Of mice and men

Cow Watching
Don't ask me how, for I honestly don't know, but I found this article on escape characters while strolling through Wikipedia:

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters.

I couldn't help reading it as a writer (In writing, an escape character is...) and immediately something went "aha!" Into the the baby's toy bag it goes, for somewhere, somewhen I'll actually start working on the New (and as of yet still nameless) Project.


Sockbooze
Last month two stragglers stumbled into my gmailbox, a year after the sockbooze was sent. Both made me laugh:

Analysis of the first (one year later, nearly to the day): opens with a polite but impersonal greeting and explanation how the sockbooze got lost and why the necessity of the impersonal answer (fair enough) and then style-breaches right into a warmer and more personal explanation why it's a pass (schizo much?)

Analysis of the second (13 months later): three short lines that rollercoast from sorry > spam > catching up > resubmit whenever open again ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME? HAHAHA

Anyways, with all my sheep returned, I find it's nearly a year after I said "I'll wait till summer and then we'll see..." The sockbooze returned Dreams of Cold Stone to my attention, and I'm weeding through it for the last time (Really. Promise!) Cutting down some more kudzu. Fluffing up and patting down the eiderdown. And then we'll see for real.


Stuff of life
Two weeks ago changes were in the air.
I quit my job (but I've already landed a new job, I start on Monday, wahay!)
But more importantly: my dad had a thrombosis-stroke, which all-in-all could have turned out far worse for a 75-year old. For now he lost the left hand side of the world (irremediable), and processing speed (remediable). We're all happy/lucky there are no mobility problems. And while after revalidation he probably could live independent (with some ambulant care), we (his not-living-in-girlfriend, my brother and me) have decided his place is too far away and too big to let him return there, to live on his own.
Factoring into that story, is how my dad always has had a thing of finding stuff in the street and keeping it for when it comes in handy, a bolt, a screw... A cute and quaint little tick, you know? Dad always had a thingy if you needed a thingy. And economic household tips, like keeping a couple of water kettles on the stove during winter, which means you don't have to spend extra gas/money on warm water to do the dishes. Cute and quaint, but he was born in 1935, after all, and the war and the consequent scarcity must have made a serious impression on a child who'd become the eldest of seven.

So, two weeks ago we went to his house, mainly to clean out the fridge, since he wasn't going to return soon. For me it had been some time ago, see, I usually see dad when he and I are visiting my brother's. My parents divorced ages ago, so it's sorta, I keep an eye on mom, and my brother keeps an eye on dad. After we decided he wasn't going back to the house, we kept on going to start cleaning up and putting some order into his affairs. From the first day we've been utterly baffled by the OCD levels of hoarding, and how extreme a weakness he has for promotional sales. Seriously, you could keep whole battalions going for months on the clothing, food, wood and tools we've found there. You could stock a nuclear cellar for a large family, cheap shirts and sheets still wrapped in foil included. It shames me, in a shoulda woulda coulda way and makes me feel horrible horrible horrible. So there, that needed off my chest.

Ourobouros

Exposed to it on Nicola Morgan's blog, I just have to reiterate the youtube here because it's just so witty that *head explodes*

Quick Notes continued

Also, last year, whilst browsing a second hand bookshop for Christmas gifts (we usually find some quirky theater play for muminlaw that way), the hubby found a book of which he said: "Here, that's one for you!" Well, actually he used a Flemish/Dutch expression which, translated literally, gives: "It's written on your body."

The Games People Play, subtitled The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis, is a quite readable manual in which the way we people talk and act around eachother is analysed into handy formulaic patterns. You can read more blahblah on it on its Wikipedia page.

I found the book eerie, as I always do when complex human behavior is revealed to be quite simple programming. Never fails to catapult into the past, many many years ago, where I sat in front of our C64, typed in the code given my a computer magazine, and presto: had my own version of Pong. Wow! That's how easy it is!

But it's also interesting, because the simple patterns are an excellent tool to look at dialogues and other human interaction from a writer point of view.
Up till now, whenever I wrote anything from a pissing contest to venomous green-eyed spitting match, it has always been the inspiration of the moment, and not necessarily what the plot required. Nothing so angst-inspiring as knowing I have to make my characters angry at each other. Very very angry. And there has to be dialogue.
Over the years I managed to get a better feel for it; it helps to crawl into the character's skin and annoy the crap out of him/her until he/she finds her angry voice. But still I'd rather find a way around my characters having a hissy fit on the page. Fake verbal fights are ... so fake.

Luckily now (well, quite some time ago but for me just a few months ago) the mechanics of such "transaction" are revealed with absolute clarity. Very helpful for writing. Also, very helpful for realizing how my own hissy fits work and doubt the hubby finds that a bad thing, 'ey.

So, Games People Play. Look it up. Cool stuff.

Some quick notes

Whilst procrastinating with website stuff, I came across this list of webpages. It's student reference materials for lectures given by one Sandra Shaw, pictures with just a remark, no text or explanation. Cannot say whether her lectures are interesting or not, but the juxtaposition of old art versus quick sketches (like here) and the historical overview in images got my visual muse all aflutter. So there.

The story between the story. As in comic books (the narrative existing literally between the panels of a page and not in the panel itself, like in the space between panels, and drawing inter-"textual" lines from one panel to another). Also in TV series. Lately, been re-watching old series on DVD in high speed; and no, not as in increased frame-rate, but in increased episode-rate. Dark Angel vs. Buffy, averaging on two weeks per season, which is of course not the way they were meant to see. As it happens, it has some strange effects, concerning story-telling: Dark Angel just creeps along its uphill romantic struggle with some ass-kicking thrown in. There are temporal leaps between episodes, but not really. Seen back-to-back, the string of episodes become this one long-assed story, and also... boring. And here I liked Dark Angel so much back in the days, even if the plot suffered from floppy-hat syndrome. But hey: things were coming together towards the end of the second season! I remember being very pissed when they scrapped the show.
Buffy on the other hand makes these subtle little jumps between episodes. The hubby and me often frown and mutter: "This happens already? I thought it took at least five episodes longer before [Angel shows up, Angel leaves, whatever]" See, that's because we're remembering the narrative of the series, which isn't congruent with the actual story told in every episode. The narrative is more than a plain sum of the episodes. Good trick, that. Well done.

I was going to add how this applies to writing, but see, I'm just going to let y'all fill in the narrative yourselves.