Month: November 2019

An Unexpected Journey

Nope, not the Hobbit book. In this case, I’m actually referring to the book that I wrote titled An Unexpected Journey a few years back. I recently realized that I haven’t bothered to talk about it, despite this being an ideal place to do so, so here we are. So… it’s a kids book about an alligator named Cilantro who accidentally ends up going on a quest when he really just means to find a new place to live. Yeah.

You can find out the rest by reading it! It’s really short, 46 pages and it’ll be shorter once I’m done editing out the unnecessary extra line spacing, but, well, it was my first book and I may have made some mistakes. That’s part of the point of this post: to advertise the fact that I am finally going back and fixing spacing, punctuation, I think one or two typos… all the stuff that makes me cringe when I open it up and go, “There should be a comma before that dialogue!” Which means that first edition will be, fingers crossed, going out of print very soon. If you’d like a copy, pick it up before second edition is released! (This may also be a good time to plug the fact that the second book is in the later stages of editing, so you have that to look forward to, too.)

While I’m working on that, I’ll leave you with a snippet of one of the fight scenes. Enjoy!

“What was that?!” Rebecca whispered, “A monster?”
“Shhh! I’m trying to listen!” Allan warned, “I think it’s goblins. Everyone, stand in a circle, back to back.” 
Cilantro noticed a couple of sharp, pointy sticks. “Rebecca!” he whispered, “I’ll grab a stick. Use your horn as a spear.”
“What?! Are you kidding?!” she yelped, “I spend hours polishing and cleaning my horn until it sparkles like freshly fallen snow! I’ll take a stick too, thank you very much!”
Allan looked at them. “Do you guys even know how to fight?” 
Rebecca looked at him, giggled, and said, “Of course! Beat up the bad guy, and don’t get beat up!” 
Suddenly, a goblin pack started dropping from the trees. “Augh!!” Rebecca screamed, while instinctively poking at one with her “spear.” 
Meanwhile, Allan had drawn a sword and was busy slicing goblins with, may I add, great skill. Just then, they heard a shout from Cilantro, signaling that he had been captured. Allan took one look toward Cilantro, chopped off a goblin’s head, and charged toward the goblin holding Cilantro. 
As Allan’s sword made contact with the goblin’s torso, he heard another scream from behind him. As Allan and Cilantro stared, they realized it was the goblin’s scream, not Rebecca’s. “How dare you mess up my hoof polish!” she scolded the goblin, “It took an hour to put on!” That made them laugh hysterically.

Do give it a bit of slack, I’m not adjusting the actual story or the writing style and I was nine when I wrote it, so there’ll be cliches and tropes and so-so sentences that are probably unnecessary, but I’m trying to stay true to my beginnings.

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Forgotten History

Occasionally, I go poking through old papers of mine to reminisce, and, just possibly, find something worth sharing. This one is an excellent example: a summary of the Peshtigo Fire that I wrote in fourth grade. Since I don’t think I say it in the report, it should be noted that Peshtigo is a town in Wisconsin. As I explain in the paper, the Peshtigo Fire has been largely forgotten — in fact, up until digging this up, I had forgotten about it, too! Historically, it’s lack of coverage is because it happened in a similar timeframe to the Great Chicago Fire, which was smaller, but in a more known area. Why I forgot about it, I have no idea. As for the rest of the information, I’ll leave that to my nine-year old self.

The Peshtigo Fire was caused by drought and harsh winds. The winds caught onto the fires the lumberjacks set to burn fallen branches. Due to the wind and the many little fires, a firestorm broke out. Firestorms are rare fires that form their own explosive gases. Also, due to the trees in the area, the fire had many flammables to fuel itself with. When the fire stopped, the forest near Peshtigo was a sea of scorched wood and ashes more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, this fire has been nearly forgotten, replaced by the significantly smaller Great Chicago Fire. On the same day the same winds stirred fires at both Port Huron at the tip of Lake Huron, and the cities of Holland and Manistee across Lake Michigan. It is a shame that only the Great Chicago Fire is remembered of all the significant fires that day.

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Narwhales!

One of the many games that I play online is called Narwhale. Aww! Sounds nice, kind of sweet, right? Haha, nope. Narwhale is a very simple game where you’re all — surprise! — narwhales, and you’re trying to kill each other by impalement, courtesy of tusks. A good example is this image, where I’m less than 1.5 seconds away from getting skewered by someone who’s about to make a sharp turn into my side.

“Why would you want to kill the other narwhales, though?” Well, that’s a good question. For starters, they’re all trying to kill you. You also get bonuses for each level you get (you advance the number of levels that each narwhale you kill has), like stamina (the little dots by your tusk, those are how many dashes you have left at a given time), stamina regeneration, dash speed, general speed, tusk length, turn rate… that sort of thing. You can see each upgrade for a moment as you get it, and then the words fade so that you can actually, you know, see what you’re doing.

Of course, bonuses that make it easier to kill shouldn’t really be the only reward to killing, should they? Of course not! It’s mostly for the rush of exhilaration when you get out of a tight spot, or see your username on the Leaderboard in the top right corner (if you don’t put one in, you’ll come up as “Lazy Narwhale”) or, if you do really well, get a crown for being the top player. Your tusk also turns into a kebab if you hit max tusk length, so that’s fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots of my crown/kebab combo, since I was a bit busy trying not to die, but I do have one with just a crown.

It should also be noted that digital narwhales seem to be contortionists, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether they’re missing the back half of their body, therefore dying and no longer a threat, or whether they’re scrunched up, like the little greige-ish dude near the bottom of that last picture. Unfortunately, that’s an unavoidable result of high speed turning, so just know that it’s something to watch out for.

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Write It Down!

Well, it’s NaNo season again, and as such I’m going to give you all some unsolicited writing advice. I don’t know about all of you, but I have horrible impulse control, and a lot of fun story ideas. For a long time, the result of this was droves upon droves of partially started books. “Ooh, what about this story?” So I started it. “This seems like a neat concept.” And I started it. The result being a lot of “I started this based off of a half-formed concept and don’t know where to go with it, but I have now jumped from the train of thought of my other story and don’t know how to get back” situations.

The solution to this was, surprisingly, really simple. I made a concept document! Now, I just type up notes in my “Write it down!” doc and get back to it when I have the time. This means that I’m not rushing to come up with a full plot for a single piece of dialogue or a vague idea, but I also don’t feel like I’m abandoning them. I can keep expanding on the possibilities, knowing that when I get to them, that work will pay off, but also that I don’t have to have all of the details in my head. For someone who had previously done little writing down the things I needed to remember, preferring to just, well, remember them, it was a bit of a difficult transition to make, but it’s certainly been worth it.

A good example of what I couldn’t have done had I mentally catalogued the ideas instead is actually this year’s NaNo. I was working on another story, see, and it wasn’t until partway through October that I realized we were almost to this time of year again. Not wanting to come up with a new concept with such little time, I turned to my concept doc. If I had been trying to remember all of them and find the most fleshed-out idea to use, I probably still would have ended up choosing the story I did, but I would have misplaced some of its details. I also wouldn’t have been choosing from the full eleven choices that I had written down, because I wouldn’t have remembered what all of them were at any given time. I say this with full confidence, seeing as I just tried to remember all eleven (I cheated; I already have the number from counting them in my doc) and could only recall seven of them.

Anyways, just a friendly suggestion: write down your ideas! That might seem obvious, but for me it wasn’t, so I’m going to assume there are other folks like me who need the nudge.

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