Bad Nerd

I suppose I should say something about the passing of Madeline L'Engle, since she was a well-known fantasy writer, but the fact of the matter is, I made one aborted attempt many years ago to read A Wrinkle in Time and couldn't.  But still, rest in peace.

I am also a bad nerd because I never did manage to wrangle my mother's wireless adapter into submission; I gave up and bought a new one for her today.

Or, rather, I bought one today.  My wireless router is still off more than it's on -- it turns itself off, I swear, if you look at it wrong.  So I suspect I will use my $100 for being an early iPhone adopter towards an Airport Extreme base station.  However, the Airport Extremes have only 3 ports for wired connections, where my current wireless router has four.  Therefore, my desktop will need the wireless adapter then.

Believe it or not, I'm not considering the Airport Extreme because I'm an Apple fan but more because I would one day (when I have a TV that is compatible) like to have an Apple TV -- as I've said before, my iPod can't hold all of my library, and it would be nice to watch anything I wanted without having to sync my iPod and plug it in to use the video out with my TV.

In other news, I got an email from Aide T today that she won't be coming back for four more weeks!  Boo!

Meanwhile, I actually am writing again -- though it's cheesy and schmoopy.  It's coming slowly, but at least the words aren't all jumbled up in a useless pile in my head anymore.

I have no idea if this is what writer's block is like for other writers, but let me do my best to describe it here.

There is a Harry Potter fanfic author that I discovered once when searching the 'net for stories featuring characters with disabilities (someday, I will get around to writing what my vision of that ideal would be -- someone for whom their disability is just part of life and neither a major Plot Point nor their main source of Drama)....

That was a long parenthetical.  Let me start again.

There is a Harry Potter fanfic author (actually, she now writes Harry Potter/CSI:NY crossovers, and, no, they are not as weird as that sounds) who describes her stories as "mind movies."

I like that analogy -- that's exactly what I get: fully-formed visuals that I see in my head.  When I was younger, I would sometimes lay in bed and narrate what I was seeing to myself in a whisper; ironically, I think all that practice with description is why my dialogue is chronically weaker than the rest of my writing.

In any event, most of my stories start out as "mind movies."  Some of the more schmoopy, schmaltzy ones either live on my hard drive knowing that they'll never be posted for anyone but myself to see.  Some of the others are only "mind movies."

When I have writer's block, my (now internal) narration of what I'm seeing dries up.  I still often see the mind movie itself -- I can still see the scenes which I plan to write -- but the dialogue, the description...anything "verbal" that I would need to commit the scene to "paper" evaporates.

That's what happened this summer.  I had a few "mind movies" going on in my head, including what felt like an interesting morality piece that began as a missing scene from a Stargate SG-1 episode.  But there were no words to describe it.

I know that's not too coherent, but it's a difficult thing to describe if you haven't experienced it.

Suffice it to say that when I started writing a simple scene -- actually, it was adding description to what existed simply as a script-type list of dialogue -- it was a huge relief.

By the way, apologies for the extensive use of snigger quotes.

And it disturbs me more than I can say that I remember that term.  I'd hoped my memories of that class would have long ago evaporated.

(Scarily enough, the only non-PDF result for "humanities tutorial clunet.edu" was the syllabus from the year I took the class.  The beach, it is calling to me....)