One post every six months is a doable goal, surely?

Blogging about not blogging is a kind of anti-meta-blogging joke that doesn't even really amuse me.
There's a distinct lack of concentrated awesome, isn't there? Where is the concentrated awesome?
I think the space travelers must find it at the Core of the Galaxy:

"Exploding Suns! Galaxy-eating Singularities! Holes in the Very Fabric of Reality! Superintelligent beings made of Pure Thought!"

"Down, boy!" Bob made calming motions at Brown.

Brown grinned. "Don't try to kid me, you faker. You're as excited as I am."

Bob coughed.

"Are there really things like that, there?" Donna asked.

Before either Bob or Brown could answer, the MM vented steam loudly enough to make them jump. "Nobody knows what's there."

"But it must be something pretty amazing, all the same," Brown insisted. "Maybe something every more amazing than we've ever thought of."

The MM performed the mechanical equivalent of a shrug. "Perhaps, perhaps not. In any event, we won't know until we get there. In the meantime, I'm long overdue for a maintenance overhaul. If you want me, I'll be in the mechanics bay rebalancing my mainsprings." He clanked off around a corner and somehow disappeared in the distance at the same time.

Donna shuddered. "That's so weird."

Brown chuckled. "That's nothing. You should see the engine room!"

"I don't think I want to."

* * *

"Let's review," Bob said. "It looks like Xanthippus' distorter has sent him round the bend from merely mad..."
Bob bowed.
"...to omnicidally insane."

"What?" Donna asked from her upside-down post on the overstuffed chair.

"He wants to kill everything in the universe."

"What he wants," the MM said, "is to enslave everything in the universe."

"There's no practical difference," Brown argued. "He can't do that, and he'll either accidentally destroy everything with that distorter by trying, or else when he figures out it has no chance of working he'll destroy everything on purpose. You saw what he did to the..." he paused, glancing at Donna. "To the boarding house."

"Hmmp." Donna said. "I'm not a little kid. I know that wasn't a boarding house."

"Hmmp yourself. Little girls are supposed to be sweet and innocent," Brown began.

"Oh stop it! I hate that kind of stuff!" Donna snapped. "I told you, I'm not a little kid!"

Brown cleared his throat. "Oh. Um. OK. Sorry." There was a brief silence. "Anyway," he went on, "One way or another, X is going to end up destroying the universe, either on purpose or accidentally, if someone doesn't stop him."

"Agreed," Bob said. The MM emitted a mechanical sound indicative of assent.

"Then we better stop him," Donna said.

"How?" Bob asked.

"How should I know, you're the science guys."

"I don't know either," said Brown, "but I think X, at least, thinks we have some way to stop him, based on his actions. Something I have, or can do..."

"Or me, or Donna, or the MM," Bob suggested.

"Maybe." Brown was dubious. "I think he was aiming at me, though, even before we left Earth."

"Maybe it's this thing," Donna said, gesturing to snap the "spagoyenator" into sudden visibility.

"Maybe. But we don't know. For now, the only thing I can think of is to track him down as fast as we can and try to think what can stop him while we do it."

goal for today: 1080

for yesterday, really, since it's already tomorrow.
I've got 450 more words here, so I'm 280 behind...

1/29/2011 11:51 PM
[Notes: That last post was a stab at a vague idea I’ve had for many years now: to re-tell a Tolkien-clone story where the Wizard is a big fake. Actually a young girl (or boy) who pretends to be an old man on the theory that people will respect them more. I’m not sure I want to start with the fakery known to the reader. Better, perhaps, to start from the POV of the ordinary farm-boy hero. The slightly crazy ugly kid tries to tell him about the big danger and gets brushed off. Then the (fake) Wizard shows up. This requires the wizard to be able to fake wizardry. Maybe they really can do it.
[There must be a big scene where the Wizard is revealed as a fake, maybe ¾ of the way through. The rest of the ‘fellowship’ mostly abandons the Wizard and the Quest.
[The Wizard will discover true power of some kind—maybe the power of physics and engineering? And have another big scene where he/she defeats, maybe, the Big Bad Guy’s chief lieutenant.
[More notes:
[I’m working on several different stories at the moment: The Mad Scientists in Spaaace, the two boys lost in the weed patch that’s a jungle, and fragments of some other stories.
[So what are some scenes I want for the space story?
[The scientists try to leave the stowaway girl with their friend the brothel manager.
[The scientists meet their old mentor, and discover there’s a single intent of some kind behind the seemingly random events they’ve experienced.
[The octopuses in the moat explore the main castle, looking for fish, and discover the scientist’s troubles.
[The scientists must take the girl to the galactic core with them, because the glowing gadget she is carrying around, and that she can’t get rid of, is of some crucial importance to the plot.
[Scenes for the jungle story:
[The jungle-king’s mate (the jungle queen) is summoned by the monkey to find one or the other of the boys. She’s just as awesome, if not more so, as the jungle king.
[The boys are chased by a cannibal village.
[the hunters in the elephants graveyard are chased by angry natives? Rescued by the jungle king?
[A correlation between the jungle and the weed patch must be present.
[this will require a more precise explanation of the layout of the weed patch: a streamlet trickling through the patch corresponds to a river, a puddle is a lake, an anthill is a lost city… the elephant graveyard is a small pile of animal skeletons.]

Resurrection of the Blog

Here I am, trying to write 360 words per day until Oct 31, which will give me 100K words, the moral authority to blow off NaNoWriMo.

What'll happen?

Cassie Jonsdotter wakes up with a gasp. It's the Dream again, the bad one. And in a short time--years? months? she doesn't know--It'll be more than a dream. But how can she convince anyone? Crazy Cassie, skinny, flat-chested, pimply, going gray already at less than twenty (she was pretty sure), with the cross-eye. Who'd believe her? Nobody. But if nobody does anything...

She has to try, at least.

She kicks off the mess of ratty furs and rattier blankets that serves her as a bed, jumps to her feet and throws the pile into a corner. Can't have a regulation bed. Have to play the part of the crazy witch girl, after all. She crosses the cold wood floor of the hut on bare feet to the wood stove and cracks open the stove door to peep inside. The carefully banked coals still radiate heat and a few minutes of work stirs the fire to roaring life again. She's almost out of wood, have to see if she can talk Fred Davidson into chopping her some more. She mentally runs through her collection of mostly useless charms, wondering if Davidson would want one to ward off skunks... Maybe.

Maybe she can talk Davidson into doing something about the Dream.

"Fred," she'll say, "I have something Very Important to tell you," only it'll come out with a stammer and a mumble, or else a shriek. "You have to stop the Dream."

"What Dream? What are you talking about?"

But as usual by the time she's boiled a pan of oatmeal on the stove for breakfast, the exact details of the Dream are gone from her mind.

What can she tell him? "A bad Dream I can't remember?"

Why, she wonders in frustration, *can't* she remember? If the Dream is that important, and she knows it is, why does it *fade*? If the Higher Power, whoever, whatever, it is, wants her to *Do* *Something*, why does it make it so difficult to do it?

Whoever or Whatever is maybe not the Highest Power, she supposes.