All work and no writing makes writers twitchy

Apologies to my usual blog haunts. I have not had the freetime to hang out in my beloved internet. Blame work. I do.

While I love the ability to pay bills, the lack of writing time is really getting on my nerves. I pity the character who gets their wish to have me work on their story next. I have a good deal of pent up aggression to vent into words. People might get hurt. No, I'm kidding, they'll certainly get hurt. Hell, they'll probably get killed.

I could really use a good fight scene right now. In the mood I'm in, I wouldn't place bets on which side would win.

Mermaids might suddenly find the ocean dry pumped for a good scrubbing.

Samarah, you might find the middle is one bloody fight after another with no sex until the end, which as I recall, there wasn't much sex at the end. Your patience is hightly recommended.

Jackson, your story includes a lot of blood and gore. I don't think I could make that more depressing, bloody or gory than it already is, but hey, do you really want to challenge me on that?

Bruce, my dear knight, your story already doesn't end well for you, suffice it to say, the middle will likely not be any more pleasant. What with the excess body hair, the flock of godly sheep, and your empty-headed twit of a girlfriend...say what if she talked a lot, really loudly, until she drove you all into madness? I'm open to changing up the ending. What do you say?

Maribella, I'd recommend not making any demands right now. I'm much more in the mindset of your uncle at the moment.
You don't want me writing about babies right now, Marion. I guarantee it would be some deformed, demon-possessed creature dead set on bringing about the end of your world, and while it wouldn't provide much resolution, I'm inclined to let the baby win.

Which brings me to Vayen and the gang. Really? Do I need to even go there? You know what this mood is like first hand.

Deep cleansing breaths and all that. Ahem. Yeah.

I came home to a letter

I returned from my trip to Yellowstone late last night to find a note on my desk. In light of not having all my photos organized enough to post anything trip related, I figured I'd share the letter.

Dear She Who Taps the Keys,

We hope you are enjoying your time away from us. We stand here stunned. We don't have much choice, you see, because you left your laptop behind. You've left us for a long weekend, sure, but nine days? What were you thinking? What about all those great ideas you get when you're away from the computer? How are you supposed to apply them to our stories if you leave us behind?

Perhaps you don't fully understand our plights. Here, we'll lay them out for you so you can sit your butt on the couch, plug in your laptop and seriously consider making up for lost time.

Samarah would like to know what the hell happens in the middle of her story.

Jackson wonders what happened to his family (and the rest of the human race for that matter).

Bruce also wants to know what happens in the middle of Not Another Bard's Tale. What is it with you and skimping on middles anyway?

Maribella demands to know which young man (none of which she likes) she's going to marry. Her uncle suggests himself as he's quite content to run the kingdom. No really, he'd be happy to take that plot issue off your hands.

The mermaid is getting restless and is threatening to feed your toes to her new husband if you don't finish her story's revisions.

Marion is very depressed as you keep talking about fixing her story but never seem to get around to it. She may start stealing babies from other WIPs if you don't act soon.

Oh and Vayen and the gang are quite annoyed that you've set their third novel on the back burner. Are you sure it's wise to annoy them?

We hope you enjoyed your vacation. Don't plan on another any time in the near future.

Sincerely,
Your Characters

Go ahead, freak me out.

From my pond: One of our many friendly frogs.

With now seven submissions bouncing around as they look for a home, opening email has become even more of a gut-wrenching, nail-biting, take-a-deep-breath-and-click daily trial. The odds of rejections, sometimes multiple per day are even more likely. Yes, rejections are part of the game and certainly to be expected, but that doesn't make getting email any more fun. Yet, masochist/writer that I am, I still find myself checking the darn inbox several times throughout the day. So feel free to mess with and write a comment. Nothing like seeing something in my inbox to make me freak out for just a split second.

I'll be maintaining blog silence (no new posts anyway) for the next two weeks while I take a road trip out to Yellowstone. Ah, the smell of sulfur, it refuels the creative juices. Or maybe those are churning stomach juices... Anyway, I'll be recharging all my juices and taking some photos to adorn future posts. It's been fifteen years since my last visit there so it will be fun to see what has changed along the way as we travel.

See you on the other side of silence.

Don't say no to the Panda.

I'm still buried under work and trying to finish a short story before the submission deadline. While I'm neck-deep in that...

....here's something completely different.

Can I just say, I love this Panda? I laughed so hard I was crying for the whole last two minutes. I had to watch it again. If I ever had to pick an animal that best represents me, this particular one would be it.

All set to take over the world

...Now that my army of tiny NaNoBots is complete! Mwahahahaha

I really have to stop checking in on what the other NaNoWriMo MLs are up to, because it just leads to inspiration and that leads to projects that I really don't have time for. But they're fun!

They don't need to sleep. They just do. And do. And do. And some of them even smile about it.

So how does one go about raising an army of their own?

First, visit your local robot part outlet. Mine happened to be called Hobby Lobby.

You'll need two sizes of wooden blocks. I used 1 inch and 3/4 inch. There are smaller sizes, if you want really little bots, just keep in mind that you'll need to find hand and feet parts that are equally sized.

I picked dowel hole plugs for the head knobs, 1/8 dowels for the arms and legs, wooden balls for the hands and some little rounded dowel part for the feet.

I cut the dowels at 3/4 inch using a wire cutter. They snap off really easy. You will need to sand the cut edges to get a good base for the other parts to attach to.

Using hot glue (because I really didn't have time to sit around while stuff dried), I attached the head knobs on the smaller block and then glued the smaller block to the larger one.

Things got rather assembly line after that. Attach the arms to the hands and the legs to the feet.

Because I was doing thirteen of these (the max I could do with the pieces I had purchased), I assembled all the arms and legs before moving on.

The easiest way to assemble the feet is to set them both side by side and put a drop of glue on top of them. Set the block body on top of the feet and adjust as necessary until the bot stands up.

If the legs are mostly in the middle section of the block, it has a pretty good chance of standing on the first try. Making sure the legs are generally the same size would be a good idea too, if you're going for a uniform look. My army is a little haphazard. I'm okay with that.

Once my robots were assembled--all thirteen took about an hour from opening the supplies to figuring out the first one to gluing on the last leg.

Removing all the glue blobs and stringy bits would be a good idea at this point.

Then it's time to find some paint!

I could have opted for regular old acrylic paint, but I had this hammered silver spray paint in my closet and it begged to be used.


As you might notice in the pictures, some of my robots have different feet. I ran out of the nifty little bowl pieces. Boo! But, I had some craft sticks sitting around so I snapped off the rounded ends and darn it, they made cute feet too.


Behold my army of NaNoBots!