Big momma slider turtle

Saw this turtle on the path while biking to work; have seen it a couple of times. One time, I startled it when trying to get close for a photo...and it was climbing a concrete embankment...and it yanked in its legs and slid down the steep slope.

I mean, I'm assuming it's the same turtle. It didn't have a bar code or anything.


My birdwatcher friend Mikael, my go-to guy for wildlife, says it's probably a red-eared slider and that it's probably a female looking for a place to dig a hole and lay eggs in.

I think that's great, and it's likely to keep the deadbeat male turtles away, too. I mean, picture the scene in a turtle singles' bar:

"Hey, baby, what's your sign?"

"I'm looking for a place to dig a hole and lay eggs in."

Turtle guy just walks away. Slowly, of course.

Possums in daylight

On one of my morning bike rides, this one on 3/24/08, I saw a couple of possums frolicking, or whatever. I actually got a shot of one of them. They moved too fast for me to get anything better:



They were pretty entertaining to see as they ran away from me. I wouldn't have noticed them if I'd been driving.

Writing a Madrigal script; Character Matrix

I'm working on a script to submit for the University of Texas' annual Madrigal Dinner production. I've written several of these before, and they've even used a couple of them for the show. It's a dinner theater production with a choir, and the feasting has to be integrated into the story.

Last year I wrote one that I was just inordinately happy with, but they didn't choose to use it. Now Madrigal script time has rolled around again and I've decided to write another script.

In a way, I'm surprised at myself. My usual pattern would be to let last year's rejection get me down, and skip it this year. But writing last year's script was such a positive experience, and I was so happy with the result, that I don't feel that way at all.

A Madrigal Dinner, in the UT style, has a very specific format. It has a constrained set of scenes and length and several clear dramatic unities. It must take place around a feast. It must include a king, queen, and assorted nobility. It must provide specific opportunities for the choir to sing.

These limits are not negatives; they make a Madrigal writing project go very quickly. In fact, there was a post on 43Folders recently about how limits can be used in creative projects. For me, I find the Madrigal limits kill a lot of my problems in finishing a story.

Here are some of the things that I waste time on in story writing that are nonissues in a Madrigal project:

• I used to waste a lot of time choosing a point of view, and would sometimes write half or more of a story in one point of view, then try another. I don't do that so much anymore...but you really can't worry about this one in a Madrigal: it's a play. It's not about point of view. You can use the point of view of whoever's on stage.


• Flashbacks and timejumping. I've seen Madrigals that had complicated time jumps. I don't like it; it's complicated. It's a big complicated production as it is, and it's not worth risking confusing the audience.


• The setting and characters are fairly defined already. It's gotta be a court, you need a king, queen, prince/princess, probably a jester, that sort of thing.

And then there's a technique I now want to use in all my stories, that I developed while writing madrigals. Basically, I make a character matrix. I compare all my major characters to each other and make sure that for each, I develop an overall motivation, a specific goal, a conflict, an epiphany, some dialogue tags if possible, that sort of thing. This year I've got a theme of stated goals versus real wants, so for each character I'm trying to develop those...the wants may develop into the epiphanies, as the characters realize that what they think they want isn't what they really want.

I usually do this with separate sections for each character in my notes; doing it in a table, as a matrix, somehow makes a lot more sense to me. The act of aligning and comparing the characters story-relevant properties seems to move development along better.

City box done: "Daddy, you made this for me?"

I've been building a toy box that's designed to look like a row of buildings. I built it while my family was out of town for a week during spring break. When they got back, my youngest daughter, age 2.5, walked right up to the box and said, "Daddy? You made this for ME?" She sounded so excited. That was a lot of fun. Below are some photos of the 'finished' box.

I really meant to paint some black shadows between the buildings, but I haven't gotten around to it, and it's already in use as a highly successful toybox reducing the clutter in our living room, so I don't know whether I'll mess with that delicate situation. I used a piece of poplar 1x2 to make the handle. The rest of it is MDF, except the base, which is 1/2" plywood. Really it's all just scrap that I had lying around.

Felt devil

Here's a stuffed creature I made about a year ago. I was going to say that I'm happy with him because he looks a lot like the drawing I made him from...but actually, that's not true. His proportions are quite different. I only have a terrible photo of the original drawing, but I'll place it below. Apparently in the process of making him I went from the original idea of tiny wings to focus on long arms. Anyway, I like how he turned out, although the photos don't do him justice. He's kind of a cross between a ghost and a devil.

I used to shy away from making things from felt, but there are some neat colors of felt now available, and its non-raveling faculty certainly makes things easier.

How is a garage sale like an enema?

Keep your friends close, and your enemas closer? I dunno, I never had an enema. But I did have a garage sale. A big garage sale. We stopped giving things away to Goodwill some months ago...seems like it's been a year, but that can't be right. We started keeping stuff and planning to have a big garage sale to raise money for a trip to Germany through the school.

Well, we used to donate a good sized box of stuff to Goodwill about once a month. Which only underscores the crazy amounts of useless stuff that we take in every week, but in any case -- that's a bunch of stuff that we were NOT giving away anymore. We were piling it in the garage. And that's just the toys, books, clothes, housewares and such that would fit in boxes. Add to that the several furniture items we decided to sell, and the many many items a friend of ours donated when he moved. He moved last week, and that really was the catalyst to get off our butts and actually have the garage sale, because suddenly our house was stuffed with his leftover stuff and we needed to get rid of it.

Well, it feels great to have the space back, let me tell you. That mountain of junk was blocking my access to my workbench....making me not want to even walk through our garage...and making it harder to walk through our house at all. I feel all clean inside and out now.

City box...construction and planning photos

Construction photos of the city box....

	Sides assembled with base, handle; basecoated using leftover latex house paint.
	Here's the drawing I did for the decoration of the box.
	Here's the initial tape masking I did for the first color.
	Here it is after applying a dark grey color.

A week of no television, and hopefully less going forward

If you don't count watching a movie over at a friends house, and I don't, I haven't watched any television this past week. It's easy to do that when the family is away, as they were -- Tanya took the whole circus up to Wisconsin for Spring Break. The thing is, with no one else in the house, I'm not particularly tempted to turn the TV on. When someone else is watching TV, though, I have a real hard time resisting it. And if I'm having any trouble at all writing, well, then it's sheer torture to be trying to write something difficult when I could be watching an episode of Stargate: Atlantis with Tanya.

And to think I spent several years carefully not knowing anything about Stargate: Atlantis. It was one of the few SF shows on TV where I didn't even know the premise. The commercials simply bewildered me, and I felt no temptation to watch it. Tanya started watching it recently, and now I feel like catching up on the whole continuity....whereas before, I felt like it was a second-tier-quality show and I was simply saving myself some life time by not watching it.

We just cancelled our Dish Network subscription, so we're trying out a period of less TV. Should be interesting to see how this goes.

Before the writer's strike, I would often watch a show every weeknight. The strike has helped a bit. Really, I don't have time to watch a show every night AND get a decent writing session done.

The lesson of Mr. Crabs

I'm recording some paper notes of mine, with random ideas. Basically, I write ideas in whatever notebook is handy, and mostly I'm pretty good about recording them later...but sometimes a notebook sits around for a while before I sift through it for the gold.

Here's a bit of gold dust from August 2006 that I found this morning:

Spongebob's boss Mr. Crabs is a great character because he's a fundamentally
nice guy whose good intentions are completely overwhelmed by his insane greed.
You know he'd sell you out for a dollar, and you still love him for it.

I'm thinking that he can be a model for a type of character, one who has a terrible weakness. In his case though I'm captivated by what a jolly fun character he remains. Honestly, I can see him selling my kidneys on eBay.

It's important to convert time spent watching Spongebob into highfalutin' literary ideas when you have kids. Keeps you sane.