That Time I was Flash Robbed

Otherwise known as my first Trunk or Treat.

I know we're well past at this point, but if Christmas can sucker-punch me on October 28 then I can punch right back.

Plus, now that it's past October, have you considered adopting a black cat?

So the day started for me actually on October 30th. I worked 12 hour night shift starting at 6PM and had to switch to dayshift as fast as possible (I keep night shift hours even on my time off) so the fastest way possible was to stay awake long after I would have normally gone to bed. I got off at 6 AM, went home, waited for my brother to get up, helped him into his costume (which takes an extra person and 20-30 minutes to put it on), put on mine, and was right back to where I had worked only two hours earlier.

Now, I haven't done anything with Halloween since I was about eight years old. After that we would just buy our own candy and have a Simpsons marathon consisting of VHS tapes we'd recorded episodes on years ago. So it was actually a lot of fun to see people letting their inner child have free reign. There were people dressed up Mario Kart style, including 3 balloons and scooters. Green army men. Enough pirates to form an actual crew and enough witches (self included) for a coven. After getting my fill I headed home, 21 solid hours of being awake under my belt, and took a long nap while playing the "Just one more hour" game for 4-5 hours until my brother got home from work.

It was like having kids except  I actually got sleep.

From there we went to out friendly neighborhood trunk or treat.

Initially it felt like a flash rob, the participants becoming increasingly wild as the sugar in their system hit critical saturation. There were plenty of Elsas this year, and the one girl going as Cinderella was probably mistaken for an Elsa too, but there were a lot of cool ones too. A couple of my favorites were a tiny little Anna with a crochet hat made to look like her hair (complete with white streak) who's name was actually Anna, a Luigi with a ghost vacuum, and a kid in a stack of boxes I had mentally nicknamed Awesome-O.

If you're still young enough to go trick or treating yet watch this cartoon, your parents don't love you.

Now here's where I probably turn into an old coot.

I'm already awake trunk or treats defeat the whole point of the thing and that it has basically broken down into a fast-grab of candy, but what I wasn't expecting was the picky nature of the kids. I had one walk right up, take a good long look at the bowl, and proclaim "nah." And, by the end of the event, our bowl had actually gained different candies. That's right: the children were dumping lesser candies on us.

All I could think was "What the heck?" Back in my day (there's the old coot thing again), when we had to actually walk further than 6 feet for our candy, we appreciated every last bit we got.

I still enjoyed it though. It's been so long since I actually saw children dressed up in costumes that I guess I forgot the whole event of Halloween even existed on that level.



And, on a totally unrelated note do you have any idea how expensive razors are these days?

When You Get Stuck on a Scene

When I write sometimes I just end up getting stuck. Call it Writer's Block, call it your Muse taking a vacation. Doesn't matter how it's said, it basically means you reached a certain point where you can't write any more. This can bring any story to a grinding halt.

Especially when you try to rekindle your inspiration with Cheezburger.

A personal rule I use is that I give myself three days with no writing. I don't force myself to think about it either and instead hope it comes along more organically. It does, especially when I give my brain the opportunity to go on Standby Mode (which I will discuss in the next post). Sometimes I just rehash in my head what I've already written, other times I think too far ahead, and sometimes I work out exactly what I need.

Other times, however, my brain just flat out refuses to cooperate, and my three days are up. What do I do then?

I write anyway.

Sometimes it's my best writing, sometimes it's not. The times that it's not I plow though anyway because, later on down the road during the editing process, I come up with a much better idea or flesh out the one that's already there.

You can give yourself more or less time, depending on circumstances, but I use three days because if I have less I'm distracted with the deadline of getting back to writing. Longer than three days and it starts getting too far from my mind. You want a golden point between the two.

Brain Standby Mode

No, I don't mean burst suppression brought on by events such as hypothermia, I mean spacing out. I call it Standby Mode because I see the brain as a lot like a computer. With no activity it goes into standby mode waiting for outside input to get it working actively again.

As a kid I used to space out a lot. I could do it at the drop of a hat, in a crowded room, or even in the middle of eating. Although not as often, I still space out today.

Just honk if you're behind me and the light turns green.

This is one reason why all your best ideas come when you are falling asleep, or taking a shower. When falling asleep your mind isn't distracted by the input of the day, and when you're not kept awake with other thoughts ("Should I watch Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore tomorrow? They're both on at the same time and I can't decide, aaaaaargh!") your brain is free to roam. The same goes for taking a shower. If you're like me you shower pretty much every day.

And if you don't shower at all you probably smell like a hobo.

After a bazillion times showering it's pretty much a routine. It's so routine, in fact, that your brain doesn't even have to devote a lot of thinking toward it, giving it a chance to wander. A shower is also a bit of a sensory deprivation chamber, since the sound of the bathroom fan and water make white noise so that you can't hear the outside world, and there's not a whole lot for you to see in the shower either.

Unless you've got, like, a super rockin' bod.

So maybe you fall asleep really fast and your skin chafes from taking five showers a day, how do you manage a Brain Standby Mode?

Force it.

It's both easier and harder than it sounds. I imagine it's a bit like meditation, except instead of letting go and emptying your thoughts to achieve nirvana or the like you're merely providing your brain an opportunity.

Basically, you want to unplug from everything. No Internet, no TV, no phone, no people, not even a book. You want to make your brain go from focusing on the outside to turning toward the inside. You want it give it an unchanging environment so that it doesn't have to use all of its power processing what's going on. It's why so many authors having rooms dedicated to writing (Neil Gaiman's writing gazebo being a personal favorite of mine.)

Granted, sometimes if you find your brain spacing off about the wrong things (the car, the house, the kids, what's for dinner, work, etc etc) you have to give your brain a little nudge in the right direction. Think of the last scene you wrote, or think of a different scene, or a scene in the future. Play with some ideas, your characters, go through some scenes in your head you don't plan to have in your book.

If you need to, open up to the last page of what you've written, but don't actually write. Sometimes I find myself doing that. I don't stress that I'm not actually writing though, because I'm working it through in my head.

If anyone saw me staring glassy-eyed into the computer screen and asked what I was doing, however, I would tell them "Writing" because, in my mind, that's technically what I'm doing.

Yet Another Maximum Ride Book!?

If you've read my blog posts in the past you know about my Love / Hate relationship with the Maximum Ride Series by James Patterson. Well just last Monday I discovered this:

From Barnes and Noble:

THE NINTH AND ULTIMATE MAXIMUM RIDE STORY IS HERE! Legions of Max fans won't be disappointed by this encore episode in the beloved series about the incredible adventures of a teenage girl who can fly. As Maximum Ride boldly navigates a post-apocalyptic world, she and her broken flock are roaming the earth, searching for answers to what happened. All will be revealed in this last spectacular "ride"- a brand-new grand finale featuring all of the nonstop action, twists and turns that readers can rely on in a blockbuster Patterson page turner!


You know what I say to that? Bull. Freaking. Crap.

This book says to me "Remember that really crappy ending in book eight? Haha just kidding here's the real-real ending!" Book eight is literally titled Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure. I bet this is Patterson's (or, what I suspect, one of Patterson's many ghost writers) attempt at "fixing" the mess of the Maximum Ride storyline that was already so messed up even as far back as book three. So stop, just stop already.

Am I going to buy it? Yes, but my heart won't be in it. It died reading book four, and went through agonal heart rhythm during books five through eight. I'm going to read through book nine and watch as they take a bad taxidermy job and try to make it look better using a baseball bat.

What the series looks like, and also my current expression.

A Sunday Adventure Featuring Footloose, Brony Baristas, and a Zombie.

As you may or may not know I'm quite religiously inexperienced. My parents raised me under no specific beliefs and allowed me to think upon it and decide for myself. I've pretty much made my choice a long time ago, and continued to build upon it from there, but it's always interesting to experience new things.

Deciding to do something different, my dad took my brother and I to a Nazarene Church, which is apparently a Footloose religion that doesn't allow dancing (at least, so I've heard.) Being night-shift I go to bed at about 5am usually, service started at 9. Coupled with the fact that I had worked a long night Friday and got uneasy sleep, meant the whole thing had kind of a sleep-deprived wackiness to it.

Now, the area I live in is about 99.99% Mormon, so if you know anything about them picture growing up surrounded by them, but not being one.

Around here we have shirts that say "BYU Idaho" which mean the same thing.

So, first stepping into the church, I immediately fell to me knees and screamed "THANK YOU JESUS!"

Was it a divine revelation?

No.

...I just smelled the coffee.

Sweetened with the love of our Lord.

The place had a little coffee bar (plus juice and tea and muffins) and it was set up more like a cafe. They played some acoustic guitar group of three people and sang a little like a holy karaoke. The whole time I'm switching my attention span between the music and a picture of Jesus with open/closed eyes that followed you around the room.

Still not as creepy as Potato Jesus though.

Sometime during the singing one woman holds her hand up and I think at first that she's trying to gesture to a friend of hers to say hi. However, on the far side opposite her is an older woman doing it while her eyes are closed. Toward the end of the singing about ten percent were holding their hands up. At that point I start to wonder if I missed the memo.

Maybe they were all directing traffic?

Overall it was an interesting experience, although I don't know if I could consistently deprive myself of sleep like that. Still, the people were very friendly and nice and it looks like a great place to meet people.

Afterwards we went to a place called Villa Coffeehouse, a place I read about in a blog called Lost in Idaho (Hilarious reading about a guy moving from California to live in Idaho Falls, but a some of his subject matter is NSFW, so you've been warned.)

The barista was a Brony, judging by the hat he wore (he also had a Pokemon belt, but that never came up), and he was an interesting guy to talk to. I've never really been to more than just a Starbucks inside of a Barnes and Noble, like a little caffeinated tumor. So this was really interesting, and it had a group of people that I thought didn't really exist in Idaho Falls. I even saw a couple of girls who had some light PDA while waiting for their espressos. At least, I assume gazing deeply and gentle petting means they're more than roomies.

I think it would be rather interesting to see what the place is like in the evening on a weekday.

Afterwards I got home and crashed for about three hours. As much as I still wanted to sleep I knew any more would only mess up my sleep schedule more than it already was. So I dragged my feet into the kitchen and decided now was the time to try some Zombie Cure tea.

That's right kids, the zombie craze has infected tea now, and it is deliciously awesome.

Normally I'm pretty much exclusively a chai drinker, but when I first opened my little bag of Zombie Cure I already knew I was in for something good. It has a sweet, caramelly smell, which is the kind of teas I enjoy. It tasted the same way it smelled, going perfectly with milk and sugar. Best of all? It woke me right up and kept me going for hours.

So, in all, it was an interesting day.

If you hear me snoring, however, don't wake me.

Omniscent Versus Limited

I've already mentioned before about first and third person (as well as the abhorrent second person) but third person has yet another branching option, one of which is better left to people better at explaining things than myself.

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2012/11/third-person-omniscient-vs-third-person.html

Books to Read When You Have Book Depression

I really love dystopian books, especially of the YA variety. The problem is, sometimes they really start to get to me and I find myself getting something I just now named Book Depression. It's basically feeling depressed from having read a really sad or depressing story, and now you need something to contrast all the bleak (but utterly good) books you've been reading lately.

Here's what happened to me.

I guess it must have started when I read Allegiant by Veronica Roth. After mowing through the Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch and chasing it with The Giver Lois Lowry, I then read The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder, some of Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells and most of Moth by Daniel Arenson (I also apologize for my list of hipster indie books.)

My dad says I use this picture too much.

I had just started Enclave by Ann Aquirre. The story starts in a dank, grey subway tunnel. I was interested, but also felt myself going "Unnnngh" as I could feel the depression of the story kicking right in. I only made it a couple of pages when I knew I had to stop.

What could I read that would kick my spirits back into high gear though? One immediately came to mind and, after some thought, I managed to compile a list of books that I would give to someone if they said they wanted a more happy read.

Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She's Dead

This one is a favorite of mine on my Kindle, and the very first ebook I ever read two years ago almost to the day of this post, so it has really stuck with me. It's got a funny cast of characters, a "bad to worse" situation, and manages to give you whiplash through it's flawless combination of comedy and horror. This was the one I grabbed when I was feeling down from an overload of dystopia. Best of all, there's a brand new sequel!


Undead and Unwed by Maryjanice Davidson

 It's the perfect mix of vampires and humor. The story brings the laughs and never takes itself too seriously.

Hounded by Kevin Hearne

While not an outright comedy it's a very lighthearted story most of the time, which is why I would actually recommend it over Dresden Files in terms of overall happy factor. Plus, the author is a complete, lovable nerd, and it shows in every page.

Ithanalin's Restoration

I have almost no memory of this book, but it's been on my shelf for over ten years. Any book about a wizard turning himself into runaway furniture and his apprentice reversing the spell has to be a good way to lighten up your reading.



I have a big stack of dystopian books ahead of me, so I would love to hear about some more happy reads to keep me going in between the dark ones!