Twas the night before camp

And all through my mind, the words were clamoring for midnight o’ one. Characters danced and begged “please let the writing begin.” Not until the first of July. I would gleeful cry, its almost, almost the day.

Yeah, I wish this was me, but the closer July 1 creeps. The more my thoughts have become negatively introspective. “Oh we can’t possibly write this July, too much going on … ” And since I lost files last week, my inner doubts have cackled and crowed, “see we told you this wasn’t a good month” I keep opening a new document to get down details for my story, get ready to write. And my mind is as blank as a brand new dry erase board. So I close the document and putter around with something else. Hoping that when tomorrow morning roles around I will have something to write down.

Some of you will say she has writers block, and it may well be. Except this old girl has a trick, called random scene writing. Meaning I think about a specific character or place and let my mind wonder and my clever fingers describe what is happening. It works for me, but I have been leery to employ this technique prior to the start of camp. Sometimes I wind up with a brand new project. Oops.

So for all those preparing for NaNoWriMo summer camp, good luck and happy writing. For the ones thinking about joining the madness, come on in. The ink is fine. Cheers, james

App Woes

Update: Finally I figured out what happened to my files. When I cleared my cache, I also cleared some misc file bits. It was the clearing the misc bits that deleted my files. I have emailed the app maker and I hope there is a solution. Until then I know to make sure Not to delete the writer p misc file bits. If you have been following along with app. I do still recomend this app. So now I will go back to getting ready for Camp NaNo with Writer Plus app in my survival writing kit.

Well as I write tonight, I am racking my brains over what happened. Last night I was happily gushing over Writer Plus and preparing for Camp NaNo. This morning my folders and my documents in the app were gone. 😥

I emailed the app maker, Eric was sympathic to my problem. He isn’t sure what happened and the only thing I did was clear my cache on my phone storage. Since everything was suposed to be safe on the sd card, I didn’t think anything of clearing the cache. It is something I routinely do without problems. The Writer Plus files were the only thing effected. I am hoping that Eric will be able to fix the glich or tell me what happened. I still believe in this program and support it. However I will be backing my files up from now on.

Cheers on this sunny Saturday evening, james

Automous Driving Vehicles

The New York Times had an article about self driving vehicles. In a senerio of an unavoidable accident between the vehicle and its passengers and a group of pedestrians. The study, through a host of surveys, found drivers would rather the vehicle protect the driver and passengers than swerve into an obsticle thus saving the pedestrians. The main question the article raised was how do we program a sense of morality into a computer program when our morals are not clear. We want to do the right thing so long as we are not adversely affected. The more interesting question to me would have been why the driver didn’t take control of the wheel or apply the brakes. Although in the survey that may not have been an option.

One of my stories takes place three years in the future and the cars do have an auto drive function. However in my story car and driver are not seperate enities where the car has complete control. More like the driver oversees the driving and if something comes up like the unavoidable accident the driver takes control. Traffic accidents are greatly reduced but not eliminated, long distance truck drivers have a self driving function and allow the driver to sleep and the truck would alert him if something came up. However in certain places this function wouldn’t work and the human driver maintains his job.

The main driving force behind my story’s auto driving system is the road being able to communicate with the vehicles. If a mile down the road a car was in the lane broke down, the road notifies the vehicles to begin slowing down and manuever around the obsticle. Or a car is making a left turn and there is on coming traffic, the vehicle would be notified to get out of harms way. One flaw that is mentioned is older classic vehicles that aren’t equipped with the auto drive function. In the story, corrivettes have been outlawed, I am still fleshing out the hows, whys and what fors. Older vehicle can be street legal as long as the driver pays an extra fee. Traffic control is handled by drones, ticketing, vehicle inspections, and traffic violations.

So what are your thoughts on self driving vehicles? Should we or shouldn’t we? Cheers on the last Friday night before Camp NaNoWriMo. james

Article link posted heree

Writer Plus App

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.easy4u.writer

Update: Just wrote a post in the app and sent it to WordPress. No fuss, no muss, just cool. Too bad it doesn’t come with spell checker. Awesome.

I downloaded this app on Saturday, and I have been very impressed. The format is a simple word processer that is very user friendly. I really like that all my files are stored on my phone’s sd card. Yes, I know, I am one of those people except I’m not. My phone is an acceptable method of writing when pen and paper or my computer is unavailable. However it is not my main writing tool. I found my phone’s standard memo app quite useful for recording thoughts or notes I needed to capture quickly. The loveliness vanished when it came time to get the notes off the phone. My choices were write or email. I chose to email the back up and to write the scene on paper and put it in the notebook.

This was a good practice except all the time lost. I am hoping with the Writer Plus app, I will write in one main document and I have already created a notes page and I have started typing the last four pages I wrote so that I can still work on the story before camp but have a clean starting point.

Best of luck if you are reporting to Camp July 1st too. May the word counts soar and your goals be met and surpassed.

Cheers, james.
#Writerplus #campnano

Reblog: Julie Allen

Lesson In The Kitchen – http://wp.me/p4Uooj-hH

Ms. Julie is a great lady and I have shared some of her posts before. Tonight this post is full of sadness over the past tradgies. But Hope is the all encompassing message. I hope you will take a look and her post touches you as it touched me. Cheers, james

135 Readers, Followers, Friends

Dear Readers,

I checked my notifications tonight. A pleasant suprise awaited me, 135 people have chosen to hang out with me on this blog.

Thank you for supporting me and my writing!

I will continue to write and I hope inspire each of you as you have inspired me with your thoughts and feedback. Cheers, james

Camp NaNo

I never liked summer camp as a kid. So why would I want to get involved in a virtual summer camp? No bugs! LoL!

November was my first attempt at NaNo and while I didn’t make the count. I did write every day through the month. Afterwards I lost my momentum and haven’t spent as much time writing. I am hoping by setting a lower word goal I will be more motivated to suceed.

I wrote about all my writing projects in my previous post. So it is tempting to say let’s work on all of them. I am furtherest in my
writing on Owl Story and MEI. I was torn between these two stories. However MEI seems to be a project well suited to this type of high intensity writing. It has a slightly futurestic setting with a few significant changes. Most of my research is in the manuscript and book making aspects, rather than world building. I have also dug around into Robert E. Howard’s writing career and life as well as the Conan stories. Since it is his chronicles that she is comissioned to make. I am more focused on the story and not on the world the story takes place.

In Owl Story, I am still world building as I write. So my mind is split on the story as well as figuring out the rules of world as well as building it. Time consuming and richly rewarding, but not a fast and furious type of project. I would rather spend the time and effort to lay a solid foundation down. I get the feeling this will be a long if not a multibook project.

A really cool thing I stumbled on the NaNo forum is a Tea Swap. As I understand it, you send three to five teas including enough for at least five cups of each to your swap buddy. All teas must be mailed out by July 7th. So I signed up for one swap buddy. Also there are Tea Angels, folks that mail tea out to folks that didn’t get anything. The whole thing sounds awesomely fun.

So signed up for camp, camp project picked, tea swap signed up for. Cabin assignments go out in a week or so and then tea assignments come after June 30th. Fun plans for this summer.

Cheers on this peaceful Sunday afternoon, james

Writing Projects Update

I am working on several writing projects. I have Owl Story, there is a page for it under Pages. Saving Emilsa also has a page listed under Pages. Zombie Shark story/screen play I play with in moments of humor. I need to set up a page for it. Then my first NaNo project Manuscripts Ephinanies Illuminated, or MEI for short. Plus two untitled stories that are only a page or two right now.

Cheers and staying busy, james

Mid Year Ponderings

Today is Friday June 3rd, the year is at the half way mark. What? Where did it go? I was flipping through my old posts, thinking didn’t I just post that. But no it was way back some time ago.

The old folks say the older you get, the faster time moves. If its moving this fast at 34, a year when I’m 74 might feel like a slow blink. I looked at my unfinished NaNo project, haven’t touched it since the end of February. Tonight I changed that, two pages written and I still have the flow going. I just took a quick minute to finish this post.

So I am still writing, still blogging, journaling, although a wee bit slower than before. Cheers on this stormy evening, james