance in time. Your brain, which cannot accommodate time travel, stays behind to keep your heart pumping and your lungs breathing. The body itself, and the components that make it up, are dependent on time - cell cycles, aging, etc. It cannot physically travel through time. The mind is something more, and does not necessarily age, and so is free to traverse the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

What is a memory, if not traveling backwards to a specific point in one's life? Can you not see the events in your head, feel the emotions you felt, the way you did at the time it occurred? If our minds are capable of returning to and revisiting moments in our past, why can't they jump forward?

Anyway, I was a strange girl, but felt that this was a perfect anecdote for Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. Now if only I could travel ahead to see a finished manuscript, and somehow sneak it back to the present.

Wibbly-Wobbly Links for fellow Time Travel Pretenders:
- The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
- Photographing the Past
- Young Me / Now Me
- Time Travel Face Bags
- Dear Photograph

-Em

Ex Libris, Vitam: Working Title

2011-12-05T17:01:00.002-05:00

That, if Google Translate is to be trusted, is the working title for a new(ish) project idea that is finally getting a proper work over. A project that will have me listening to a lot of trippy, progressive rock.

The idea itself came out of listening to a couple of different prog songs a while back, but was a kind of carrot-on-a-stick until very recently. It kept dangling itself in front of me, whispering, "Hey, I'm a good idea!" and I'd hiss back, "No, you're not! You're exactly like this other story over here! Get out of the way!" Yet it kept stringing me along... that is, until my brain found some scissors lying around, and reached up and cut the string.

What I have now is a very small idea that wraps up an otherwise very large idea and makes it not terrible, and also different from that other story.

Ex Libris, Vitam... From the Books, Life.
Part prose, part verse, and purposefully very disjointed. Chuck Palahniuk, H. G. Wells, and Isaac Asimov drop acid together and narrate a stream-of-consciousness car crash, while Pink Floyd and Dreamtheater provide the soundtrack. Well, it's more like a spaceship crash, which is also a person's life.

I told you - lots of trippy, prog rock.

There will be a lot of straight up research too, as my protagonist, at the moment, is a physics buff. That might change. If it doesn't, a decent percentage of my research will be done by watching the Big Bang Theory. I might be kidding about that.

The holidays are approaching faster than I can blink. I've gotten 90% of my shopping done and today's endeavor was Christmas cards - so far, so good. No tree yet, but that might be remedied soon.

Cheers,
Em

In a Post-NaNo Haze

2011-12-02T13:12:00.002-05:00

November has come and gone, which means that my yearly endeavor in literary abandon has come to a close. This year was fraught with illness and wordless days, but I somehow managed to come out on top regardless.

As usual, while trying to write one story, I was hit with ideas for three others - the downside to being an Aquarius, I imagine - and now have them waiting in the wings. The first of which I am started to draft today, using primarily Google Docs. I haven't done much with Docs before, preferring my fuddy-duddy hard file transfer ways. However, in my month of NaNo-ing, I discovered that one of the computers I use for a lot of my writing has a flash drive port exactly even with the seat of the chair, and one turn too far and too fast would likely snap any drive sticking out. As this computer does not belong to me, but rather my day (evening) job, I cannot change it, nor the chair, and had a couple of close calls that almost lost me my NaNovel.

So, Google Docs. So far, I'm liking it. I have yet to try it out on my android, though if it functions well enough, I may end up writing at a near-constant level (with the anticipated side effect of my thumb-typing WPM going up dramatically while my standard WPM remains the same).

The project I am starting first is as good as any to store in a cloud - it will be very Internet-oriented. I took some time earlier to research some of the history of the Internet and the various tech involved, and found myself, of course, on Wikipedia. About two sentences into the article, it occurred to me that researching the Internet via Wikipedia was as close to a personal interview as I would ever get, and it almost looked like my plot was on the other side of the monitor, reaching out and pressing its hand to the glass (ok, LCD). Before you jump to conclusions, I was able to restrain touching my own hand to the screen, thank you very much.

What I was completely and utterly unable to do, though, was restrain myself from writing. The first five hundred words spilled out onto the keyboard before I could stop them, and are now sitting comfortably in a clouded document. In five hundred words, I've set up the world, described in the tone of the main character's voice. That's a pretty productive clump of words. We'll see where it takes me! I'm hoping it's far away from this head and chest cold that's rattling around inside me.

-Em