I don't usually post videos, but this one is too good not to share. It covers a lot of my geekiness with both Star Trek and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you look at related the related videos, you'll see another one that's a mash-up of Star Trek and The A-Team. That one's pretty good, too, but the Python one is my fav.

I've learned a few things in the past couple of weeks about world building. I've done it for futuristic, including a proposal that I put aside and never pursued very hard, and I find this comfortable to do. Maybe because I can look around and extrapolate what I think the future will be. Or at least one possible version of it. The proposal that's sitting on my hard drive had some pretty interesting world events, including a water shortage among other things. That, unfortunately, I can see happening far too easily--but I don't want to talk about the real world or potential future problems.

I've also done world building for my Light Warrior series. But by and large, the Gineal live within human society and their council and magic is merely an extra layer. Their world is somewhat different, but not hugely so because their focus is to blend in and remain unnoticed. Yes, they have a council that rules them and their own particular societal hierarchy, but their world is much more a part of ours than separate from it. This is deliberate, BTW, so if anyone is expecting some hugely elaborate world building, it isn't happening in this series.

Besides it was Ryne who did the world building here. When she first came in, she talked for weeks nonstop about her people and told me nothing about herself until later. I had the basics of the world down before I had just about anything else, including her name or who her hero was.

But now I'm world building a very different society, one that operates on completely different rules and paradigms. Unlike futuristic world building, I can't look at now and project forward in time. In fact, I wasn't even certain what questions I needed to ask, but I had a couple of friends come through with suggestions and I've been thinking about them. What I'm finding is that it's complicated.

I'm still mulling, but yesterday the heroine from book 1 began to explain a few aspects that I hadn't considered, things associated with the job her "people" do. The thing that's interesting to me is that I didn't realize I needed this kind of information until she started sharing it. Why did she have to go into detail, though, on the commute home? It's not like I can write while I'm on the freeway and I don't own a digital voice recorder. I kept talking about getting one, but never quite did it. I hear the iPod Touch has one of those, though. Doesn't that make it a writing-related expense? ;-)

The other interesting thing about all this? I had this idea more than 2 years ago, but I was already committed to working on the proposal for Edge of Dawn. For all this time, the characters have largely been quiet. Mostly distant, even, but now they're awake. Well, at least the first hero/heroine are. I also have a handle on the second and third heroines, but their heroes are still vague. Working on that along with the world.

Back to mulling.

Not the drinking kind. :-)

Four days off from the Evil Day Job (EDJ) meant too much time on the laptop for me. My eyes hurt, my neck and shoulders hurt, my back hurts, and even my butt hurts. I'm not excited to return to the EDJ, but on the other hand, at least there I can't spend all my time in one position.

I know, it's bad for me. I should be moving around more when I'm at home, but I start working on something and I don't want to move. Which is where the shoulders, neck, back, and butt come in. The eyes hurt because I don't blink enough while I'm on the computer. This is a problem at the EDJ, too, but there my job has me getting up to walk around and it doesn't seem to be as bad.

Thanksgiving ended up being nice. I didn't go out to any stores, but I did do a little shopping online. QVC was selling a pair of weather radios that were cranked for power as well as solar powered. Guess what my mom is getting for her birthday? LOL. My folks don't have a weather radio and if she wanted something different, she shouldn't have said "nothing." My mom is so hard to buy for.

I also picked up an iPod speaker system on an Amazon gold box special deal. This is for me because I've had no luck getting a system for my living room, and because the unit in my bedroom is plugged in behind my dresser, moving that isn't easy. Much simpler to move the iPod.

I'm also contemplating buying my laptop replacement now rather than in January. The plus side is that Best Buy has free shipping today and tomorrow (Monday). The down side is that I keep thinking, wow, what if something even better comes out in January? And something better always does come along in computers.

One of my family's traditions is to watch movies at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You'd think this would be a simple thing to do, but you'd be wrong. Finding a movie we can agree on is a struggle and my holidays are just my parents and me.

We start out with one big strike--my folks don't enjoy action/adventure movies and these happen to be my favorite. I don't like "heartwarming" stories about animals, particularly if there's a chance the animal will die or suffer some other hardship. These are my mom's favorite movies. I'm not sure what my dad prefers because he'll go along wit anything, but my guess would be comedy, particularly older comedies where he won't feel uncomfortable about the language or situations.

Last year was a big fail. I tried a Jane Austen movie. I don't remember the name of it, but it starred Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Both my parents slept through it. I wished I could be lucky enough to drop unconscious. Talk about boring with a capital B.

The year before that we tried a Dean Martin celebrity roast. No one fell asleep, but the humor was very dated and some of it was like OMG, did someone really say that?

I could go back for years with similar stories. We just can't find something that we all are interested in watching that is actually good. So with this in mind, on Sunday I picked out this year's Thanksgiving Day movie. I figured the family section on Netflix was a good choice and from there selected comedies. Most of the movies were from the 60s and 70s which really says something about how many good family films are coming out of Hollywood now, but I digress.

I clicked through page after page of live-action Disney movies, many of which I'd already seen. I finally decided on The Boatniks even though I've seen that one, too, and I think my folks have as well. It's Disney, I remember it being funny, and my mom and dad should get a kick out of it. I hope. I'll find out later.

Happy American Thanksgiving!

In the past few weeks there's been discussions on one of my author loops about getting data off of those old 5 inch floppy disks. You know, the big ones that look like coasters for a beer stein? Of course, since no one has those ginormous floppy drives any longer, getting the data off takes time and money.

I was feeling pretty smug as I listened to these discussions. All my work is still on my laptop--I just keep transferring it. With one exception. I'd moved Ravyn's Flight to CD. This format discussion had me reloading all the files for my first book back on my computer.

And my smugness returned.

Until I started thinking about this new series idea and remembering a fragment of an idea I'd come up with years earlier. Of course, I couldn't remember enough of it for the thing to be useful, but I could just look at the file

Um, yeah. You see, all these idea fragments were saved *only* to one of the small floppy disks. (I console myself with the fact that I never used big floppy disks.) Problem is my laptop with the small floppy drive died. My old desktop can still be fired up...if I have half an hour to kill while it boots.

That sound you heard? That was my smugness balloon being popped.

I ordered an external floppy drive that plugs in via USB, and when it arrives, I will be transferring everything off the small floppy disks onto my hard drive. Then it will be backed up by Carbonite (an automatic, off-site backup service) and all will be good.

I'll also be slower to scoff at authors who don't have all their data in a readable format. If this discussion hadn't come up, in a few more years, it probably would be difficult to even find an external floppy drive and I'd be in the same position they're in now. Technology moves fast, but word processing files are small and hard drives are large. From now on, everything goes on the hard drive and moves from system to system with me.