Adulthood
Before I start, see if you can tell what’s wrong with this picture (of items that I gathered without thinking only moments ago):
Waking up, and moving on. . .
CJ and I plan to have kids one day. We’re in the perfect phase of parenthood – when your kids don’t exist, and are therefore perfect in every way (except that we’re pretty much assuming, based on strong tendencies in our genes, they’ll have ADD, some kind of mental disorder, and a lack of coordination bordering on the comical).
I see our “job” to be teaching our kids how to be good and functional adults. Last night, to clarify my thinking, I wrote a list of what skills or mind-sets ideal adulthood includes:
Awareness of how to maintain physical health, and prepare healthy meals.
Knowing how to run a household.
Being responsible with finances.
Able to hold down a job/s and/or contribute to society.
Human relationships (including holding a conversation, making new friends, accepting/adjusting to different people, and knowing manners and how to treat people with respect – and how to end friendships if necessary).
Romance – how to choose a good life partner and how to stick with them – and parenthood.
A sense of self-worth and contentment and psychological health (including management of illness).
God/spiritual health.
Some of these things, especially at the beginning, are quite easy to teach. Others are taught by example (particularly romance, I think). I think the last item may not be teachable at all.
What do you think?
T#256: Text to movie
I used the site http://www.xtranormal.com/ to make a movie. Click through to http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8228129/ to watch it.
In other news, I’ve now made the donation to Heifer International. I rounded up the number of comments (at $1 per comment) to $300 and donated that.
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#255: Play Date
Today I introduced my 2-month old niece (she of the dark hair) to my friend’s 3-month old girl. They cast many suspicious looks at one another, and my friend’s baby kicked my niece in the head.
Kids can be so cruel*.
Tomorrow: I’ve written a rom-zom-com (romantic comedy with zombies. . . well, one zombie) which I’ll hopefully be able to post tomorrow as a genuine internet movie thanks to “text to movie” online.
*To be fair, she WAS giving her sass.
#102: Write a twitter tale
Clearly, this is something I do rather often. Still awesome, though.
If you’d like to do so yourself, here’s what I’ve learned (mainly by doing the opposite):
1. Readers need to clearly understand what’s happening – no matter how tiny the “chapters”.
2. Readers need to be emotionally involved (no matter how tiny the “chapters”).
3. Don’t have more than about three updates per day – it’s annoying.
4. If you use an account for stories, you probably can’t use it for anything else (too much explaining, too little space).
5. Be extremely careful what you say – even in the context of the story. Tweets can easily be misinterpreted, and they can’t be erased.
6. Twitter doesn’t have paragraphs, so dialogue needs very clear labels.
7. Use short names. Every letter counts. (First person narrative also saves space.)
8. Humour and action work better than anything else. Twitter’s one advantage is that you can tell a story in real time.
9. Use your own name wherever possible (including urls).
10. Don’t have an underscore at the end of your twitter name – computers can’t handle it.
11. Link your twitter account to a website for readers who want to know more. On mine I post the story so far each Friday, and the full story (in chronological order, with paragraphs) when it’s complete.
#11 is interesting because I’ve discovered that very few people actually read the entire tale – they enjoy the occasional dip into it, and that’s all. Which is great, because my aim is to be known as a writer, and that’s working. Plus it makes life slightly more absurd knowing that a few hundred people will be thinking, “Oh no! The pirates are attacking and I can’t remember why” or, “That was sweet how he got together with whatserface.”
I spent every spare moment in December editing a novel for the Terry Pratchett contest, which meant I was desperately scrabbling to write this month’s tale (Zeppelin Jack and the Black Diamond) from day to day. Today, I finally got ahead of the game.
Twitter tales are HARD to write. It’s not a good form for world-building, characterisation, or plot twists. But it IS good for a bit of fun (especially fanfic, oddly), and a surprisingly wide audience. I’ve been writing them constantly since August 2009, and it’s not easy to sustain the odd cast of mind required to squeeze a tale into such small spaces.
I post them on facebook too, at “Louise Curtis Books”.
It’s slightly disturbing that, with around 2500 followers in various places, my twittertales have more readers than anything else I’ve done. They’ve also garnered several radio and newspaper interviews, so I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll fulfil their ultimate purpose (which is to make me familiar to readers, so they buy my books).
If you’re interested in writing a guest twittertale, I’ll almost certainly say yes to anything G/PG in the specfic and/or humour genres. Leave a comment or email me at fellissimo at hotmail dot com.
Here’s the $2400 ring that inspired this particular story (I’m going to sell it at half price, if any of you are interested in that kind of thing – same email address as above).
S#4: Share the cookie wuv
This was one of those times when I used my skills of interpretation. The task of today’s awesomeness (from steffmetal.com) was to take a batch of cookies to the “local metal bar”.
I interpreted “local metal bar” as “parents house”. it might sound like a leap, but check out this individual:
She’s
-underage
-has a skull tattoo
-has crazy hair
-has crazy eyes
-is topless
-began cross-dressing* immediately after this photo was taken.
-flails a LOT
I was going to cook meringues but Mum** wanted me to cook cake instead. So I did.
I know, I know – it looks like I just vomited onto a plate. I promise it was actually chocolate cake, and rather good too.
*ie, she wore a blue onesie.
**er. . . the band?
2010 blog stats
Crunchy numbers
About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 378 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 547 posts. There were 931 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 217mb. That’s about 3 pictures per day.
The busiest day of the year was July 6th with 317 views. The most popular post that day was Cloud Wars: What is steampunk?.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, yesandyes.org, twitter.com, blogger.com, and Google Reader.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for steampunk, fantasy landscape, steam punk, steampunk building, and steampunk landscape.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Cloud Wars: What is steampunk? February 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,
Advice for Beginning Novelists September 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,
Three Things You Need to Begin a Novel October 2010
2 comments
#124: Frolic in a Fountain April 2010
7 comments
Dr Yes: Spy Suits for Women March 2010
It’s interesting what a hook steampunk stuff is – I’m glad Zeppelin Jack is back. I’m also pleased that two of my writing articles made the top five – there’ll be plenty more next year.
Not a bad result overall, especially considering the Daily Awesomeness only started nine months ago.
#254: Visit a pet shop
It’s like a free zoo and aquarium, but cuter.
If I had any artistic skill whatsoever, I’d love to be the person who paints the hermit crabs. Wouldn’t you?
This is definitely recommended for playing along at home.
#252: Tattoo War
Ever woken up on New Year’s day with a champagne headache and half a dozen pirate tattoos?
I know I have.
It started off so civilised. I put a pretty thing on my sister’s ankle.
I put another on the arm of She Who Must Not Be Named*.
CJ “volunteered” for a pirate flag.
And then I picked what I wanted, and CJ and I had a long conversation about Are You Sure, No Really I’m Being Serious About This, You Want To Do This? and, You Do Remember That We’ll Be Going To Church For Your Niece’s Dedication, Right? and, Okay Just Remember That I Asked.
My sister graciously helped me with it, which meant the cloth we used was extremely wet. It was rather a lot like standing under a waterfall, with my head held in a vice.
Worth it!
Also, I discovered I could make it dance.
At that point we still had heaps of tattoos, so I did the only logical thing: I slapped a treasure map on my sister’s leg.
She retaliated by putting the remainder of that sheet on my chest.
I struck back with a pirate ship on her neck (making sure plenty of cold water dripped down her shirt).
She gave me upside down skull drool.
And then, finally, the battle was over and it was time for dinner.
It was the slowest, wettest war ever.
As promised, here is my real tattoo which I had done on my belly to mark the year I gave up my dream of moving to Indonesia permanently (where tattoos are more difficult for Upstanding Folk to deal with).
It’s quite high up on my belly, in hopes that future pregnancy won’t utterly mangle it. If I remember (in however many years’ time), I’ll post another photo of it after I’ve had a kid or two.
It didn’t hurt all that much – the difficult part was lying on my back and thinking more and more about how the whole reason I was there was so the nice man could cut into my flesh. And then when I was finished, they put some cling wrap over it to catch the blood that kept running for the next hour or so.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but cling wrap doesn’t actually cling to skin.
But it’s all fine now, and fun whenever I wear a bikini top.
Today is 1/1/11, which is cool. It also means less than three months remain of my Daily Awesomeness experiment (not that I expect to stop being awesome anytime soon). Here’s the few remaining items from my SteffMetal.com list:
10: Trim (aka clothing attack)
8: Glow in the dark stars on a friend’s ceiling
19: Bells around my ankles
32: Seven days without TV or internet (two down. . .)
94: Pay off debt
89: Dinner and a movie. . . by myself
93: Collect something interesting
86: Starry night at an observatory
79: Karaoke (uh oh)
80: Sparklers
99: Mmm. . . sprinkles
28: To the theatre
12: Healing Stones
2: Sushi
95: Paddle pool
39: Learn Braille
4: Share the cookie wuv
73: Get away from it all (ie, go on holiday with CJ)
77: Go to a deserted beach (ditto 🙂 )
76: Up in the air (hot air balloon ride!)
And naturally, there are plenty of the infamous Ben suggestions coming up.
As always, feel free to make your own suggestions and I will almost certainly do them (especially if they’re free).
*That is, my mum. She’s a priest at a nursing home, so she was Concerned About Her Reputation and asked me to be sure to cut off her head. Which I did.
Felicity Banks 