Whoa.. I knew that Necromancer had melee-ish capability when you equip daggers, but I didn’t realize until last night just how much raw damage it puts out. I’ve been using a Staff or Axe/Dagger combo, but last night I decided to try out Dagger/Dagger again, and holy crap I was suddenly killing stuff super fast. I’m still not really happy with the Necro’s AoE capabilities. I haven’t found any decent AoE damage spells (compared to the Elementalist at least); it’s mainly AoE debuffs, which are not terribly useful in PvE events.

I’m trying an experiment. You may have already noticed it. I’m going to post the text of my novel draft “Airworld” as I write it (more-or-less). Some days I might post thousands of words, and some days I might post a couple of sentences or nothing. (Lately it has been more of the latter.) I’m also trying an email subscription plugin. The idea is that you subscribe and new posts are sent to your inbox, so you have a serialized story delivered right to your doorstep without the hassle of using a bookmark link.

Liveblogging Dr. Who stream on BBC thanks to a proxy … 00:35 - Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on without rewinding a bit. 01:40 - Oh, the dog barking outside was actually on the stream … 02:30 - Wow, he doesn’t even ask anymore. 02:50 - That was a super-fast setup. 06:00 - Wait, is that a two-headed dinosaur? Oh, it’s just a pair of them hanging out together.

I really don’t remember how the last season ended, and I haven’t yet seen the Christmas episode. (Thank’s for nothing, Netflix.) 00:00 - Who’s Hannah? Oh. 02:30 - WTF! They’re all grown up! And broken! 04:15 - Why doesn’t Matt Smith look human? His face is all … weird … 05:20 - And why is he slurring his words? I mean, more than usual for British television. 06:00 - The intro looks different somehow.

A Cavern of Black Ice by J.V. Jones was a hard read for me, but I made it all the way to the end. I should warn you that there is no resolution whatsoever; it’s one of those series books that simply stops, rather than providing a self-contained story. According to the Internets, there are four more books planned, but only two have been released. It’s a low fantasy in the vein of Conan, meaning the world is dark and horrifying and Celtic and Norse and mountainous and snowy and the most advanced technology is the bow, fire, and horses.

00:00 - Took forever to get the stream running tonight. 01:48 - Dr. Who in the Old West is just weird. 04:45 - His face still looks weird. 08:13 - I guess this is a nod to steampunk. Well, more like a jumping up and down pointing frantically to steampunk. 09:38 - I wonder if this actor is American or if he’s a British dude with a great accent. 10:33 - So far Rory and Amy are props in this episode.

Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.

Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV).

Starting Episode 4 stream as soon as I find a working proxy… Ah, it’s working now. Starting the stream in a second… wait, maybe it’s not working after all… Ah, I see. Had to add bbci.co.uk to the auto-proxy-switch list. And here we go. For the record, I am eating heated up leftover vegetables from a can while I watch. 1:09 - “The year of the slow invasion.” Woo, cool concept.

Yesterday I decided that I was being stupid and paranoid for embedding secret adjectives in my text, so I stopped. Today, I see in a Google Alert that someone jacked that exact same post!! On one hand, it’s really annoying and disappointing to see that my Internet fears were completely justified. On the other hand, it’s like, Yes! People are stealing from me! Hello, free exposure! Anyway if you find me on Google, make sure you’re actually clicking on a link from everettrenshaw.

Getting spaghetti made and getting setup to watch Episode 5, “The Angels Take Manhattan.” I’m not sure I really want to watch this one. It’s the “half-season finale” (whoever came up with such a ridiculous concept?) and … it’s the last episode with Amy and Rory. It says, “The Doctor’s heart-breaking farewell to Amy and Rory” on the site. This does not bode well. Okay, food ready, now playing! 2:25 - Neat imagery…

Back on the subject of Doctor Who for a moment. Tor.com posts “reviews” of each episode, which I find interesting to compare to my own reactions. In their review of The Angels Take Manhattan, the author had a lot to say about the “inaccuracies” in the episode regarding the Angels and how they affected their immersion. Sure, it makes no sense if you think about it. But I didn’t really notice.

Sorry, I forgot to update my credit card info so the page was down for a bit. :)

Looking at my schedule, which is really a virtual schedule, in that there is nothing to physically look at, I see that October has just begun, and I’m currently a little over 15k into Airworld, and writing at what I estimate to be a slothful rate of 500 words a day. NaNoWriMo begins on November 1 and runs through November 30. Naobi still has to have an adventure in Sarin Morn, some kind of discovery or adventure in Leavon, and, assuming nothing else happens, she still needs to deal with the Council.

I just totally cheated and wrote the first paragraph of my NaNoWriMo novel. I couldn’t take the chance that I would forget it before November 1st! First there were sounds. Indistinct, without description. From far away. Then there were shapes, shadows on shadow, fluid. But something familiar about the shapes. Some took on forms that were recognizable. A tree. A house. A home? My home? A face, lips moving, speaking words just out of reach.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering what I’m reading. After The Cavern of Black Ice I wanted to read something a little less heavy, so I went back to Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. Previously I wrote such scintillating endorsements as “it’s not growing on me” and “I got bored.” Well, the book *did* eventually grow on me. In the second half, I was glad to be reading it. The author did some very interesting things with the narrative voice.

Is it: She thought it must be stuck, a problem that was not uncommon in her own Orderhouse. Or: She thought it must be stuck, a problem which was not uncommon in her own Orderhouse. Grammar Girl is not helping me. I think it is “that” instead of “which.” UPDATE: Looking at this post on 7/25/2013, I now think it should be “which” instead of “that.”

NaNoWriMo is flying closer with every second, and I’m terribly unprepared. Last year, I spent months worldbuilding beforehand (and then used almost none of it). This year, I have a story seed that’s been in my head for quite some time, but I’m starting to have second thoughts about it. Mainly because this “seed” is not much of a story. It’s just a collection of ill-defined characters and the barest thread of an excuse for them to come together.

I have re-published my first novel Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon and CreateSpace. I disabled it a while back because … well, I don’t actually remember why. Possibly because I thought it might hurt my “career” as an author (such as it is). Perhaps I thought that if I ever did submit that novel to a publisher, they might Google it, find it on Amazon, see that only four people have read it, and drop my manuscript in the trash.

Drumroll, please! I have decided to go Rebel for NaNoWriMo this year and continue my current WiP, instead of starting a new one. Possibly as many as 2 people could like this news. I finally decided to drop my previous story idea (which I had sort of dubbed Mixtime - for mixing up people from different times.. get it?). I just couldn’t think of a goal for these disparate characters from different times to work toward once they were together.

Consider this contemporary engraving of a woman by Wenceslaus Hollar, from around the mid-1700s: From here, btw. Sadly, I am a complete moron when it comes to clothing. If I look at that picture, I see a woman wearing an old-timey dress thingy, with a hat thingy on her head. But for some reason, that description wouldn’t go over very well in a published work of fiction. So, what the heck are these things called?

You may notice some changes in Airworld’s writing style now that NaNoWriMo is starting up. Until now, I have made some small efforts to write grammatically correct sentences, avoid too much repetition within a paragraph, find the right words to describe things, put events in the right sequence, etc. With the start of NaNoWriMo, all of that is going out the window. I will need to roughly double my daily output, so I will have to go into a more stream-of-consciousness sort of a writing mode and discard all filters.

Okay so I’m a little bit ahead in writing today, so I thought I would finally sit down and watch the first episode of Walking Dead Season 2 on Netflix. I thought the first season was “okay” but I didn’t see where it deserved all the nerd praise it got. I guess it’s a generational thing. Zombies are “cool” with the kids and whatnot. But since Walking Dead is now in it’s third season and everyone is still raving about it, I thought I should give it another chance.

I started out writing Airworld as a sort of light-hearted adventure. Despite a somewhat serious premise (the home town is dying!), I didn’t intend for anyone to get into any real trouble. But somewhere along the way, things got pretty serious. People are getting their throats cut. People are getting their heads smashed on stone walls. People are getting framed and tortured. People are coming face-to-face with their worst nightmares, and doubting their own convictions, and having to make life-altering decisions.