Wandery Wednesday: "Maladapt"

I daydream. Always have. It's part of being a writer, I guess. I'm always thinking of new settings, new characters, new dynamics. When I was a kid, I would act those stories out. (I had a copious collection of cap guns, plastic swords, and other assorted cheap trinkets). Eventually, I realized that I was getting too old for that behavior to seem normal anymore. So everything got bottled up in my head. For the most part, it was channeled into writing. Hence, you know, the English degree, the blog, the book of short stories and poems... 

But sometimes I still find myself acting out scenes in my head, getting into the mindspace of characters to analyze how they would react, how they would speak. Again, something a lot of writers do, to some degree or another. Sometimes, though, I wonder. As awful as the lives of some of my characters are, why do their lives often seem better than mine? 

I don't know. I don't know. 

Wandery Wednesday: "I Went to the Archery Park. I Did an Archery."

So a long time ago (before college), I shot archery. I was...moderately good. I placed in a couple state youth tournaments, and my archery group placed as a team multiple times. So...moderately good. It helped that I would spend an hour or two a day over the summer just shooting archery. I actually wore out a Yellow Jacket target, which are designed to reconstruct themselves. And then I started college and started working full-time during the summer and, well, my free time dropped considerably.

It's probably been a year and a half since I shot archery last. Until last weekend. I discovered a dinky little archery park about a quarter-mile from my apartment. It's nothing fancy, just an open area with some distance markers and some moldy haybales to shoot into. But all the same it was fun to see that my overall ability hasn't degraded much with time. Back when I was shooting ~two full tournament rounds a day, it was a good day if I averaged 85% of shots into a tennis-ball sized zone of the target at twenty yards. I managed that this weekend, which is pleasantly surprising.

Anyway, it seems that very few people actually use the archery park for, you know, archery. This became apparent to me after the first pedestrians to pass spent several minutes watching me, examining my car, and generally rubbernecking. I felt a bit violated. Then the old ladies walked by and actually wrote down my license plate number. After that I decided to leave...

I don't really know where I was going with this, other than "don't be a menace to South Central while shooting your bow in the hood." Or something.

Oh, and also. I realized that Saturday Evening Warfare (Wednesdays) was taking up a disproportionate amount of my writing time. (You know how hard it is to edit down 50+ pages of Skype textlog into a five-page blog post? HARD.) That means that, for the time being, SEWW is on hiatus. Sorry. Instead you get these...blog...things. About random junk I've done. Sorry.

Heretical Babblings: Winter Has Come

Hello and welcome to the inside of my skull. Don’t mind the clutter! I’ll clean the place out someday. Someday. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, as I’m about to enter finals territory and it’s cold cold cold. But still, I’ve carved out some time to read a couple books and watch some TV and just generally be a lazy bugger. So here’s the scoop on what’s been floating around in my head lately. I’ve slapped this together with absolutely no concern as to narrative flow or any of that jim-jam. Deal with it. Also there’s no pictures. Deal with it, I sez.