"Who is that girl in the brown suede cabby hat?"

-Random person in the hallway, 2005

For
those of you who are curious, that girl in the brown suede cabby hat is
me. 5'8" of pure, unadulterated random geekiness. Blondish hair, bluish
eyes, vague expression due to running into walls. And no, Britt, I do
not resemble seaweed in any way whatsoever.

I find myself irresistably attracted to guys of the Ponder Stibbons persuasion - skinny, geeky, preferably with glasses. I can't explain this phenomenon. It's just that something about bulging muscles and a tendency to talk incessantly about sports inexplicably put me off. I have no idea why I just felt the urge to tell you that.

I write. Obviously.
Fantasy, sci-fi, whatever. And I draw. Badly. And I listen to Relient K
incessantly. And TFK. Heck, I can throw up mah rawkfist with the best
of 'em.

It has been far, far too long since I posted anything here. My deepest apologies for that. Lately, my spurts of creativity have been too few and far between. At the very least, I'm hoping to get several one-shot stories up in the near future. Current status for the stories currently up here? Well, Second Chances seems to have lost all momentum whatsoever. I'm not sure it will ever get finished. I will attempt to do some work on it, as I am reluctant to give up entirely. The next chapter of Treeworld is about half written, although to be frank I have no idea where I'm going between now and the end of it. If anything is ever going to get done with Treeworld, I'll have to sit down and have some serious brainstorming time before I do anything else. Elves, Inc. just underwent a burst of enthusiasm, and has been revamped to include my own mythology rather than Tolkein's, which has been much over-abused and besides is not mine to use.

In other news, I have recently been working on organizing my very own CabbyHat Character Adoption Agency. I have a number of characters that I absolutely love and put a lot of effort into creating and developing, but can't find a good place to put them. Rather than consigning them to my circular filing cabinet, I put them up for adoption so that I don't have to get rid of them entirely. Drop me a line if you're interested in adopting a character!

Humph. All my friends on Fictionpress have conspired to make me feel bad by singing the praises of my writing on their accounts. Payback time! Go read the workings of Official Rambler, Fishguts-sama, and Spade Dawson, excellent authors and good friends of mine. And prepare to be hooked. Also check out the works of llcorp2 of Black Dragon Publications, who, aside from being a great writer with fresh, original ideas, is the best reviewer I have ever known. If only everyone could be that constructive...

Update: May 17

I put up another little one-shot, "Benjamin's Lesson." It kind of ticks me off how an adventurer can go through a standard fantasy game/story and rack up the body count almost without thinking about it. I mean, even when they're human or humanoid, like bandits or something, the hero can just go through and kill them all just because "they attacked first" and "I'm in the right; I'm the hero." Don't they ever stop to think that these are actual human beings, with a soul, a heart, a personality, a mind? Nothing justifies just randomly killing all that because it's more convenient than negotiating or just incapacitating them and leaving them tied up. Anyway. That was my rant for the day. No idea if I'm alone in thinking this, but it felt good to get it off my chest, anyway. So... read and review!

Update: May 25

Benjamin's Lesson has been edited, thanks to the welcome input of Taltush/Mei Mei. However, I think that no story can ever be edited to perfection, and certainly not on the first try, and so I still crave your input. In other news, I'm taking off for YC in Edmonton in one hour. If you're going to be there, watch for me in my plumed tricorn hat and "hug the pirate" sign.

Update: July 21

I took Pursuit off. As some of you may remember, it was my NaNoWriMo submission for last year, which means that there were going to be certain things wrong with it as a given. Among these things is that it happened to be written during NaNoWriMo. What I needed most was some time away from this story, to think objectively about it and let myself make a decision that wasn't too closely tied to my love of the story. It was incredibly hard to give up on this story, because at the beginning of the month - and this will sound silly - I promised my characters I wouldn't let their story die. That was a mistake. Which is okay. Making mistakes is part - huge part - of the glorious, frenzied experience that is NaNoWriMo. And I've learned from it. Next time I undertake an endeavour like this, I won't get myself too attached to the rough draft, in case it turns out to be irredeemable, as was the case with Pursuit. It still hurts, but seeing as the way to fix it would have been a complete rewrite with all new characters, plot, dialogue, events, backstories, etc. I think it might just be easier to make the mature decision and scrap it. It's still sitting in my computer files, because after a month-long series of labor pains there's no way I can murder this baby completely, but I won't burden you or myself with the effort of being polite about it. So I'll try again this November. Please, don't expect anything much from me for a bit. There might be - correction, there are - some angsty one-shots or poetic types in my system, so that's all you get in the near future. This is one advantage to not having many fans that don't know you personally. :P