Summer projects!

So every summer I make goals for myself, since I hate it when I just wind up wasting away three months and don't have anything to show for the time. My lists are always overly ambitious, and this summer was no exception, so I'm trying to focus now on what I have accomplished, even those things which were not on my list.

First off, enjoyed discovering Doctor Who with some friends. And while this may not seem like an accomplishment, it was a nice group thing that came about rather randomly. Slowly we're adding to the number of people who are watching, and while we may be on varying episodes at a given moment, it's been nice to share this with people. "Not now, Rose, I'm resonating concrete!"

Second, and I need to remember the importance of this one: I wrote, edited and submitted a story to the second Machine of Death anthology. For the longest time I've fancied myself a writer - I like to come up with stories, worlds, characters, etc., and use words to bring them to life. But this was the first time that I rigorously edited a story, albeit with a lot of help in the form of readers of varying ages and "skill" levels. I put skill in quotes because I got some valuable feedback from people who claimed to know nothing about writing stories - but considering they make up the overwhelming majority of my intended audience, they're not that bad to write for. This editing involved rehauling my climax, wrestling with some awkwardly worded sentences, debating between two seemingly equal words or phrases, and agonizing over writing a new scene to better explain a character.

They've received well over a thousand submissions with the intent to publish about thirty, and while I think I've got a solid chance, I'm not holding my breath. Merely the experience of writing and editing the story was great for me as a writer. Simply the fact that I hit the button and submitted it is a step way beyond anything I've done before. I've shown my work to other people now, and they didn't hate it. In fact, a good number of them claimed to like it. Now to take this momentum and apply it to my next writing project.

Speaking of which, though it was also not on my original list, I got added by the guys at Silver Asterism to do video game blogging, which has been quite a bit of fun. Hopefully we can keep up a reasonably steady stream of posts even as we enter the school year. We're planning on branching out into more analysis, anticipaiton of upcoming games, and commentary on the industry on the whole. Watch that space!

My third project that is coming along is Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon using a tutorial from deviantART. I'm hand-sewing it, and I just finished the embroidery. There's just a little more assembly to do, including the eyes and legs, then stuffing it and finishing it up! :-) More pictures to come when I finish.

My wobbly embroidery still manages to improve the wing by making it look like, well, a wing.

In crafty news, I have also knit a camera case, two iPod socks, and a scarf as I slowly whittle away at the portion of my stash that I brought with me. (I've cut myself off from buying new yarns until I go through it all.) Next on the list is a TARDIS! :-D

As if the rest of this post wasn't geeky enough, I also got it into my head to program Minesweeper. I just got thinking about the logic behind the game and realized that I know enough to program it. So I began working on a terminal-based game written in C++. As of right now, the check, flag, remove flag, and double-click function works. The game knows when you lose, but is blissfully unaware of when you win, which is both confusing and depressing. Working on that. The next step is to program the computer to be able to solve a board. I've got the basics of the logic figured out, but I'm not sure how to get into some of the more complicated inferential steps. For now, maybe it will just guess. :-P Anyhow, the fact that I'm voluntarily programming in C++ proves that either I'm crazy or in (approximately) the right field or both. :-)

Oh, so much to do, so little time. Hopefully I can make the most of my remaining two and a half weeks before band camp and manage to keep simple projects going this year. And finish a costume in time for Halloween, if I really get my act together.

I solemnly swear I am up to no good...

The final Harry Potter movie premiered at midnight today. I’ll admit that I haven’t followed the movies very closely - while they are well done, I’m very picky about my book to movie adaptations. I haven’t seen the first part of the seventh yet, so I imagine I’ll see both parts together with my sister when they come out on DVD.

This is significant to me because the first book came out in 1997 in the UK, 1998 in the US. I was about 9 or 10 when I started reading them. My grandfather got me a copy of Prisoner of Azkaban before it was released in the US. I hoped for a Hogwarts letter when I turned 11. From book one, I was an obvious Ravenclaw. I was the first person in my family to read each of the books. Now everybody in my family has read all seven books, down to my 11-year-old sister. My other sister attended the midnight premiere, much as I attended the midnight book release for Order of the Phoenix eight years ago.

The Harry Potter saga, in book and movie form, has spanned the latter two thirds of my life. It is one of the series that has shaped my own imagination and writing, along with The Lord of the Rings and Pullman’s His Dark Materials. I still wonder sometimes if Hogwarts (or its American equivalent) just somehow missed me.

Two months from today I turn 21, which is considered a passage into adulthood, despite the fact that I’ve been a legal adult for the past three years. I graduate from undergrad in May, going on to grad school or an actual job and who knows what else. In many ways, I was the ideal age for Harry Potter, because, especially in the latter books and earlier movies, he was my age. As I read each book, the characters were growing up with me, going through so many of the same situations, even if they have magic on top of all of it.

In particular, I’ve always identified with Hermione, and she was one of the first smart female leads I ever encountered, and I appreciate that her hair is as unruly as mine. (I jokingly cite Emma Watson’s hair after the first two movies as the reason that I don’t watch them.) She was such a pivotal character to the story and the right kind of role model for a geeky young girl with bushy hair of her own. Especially in fantasy, there are very few strong female characters. It's a model that we're breaking out of, it's just that "classics" are lagging behind the curve as women come into our own. (Watch Star Wars again sometime and realize that Leia would have made the better Jedi.)

References to Harry Potter pervade our culture now. Yesterday my boyfriend asked me “Do you solemnly swear you are up to no good?” The term “Muggles” is frequently used to describe people who are uninitiated. (On that note, we’ve decided I’m a geocaching Squib, since the rest of my family has gone and I haven’t.) Thanks to the books, fantastical creatures such as the basilisk have been brought back in to the modern awareness. My little sisters jumped from there into a study of mythology.

My mother showed me the ad that Alan Rickman took out to thank J.K. Rowling for the journey. She convinced him to take the role of Snape before he was given much character in the books. I think many fans of the series can agree with him about the need to be told stories. I cried at every death, held my breath at each battle. I read the extra books, kept up on the lore and the world.

Growing up is a strange thing. I think we worry about it a lot, but no matter how much we fret, it happens and can often surprise us. I’ve often thought that when I “become an adult” I have to get boring, but I’ve come to realize that adulthood is what you make it to be. And if I still want to keep the magic of Harry Potter alive in my life, I can. Harry’s journey didn’t end with the seventh book, not really, and neither does mine. Harry had the advantage of skipping straight to the epilogue. I get to live my life all the way there.

So congratulations to J.K. Rowling, for living every author’s dream. Thank you for the world I spent quite some time growing up in, thank you for the characters I could relate to as I grew with them, and thank you for proving that adults and children alike can still believe in magic.

Mischief managed. For now.

Choosing is hard

There is so much out there in the world to be learned and done and seen and enjoyed, and I'm never going to have the time for it all. That's one of the hardest things to accept about the world. And it's hard for me to prioritize what I want to do and what I want to learn because there's just so much of it.

Case in point: I play, to varying degrees of ability, eight different instruments, five or six of which I would actually play in front of people. I also conduct, which, I've discovered, is a somewhat comparable skill. And yet I want to learn more. I've fallen more in love with strings lately and wish that I could play the fiddle. Then I remind myself to learn the instruments I already have.

I've written about this before, to an extent, discussing the concept of the "Renaissance soul." I've been thinking about it again because there's not much for me to do at work, which has given me time to doodle and read interesting articles, like this one about a crazy awesome computer virus. Computer security is fascinating. I learned a little bit of assembly code and the basic concept of a few injection attacks in some computer science courses. I'm hoping that in the spring I can take the course on viruses.

And roller coasters. I rode some this weekend, and they're awesome! Everything about them, from the design of the track, to the chains and brakes, to the steel (or wood) that holds them up, to their construction in the winter offseason, is really nifty. That would be a cool job too.

I feel like I'm often either torn on what to do with myself because there are simply so many options or too lazy to pick any of them. When I get these crazy bursts of energy, I'm not sure how to constructively focus them. Sometimes they are focused (like right now I want to play trombone, but sadly, I don't have one) but often it's just a jittery sort of energy that demands I do something. I suppose right now I'll put it to good use by doing the laundry...

But the amount of knowledge in the world is so incomprehensibly vast! It's amazing! There are so many technical things that I'm never going to understand because I don't have time to learn it all. Even subjects that you may scoff at and believe there's no way that can have a lot of depth can have incredibly complex histories or mechanisms or underlying chemistries. Wild stuff. Maybe I like writing because it's a good way to learn some of this stuff, or at least pretend that I know it when writing about characters who do. It's a good way to live vicariously.

Sometimes I think about immortality and how cool that would be, not because I fear death, but because then I would have the time to master everything. At the same time, though, human knowledge is constantly expanding, so maybe I wouldn't be able to even then! But I could get a much larger chunk of it. Probably even reach the limit of my brain's capacity... I wonder how many GB, TB, etc., our brains can hold. It would probably depend on the compression and file format... :-)

This is really rambly. But that's the kind of mood I've been in. Now, off to laundry.

Writing is Easy

Yes, in the past couple months I have come to the conclusion that writing is easy. Stringing words together into coherent, useful sentences is a piece of cake when you've been doing it for most of your life. Storytelling, an extension of writing that involves coming up with characters and plots and making the reader care about them, is a little bit harder. It something I enjoy and have spent some time doing and I'm reasonably good at it.

Editing, on the other hand, sucks. It's really hard. You have to get nitpicky about comma placement and sentence structure. You have to evaluate whether things have been properly explained. You have to add scenes to clarify and delete scenes that are unnecessary. You have to get other people to review your work and tell you what works and what doesn't. It's a lot of hard work.

I'm on this subject because I've spent two months working on a short story for an anthology. I wrote it and was pretty happy. I was then told that my climax sucked, which I had to admit was true. I rewrote that and was told that my character didn't make sense. I spent a couple weeks trying to eke out one more scene to explain her. It started as a good story and the editing has pushed it to be better, but it's still not quite where it should be. Time for more work.

When I was younger, writing was easy. I came up with things and wrote stuff and thought it was pretty good. But until now, I've never taken the extra step towards editing. That's where writing really becomes work. It's a step well worth taking though, and my story has been polished to a neat shine. Just a few more tweaks and then I'll submit it and see what happens.

Five weeks left in summer. I'm still deciding how to make the best of it.