Oh, just stick the needle in already!

Bittorrent is evil! Evil, I tell you! The enemy of hard-drive space everywhere! I can't believe I allowed myself a taste of this dangerous, horrible, nasty, evil, addictive software. It's not just that you've gotten me hooked on Read Or Die: TV, but what is this Naruto thing?

Gads, I'm now jonesing for Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Things Precious to a Mage).

Evil, evil bittorrent. Next thing you know, I'll be downloading episodes of Spooks before they're released (as "MI-5") on A&E. And it doesn't help that, unlike television, it's portable: I can play these things on my laptop. Anywhere.

Ah, well. I only have one more story to release before the end of the year, and then we'll see what 2004 has in store for The Journal Entries, hmm?

Kinda bummed

Not sure why. I think it's because there's this huge backlog of stories resting in my head and yet I know that many of them will never come to fruition. I have five (count 'em, five) Aimee novels in some quasi-limbo state-- tens of thousands of words written, and yet none of the characters seem to come together finally. Aimee and Darynn and Miri and Virginia and Adric are all resisting me. It's like they want their tales to be told, but they're not sure how the story should be told.

I took the first step into my Rome-like fantasy novel. I'm not happy with that step because I haven't quite hit the right mix. I'm going for the Guy Gavriel Kay treatment, who managed to create a fantasy world, completely in another universe, but very like the Byzantium of our universe. There seem to be only a few functional popular fantasy settings: The sparse universe of Conan or Elric, the medieval fantasy of Jordan, Barry Hughart's Confucian setting, and for the goths, the Victoriana of Mieville. But two more interesting periods to me are the pre-Imperial Roman era and the era of the High Dutch traders towards the late Renaissance.

But I bow to a master, and Kay is truly a master-- his choice of names is so wonderful, and his characterizations so spot on, that I'm intimidated to write more. I read a lot of Caesar and Petronius when I was younger, but I need to do more research. Maybe this will be an excuse to get Harris' Pompeii sometime soon.

And the era of the High Dutch Traders-- the closest I can recall in a magickal setting is Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders, but that doesn't come close to the financial, political, and guild-style shenannigans that writers like Dorothy Dunnett manage to make so vivid in the Niccolo series. I want the Aimee' series to move in that direction as the universe ages, since after the second novel it moves forward three hundred years or so.

And I have the database library for plotlines done, but I'm not happy with it, and I have yet to actually make any more progress on the UI since doing the rough draft. Maybe it's time to go literate, my favorite programming technique when working alone.

On another note, Naruto was just plain silly. Not my flavor at all.