I'm a Bad Blogger

So yeah. I fail.

I was so excited about my "LOST" blog, and then I never got to keep up with it. :( Sadly, my access to the internet and television have been severely limited ever since I started my journey. If I had more time, perhaps it'd be easier. However, by the time I get to watch the new episode, I don't have time to go back and re-watch the old ones. Life has gotten in the way, yet again.

With Asteri's 11th birthday coming in now less than two months, I'd like to say I've been hard at work getting all that done and thus have a valid reason why I didn't keep up with the topics of this blog. The website revamp too has unfortunately suffered a similar fate, being pushed aside for life. The thing with that is, I have to meet the deadline for a variety of reasons so I need to start trudging along and facing life as well as these tasks at the same time. Otherwise I'm left without a release, and with regrets of not getting all my projects completed when I wanted them to be.

I have some exciting things planned, and granted a lot of the work has already been done but that is just the beginning of what needs to be accomplished. Here's hoping I find a way to fit it all in.

Raised by Another after Sundown

First off, forgive me because I had already re-watched episodes 1 through 9 prior to coming up with this project. I thought about going back to watch them now and restart, but when I realized my next episode would have been “Raised by Another” if I kept going… well, I thought that was perfect considering last night’s episode, “Sundown.” I will eventually go back, but I’ll work that in later. Besides, for now until I get into the swing of things… this may not take complete shape just yet.

Now, the last episode (“Solitary”) saw Sayid meet up with Rousseau, learn about the “sickness,” “the monster,” and of course… the whispers. This episode begins with Claire having a dream about a very creepy looking Locke (with one pupil black) and then getting attacked. Charlie ran over to Claire after hearing her screams, and saw her hands were bleeding. Jack cleaned her up and they have a discussion about her OB-GYN. Now, at this point, neither they nor we know they are brother and sister. That is an odd thing I keep reminding myself, even watching the pilot and seeing Claire was one of the first people Jack helped.

Things I note during the episode:

- Initially, I thought Kate would end up with Sayid when the series started.
- As soon as the psychic got freaked out and made Claire leave the first time, I thought for sure he saw an evil future for her and her child. As did many others. Looking back, FORESHADOWING! Which yeah, we figured anyway…
- What would Charlie do if he were still alive and seeing what Claire is like now?
- Hurley has always been awesome, and wow he actually did lose a lot of weight during the course of the show.
- He showed signs of a leader in the beginning, with making the list of people who were on the plane. (Hey, is that meaning something considering Jacob and his lists?)
- Did Thomas get some sort of visit from Widmore/Abaddon/someone that scared him away from Claire? Perhaps he was promised fame for his art in exchange for not staying with Claire and the baby. Perhaps that is why Widmore has Thomas’ painting? (Although, granted, that painting of Widmore’s was technically shown earlier than Thomas was painting it.)
- Haha, I love that Hurley was creeped out by Locke.
- When I first started to watch LOST, I never read spoilers. Yet I knew as soon as I saw Ethan that he wasn’t on the plane.
- Aww, Jack and Claire are fighting like siblings even though they don’t know they’re siblings. Cute.
- Shannon made up just as many awesome names for things as Sawyer did. Craphole Island. Rape Caves. God’s Friggin’ Gift to Humanity. <3 I miss Shannon… (I realize I am in the minority. :P)
- Hurley melted Sawyer’s heart faster than Kate ever could.
- “Do you know ‘Catch a Falling Star?’?” Hmm.
- Wait, her dad used to sing it to her? Was this her step-father, or Christian? Was he around at all when she was a child?
- As everyone speculated back then, the Island somehow made Claire’s pen not work. Perhaps that was Jacob’s doing? Or MIB’s? Who knows at this point!
- “Someone promised me it’d be different.” What? A couple raising your son in LA and you not raising him on an island? Well, Jack and Kate were for a while. In LA. :)
- So the psychic (Richard Malkin?) told Claire the couple would meet her and she had to take flight 815 to do so. Technically, she did meet Kate and Jack because of that. :)

As for the rest, I will say honestly I got a migraine toward the end and wasn’t totally focused on the task at hand. I’ll have to rectify this bad ending later when I go back to watch the beginning. This is a work in progress, most definitely.

Yet Another LOST Experiment

Chances are, even if you've never watched a minute of it you probably know that LOST is ending this year. It is all over the TV, the internet, print, and radio, popping up in random places like weeds pushing through the ground. Well, weeds don't always have to be bad things. I find dandelions quite pretty and a lot of people I know enjoy eating them with olive oil and lemon juice, so I can't really get too much LOST information.

If you don't give a rat's ass about it one way or the other, this will not interest you in the slightest. If you are someone that has grown sick of hearing about Others and the Smoke Monster and a million other things you can't begin to understand, then I invite you to walk away now lest you decide to virtually chuck tomatoes at me. When it comes down to it, I'm committing myself to doing this "experiment" (I guess it is more of an exercise) for no one but myself. Well, maybe that is a lie, because who knows what theories/ideas I will inadvertently spread and... um... my non-LOST friends will probably thank me for having somewhere else to dump these conversations.

So enough of my usual long-winded text, let me get down to it: I randomly decided to re-watch the LOST pilot the other day and it of course made me want to keep watching from the beginning. Unfortunately, I'm also following it in "real-time," meaning last night I watched "Sundown" with amazed eyes and creeped out ears. However, while re-watching "Solitary" (Sayid's first flashback episode) I realized how amazing it would be to follow that with this year's season premiere. This show is certainly a well-crafted series of layered novels in disguise as a television series. Maybe that is why I'm drawn to it. Even in the "bad episodes," the writing is something to admire. To date, the only other television series which has managed to capture me the way LOST did in the beginning is what I've seen so far of "Caprica" after happening to catch the pilot's re-airing prior to the series' premiere on SyFy. That, however, is another post.

What will I be doing exactly? I think it might be fun and interesting to re-watch the series while watching this last season, comparing what happened before with what is going on now. I will try not to put spoilers for future episodes anywhere (I went 9 months without reading one, but since this season's premiere I've succumbed to temptation a few times), but if I do I will give fair warning. However, if you are not caught up to the latest newly aired episode then do not expect to be unspoiled. For the record, I'm currently on eastern standard time but do not always get to watch the episode the night it first airs due to unreliable access to cable. I've been lucky lately, but Hulu and ABC.Com work just as well!

So stay tuned... or keep reading... or whatever. Go visit another web page or order a pizza. You have free will, right?

Being a Writer in the Real World Kinda Sucks

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a new project she is working on and after very excitedly talking about it she ended things with a statement that she assumed I thought she was crazy. My response? "You're not crazy. You're just a writer."

While it may be true that many artists, writers, musicians, comedians, etc. do have some serious issues, in reality... who doesn't? The thing is that anyone that does anything which is creative tends to be a little more passionate about things. Plus, with creativity comes the things that are created. To me, her descriptions weren't weird because I've been spending my spare time working on my "Once Upon a Mushroom" project. I've been writing about a gnome going on an adventure with a talking dog, and that really isn't that insane compared to other works out there. Furthermore, it isn't even subject matter which makes the creative types seem a little nutty, it is the insane amount of research, note-taking, and even doodling that occurs in conjunction with it.

So while she was telling me how vast the amount of notes she has for her project it just seemed normal to me since, well, I created a wiki for OUaM because I had too many notes myself to keep track of. Heck, part of why I have so much junk in my house to sort through is because I have over 18 years of journals, sketch books, note pages, and so forth of my creations laying around. Knowing me, there's probably even a notepad tucked away in the kitchen somewhere that has the description of the main villain from "Shadow in the Mirror" (and don't get me started on how many dot matrix printouts and type-written pages that probably still exist at my parents' house).

However, the biggest issue with being a writer is that you tend to also wish you could write out your real life (and since I also used to do a lot of work with video editing and directing, I tend to also think of things in screenplay form many times). I have sadly found that I can (generally) figure out major and minor plot details in most movies and television series I watch just based on the tried and true devices as well as the writer's (and director's) styles. Sure sometimes I'm happily proven wrong, but more often than not I find myself realizing I could see the story unfold just from a mere plot summary.

Valentine's Day is right around the corner right now, and with it comes so many movies and shows about hardships in love. In the end, it is almost always a happy ending. Guy/Girl does something stupid to push other guy/girl away, a bunch of stuff happens, either guy/girl meets another guy/girl who starts out as a foil but ends up their "true love," or the original couple get back together. There is almost always a misunderstanding, but in the end people tend to live happily ever after (unless there's a sequel, or badly written fanfiction). Real life, sadly, doesn't work that way, and even the movies where it shows relationships more realistically still have the whole condensed-timeline thing working for them.

While pretty much everyone I know thinks "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is one of the funniest movies they've seen, I ask them to imagine if it unfolded in real time. (By now, you should have seen it so I don't care about spoilers!) If we actually had to live through the time she was apart from the man she loved, because her own family didn't like the idea and wanted her to be with a "nice Greek man," would we still have laughed as hard? Being forced to not be with someone you love is not exactly a pleasant feeling. And yes, "Titanic" (again, you should have seen this already) didn't exactly have a happy ending but imagine how much worse that'd be living not only through the disaster, but going on all those years not being able to tell anyone the truth and knowing your (for all intents and purposes) "true love" died before you could spend your lives together. Every day, people deal with relationship roadblocks, however big or small, that they can't get over right away. I know people who were together over thirty years ago, remarried and had kids over the years, and then found their way back to each other recently. Sounds like good fodder for a story, right? Well, of course, but no one is going to want to wait thirty years for that pay-off in a movie (even soap operas don't spend much time on things anymore).

Right now, I'm going through one of the most adult things I've ever had to deal with in my entire life. Something I can't run away from, even though it'd be so easy to do it. How it makes it "adult" is the fact that I'm owning up to all the facts and dealing with it instead of being a coward. My entire life is changing, some for the better and maybe some for the worse, but the rest is still up in the air. There are certain things which are known to be true, and other things which are variables that could destroy that. Since no one can predict the future, no one knows how to proceed because at this point any answer could be the wrong one. Hindsight is 20/20, right? That is part of the problem: We can look back and figure out where things went wrong and how they could have been fixed, but since we're in the now that is impossible. All that can be done is to move forward and see what happens. Day by day, little by little, until the answer reveals itself. Now, if my life were a movie, I'd already know the ending. Of course, depending on the genre there would be several possibilities, but I'd have it figured out already. I'd know the outcome based on everything that has been given so far. Sadly, real life isn't some cliche (well, not usually). Plus, if you just edited out the time it takes between decisions and occurrences, these moments in life would still be a movie you could figure out.

Maybe I'm just rambling now, but to me at least it all makes sense. Trust me, there is not a moment that goes by in my life that I don't have set to music somewhere in the back of my head, with narration going and an idea of where I'd possibly take things if it were actually a story I was working on. That is just how I roll.

I'm a writer, and it does make me crazy sometimes. Then again, you kind of have to be.

"Once Upon a Mushroom"

I decided to jump right in and create a Facebook fan-page for my new project: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Once-Upon-a-Mushroom/248607449725

I hope to get back to you all with some better updates. Right now, "Real Life" is cray hectic. I'm hoping this helps, though.

Tim Curry Was an Awesome Wizard

It is almost Halloween, and I am in the least-Halloweenish mood I have been in YEARS! I also have writers block again, which is bad because I had been working on numerous projects and they have now all come to a grinding halt. In fact I had two articles written up last week about a most interesting camping trip, but they have just sat on my desktop stalling and staring at me like a lost kitten. Bwah, when did this all become so hard?

But back to Halloween: This Saturday I am having a party and I don't even know what I'm going to be yet. Usually I have an idea of this by August, although my idea generally changes last minute. Still, it is unsettling. Sure the house looks kinda cool, but meh. The economy is getting me down and now that I'm supposedly older and more mature, I feel bad about buying decorations and costumes I'll only use once a year. I notice I've become a lot more multi-purpose about things as the years have gone by. If I buy something, it has to work for like ten other things or it isn't worth it. Okay, maybe not ten, just at least more than one or two. So now I like to get some September "Welcome to Autumn" time with my decorations as much as I want to keep it through Thanksgiving. That works with most of the pumpkins and the leaves, but what about the seemingly never-ending box of skeletons and strange dummies that keeps popping up? Even with all of that, I feel bad and can't get in the mood.

I also usually try to go all out for my costumes (making a melting face was the coolest thing I ever did, and it is the one costume I do not have any pictures of!! Argh!), but lately I just can't think. I don't know what is wrong with me. I don't want to say it is growing up that has done this to me, because my whole family is pretty Halloween-crazed.

Maybe I need to rewatch some of those old Halloween shows from the 80s . They really don't make good holiday shows anymore like they used to, and even if they were pretty cheesy they were still fun. In fact, I have very fond memories of "The Worst Witch" so much so that when I first found out about Harry Potter and all the hype I was like "Seriously? It is like 'The Worst Witch' in so many ways." Or that movie with Judd Hirsch as Dracula... but the name escapes me now. Ack! Has my brain really tried to drive out all the Halloween stuff from itself? I really hope not.

Her Story VII

I can't count for you how many blog posts I've written since I last posted here. Unfortunately, they were all done via a personal favorite of Dr. John Dorian. The Internal Monologue. And like J.D.'s silly and sometimes elaborate tangent fantasies, these telepathic blogs that fail to publish to any known server tend to take on qualities of movies and television shows. No, I don't mean I write stories about my life that end up involving actual characters, but rather as I notice there are things in life that really do come up as if they were a last minute plot contrivance I also go into a sort of "scripting and directing" mode. Thus, the blogs start getting way too planned out for my own good (cue music) and don't exactly translate well to the written page, or pixel if you will. Perhaps that is where I fall short of segueing my J.D. into my Carrie.

My other has been encouraging both these sides of me, however, but I believe he gave up some where around New Years. I mean, there's still the occasional "writing is something you enjoy, do it more" spiel to get me motivated, but at this point he's (rightly) left it up to me to decide.

However, I know he genuinely does want this for me, and I'm glad for that. Especially since I wasn't really in total "writing" mode when we first got together so he never actually saw the regularity that I did it, nor the happiness and (cliche, I know) calm it brought me. The funny thing about it all though is that while he understands my want and my need for it, he doesn't understand how I get motivated.

Take tonight, for example. I have been looking forward to this night for a while. Lights down low, speakers on loud. Maybe a nice glass of wine. Time to cuddle up on the couch with a nice blanket, and watch the season premiere of "Lost"! While this may seem silly, this is one of the only shows I've actually followed start to (and this will be true in a few years) finish when it was first airing. I generally watched reruns growing up (I miss the old Nick at Nite, truly "a TV viewer's dream"), and I know this is cheesy but there is something about wondering what the hell is going to happen next that is exciting. Now that I know there is a specific end (oh how "Stargate SG-1" would have benefited with that, among many countless other series. You know who you are.) I can become more invested in the show. As that happens, I enjoy it more, which then... wait for it (yes it has a point, and apparently a lot more comments in parentheses. I'm like my own MST3K! And if you can't figure out what that is by just those five characters, then me telling you the name of it wouldn't matter anyway to this commenting. But I digress, as usual.). ... Okay, where were we? (<-- Comment put in for attempt at humor.) Oh yes, the more I enjoy something such as "Lost," it gets me more excited about creating my own media, and thus beginning to get more excited about writing! So I turned down all the lights, cranked up the stereo and tuned in intensely to watch... and he just thought it was the silliest thing. He respected it, and he watched it with me (he's missed way too much to understand where they are now, and had unfortunately missed the pre-premiere recap), but he did not get why I got so excited about it. And therefore, how the heck could it help me in my quest?

No matter what anyone's goals are, they may have unconventional or seemingly odd ways of getting there. Take the fact that I just spent precious sleep time (7am open, eww) writing here. Writing this silly, seemingly making no sense entry. Seriously, what does any of this have to do with anything? Well, maybe nothing to you, but...

Hey, I wrote something down, didn't I?