Waterbug: Moving Forward

So, having almost ground to a halt less than 6,000 words into NaNoWriMo, and with only a week left to write the remaining 44,000 words. While my NaNo stats are telling me it'll take 6,300 words per day to finish on time, I don't think saying this won't get done falls under the purview of my usual pessimism. I'm pretty sure it's abso-frakking-lutely guaran-frakking-teed.

However, the sticking point is that I'm definitely still into these characters. As little ahead as I've actually begun to figure out, I like where it's going. I've introduced and started to formulate even more characters who're fun to write. I'm just sorta losing it in a couple areas:

1. Plot's never been my strong suit. Worlds and people in them? Fuggeddaboutit, but as soon as they need something to do to keep an audience entertained for a long time, then we're in trouble. I don't know what the solution is to this other than to keep throwing stuff at the wall until a plot comes together out of the mess.

2. The format. I definitely had a lot more fun writing the script versions of Waterbug than any of my prose attempts. I like letting these characters talk, often to each other. I like interspersing their conversations with action. Where I run into trouble, in prose, is figuring out how to work descriptions of stuff into the mixture. It may not be sexy and glamorous, but I think it'd get me from point A to point B a lot quicker if I could just set the scene in one block of text before two or more characters start talking to each other.

So, I think, since I'm somewhere in the middle of what would be the "pilot" of Waterbug, I'm going to, over the next couple months (3D has been woefully neglected while I've been busy not-writing for NaNoWriMo, so I need to strike up a better balance) work on turning the new content back into script versions to follow a revised version of the scene that I scripted way back in the summer. I've got ideas for other chunks of Earth's outer colonies that I want to explore, people, places, things etc. I've got history. I've got the starts of a handful of distinct colonial cultures. We'll see what happens...

Waterbug: NaNoWriMo Version

I've finished re-writing the first 'chapter' in Waterbug for National Novel Writing Month. After this point, I'm flying the Cargo-Hauler Waterbug into uncharted space, done boldly going where I've gone a half-dozen times before. What's next, you may ask? I don't know. I've got rough ideas. I need to explore what happens when Robins gets to Ganymede, and I'm going to introduce more than one character who can both walk in environments with gravity and speak English. Plus, the more terrified I've made Erika of returning to Titan City and her parents, I feel like a confrontation with whatever it is about that colony that truly frightens her is in order. 22 days and 47,764 words to go. Stay tuned!
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The ship shuddered, more violently than usual, violently enough to dislodge John Robins from sleep. He loosened the belt that kept him from drifting out of his bunk and turned to try and sleep on his side. The only light visible in this part of Waterbug came from the stars outside Robins' tiny window.

Then the alarm began blaring, and the captain's voice crackled over the intercom. "Back to sleep, Aspiring-Titan-City-Councilman Robins," the young girl ordered, slightly panicked. "Sitch is normal." Something clattered loudly on her end. "Under control. Definitely not doomed."

He undid the belt and launched himself towards the wall with the intercom. "Not doomed, you say?" he asked the intercom.

"Not a chance. Well, a chance. Big chance. Actually... you can breathe CO2, right?"

Months on the campaign trail had left the crass former lawyer with a dangerously overtaxed verbal filter, which he allowed to explode in the privacy of his quarters. As he dressed in the dark, a series of half-sentences spewed from his mouth, covering a range of topics from 'That little...' to 'If I get my hands on her...' Once dressed in the loose, warm jumpsuit that served as the zero-gravity equivalent of a bathrobe, he went back to the intercom. “No, as a matter of fact, I can't.” He chuckled nervously. “My body has this weird tendency to expel carbon-dioxide. I've been meaning to see a doctor, but, you know how it goes. What can I do to help?”

“You can... go back to bed. Relax. If you wake up tomorrow, everything will be fine.”

“If? I'm on my way! Engine room?” Without waiting for a response, he quickly pushed his weightless body out the door, propelling himself via a series of ladder rungs along the wall.

Outside the guest cabin, some of the warning lights actually worked.. Robins pulled himself aft, guided by those flashing red lights that were not burned out, shattered, or missing. In the semi-darkness, he could make out the large, transparent, water-filled pipes that. At the end of the hallway, he passed through an airlock. Normally, it separated the rotating living areas with gravity from the stationary parts without; the hold, engine room, and cockpit. It was superfluous on Waterbug.

At the far aft end of the ship, a sloppily hand-painted sign indicated the entrance to the “Captain's Playroom” and warned that any damage could “Kill Us All” and that “Horseplay should be undertaken only by trained professionals.” Under the paint, the raised lettering of “Engine Room” was still visible.

The engine room was a mess of parts, floating in the microgravity. Robins was careful to breathe through his nose to avoid inhaling any floating bolts, and that immediately alerted him to the rotten seafood scent of Waterbug's Europan co-pilot, Crabby.

The creature hung near his waterlock, four hind legs easily finding purchase among the pipes and machinery on the wall. A gigantic claw, the central of three forelimbs held a tool box, while a pair of smaller, dextrous arms twiddled nervously, ready to dig through the box as needed.
From under the chitinous shell, a pair of stalks tipped with beady 'eyes' turned to 'look' at Robins as he entered. Technically, they were sophisticated heat-sensing organs; heat was far more useful to detect than light underneath Europa's ice-encrusted oceans. His seven dangling mouthparts twitched fiercely as he hissed a brief, agitated question at Robins.

Robins wiped the alien's spittle from his face before retorting, “You know I can't speak your gibberish. Where the Hell is the captain?” He thought for a moment, then added, “Point; don't say.”

Crabby glared at Robins for a moment, gurgled a something that sounded dismissive, and pointed one of his smaller forelimbs into the gloom. In the dark, Robins could barely see a pair of bar feet dangling out of a large machine. They disappeared, and a moment later, a blinding white light replaced them. If he squinted, Robins could almost make out the torso of a lanky thirteen-year-old girl, Erika Stellane.

Captain Stellane exhaled a few hot breaths onto her hands to help them stand out to Crabby's infrared sensory organs. She dangled seven fingers below her chin in imitation of his mouthparts and hissed to get his attention. She flashed a series of quick gestures to the arthropod. Once Crabby was rifling through the toolbox, she seemed to notice Robins for the first time and flipped a switch on her headlight. The beam disappeared, replaced by a soft glow.

The tween could hardly be called cute; going through puberty in microgravity ensured that. Her limbs were way too long, the muscles beneath them too small. It was tough to tell, between splotches of cheap dye and a variety of grease and chemical stains, but she had red hair tied in an sloppy bun. She wore a greasy jumpsuit, sleeves rolled up to hide how little of her arms they covered.

Robins pushed off the door behind him and began floating towards the girl. “Aspiring-Titan-City-Councilman Robins,” she called, “Didn't I tell you to go back to sleep?” She reached up and caught a tool that Crabby hurled her way, then ducked back into the machine.

“I've never been able to sleep with flashing lights and sirens everywhere.”

From her crawlspace, Erika muttered, “Amazing you get any sleep in Titan City then...”

“What?”

“Nothing!” she called.

“Look,” Robins caught himself on a nearby machine to keep from floating past her. “This ship's clearly falling apart. There's got to be something I can do to ensure I don't need to take an escape pod the rest of the way to Ganymede.”

“First we'd need escape pods...”
“What?”

Erika puled herself back out. “I said, 'first we'd need escape pods.' We pawned 'em for parts a few months back.” She grinned. Given that confession, it was unsurprising that she was in dire need of about a month in a dentist's chair. “Also, everything you're hearing is normal.”

“This is normal?” Robins asked, one hand gesturing at everything, the other holding him in place.

“Yeah... 'cept the alarms... and the warning lights, but those are only for this faulty CO2 scrubber.” She smacked it with her wrench for emphasis. “And before you ask, this crawlspace is tight enough with just me; Crabby's got the tools, and I don't need anyone 'holding the light for me'.” She pointed to her headlight. “So, you can't help, and you may as well go back to your bunk so you can suffocate in comfort.” She ducked back in and began working again.

“What do you mean 'you can suffocate'? You don't, just me?”

“No, I meant 'we'.” She popped back out and signed something to Crabby. Both laughed; it must have been a joke, probably at Robins' expense. “'Sides, aren't you some big-shot politician, now?” She pointed her wrench accusingly and waited for an answer.

“Running,” he responded weakly, not liking where this was going.

“So, you could've flown in style, couldn't you've? Which, she added without letting him respond. There were actually good odds he could not. Even as big as Titan City was, the Outer Colonies Group' remoteness tended to keep their politics rather spartan, compared to the circuses that happened during election season on Earth, Luna, Mars, and a few of the larger asteroids. “Makes it miiiiighty suspicious that you would charter an old Scarab that —and lets not mince words, here; let's really make our leftover O2 count!— is worthless scrap even by Scarab standards.”

“Circumstantial,” there was a mantra in Titan's law schools: 'deny until you can't.' Robins wanted her to get it over with so he could react. It was the theatricality that aggravated him. He was cornered; they were alon so who was the big show for?

“Therefore, I can only surmise that you, Aspiring-Titan-City-Councilman Robins, chartered Waterbug because,” she paused to heighten the drama of her reveal, “You missed me!”

“Missed you? Why would I ever want to see you again? Losing your trumped-up emancipation trial cost me everything! All my credibility as a lawyer, right out the airlock because some sympathetic tweenie jury believed a nine-year-old girl belonged out on the streets! You're only flying around the O.C.G. in this pile of scrap metal you call a ship because of a freak loophole in Titanic Law, which, by the way, will be closed as soon as I'm elected. Then every delinquent like you in Titan City will be tightly leashed to her parents until age 18 when you can be reasonably stuck in a padded cell!”

“Aha! Nailed it! A confession, straight from your own mouth,” Erika noted Robins' perplexed expression and explained, “You chartered Waterbug for your big secret trip to Ganymede so you could keep an eye on me and, once we're back on Titan, drag me kicking and screaming back to my parents.

“You think I don't see it? That would be killer for your campaign! Call in all the top journalists in the Jovian Newsweb for the big photo-op, 'Parents Reunited With Estranged Daughter After Four Years of Titanic Double-You-Tee-Eff Thanks to Candidate Robins!' '”This is just the start,” Aspiring-Titan-City-Councilman Robins added. “Robins 2268!”' Don't worry, if anyone can force me to smile while I'm being crushed under point-oh-two-five gee's, it'll be my parents, so I won't ruin that for you.” She went back into the crawlspace and closed the hatch to seal herself in. She did not continue her repairs.

“Of course, it's all moot,” she announced, somewhat muffled by the hatch, “I won't let you. Crabby won't let you. And it's extra-moot because we're all going to suffocate before we even reach Ganymede.”

Robins stifled a laugh. He almost felt bad for her, but he had learned four years ago that she was a manipulative brat, a brat whose ship was going to get him killed. Given the circumstances, he felt no compulsion to pull his punches. “That's your theory? That I put my life and career on the line —the second career I'd be wasting by getting tangled up in your life, I might add— in your flying deathtrap to bring you home to your parents? You think I've got some file on my desktop with an elaborate flowchart of how I can reunite the Stellane family just to ensure your perfect misery? Well, I've got news for you. This may be something you're psychologically incapable of comprehending at your age, but you're not the center of the universe. I picked your rust-bucket over everything else in that junkyard they call a spaceport because I saw a Europan and thought, 'Hey, a pilot who can't speak any human languages, I bet he won't ask me any uncomfortable questions!'— an impression about which I learned I was sadly mistaken once I saw you here!”

“Yeah, I'm sure questions won't be an issue,” Erika called. The sound of metal scraping on metal suggested she was jury-rigging a lock. “When our corpses drift into Ganymede orbit in a few days. Politician in his pajamas, cash-strapped teenage girl hiding in the crawlspace, ship registered to a Europan, the newspost writes itself.
“Then again, the vultures'll probably ask anyway, won't they? Whaddaya think Missus Robins will say when they ask her about it? Is she gonna be all weepy to see your political career floating belly-up in the J.M.C.? Or will it be more like 'Frankly, I'm surprised it took him this long to get himself killed trying to do something deviant in zero-gee with a desperate, way-underage hooker.' Is there even a Missus Robins?”

“Leave her out of this, you deluded brat!” Robins launched himself at the CO2 scrubber and began frantically pounding on the hatch and trying to pry it open with his bare hands. After a few moments he gave up. “Fine, stay in there. You've gotta have E.V.A. gear somewhere. Once we get to Ganymede, it'll be a bargain to add you and the crab to the hit. A hundred-thousand for Councilwoman Griffins, and a pack of gum to make sure the annoying little girl suffocated like she said—“

The hatch flew open, smacking into Robins' chin. The smack sent him tumbling starboard. Erika emerged holding a small audio-recorder. “You win,” she called to Crabby, “My breakfast rations are yours.”

She turned to Robins' drifting form and waited for him to collide painfully with the wall. Then she spoke “As for you, Crabby's always happy to ensure that asphyxiation remains an option for you if you ever threaten me on my ship again. If it's any consolation, all the cash you're going to pay me to keep this out of the hands of the Titan Election Committee and out of the mailbox of every reporter in the whole of the J.M.C. Will ensure that your next flight on Waterbug will have all the comforts of home: Gravity, food that was vacuum-packed this century, lights, and of course,” she ducked back into the machine one more time, and the alarms and warning lights stopped, “Working Life support. Please enjoy the rest of your round trip, Aspiring-Titan-City-Councilman Robins!”

National Novel Writing Month

After several years of thinking, "This is a great idea, I should sign up," and then not doing so, I decided to take a stab at National Novel Writing Month:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/unitedshoes37/novels/waterbug-292447

The plan is to use the Waterbug script as a jumping-off point, rewrite it as prose, and then tell a handful of other stories within that universe, giving a bit more exploration to the characters and the setting.

European Vacation Part 3

Following the format of the previous update, I'm just going to copy and expand on my bullet pointed travel journal, occasionally complaining about the unintuitive nature of formatting images in a Blogger post, since this is where we get to myself (and others) actually drawing...

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9/27/12

• Our last morning in Prague. Got up early for a false alarm saying our train to Ostrava left at 9 AM, when it actually left at 1 PM. Crawled back into bed after the mistake was realized.
• Woke up (for real) grabbed a cappuccino from a nearby coffee shop and an apricot-filled crepe from the little street market/festival that had been going just up the street from our hotel all week.
• Met everyone(-ish) and took a short walk to Rocky's, Prague's largest Irish Pub, for a round of hard cider before the train left.
• Took another very lazy, sleepy train ride from Prague to the small, border town of Ostrava. Hans, one of our party got ambushed by his family, whom he hadn't seen after living in the states for more than a decade, including two nieces whom he had never met before. They drove us to this beautiful lake-cabin-hotel.
• We settled in, put our stuff away, showered etc. Then Hans led us on the long walk to his parents' cabin.
• We were treated to a bottomless pot of homemade goulash and dumplings, nonstop trays of appetizers, a keg of some great, local pilsner whose name I could've sworn I wrote down, and three bottles of homemade slivovitz —a local liquor, almost but not quite entirely unlike rubbing fluid— to celebrate Hans' homecoming... and the lifting of the hard liquor ban.
• Aside from Hans, None of our party spoke more Czech than "Pivo, prosim," (well, and the dirty words he taught all his co-workers and then warned them not to use in front of his family), and no one there spoke any English, but we managed to have a great time and make our gratefulness understood.
• And then, for the first time in my life, I blacked out, and it couldn't have happened at a better time. The last thing I remember was Art telling Hans it would be a good idea to walk us back to the hotel, and suddenly I'm asleep in my bed. No extremely long stagger for me!
  

9/28/12

• No hangover for me, either. Must be something about getting blackout drunk on a very, very, very full stomach (it certainly wasn't proper hydration, that's for sure).
• We had, what I'm pretty sure is a pretty traditional central European breakfast at the hotel: Bread bacon, espresso, honey, cheese, mineral water, and of course, hair of the dog that bit us. The little bit of a hangover I had never stood a chance!
• After that, I headed out to the beach, deliberately leaving my camera behind so I would be forced to draw if I wanted to remember the scene. I whipped out some fancy markers that I had purchased for a class three years ago —and never used in that class— and put them to use on the mountains and forests across the lake from us.
• We headed into town to buy our train tickets back to Prague to connect with our Prague-Munich return trip.
• Is it weird that I regret not having my camera with me when I went to the bathroom in the Ostrava train station? Or the other couple times I regretted not bringing it into various public bathrooms? Sorry...
  • It was just so cool, though. They had normal urinal backs (the tall kind, obviously), but they all terminated in this communal, raised, tiled-in trough with a central drain. Little details like that are how you know you've walked into a Central European bathroom as opposed to, I don't know, New York or L.A. or... anywhere else. But no, I stupidly left my camera in the bus.
• Then, began our three-country-one-afternoon pub crawl. A time to check out the countryside of Central Europe, and complain about no longer getting Passport stamps.
  • Stop 1: Polski Cieszyn
    • Tyskie Beer at a cafe in a little plaza
    • A wonderful little exchange by two of our party:
      • Art: What town is this?
      • Wally: 3:30...
  • Stop 2: Slovakia, I didn't catch the name of the town.
    • Met one of Hans' friends who lived here.
    • Stopped at the "Jack Daniels Whiskey Bar" for beer and slivovitz
    • Grabbed dinner at the Restaurant on the Gate.
      • There, Gambrinus was the beer of choice, as well as even more slivovitz. I had what was, essentially a Chicken Cordon Bleu, while also picking at an extra plate that had apparently been delivered by accident.
      • Central Europe is really very cheap. It's kinda easy to miss in the Czech Republic or Poland, since they're not on the Euro, so you have to actively be running the conversion if you want to figure out how cheap, but Slovakia's on the Euro, and I don't think anyone's dinner was more than €5,00.
  • Stop 3: Back to Ostrava for a trip to the brothel and a couple clubs afterward
    • I don't know if this technically counts, since a lot of people went to bed instead of to the bar...othel
    • He who hesitates, gets to choose between the brothel's dregs and racking up a bar tab comparable to what an hour with a prostitute would've cost anyways. Now I know...
    • Probably the highlight of this leg of the trip: The brand of toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom of the brothel was "Big Willy: Der Super-Spender". Hilarious, no?
    • Cabbed to a couple bars in town. Grabbed a few beers and passed out back at the hotel.

9/29/12

• Had the poor fortune of getting on a very crowded train that teased us with vacancy for a stop or two. Right when everyone was getting comfortable, all the occupants crowded aboard to fill the train to bursting. 4 hot, crowded, hungover hours from Ostrava to Prague...
• Couple-hour 'layover' in Prague. Went out, wandered around for a bit. Stopped at McDonald's for lunch. Everyone grabbed a Royale with Cheese while incessantly quoting that scene from Pulp Fiction.
• Had a much more peaceful ride from Prague to Munich. Got back to town just as Oktoberfest was closing, so we had to contend with an U-bahn full beyond capacity with beligerant drunk people in lederhosen.
• Made it back to Peggy's, unpacked, repacked, groomed, and slept...

9/30/12

• To Innsbruck. Another crowded train ride, so crowded, in fact, that the morning train sold out and we had to get on the afternoon train.
• Chinese food in Munich while waiting for the train.
• I'd say the later train was worth it because it allowed the half of our party in the other compartment to meet our new, very temporary, party member: Danielle
  • Pretty girl, approximately my age, blinks 90 times a minute (and thus, reminds me of the Twilight Rifftrax, another point in her favor)
  • Highly recommends solo travel as a means to figure out what to do with one's future, so, valuable tip for next time across the Atlantic (or anywhere else outside of my normal chunk of Southeast Wisconsin), I guess.
• Wandered Innsbruck as a big group; saw the sight, grabbed cocktails at a rooftop bar.
• Left my camera with my luggage, foolishly.
  • Ergo, lots of kicking myself, as well as the decision to declare Innsbruck a vacation from being a "GAD Tourist"
• And then we headed to the B&B, which was gorgeous, and Art's friend Jen's family were awesome hosts.
• Dinner was pork, sausage, baked potatoes, and half a dozen different salads. I never really liked potato salad until I had it in Europe...
• The beer of choice was Zipfer, and it was easily the most easy-to-drink beer I had the whole trip, dangerously so...
• On the subject of easy to drink, Jen's family brought out homemade hazlenut schnapps and walnut schnapps.
• Three bottles of schnapps and countless Zipfers later, my omnipresent sketchbook was one of the top attractions, and I was more than happy to allow the interested parties to fill in a couple pages.
  • Other people drawing in my sketchbook is kinda awesome. It sorta... I guess... commemorates the people I was with, especially those I was only with briefly. However, it's also kinda sad because it's hard not to feel like there were more drawings by strangers in a couple hours than by the purported artist who's owned this sketchbook for a couple months now.
• Took a late night stagger around the grounds to see how beautiful they are on a cool, crisp night.
  • Anyone who accuses me of passing out outside is a dirty liar. I was awake until the moment I was checked up on and sent inside, looking up at the stars, reflecting on stuff, and just generally not being ready to join four guys in a bunk bed until I absolutely had to.

10/1/12

• The infamous "Breakfast in Austria, Lunch in Italy, Dinner in Germany" day.
• Woke up to breakfast at the B&B: Coffee, rolls, deli meats and cheese, orange juice, mango juice, cake...
• Hour drive to Italy, very hungover, missed the scenery heading in.
• Ate lunch in Brixen, Italy, so close to the Austrian border we had to order our ravioli and lasagna in German.
  • Ravioli unlike any I've ever eaten, the noodles were so thin, they were practically crepes.
• Wandered Brixen for a bit, checked out the churches and the miscellaneous sights. After a brief foray into the concept of keeping the break from being a "GAD tourist" going, I realized I couldn't help it and threw myself at every wall, cobblestone path, fountain, and pile of garbage I saw.
• Capped the trip off with the best gelato I've ever had.
• Sent our new friend on her way to Venice while we headed back to catch a train in Innsbruck.
• For some reason, in spite of practically having a whole car to ourselves, we decided to cram into one compartment and spend the whole ride back to Munich plugged into our assorted iPods, lip-synching and air-drumming to whatever we happened to be listening to (a whole lot of CAKE, in my case...)
• Dinner at Schneiter-Weisse. Great beer (Tap5: Meine Hopfenweisse, a thick, hoppy, bock), great pretzel soup, mediocre sauerbraten, and terrible news.
• It was at dinner that I learned I would be flying back on the second, not the third as I had thought.
• So, after dinner, the whole group headed out for cocktails at a quiet Mexican bar to send off myself and the others who would be heading out the next day.

10/2/12

• Got up early, crammed everything in my suitcase, got on a bus to the airport, and waited for my plane to land, let me board, and slowly suffocate me in a gigantic pile of humanity.
• All in all, a pretty miserable flight, crammed in the middle of so many people while at the peak of a nasty cold, but I did manage to leave my iPod on during takeoff, so that's a plus...

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Previous entries: Part 1 and Part 2.

European Vacation Part 2

Following my previous Europe post, it's now time to get into the stuff I didn't get around to emailing my parents (i.e. the last week or so of the trip). Without the constrants of "writing an email on my Kindle" (which, is, by the way, a massive pain in the ass. Gmail in the browser, once the message gets long enough to need to scroll, it has a tendency to jump all the way to the top if you ever try to move the cursor and be needlessly difficult to get your cursor back down to the bottom. In the email app, it's just impossible to find drafts or anything other than the Inbox), organizing those thoughts (i.e. converting bullet points to paragraphs) is a tricky thing to care about, so, I'm just gonna sorta transcribe my bullet points, throwing in some context here, turning fragments into sentences there, et cetera.

This post is where I discovered that it's a good thing my Blogger is my writing blog, and my art blog is WordPress. Trying to wrangle pictures into the position I want them in is a real hassle on Blogger. Apologies about the lack of visual aid, though, if its any consolation, most of my pictures were things your average person finds boring, like walls, or tile floors, or the one I really regret not getting: The dirt in Munich that was full of discarded bottle caps. Nothing says "Here's me in Prague," like a nearly-orthographic view of a cobblestone sidewalk...
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9/24/12

• Made it to Oktoberfest for real. Hung out at the Paulaner tent all day and most of the evening.
• Reason #672 that I didn't fit in with the group I was traveling with: They were all about grabbing steins; if I were going to steal anything it would've been the badass soup bowl with the lions on it.
• After a couple liters of beer, I decided I needed to go home, something about not being able to walk straight or stay awake or not feel nauseous. I grabbed one of our spare U-bahn tickets and, after making sure I knew exactly how to get home, left the tent. After a lap around the festival grounds, I staggered back to the tent, so, the good news is, I was safe and sound, and the search team could be called off. The bad news, though, is that it's a lot harder to claim I have a good sense of direction.
• So, to summarize our only real trip to Oktoberfest while I was in Europe:
• 1 almost-lost tourist
• 1 almost-fight
• 1 severe laceration
• 1 expectoration that night (at least one the next morning as well...)
• And, I'm going to take a wild guess and say 9 serious hangovers...
• We headed home in shifts, watched one of the last NFL games to be ruined by scab refs, and packed for our Czech Republic trip.

9/25/12

• Train ride from Munich to Prague, via a very short stop in Pilsen.
• Spent most of the Munich-Pilsen leg sleeping.
• The Czech countryside's kinda funny. It's full of quaint little villages, aside from the ubiquitous solar panels and satellite dishes.
• The ride from Pilsen to Prague was full of beautiful views; occasionally, I had to look out the window for them...
• After a short walking tour of Prague, I quickly came to the conclusion that my statements about how sexy Salzburg was were premature. Prague was easily my favorite city of the trip. It had all (or most) of the traditional beauty and history of Salzburg with the history and architecture and whatnot, but Prague had that extra layer of grunge —graffiti, crumbling façades, scary-looking back alleys— that all those years of environment art training taught me to find so sexy. Nothing quite like a city that shows its age, and Prague shows a lot of it...
• We grabbed dinner at U Vejvodu, goulash and dumplings.
• Then we went bar-hopping.
• First to the Blue Light, this dingy, little, poorly-lit jazz bar in which I spent what probably looked like a suspicious amount of time taking reference photos of its awesome, dingy bathroom.
• Second, to Hany Bany, which drew a lot of inspiration from the '50's and covered itself with Pulp Fiction memorabilia. 

9/26/12

• Our only full day in Prague, we did some of the touristy stuff, specifically Prague Castle & St. Virtus Cathedral. We also walked through the Jewish Quarter, but everything was closed for Yom Kippur, so we couldn't really be touristy there, just creepily shove our cameras through gaps in the fences.
• Unfortunately, my camera was dying during the self-guided tours of St. Virtus & Prague Castle, so I got about half the pictures I wanted (also, it didn't make it into the original email, but after the return trip from Salzburg, my camera leaped out of its holster at the Munich train station, so it was in a bad state even with a full battery). Then it died completely the whole time we were in the Jewish Quarter.
• We grabbed lunch at U Vejvodu's sister restaurant U Vltavy. The food was great, but the service was very, very slow. Here, where our group split up to conquer three of the five outside tables, we noticed that we were a large enough group we could easily take over a small restaurant.
• At our table, there was a plate of Wiener Schnitzel, one of Chicken Souvlaki, Smoked Ham & Bread Dumplings, and, in front of me, a giant pile of honey-glazed ribs. Probably the best meal that I payed for in Europe.
• Accross the street from us (and, all over Prague, especially the Jewish Quarter, it seemed) the buildings were all supported by these excellent reliefs, like Atlas-esque figures holding up balconies or animal-shaped buttresses. It was really cool and made me regret the death of my camera and the atrophy of my drawing skills. Then again, if I'd known the service was going to be as slow as it was, I might have started drawing knowing that I'd probably have filled up six freaking pages, while learning how to cross-hatch to boot, in the time it took them to raise the pig from a piglet, butcher it, and prepare it specially for us or whatever it was that was taking so dang long...
• After that, we headed back to the hotel to charge our cameras and whatnot while waiting for our newest party-member's plane to land. Then we did what any rational group of heavy-drinking tourists would do in a place where the alcohol is so cheap: Got a bunch of cans of beer and serving-size bottles of wine from a nearby convenience store and had a little party in the living room of the couple who popped for the nice suite.
• Once our... eleventh party member showed up, we finished our convenience store libations and went out in search of dinner, but not before picking up one more follower. We tried Hany Bany again, but found them way too crowded for a twelve-person table, so we headed back to U Vejvodu and pushed three or four tables together. By this point, our party contained two native Czechs, who put out the call and got us joined by another two...
• Since it was getting late, and since it was to be our last night in Prague, I went for something I haven't had since before my grandma died: Fruit dumplings (knedliky). I was offended to have had to order them off the dessert menu —seriously, potato dumplings full of fruit and covered in sugar. Who, in their right mind would put that on the dessert menu?— as, for this American of Czech ancestry, that had always been a main course, which I made abundantly clear, and was, thankfully, vindicated by every Czech at the table agreeing with me that it's not just a quirk of Wisconsin Czechs: Czech Czechs apparently eat them as entrees too.
• After everyone needed a break from U Vejvodu (and round after round of Pilsner Urquell, a fine beer, but it can't be all that you drink, especially when you're used to nursing IPAs, not slamming pilsners...), we lost probably half the party to sleep, and the rest of us moved on to find another bar.
• And we found Kozicka, thanks to our Prague-native guide. A cute little bar with a goat theme and a deceptively tiny upper floor. The basement is kinda massive. There's a noisy, cramped area near the bar for people who want to dance or shout their conversations or whatever. Or there's a couple quieter 'wings' where you can grab a table and drink in relative peace (depending on the relative peacefulness of your party...). After a couple more rounds of Krusovice, we called it a night.

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Okay, well, this is getting kinda long. Guess I'll stick Ostrava, Innsbruck, and Brixen in Part 3...

The novel of my dreams... literally

I often lament my lack of a tendency to remember my dreams. It seems like I'm surrounded by people who not only remember their dreams, but who, nine nights out of every ten, seem to have some new, vivid, and utterly insane dream to tell me about, either in private or on my Facebook news feed.

I've explored a lot of outlandish theories trying to make my lack of dream memory into something extraordinary. I wish I had some examples, but I did most of that exploration in my joke of a freshman writing class, nothing of which survived*. However, I now have a new theory: I don't really remember more than so-brief-they're-negligible snippets of dreams because my subconscious has a finite amount of dream memory that it was saving up for the insane, two-layer, matryoshka of a dream I had last night.

So, I was lying in bed this morning and reading. Regardless of time of day, I like reading in bed, but I can't really recall the last time I woke up and read in bed. Probably a long time ago. It was a thick paperback, engaging, but kinda weird. Feeling myself start to doze off, I put my finger down to make sure I didn't lose my place and kept reading. Then, I 'dozed off for a second' —though the evidence seems to suggest I actually woke up for a second— and when I woke up —for more than a second, this time— the book was gone. It wasn't on my pillow, where my finger had been keeping place, wasn't among the clutter on my bedside table. It just plain ol' didn't exist. It took me a few minutes to realize what had happened: I just dreamed up a novel.

It's too bad it didn't actually exist. From what I recall, it was a pretty interesting story, and, while I don't doubt my writing ability (my ability to focus on writing it, perhaps, but not my writing ability), I can't shake the paranoia that much, if not all, of its original charm, is lost in forgotten dreams.

So, here's what I do remember: It was sorta taking cues from that 'writer as an accidental god' genre, like Stranger than Fiction or Ruby Sparks. Zach (somewhat in line with that Batman the Animated Series Episode, I didn't read much in my dream about reading a novel. The only word I distinctly remember seeing in print is Zach's name, which is why I know it's Zach, and not Zak or Zack. I think my finger was on his name when I 'fell asleep') has written a very successful novel, and all his best friends are in it.

But then the honeymoon period is over. After everyone's initial excitement about his briliant debut novel, before too long, no one's talking about Zach or his quirky friends or his best-selling novel. As people stop finish the novel and talking about it, Zach's friends start to fade away, Back To The Future-style. When he realizes the correlation between his writing and his friends' existence, Zach scrambles to bring them back by writing a sequel, but he may have lost too much of them as they faded away...

*Wait, I think one of them was my subconscious being a massive coward after the months of nightmares that  "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float" episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark gave me in kindergarten and deciding that not remembering my dreams was better than remembering nightmares.

European Vacation Part 1: The Email Summaries

In response to a couple emails I sent describing my first half-week of experiences, it was requested —by my parents and Aunt, but a request is a request— that I write more of my experiences in Europe at the end of September/beginning of October. For starters, the two emails that I sent my parents detailing the days when I could reliably go home to the Internet and not be too pass-out drunk to handle a Kindle Fire, slightly edited from their original format to provide additional context/remove irrelevant family bits.

Summary:
Landed on September 19th in Munich. Flew home on October 2nd.
Nailed 6 countries: Germany, Austria (on two separate occasions), Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Italy
Peggy & Phil: My cousin who lives in Munich and her English boyfriend (who let all of us sleep on the floor of their apartment)
Art: My cousin, Peggy's brother, whose birthday we celebrated on this trip. Lives and works in Beaver Creek, CO, and many of our traveling companions were his friends from Colorado.
George: My brother

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To: Mom & Dad
Subject: Munich Days 1 & 2
9/20/2012

Hey. Just thought I'd give you a quick update. Miss you; love Munich so far.

Once we landed in Munich, we met some of the Beaver Creek crew outside the airport, shared a round just outside, and hopped on the bus for Peggy's. After we settled in, we grabbed lunch at Hofbräuhaus. I picked the scweinebraten (a slice of pork with a crispy skin sitting in gravy); Peggy got essentially Mac & Cheese made with spätzle (Käsespätzle), and Art had some of the best sauerbraten I've ever tried. After lunch Peg showed us around Marienplatz, then we picked up sandwich fixings to make dinner at Peggy's while waiting for Phil to get back from Nuremberg.

Today we grabbed döner kebabs from a street vendor while Peg was running an errand. Peg showed us the spot where they had to detonate a WWII bomb in the city (not the one in the potato field; this one was discovered slightly before that one while crews were demolishing an old night club to build something new). Then we took a leisurely walk through the Englischer Garten before making our way to an Irish pub just outside Sendlinger Tor to get drinks and appetizers while waiting for a couple more Beaver Creek-ers who had just landed and checked into their hotel. We stayed there to wait for Phil to meet us as well. Then Art led us to this great Afghan restaurant. It kinda reminded me of the Moroccan restaurant in Porto. We had some great appetizers: little crispy potato wedges and this amazing roast pumpkin. For dinner, I got Mantu, which are these sort of little meat pies made with filo dough and slathered in this spicy red sauce. Art got chicken kabobs with rice that was spiced kinda like pumpkin pie. We were crammed into this great little side room; though we were a party of twelve, and there was probably only room for about seven of us to sit comfortably. After dinner we made our way back to Peggy's just in time to get a text from George letting us know he was boarding and would see us soon. Then we took a couple shots of absinthe and toasted Art since, in Germany at least, his birthday had officially begun.

Also, and it's a good thing I wouldn't actually be able to use it for the next two weeks, but my phone would appear to have jumped out of my bag somewhere between de-planing in Dusseldorf and getting to Peggy's apartment. I've searched through all my bags and the floor around them to no avail, so we may need to hasten the "replace my phone" initiative.
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To: Mom & Dad
Subject: Munich Days 3-5
9/23/2012

On Friday we got up late and had breakfast and lunch at Peggy's. Then Art showed us around Marienplatz while Peg took the girls dirndl-shopping. We grabbed beer and brats at Victualenmart before discovering a place for döner kebabs just up the street. This began the long tradition of me not joining the guys every damn time they needed a döner kebab...

Afterward, we took a long walk to the Augustiner Brauhaus for Art's party. We had about 3 maß each and several rounds of pear schnapps. George finally showed up during the party. He and I both had the Bavarian Sampler platter, and that was my first time learning that bread on the table isn't complementary in Germany. Art got a set of lederhosen for his birthday, which he put on at Augustiner and wore through Oktoberfest yesterday.

Yesterday we went to Hauptbahnhof to get train tickets and döner. Then we went to Oktoberfest. We had a couple maß outside the Löwenbräu tent. Then Peggy took us to a show in which they challenge volunteers to sit on a spinning disc in the middle of a tent. After a couple seconds of letting centrifugal force eliminate people, they start throwing ropes and a big foam ball at the survivors to dislodge them. I volunteered (the first person Peggy brought to Oktoberfest to do more than just watch); I didn't last very long becausesome jerk used his foot to prevent me from sitting down all the way for more surface area. We left early to pick up some groceries before the stores closed for Sunday. We ate homemade piazza and a pot of pasta for dinner.

Today we went to Salzburg. We took a two-hour train ride through gorgeous countryside before arriving at the most beautiful city I've ever seen. We wandered through a little craft fair along the river, headed into a dozy little biergarten for lunch, walked through a crowded street festival and arrived at the funicular to go up to the castle. We spent a long time exploring the castle-turned-museum, then went back down. We ate dinner at a different Augustiner brewery, which had sort of a food court attached. Then we took a liesurely walk back to the train station through the royal gardens. Once back in Munich, Peggy had pizza and the Broncos game waiting for us.

Tomorrow, we return to Oktoberfest, then come home to pack for Prague while watching the Packer game at 2 AM local time and hopping on the earliest train we can muster to Prague via Pilsen.
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After these two points, we began traveling more, and, though I was still taking notes on everything that happened, I wasn't emailing at all, and was, in fact, barely on the Internet at all.

Continued in Part 2 and Part 3.

More Misc.

I've been getting back into 3D pretty seriously lately, and thus, my writing has been rather scattershot as of late. As such, here's another wander through my notebook, little bits of things that I's started scribbling down.

 As I've struggled with figuring out what I want to do with my post-college life and repeatedly gotten frustrated by my situation. My monitor is surrounded by Post-It Notes with motivational quotes, such as the Litany Against Fear, and somewhere in there, one of my favorite sentences in all of fiction, from Terry Pratchett's short story "Troll Bridge": "'Yeah,' Cohen wheezed a stream of smoke at the sunset." I've often joked to myself that, if nothing else, by the time I finally get out of this detestable situation, I'll at least have the makings of a great motivational book. One night, I decided to scribble down one of the revelations that would go into this hypothetical book.
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It's a bit of a paradox that "hard work" often sounds like one of the easiest things in the world. It's a key component of so many platitudes. "All you have to do is work hard..." "It's simple, really; just work hard every day, and..." You see what happened there? Juxtaposing hard work and simplicity sends the wrong message, at least to me.

Now, I can understand playing up the rewards of hard work and downplaying the pain and suffering that goes into whatever you want to accomplish. Makes perfect sense to me.

What gets me, what it pisses me off to no end that I took almost 25 years of my life to figure out, what, I think, a lot of people take just as long or longer to figure out, is that hard work isn't just something you decide to do one day. It's a decision you make a million times a day. You don't just go into work mode, or, if you do, I'm insanely jealous of you, because in my experience, it's a constant battle. You have to just sit at your desk, or lie on that little rolling bed under your car on its jackstands or stand at your easel or whatever it is you do, and convince yourself over and over again that what you're working on is more important than whatever the lazy part of your brain would rather be doing. Hard work and determination are constant, bitter struggles against a chunk of your psyche that wants nothing more than simple pleasure —a more comfortable chair, a quick stretch, another cup of coffee, a short Minecraft break— and it's clever enough and amoral enough that it will do anything to get that pleasure. The toughest part, though, is that you've only got a few strategies available in this fight. Sure, you can barter, or bargain, but I find that making any deal with yourself is just a gateway for the lazy lobe to wring further concessions out of you. In my experience —a term I hesitate to use considering how little of it I have— you have to be firm. Don't surrender; give no ground. Grit your teeth and work until you can't anymore.

There's a flip side to this, though, a silver lining. Surrender is just as much a decision as hard work. You can, at any moment, make the right choice instead. Even if you gave in and took a longer coffee break than you should have or, against your better judgement, decided to check Facebook again, you never have to let the slip-up define you. You're only a hard worker if you're working hard at any given moment, but you're also only a failure if you're failing at any given moment. You can always turn it around!

Notes from Michael Poore and Lev Grossman Book Reading

August 7, 2012 Michael Poore (author of Up Jumps the Devil) and Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians and The Magician King and Time Magazine's book critic) split a book-reading at Boswell Books in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What follows are my notes, or more accurately, paraphrased quotes that sounded more brilliant before I managed to get my pen to cooperate and write down whatever I could still remember of them...

• "Every once in a while, a piece of literature speaks to you so strongly you just have to answer it." —Michael Poore
• Lev Grossman talked a bit about his childhood experiences with the Narnia novels that heavily inspired the Magicians series:
• He talked about 'Becoming lost in another world... a world made of words, but more real than this one."
• He called reading The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe at a very young age 'the most important reading experience of his life'
• And then he brought up that part of the core idea that spawned The Magicians was wondering if it were possible to write a children's story, but for adults and containing all those things that adults like, like sex and alcohol and drugs.
• Lev mentioned that a third Magicians novel, tentatively titled The Magicians' Land is on the way, and he read a first draft of a chapter from a new point of view character, Eliot. He also mentioned that the first two books in the series were exactly two years apart, so we can probably expect the third on about August 8, 2013. Weird...
•  Lev's early drafts are apparently much more littered with profanity than his already rather curse-laden final drafts, a characteristic for which he apologized profusely.
• Lev had a rather interesting explanation when someone asked him about the goal of the magic schools in his world and why none of the magicians ever use their power to cure cancer or anything else altruistic.
• 'The magicians who are altruistic, their stories tend to end fairly quickly. The interesting ones, we tend to focus on the losers, the morally crippled.'
• During Q&A I asked, prompted by Michael mentioning a movie that had served as inspiration for Up Jumps the Devil, about how the pros handle reference, citing the example of watching a bunch of westerns* before I wrote the first draft of "The Preacher and the Parasite", specifically regarding my paranoia that I'm going to blatantly rip something off. The answer essentially boiled down to something along the lines of 'Don't worry about it; absorb everything. Draw inspiration from unexpected sources (Lev drew a lot of inspiration in The Magicians series from the way the Bourne movies handled action),' and I mentally added 'you've got plenty of revisions to make the theft less blatant.'
• I don't remember the context for this quote, but it seemed like a good one from Michael: "I think that's one of the reasons we do write: To figure out what the heck we meant to write about."
• It was also interesting hearing Lev talk about, apparently he's a big story outliner, but there's a few characters that just refuse to be coralled by an outline. He cited Penny as an example of a character you just can't kill. Not for lack of trying, the poor guy, but he won't die; he's "like Rasputin." The character of Julia is also a major wild card for him. Apparently she was supposed to only be in the very beginning of The Magicians, but she's "a rogue agent of some agency in my brain that I don't have good communication with," and she just kept worming her way into greater and greater significance in the story.
• A neat little paraphrased quote from Lev when someone asked if his role as Time's book critic ever played a part in his writing. I wish I had managed to record a bit more of the context for this one; it could use some elaboration, kinda cryptic right now: 'in order to get anything written, you have to convince yourself of this bizarre delusion that this will actually be read by other people.'

*A better example, had I thought of it, might have been my staunch refusal to rewatch Firefly while writing "Waterbug" out of this same fear...

MIscellaneous

We've been in the midst of a horrific heat wave that seems (*knock on wood*) to have finally broken today. During the heat wave, I was all over the place, both physically and mentally. My house is an impossible building to occupy once the heat and humidity get oppressive, so I escaped to libraries, museums, my granparents' cottage up north, and my friend's air conditioned house as frequently as possible the past week. I was also all over the place mentally. Focusing on anything in that weather is just impossible, but heat-induced delirium can occasionally lead to interesting ideas that may grow into bigger things now that it's cool enough to focus on stuff. In no particular order:

• Childhood friends/brothers who had adventures in a fantasy world return to that world as adults and discover that the world has become corrupted and overgown. Their fantasy world is for all intents and purposes conquered, and those forces threaten to spill over into ours.
• I envisioned this world as being united by a magical forest, mainly because I spend so much time wandering around a nearby forest looking for ideas, but also because I could envision lots of cool ways for the forest to 'conquer' the civilized parts of the world. There's also some nifty potential for the transition between our world and the otherworld to not be distinct, like the kids were just wandering through the woods and wound up in the other world without it being immediately clear where one began and the other ended.

• How come hyper-intelligent, super-advanced civilizations are only ever portrayed as really serious about everything with only one or two exceptions (e.g. Q, the Doctor and the Master). It seems like there would be some trolls (in the internet sense of the word) along the way. Perhaps a little more primitive than the examples above. I mean, if most humans were omnipotent and could run around time and space, I bet they'd fuck around with most of the 'primitive' life they might run across. Maybe it's just a transitional phase or whatever. I'm also thinking about the old mythological gods (through the lens of Clarke's Third Law). They were always sticking their fingers in things (and, in a more literal sense, other appendages...). I want to see more nigh-omnipotent trolls in Sci-Fi and fantasy.
• "Hey! Check it out! The 'intelligent life' on this planet hasn't even calculated the last digit of π yet, and he's one of the 'smart ones'."

• What went wrong with One More Day (the Spiderman arc in which they rewrote history so that he was never married to Mary Jane, never revealed his identity during the Civil War, and Aunt May never took a bullet for him), at a thematic level, was that it took away the notion that being a superhero has consequences, and that you're not the only one that your behavior puts at risk. Could be interesting to play around with heroes who have to live with the consequences of their actions, as well as those who can't handle that responsibility and thus refuse the call.

• Beginning the physical act of drawing, writing etc. reveals details that you can't know until you attempt the actual creation.
• This one occurred to me while at my grandparents' cabin, and I grabbed a stick and started drawing the fire in the dirt.
• I keep coming back to this as an interesting seed for a magic system in a fantasy story, tying magic to artistic expression and figuring out what you learn from different types of creation and how that might affect the magic cast.
• For example, drawing, sculpting anything directly representational requires you to notice and understand and (as a magic spell) alter the physical characteristics of things. Magic based on music or poetry, alternatively, could be something more along the lines of large-scale emotional manipulation.

• "Poetry by Coersion", "Surprised by Lasers"
• Phrases I felt the need to write down in that "Would be a good band name" kinda sense...

• I'm also thinking in the near future (once I stop feeling guilty about how the heat forced me away from 3D work, and/or finish my various personal 3D projects) I'll be taking another stab at a revision of my first posted story The Preacher and the Parasite. I got some partial drafts of a prequel of sorts, describing how the Preacher wound up attached to the Parasite, but I kept hitting various walls, and I've come to the conclusion that part of why so many prequels fall flat is that they're forced to shoehorn in drama that didn't previously exist or being forced to compress a bunch of potentially interesting plot points into a much smaller period of time. I don't think the prequel attempts are a complete waste, however, as they'll work rather well into the various flashback dreams that the Preacher has during the course of the original story.

Waterbug Early Handwritten Drafts

Art school —especially art school with a focus on finding jobs in the entertainment industry— taught me that showing process is extremely important. I don't know if this policy carries over as much to the writing side of things. I doubt you'll sell anywhere near as many of The Chicken-Scratch, Handwritten Rough Drafts of Star Wars as you will The Art of Star Wars. Aborted rough drafts sure aren't as pretty as concept art, but, should anyone want to see my writing process, I'm going to try and document it for the things I post that wind up going through a bunch of revisions.

In the second draft, I was fairly certain that the bedroom scene didn't have any information or great character moments that couldn't be handled later, but I was very interested in including the hallway scene for its world-building details (the signs, Crabby's tubes, zero-G locomotion). I also tried to work a bit more characterization into Robins' political rival and that proved to be a dead-end.

For the third draft, I experimented with writing the scene out in prose, figuring that it would allow me to sprinkle description throughout the scene rather than the huge chunks of scene-setting description that I needed in script form. I also took a stab at present-tense narration inspired by Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

The fourth draft was my attempt at Kurt Vonnegut's fifth rule of short-story writing: "Start as close to the end as possible."

I went back to a script for the fifth draft. I was bouncing back and forth between this draft and the most recent draft on my computer (another good reason for referring to it as "Draft 6-ish"...). When I'd get stuck while typing, I'd switch to handwriting, and that seemed to fairly consistently jostle something so that I could keep pushing forward.

Waterbug (Draft Six-ish)

Most recent draft of Waterbug. (Draft Six-ish because of the four hand-written partial drafts  between the first draft and this one, which I hope to scan and post in the morning)

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Dramatis Personae:

Councilman Robins: Late 30's, prematurely graying. Due to the nature of the politics in Titan City, Robins is a paranoid individual, quick to avoid blame. He angers easily.

Erika Stellane: 13, captain of the Cargo Hauler Waterbug. Feisty, seemingly never serious, manipulative, but in a mostly harmless way. A lack of human contact has left her a bit of an oddball.

Crabby: About 5 Jovian years (late 50's, early 60's, by the Terran Calendar), a Europan, like a large, sapient crab or lobster. Due to his species' inability to handle human language, he mostly stays quiet, but he is fiercely protective of Erika.

Cargo Hauler Waterbug: 27, a Scarab-class light freighter. Scarabs are budget starships that were widely considered flying deathtraps even when new. To accommodate its Europan crew member, large, clear water pipes run throughout the ship with airlocks in the engine room, cockpit, and cargo bay.

INT: Waterbug Engine Room

Councilman Robins climbs down a ladder into the center of the Engine Room. He holds on at the bottom of the ladder to keep himself from floating away in the microgravity. Crabby is clinging to the wall near his airlock, holding a toolbox in one of his seven limbs. The room is dark, except for flashing red warning lights. Alarms are blaring, and the whole ship is shaking. Miscellaneous tools and spare parts float through the room.

Robins: Uhh... Captain? Captain, you down here? (He turns to Crabby) You! Have you seen the captain. Where is that little—

Erika emerges from a hatch in a machine in the aft portion of the engine room and whistles loudly. She is wearing a headlamp which shines a bright white light on Crabby and Robins. Robins turns to face her, shielding his eyes from the bright light with his free hand.

Erika puts seven fingers in front of her mouth, in imitation of Crabby's mouthparts, and flashes a quick series of gestures to him. He opens his toolbox and gently lobs a wrench to her.

Robins pushes off the ladder towards her. She ducks back into the machine and resumes her repairs.

Robins: Captain! Are you sure I can't help—

The ship shudders violently.

            Robins: —help us not die?

Erika pokes her head back out of the machine.

            Erika: Thought I told you to go back to sleep...

She pulls herself back into the machine.

            Robins: (grumbling) I've never been able to sleep through flashing lights and alarms...

Erika: (muttering) A miracle you can sleep at all in Titan City then...

Robins: What was that?

Erika: (shouting) Nothing!

Robins: Look, the ship's clearly falling apart! There's got to be something I can do to make sure—

The ship shudders violently again.

Robins: —I don't have to take an escape pod the rest of the way to Ganymede!

Erika: (muttered) First we'd need escape pods. (She pushes herself out again) 'Sides, everything you're hearing is normal.

Robins: This is normal?

Erika: Yeah... 'cept the alarms... and the warning lights. They're here to tell us that this old air scrubber (she taps the machine with her wrench) may not make the trip, and one person in this little crawlspace is more than enough, so, no, you can't help.

Robins: And if it doesn't make it?

Erika: We inhale all the oxygen in the ship and exhale CO₂ until there's no more oxygen. Then, well, you know... Oh, don't look at me like that. You're some bigshot politician now. You could've flown in style, but you chose the freighter that's almost twice as old as its captain. Was it because you missed me?

Robins: “Missed you?” Letting you get emancipated cost me my legal career!

Erika pulls herself back into the machine.

Erika: (Under her breath) Hiring cheap lawyers. Further evidence my parents provided an unstable environment, your honor...

Robins: I wasn't cheap—

Erika: (under her breath) Probably shoulda been...

Robins: Look, that was a technicality, and you know it! You're only free because of a loophole in Titanic law! One that I intend to close once this election is over—

Erika climbs out of the machine again. She points her wrench at him accusingly.

Erika: And you chartered Waterbug so after the big secret trip to Ganymede you can drag me kicking and screaming back to my parents. Is that it? A big happy photo-op: Prodigal daughter, her parents, tears of joy, and you, with a big, happy smile, all sitting right under an optimistic headline where you promise this is “just the start” and you'll be “personally addressing every colossal 'double-you tee eff' that's ever been perpetrated by the government of Titan City”!

Erika pulls herself back into the machine. This time there are no sounds of her working.

Robins: You? You seriously think I chartered this flying deathtrap for your sake? I know, as a teenager, this is a tough concept for you, but you're not the center of the universe. There's no elaborate scheme in my desk on Titan laying out in exquisite detail how I can return to a four-year-old status quo. I picked your ship because I made a judgment call at the docks. That crustacean over there who can't speak any human language gave me the idea that this would be the ship that would ask the fewest questions. An assumption I was sorely mistaken about, I might add.

Erika climbs out of the machine again.

Erika: You're worried about questions? Just wait'll the bodies of a politician in his bathrobe and a thirteen-year-old girl drift into Ganymede's orbit. What d'ya think Missus Robins will tell the press? Is there a Missus Robins? Will she be sobbing about how she had “no idea” or will she just smugly tell the reporters “Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't suffocate on starship with a waaaaaaaaaaaaaay underage prostitute sooner. He had tons of chances. Can I have my e-book deal now?”

Robins: Leave my wife out of your scenarios you deluded little brat!

Robins leaps toward Erika, arms extended, ready to throttle her. She ducks back into the crawlspace and pulls the access panel shut behind her. Robins pounds on it frantically.

Robins: Maybe I oughtta just leave you in there! You've gotta have EV gear, an air tank, somewhere. When I get to Ganymede, it'll be easy enough to add your name to the hit! Those gangsters'll probably give you to me nice and cheap compared with that jackass I'm running against! Just—

The access panel flies open, sending Robins floating through the engine room. Erika emerges holding a small recording device.

Erika: Had a hunch you were flying cheap to do something shady.

She ducks back into the air scrubber. A moment later, the warning lights and alarms stop. She re-emerges.

Erika: If it's any consolation, next time you fly Waterbug, we'll have all the comforts of home: Working air scrubbers, gravity, lights, food that wasn't vaccuum-packed before I was born, all thanks to the generous sums you're going to pay me not to send this confession to the Titan City Times.

Robins smacks into a wall. Still seething with rage, he prepares to launch himself at Erika again.

Erika: And, of course, Crabby's always happy to make sure suffocation remains an option for you, so keep that in mind before you ever threaten me on my ship again.

Fantasy World-Building Outline

I think world-building is probably my favorite way to be creative. To heck with things like "plot" and "character". There's interesting worlds out there to imagine. What happens if I change... this?

This world's been kicking around my head for a while now, and I didn't really know what to do with it, so when Gamasutra's Story Design Challenge #4 came along as a straight-up world-building challenge, I suddenly knew exactly what to do with the world I didn't know what to do with. Still no ideas for an actual story in this world, but it's been fun nonetheless.

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The World

• This is a world in which magic is a powerful, pervasive energy source. The world is steeped in magic, and all but the lowest castes of society have some faculty with magic.
• However, prolonged use of magic causes mutations related to the spells cast. For example, casting fire-related spells all the time would eventually lead to your hands always being on fire.
• Because of this trait of magic, the most powerful sorcerers cease to be even remotely human and become magical creatures, analogous to dragons or elementals. Similar fates await those who live in prolonged service to powerful sorcerers.
• Magic applies to nature in a similar manner. Evolution has favored magical animals. Solitary animals often have one or two magical tricks to aid hunting or protect them from predation. Social creatures often have their own “sorcerers”, the alphas of the packs that can cast 'spells' on the rest of the pack.
• Magic is a 'sticky' energy source. In places where it was used a lot (e.g. big magical battles or sorcerers surrendering the last of their humanity), there tends to be a residual magical energy, making those places into Places of Power, in which there is simply more magic to draw from, making it easier to cast bigger spells there, until the residual magic gets used up.

Society

• Magic use is common, and a powerful command of it is necessary for any sort of leadership role. Attempting to rule a city-state or lead an army without being a powerful magician is a good way to quickly get deposed by someone more powerful.
• The fact that powerful magic is a necessity to rule and that powerful magic tends to remove a person from human cares like power means that attempts to build empires usually fall apart when their leadership transcends humanity. Thus, city-states and small principalities are usually the largest political units.
• There is little standardization. Non-magical science, social progress and education advance with glacial slowness.
• Each city-state has its own religion, centered around their lead sorcerer as either a god or high priest to a previous leader who is no longer human (and thus, divine).
• The technological stagnation does not, however, prevent monumental architecture. As long as even small city-states are ruled by sorcerers with god complexes, elaborate palaces, fortresses, and wonders are common sights, even in relatively small city-states.
• Division of magic ability has led to a rigid caste system. Though distributions of the castes and mobility from caste-to-caste vary from city to city, the basic hierarchy looks something like this:

• At the top are Sorcerers. These are the aristocracy of the world. They have the raw magical potential and the resources required to learn a wide variety of spells. These are the type most likely to eventually become magic creatures.
• The next level down are Casters. They are less powerful than sorcerers and are unlikely to master more than a handful of spells. They often serve as officers in Sorcerers' armies or bureaucrats.
• Glamours are the artisans. They have one spell they are able to use, or a narrow family of spells. Because this one spell tends to be their livelihood, Glamours tend to become permanently enchanted. For example, many professional thieves and assassins are Glamours, and it is not uncommon to run into a thief who is stuck completely invisible.
• Receivers are the peasants. They are unable to cast magic of their own, but they are highly susceptible to it. This makes them useful as grunt infantry when city-states go to war, as the officers can easily enchant whole platoons.

Sample City-States

• The Tower: Named for the magic academy at its center, the Tower is a very populous city. It is a hub of trade, with merchants bringing magical artifacts from all over the world across the relatively safe lands around the Tower and selling these artifacts for high prices to the scholars of the city-state. Due to the academic nature of the Tower, the city-state's High Sorcerers tend to transcend humanity very quickly, leading to a perpetually unstable political landscape.
• At the heart of the Blacktree Forest sits The Clearing, ruled by the powerful Sorceress known as “The Mother of Trees” or “The Dryad”. She views her subjects with a highly protective, maternal hand, and has been steadily enchanting the surrounding forests to serve as an impenetrable wall full of murderous plants and deadly predators, keeping out invaders from the outside world, but also trade. The forest is ever-so-slowly expanding towards a neighboring city-state. The magic to keep the forest under such tight control is slowly turning the Mother of Trees wooden, like an Ent or Dryad.
• The Giant's Spine is built on the back of a humongous, human-shaped peninsula. Some say an ancient band of sorcerers bound a giant with spells that turned him to stone to found the city; others say a bookish geomancer coerced the earth into this shape so he could say he built the city upon a giant he slew. The Sorcerer Kings of the Giant's Spine have traditionally been savage warriors who used their magic to enhance their abilities to fight up close and personal rather than avoid it. The Arena is central to life on the Spine, and no day of bloodshed is complete without a display of the High Sorcerer's ferocity. When he finishes his slaughter, the whole mountain quakes, as though the king's magic causes the giant himself pain.

Gameplay Idea:

• I picture a game in this world casting the player as an up-and-coming sorcerer attempting to make his or her mark on the world. Perhaps they will attempt to take over one of the city-states. Perhaps they will try to build an empire, or rush to become a powerful magical creature and simply do whatever they want without caring about humanity at all anymore.