December, and all that comes with it

November is over, and all the excitement of Christmas is coming.

I didn't blog once during November as I focused all my writing energies on NaNoWriMo, and seeing if I was up to the amount of daily writing that it would take for me to become a writer full time. Well, quantity I can do. Quality, not so much, but its all about practice. I enjoyed doing it, and hopefully I can keep motivating myself. 

An odd side effect is that now I no longer know what to do with my free time if I am not writing!

Anyway, December in all its glory is now here, and I am both looking forward to and dreading Christmas in pretty much equal measure.  Its only a week until I have my hand surgery, and while I know that its not a big deal - its only hand-surgery after all, not heart surgery - I am pretty anxious about it, and can't keep my mind off it.  6 weeks in a cast also does not sound like fun over the holiday period.

Still, I get 2 weeks paid off work over Christmas, so that's good.

But things I am most concerned about are thusly:

• ASD Daughters getting more and more hyped up, with no space or time to calm down. Meltdown City, if last year is anything to go by
• parents coming to visit for Christmas for first time. this will add to point above, and put wife in same category. She likes my parents, but this is pressure!
• Operation going badly, leaving me less able over the period.

now I love Christmas, and everything that goes with it (other than drunk drivers and office parties) and normally I don't stress about anything like this. I just relax and enjoy it, letting the good old Christmas spirit take over, but in recent weeks, wife has declare her theory that ASD people love Christmas because they are programmed to from childhood, with everything reinforcing how wonderful Christmas should be, and we are effectively forced to love it, meaning that a bad Christmas to NTs is an absolute disaster to NNTs, and that maybe if we thought for ourselves, we would see that Christmas wasn't that great.

And I was gutted! She didn't use those exact words, but I followed through on her train of thought, and it made me sad and a little angry that she was telling me that I only like Christmas because people have told me to, and because my brain is abnormal.  It really hurt, but I couldn't tell or show her that because I felt it would only reinforce my abnormality.

It hurt, and it made me sad, and it only reinforces the feeling I have that wife and I are drifting apart, but that's a blog for another day.

Right now I have presents to wrap, cards to write and a family Christmas to prepare for.

Fab fun forgotten fiction found!

I can't believe it!

After 5 years of neglect, my old LiveJournal account still exists!  I am shocked.

The best thing about this is not LJ itself but the fact that I had short stories that I wrote years ago attached to it. I am so excited.

Each of the short stories was inspired by background characters in an RPG I used to run set in White Wolf's World of Darkness, a setting that I think is largely responsible for the current obsession with Vampires in pop-culture.  I loved it so much, and i loved the act of creation.  I couldn't just create the city or set the stories for the characters, i felt I needed to give more depth to my city, and these stories were part of that.

here's an excerpt from Beyond any Measure, a chapter in the story of the hulking ex-con Monk, who works as a doorman/ muscle for one of the major characters, but has no idea that his boss is a Vampire.  In this story he was on the trail of whoever killed his friend with lethally cut heroin.


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“Well shit, it really is you,” sez Eddie the Ear. “I ain’t seen you since…” his face screws up as he thinks
“… night before the Spinozzo family had an accident in Harlem.” I supply.
Eddie’s startin’ to look like an old man. His face is getting’ flabby. I guess he’s put on about twenty pounds in the last few years. He scratches at his greyin’ stubble.
“The Spinozzos, yeah,” he sez lookin’ thoughtful. I take a look at his office. Eddie’s workin’ out of an upstairs apartment above the pawn shop he owns downstairs. I don’t know what angle he’s workin’ these days, but it’s guaranteed whatever it is ain’t legal. His nephew Vinnie is sittin’ on the edge of a table glarin’ at me. I recognise the type immediately; he looks about twenty, still wet behind the ears, and that sneer he’s carryin’ says he wants to make a name for himself, and maybe thinks I’m the man whose corpse to make it on. Eddie sends him out to get a beer for me.
“So why you turnin’ up here after all this time?” he asks me, “I thought you stopped workin’ for The Family.” I nod my head, relaxin’ down into a chair.
“I talked to Old Mike Gravano when I came out of my last stretch. Told him I wanted out. Old Mike gives me a handshake, tells me I done good an’ proud by his family, and if I wanna work again, to come see you.” 
The kid comes back with a beer. Its some German shit that I wouldn’t feed to a two day drunk. I hold the bottle loosely between my first two fingers, down by the side of the chair.
“But I ain’t lookin’ for work,” I say “I need information, and you’re “The Ear”.
“There’s someone pushin’ bad shit in town. I got a friend who is the worse for usin’ it. I need to know who’s workin’ East Rutherford.”
“Sorry Monk,” he sez a little too fast, “I don’t know nuthin’ about drugs. That ain’t my bag.”
My lips go tight. This is Eddie “The Ear” Scoleri, the best information magnet I ever met. He never knows nothin’ about anythin.
“Eddie,” I say softly “if you don’t tell me what I need to know voluntarily, I’m gonna have to ask you another way.” Eddie don’t flinch, but I see Vinnie straighten and reach for his piece.
“Kid,” I say, raisin’ my voice, “do you know what a bi-polar recursive haematoma is?” I look at him, seein’ the confused look in his baby blues. “Its when the part of your brain that causes you to feel pain – when, for example, some young Paesan puts a bullet in you – shuts off.
“Now if you draw that sidearm you might kill me, but my body’ll take thirty seconds or so to shut down. More’n enough time for me to snap your neck like a rotten twig.” Little Vinnie gets some fear in his eyes but his hand is still inside his jacket.
“’Sides,” I add, “my guy on the roof across the street’s got you covered.”
The minute the kid’s eyes flicker to the window I’m in motion. My right arm whips up and over, releasing the bottle, and I’m right behind it. The base of the bottle hits him just above the right eye. His head snaps back. I reach him and slam a right into his gut, lifting him off his feet as his breath whooshes out. My left mitt clubs down across his jaw, knockin’ him to the floor.
I pull my knife from under my coat and kneel on the kid’s neck. A gurglin’ comes from his throat ‘til he passes out. I grab his right ear and pull hard. Behind me I hear Eddie protest. I ignore him and make a hard ’n’ fast pass with the knife. I stand up with my prize in my hand.
“Next time get me an American beer,” I sneer into the ruined shell of his ear.

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Its not my best work, but I loved writing it, and finding this and some of the other stories from those days really makes me excited about NaNoWriMo. Maybe I can get back to the stories of those minor characters and sidekicks; the hard-working and unappreciated colleagues and minions, the left-hand men and button men of that shadowy world who played out the instructions of their dark masters.

fun!!!

Writing time

So, to take my mind off of my impending surgery I have decided to try my hand at novel writing. And because I lack focus, tend to become obsessive and work in short bursts I am joining in with thousands of other people attempting to write a 50000 word novel in 30 days as part of NaNoWriMo

So, that's thinking of and typing over 1000 words of story and dialogue per day. I am not convinced this is a good idea but I imagine its going to be a hell of an experience, and I'm even looking forward to the local launch party 2 days before where I will get to meet some people who are doing the same thing.

But the thing is I've signed up as anonymousaspie, and so it will be odd going to the launch event and either
A- introducing myself as anonymousaspie or
B- using my real name and thereby destroying my illusion on anonymity.

I am puzzled.

Anyway, I've got a idea or 2 percolating away, things I have gathered together over the years or stuff that has stuck in my brain.  I have a couple of character ideas, a story name but not yet a concept for the full story, but I'm doing some research and thinking, noting down anything new that occurs to me.  Anything to not think about the hand surgery!

I am wondering if my new awareness of self and aspie state will influence any of my writing. Writing isn't new to me. i used to write settings for role-playing games, and when i wrote a setting it was intricate, well-planned, evolved and detailed. There were characters you would never meet that i had hopes and dreams sketched for.  I loved creating a living setting, so that if players decided to go off-piste, as it were, i always had a vast expanse for them to explore; sort of the RPG equivalent of the computer sandbox-game experience.

but this is completely different. I had time to shape and mold and perfect my characters and settings. this is the exact opposite. in a lot of ways its a nightmarish proposition, but if i ever really want to be a writer, then i need to start somewhere, and taking the plunge here might be just the thing to get me into a literary frame of mind.

And away from hand surgery!