It’s been a good weekend, if not productive in my core projects. Even so, my parents were so gracious to take me out to breakfast Saturday morning, then helped me repair my backyard fence. It’s a standard white picket fence that’s seen better days; the wood’s rotting and several pickets have been missing since I moved in. In fact, I’ve been using an old wooden pallet to block a large gap in the fence.

But Dad had some spare boards that he was able to cut and paint and use as pickets, so we all spent about an hour fixing the fence up. Looks quite good now.

I then drove to GMU to meet with another potential Otherspace artist. She wants to draw backgrounds, which we very much need, and I ended up spending an hour and a half explaining our processes to her. She was very interested in everything we’re doing.

She was a good example of the difference between someone still in college and someone who’s graduated. She graduated awhile back and has been working for a while, and she naturally asked a lot of questions about the company and was generally very engaged with me. When I interview folks who are still in college, they often ask only a few questions before saying that, yes, they’d like to work. Completely different.

Anyvay. I spent today (Sunday) catching up on chores, and watching episode one of Densha Otoko, a.k.a. Train Man, a live-action Japanese drama about an anime fan who helps a girl on a train, and develops an incredible online support network of fellow netizens to advise him as to what he should do next. Once I got used to the over-the-top action, I became hooked. The show’s packed with anime jokes (most of them Gundam-related), which helps, and they use a number of songs to set the mood. Heck, the first episode opens with various shots of real-life otaku hangouts set to Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.

So, needless to say, I’m downloading episode two now. I’d wait to buy a legitimate release, except that I doubt this will ever be released in America. Heck, it looks like even the Japanese release won’t have English subtitles. So, there’s one sale they won’t get. Ah well.

(Oops. Forgot to post Friday’s entry, and to upload more VR story. Done.)

It’s been a very weird October. Temperatures have hovered in the high seventies and low eighties every day until this week, when a deluge of rain has dropped temperatures to more seasonal levels. It’s still very comfortable for mid-October; I went on a brisk walk today and had to remove my jacket after a few minutes.

But a stubborn net of clouds still clings to the sky, with only rare gaps allowing glimpses of blue. Frustrating. It’s October, two weeks from Halloween, and I want blustery winds with clouds sailing like merchant ships through that odd slate blue that so often tints autumn skies.

I’m also impatient with my young adult novel, as I’m nearly done with the second outline (of three). Another hour’s worth of writing should bring me to its conclusion. This is the five thousand word version; the first one was an eleven-bullet summary, and the third will be a stripped-down version of the book itself. You could call the third version “draft zero,” since I won’t even try to write pretty descriptions or get the characters’ voices exactly right. It will be the humanoid lump of rock which I will then chisel into a fine statue.

So, I “only” need an hour to finish outline two, but an hour can be difficult to come by. I’ve got that, plus Otherspace, plus drawing, plus Syllable build attempts. And anime. I have far fewer projects now than I had even two months ago, but now that I can devote serious amounts of time to each project, I’m just as busy. I’m much more productive, though.

I just sat three rows from a stage where I witnessed a complete production by the Peking Opera (the Chinese entertainment form that essentially spawned kung fu movies). It was indescribable. The costumes were prisms painted on silk. The acting was intense, powerful, moving, and at times overtly funny. The acrobatics were fantastic—rarely has anyone in the movies done better, and these somersaults were performed twenty feet from my head.

The music…well, I could get used to the music, but I was annoyed by its simplicity and lack of melody. Not my kind of music. But it’s amazing to think that that’s my only complaint.

Fantastic.

Well, this Hungarian Whooping Grippe or whatever it is really knocked me for a loop. I’ve been out of commission for the last seven days. And for a guy like me, that’s frustrating.

I did manage to catch up on my reading, though. I powered through all 534 pages of Disney War, an account of Michael Eisner’s time as head of Disney. Boy, that was an eye-opener. Eisner’s not quite the guy I imagined him to be; he’s cluelessly drunk with power. He made a lot of excellent decisions, but he apparently couldn’t stand the idea of someone threatening his position. He consistently bad-mouthed each executive who might be a possible replacement (or even right-hand man). He made a lot of enemies. Sad.

I also re-read From the Dust Returned, a recent book by Ray Bradbury that collects and re-spins several of his spooky short stories into the tale of a Twilight Family, an Addams Family. This is quite intentional; he and Charles Addams had plans to collaborate on this book decades ago, with Bradbury providing the stories and Addams the illustrations. Bradbury wrote a few stories in preparation, but it never came together, and now that Addams is gone Bradbury put together the book, at least, and had that published with Addams’ wonderful original concept illustration as the book cover.

Addams wanted it to be “a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people will buy the book, just as the buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace, with lights low. Halloween is the time of year for story-telling.” And it is certainly that. It’s part of my October ritual, where I read and watch a number of moody Halloween works, including:

• October Dreams, a thick collection of spooky stories centered around Halloween itself. Some are horror, some are more thrillers, while some are true accounts of authors’ childhoods. Wonderful stuff.
• Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, about a group of boys who descend through Halloweens past in search of their dying friend
• An animated adaptation of The Halloween Tree, made several years ago by Hanna Barbera. It’s quite good, despite being made by Hanna Barbera.
• The original Halloween movie
• It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
• Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, an odd little thing. X-Entertainment has a fabulous article.

And I’m back out of business. That cold nabbed me again, and I spent the last three days in bed. I’m just well enough to come to work today, but I suspect I’ll crash again tonight.

I have been watching some anime. Specifically:

• The new Ah My Goddess TV show, which is moving along slowly but entertainingly. Overall, I’d grade it a ”B”. I’m a bit frustrated that by episode five only Belldandy has shown up. No major complaints otherwise.
• Planetes, an awesome hard SF show. Seriously high-quality, adult storylines (and not in the pornographic sense). This is clearly made by people who love the idea of realistic space work.
• Fafner, a show with all the trappings of a giant robot show that nevertheless handles them all perfectly. This is what I want in a giant robot show.
• Smatterings of various Gundam shows of various quality. I’m having fun, learning about bits of the Gundam universe that aren’t known to the casual fan. ZZ Gundam is almost straight comedy.

More once I’ve recovered. Which hopefully won’t be too long.

I’m back in business (mostly). Worked a half-day at work, and that partly because things are quiet there. I’ve powered through pretty much all of my work, so I cleaned out my inbox and took care of a few things, and generally went easy on myself to prevent a relapse of this cold.

Got home to a couple of phone calls, both of which were good. One of them makes me feel very good about Otherspace, and the other was a chat with a friend. I felt so good that I made sweet-and-sour pork, wrote eight hundred words of outline for my young adult novel, and drew half a dozen heads of hair in preparation for my comic. I think I’ve figured out something important about how to draw hair; I’ve been trying to draw individual strands, when actually I should be drawing more of the overall shape of the hair, and adding the strands as details. But the hair as a whole is made up of strands, so I’m drawing a flowing, watery shape more than a solid shape. I can’t describe it, but I think my brain’s wrapped around something important.

Lessee. In other news, I’ve re-watched the first two episodes of Planetes, which was as good as I remembered. It’s a hard SF show set seventy years in the future, about a group of astronauts who deal with space debris. Though, being good anime, that’s only a small fraction of the story; it’s also about perseverance, and honor, and heroism, and friendship, and justice, and a bunch of other things that I can’t even put into words. So, good good stuff.

So anyway, yeah, I’m feeling better, and things appear to be on an upswing.

And just when I get a little more interested in blogging, a cold grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and threw me into bed for a few days. It’s been pretty bad yesterday and today; so bad that I’m staying home from work today. Don’t want to infect anyone else, though I got it from work. This same nasty cold has been leaping from cube to cube. It’s the current office joke; someone will be out for a day or two, and the rest say, “Ah, must be that cold.”

So I’ve spent a fair amount of the weekend watching anime, particularly After War: Gundam X and ZZ Gundam. I’m enjoying both for very different reasons; X has accelerated its character development and is (as of episode 15) moving along at a nice pace. And it’s refreshing to watch a Gundam series that’s more focused on the action/adventure aspects of the Gundam experience than the ”War Is Hell!” drumbeat of many other Gundam series.

I’m only three episodes into ZZ (well, two really, since episode 1 is just a clip show summarizing the first two Gundam series), and it’s fun, too. It’s certainly more light-hearted and comedic than any other Gundam series I’ve seen (though Turn-A comes close), but I mean that in a good way. ZZ isn’t a screwball comedy; it’s a Gundam series with more comedic bits than other Gundam shows. Again, refreshing.

And with that, I’m going to go drink some orange juice and think for a while about some things Brennen just posted to his blog.