A novel idea....the Dragon Matrix

It's probably way too soon to get excited about it, but I am excited. I'm excited because I had a new idea for an organizing principle for my novel this week.

This started when I was talking about titles with my friend Bill Woodburn, an excellent writer himself, and he remarked that any story for which he'd had trouble finding a good title never seemed to gel.

Cue ominous music and a raspy voice. His words sounded dangerously like destiny where my current project, "The Wonder Kid", was concerned. "The Wonder Kid" is only the best of a bad string of titles that started with the working title "Elf and Troll." And I'd floundered for a central organizing principle, and so it never seemed to set up.

But I decided not to treat this as destiny, and to apply the theory in reverse: to try to find a title that did work, and thereby come up with an organizing principle that would help the story to congeal.

Yeah, I could go for some jello right now.

Then this week I was doing some world building, something I'd somehow not let myself do much of for this story, and was working with ideas about gems that you store auras in. All the magic in this world, which I refer to as my Elf Refugee Setting (the world itself is called Hame), is based on auras, and auras are described as patterns of threads, strands, or tendrils.

There's nothing terribly unique about gems that store magic, but what I'm working with are gems that serve to store aura patterns and thereby store information. I'm thinking of a gradient of possible uses, starting with bare info, moving through memories, and going all the way up to a full recording of someone's aura, which would amount to storing their soul -- or a copy of their soul -- in a gem.

That led to the idea of calling the stored patterns "matrices", but that's what the magic gems in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels are called. So I may come up with something better.

But the matrix idea, the idea of the pattern of someone's aura being a separate thing, a copyable/storable thing, led to my new title idea and organizing principle: the Dragon Matrix.

I've already spent a thousand words just setting up this anecdote, so I'll try to get to the point. In this story, there's a danger of someone reaching a state where their aura becomes a sort of vortex that sucks in the magic of everyone round them, absorbing and destroying people in a wide range. When this happens, that person is called a dragon, because of the way they flare up and burn out the people around them. So, their aura, when they achieve that state, would be a Dragon Matrix.

I like that a lot. When you tie it to the idea of storing or recording auras, then you have a dangerous and powerful thing that someone unscrupulous might want to capture. So the matrix becomes a useful macguffin for the plot. And everything in the story can be tied back to the dragon matrix.

I have a lot of work to do with this. I'm expecting that I will find, as I try to integrate this with the plot that I already have, that it will break six or seven things. But that doesn't stop me from being excited now.

Art from Emil Blichfeldt, licensed under Creative Commons.

That's one way to do it: tell the world what you want

Ryan Sohmer, who writes the daily webcomic Least I Could Do, put out a little manifesto on his blog on 1/23/09...saying that he wants to write for Marvel's Deadpool comic. 

My first reaction was that it was too arrogant. He tells the world that one of his New Year's resolutions is to write for some other properties, and the one he most specifically wants to write for is Deadpool.

But you know, the guy has a webcomic that's pretty popular, and has been paying his bills for five years. Heck, there might be folks at Marvel who read him. If he were his com

ic's main character Rayne, the very next thing that would happen would be for Marvel's lawyers to run up and offer him a contract. 

Really, when you have a forum like he does, you'd kinda be stupid not to mention your in

tentions this way. 

So, world, I'd like to write for Gotham Central. And I do not think that choosing a comic that's over and done with reduces my chances at all. :) 

I want a paste-plain-text key combo in Windows

For a while, Windows apps have started to implement Paste Special commands that allow you to paste text that you copied with formatting, like HTML or RTF, as plain text, scrubbing out the formatting before the paste. This is handy whenever copying from one document to another.

But it's too slow to go to the menu. Let's make a Windows standard for this. We have Ctrl-V for paste; what about Ctrl-G for Paste-Special-Plain-Text?

I know, I know, I can get a clipboard scrubber app for this. I can even assign the scrubbing to a hotkey using a hotkey utility. I can prove I'm a geek any number of ways; I want this built into my operating system, thank you very much. I want a standard, that is available on any Windows box I sit down at.

Jugglefest is coming Feb 20-22, 2009

Jugglefest 2009 is coming up fast. There will be a free public show on February 21. The festival itself runs the whole weekend long, on the UT campus. More info here.

The photo is of Matt Hall, who performed at an earlier Jugglefest. This shot is from some other town's Jugglefest and is by rrazor, from Flickr. 

One extra ride for the month is probably pretty good

My score for commute-avoidance ("nodrive") days for January was 18. I need to average 17 per month to meet my goal of 200 for the year.

I'm coming out of last year when I started with a goal of 100 and raised it to 150, and when I started the year slow and increased my average number of rides every month. I gotta be realistic. There aren't enough work days in a month for me to do a whole lot better than 17. Doing one better is still beating my goal.

Right now the chief issues are logistical: days when I need a car to tote one of the kids somewhere, or run an errand. Weather hasn't stopped me yet. We'll see how I do when it gets rainier. Maybe Tanya can knit me a bike cozy out of waterproof yarn.

Lily looks back

Here's a photo of now-three-year-old Lily from back in February of 2008, from a little trip to a bank we took to see some of Chloe's school art on display.

Great drawings on dude-a-day...and copyright?

The site http://atomictoy.org/365dudes/ posts a different character drawing every day. At a glance, they appear to be new versions of well-known comic and movie characters.

The art is distintive and enjoyable. But it made me wonder what the copyright issues are here. I hope no one would be so stupid as to sue the guy. But the comic companies seem to try to claim rights to the images of their characters. Does the fact that the guy drew new art in his own style protect him enough? 

I hope so. If the law is against this kind of creativity, then it's wrong.

London shop fronts

This blog posts photos of London shop fronts. That's it. That's all it needs to be. I think they need to be on greeting cards.

Unpublished JRR Tolkien Stories

I used to brag about how I'd read The Lord of the Rings fourteen times. There I go, doing it again. Confession time: for most of the later passes, I skipped the poems and songs and kinda skimmed over the crawling through Mordor parts.

Whew, I feel better.

But I still love 'em. Last weekend, we got to watch the Fellowship movie with Ethan (11), which was a lot of fun. We made him read the book before we'd let him watch it. Parental power is sometimes fun.

I was talking to him about the Hobbit as well, and it reminded me of a series of Tolkien takeoffs I've long wanted to do.

Just imagine that yet another cache of unpublished Tolkien works is found:

Unpublished JRR Tolkien Stories

• Plucky kid menaced by brutal bully at school dares to fight back: he whacks the bully in the head with his lunchbox. Just before the bully can smash him, an enormous eagle scout plucks him out of danger by the neck of his shirt.
• Hard-working middle-aged salesman is in a slump. He needs to get the Ring account or he's through. He wants to offer the Ring manufacturer a discount, but he's told no dice. On the last day of the quarter, an Eagle Distributing clerk offers him a discount on service, and he's able to pass that on to the customer and win the deal.