Holding down the fort

I was thinking during band practice today when the directors had the low brass play our background rhythm for "Edge of Glory" (yes, the Gaga song). It's a bit weird to read, but once you figure it out, it grooves. I remembered when I was playing flute or piccolo, I would just tune out whenever the director worked with the low brass. After all, their parts were so boring.


But now, I love playing trombone. Rocking out on the baseline can be tons of fun, even if you'll never get the recognition that the hotshot trumpets do. Because they couldn't do it without you. And even if they don't realize it, you do. And hopefully so do your directors.

Some of my favorite songs to play are actually the slower ballads. Something about having the sustained notes underneath a melody, whether it's a soloist or a section, is really neat. I like to close my eyes and picture the sounds as wisps of color in the air, and see my sound rise up and support the melody, pushing it higher into the air. Often, the most musical parts can be found in the chords behind the melody. There was one particular measure in "Summon the Heroes," where, under the trumpet soloist, the first trombones held a whole note, the seconds and thirds had moving quarters, and the baritones had corresponding eighth notes. It was such a neat moment in the music that most people wouldn't notice consciously, but that's one of the beauties of music.

In sixth grade I sat there with my flute and wondered why anyone would ever want to play a non-melody instrument. Many years later and just a little bit wiser, I get now that some of the best parts aren't melody. I've been so jealous of horn counter-melodies on so many occasions. They really get the best "Hollywood lines," to quote my director. And some of the oom-pah tuba parts and walking basslines they get make me jealous. Music really only happens when everyone contributes, from the percussion to the bass lines to the chords, counter-melodies, melodies, harmonies, ostinatos... the list goes on. And that's what makes music truly beautiful.

I've often found that playing a piece well with a group can be a truly transcendental experience. I feel connected with the other players on a fundamental level in a way that I haven't found anywhere else. Music is a universal expression of the soul, and I feel that our shared humanity connects us as we create these sounds weaving in the air, carrying our dreams, our lives, our stories - for that is what we put into the music that we play.

Legitimate writer status: Achieved!

So over the summer, one of my projects was to write and submit a story for the second Machine of Death anthology (www.machineofdeath.net). It was a great experience for a (still young) writer - I had never edited a story to that degree, or indeed really shown one to other people. Boy, was that terrifying. Fear of rejection is the main thing that's kept me back from pursuing these creative things (and more than a few other things in life), so it was really difficult to hand it off to other people and accept criticism of it.

Overall, I think it turned out well, but could have used some work. Still, I'm proud of the end result, and was (yes) a little disappointed when I got the e-mail this morning that it didn't make the anthology. With 1,958 submissions and only 30 stories chosen, it doesn't surprise me. The best part is, this doesn't bother me - it's just motivating me to try again. It was a form letter, and I'm not sure if this was their only rejection letter, but it does also include reassurance that a lot of the stories we're great but they don't have room in the anthology. Apparently my story is still in consideration for possible future projects, but we'll have to see on that one. It'll probably take a while.

Smiling after getting a rejection is a little odd, I suppose. But it's not like I really expected to hit it right straight out of the gate. Writers are supposed to suffer - it's where we get our best material. :-) One thing about this really stressful semester is that I'm discovering what I really miss about having free time, and I love writing. I love creating in many senses, but writing, creating worlds, characters, stories, may just be my favorite. My dad mentioned to me last night one of the story ideas I came up with in sixth grade. There's still potential there. And my other characters all keep growing with me.

Step one, survive this semester. Step two, figure out what I'm doing next year. After that, I should have free time again. I'm missing NaNoWriMo again, since school and marching band take up too much of my time, but maybe next year will be better. And if I start planning now... :-) For now, maybe I'll get a picture or two together for the MoD evidence photo contest. And maybe do some homework.

For those interested, the full story is after the jump. Enjoy, and let me know what you think! I welcome any constructive criticism and would love to keep improving. (Basic background to the anthology can be found at the MoD website, link above.)

Checking In

Well, it's been a while since I last wrote. This really is going to be a busy semester - whoever told me that fourth year was easy straight-up lied. The biggest problem I've encountered is that most of my classes are based around long-term deadlines, which are hard to pace out, particularly when two or three of them involve coordinating group work.

The Android game is coming along well, though because of difficulties getting the engine set up, I haven't been able to contribute as much to the coding as I would have liked. I have mostly been working on writeups, assets, and level designs. It's a top-down stealth game, so the pretty standard avoid the guards and get the gems sort of fare. It's not terribly original, but it's the best we could come up with that would satisfy the requirements of the project. We are learning some interesting stuff in lecture and I'm excited to jump into the XNA (Xbox) project that we're getting assigned next week.

Capstone is proving to be a somewhat frustrating project only in that we don't seem to know enough to complete each deliverable. Because the course is taught by ten different faculty members / professional engineers, it's a little hard to track down a lecturer for questions. We also haven't gotten feedback yet on our initial architectural design, which is worrying because we have to plow ahead with putting the buildings on the site like that. Hopefully he doesn't have any major issues with it or we're going to have a lot of catching up to do.

I decided to go with an independent thesis project, which is creating more work for me, but I'm more excited about what I'm writing about. I'm going to get into the lab this week and start working with the data, as well as hitting the books to find sources for the bibliography I have to turn in next week. The fun never ends...

Outside of that has largely been marching band - our last show was fantastic. The theme was Superheroes, and we played the theme from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the Danny Elfman Batman theme, and James Bond. It's up there on the list of my favorite marching shows, definitely. Next up is Rolling in the Deep and Party Rock anthem, which sounds like fun (though the dance we have to do looks a little odd...). After that is another Disney show, and later on we've been promised a video game theme. All in all, it sounds like a good year for band!

With so much going on, I really haven't had time to consider what I'm doing after graduation. I didn't have much time to spend at the fall career fair or to spruce up my resume beforehand. Really, I'm still in denial about this being my last year. I'm not sure that I'm ready to go out into the world. Then again, senior year of high school, I didn't think I was ready for college.

Fall break is in two weeks, so hopefully I can make it til then without cracking. For now, I've got Carbon Leaf's live acoustic album in the background and some problem sets to get back to.

Penultimate Semester

I don't really have anything profound to write here at the moment - I'm just trying to get into the swing of a new semester and enjoying seeing people again.

My classes are a little intimidating: thesis, capstone, Water Chemistry (dual-listed as a grad course), Traffic Operations (same), and Introduction to Game Design. Woooo. We got our capstone groups on Thursday, so that looks like it'll be pretty good. The civil engineering project is the design of an office park and it's set up to be close to the actual design and bidding process. We've received our RFP (request for proposals) and lecturers throughout the semester will make sure we know enough to complete each stage of the design. I'm kinda excited about it.

Our first project for game design is for the Android phone, and we'll get our teams and the assignment for that tomorrow. I'm really excited but also a little nervous - I'm hoping I'm not in over my head in terms of programming. Better brush up on my Java... We also get to do a game in Microsoft XNA (for Xbox) and for another platform he hasn't decided on yet.

I'm a little confused because none of my classes have given me any real work yet. I've had a little reading for Water Chem and that's it. I haven't known what to do with myself all weekend. (The answer turned out to be a good amount of video games, hanging out, and watching movies.) I'm sure it'll get harder soon enough.

Marching band is off to a pretty good start - I'm both on uniform staff again (yay!) and a drill instructor this year, which means a couple extra meetings a week. Our first show is Earth Wind and Fire, so not one of my favorites, but some of it is pretty fun. The directors haven't told us what any of the other shows are going to be yet, so that's been the cause of much speculation.

Well, fourth year's here, whether I want to admit it or not. Hoping to make the best of it and get involved in other stuff (Hauntings, Student Game Developers, return to swing dancing...) despite my courseload. Now, off to read about water chemistry!

One week left

Oh jeez. Band camp starts in a week. That means that I start my fourth and final year of college. I take the GRE in a few weeks, by which point I need to know what grad schools I'm sending scores to. I also need to finish updating and tweaking my resume, not to mention beginning to research companies that are coming to the career fair in two months. Oh, and I turn 21 six weeks from today.

I have a tendency to panic and look at the big picture of everything coming up rather than realizing that I still have one more band camp to enjoy, one last year of undergrad to live through. And hey, in six weeks, I'll be able to buy alcohol to cope. :-P

So what am I doing with this last week of nearly responsibility-free freedom? Not sure yet. Likely more crafts - I'm close to finishing Toothless. Also more Doctor Who and Eureka, TV shows I'm watching with my friends. No, I guess I don't have any grand plans, though I may jaunt home for a visit. I probably won't do anything too exciting, because I refuse to believe that my childhood is ending. Only the lame parts, like early bedtimes, curfews, homework. Ooh, homework. This is my last year of homework (barring the possibility of grad school)! Also, I have a really hard time coming up with lame parts of childhood. My parents are pretty awesome.

I have so many projects in the pipeline. I have no idea how or when I'm going to get around to them all. I got a capo for my guitar yesterday, so I've been working on that some more. When I mentioned to a friend that I'm really gonna work on guitar this year, he asked "With, what, the -2 hours of time you'll have free this semester?" Which really is a good point, the way I run my life. It's gonna be a busy one.

I am up to 6th on the waitlist for the game design course I want to take. I ran into one of my professors in Kroger the other day and it sounds like that'll be a good class. Two other classes I'm taking should help me narrow down what field I want to go into. And there's always marching band - our first show is Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Now to go bake stuff and figure out what food I need to eat before I move out next week. :-)

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.