My Other Blog

Since I have accepted my identity as a glorious failure as a writer, perhaps it’s about time I’ve pursued writing ideas to go with that identity.  And one idea that has captivated me for YEARS has been the idea for a sequel to one of my favorite novels, Gone With the Wind.

Now, there has already been an excellent sequel to Gone With the Wind, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley.  In addition, there has been a not-too-bad sequel called Rhett Butler’s People, and a sucky-horrible novella called ‘The Wind Done Gone’ by Alice Randall, who evidently played the race card to get this third-rate piece of govno published.  Hint to Alice: the next time you decide to write some crappy fan fiction and inflict it on the public, pick something you’re actually a fan of.

My concept of a Gone With the Wind sequel is a bit different from the previous. For one thing it’s set in outer space two hundred years in the future. For another, as our story begins, Scarlett O’Hara is dead and Melanie isn’t.  You see, the whole last bit of Gone With the Wind, from Scarlett’s miscarriage on, is actually a hallucination Scarlett is having as she’s dying.

Other bits of the story: Melanie wants revenge on Ashley because he’s a lousy husband, she kind of has a crush on Rhett, and Prissy, the slave girl who doesn’t know anything about birthin’ no babies, is a lawyer.  (In this futuristic Old South, slaves are educated and can run for office.  Common whites (poor white trash, non-slaveowners) complain about how the slaveowners would rather vote a slave into office than a common white.)

In order to write this weird epic, I will have to mentally transpose the whole story of Gone With the Wind into the futuristic setting before I can write the actual story at hand, create new names for all the characters, and so on.

The question of course that comes to mind is if this story, if I were to manage to write it, could be published.  The court case involving Alice Randall’s GWTW micro-epic would indicate that in spite of the rights of the Margaret Mitchell estate, a GWTW parody/sequel could be published.  And my ideas are a great deal farther out from Margaret Mitchell’s copyrighted work than Alice’s.

As I write about this, I’m filled with the desire to get this blog entry done and actually begin work on the novel.  This eagerness is something I haven’t felt for a while.  I do believe I’m actually going to do it.   (Scary, isn’t it?)

Another writing idea that was inspired by my last blog entry was to resume work on my old lesbian romance novel.  Now, the problem is that when I wrote it I was a Neopagan Marxist and now I’m a Catholic Conservative. (I’m still Gay, though.  And chaste. But I was chaste back then, too, though then it was because of unattractiveness and autism rather than because of religious convictions.)

So now I’m filled with the desire to write a lesbian romance novel that is also a work of Christian (Catholic) fiction.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll start a whole new genre— the sexy/chaste Catholic lesbian romance genre.

Now— my challenge to my reader(s): what weird and possibly unpublishable novel ideas are YOU playing around with?  Remember: anyone can fail at being a writer.  You’ve got to take some risks if you want to be a GLORIOUS failure.

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Sheep news: yesterday one of my Shetland sheep, Rue, had twin ewe lambs. This is the first set of twin lambs of the year. There were 4 single ram lambs born before, and one more single ram lamb this morning.  I need to explain to the girls that sheep are supposed to have twins!

The firstborn twin I named Katarzyna, it’s a Polish name and I’m on a Polish language and culture kick, plus I read a blog by someone called Katarzyna. I played around with other names for the other twin, even considered ‘Klom’ (a planet mentioned on Doctor Who).  Finally I settled on ‘Sana’, the main character in a manga/anime series I like called Kodocha.  After I named Sana, I remembered that I’d named a ram lamb Rei after a character in Kodocha last year. (Rei’s twin is Rhys, named after Gwen’s boyfriend in Torchwood.)

Failure in life is something I am well-acquainted with. Sometimes failure makes me cringe with embarrassment, sometimes I don’t much care.

But failure in writing is something I do care about, and I’ve noticed that I’m trying to hide it. I try not to mention the number of years I’ve been trying to write a completed novel. I even try to hide my age so people won’t know how many years I have been trying to finish a novel but in vain.

I’ve decided that now is the time that this must stop.  I must embrace my identity as a failed writer: not only that, I must learn to take pride in how extensive and complete my failure has been. Only in that way can I rise above being a mere commonplace failure into the ranks of the truly glorious failures.

One could tell from an early age that I was destined to be a failed writer.  I learned to read before I entered school, I made up stories in my head all the time, but I was clever enough to know that writing things down just invited fierce criticism from teachers and other kids.  Since I couldn’t bear being laughed at— strange, because I experienced so much of it— I kept my stories in my head where they belonged.

During the dreary years of my imprisonment in high school, I slipped up. I took a creative writing course, and actually turned in an assignment in which we were to write the first paragraph of a story. The teacher singled me out for praise, reading it to the whole class.

It was as follows: “In the beginning, John created the heavens and the earth. At least, that was John’s opinion. It was for that conceit that I resolved he must die.”

This might have been fatal to my career as a failed writer, but luckily none of the other kids noticed that the teacher had singled me out and continued to hate me as usual, and after a few feeble attempts to complete the next assignment, which was to finish the story, I gave up.

I managed to get through college without much in the way of writing attempts. I was having enough trouble keeping up with my German verbs and minor prophets. But after graduation and my failure as a schoolteacher (great with kids, lousy with parents and authority figures) I ended up here, at my farm in upper Michigan, where I began my first failed novel.

It was called “The Captain’s Woman” and was a regency romance about a young woman swept off her feet by a dashing pirate— who happened also to be a woman.

This was not long after I came out of the closet, and also after I lost my faith in Christianity and after a rocky four days as an atheist, became a Neopagan.

“The Captain’s Woman” made it to about page 70 or so before it ran out of gas— a pretty impressive journey considering that my other written work tended not to need more than one sheet of paper.  Although it was written many computers ago, in about 1990, I believe that I may still have a version of the manuscript around somewhere.

My other writings at the time were: ‘The Charm of Alien Suns’, which was either the first chapter of a novel or a finished short story, notable mostly for its Communist point of view and that group sex thing near the end.

Another was a Star Trek Voyager novel, inspired by the fact that I had a serious crush on the alien girl, Kes.  I worked on this for a long time— right up until the producers of the Voyager series got rid of Kes and replaced her with the Borg with the boobs.  I hate the Borg.  I really, really hate them.  They’re kind of like Daleks but less fun.  And so this discouragement caused my Voyager novel to founder.  It had reached about 70 pages at the time as well.

My career as a writing failure went on in a similar manner, until in about 2004-2005 I started work on a novel called ‘Viridian’ about an alien invasion.  As usual, being a good Pagan girl, I started my work with a prayer.  I cast around in my mind for which Pagan God to pray to: Freyja, Thor, Odin, Forseti?  And it popped into my mind to do a little experimental theology and pray to good old Jehovah and give Him a chance to prove that Christianity was true by helping me with the novel.

Well— Viridian went to about page 130, breaking my old record of around 70 pages, and I was thus obliged to become a Christian.  But Viridian ran out of gas all the same and my hopes for being a successful writer diminished.

Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that my life story IS that of a failed writer. Even if I finish a novel in the next month and it is published, there are all those years of failure to account for.  If someday some scholars examine my body of work, no matter how much success I might have from this point on, there will always be those might-have-beens. If only she had finished this novel or that one years earlier, what might she have become???

And so I am embracing my identity, not just as any old wannabe writer, but as a failed writer, and as a glorious failure at that.  Very few there are with the gifts to fail on the scale that I have done!

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On another topic: have you yet signed the Esperanto pledge, in which you promise to learn the international language Esperanto if 20 million others make the same promise?  Let’s face it: if 20 million people make that pledge, you would be silly NOT to learn Esperanto.  And it’s not as if learning Esperanto would take up much of your time.

Here are some Esperanto words to start with:

kato = cat

katoj = cats

hundo = dog

hundoj = dogs

mi amas katojn= I love cats

vi amas hundojn = You love dogs

lando = country

paco = peace (pronounced pat-so)

milito = war

To figure out on your own: Vi amas paco. Mi amas milito.

My mother has recently mailed a teabag to Obama.  I believe it was Constant Comment, or perhaps an Earl Grey.  It’s not that she wants Mr. O. to sit down and have a nice cuppa. It’s that for some reason she’s upset over the massive spending orgy Obama and his cronies are presiding over and what that has done to her life savings (what life savings?)

I haven’t sent a teabag.  It’s not just that I don’t know where my next teabag is coming from and I’m certainly not going to send one to some fellow I didn’t even vote for and who can afford to buy his own darn teabag.

It’s just that it seems so trivial to complain about some mere massive crushing national debt laid on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren when there are more serious reasons to be upset with Obama such as use of tax dollars to fund abortions.  Since abortion is the number #1 cause of death for Black children— nearly one out of every two Black children dies from an abortion— I’d kind of expected better from a Black president who says he is a Christian.

Besides the teabags-for-Obama campaign, there is also some move afoot by internet nerds to send condoms to Pope Benedict, as a protest of the fact that the pope has not changed the Catholic church’s moral teaching regarding chastity and replaced it with a ‘well, so long as you use a condom’ policy.  Since the pope does not have the authority to change the moral teachings of the church, one doesn’t know why the nerds are so upset, but that’s nerds for you.

Even if the Pope were not celibate and Catholic, it’s doubtful that a man of his advanced years won’t have much use for a million condoms, so I don’t know what to send him. A teabag?  I don’t know if the Pope even drinks tea.  I think he likes Fanta, but sending him Fantas through the mail might not be a good idea, the post office would get it all shaken up and when the pontiff opens a can he will get soda all over his fancy Pope clothes.

But I know what the Pope really wants— kittens!  It’s not just that the Pope is a well-known cat lover, or that the Pope’s cat Chico has written a book about him.

It’s that my cat Sarah Palin has just had a litter of kittens. Cute ones.  I think John McCain may be the father.  My cat John McCain, that is, not the other one.

I’m not going to mail the Pope the actual kittens, I’m getting attached to them and besides the Pope is not allowed to keep cats in the Vatican. I’m just sending him pictures. Why don’t YOU send the Pope pictures of YOUR cats? You know, in order to send the message that you support the right of the Pope to stay Catholic, unlike the condom nerds who want to make him change his religion.

It’s possible that there may be a kitten picture following these words. Or not. To see my cat picture album, go to http://www.ipernity.com/doc/36786/4569744/in/album/119130

As promised, today I am going to write about a topic dear to many hearts— buttockless chickens, better known as Araucana chickens— and how I got some.

The Araucana chicken is descended from a couple of South American chicken breeds known for laying blue eggs. None of these original chicken breeds is called ‘Araucana’, which is the name of a local Indian tribe.

The Araucana breed of chicken is accepted by the American Poultry Association (also known as the Evil Poultry Dictatorship or EPD), and in addition to the blue egg thing, they are known for being rumpless, lacking the tail found in most chickens. They also have tufts— little bits of feather on each side of the face. The tufted trait is a rather hard one to breed for, because if a chicken has two genes for tuftedness, it will die in the egg. Only chickens with only one tuftedness gene can live, and so there are a good many Araucana chickens with no tufts.  To see a picture of an Araucana chicken with tufts, visit the Araucana page at Wikipedia, the Liberal Encyclopedia .

There is another kind of blue-egg chicken bred from the same South American chickens that produced the Araucana. These chickens have buttocks, and have muffs and beards on their faces rather than tufts. When this breed was accepted into the American Poultry Association, the name Ameraucana was chosen since ‘Araucana’ was taken. Note the spelling of Ameraucana (there will be a test).  It’s not ‘Americana’ or ‘Ameracauna’.

To add confusion to the game, the chicken breed called ‘Araucana’ in Great Britain resembles the Ameraucana rather than the American Araucana, and has buttocks.

For added confusion, if you look at your poultry catalog (you DO have a poultry catalog, don’t you?) you may find a breed of chicken listed as ‘Araucana/Ameraucana’ or ‘Araucana/Americana’. These chickens are not Araucanas or Ameraucanas, but are crossbreds usually called ‘Easter Eggers’, and are bred for their ability to lay green and blue eggs.

A word about egg color. There are really only two chicken egg colors, white and blue. In both cases the color goes right through the egg to the inside. In the case of brown eggs, the color is a coating on the outside of the egg.  Green eggs occur when a chicken has genes for laying blue eggs, and for the brown coating that produces brown eggs.

If you want Araucana chickens that really are Araucanas and not Easter Egger crossbreds, they can be hard to find. I looked for hatching eggs from the usual sources (eBay and Eggbid), searched the internet, and still couldn’t get hold of an actual no-buttocks chicken.

Finally, I turned to Craigslist. I had thought that Craigslist was just a place for prostitutes and their clients to find each other, judging by news reports, but found there are more practical and less evil ads as well. A lady in Crivitz, Wisconsin had two Araucana roosters for sale.  Now, I live in Daggett, Michigan, but Crivitz, Wisconsin is very nearby, and so I quickly emailed and arranged the sale.

I asked the owner if she had any female Araucanas for sale, and she said she had one that had the same coloring as one of the roos.  I asked for directions to their place, but they said their roads were no good and we arranged to meet in the parking lot of the Walgreens in Marinette, Wisconsin.

I just wonder what the men on the security cameras at the Walgreens thought when they saw two pickup trucks in their parking lot, the exchange of money for chickens, and the loading of the birds from his pet carrier into mine. Probably thought it was some sort of shady deal, perhaps involving cockfighting.

And there was cockfighting involved as soon as I unloaded my new roosters into the henhouse. It just wasn’t very good cockfighting. The new Araucana roosters got beat up by my Brahma roosters. It was embarrassing. Brahma roosters are big, but not feisty.  They frequently get bullied by bantams (miniature chickens). Getting whupped by the Brahma roosters is like getting beat up by the Amish. What a disgrace!

After a few days, I noticed one of my Araucana chickens chasing a hen and mating her. What caught my attention about that is that it was the Araucana HEN.  After taking a closer look at ‘her’, I confirmed that ’she’ was actually just a small rooster with very few rooster feathers.

Since the seller charged me the same price for the ‘hen’ as for the roosters, I don’t feel I got cheated. The amazing thing about the whole deal is that they had Araucanas for sale that were, in fact, real Araucanas.  Amazing.

I notice that the Esperanto pledge located in the sidebar has only increased by one since the last time I looked, while the counter on this blog has gone up bigtime. That means there are folks out there reading this blog and NOT promising to learn Esperanto if 10 million people do the same.  That is NOT okay. Sign the promise NOW or I will let my Brahma chickens beat you up! Vi DEVAS lerni Esperanton! (You MUST learn Esperanto). At least if 10 million people promise to learn Esperanto, you must.

This is why people with autism probably shouldn’t blog.

I got a comment on my blog from a Mr. Cyde Weys (I’ll bet he was teased a lot in school— Cyde Weys/Side Ways, get it?)  Said comment was as follows:

Wikipedia, the “Liberal Encyclopedia”? Way to trash your credibility before even getting to the details. Here’s a tip for you: Wikipedia is written from a global perspective. There are a lot of English-speaking countries out there that are NOT the United States. The United States is the most conservative amongst them.

People in other nations tend to think that Wikipedia is too conservative.

Now, as a person with autism I have problems communicating with other people, tending to assume other people are as educated, intelligent and well-informed as I am when I ought to know that isn’t so.

When I use Wikipedia, I am as likely to use it in other languages rather than English. The Wikipedia I am most likely to use is the Esperanto version, commonly known as Vikipedio, la libera enciklopedio. For those of you who are not yet fluent in Esperanto (and shame on you!) this means ‘Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’.  The word ‘liberal’, in case you don’t know it, derives from the same Latin root word as the Esperanto word ‘libera’.  If you are not sure what the word ‘liberal’ means, do look it up in the dictionary. There you will find that the word has many meanings outside the political one Mr. Weys is familiar with. Mostly involving generosity with one’s resources. Can any intelligent person deny that Wikipedia is acting liberally (in the ‘generosity’ sense) by providing a very excellent encyclopedia for free in many languages?

Mr. Weys is also under the impression that Wikipedia is ‘global’ rather than American. This is not so. Like most institutions on the internet, it is affected by the fact that computer technology and internet access is much more widely available to Americans, and mostly in English. It has in the most recent time become more common in Western Europe, particularly among those fluent in English— which, in spite of English being taught in European schools, is far from everybody!

Non-European non-Americans are beginning to get computer access in the more techno-friendly parts of the world such as Japan and Korea. But for a great part of the globe, the internet— and Wikipedia— might as well not exist.

As for comparing the United States and other countries in regards to being ‘conservative’, I would like to assure Mr. Weys that this is just not possible. There are too many interpretations of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ floating around the globe to make that meaningful.  And as for the United States being the most ‘conservative’, that is a frank insult to the many nations around the world that are far more faithful to conservative principles than the US is.

But of course one cannot blame Mr. Weys too much for being ignorant if he doesn’t even speak any Esperanto. How can you communicate globally when you aren’t able to meet the rest of the globe halfway, linguistically speaking?

But of course as a person with autism I don’t have much of a chance of communicating globally myself no matter how many languages I speak or how much I know about the world (I know very little about the world, and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know).

For those of you who are waiting with bated breath (or baited breath, for you fishermen out there) for my update on buttockless chickens, fear not, that is still to come, possibly with actual pictures of actual buttockless chickens.  

One controversial issue about the writing life is this— is the dreaded ailment writer’s block a real condition, or is it just an excuse for the writer who has become lazy or has run out of things to say. And can an unpublished writer get writer’s block?

To delve into this issue we must first define what writer’s block is.  According to Wikipedia, the Liberal Encyclopedia, writer’s block is  a temporary loss of the ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to a lack of inspiration or creativity.

Therefore since writer’s block is a temporary loss of this ability, to get writer’s block you must have had this ability in the first place.  So I would assume that a person who wants to be a writer, or who perhaps even has a head full of writing ideas, but is never able to translate that desire or those ideas into words-on-paper, does not have writer’s block, but perhaps may have some other type of mental block where writing is concerned.

Some writers have said that only the real, published writer may claim to have writer’s block.  I empathize in that professional writers are constantly surrounded by people who claim to be would-be writers themselves, most of whom obviously don’t have the skill set. But I disagree that published status is the key point. I would say that to have writer’s block, one must have had some degree of success at writing which is now limited by this psychological block.  In other words, one has less than one has now. So the amateur writer who can write seven chapters of a new novel before giving up in despair, but who now cannot even finish the first chapter, can claim to have writer’s block.

Different writers seem to have different writer’s blocks. The author of the Wikipedia article seems to think writer’s block is caused by a lack of creativity— one cannot think of what is going to happen next in one’s story. But this has not been my own experience. I can always think of what is going to happen next— perhaps even several contradictory somethings. The problem is with writing them down.

I tend to have deep aversions to the story I am writing on, or even turning on my word processor program, when I have my version of writer’s block.  Sometimes I also have an aversion to blogging, or even checking my blog-comments and my email. But then again I have Asperger’s Syndrome and Social Phobia, not to mention intermittant depression, and so even my writer’s block can’t be expected to be normal.

One of the causes of my writer’s block is shame. After I have written something down— committed myself to it— I find it shameful. Perhaps I feel it is too self-revealing. I don’t want to look at it, I think it’s bad and horrible and likely to cause me shame if anyone were to read it.  Yet when I read what I was writing at that point months later, I find that it was very good, at least in my own opinion.

I suppose the obvious answer is to try to be less committed to the story I am writing— to think of it, not as my breakthrough novel, but just as a job of writing work to be done, something like hackwork.  Now, if it actually reads like hackwork I am sunk, but I hope there is some middle ground where I can work on a project without feeling that my entire future self as a writer is on the line.

Another aspect of my own experience of writer’s block is when the aversion is caused not by shame but by boredom. If I have had one writing project running around in my head for a long enough time I tend to lose interest in putting it down on paper. The answer to this problem is to strike while the iron is hot; or, conversely, to let a project rest for a while and come back to it later.

As a person with Asperger’s Syndrome the writing life is an attraction to me, it’s the kind of career where personal weirdness will not get you fired. But there is also the constant fear that in this area as in others I won’t measure up, that the ‘normals’ won’t embrace my work, that I am doomed to failure.  There have been people with Asperger’s Syndrome who had successful writing careers— Herman Melville, for one. But the question is whether I am destined to become more like Melville, or more like Captain Ahab, pursuing an obsession that will kill him in the end.

Tune in tomorrow:  when there will be an update on buttockless chickens! Possibly with photos!

The Russians are coming! And they are spamming the hell out of my comments. I’ve generated twenty spam comments since yesterday, nearly all with .ru endings.

Typically these spam comments are long lists of links. Several of the links promise things like big boobs or lesbian porn— which I’d be willing to bet bigtime is not anything to do with actual gay women.  One or two were lists of links that had random alphabet letters as titles.

But the majority were offers to show various celebrities in the altogether. Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria and Angelina Joli were among those mentioned.

Now, I don’t know but I’d be willing to bet that these women have never posed for nude pictures and then given permission to Russian spammers to post them online for the spammers’ profit. So it seems to me that these spammers are being unethical by not having permission, as well as by spamming and porning.

In addition they are highly discriminatory. All of the women they offered to show me nude were good looking women. There were no links to Phyllis Diller Nude or Joan Rivers Nude or Rosie O’Donnell Nude. How unfair!

And the discrimination continued.  They didn’t offer to show me a single nude male (not that I would be interested.) No Dan Rather Nude or Bill O’Reilly Nude or Barack Obama Nude or John McCain Nude.  Not even Bill Clinton Nude, and I’m sure that’s a relatively common sight.

And there were no historical figures included either. No Joseph Stalin Nude or Adolf Hitler Nude or Eleanor Roosevelt Nude.  Being a history buff, I might have clicked on an offer to see history in the buff.

But then again, I think William Howard Taft Nude would have been a bit more than anyone can take.

Recently I did an Ask.com search on the concept of Internet begging. I’d heard a news story in which this concept was mentioned.

In the stories I found they said that the poor people who used to panhandle you on the street were now able to do the same thing on the Internet.  I guess this is an improvement in some ways. Back when I lived in The Big City, I used to get really scared when someone came up to me and begged. The Internet provides more distance.

Of course the would-be Internet beggar must have Internet access and the ability to use a computer. More importantly, you must have a Paypal account which requires a credit card and/or a bank account. So I think for the most needy people— homeless alcohol addicts and the like— they will still have to beg the old-fashioned way.

Speaking of old-fashioned, I’ve always believed there is something shameful about begging, no matter what method you use to do it. But on a personal level I do see what the appeal of it is.

I myself have Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism) and Social Phobia, and as a result have not had employment for many years. This is not uncommon for people with Asperger’s. I haven’t been able to get disability payments, however. My family has been kind enough to help me out and even bought me some country property where I currently live. But now my surviving family is in tough financial shape and I may lose it all.

Given that, there is some temptation to beg but I would be ashamed to directly beg. It’s hard enough to mention the reasons I’m tempted— I’m only doing it to help create understanding of the Internet begging phenomenon, and hopefully create some compassion.

But what about other forms of Internet money making? Are some of them disguised forms of begging? Or are they legit pay for work?

For example, this blog I have on Today.com is a VIP blog. That means that Today.com pays me a dollar for each post. So when I post, is that a form of begging, or is that legit?

I also get paid based on the viewership of each page. So when I promote a page on reddit.com or some other site, does that constitute begging for readership which will bring me money (fractions of a penny, probably), or is that legit?

There is also a referral program at Today.com. This is my referral link. http://www.today.com/ctr.cgi?idx_mem=11478&mode=vip
If someone chooses to follow the link and join Today.com’s VIP blogger program to get paid to blog, is the money I make for the referral legit or is it the result of begging.

I also do other things online to try to make a few bucks. I write articles at Helium.com. My ‘About Me’ page there is at http://www.helium.com/users/44227  If you go there and read some of my articles, I get paid (in fractions of a penny, most likely). I also write for Associated Content, where my page is http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/43060/nissa_annakindt.html

Are all these things forms of begging? Sometimes I think so. But- what if I wrote a great book, and a publisher snapped it up, and sent me on a tour of all the talk shows and media programs to promote it? Is THAT begging? Is EVERYTHING begging?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

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One of the things I do far too often is play computer games. When I get seriously hooked on one I can spend hours on it and end up sore from sitting so long at the computer.  Lately my obsession has been a computer game called Totem Tribe.

I found it where I find most of my games lately, my WildGames console. At Wildgames you can play one or two sessions of games for free, and then can play more sessions for a fee per play. These fees can add up to money off on the game.

For budgetary reasons I try to get by on the free sessions, but every once in a while a game comes along that I can’t be reasonable about. Totem Tribe is one such game.

In Totem Tribe, the player takes the role of the scantily-clad tribal chieftainess, Aruku. I can’t decide whether that’s a blow for feminism or for male chauvinism. Anyway, each level of the game is set on a different island with different challenges.

You start out building your villages. As you progress through the levels more buildings for your village become available. Some buildings generate people, either workers or various types of military units.  Other buildings conduct research.

Each island has various goals you have to meet. You have to find various items— jewels, amulets, totem symbols— and you have to battle a variety of enemies. The enemies are things like walking mushrooms, animated stone slabs, floating eyeballs…. and then there are the Shades, evil black things that are hard to kill.

The first few levels were easy and I did fine on my own. Later I tended to do internet searches on ‘Totem Tribe’ and whatever the name of my current island was, to get to some tips and tricks to guide me through it.  On some levels I was very dependent on these guides!

After a few days of obsessive playing, I’m now at the final level, which is very tough. I followed directions on the walkthrough and planted groups of six towers at the top, bottom and left side of the village area to combat the periodic attacks by animated stone slabs, and built up a crowded village and researched all techs that were available.

Then I planted the combat flag at the enemy’s stone idol, which set all troops to combat there, while I spent my time back at the village directing my construction crews to repair buildings damaged by the repeated attacks.

After what seemed like hours of this, my soldiers destroyed the idol, only to have it replaced by an evil alien squid which seems to be ten times more difficult to kill. I’ve hit it with various spells from my temple, as well as having my troops go at it for a few hours, and its life line is still almost all green with only a tiny bit of red at the tip.

My current strategy is to disassemble some village buildings and rebuild them more closely to one another in the hopes of getting more space to place a couple more soldier-generating buildings.  All the while continuing to repair the village as it continues to be attacked.

Of course, all this game playing doesn’t help me get any writing done, though I lie to myself and say it’s helpful in plotting my fantasy novel. I keep resolving to not allow myself to play until I’ve done some work on my novel, and yet I keep allowing myself to play the game— just a little— first, and before you know it the day is done.

Perhaps I should have given computer games up for Lent. I didn’t really think about that option. Instead I resolved to read only Christian fiction and non-fiction for the duration of Lent. (I have a friend, the Sci-Fi Catholic whose blog is in my blogroll, who gives up ALL FICTION during Lent. I couldn’t handle THAT much sacrifice.)  So, for the time being I’m trying to simply be more moderate in my use of computer games. (Pray for me!)

Being rather insecure about my writing (and everything else) I’m always very interested in descriptions of the writing process— how real authors went from that first glimmer of an idea to a finished novel. I had the idea to document one of my own writing ideas from that first glimmer to either a finished novel or when I give it up in despair, whichever.  (I must point out it may not be a good idea to share about a fictional idea while you are working on it. I also have another project about which I will not blog. I’m trying to see what works best for me; and what works well for you may not be the same thing at all.)

It started when I was out in the barn dealing with some of my goats. At least one of the cats was out there with me and I called her ‘Princess Kitty’— a generic nickname of affection I give to my cats.  That was when I got the idea that ‘Princess Kitty’ would make a good title for a fantasy novel.

In the next few minutes I roughed out, in my mind, the beginnings of a story. A young man awakes in an old woman’s cottage and sees a cat staring at him.  The old lady says that’s Princess Kitty. The young man asks why the cat is staring at him.  The old lady says ‘because you’re sleeping in her bed’.  Later the cat changes into a small girl. A girl named Kitty, to be precise.

The next part is to figure out who these three people are.  The young man is Milo, a young wizard who is on a quest, and who is being chased by the people who killed/captured his mentor (haven’t worked out all the details on that yet). The cat-girl is Kitty, and she is part of a race of shape-shifting White Tigers. She is also the only survivor of an otherwise extinct royal family.

The old woman is called Mental Rosa, and she is both a noted crazy lady and a skilled wizard.  The name was inspired by the Spanish word ‘mentirosa’ which I heard in a soap opera episode a few days ago when a fellow called a girl a ‘puta mentirosa’ which I believe means ‘lying whore’.  Somehow my brain transcribed ‘mentirosa’ to ‘Mental Rosa’ which I thought was cool.

The fantasy world is one in which there are five prominent kingdoms— as yet unnamed, but they will be based on the Five Elements of Asian tradition. The Five Elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water.

Looking up those Five Elements on Wikipedia I found a table of associations for each Element. There are colors, directions, magic animals, livestock, fruits and grains, among others, and I am using this to develop identities for each of the kingdoms. (This is where I got the idea of making Kitty a White Tiger.)

A principle I am adopting for this story is that of simplicity. My plotting tends to get bogged down in subplots and elaborate backstories, which is why I find it so hard to get a project finished. In this story I am trying to stick more closely to the basic idea.

The official conlang to be used in the story is  Volapük. What is Volapük? Well, actually I ought to explain what a conlang is first. ‘Conlang’ is short for ‘constructed language’. Think of the Elvish language in Tolkien, or for that matter the Klingon language in the Star Trek series.  Many fantasy and sci-fi writers create their own conlangs for their project. Rarely is it as elaborate as Tolkien’s Elvish, these conlangs often consist of a few words.

I actually have an original conlang of my own somewhere (I hope I saved the computer files) but it didn’t seem like quite the right thing for this story, and in addition it would be a distraction since I would be busy creating more of the conlang when I should be writing.  So I decided to use an already-existing conlang, Volapük, which was started in 1880 as an international language but lost out to the more popular conlang, Esperanto. (Currently Esperanto has 2-4 million speakers while Volapük is estimated to have only about 25 speakers)

I have an opening scene in mind for the story which involves Milo being pursued by soldiers. Milo uses his magic ability, Finding, to find a way to escape the soldiers. It leads him to the edge of a cliff, where soldiers corner him, but the cliff falls into the river below and Milo is washed away into the neighboring kingdom where he meets Mental Rosa and Kitty.

I also have to work out some of the details of Milo’s quest. I believe he will have to retrieve an item from each of the four kingdoms he visits.  But the important thing he’s carrying with him in his travels is Kitty, and each item he obtains will also reveal things about Kitty.  I think there will also be changes in Milo connected to each item, so that he will be a very different person by the time his quest is through.

Anyway, that is the story of my current writing idea, and my hope is that it will encourage other writers and would-be writers to be more confident in their own ideas. Please, if you are reading these words and they have helped you, do leave a comment!