Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1410

I haven’t written my drabble for “Enigma” yet, but I stumbled across a drabble contest where you can win a free Gotham writing class. The deadline is August 27th. I’m guessing the winning entry won’t be a Stargate drabble.

The other 600 words for Seema went into a non-fiction article, not my fiction word count above. While surfing around for research, I noticed that quite a few domains are down (though not EatSushi.com). I suspect the big blackout.

Word count: 605

I was visiting the cult at Kenmore Square and there were all these book trucks out on the sidewalk by the Kenmore T entrance, in front of that weird replacement for the buildings that burned down. I bought a few hardcovers. If you’re passing through, Commonwealth Books is worth a look. It’s your basic college town used bookstore, the college being BU. I don’t know what happened to the Boylston location - this one is at 526 Comm Ave.

I saw the new Apple Store at Chestnut Hill recently and drooled over the 12″ PowerBooks. Rumor has it new PowerBooks will be out next week. I’m still looking for the PowerBook at the end of the rainbow.

Word count: 1002

By way of Jerie:

Hee. You’re a sweetie. *pat*

Random Pointless Stargate Quiz
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Have I mentioned how much I like Stargate? “Singularity” was a sneaky, great episode, despite the lack of cheese. If there had been more cheese, then my drabble addition Proximity would have been a better fanfic; instead I just picked up on a theme that was right there in the open in the episode. Yes, a real, live theme, and Season 1 wasn’t even a good season!

Word count: 1010

Yet another drabble is up, Pheromones, based on the episode “Hathor.” I’ve seen “Hathor” before; though it’s not quite a Fish Story, there was a gratifying amount of cheese.

I was surprised at how quickly Hathor ran away from a fight. My theory is that the Goa’uld are too lazy and cowardly to take over a planet when there’s effort involved and they might, say, break a nail from overuse of the mortal-whomping ribbon device.

Or it could just be the cheese…

Word count: 1137

Three new drabbles are up on the Stargate page, This Worm a God, Heliopolis Lost, and Fish Story.

I’ve also been working on the preferences database for ficml.org, but that’s going more slowly than expected. I was hoping to write more, but I spent most of the day helping Veronica move. I didn’t know I was tired until I opened Colony and muddled through the first 300 words. Tuvok is behaving strangely…

Word count: 100

When the 2003 Stargate SG-1 Fan Fiction Awards came out, I ignored the warning on Queen of the Amazons by SelDear telling me not to read the fic. I didn’t understand all that much of it. I was mainly attracted by the title, and I figured humor was universal, or at least that I’ll never get it if I don’t read more.

I’m finding that watching the show is more satisfying than reading the fanfic. I was worried for a while there that Stargate was just too good to fic - fanfic flourishes best in a cheesy atmosphere. My worries ended with “Fire and Water” - you can’t go right with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, character death, and unreasonable demands for information available for free in any public library.

While researching my forthcoming drabble, “Fish Story,” I found a cool Stargate mythology site, The Truth Behind Stargate SG-1, which had a random link to this Ninja mask lesson. I was unable to determine the connection to Stargate, but it’s funny.

Word count: 100

As you may have noticed from the new splash screen, the name of Jemima’s Trek is changing to Jemima’s Chevron. I’ve had a chevron theme since Jemima’s Trek first opened for non-commerce three years ago. Since my Buffy phase I’ve wanted a more generic site title, and while Buffy still isn’t covered by chevrons (unless they’re especially wooden and pointy), they are coincidentally a Stargate theme as well. If you don’t like the new name, feel free to suggest something better, such as “Jemima’s Pointy Things.”

Along with the name change and splash screen, I’ve tried to get everything over here from Freeshell except the (non-SG1) fanfic. The About/Style section has been slightly updated, though the blog is still a better place to find most of that information. Random pages like the Borg Plot Classification, B’Elanna’s Award Shelf and the Section 31 FAQ are here now. I think I’ve accounted for all the broken links, though I’m sure a link or two must have gotten past me.

Finally, two new drabbles have been added to the Stargate page: Just Testing and Baseball. Yet more drabbles are on the way.

Word count: 0 and counting

I wasn’t in the mood for Colony today so I made a new splash page based on the W3 tip about confetti menus. If you look at their stylesheet, you’ll see that’s it’s all done with margins. Unfortunately, I was having a lot of trouble with WinIE cutting the words in half (vertically) and both WinIE and MacIE mispositioning them (presumably by adding up the pixel values incorrectly), so I switched the whole thing to absolute positioning. Now it looks more or less the same in IE and in competent browsers.

The splash screen is pure CSS, using your system fonts. For example, if you have Final Frontier or the Stargate letter font, then Voyager and Stargate will show up in their respective font. Colors were picked from the color table of the background image for the main FicML page. I also added a dotted border as a hover effect. You can see the CSS at the bottom of my stylesheet, jp_tab.css.

Word count: 1025

I made a few changes to the preference picker to allow users to see the generated CSS code. You can also view the PHP source. Soon users will be able to save their preferences as well.

Word count: 1115

Seema asked a question about the ominiscient point of view on Zendom - specifically, how it differed from a wandering limited POV. I said:

In the omniscient POV, it’s the narrator (generally the author) who sees and knows all. If you’re leaping from character to character and having each character tell what he himself knows, then it’s not omniscient, it’s just very choppy limited POV. If, on the other hand, you can tell it’s the author (or narrator) providing the information, then it’s omniscient. It can be hard to tell the difference.

Not surprisingly, this was misunderstood. Some writers do leap from head to head while writing the omniscient POV, and only occasionally make it clear that there is a narrator’s POV present. That makes it hard to tell the difference.

Better examples of omniscient POV convey character and feelings without leaping into everybody’s head. Tolkien was mentioned as an example, but it’s easier to open any pre-20th century work of literature if you want to see the omniscient POV in action. Jane Austen is my favorite example of what can be done mainly through the medium of dialogue, without all this modern head-banging.

So I’ve been considering shifting Colony from its original head-banging omniscient POV to a more restrained example of the bird’s-eye perspective. The scenes I’ve written recently are in limited omniscient (that is, third-person limited POV) because I’ve gotten into the bad habit of writing that way. Like most fanfic writers, my initial style was omniscient. I didn’t change until someone pointed it out to me, and now I’m starting to find it tedious to pick a POV character and follow him through a scene (unless it’s Tom). I like the idea of omniscience better.

The Internet Writing Workshop has a nice omniscient POV exercise.