Ficlet: “Ancient Children”

Today, as part of my fairly excellent birthday vacation day, I got to go to Caleb’s school and eat lunch with him. It was a great experience, eating a meal with prekindergarteners that laugh and joke and make fun of their food. The experience actually inspired a brand new birthday Ficlet entitled “Ancient Children“. The Ficlet itself doesn’t have anything to do with my birthday.

And just so you know, the situation described in the Ficlet did not actually occur. In case you were wondering if I happened to witness two ancient wizards disguised as elementary school children engaged in mortal combat today. I didn’t. Unfortunately.

Big weekend plans

This should be one of those big, hectic weekends that we seem to have a love/hate relationship with these days. We’ve got Brant’s Great Pumpkin Festival most of the day Saturday, and then that night I resume duties as emcee to the First Things Tour concert coming through our church. I’ve got to figure out how to give away a day with Skillet for our upcoming December 7th concert. Then on Sunday afternoon I’ve got the kick-off meeting for the Des Moines/Central Iowa NaNoWriMo group.

And then? Four-day weekend! I’m off Monday and Tuesday of next week for my birthday.

Did I mention my birthday is Tuesday? I might have to mention that a few more times to make sure everyone remembers.

And hopefully during all this, Alex’s ear infection goes away and we get a good night’s sleep. And by ‘we’ I, of course, mean Amanda.

Story prep completed!

I’m pretty excited now. I’ve just completed all the preparatory work for starting my NaNoWriMo novel next week. This is the first time I’ve put so much effort into my writing in — well, ever, to be precise.

The first thing I did was to put together a basic premise paragraph. I followed that with a paragraph on the climax of the story. Then topped it off with a paragraph explaining the conclusion. That nicely bookended the work I was beginning. It gave me a reference point for the start and the end, and the major conflict that would define the bulk of the story.

Next I put together some short descriptions for the main characters of the story. This involved writing out the background, motivations, and allegiances of all my creations.

I then set out outlining the novel chapter by chapter. I split each chapter into four to six sections, each focusing on different characters. I planned everything out, adding about two to three sentences per section to describe the focus of that particular part of the story. As I worked my way through the entire novel, I would constantly go back and revise the character descriptions as I changed elements of the story.

And now, it’s all planned out. Every step. It was a fairly organic process, but amazing to see it all come together and wrap up at the end. I’m now eager to actually begin writing the story and seeing all this planning come to a logical boiling point. I want to watch the creation take flight and see how much I deviate from the outline as the story progresses.

I see a mountain of work ahead for me, with no real hope of any kind of publishing deal at the end. I’m really just doing this to see if I can. Is this what it’s like for authors? An exhausting mountain of work that you tackle one foothill at a time, and hope that something you can proud of will be waiting for you at the day’s completion?

Nintendo might be hoping that Battalion Wars 2 won’t sell well

GoNintendo is a Nintendo fan blog I read frequently because Rawmeat Cowboy will post absolutely anything there that is even remotely Nintendo related, and I can’t get all the content he manages to post in a single day on a single site, anywhere else. Today, RMC posted an “End of Day Thought” regarding the complete and total lack of hype surrounding next week’s release of Battalion Wars 2 (BWii) for the Wii. I’ve been especially looking forward to this title, as I never played the first, and have been eager to play some strategic battles online against some of my friends. But Nintendo’s neglect for this title is obvious. In fact, I have a theory that it may be entirely intentional.

I think BWii is likely the most graphically advanced and technically complicated game to hit Nintendo’s online network (which isn’t saying a whole lot, I know, but bear with me). Super Mario Strikers was the first, and its release was quickly followed by stories of lag and disconnects. Pokemon came out, but ended up being nothing more than a stadium for matches between your Pokemon on your DS. Graphically underpowered, and not a technical challenge, so we haven’t heard much about online quality issues. The rest of the games on their network are all DS games, which are also not high in the graphics area, and are not overly sophisticated, technically speaking.

Then comes BWii. I think Nintendo is planning to undersell this game dramatically and purposely just so it doesn’t put an enormous strain on their online infrastructure. Wait for it to sell fairly low through the holidays, and then sometime in the spring — after Super Smash Bros. Brawl and possibly Mario Kart Wii hit the shelves (and the online network) — look for Nintendo to begin pushing BWii in a sort of a “second wave” of advertising and promotions. Possibly as some sort of campaign alerting consumers to check out Nintendo’s online offerings.

Of course, this is all pure speculation. It could be that Nintendo is saving their pennies for a big Super Mario Galaxy marketing push. Or maybe the game is crap and instead of quietly axeing or delaying the project, they’re going ahead and releasing it so they can fulfill their obligation to Kuju (or possibly free up the developer for another, tastier project). WHo knows? It’s all conjecture at this point. All I know is Nintendo is being too quiet about this game — quieter than they were about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption — and that worries me.

DS Lite is moving higher on my list

My co-worker brought in his Nintendo DS and his brand new copy of the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass into work yesterday so I could check it out. All I’ve heard from him for months is that despite all the games coming out on every console these days, the DS remains his favorite system. He’s been trying to convince me to get one of my own. And, let me tell you, Phantom Hourglass may just be the thing that turns indifferent curiosity into rampant desire.

I picked it up in a dungeon. Moving around took some getting used to as the closer you move the stylus, the slower Link follows your motions around. Slashing the sword also too practice, as you are required to quickly move the stylus back and forth in the general direction you want to slash. Or, alternatively, you could simply click the enemy, and Link would run right up and begin wailing away at the poor creature. I’m not usually one to relinquish control of my gaming without a fight, but in this instance, very little interaction yielded particularly satisfying results.

I then exited the dungeon and hopped on the ship for a quick jaunt around the oceanic overworld. This area of the game was approximately infinity times more entertaining than the oceanic voyages that existed in the Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which was Phantom Hourglass‘ GameCube predecessor. You simply sketch out the route you want to travel, and hit “Go”. The ship begins moving, and you are free to blow up random creatures (or birds sailing overhead), stop and search for treasure (which involves a fun “ski slope” type minigame), jump/avoid traps, or initiate detours to investigate nearby oddities.

Keep in mind that I only played for roughly 7 minutes. I was enthralled.

So, needless to say (but I’m saying it anyway), the DS Lite has moved up in importance on my wish list.

The Weekly Release

Nick Puleo of Evil Avatar (a site I can no longer visit at work thanks to our new network web content filter) has set up another cool website called The Weekly Release. You may recall Puleo as the person that allowed me to desecrate his Gamers’ Gallery site with my hideous graphics.

Over on EvAv there are always several posts a week that detail entertainment releases. Nick has decided to consolidate those listings on The Weekly Release, dividing them up amongst DVDs, theatrical releases, retail video games, Xbox Live Arcade games, Wii Virtual Console games, and Playstation Network games. It’s a very cool idea, and the RSS feed is particularly well formatted in Google Reader.

So, check out his new site! And then follow him on Twitter. Don’t tell him I sent you. He’ll get scared.

Time to tell an embarrassing story

As if it weren’t already obvious enough, I’m about to tell a story that actually occurred this weekend and contains a fair bit of personal embarrassment. Just a warning.

So, I found my wedding ring on Saturday. Yeah, let me tell a bit of back story first.

About two years ago, I was out un-burying my car from several feet of snow. Upon completing the task, I took off my gloves, entered my car, and drove to work in that order. Halfway to work, I felt a noticeable lack of weight on my ring finger. My wedding ring was missing. I panicked at first, and then remembering that I took off my gloves before getting in the car, I panicked further and assumed the worst: that the ring was now buried somewhere within the depths of white snowflakes collected and mounted around the driveway. I got home that night and discovered that a kind neighbor with a plow had driven through our alleyway and helpfully plowed our driveway. I presumed the ring lost forever.

Fast-forward to Saturday afternoon.

I’m cleaning out my car for the first time in two years. As I’m removing wrappers, pop cans, and plastic breakfast sandwich containers, I notice the briefest glint of metal on the floor of the drivers side. There, buried beneath several years’ worth of gravel, dirt, and other miscellaneous shoe-barnacles and natural stowaways lies my wedding ring. It had been underfoot this entire time. Two years. I could hardly believe it myself.

My wife was never really that concerned with the fact that I had lost my ring in the first place. Ever since becoming pregnant with Caleb (our first child), she has constantly been sans-ring herself through two pregnancies as her finger size expanded and collapsed with her weight gain and subsequent loss. We also trust each other enough in the presence of others that we don’t feel the need for a I’M MARRIED AND THIS IS MY RING FORCEFIELD SO BACK OFF sort of protection from lecherous, bloodthirsty “single people”. Indeed, my wonderful wife’s first words to me upon hearing the proclamation of my discovery: “does that mean I have to start wearing my ring again?”

As a matter of fact, it does.

Wil Wheaton finally Ficletting

I’ve decided that with NaNoWriMo fast approaching, now is a perfect time to get back into Ficlets. So, I logged back into the site and took a look at the dusty place that I hadn’t visited in several months. I checked through my contacts and realized that some of my favorite authors also have neglected Ficlets for roughly the same period of time. I started to wonder if Ficlets was beginning to become some sort of ghost town. A quick check on Alexa shows that while traffic is fairly low, it’s also fairly steady. I guess I just managed to find some authors that were just as dedicated as I was — which is to say, not very.

Then I checked just one last author: Wil Wheaton. Wil had signed up fairly early in the site’s life, and, for whatever reason, he never ended up creating anything. Probably too busy, it’s completely understandable. But as of today, he has two ficlets up! Both created within the past couple of days. I find it humorous that I decided to rekindle my love with Ficlets at about the same time Wil decided to do the same.

I love one of his comments to his story, The Fifteenth:

I’m an experienced non-fiction writer, and this represents one of my first steps into writing fiction.

I’d have to say, so far, so good!