Wednesday, December 5, 2001

On a whim, I took off work today. I have several vacation days left to take anyway.

I really enjoyed myself, particularly with the seventy-degree weather. I replaced some of the Christmas lights in my garden, and ripped several CDs to mp3. I read several more chapters of Every Man’s Battle — great book, by the way — then had a wonderful lunch with my Mom (in the gazebo!), followedy by an hours-long chat with her about all sorts of things, from thought patterns to Bobby Fisher.

Delving into another IRC community gives me warm fuzzies. I’ve missed this sense of cameraderie, for quite a long time.

In the evening, I took my parents out to dinner at a local pub. After returning home, I hopped onto #RO-World.com, where I unfortunately had a run-in with an op.

To make a long story short, I brought on a bot, which annoyed the op, and she responded by reflexively kicking the bot. I felt hurt, having not understood that she was annoyed. After stewing for a few minutes, though, I sent her a private message, explaining that I felt hurt, but that I apologized for annoying her. She was very gracious and conciliatory, and we patched things up.

Which is good, because I was afraid for awhile there that I was involved with another power-hungry op. This happened to me once before, on events — an experience that was itself worthy of a novel — and I had to leave the server permanently. I think I won’t have to do that here, though.

I then took part in the weekly DSP meeting, where Saalon, Brennen, and I brainstormed about the future of online fiction. We came up with a fascinating perspective, that of webdramas as a collection of ordered data, presented to the audience in some sensible way.

Imagine a webdrama where you can access a database of textual (or other) snippets — news reports, diary entries, regular third-person narrative stories, etc. Where a new snippet is posted every day. Where all of these snippets are interrelated. Mightn’t you start to dig deeper?

This would be an excellent outlet for my recent writing urges, too. I could write little snippets, perhaps a page long, to be posted three times a week. That’s certainly do-able, and would dovetail nicely with the amount of weekly writing I’d want to do to keep my writing muscles toned.

So, maybe, during my Friday night writing time, I’ll outline a few characters and plot ideas. And, maybe, I’ll start writing.