I just signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo for June. Camp NaNoWriMo is the same as regular NaNoWriMo but it takes place in June or August rather than November.

I signed up because I’ve really been struggling with writing new fiction this year. I’ve created several poems I’m really fond of, but when it comes to fiction I haven’t written anything new all year. I’ve re-written a few stories, and I’m up to my eyeballs with HTRYN revisions on Twixt, but brand new from nothing drafts? Nada. In five months. That’s unacceptable.

So, that’s where Camp NaNoWriMo comes in.

I have a story I’m meant to be working on with Danica. It’s called Hollow Children and the idea is that I’m going to write it and then she will illustrate it. I’ve decided to make it my Camp NaNo project. Perhaps the daily word counts, accountability and a NaNo-light atmosphere will help me get it done. It will then sit for a few months until I find time to revise it, but it will be written and maybe that will break through this wall in my brain that is keeping me from getting any new fiction written.

Or, maybe I’m just crazy.

This is Danica. This isn’t the most flattering photograph I have of her, but she looks angry in it, and that makes it the most appropriate photograph for this post.

Thursday was Dani’s track and field day. This is ungood for a few reasons

- Like her mother, Danica isn’t much into sports. That includes track and field.
- Dani’s birthday is in October, which means she has to compete against kids a grade higher than her
- We, as a family, haven’t really had a very active lifestyle until recently which means we’re all somewhat out of shape.

So, Dani was not looking forward to track and field day, but, like a champ, she sucked it up and was going to make the best of it. Still, she did call me from the track and field day to complain about the weather, and then again in the afternoon to tell me that the event had been canceled on account of snow (gotta love springtime in Edmonton, right?) and would be continued on Friday.

Then she came home and wanted to talk to me. There were tears in her eyes.

She cried as she told me about how the people who were measuring and raking for the triple jump event had made fun of her performance.

*sigh*

I was furious. Mean people suck. And people being mean to my kid, well, they suck even more than most.***

One of the worst parts of the whole situation was that she would have to go back to school the next day (Friday) and compete in two more events.

Could I force her to do that? Turns out the answer is no.

I know we can’t shelter her from everything, but I asked myself, what would she learn from going to the track meet that would make it worth the anxiety she’d feel and the potential for having to deal with insensitive people. In the end I couldn’t see any valuable lesson to be learned other than ‘sometimes you have to do stuff that sucks’. I decided she’d done that when she’d participated in the track meet on Thursday, I couldn’t force her to go back on Friday.

Jo and I discussed it and we agreed. We decided that if Danica asked to stay home on Friday we’d let her. She did, and we did.

My point?

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
~Plato

It’s something I sometimes struggle with** and maybe this was life’s way of reminding me, so I thought I might help spread the word, in case I’m not the only one who could use it.

~*~

On a sideways-related note*, Danica has decided to get into better shape and so she and I have commited to doing the Couch to 5k program starting today. Monday, Wednesday and Friday will be our running days. We know it’s really going to suck at the start, but we’re determined to stick to it.

That’s one reason why I’m making this blog post, actually. This is going to be hard. Super hard. I would have a difficult enough time keeping myself motivated to do this. Now, not only am I going to have to push myself to do this, I’m also going to have to push Danica.

Did I mention that it’s going to be tough?

Yeah. So I’m hoping by sharing this it will not only provide a little accountability, it will also give me a whole bunch of people who will be able to remind me that I’m doing the right thing. The right thing for myself and for my daughter.

Yeah. I’m definitely going to need that.

*The kids at the track meet were just the proverbial final straw, not the sole motivation for this. It had been a long time in the making.

**As evidenced, I suppose, by the fact that when I originally wrote this post I referred to the children who mocked Danica as jerks. Not very kind there, Rhonda, not very kind at all.

***It could be that those kids are actually good people who are usually very nice. It could be that they didn’t know she could hear them. But what they said was mean, and she could hear them so whether they know it or not, they really hurt her feelings. I grant you that there is a huge difference between intentional and unintentional meanness, but when I’m in ‘protective mother’ mode I don’t clearly see subtleties like that.

The Blogging From A to Z Challenge: This was by far the most time-consuming challenge. Not only did I have to publish a blog post almost everyday of the month, but I had to visit 10 other people’s blogs, take a look around, read thier posts and leave a comment. What’s more, I replied to every comment left on my blog and visited those people’s blogs as well. Now, from what I can tell, a very large proportion of people who did this challenge skipped that part, and frankly, that kinda pissed me off.

The challenging part may have come from writing blog posts everyday, but if that’s all you did, you missed out. What’s more, you took advantage of the people who embraced the challenge in its entirety. The point (at least in part) was supposed to be to meet new people and expirience new blogs, not just sit back in your cozy hole and enjoy free traffic from the Blogging From A to Z participants list. /rant

Anyway, I did meet some new people and added a couple new blogs to the list of places I’ll visit regularly, and I did get to blog about somethings that I might normally not have had an excuse to. I don’t know if I’ll do this challenge again though, because I worry that it was a bit too much. Not necessarily for me (if I were to do it again I would have a theme, shorter blog entries and they would all be pre-scheduled LOL) but for my readers. There were far more comments on my posts at the beginning of the challenge than at the end, and I suspect that’s at least in part because people were tired of hearing from me everyday So… I’ll consider doing this again next year, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

The Platform Challenge: Robert Brewer offered  his readers the first annual Platform Challenge this April, and I participated. It was, by far, the easiest challenge I did. In fact, it wasn’t much of a challenge at all. For me. I know it was a huge challenge for a lot of people, but for the most part the daily assignments were things I’d already done or do regularily (sign-up for Twitter, get a blog, make a blog post…). If you are just starting out in social media/platform-type stuff than this challenge would be great for you. It would push you to jump into the fray, but at a pace that was designed to avoid overwhelming you. If your already social-media savvy and running a blog, however, it will be less helpful. That being said, I did learn a few things and discovered several ways to tweak my blog to be more betterer. Those share buttons at the bottom, for example, and the ability to follow the blog via email from the thingy to the right there (not available on LJ, sorry). So, yeah. I’m glad I did it. I won’t be doing it again though unless Robert puts out an intermediate version.

The April Poem A Day Challenge: This challenge was also hosted by Robert Brewer on the Poetic Asides blog. The idea was a poem a day for thirty days. I finished up to and included Day #26 by the end of April. That means I have four more prompts to write poems for over the month of May. It was a struggle this time around. I think largely because I didn’t have any focus, I didn’t have a theme. Allow me to illustrate:

Day One	Day Two
Day Three

Day One. A fresh new notebook, a big fat blank spot where theme should go. Not a great start, right? Okay, so, then we have Day Two over to the right there. Happily I have a theme, a theme I really, really like. In fact, someday I will write a poetry collection with a corvidae theme. Alas, that day was not situated anywhere in the month of April 2012 LOL

Day Three. Okay, says I, maybe corvidae is too narrow a theme for this particular poetry challenge. If I broaden it to be ‘Wings’ that can include birds, and planes, and angels and metaphoric wings and… Yeah, so that theme last until about day six when it, too, got crossed out and I went with a big fat question mark for a theme LOL

I think I have a few poem seeds as a result of this challenge that I’ll be able to make grow into something cool, but right now I’m not blown away. Many of the poems feel unfinished, like I had the start of an idea but I didn’t know how to end it. Or there’s the gems where I obviously just wasn’t feeling the prompt, like the haiku I wrote as my rejection poem for Day Eight:

It’s not quite for us
but please submit again
stabby, stabby, stab

Still, it’s a bunch of poem starts I wouldn’t have had without this challenge, and you bet your ass I’ll be doing it again next year

I had a very productive month in April, and remain on track for my W1S1 goals. I didn’t write any new fiction but I participated in the April Poem a Day challenge (as of this post, which I’m writing on the morning of April 30th, I am a couple days behind but I expect to catch up this afternoon. I’ll update you next week when I write a post about all the challenges I did this month). I read through my poems the other day, to see how bad they were and discovered a great many of them are unfinished, but several have potential so… Yay?

I also made three sales this month and added at least one more poem into the pool of work I’m actively submitting which gives me 13 pending submissions right now.

Not too shabby, eh?

Z is for zombie. It’s also for Zamboni. Sadly I don’t have any zombie or Zamboni photographs handy that wouldn’t require effort to locate and edit, so I went with this picture. It’s not apocalyptic-y, but it’s kinda forlorn, so… Close enough

So yes. Z is for zombie and Zamboni. A couple years ago my NaNoWriMo novel was a zombie novel set in Edmonton which I, oh so cleverly, titled Deadmonton The spark that set me thinking about Deadmonton was the idea of having a book which included a scene where a zombie gets killed with a zamboni.

Deadmonton, in its current incarnation is deeply flawed and I’m not sure I’m ever going to get around to fixing it, to be honest. The good news is that means I can share a scene from it with you here. Which scene? Well, the zombie vs Zamboni scene of course. This scene has a lot of problems with it, but if you read it without your editor hat on, it’s kinda fun too.

Warning: There is plenty of violence and profanity in this scene.

Zombie Vs Zamboni
(A Deadmonton excerpt)

Leading up to this scene Ashley was skating on freshly Zamboni-ed ice at Hawrelak Park when zombies start coming from all directions and surrounding her. The driver of the Zamboni has helped her onto the Zamboni, presumably to get away.

“Look, buddy, let’s just get out of here before these freaks reach us. There’s no need for—let’s just go, please?”

“No way.” the man cackled, as a speck of white spittle danced on his lips by the toothpick that protruded from them. “I’m gonna run some of these fuckers over. I can’t wait to see what the auger does to ‘em.”

Again Ashley swallowed back vomit that burned the back of hr throat. She considered getting back off the Zamboni and taking her chances with the zombies, but she still had her skates on. She’d make good progress on the ice, but once she stepped on the ground there was no way she’d be able to stay ahead of these things. At least not for long.

“Please,” she tried once more, looking from the crazy man at the wheel of the Zamboni and then to the zombies coming closer. Some were crawling across the ice, but a couple were still walking. Slowly and unsteadily, but walking, directly for them. Their arms were outstretched and one, the cop with the turban, was groaning unintelligibly. “Please, let’s just go.”

The driver didn’t even look at her. Resigned she double checked her seat belt and gritted her teeth. This was not going to be pretty. I should have gone home after school, she thought as she felt the Zamboni rev beneath her. I should have gone home, and then this wouldn’t have ever happened.

The driver made a strange noise, something halfway between a laugh and a cough, then spat his toothpick out and growled “Come get it, come get it you sons a bitches.”

And the zombies came.

They were close now. So close she could see them clearly even in the half-light of evening. Their wounds were obviously fatal, their eyes vacant, tongues lolling and bodies broken. They were zombies, and if the zombie movies Ashley had watched all her life were true, they wanted to eat her, or just her brains perhaps, and make her one of them.

She didn’t want to be one of them.

She didn’t want to run them over on the Zamboni either. She just wanted to be at home.

Then they were there. Six of them were at the Zamboni. Their fingers reached for it and Ashley could see ragged fingernails, filthy, with all manner of stuff stuck under them. Stuff she didn’t even want to think about. They reached for the machine and patted it. Moving against it.

The driver put the Zamboni in reverse and Ashley felt a bump as they hit something, then she heard noises no sane person should ever hear. It started out wet and mushy sounding, then quickly changed to a scraping, grinding noise that made her teeth stand on edge and vomit rise to fill her mouth.

Unable to keep it in, she leaned over the side of the Zamboni and sprayed the ice with what was left of the pizza sub she’d had for lunch. It steamed in the cool evening air, and Ashley felt her stomach retch once more as she looked at it, then she straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her glove.

A maniacal laugh that reminded Ashley of a high-pitched version of the narrator from that song Thriller, erupted from the Zamboni driver. It cut through the air, and Ashley saw other zombies, who had been oblivious to them up until then, turn their heads, change direction and come closer. Christ, she thought, why did they have to hear the laugh? They ignored him shouting, they ignored the sound of the Zamboni, but the freaking nut case laughs and here they come, wanting to join in the fun.

The Zamboni moved forward, and Ashley felt another thud as it connected with something that used to be human. The machine didn’t stop, it just kept going at its slow but steady pace. Much like a behemoth version of the zombies, actually. Ashley winced as she heard the wet squish of an undead homeless man with one red mitten being hit, then dragged under and torn to bits.

It was surreal. The zombies didn’t make any noises as they were run over, torn into chunks and stored in the ice bin. They were silent.

She looked behind them and the ice was a smear of blood, stained varying shades of pink. Bits of meat, mush and things she couldn’t even begin to identify spotted the ice, like islands in the pink ocean. “There must have been too much for the augers to handle,” she heard herself say, then leaned over the side of the machine and threw up again.

They ran over another zombie, and if it hadn’t been for her seatbelt the resulting jolt would have knocked her off. The zombie’s arm, came up over the front of the machine, clinging to the hood. It was futile though, the hood was smooth, nothing for it to get a grip on, and very soon she could hear the grotesque sound of the zombie being ground up and swallowed by the ice resurfacer.

“Please,” she said, her voice as weak as her body after throwing up twice. “Can we go now?”

The driver ignored her, swung the Zamboni around in a wide circle, and started to head back the way they’d come. Zombies from all around the park were coming. They seemed to be growing in numbers. Some were at the edge of the ice, some were actually on it, and for a moment, Ashley felt very sorry for them. They couldn’t possibly comprehend, she figured, what was going to happen to them as soon as they got within reach of the deadly machine.

The driver of the Zamboni floored it, Ashley could hear his foot stomp on the pedal and the pedal hit the metal floorboard, but even so, the machine didn’t go very fast, in fact, Ashley wasn’t sure if it sped up at all. She felt her fingernails dig into the bottom of the seat, one snapped off in her glove and she cursed. Pulling off her glove she stabbed her finger into her mouth, sucked on it, ripped the bit of nail still hanging there off with her teeth and spat it onto the ice. The ice that so recently had beckoned her but now repulsed her.

“Can we go–” the rest of her sentence was lost in the jolt as the Zamboni hit two zombies at the same time. It bucked and there was a wet crunching sound as it drove over them. Then, as the grinding began and the moaning stopped, the machine stuttered. It paused in place, shuddering violently and making the same noises her mother’s car always made when it was about to stall. “Oh no,” she breathed.

“Fuck!” the driver said, slamming the ball of his hand into the steering wheel. “There’s too much of them for it to chew up. C’mon,” he rubbed the steering wheel affectionately. “C’mon baby, you can do it. Eat ‘em up. Eat ‘em up and spit ‘em out.”

Ashley’s eyes darted from one zombie to another. They were growing closer, fearlessly approaching while the gigantic machine slowly chewed its way through their brethren. Her heart slammed in her chest and she held her breath. Though she knew it was only a few seconds, each one felt like an eternity as she watched the zombies come closer, and closer.

“C’mon,” the driver said, drawing the word out and tapping on the steering wheel, his eyes sliding from one walking corpse to another. “C’mon.”

Then the engine caught again, and the Zamboni began to inch forward once more.

Ashley sighed, letting her breath out in one long gush. “Now can we go?” she asked, hopeful that their near miss would be enough to encourage the crazy driver that running over zombies wasn’t in his best interest.

“Now we can –” the man turned his head to look at Ashley as he was responding, then his eyes became wide and his lower jaw slack. It dropped against his chest and the toothpick in his mouth fell and landed in his lap. Ashley followed it with her eyes, and then looked back up at the fear in the man’s face.

“What?” she asked, feeling the blood rush through her brain, bringing with it a new shot of adrenaline as fear began to twist through her body once again.

The man driving the Zamboni didn’t move for a second, though his eyes darted forward, as though checking that they were still on course, and then they looked back toward her again. “Behind you,” he said, finally, his voice sounded dry, like it was scraping across sandpaper.

Ashley was filled with dread and warring emotions. Part of her wanted to look behind her, another was content to wallow in ignorance. Finally, moving almost as stiffly as the zombies around them, she turned around. There, slowly climbing up the back of the Zamboni, were two zombies. The first was the police officer with the turban, the second a woman wearing high heels and what remained of a black power suit. They were inching upward, their fingers curled into claws as they fought against the momentum of the Zamboni and the slick surface they were on. They were moving, unfailingly, toward her. Directly toward where she sat, strapped to the machine.

“Oh my god!” she screamed, then looked back at the driver who was alternating his attention between the zombies in the back of the machine and the ice in front of them. “Gimme something, give me something to fight them off!”

The driver reached over onto the floor beside him, and she could see his arm swinging around randomly, looking for something. He came up empty.

“I ain’t got nothing,” he growled. “Maybe I can knock em off if I zig zag the Zamboni.”

“You can’t,” Ashley screamed, her voice rising to a hysterical-sounding shriek. “Anything that will knock them off will knock me off too!”

She could smell them now. They smelled of the thick coppery scent of blood, and of something else. Not body odor or dirt, but something she couldn’t put a finger on. Then, as they drew closer, the wind pushing against them but not slowing them as they kept coming in slow motion, she realised it was her, not them she could smell. The sick scent of fear, of sour sweat, was coming from her.

She looked around, tears blurring her vision, while the driver jerked the wheel of the Zamboni in one direction and then another. Maybe she could undo her seat belt and make a run for it, but no. There were more zombies on the ice than on the Zamboni, and all the other things that had kept her there when the crazy man at the wheel had decided to play bumper cars with the zombies were still true. She was still wearing skates rather than shoes and—wait! She was wearing skates.

“Stop that, stop it you moron,” she yelled. Yanking off her gloves, she reached down with one hand, loosened the laces on her left skate and pulled it off as fast as she could.

She jammed her right fist in where her foot was meant to go, undid her seat belt and turned around. The woman in the business suit was almost at her. Ashley reached forward and slammed the part of her blade that stuck out past her heel into the woman’s hand. She felt it sink in. The bones ground against it as it slid past them, but the woman didn’t react at all. Ashley’s stomach twisted, but she managed to avoid throwing up, and pulled the skate blade out of the zombie’s hand. Obviously that wasn’t going to work.

Taking a deep breath, she made a fist of her hand in the skate, drew back, and slammed it right into the woman’s face. It hit her nose and ricocheted to the side, cutting into the right side of her face at a slight angle. Ashley saw it cut through flesh, muscle and the woman’s eye, yet she didn’t bleed or react in any way. She just put one hand in front of the other and pulled herself closer.

“Fuck!” Ashley slammed the side of her fist into the side of the woman’s face. She put all her weight behind it and it was enough to knock the zombie off balance. It toppled, without making any effort to catch itself, off the side of the Zamboni and landed with an audible crunch on the ice below.

Unfortunately, the momentum of her blow didn’t vanish with the swipe and Ashley found her own body following her arm.

“Oh no you ain’t,” the man driving the Zamboni said, and Ashley felt him grab the waistband of her jeans and pull her back on. That, combined with her own efforts got her back on the machine just in time for the zombie with the police uniform and the turban to strike. She was turned around in her seat, facing the back of the Zamboni when it grabbed her left arm. Before she had a chance to react, she felt its teeth dig into her flesh. It was excruciating, and she couldn’t restrain the scream that ripped itself from her throat.

“Fuck,” the driver said, and let go of her. He whipped around a corner. The police officer lost his balance and was tossed to the right side, but he didn’t let go of her arm with either his teeth or hands. He dragged Ashley with him. She was pulled across the Zamboni and ended up crashing into the driver, the zombie still latched on to her and laying at an angle along the back of the big machine.

After much scrambling she managed to get her feet back under her, standing to the left of the driver but the zombie still had her arm. She tried to pull away but it was to no avail. She watched the creature tear a chunk off with its teeth, and screamed again, falling back to her knees. The zombie made a slurping noise and through the fog of pain that was enfolding her, Ashley looked up to see it chewing on a ragged chunk of her down-filled coat and the hunk of her arm it had bitten off.

Then it swallowed.

She felt faint. She felt as though she were going to throw up again. She felt pain as she’d never felt before.

In a fear and pain-fueled frenzy she slammed her fist with the skate on it into the zombie’s face. It sliced it diagonally, cutting across the bridge of its nose and tearing open one of its cheeks, but the grip on her arm didn’t loosen. In fact, oblivious to the damage she’d just rendered it the zombie leaned forward as though it were going for another bite.

In desperation, Ashley jammed the blade of her skate between the cop’s mouth and her arm, at the same time the driver of the Zamboni slammed into another zombie. The extra jolt rammed the skate blade into the creature’s mouth. It sliced it open at the corners, extending its smile and kept going until the blade got stuck in its jaw bone. The zombie, its mouth wedged open with her skate, let go of her arm to try and pry the skate out, but without any part of it holding on to the Zamboni, it slipped off the side and landed with a thud on the frozen, pink-stained ground.

Ashley let her hand slip out of the skate as the zombie fell and grabbed hold of the torn fabric and gaping wound in her arm. Feathers from her coat were stuck to the blood at the top edge of her wound. In the middle of it, the blood was flowing freely, and as she clamped her hand over it, the sticky wetness coated her fingers.

Her legs wobbled and she fell to the side of the Zamboni and then slumped down to the floorboards beside the driver. She looked up at him. He was looking away from her, toward the other zombies on the ice. “I’m going to die,” she whispered, her lips suddenly dry, her body thirsty in a way she’d never imagined before. This must be why people always ask for water as they are dying in movies, she thought, and half-laughed.

The man driving the Zamboni jumped at the sound of her laugh, and she tilted her head to look at him. Darkness feathered the edges of her vision and she watched him, staring straight ahead. Ashley was sure he hadn’t heard her.

She felt the Zamboni leave the ice, there was a big bump followed by a myriad of smaller ones as they rode over the snow, plowing it ahead of them. She tried to increase the pressure she was putting on her arm, but she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. She looked down at them, and there they were against the bleeding wound in her arm, but even when she wiggled them, and saw them move, she couldn’t feel them.

“I’m going to die.” she said one last time, crying. Not as a plea or a question, but as a statement of fact. She looked up at the psycho driving the Zamboni and wished with all her heart that she’d never accepted his hand when he offered her a ride. Then she wished, with just as much passion, that when she died, if she became one of them, that he, the moron who had insisted on running over the zombies, would be her first victim.

Last month I asked people to ask me questions that I would answer for letter Q. I’ve cheated a little bit and used them for Q is for Questions as well as I is for I Lied. I still have a lot of questions left over though so I thought I’d cheat again today (just a little, sheesh :-p) and answer a couple more.

Beth asked:

You juggle so many things at once right now. What is your favorite writing-related thing? What fills you with dread (other than rejection!)?

My favourite writing-related thing in the whole world is when someone reads something I’ve written and likes it. I know that sounds a bit cliche but it’s totally true. I treasure every comment and the couple times I actually received emails from strangers saying they liked my work (!!) I got all weepy. Acceptances are a close second on my favourites list, but approval from readers means more to me than approval from editors (sorry editors).

The thing that fills me with dread is the idea that someone will mistake what my characters think and say as being what I think or feel. I’ve got a homophobic character in a recent work, for example. A very vocal homophobe. I worry that people will read that story and think I am using him as a mouthpiece for my own opinions. I guess that’s actually rather unlikely given how vocal I’ve been known to be about gay rights and equality, but the idea remains the same. I don’t want people to think my characters are myself. But, that’s one of those things I can’t do anything bout, so *shrugs* I guess I better learn to let it go LOL

BD asked:

If you could only ever play one position again, would you DPS, heal, or tank?

^_~

This is a seriously bratty question and BD knew it. I have a lot of alts in World of Warcraft because I’m fickle. I want to play one role one week and a different role the next LOL

For those of you who don’t play MMOs, DPS, heals and tanks are the three different roles in a typical game. The tank is the person in heavy armor whose job is to keep all the monsters mad at them so they don’t run around and smack all the other people in lighter armor (the squishies). The tank is the person in charge, they maneuver the monsters, positioning them how they want and leading their group through the dungeon or raid. I tend to have control issues, which is why I like tanking. At the same time, I get frustrated if I have DPS who make my job more difficult and it’s a pretty high-pressure job. That’s great if you’re in a group of your friends who like you and won’t freak out if you make a mistake, it’s less great if you’re in a random group of people you’ve never met before and who have no expectation of seeing you again. That combination tends to make people be bigger jerks than they otherwise would be, and the tank is a great target for all that vitriol if things aren’t going exactly how they expect. If I could only play one role ever again it wouldn’t be a tank. I could get my tank-y fix by soloing with a tanky character

DPS classes are the damage-dealing ones (DPS stands for Damage per second). These characters are in lighter armor than the tank and their number one job is to avoid drawing the attention of the monsters you’re killing. Their second job is to kill it. Each class has different skills and abilities that they use to buff their party members, kill monsters and offer support to their team. DPS is the lowest pressure position in any MMO because there are more of them in any group so they can pick up the slack for each other if necessary (a dungeon group is 1 tank, 1 healer and  DPS, for example). I like being a DPS because of the lack of pressure but DPS comes with a whole different set of pressure — competition. People run meters that track how much damage they are doing and how quickly and they are very competitive. You don’t want to be the person who is doing the least, let me tell you.

That’s why, if I had to pick one role to play for the rest of my life it would be healing. It was a very tough call because I like DPSing, but I think healing wins. I think their role is kinda self-explanatory. The healer’s job is to heal everyone in their group to keep them alive and kicking. This is obviously a pretty high-pressure position, but it’s not high pressure in the ‘You’re in charge so if anythign goes wrong it’s your fault’ way, nor is it in the ‘Numbers matter above everything else no matter what the extenuating circumstances are’ way. It’s high pressure in the ‘If you don’t do your job people will die’ way and that’s the best possible way. It means you have very finite and obvious ways to measure your success. Is the boss dead? Are at least one of your teammates still standing? Congratulations, you win!

That would be my choice… I think.

Arlee Bird asked:

Why do you blog?

Ooh, good question. When I started blogging on Livejournal in 2002 I think it was partly because everyone else in my circle of friends was doing it, but mostly because of a bit of an exhibitionist streak. Then when I gave up my other job so I could focus on writing (ha! focus. I wish LOL) it seemed like it would be a good idea to have a website that represented me online, as well as a central place to list my publications. Thus, this blog was created. That’s why I started it, but I guess the reason I maintain it is a combination of professional obligation, to connect with friends and readers, and an exhibitionist streak.

So now I’ll ask you, readers, why do you blog? I know most of you do because I follow your links to your blogs every day LOL

~*~

This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by the letter Y. On Monday I’ll be blogging about something that starts with the letter Z. If you know me at all it’s probably not difficult for you to guess that that might be

So, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I honestly wanted to come up with an X word that wasn’t a cheat, but April has been an energy vampire and my creative gas tank is running on fumes right now. I have a very finite amount of emotional, physical and creative energy (which is likely thanks to depression.) and I took on far more this month than I should have. Let’s take a peek at what I’ve been doing this month:

- The Blogging from A to Z Challenge

- The April Poem a Day Challenge

- The Platform Building Challenge

- The NaNoLJers Anthology

- The Niteblade Fundraiser

But wait, there’s more! This is a busy Niteblade month because I need to have the table of contents for the June issue set and good to go by the end of this month, which means getting all the edits and paperwork and stuff done. I’ve also been managing to stick to my exercise goals despite the fact my weight loss has hit a plateau (how depressing is that? Ugh). Also, there’s all the ‘life’ and ‘wife‘ and ‘mother‘ stuff. And stuff. Yes. Lots of stuff :-p

Overall, I’m pretty stinkin’ proud of myself, but I’m looking forward to the month being over so I can have some recovery time.

Then Amber posted the sign-up form for Writo De Mayo (the annual challenge NaNoLJers hold in May) and I went ‘Oh. Shit.’ I thought about not signing up this year, but I think I should. If I don’t have some solid goals for next month I may well spend my days curled up in bed getting nothing done and turning into a lump. So I signed up, but I didn’t pick super challenging goals. Their job won’t be to stretch myself but just to motivate me to keep going.

Writo De Mayo goals for 2012:

• Do the 200 Sit Ups Challenge (beginning on Week Two in Column Two) without straining or otherwise injuring my neck in the process
• Stay on track for W1S1
• Write the first draft of at least one new short story (not a poem)
• Write the first draft of a query letter for Shadows and get feedback on it
• Get back to the HTRYN course I’m using to revise Twixt (and that I’ve neglected all April)
• If I’m not successful in finishing up all the prompts for the April Poem-A-Day Challenge finish up any I missed.

What are your goals for next month?

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This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and the letter X. Tomorrow I’ll be blogging about something to do with Y (actually, I expect to go with ‘Why?’ but, ya know, it’s the thought that counts) so pop by then to check it out

We talk about a lot of things around our house but a theme that recurs again and again in our conversations is gender. The perceptions of gender, the portrayals of it in fiction and popular media, that sort of thing.

When I asked Jo to do a guest blog this month he said he had just the thing, and that it had something to do with chickens. Turns out, we don’t get to hear about chickens, but his post does include turkeys, which are almost as awesome, so that’s okay

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I was asked to do a guest column focusing on the letter W, and I wasn’t sure where to settle. I am a scientist, a biochemist specifically, but my interests extend beyond that. The first thing that comes to mind (that is science related) with this letter is tryptophan. This is an amino acid—an essential amino acid famously mentioned on Seinfeld!(1)—but the relationship to the letter “W” comes from the shorthand notation we use to refer to it. As I often point out to student in my classes, biochemists are lazy and would rather write three letters—or maybe just one, if they can get away with it—instead of the full name for something. Tryptophan is typically written as either Trp or W (T was already taken by threonine)—and you can remember this if you pronounce the word “twyptophan”, as if you have some kind of speech impediment. Ha ha, such laughs we have in science! That said, the extent of my dialogue is only as long as a Kilgore Trout novel.

So that got me thinking about W in other ways. W is for “Woman”, both as the straight up letter thing, but also in a more obscure way. Tryptophan, as Seinfeld implies, is abundant in turkey, which leads me to the other way that W and Women come together. In humans, at the genetic level, women are homogametic (XX) for the sex chromosomes while males are heterogametic (XY); the Y chromosome is a degenerate version of the X chromosome and that of course leads to a wealth of joke material regarding remote controls and sexual relations in general. But in turkeys (also other birds, insects and other species) the males are homogametic (ZZ) while females are heterogametic (WZ). This has an immediate repercussion—particularly if someone makes a joke about roosters having inferior chromosomes based on them having an X/Y chromosome system instead of the W/Z. Not that I think hens are inferior to roosters because they have degenerate chromosomes!

Variations on this occur, which leads to one of my other interests regarding sexual ambiguity. It is never as simple as having two options—and in moths and butterflies the difference between females and males may extend from WZ/ZZ to Z/ZZ or WZZ/ZZZZ or further, making the situation much more interesting. The lines between woman and men are never as clear as we like to think, not even at the genetic level.

Kate Bornstein is one of my heroes, and if you have never read the book “Gender Outlaw” I can’t recommend it highly enough. I have loathed gender-based generalizations for as long as I can remember; awareness of the genetic spectrum as well as the phenotypic spectrum of gender/orientation is a huge eye-opener for tolerance and awareness. When I was a grad student I wore skirts regularly; I have never minded being mistaken for a woman; and although I have never identified as female I was always a little jealous of the clothing options (especially formal wear!). One of my tattoos revolves around gender ambiguity and combines male and female symbology as a core part of the design. I do not considered myself “straight” but as slightly bent.

So what is the end message here? “W” is for women—no matter what their chromosome composition—and I love them all.

References:
(1) Seinfeld script for episode 162 “The Merv Griffin Show” http://www.seinology.com/scripts/script-162.shtml
Kate Bornstein’sWeblog: http://katebornstein.typepad.com/

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In case you didn’t catch the mouse over, that picture up there? That’s one of Jo’s tattoos.

Did you see how he ended his post with ‘I love them all’? He did that to drive me bonkers. Anytime someone says they love/hate/whatever all of anything (including groups of people) that I’m like ‘Argh! You do not! You don’t know them all! Rawr! Rage!’ Well, okay, not so much the rage, but definitely the rawr ;0)

Anyway, I love Jo’s point about how there is a spectrum of gender identities (and sexuality) even at the genetic level. You can’t just put people into box #1 or box #2 and expect them to fit. I feel like that idea is beginning to creep more and more into my work. For example, I had a lot of fun when I was working on See The Sky Again (an Aphanasian novel that is still very much a WIP) in taking the usual gender roles, standing them on their heads and then turning them inside out.

If you haven’t quite heard enough from Jo, you’re in lucky. Last night we went to the premiere of the documentary ‘Always Forward‘ by PhotonMotion. The documentary is about the Biochemistry department at the University of Alberta, which happens to be where Jo works and teaches. He’s featured in the movie (mostly near the beginning) with his super awesome 3d models making appearances throughout. I thought he looked a little un-used to being in front of the camera, but the footage of him lecturing his class really shows the Jo I know.

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This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by Jo Parrish and the letter W. I can’t believe the month is almost over (though I’m pretty thankful LOL). Tomorrow I’ll be tackling the letter X.

Abbadon’s Curse.

Abbadon’s Curse is a game I wanted to create over ten years ago. I looked over the main game description document that I gave to the developers and it looks like it was created in early 2002 and I’d been working on stuff for the game long before I began that file.

Abbadon’s Curse was going to be fantastic. It was an MMORPG with all of the usual MMORPG-type things in it, but there were a lot of other cool things that I hadn’t seen done in games up until that point. Night and day, for example, with certain spells and abilities only being able to be used in one or the other. Capes which could be designed (like tabards are now in WoW) to have a unique look for each guild (or character). It was also going to be very story-centric, very lore-based.

The game was set in the world of Aphanasia. A place where, upon the death of her son in battle, she blessed that land so that any who died in battle would not remain dead but rise up once more to fight again. Unfortunately, despite the fact her intentions may have been good, in reality her blessing turned out to be more like a curse.  Dun dun dun.

Moonberrys were also very important in that world, as was the magical tree they came from. They were especially important to a race of lizard-men called the Urbagdú or the Reptar who used them in every part of their society. The wise men used the berries for medicines, the mages for magic and the warriors used shed boughs from the trees for weapons. Moonberries were even the closest thing the society had to a currency.

In developing the game and it’s storyline we focused a lot on the reptar because they were going to be our first set of adversaries (you know, after everyone was done leveling off rats, and moving on to wolves, and then…) and we needed to give them depth and story. We had several other races in mind we were going to use as spice in our first release and make more important in the future. The Reptar were found mostly in and around the swamp, but the mountains were home to a race of shadow elves, and pirates tended to prowl the coastlines. And of course, what kind of RPGMMO would be complete without vampires? We had them too… In fact, one of our important, named NPCs was a vampiric pirate

In addition to our races and plots and maps and game design documents, we also had a series of gods for the denizens of Aphanasia to worship (the icons for each are along the bottom there). Abbadon, Calamyr, Rakkir (named after a character I used to RP with), Xaphan and the Dragon Gods.

Alas the game fell apart. I totally blame myself. I was the lead on the game, the story was mine, the bulk of the world development was mine, and it was my work that filled the game design documents, but I can’t program. Not even a little. I wasn’t able to provide strong leadership to the programming team and I think it was largely because of my ignorance in programming. I couldn’t set reasonable timelines or expectations and I didn’t know how to crack the whip.

I’m still very sad this game never got to become a reality, but I was determined not to allow the insane amounts of work I’d put into the world development for it to go to waste. That’s why, if you’ve read any of my Aphanasian stories, a lot of this stuff will sound familiar to you.

The moonberry tree got a bit of a makeover, and I set my stories in a time after Abbadon’s curse has ceased to exist (so far anyway LoL). I tweaked my races and my world to suit the world of fiction better than that of video games, but the skeleton of that world definitely comes from what I developed for a video game.

~ Shadows ~ Sister Margaret ~ Lost and Found ~ Shades of Green ~ There’s Always a Catch ~ The Legend of the First Reptar ~

All the above stories are set in Aphanasia, and most of them can be read for free, if you’re interested. It looks like the e-zine that published The Legend of the First Reptar is no longer in existence, but the other stories are all still available (except Shadows which I just finished LOL)

So, yeah. While I’m terribly sad that Abbadon’s Curse will never be a game you can download and play (barring a minor miracle anyway LoL) I’m pretty pleased with myself that I managed to continue to use the world I’d created for it, making it even more lush, detailed and populated than I had for the game.

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This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by the letter V for Video Game. Tomorrow my husband Jo will be doing a guest blog. He won’t even tell me what it’s going to be about except that it has something to do with chickens. I hope you’ll stop by, it ought to be entertaining