The Other Dom Driver @theotherdomdriver - Tumblr Blog

"I’ve got to look like I could kill someone when I take my shirt off."

Quite.

It's no secret that since moving back across the planet from New Zealand, I've let myself go. From regularly running 20km, I've managed to go a full 18 months without doing any regular exercise of any sort.

I turned 33 the other day, and that's not old enough to settle quietly into middle age. Since we've now joined the local gym, I've got no excuse not to get cracking on a new health regime. I'm cutting down on the ridiculous amount of biscuits I'm chomping, reducing my obscene caffeine intake, and sorting out my currently-knackered bike. I'm also going to attempt this workout.

Frankly, it's a big ask. Hitting the gym 5 days a week may not actually be possible, but each daily workout is 45 minutes long, and isolates a particular muscle group. There's a chance I can double-up once or twice a week. The workout itself, if you haven't clicked the link, is the one used by Daniel Craig to get into shape for his role as British Icon James Bond, and that's also where the quote across the top comes from. I'm a long way from having a Bond-body, and I'm not sure that I could kill someone by taking my top off, but I'm pretty sure that disrobing in public could result in an onlooker vomiting up their lunch in a fairly explosive manner. Hopefully, a few months throwing lumps of iron around will change that for the better. I'm taking my 'before' shot shortly. See you in 6 months!

The Amityville Horror

Awake just before 4am again. What gives? This is a bit earlier than usual. Normally, it's 4:15 on the dot when my body decides it's pseudo-morning and ready to be awake and start thinking about work; and as we all know, that only ends in disaster.

Have you seen the Amityville Horror? If you have, you know what I'm referring to. Every time James Brolin/Ryan Reynolds woke up, the time on the clock was exactly the same. Where did this idea (trope?) come from? Did Jay Anson wake up at the same god-forsaken time every morning, and thought that'd be a great little spooky niggle to throw into his story? Was he suffering from the same chronologically-triggered insomnia as me, and thought that if he was, others were probably suffering too? Was it an attempt to break the fourth wall and create a link forever between those unfortunates who found themselves waking up at a pre-determined time every morning and memories of his chilling horror? That's pretty clever if it was, and is just one example of creating the necessary connection with the everyday life of the viewer/reader required to make good horror work.

Many references to digital clock times in western horror refer to some passage in the bible: i.e. Book Blah, chapter 4, verse 15. The apocalyptic standby 'Revelations' only goes up to verse 11, so I can't use that. However, the moody 'Lamentations' does, and that gives me the following:

"They cried unto them, Depart ye; it is unclean; depart, depart, touch not: when they fled away and wandered, they said among the heathen, They shall no more sojourn there."

Arrrgh! The subtext! The subtext! Is this a subtle way for the creatures of the night to tell me that I should leave the house at once? Is it a warning from beyond the midnight veil? Maybe it's the 'Smiley Man' (more on him another day) communicating through the medium of bright orange LCD digits? If I don't post again, we'll have our answer.

Night night.

The cynic in me hates these cheesy motivationals, but they do tend to impart inspiration just to spite me.

Fatherhood

Although a profoundly life-changing experience, and one demanding emotional and practical depths in equal measure, the transition to fatherhood has elicited the following observations from me:

* Cold, half-drunk cups of tea adorn various level surfaces in multiple rooms.

* T-shirt necks stretched so far as to render them cool again, albeit in a retro, 80s-only kind of way.

* The passage of time paradoxically slowing to treacle and zipping by at the speed of light simultaneously.

* Finding that one is too tired to do anything, but miraculously achieving more in the evenings.

* Insufficient conscious brainpower diverted to subconsious worry and distraction - leaving just enough to perform one single task at a time (good for these people).

* The ability to communicate via simple facial expressions, or speaking like an idiot.

More to come I'm sure; especially since my wee-man can now call for both "dada" and "mama".

Rumours of my Demise....

Bloomin' work ethic.

I love my Stochastic Diffusion Search application, and I want to play around with it more to see what I can really do with it. I love it so much, in fact, that when asked to do a presentation on a technical subject at work, I chose said project to let everyone know exactly what it was I'd been messing around with. I love my SDS so much that I spent nearly every morning, lunch and evening for almost two weeks sprucing up the application and putting together this presentation to show off my shizzle.

It all went down rather well. And despite a somewhat embarrassing segfault ("Hey - it's a prototype!") all my examples worked nicely. I demonstrated SDS finding Wally in a 'Where's Wally', a rotated letter 'A' in a jumble of letters, and found another Wally twice the size of the original pattern space wearing a fake beard. All-in-all, job well done. Feedback was excellent, with a flurry of questions and suggested improvements following the talk, and even some guys stopping me for a chat in the tea-room days later. Mondo.

All this is good vindication of my decision to do the talk in the first place. I was asked, and I said yes. Foolishness. I knew what I'd be like; I'm one of those people who hates public speaking and so I have to put in OTT levels of effort until I feel comfortable enough to stop my voice from quavering like an spasming sparrow gargling an ornery oscilloscope. This came in very handy.

It's got to be done though. Sometimes I surprise myself by doing something outside my comfort zone for the purpose of self-improvement. Awooga. Unfortunately, preparing for the talk took up so much time that I didn't have any left for writing. That should change now, but with monumental plans afoot in Chateau Driver, I don't know how long the calm will last before the storm hits. I think I'll have to just see how much I get done.

#SDS #Stochastic Diffusion Search

RageQuit

I didn't enjoy the weekend much. I spent all of Friday night and 6 hours on Saturday trying to replicate a particular development environment on my laptop. Eventually, I managed it, only to find that my SDS app ran so slowly that it was unusable. Bugger. Instead, I've had to make do with an hour at the end of the working day to continue my refinements of the algorithm. At uni, I managed to get the basic SDS implementation in place for a very simple single use-case. Here, I've already managed to make the pattern search rotation invariant, and today I almost finished the implementation to handle scaling in x and y directions. 9 days until the presentation. If I get the scale-invariance working tomorrow, and can spend the rest of the time tarting it up 'til it's all sexy-like!

All that faffing with IDEs left little time for writing, but I still managed to hit the 500 word target. Awooga. I can feel myself getting jaded with the same old targets though, so it's time to change tack a bit. The next lot of targets are going to see how long I can write continuously. A test of stamina, if you will. Or perhaps more fittingly, a super-combo of back-to-back word spewing.

Target 012 - Do writing on 2 consecutive days before Friday.

#Target 012

Gah!

A thousand apologies!

I hit my most recent target - exceeded it in fact - but that was a full week ago. A full week! How does that much time go by without a pseudo-writer writing anything? Easier than I'd like, it seems.

Here's the excuse: I've been approached by some guys from work and asked to present my SDS application as part of a series of internal tech-talks we're doing at Metservice. Yesterday was Google day, and by golly, I made some excellent progress. The Qt application is mow multi-threaded, and allows for the user to specify the exact format of the pattern space using a specific pixel colour to eliminate potential mocrofeatures. I also added an hypothesis validation stage which prevents the app from getting itself into an infinite loop situation where no microfeatures can ever actually be processed! Good thing, too. That wouldn't have looked too flash during a live demo.

It's all well and good to be given the opportunity to present something cool (even though I hate presentations, but that's another story), but that means the top-most non-baby-related item on my todo list has become the presentation. I'm installing VirtualBox as we speak, and will have to do some programming in my free time in order to get the thing finished in time for the presentation on 10th May.

The problem now is reconciling the left and right halves of my brain.

Creative brain can't wait to finish off 'Meanwhile...', and has been spurting ideas into my brain in response to the excellent, though potentially disheartening, feedback from Mr. Gary Smith re: 'Displacement'.

Logical brain is busy making a list of tasks still to be done before the SDS app is presentable, calculating how long each of those tasks will take, and placing them in priority order. He's also trying to work out how to show off the app in a way that creates the biggest impact on the audience.

I think this situation might work out, however. I'm very much an all-or-nothing person with my interests: periods of intense activity followed by periods of dejected apathy. In this case, I can see Creative brain tugging at Logical brain's sleeve contantly, whining things like "Come on! When's it my turn? It's my turn now, isn't it? It must be my turn, right? Come on Logical Brain!" Logical brain will do his best to ignore him until the presentation's over, by which time Creative brain's insistence will have put so much pressure on the greymatter dam that it'll burst it's banks in a frantic tidal rush of rapid-fire writing goodness.

That's the hope. I wonder what it takes to be like this guy instead?

Target 011 - Add 500 words more to 'Meanwhile...' by bedtime Sunday. Yipes!

Slim Pickings

500 words isn't a lot is it? Not really, I thought. Well, I just did a quick search and found that 'industry standard' page length is 250 words. By that count, I'm managing 2 pages per target. When I put it like that, it doesn't sound too bad.

However....

The NaNoWriMo organisation challenges would-be-writers (and established ones too, I think) to crank out an entire novel during the month of November. So how long is the average novel? NaNoWriMo accepts nothing less than 50,000 words, and the Oracle's Oracle (Wikipedia) tells me a novel should be at least 40,000 words. OK then. I'd have to slap down a whopping 1666.6666666667 words each day in November in order to qualify for NaNoWriMo. At the moment, 500 words takes me anywhere between half-an-hour (when the juices are flowing!) to 2 hours (when I feel like I'm pegging dough on a washing line).

Worst case, then, I'd have to spend 400 minutes of every day in November at my writing desk. That's 6.666667 hours. Taking lunch and coffee breaks into account, that's virtually a full time job. Even if I got home at 5pm and started writing immediately, it'd be after 11:30 by the time I'd hit my target. And I'd miss my dinner. Scary.

Fine. What if my eggs were sunny side up? 100 minutes. Just over an hour and a half.

Now that sounds a bit more like it. Can I justify the life of a hermit for a couple of hours every evening for one month a year? Hmm. That might just be doable.

Does the novel have to be good when it's finished?

Still, November's a long way away, and I've got a shorter story to finish before I start getting any loftier ideas!

Target 010 - Get 600 words added to 'Meanwhile' before bedtime on Friday.

#NaNoWriMo #short stories #Meanwhile in the underworld

Back in the Saddle

Done! 577 words in the bank. Our auspiciously-attired antagonist is in play, and has already elicited a tirade of abuse from the protagonist's sidekick! Good work, baddie! This isn't my finest work (I blame not having a beer before sitting down, as I intended). I've written virtually nothing for two whole weeks and so feel kind of rusty. What kind of writer am I anyway?

One who likes his short stories, that's what kind! I also like flash fiction. Flash fiction is something I'd never heard of until I did the short story course that started all this. We were challenged to write a story in exactly 100 words that could still be considered a complete story (i.e. had a beginning, middle and end). I cranked out 2. The first one went down pretty well, and is referenced in the 'Stanley Labasco' story. The second didn't go down quite so well. I'd wrongly assumed that everyone knew the names of obscure ancient Greek deities. Naturally, no-one did, so it all fell a bit flat. I also think I couldn't express everything I needed to express to do justice to that story in only 100 words. It was too big. Hence, I started to re-write it, and it eventually metamorphosed into 'Meanwhile, In the Underworld...'

Hopefully the short-story version makes more sense!

I think anyone with aspirations of being a writer should try to write a story in 100 words. It's not as easy as it sounds. However, it does force you to really pare down your words and choose each one carefully. That's a handy skill to learn when you're prone to produce purple prose like I am. It's also a pretty fun challenge when you've only got a few minutes spare and don't have much inspiration!

Target 009 - Add another 500 words to 'Meanwhile...' by bedtime Sunday!

It's Not All Bad News...

'Stanley Labasco' got through to the third and final round of its current submission process! That means it's all in the hands of the editors now. I'm still not quite sure exactly what the requirements are to get through to round three, but I've done it nonetheless. Maybe I spelled my name right and the second-round readers saw that I currently live in NZ?

Or maybe, just maybe, I've written a half-decent story that someone liked well enough to put forward for publication?

Poor Marksman

Bah! It had to happen sooner or later. I missed a target. In this case, the target was 007. I'm in good company though; Blofeld, Scaramanga, Goldfinger, Nik-Nak - all those illustrious evildoers couldn't hit 007 either. Har har!

Crap puns aside though, I'm a little annoyed that I missed this target. I completely forgot it was Easter Weekend, but once I realised it was, I thought I could crack out the rest of 'Meanwhile...' during our break in Raetihi. No dice. I think I managed to correct a single solitary sentence in the little down-time I had. Arseflaps. I'm still on the cusp of introducing the antagonist of the piece. It's maddening. He's literally on the doorstep, waiting to bate my main character with his sarcasm, and all I have to do is find an hour or two to slip him in.

Maybe the huge target was too insurmountable? Maybe it was too big a chunk to bite off? Part of the experiment of motivating myself via this blog is to ensure I kept some kind of momentum going with my writing. I think that perhaps this time I short-circuited the motivational process by attempting too much. Maybe a smaller word-count target is more acceptable? Well, this is a learning process, so let's try that instead. It seemed to work with the earlier targets.

Target 007 008: Add 500 words to 'Meanwhile, in the Underworld...' by Friday bedtime.

#meanwhile in the underworld #missed target #target-008 #target-007

Coward's Way Out

I'm embarrassed to say that's exactly what I took during my last update. I think I've got to make a rule - if I hit a target, I should then immediately set a new target. If I don't, I find myself not doing the work that I want to do and things slacken off. It's tough being a new dad, true enough, but I should really make time for my writing. Having said that, today I managed to edit the work I did mid-week and teased out another 200 or so words for 'Meanwhile...'. I can live with that. I'm on the cusp of introducing the antagonist, too, so that gives me an extra incentive for this week's target.

I can't just blame broken sleep for my slackness. I've returned to Fallout 3 to play the DLC. Oh dear. I played right through the main story in more or less one fell swoop, and although it motivated me just enough to complete it, I found the story a bit underwhelming. I had no real interest in continuing on my adventures in the Capital Wasteland until I stumbled across an abandoned building on a random wander through the debris. On entering, I kicked off a minor quest told through the classic video game trope of discarded diary pages. There was an obvious Lovecraftian influence to the deftly-relayed story, which built nicely towards an interesting confrontation deep in the bowels of the earth beneath the building. What I liked about this was that some people may never, ever see this building or complete this quest, because, like many of the game's side-quests, it has no bearing on the main storyline. However, despite using the exact same art assets as everywhere else in the game, the location managed to exude a great atmosphere with clever placement of objects, simple scripted events and imaginative use of standard terrain pieces. As a developer myself, I can see how someone would have carefully planned how he would have executed the vision of his little quest even as he was constrained within the limits of a game engine not particularly well suited to this type of mini-story. Also, I wonder if someone just piped-up about their desire for a Lovecraft-alike in a design meeting, then got offered the chance to have a crack at writing and directing their own slice of Wasteland pie. That kind of romantic notion appeals to the writer in me. I'd like a go at that!

So, if you ever find yourself wandering the post-nuclear ruins of Washington DC with nothing to do, pop down to the Dunwich Building and play your way through a fun little horror adventure. You never know what you might find!

This week's target is 007 (duh duh d-duhhhh d-duh duhhh! Duh-d'dlerrr duh-duh duhhh!) - finish the first draft of 'Meanwhile, in the Underworld' by Friday bedtime. Tough one. That's what you get for trying to weasle out of setting targets young man!

#fallout 3 #target-007 #Meanwhile in the underworld #short stories #writing

Things are Looking Up (From Down There)

Holy Cow! That was some rapid fire tomfoolery. Not the most elegant linguistic somersaults, as first drafts often aren't (unless you're in the groove), but I was firing on about 3 1/2 of 5 cylinders so it's not utter tosh. 855 of 500 words. I reckon that's a win.

Another win: Stanley Labasco has made it through round one of his current submissions process! One down, two to go. Will our reluctant hero make it into print on his second attempt? Who can say? (apart from the editors of said publication, that is.) I'm excited, but I should reign it in. I think round one is basically a case of spelling one's name correctly and managing to have formatted one's manuscript in the requisite archaic style. Still, It's good news! If only I had a pint of Stygian Water Stout to celebrate with. I'd even settle for a carton of Um Bongo so I could blow into the straw and let the pressure force the juice down my throat without any further effort being required. Ahh, decadence.

Oh,Whilst I'm Here

Something recently surfaced that has obviously been bugging my subconscious for years (spoiler: first-world problems follow). How is this consistent with this? That's the classic example of the problem, but the specific instance that popped into my head recently (for reasons unknown - I have absolutely no idea what spurred this) is illustrated by this, this and this. Optimus Prime should only be as tall as MotorMaster's knees. Who thought they could just pass off the difference in scale between certain Transformers without a second thought? As a 10-year-old boy, that confused me greatly.

A friend once described my writing as similar to "manga but without pictures". That was probably a kind way of saying it was massively over the top, and faintly ridiculous (mind you, I've also received criticism labelling me 'flippant' on more than one occasion). However, one big influence on my style is probably Simon Furman. Simon wrote almost all of the Marvel UK run of the Transformers comics that I read as a teenager, and his signature brand of high drama and bravado-infused dialogue has stuck with me on some level. I can still quote from some of the guy's speech balloons that were written in 1990.

It's definitely on the back-burner for now, but as the thoughts coalesced, I couldn't help but string together a loose back-story of MotorMaster, Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus that links all three (to scale) and could potentially shoehorn its way into current canon. Assuming the shoehorn is massively over the top and faintly ridiculous, that is.

That's a story for a rainy day. As a grown man I should be concentrating on something a bit more worthwhile. How about the personification of Death moaning about a downturn in business? Right you are, then.

Communication Breakdown: Wah Haaow!

Tough week at the office last week, coupled with a tough week with our little boy. Lack of sleep + demanding bubba + stressed Dom does not make for good writing. Thankfully, I did contact potential proofreaders, and have got a definite 'yes' from three of them, one of whom already have a first draft of 'Displacement' in their eager mits! I'll send the other two out right now - hang on two ticks....

...done! That's three! All I have to do now is brace myself for critical impact. Better strap myself in...

In the meantime, however, I'm going to try to pull off the same trick twice. I don't remember if I blogged it back at the start of all this, but Displacement was one of at least 3 unfinished short stories I had in need of an ending. The second is entitled The Decline of Modern Death and was born out of a 100-word flash fiction story I produced on the same short story course. Some of the other guys rightly didn't get my obscure references to Greek Mythology, and the Underworld in particular. Coupling that with a sci-fi concept I was trying usurp in a comedic manner and I very quickly found that 100 words were nowhere near enough. Pop! Out squirted a malformed story baby screaming its lungs out. What I'm trying to do now is graft some functioning limbs onto its gnarled stumps and unplug it from the respirator.

Target 005 - Get 500 words of top-class medical care pumped into the veins of Modern Death by bedtime Wednesday!

What's in a Name?

Sunday morning saw the completion of the second editing phase of Displacement. Job done. I'm still suffering from the classic 'telling' instead of 'showing' mistake common to amateur writers, but I blame that on sleep deprivation and a very playful baby boy!

There's an addendum here. A Google search for 'Lieutenant McBride' comes up with a whole raft of fictional and real-life versions. Boo. There's no guarantee of ever being 100% original, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd subconsciously ripped Lieutenant McBride's name from somewhere. Also, in the first version of the story, Commander Oates was simply 'The Commander'. He was made intentionally nameless to draw attention to his situation rather than the man himself. Since his situation was the whole idea for the story and the central driver, it seemed appropriate at the time. McBride was nothing more than a pair of eyes describing the scene for the reader. As McBride developed and took on a life of his own, he gradually became the central character. That thickened the story-layer surrounding the central idea, and allowed it to actually become somewhat 3-dimensional and more grounded in reality. Now the characters were more than just a pair of conveyances for an idea, they required proper names. As with the hidden meanings lurking throughout Stanley Labasco (Google that name!), these gents needed cleverer identifiers - Lieutenant Calder and Commander Pearce were born.

Oh, and I also recruited Mike from work and Anna at home to act as proof-readers, so I guess I hit that bonus achievement too! (I still need a few more though, so I won't count that as a flawless victory!)

Mixed Bag

Ha ha! Well, I missed the opportunity to make progress on my SDS at work (has it really been two weeks since the last Google Day? Blimey). Far too busy with more pressing concerns. Boo, hiss. I hate that it's only one day every fortnight, although I shouldn't complain; most places don't have anything even close to it. One exception is Google, and every day's Google day there I suppose.

However, I do believe I've just finished that editing run for 'Displacement' that I talked about in the previous post. Coolio Iglesias! It's over 3300 words - my longest finished short story. It's not my most literary, nor does it particularly flow in places (although my proof readers should be the judge of that really), but it's done! Another Achievement Unlocked! I'm 3 for 3 now - unheard of before this blog started up. But what does it all mean? It means that there's one more editing run to do, then I'll send it out to interested readers, then act on that feedback before I start farming it out to publications. Will it be picked up? Who knows! It's early days, and I'm still very much an amateur novice rookie greenhorn when it comes to wordsmithing.

Target 004 - Finish 'Displacement' editing run number 2 by bedtime Sunday.

Bonus Target - Approach some proofreaders by bedtime Sunday!

#SDS #Displacement #short stories

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