Writing about elves and trolls

I worked on my elf/troll story last night. I actually got to the point where the troll attacks everybody, the final major confrontation of the story. I'm happy about that. Really, every time I seriously sit down to work on this thing I get good stuff done, which begs the question of why I don't spend more time on it and get the thing done.

Anyway, I wanted to mention here that I've noticed that I have several stories/story ideas that I work on that return to a concept of someone, especially a kid, meeting up with a large monster in the woods. It's a theme I have tried out in several different ways. And I see no problem with that...I'm kind of glad to have noticed it, actually. I have no idea where it comes from...probably a wish-fulfilment idea of wanting to be the special kid who has a dragon-friend-sort-of-thing.

In the current story, things turn out much darker. I hope I can pull it off. This month I thought I'd try to blog regularly about my progress on this story as I work toward the ending. I'm actually pretty far along in developing this story. It started out as an attempt to write a very short story, which I began at church one morning during the period when the kids are in Sunday school. In an hour I had hashed out the major components of the story.

The basic idea is that there's a troll attack and some kids are found, one of them killed, others scared or injured, and the adults have to try to figure out what happened. So it's initially structured as a mystery. The main character is a local teacher, whose star student is one of the survivors. It's not an accident these kids got attacked by a troll, and it's up to the teacher to figure things out.

Ah, but it's complicated by the fact that everything takes place in this elf/goblin world setting I've worked out, which doesn't really have a name yet other than "elf/goblin setting."

I've spent a fair amount of time talking about this story. :) I've laid out the whole plotline for some friends, and talked about all the various complications. Talking about it too much isn't necessarily good...it can eat up enthusiasm for writing it. Still, I'm having fun when I work on it. I've got a city filled with elves and goblines, living on the edge of a goblin revolt, sharing space with each other, and looking at each other with some suspicion, but needing to coexist all the same.

Software-company-like deadline slips...in writing

I've been engaging in a little writing challenge with my brother-in-law. We were trying to finish a story each in about two weeks...I think that's what it started with. Only we got to the first deadline and he asked for an extension...then we got to THAT deadline and I asked to extend it another two weeks. ;) Work has been busy and I haven't spent much time on the story. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to stick with it better in the near term, though.

The story I'm working on is called "Elf and Troll". It's a lousy title but it's my working title for a piece about a young elf kid who encounters a troll. Actually that's not much of what it's about, but I don't feel like getting into a long diatribe about what it's REALLY about right now...it would end up being half as long as the story.

I did want to record, though, that I had a nice little session today where I worked on a day in the life of one of my characters. I had a character whom I added to the story, who I didn't know much about yet, so I started working on her day from waking up. In the process I found I had to do a fair amount of worldbuilding...things like what kind of food she'd eat, some information on businesses in this world, and so on.

Another interesting (to me) thing about the world of this story is that I realized this weekend that it's probably the only major world-building exercise I've done that didn't get started from a map of the world. This story is set in my Elf/Goblin world setting, a world distinguished by having two major intelligent races who live in mixed communities...at least until the goblins rebel against elf oppression. (It sucks when The Man is an elf, doesn't it? :) )

Chloe and Ethan catch fish

Back in April, on a cub scout campout, Ethan and Chloe caught some fish...and here's some documentary evidence.

Ethan found a different closet to hide in

I thought about posting this to the weblog, and I find that my very last post was about this same problem, a month earlier. So here's what happened this morning: I get up, try to wake Ethan up, tell him he's got to take a shower because we've started doing that. He says he won't take
a shower. I tell him he can expect to lose Game Boy privileges if he doesn't, and go back to getting dressed. I don't hear any shower start up so I check on him. And I can't find him. He's not in his room. I finish getting dressed, go downstairs; no Ethan.

I make the circuit again, 'cause I really can't believe he's nowhere to be found, and because he's done this before. He's not in his room, not under his bed, not in his closet, not on the couch, not in the office on the computer...nowhere. I wake Tanya. In about 10 seconds, she finds him.

But the kicker is where he is: he's in the linen closet in the kids' bathroom, on the top shelf, wedged in with the blankets. Naked, with one foot sticking out. That's all you can see, the one foot.

We tell him to get down. He says he can't unless we close the door.

I leave Tanya to deal with it. She told me later he was scared getting down. I hope so. I got pretty scared when I realized I couldn't find him. I don't want to find his body somewhere because he holed up to avoid a shower. Think how THAT would smell.

Come out of the closet, children!

On Sunday I had the chance to make one of my favorite jokes, and on Monday morning I paid for it.

On Sunday I was in the kitchen and heard Ethan and Chloe rustling around in the hall, Ethan said something about Chloe refusing to leave the closet, so I hollered, "Come out of the closet, Chloe!" to make sure Tanya could hear. Yes, friends, that's the trouble with my kids, they won't come out of the closet.

So then this morning, I went to wake up the kids as usual...turned Ethan and Chloe's lights on and then went to get dressed. I went to check that they actually got up afterwards, and could not find Ethan. He wasn't in the pile of blankets on his bed, he wasn't responding to hails, he wasn't in the bathroom. The downstairs was dark. I went downstairs, checked the computer room, the living room...no sign of him starting breakfast in the kitchen. I was confused. I went back upstairs, checked his room again...under his bed, nothing. I toyed with checking the baby room. Checked Chloe's room. Nothing. I told Tanya I couldn't find him. Clearly, I was worried if I was willing to risk waking Tanya up.

Tanya suggested that maybe he was sitting somewhere playing with his Nintendo DS, as he often does...plants himself somewhere and turns off all senses outside the Sphere of Gaming. Nope. No sign of him. I went back to his room and saw that his closet door was ajar...it had not been, before. Went over there...find him waving at me from a quilt in the bottom of his closet. He'd climbed in their and gone back to sleep after I woke him. Or something. Maybe he was playing, I don't know. He accumulated 3 days of Nintendo privation for his troubles. It was a cold day out and I tried to make him walk to school as well -- but he couldn't find his jacket, which only infuriated me more, of course.

Oh, it's funny NOW.

The bananas are safe...or are they?

A year or two ago, I read an article that talked about how bananas are in danger of extinction from a fungus. That's because the bananas we eat so greedily here in the US are all of one variety, and so are vulnerable to being wiped out en masse. In fact, the bananas we eat are all clones of the same fruit; how weird is that?

I can't find the original article now, but here's one from Popular Science that takes a long look at the issue.

I post today, though, because I found a reference on the wonderful Ask a
Biologist site to some hope. In essence, it says that if bananas are wiped out, we'll find a new
variety that we can eat, and cultivate it....we've done it before.

Now maybe I can stop bugging my wife about how we need to eat bananas while they're still around. But it's hard to be sure we can stop worrying. According to the Popular Science article, we may be able to make a new banana, but it won't likely taste just like Cavendish we're so fond of, and it might not taste much like it at all. Many banana varieties taste more like apples. The soft, creamy fruit we're used to is something of an oddity.

Carcasonne: It's new to me

I had a lovely evening on my birthday: Tanya took me to a casual nearby restaurant, where she unveiled the game Carcassonne, and we played a couple of games on the spot.

Carcassone is one of the set of German boardgames that you see in the comics shops in recent years. I didn't know that it's kind of the icon of these games. The games have beautiful materials and neat abstractions; Carcassone is one of the simpler ones.

You can learn the rules in minutes, and my 7 and 9 year old were able to play. You're building structures (illustrated as cities, roads, and fields), but you do this by pulling a random tile from the face-down set. You place your new tile somewhere so that its sides match existing tiles. Then you can choose to place a marker on the tile, or not. Those are your only choices.

Your tile can have a field, cloister, city, or road on it. If you place a marker, you're claiming the field/cloister/city/road. If the tile has more than one of those, you've got to pick one to claim. When a road or city is complete, you can collect your markers and get the points for the structure. If it's a cloister you've claimed, it has only one tile, but is complete when it is completely surrounded.

If you place a marker in a field, you're placing a farmer, who stays in place until the end of the game, when you claim points based on the cities your farmer's field is contiguous with.

Okay, the farmer thing is a little complicated, but it's the only thing that is, and it's elegant. You want to place farmers near the end game, so that you keep markers available, but you want to claim fields that are open and reach many cities. It's a big part of the strategy.

When you've played a game you end up with a pretty structure of cities and roads and fields. Note that no dice are used, and turns go fast. The game can be played by two or more. It's notable in being a good two-player game.

This game has been around a while, but I'd never played it before. I love it; any game I can play with my kids and all of us enjoy gets points from me.

There's a page about the game at BoardgameGeek, and even a strange site devoted to the wooden people used as markers in the game, called Meeples.

NYC Mech

I read a review from Graphic Novel Review of a graphic novel called NYC Mech, which makes several interesting points:

• It's easier to do unusual settings or premises in comic books. "Even non-fans expect a wild ride from a comic book or graphic novel."
• This book is about a New York where all people/animals are robots...and it doesn't try to explain this weird fact. "In NYC Mech, the robots, like Barks’ ducks, serve as simple stand-ins for humanity (and for other animals - robotic dogs and sharks both make appearances). That said, the surface non-humanity of the characters does provide a bit of distance between the reader and the material - which, ironically, makes the work even more believable."

You can find the book on Amazon.

My son is starting to learn to juggle

Maybe a month or more ago I noticed that Ethan, who is nine now, has gotten a lot better at throwing and catching balls. He also started to say things that indicated he was more interested in juggling. He's always said he wanted to learn, but couldn't stick with it very long, or would lose interest as soon as we started to work on the steps. But this week I've spent just two days in a row where I just told him to get out there on the lawn and practice with me. He listens to my direction, and he does pretty well at the two-ball step. Yesterday I got him to try the
three-ball throw. He laughed when he started to get it. I recognize that laugh; the laugh when something you do surprises you.

I'm pretty excited about this; it's been a long time coming. I guess the next step is to get him started counting catches. I remember when I taught my friend Rich Landry to juggle, and he competed with his kids for numbers of catches. (When you count catches, you start juggling and
see how many consecutive catches you can get.) I can't do that of course, since I can juggle three balls infinitely. Maybe I should try five, which I've never gotten much beyond 25 catches. :) Wow, I bet he'll have 100 catches of 3 before I have 50 of five. :)

When I talk about "step two" or the "three-ball throw", I'm referring to juggling three balls using this method:

http://www.damommio.com/~aaron/juggle/HowtoJuggle3Balls.htm