I hate when this happens

So, two nights ago, I had an idea. I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote it down, then went back to sleep. This morning, I fleshed it out. I've noticed that fantasy seems to go in cycles: for a while, it's dark themes and vampires, then heroism and monsters, then surrealism and cthuloid horrors, then on again. I'm hoping I'm right and heroism and monsters are on the rise.

( The Sun, The Moon, and The Dragons: Preface. )

I'm looking at this and already thinking of improvements. It actually needs to be both shorter and punchier, more brutal, while preserving the heroine's voice. (Not even sure about her name yet, except that it's going to be vaguely French-sounding.)

I'm not even sure where I'm going with this, other than that the Dragons are basically your social Darwinist types, this world's not big enough for both species, that kind of thing, and the humans are split between those seeking peace and those who know there will never be such.

All I know is that I need to read a lot more fantasy before I go anywhere.

*Sigh* So much for the great bandwidth experiment.

Omaha and I have apparently never gotten the bandwidth we paid for. Admittedly, we don't use it all that much, but I was paying for 1.5Mb/sec and apparently never got more that 800Kb/sec even when it was working well. For the last month, however, we've been getting terrible dropouts, service interruptions, and just plain poor bandwidth. It's hard to be a bittorrent user, even of just legal torrents, when the mean bandwidth basically tops out somewhere around the same speed as a 56Kb modem. For this I'm paying five times dialup speeds?

I like Speakeasy. They try not to be evil. They do a good job of not being evil. They tell me that it's Covad's fault, that Omaha and I are 19,600 feet from the transmission center and that's very far. But it wasn't this bad back in November. We weren't having to reboot the inbound router every ten minutes. We weren't getting complete failures.

I think what happened is after the windstorm last month something happened to the lines and now they're terribly noisy and Covad doesn't want to acknowledge that their service now sucks.

I just want it fixed.

Pet Peeve

Wendy Pini once wrote:

Today in the nightmarish Theater of Imagination at EPCOT Center in Disney World one learns that "creativity is fun," "creativity is easy," "anyone can be creative," and "have a nice day-- or else!" My personal experience at age twenty was that the source of creativity was pain. It was compulsive-addictive behavior borne of the need to wrench order from spiritual chaos. I'd love to see a cute lavender audio-animatronic dragon wrap its cute plastic lips around that.

I think of that quote every time I use the "creative" tag in the moods setting with it smiling kitty surrounded by colorful pawprints.