The Game of Life

The most important reference book for this year's NaNoWriMo attempt.

National Rolfe Blogging Month

November is all Rolfe all the time at Repeated Expletives. Because I'm doing NaNo again while working ten hour days 5-6 days a week.

Blog on, Rolfe. It's your show.

NaNoWriMo Winner!

The story is far from complete and then Rolfe and I still have to compare notes and see about combing the two, and of course massive editing...

But I did it! I've won my third NaNoWriMo! In your face, space coyote!

Sharing is Herring

In past years I have shared as I worked on my book. I have yet to this year. Here you go.

Deep in the Amazonian rain forest a shaman of the Jaguar people is leading a bloodhound dog and his Asiatic friend into the village of the Matis tribe. The people of the tribe all smile at the visitors as they pass.

A smile can mean different things. There are those smiles plastered permanently on the faces of those who were taught that smiling was a good policy and would help them succeed in life. It lacks sincerity. There is the smile of the amused, people who notice something out of the ordinary and take pleasure in it. Often someone who has the upper hand in a tough situation will break out in an opportunistic grin. Like in a knife fight when someone has disarmed his opponent and knocked him to the ground taking a moment to savor his impending victory. There is the smile of winning at a game and the loser's smile of a game well played. Children will have bright smiles when they open a present and discover something wonderful inside. Pot heads lazily smile at the wonderful sensations their doped up brains are receiving.

The Matis had the smile of content, that genuine smile of knowing that some days are better than others but to sit around worrying about it wasn't going to help things. Dieu smiled back at them with the blushing smile of someone not used to being around people with ideas of modesty that involved a string to tie their genitals in place. He had removed his trench coat as a matter of comfort. The jungle was no place for layering. Wearing his canvas sneakers, jeans, and a ratty old t-shit he still felt immensly overdressed. He had paid attention in school, seen the National Geographic specials, had always known tht tribes like this still existed in many places across the globe. The unassuming beauty of it doesn't sink in until you are the odd one out.

He didn't even have any tattoos. Only the children of the Matis were unadorned in this manner. Did they think he was a child as well? Were they staring at how strange he looked to them?

Tate also felt stared at. As a dog he was used to walking among humans largely unnoticed. In this place he was a real oddity. It didn't help that he was having to pant constantly in an attempt to regulate his body temperature. Druel was pouring into his mouth and dripping onto the ground. Not a very civilized look for a visitor from an advanced planet over eight light years away. He reminded himself that he was not an emmisary sent to make contact in the name of his people with the people of the jungles of South America. He was a rogue student on a forbidden planet utilizing its natral resources to make contact with another alien species. Telling himself this didn't change his embarassment over all the druel. Hopefully that hungry looking one wasn't looking at him the way he thought he was looking at him. Best to stay close to Tumi.

They entered the shaman's oka. Behind them the rain began to fall. It was a regular occurrence in a forest named for the phenomenon. The people outside took refuge in shelters while the water from the sky formed a natural veil in front of the door separating the world outside from the one which they were now entering into. The ceremony had not yet begun, but the space seemed prepared. The air crackled with an energy betraying frequent travels into worlds known only by a few yet inhabited by the most curious race of the galaxy. From across the veil, the elves were calling.

Tumi had never known them as the elves. They were the spirits. Everything had spirits, which is why everything was capable of communicating with the spirits. There were spirits and the spirits. Both were built around the same function. The spirits existed as a curiosity for not needing anything but spirit. Tumi sang a song about this as he sat out three bowls and poured out the tea for all to drink. The song was not one meant to be heard, but to be experienced. It was sung from his spirit to the spirits with him in this place. The pitches and vibrations resonated in the vehicles of which carried spirits of one named Dieu and another named Tate.

As the song built, Dieu could not explain his sudden visions of the high school cheerleading squad. The cheerleaders jumped and chanted. Their clothes melted away and revealed the young girls underneath. They were girls of the Jaguar People, pierced, tattooed, shaking pom-poms of grasses. Their voices rattled through his head as they sang, “We've got spirit. Yes we do. We've got spirit. How 'bout you.” He hadn't even touched his drink yet.

Tumi drank from his bowl and encouraged Tate to go next. Not certain how to proceed, he started to bend down so he could lap it up as had been his customary mode of drinking during his stay on Earth. Tumi stopped him. With exagerated motions meant to demonstrate the proper procedure, the shaman took his own bowl from the floor with both hands cupped under it, lifted it to his face, and made a tipping motion. This was the way to drink the tea. Tate relaxed his built up reflexes and let his modified paws drink like a humanoid would. It felt good to use hands again. So good he almost didn't mind the bitter taste of the tea.

Dieu picked up his bowl as Tumi encouraged him to do so. He drank it down and shuttered with the effort of stifling his gag reflex. The shaman smiled and began to chant again. The road had been prepared. The journey had begun. The Matis indian cheerleaders were telling Dieu to go team, go.

A rumble was building. Dieu remembered going to a high school performance of The Rainmaker. Lizzie in the form of a bare breasted native girl was dancing as a rumble like a big chunk of sheet metal being shaken violently built up. Dieu grabbed her and kissed her as he took on the persona of Starbuck. Interesting name, Starbuck. Wasn't Starbuck a sailor? A bucker of stars. Stars opening up all around him as plain Lizzie in the guise of a non-descript woman wearing a black top, black skirt, black stockings, black boots, black sunglasses, black scarf, black blanketing the space between the thousand points of light as celophane sheet metal ripped through the senses and light assembled into dancing beings saying come and see, and he saw. A lone howl in the desert by an abandonned shack of a ship. What's that boy? John has fallen into the not so abandonned mine shaft.

The elves danced and sang as Tumi sang. The song filled his spirit and was not a song, but a map. Look at the stars. Pitsicato twangs telling him to follow the cello hits road. A spirit floated by and asked if he was thai dyeing. A pair of elves escorted him from the stage. Wrong seen. Too much. Jerry berries fucked from bushes this way. Exit stage left behind.

Tumi says tank ewe, sheep will. Back to mountain dew and his little dog chew. Mister tater tot head up town grill. New vader of the lost barks. Ayes have tits. Chew own dong hits weigh four tongues oven RC. Sea? Know the dessert dew drops cheap fall anon might red lightly. Olive juice most flower ore weed eye.

On Dirks hood. Hate orka man. Justice hue archoo. Guess who's tight? Sank two. Dose Elvis car sympathy wired. Ah, greed.

In a little hut in the jungle a shaman laughs as his visitors come back to Earth. As they fall out of the haze into dazed, Tumi chuckles. The chuckle becomes a giggle, which becomes a laugh, which becomes a roar. A young Korean guy and a bloodhound stare at him quizically. Tumi stops laughing long enough to say the first and only intelligable words of a language both of them understand to be language.

“Eyes half tits!” And Tumi is lost once again in his roar of laughter while a young Korean guy and a bloodhound look at each other and shrug.

51,011 words later

...and I'm feeling pretty good about myself. But there's still 6 scenes I want to write, and 2,866 words I want to delete.

Accomodations

All this NaNoWriMo I've been writing using the old iBook running Ubuntu. It is a rock solid combination of hardware and software. Full word processor with OpenOffice. I've got Firefox for internet. But the old G4 compatible version of Ubuntu does not have Flash capability, so it is impossible for me to watch any kind of video files that may distract me (porn) for extended periods of time (masturbation).

I have the computer set up in the living room. There I can sit in the easy chair, legs propped up, computer on my lap keeping me warm. It's so cozy I often have to fight the urge to nap. The yellow dog stays by my side to nap for me. I also think she is stealing my ideas and selling them to Bill Maher's dealer.

miscellaneous stuff that came up in searches

I'm 8,331 words into my novel, so I think I've got time to goof off for an hour or so. Here's interesting articles that came up while searching for articles on reptilian aliens:

• Environment. Whoever wins tomorrow, we're getting a better president for the environment than we've had in the past 8 years. That's a big plus, even if McCain's plan seems dubiously wishful to me. Offshore drilling will not reduce our carbon footprint.
  
  Jake, I never did hear what your environmental and global warming platform was. (Or if I did, I rudely forgot it, and deserve a smacking.) Got time to illuminate?


• The plight of the Axolotl. If you were the biggest animal that was capable of regenerating when chopped in half, you'd think you'd be able to survive whatever man could throw at you. Sadly, the remarkable little Axolotl is in danger of going extinct in the wild.


• I'd missed this article about T-Rex bloodcells found in 2005. Pretty cool. I wonder how many other fossils in museums have a juicy core. Of course, nutcase creationists think this somehow proves their insane assertions about the world only being 6,000 years old. Yes, it seems unlikely soft tissues would survive for millions of years. But it's also plenty unlikely they'd survive even just a few thousand years. I'm no expert, but I imagine once you encase something in solid rock with no oxygen, it's really not changing much until it's unearthed. Hopefully I'll remember to look for updates on this 42,000 words from now, 'cause it's interesting.


• More stories I'd missed. Did you know that working nightshift is a "probable carcinogen"? Apparently, if you work at night and sleep during the day, your chances of developing tumors goes up, especially breast cancer and prostate cancer. It's been widely known for a year now, but I didn't have a clue. I'd start workin' days, if I was inclined to start workin' in the first place.

Hmm... maybe I shouldn't post this. Considering some of those topics, I might be distracting Jake by accident.

Birth of a Warrior

I was digging through some old writing and found this short story. Enjoy it as a NaNoWriMo warm up.

Uudu was hunting when he saw the streak across the sky. Something large had fallen and then struck the ground not more than a day's walk away. His adventurous nature told him to try and find where the object had landed. Slinging his spear onto his back, he gave up the day's hunt and started towards where he hoped to find evidence of the crash.

As he approached, the usual sounds of the forest faded. The eerie silence made his pulse quicken and allowed him to hear his bare feet against the soft debris of decomposing leaves and grass. Something lay just ahead.

It looked harder than hard and had edges too perfect for having been devised by nature. In his experience, the stuff of the wilds obeyed a chaotic law that said grow every which way until you have what you need. This was sterile, like the head of his spear. It was designed for a purpose, or so it seemed, by intelligent hands.

A creature sat next to the object. It looked as much like himself as two dogs of different breeds look alike. While he had roamed the woods in the ceremonial loin cloth of hunters, this creature seemed to have wrapped itself from head to toe in some sort of green and brown cloth, leaving nothing more than hands and a face exposed.

Uudu approached in the cermonial manner of greeting, arms stretched wide and head tilted towards the sky. The creature next to the strange object reached into and opening in the cloth that wrapped his body and took out a silver tube. It's arm extended towards Uudu with one end of the silver tube pointing at the creature's face, and the other at Uudu.

Some small stick like feature on the tube was moved by the creature, and a loud noise issued forth from it. Then Uudu felt a pain in his chest. It felt like that time he had fallen from the cliffs by the sea and landed on some jagged rocks. Instinctively looking down to check his body, he noticed blood issuing forth from a whole in his left breast. The hunter went to his knees and tried to remember what Mala had taught him. Breathe deeply, visualize, the hole as closing, imagine yourself as whole and healthy.

The creature wrapped in green still gripped it's silver tube and started to approach. Uudu could now intuit the being's intentions. It wanted to kill him and cook him for a meal. There was plenty of food in the woods for an entire tribe. Why would he ask another individual to give up its life for a feast without even knowing them?

The reality of the situation opened a new pathway through his thoughts. This was a creature of fighting, it fought anything and everything and always to the death. Uudu's only chance of survival was to defeat it in a fight, and that meant killing this creature.

Diverting his focus from the wound on his chest. Uudu let his supporting knee go limp as one of his hands reached for his spear. The creature seemed slow to follow the smooth movements of the proficient hunter. A spear was racing towards his chest before he realized what actions had transpired. The spear sunk deep into it's chest.

A silver tube fell to the ground.

A creature wrapped in green screamed in pain.

Uudu felt the life flowing out of the wound in his chest, closed his eyes, and performed the rite of passing in his ethereal body.

Mala called for Ohmba. The young girl came to the great mother's side as quick as she could.

Mala spoke with a mixture of sadness and joy. "Ohmba, you are with child and shall give birth in six cycles."

"Yes, great mother, I know."

"You shall give birth to our tribe's first warrior."

"Great mother, what is a warrior?"

Mala looked towards the horizon as the sun was setting. She seemed lost in contemplation as the words came from her lips. "I don't know."

National Novel Writing Month

The time is upon us! Saturday is the official start of National Novel Writing Month! I know I've hooked Rolfe into writing with me this year. I'd also really like to see clusterlizard give it a go.

What is National Novel Writing Month? A crazy competition running through November where you challenge yourself (and others) to write a 50,000 word story in just one month. I've entered three times and have completed the challenge twice. (Last year just got a bit crazy with other events.)

What do you win? Glory!

What do you have to lose? All of your friends as you meld into your computer to write feverishly. (But you should be able to get most of them back come December.)

If you participate, add revdrroth as a writing buddy.

Since I can't bring myself to give up podcasting, November will consist entirely of me reading my first book, Black Whole Son. That way my creative efforts can be focused on book material.

Communicating With Aliens

Since the alien meme is experiencing some high rates of novelty as of late, here is yet more for folks to ponder.

Reality Sandwich | Voyaging to DMT Space with Dr. Rick Strassman, M.D.

Dr. Rick Strassman, pioneering psychedelic researcher and author of the book, DMT - The Spirit Molecule, discusses his new book, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies, Zen Buddhism, psychedelics and spirituality, Old Testament prophecy and more in this fascinating interview. Dr. Strassman conducted the first federally approved psychedelic research in the US in nearly a generation with the compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in New Mexico in the mid 1990's. Though expecting mystical raptures and deep psychological insights, in his study he was astonished to find many of his volunteers reporting unexpected encounters with strange and sometimes disturbing alien beings with advanced technology in what amounted to classical UFO 'abduction' experiences. Unable to explain away the volunteers' experiences, he concluded that these were genuine encounters with independent sentient beings in otherwise normally invisible dimensions.

I have a personalized autographed copy of The Spirit Molecule and even exchanged a few e-mails with Dr. Strassman. The book is fascinating and I have often recommended it to others interested in psychedelia and spirituality.

Terrence McKenna, who performed a lot of non-governmentally sanctioned research with DMT and psilocybin also suggested a link to very real entities. Both researchers, as well as many other individuals of varying credibility, saw consistent and repeatable experiences with non-local entities who seemed to have a desire to communicate with users of these chemicals.

An interesting side note on DMT. (I'm doing this from memory so don't quote me on specifics.) This substance is produced naturally in the human brain by the pineal gland. It is an excellent neuro-transmitter. Peak production in a normal human happens in the middle of the night, between aproximately 1:00 and 3:00 AM. This also happens to be when the majority of reported UFO sitings and alien abductions occur. The pineal gland also happens to play a central role in Discordianism which will tell you to consult your pineal gland for spiritual guidance. (The Principia Discordia will also tell you When in doubt, fuck it. When not in doubt, get in doubt.)

So anybody wishing to talk with extra-dimensional aliens can either stay up late, or go looking under piles of cow shit.

Maybe it is all just in your head. But it is very possibly in other people's heads, too. Just think of the savings in long distance charges and roaming fees!

With that I am publicly challenging Mr. Bergström to assist me in National Novel Writing Month this November. The challenge is for a writer to produce a story of 50,000 words in just one month. Let's collaborate on a book, so that each of us has to contribute at least 50,000 words to it in the month of November (100,000 words total between us). The premise: What if every single conspiracy theory about aliens is true? Every last one of them. Even the ones that contradict other ones. NaNoWriMo should give us a good kick off on one hell of a good book. And there is enough source material out there to kick start the slowest of writing days.

NaBloPoMo

Rip Off!

National Blog Posting Month:

'What the heck is going on here?' you ask. Well, it's pretty simple. You get yourself a blog, if you don't have one already -- and don't mind me if I'm stupefied at the idea that there's someone left in the English speaking world without their own blog. Then you look at the calendar, and when the whole world goes, 'Oh, I can't believe they're already playing Christmas music in the warden's office!' you'll know it's November and that is the month in which you post something to your blog every day, in accordance with the National Blog Posting Month challenge!

I could blog every day with almost no effort at all. And I'd sign up to do this if it weren;t for the fact that I didn't post anything on November first. I could always go back and change a post to appear on that daye and in that way cheat my way back into the game, but screw that. I'm participating in the far more challenging NaNoWriMo! Aren't I just some sort of uppity prick?

National Novel Writing Month

I challenge you to NaNoWriMo! Yes you. Watch as I display my swollen genitalia to your shame. We Kung Fu fight now. Come and get me.