That whimpering sound you heard yesterday would have been me. After finally figuring out the way the scene was supposed to go, I still couldn't seem to write it. I seemed to come up with every procrastination method in the book. I finally decided to just go back and re-read what came before to build up to it. And then I realized that the real problem with the scene was that I hadn't actually set it up. It was just happening out of the blue for no good reason, with no sense of cause and effect. I knew why it was happening, but I hadn't put any of that in the book. I also noticed that I have continued a bad first draft habit of writing essentially the same scene over and over again. They may be talking about different things, but the same essential things are happening for the same reason. And I have far too many scenes that have very little to do with the story, that are just there (and one thing I don't even remember why I put in there in the first place).

I think for me that's the danger of trying to do a book-in-a-month challenge type thing. I get hung up on advancing the word count and just write instead of taking the time to think it through. So I think today will be a reboot day. I'll get out my notecards and go through the manuscript to really think about why each scene is there and what purpose it serves, and that should help me find places to put the new things I need. I'm going to quit worrying about word count and instead focus on getting the book done in as close to final form as possible. My goal is to be able to send this to my agent and have her only want to make a few tweaks before she sends it out into the world.

One thing that will help is that just about everything I watch on TV is now done for the season. Next season it looks like I'll have plenty of writing time, too. They did renew Chuck (yay!), but it's not returning until after the Winter Olympics. There are a few mid-season shows that look kind of interesting, but I'm not overly thrilled with most of the new things that were announced for fall. I did watch Glee last night, and it looks like that might scratch the particular itch that Friday Night Lights targets, where some of it is painfully real and some is over the top and it makes me feel good and hopeful while also making me cry. It also makes me kind of jealous because we didn't even have a choir in my school, let alone a show choir. I probably wouldn't have my phobia about singing in public today if I'd had opportunities like that at a younger age to allow me to get used to the idea before it built up into this huge thing. I didn't even know that you could take lessons in singing until I got to college and had a voice major as a roommate, but then I'd learned to play two musical instruments rather well using the "here's a fingering chart, now go practice" method of instruction. I'm not sure that it would have changed my life significantly because I don't think I have the drive or the desire to have been a professional, and I still would have wanted to write. It just may have meant that I didn't break out into a cold sweat at the idea of singing a solo, even though I desperately want to sing a solo. Anyway, it looks like that show is scheduled for Wednesday nights, so it will be something I can tape during choir practice, and then it will be too appropriate for watching when I get home from choir.

Now to go tackle a few business items, and then I'll get out the notecards.

Thanks for all the fun science fiction recommendations. That may help me come up with good summer reading. Really, right now "fun" isn't too popular in the publishing world. "Dark and dangerous" are the buzzwords. Romantic comedy and chick lit are pretty much dead except for a few authors -- and even there the chick-lit-like books are mostly about what happens after marriages fall apart. The cover blurbs all seem to go along the lines of "Mary Sue thought she had the perfect marriage, until she caught her husband with the pool boy. Now she's trying to cope with being a single mother, re-establishing her career and re-entering the dating scene." Not really my idea of fun reading. Fantasy -- both urban and otherwise -- is all about the dark and dangerous. Science fiction seems to mostly be about how the world is coming to an end because humans are terrible. Maybe I'm shallow, but for summer reading, in particular, I want to read about people I like having adventures. A touch of darkness and danger is fine, but I don't want to wallow in it.

Sometimes, that strong craving to read something is a sign that it's something I should be writing, but I suspect that if I tried to create a Firefly-like space adventure it would probably end up looking like Firefly fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off. Or else I would be so conscious of trying to avoid looking like I was writing Firefly fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off that I'd be making character choices strictly for that reason, which isn't good, either. Maybe someday an actual plot/story/character will drop into my head and I can write it, but at the moment I'm not even sure there's a market for that sort of thing.

Speaking of space adventures, I'm going to have to come clean with a confession that will show that I'm either a bad geek or a truly geeky geek: I have no interest in the new Star Trek movie. In fact, I'm kind of opposed to the very existence of it. It's not for the reasons given in the Onion spoof video about Trekkies hating the film. I have no objections to more action and fewer scenes of debating ethical issues. I just hate the idea of a prequel to the original series involving the characters from the original series (I wasn't thrilled with the idea of Enterprise, either, but at least that was set in a different era).

While I am a fairly old-school Trekker (I may even be a Trekkie, to be honest, though I don't own a set of Spock ears, I don't have a Starfleet uniform and I don't speak Klingon), I'm also capable of being open-minded about it. I love the original series for what it was and have fond memories of watching it. I saw it in bits and pieces as a kid (my mom watched it during the original run, part of which I was alive for, so I guess I was indoctrinated early), then they started running it after school when I was in high school. Both my parents worked at the school, so we all came home together and watched it every afternoon. I fell in with the group that I ended up hanging out with in college when they used to gather in someone's dorm room to watch Star Trek every afternoon before going down to the cafeteria for dinner. The fourth movie came out my freshman year, and there was a big group outing to go see it.

But I'll admit that I liked The Next Generation even more when it came along (we crammed into a dorm room for that, too). And my favorite series of them all is Deep Space Nine, which should prove that I'm not really the hidebound, old-school Trekkie who refuses to accept anything that doesn't meticulously follow Roddenberry's vision.

My problem is that I'm not a fan of re-boots, especially not of something so iconic. If you're going to do it, go the Battlestar Galactica route and really re-do it without pretending it has any connection to the original. But to re-boot with a prequel that takes place not too terribly long before the original? I can't quite deal. The ages don't really line up well and it all ends up looking like the Muppet Babies, where there was already an "origin" story of how they met as adults, and then suddenly they all were in the same nursery together as babies. And then there's the look of things. The original series had a pretty distinct look that had a lot to do with the time period and the budget, and there are a couple of ways to approach it -- you can update the look and pretend it was always like that, just depicted using the technology available at the time, or you can go with it, acknowledge it and accept it as the aesthetic of a particular era. I loved the way they dealt with it on the "Trials and Tribbleations" episode of Deep Space Nine -- they considered it a particular era with a particular style and acknowledged that things really did look like that then. They even dealt with the old-style Klingons with the "we do not discuss it among outsiders" line.

I would have been all for a Star Trek re-do with a new crew -- like the next-next generation or even another ship. But my old-school Trekker heart won't let me cope with other people playing Kirk, Spock and McCoy in a universe that looks nothing like the Trek universe. The movie's getting great reviews, and I might have been willing to be dragged by friends, but my friends are going at a time when I can't go, and I can't picture myself taking time out to go to the movie on my own.

So, do I have to give up my geek badge of honor for not seeing a Star Trek movie, or do I enter the Geek Hall of Fame for being too geeky to accept the re-boot? I already didn't see the latest X-Files movie. It looks like I'll have to see the new Harry Potter on opening day (I plan to) to retain any geek credibility.

It's another Monday, and I think I'm revved up and ready for action, more or less, considering I spent Sunday singing Mozart (one quirk of living alone -- I haven't spoken out loud today, so I don't know if I still have a voice). My choir is participating in a community-wide Mozart festival next month, so we're doing intense rehearsals on the Coronation Mass. There's a lot of high, loud stuff for the sopranos. A long rehearsal is as good as a session at the gym.

To follow up on Friday's post on the way television portrays writers, I do want to stress that it was meant as humor, to be taken tongue-in-cheek.

However, I do want to clarify something:
There's a difference between writing what you know or using elements from your life and doing what most authors on TV shows seem to do in basing their novels on their real lives. Most authors draw upon their own experiences in developing characters, since we're the only people we know from the inside. If it makes sense for the story, there's no problem with making your characters be similar to what you know or live in a world that's familiar to you. That's different from writing your real life directly into your books.

For instance, like Katie Chandler in my books, I'm from a small Texas town. I first visited New York at about the age Katie was when she moved there. I don't know how well I could write a New Yorker who'd always lived there because it would be difficult for me to see it from that perspective (probably easier now that I've spent so much time there), but I certainly could write from the perspective of an outsider who'd come from the exact opposite kind of society. But there the similarities end. Although I was in my twenties the first time I went to New York and had gone to high school in a small Texas town, I didn't exactly have a small-town perspective, since I was an army brat and had lived overseas before moving to the small town. I'd already seen Paris before I saw New York. I'd seen the old Amsterdam before "New Amsterdam." I had to shut off that part of myself and focus on the one aspect that mattered to my story, just drawing upon the parts of my personal experience that were relevant.

To do what the TV characters always seem to do when they write novels, I'd be writing about a character named Anna Swanson who was a novelist who worked at home, occasionally got together with friends who were exactly like my friends and who maybe had minor adventures at science fiction conventions. Yeah, it would probably be the most boring book ever, and even to make it into something like a chick lit book I'd have to throw in a love interest (I'd have to give My Anchorman some role in the book), but you get the idea. I guess if I were a TV character and wanted to be a novelist, I'd have to start solving crimes just so I'd have something to write about.

That one particular TV character quirk really gets to me because the people who write TV series are professional writers, and surely they aren't all writing their autobiographies when they write TV scripts (if they are, then I vote we put a big fence around California to keep the rest of us safe from those freaks). They should know that writers make stuff up. I guess there's just more room for conflict or humor when a character gets a book published and all his friends/co-workers read it and recognize themselves. There wouldn't be much point in a "character writes a novel" plot if the novel had no bearing or reflection on the rest of the story. On the other hand, I have noticed a tendency for people to try to find real life nuggets in novels, as though the books offer deep insights into the author and if you can just decode it, you'll understand everything about that person. If a TV character wrote a truly fictional novel, the others could still be trying to break the code and figure it out, and that would be a lot more difficult (and possibly interesting) if the characters in the book weren't so obviously directly from the author's real life.

I had a spectacularly unproductive day yesterday -- just couldn't seem to focus on any thought for longer than five seconds. I couldn't even manage to read. I ended up dusting my office, taking apart a fan to dust the blades and washing dishes. But it's raining today, which is always good, and on the way home from ballet last night I figured out the next scene I have to write, which will help me get a running start.

I did a post last year on "TV Laws," on the way things work in the television universe that aren't like real life. I was thinking of some new TV laws and realized there are a whole set of laws applying to writers. Some of these may be part of what leads to the major misperceptions about life as a writer. Where applicable, I'll add the reality check.

1) If a regular character on a television series writes a book, it will be an instant, huge bestseller that immediately makes the author rich and famous. A TV character would never get an average advance and midlist publication, like most authors in the real world. And the book is published (and the money starts rolling in) almost as soon as the character writes it.

Reality: See my post on publishing realities.

2) The writer characters on TV series aren't very creative. The main characters in their books are usually not-so-loosely based on themselves, and all the other characters are based so closely on the other people in their lives that these people recognize themselves and each other in the books. Even total strangers who've read the books will immediately recognize the real people as their characters' counterparts when they meet them. These writers seem incapable of just creating a character out of thin air. Every character has to be based on a real person, and if the writer is blocked on creating a character, all it takes to become unblocked is meeting someone who makes a good basis for a character, and then the writer will have to spend a lot of time with that person to develop the character. If the writer characters work in law enforcement, the cases in their books will all be based on real cases they've worked on. The exception is the rare situation where the cases are made up, but then some deranged fan starts acting them out in reality (and the deranged fan can manage to kill the "characters" since they all have real-life counterparts).

Reality: This does happen, to some extent -- look at all those "assistant to a famous person" books that came out during the chick lit craze, where someone who'd worked for someone famous wrote a novel about someone working for someone very much like the real famous person. But those are special circumstances based on the fame of the people involved. Not knowing the real people involved, I can't say how closely the rest of the characters in those books were based on real people, but my guess is that the non-famous ones were composites or entirely fictional (libel standards are different for people who have "thrust themselves into the public spotlight" so it takes more to prove you've libeled someone who's trying to be famous and living a public life than it does to prove that you've libeled ordinary people who didn't do anything to bring themselves attention). Most novels are entirely fictional, and while authors do sometimes loosely base characters on real people or are inspired by real people, you have to be careful so that the real people can't be readily identified. If you libel a real person who can be readily identified in your work by the general community, that "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer won't be much help. Plus, if you're so creatively barren that you can't make up characters, your book isn't going to be that good.

There are a couple of characters in my books who are loosely based on or inspired by real people. Mimi is a composite of two real people (who utterly loathed each other, which I suppose is ironic in its own way) with a lot of other stuff added in, and a couple of people who worked closely with those people have recognized certain traits in Mimi, but I doubt that anyone who wasn't working with me at the time I worked with those people and who didn't know I worked with those people would ever meet those people and think they inspired Mimi. Her physical description is entirely unrelated to the real people. Mostly, I took some behaviors from real life and put them into a character. They must be pretty common behaviors because I get a lot of e-mail from people who've said they worked with a Mimi. Katie is definitely not that much like me. I certainly didn't intentionally base her on myself, and if I were to talk about her, I wouldn't get my pronouns mixed up.

3) Writer characters on TV have deranged fans who take their books far too seriously, think the characters are real (okay, given the above law, maybe that's not so crazy) and who stalk the writers or the people the characters are based on.

Reality: This does happen, as well, but it's very rare and generally limited to specific genres. I hear about it more in paranormal romance and books of that ilk. It does seem like steamy stuff involving vampires brings out the freaks. I don't know enough mystery writers to know if they get the fans trying to act out their cases. I've yet to have a fan make me really uncomfortable, aside from the men at conventions who come onto me, but I suspect that has little to do with my writing or the content of my books and might even happen if I weren't a writer, given that I'm female, single, reasonably attractive and speak conversational geek.

4) Writer characters on TV are probably writing either a mystery novel or a literary coming-of-age story. A sitcom character may be allowed to try to write a romance novel, but only if it's played for laughs, with the other characters trying to figure out who the hero is (since TV characters are incapable of making up characters) or reading the love scenes out loud.

Reality: the majority of novels published are romance novels. Mystery is actually a fairly small slice of the publishing pie. But I suspect this TV law has something to do with most TV series having something to do with crime.

5) On television, novelists are major celebrities who can get into exclusive nightclubs or who can get impossible restaurant reservations just by dropping their names. And when they give their names, everyone knows who they are. Everyone they run into is a fan.

Reality: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! There are maybe five authors in the world who are that famous -- and even there, I bet you could still run into people who wouldn't know who they were. I have friends who are national bestsellers, and still most of the people I know outside the writing or fandom world have never heard of them. I know people who have had movies made from their books, and I've run into people who saw the movie but still don't recognize the author's name. Sadly, I've yet to be in a non-book-related situation where someone heard my name and recognized me as an author or asked if I was the one who wrote those books. I haven't even had my name recognized at a bookstore when I was paying by credit card and using one of those loyalty cards with a coupon where my name came up. I'm lucky if people in the store know who I am when I show up to do a booksigning. The closest I've come to being "recognized" is at WorldCon, where the occasional random passer-by saw my name badge and said something about my books.

6) Television publishing companies all seem to be based in the city where the TV series is set. They have spacious, plush offices.

Reality: There are publishers outside of New York, but not many, and most of them wouldn't be considered major publishers. There are more agents outside New York, especially since more of them are realizing they can work just as effectively at a lower cost away from New York. I've been in the offices of two major publishing companies, and even the fairly high-up editors have tiny, cramped offices, with just about every surface covered with paper and piles of manuscripts everywhere. A lot of people work in cubicles. In one editor's cube, the "guest chair" was a filing cabinet on wheels with a padded top. It shoved under the desk and then could be pulled out to use as a seat when she had a visitor. I could probably fit three or more New York publishing offices into my office. My agent's office is fairly spacious, but she's not based in New York.

7) Editors and agents on TV shows take a deep, personal interest in their authors' lives and work. They have time to come up with elaborate publicity stunts (like fake crazy fan letters or fake stalker fans), to give relationship advice, to have lunch with their authors all the time (since they all live in the same city), and to provide lots of personal hand-holding if the writer is blocked or struggling. Book publicists sometimes do crazy things like staging crime scenes out of the books to generate publicity. Deranged editors, agents and publicists have even been known to go overboard and commit crimes to publicize books.

Reality: I've generally had friendly relationships with my agent and editors, and we do sometimes talk about our personal lives. I've met my agent's husband. But editors and agents don't have the time to devote all that much attention to any one author, and they're certainly not going to take illegal or unethical steps to promote an author's work. Though perhaps it's different if you're an instant, huge bestseller. I have known a major author who did get the hand-holding and intense attention when she was blocked and on deadline. My agent, editors and publicists have all been total slackers because they haven't staged elaborate murder or crime scenes that are right out of my books in order to get media attention (though that's probably difficult since I don't write a lot of crime or murder scenes), and none of them have killed anyone in a misguided attempt to publicize my books.

(Please note: I was being sarcastic about calling my agent, editors and publicists slackers. I was not implying that they really are because they have not killed on my behalf.)

The productivity did at last slow a bit. I got more work done on the tax organizing, which also resulted in cleaning out a space. But I came to a crashing halt on the writing when I realized I'd created a McGuffin. A McGuffin, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the object the people in the story are seeking, and the details of what it is don't really matter all that much to the story because the important part is what the people are willing to do to get it. One of the more famous McGuffins is the Maltese Falcon, or else the letters of transit in Casablanca. In spy stories, it's often "the papers," and it doesn't matter much what the papers really are, just that everyone in the story is desperate to get them, and the consequences will be dire if they fall into the wrong hands. But in my story, the nature of the object everyone's seeking does matter because it plays a role in the plot. My problem was that I hadn't figured out all the details yet, so I was treating it as a McGuffin. And then I reached a part where it starts to matter what this thing really is, what it can do and what people know about it. Even worse, it's the kind of thing where there are legends about it, and then there's the reality. So I had to work all that out in my head before I could write another word, and then once I worked it out, I realized I was going to have to totally rewrite the last scene I'd written because a character's reactions were all wrong for the situation (which could partially explain why the villain was being too nice). By then, it was almost dinner time and I had a headache (which could have had something to do with the yellow haze in the sky from the smoke blown here from the wildfires), so I called it a day and figured I'd sleep on it to re-plan my scene.

In other news, it looks like tonight is the season (and maybe series) finale of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and the season finale of Friday Night Lights (which made me bawl like a baby last week -- it didn't help that the big game was played in my university's stadium). But I'll be out singing for a church service. And then Sci Fi starts showing Primeval, which I've already seen, but which I may watch again.

Speaking of Sci Fi, they announced a few weeks ago that they'll be changing their name to "Sy Fy" (or something like that). Part of their reasoning makes some sense -- since "sci fi" is a widely used, general term, they can't trademark it (though you'd think that might have come up when they were naming the network in the first place, and then you do have to wonder about the Food Network, since the word "food" is also pretty widely used in a general sense). But then the rest of their reasoning is utterly baffling. Apparently, they feel that the name of the network is keeping people who might like some of their shows from watching those shows because those people don't think they like science fiction. They seem to think that there were a lot of people not watching Battlestar Galactica, in spite of all the critical raves and awards, because it was on a network called "Sci Fi."

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If someone thinks they don't like science fiction and therefore are avoiding a show just because it's on the Sci Fi channel, I don't think they're any more likely to watch something called Battlestar Galactica on any channel (especially not one called "Sy Fy," where it sounds like Sci Fi when you say it). And then even if you change the name of the series to something that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with space battles, they're still going to see the spaceships and robots and figure it out. I couldn't even think of a series description you could put in a TV Guide that left out the science fiction elements and didn't sound boring.

Then there's the fact that, apparently, people who actually like science fiction aren't good enough for the network, and they'd rather make a futile effort of tricking people who aren't into spaceships into watching than make a good network that their audience will watch (which would probably not include wrestling). It's like the nerdy boy in high school who gets a crush on the cheerleader who will never give him the time of day and attempts to change his image so she'll like him, but it doesn't work because she still knows he's a nerd. Meanwhile, he's completely disregarding his cute and nerdy female best friend who likes him the way he is. Ultimately, he'll end up never getting the cheerleader and also losing his best friend who would have liked him. It's like a John Hughes movie from the 80s, as played out by a television network.

Though, actually, I suppose that if it were a John Hughes film from the 80s, the network would be an awkward girl chasing the high school stud while ignoring her dweeby male friend, and she'd actually end up with the stud and still be friends with her friend, so perhaps the problem is that the executives have seen too many John Hughes movies from the 80s.

Memo to the Sci Fi Channel executives: Your network is not Molly Ringwald. You will never catch the "popular" audience, no matter how many wildly creative prom dresses you wear, and when you change your image and ditch your nerdy friends, we won't forgive you and stick around. Give us spaceships and robots with good scripts and acting. Give us Doctor Who (and while we know you have to put in commercials, you don't have to use a chainsaw to do so). I'll even take Mansquito (because that was actually rather entertaining, in a ridiculously silly, drive-in on the TV kind of way). Hire someone in programming who is actually a fan. And we'll be there.

Well, I did not end up in Oz. But we did have sustained winds of more than 25 miles per hour here, with gusts of up to 50 mph. Today's much calmer. I wasn't really planning to go out yesterday, anyway, because I haven't been feeling that great. It occurred to me this morning that I feel the way I tend to feel when I'm recovering from the flu, only without the respiratory symptoms -- I've had the achiness, the tiredness, the lack of appetite and the general fuzzy-headedness, but without the fever, coughing and sore throat. I had the flu shot, so I'm wondering if maybe I've had a mild case of the flu that the shot partially deflected. I'd been feeling down on myself for being so out of it, and now that the pieces have fallen into place, it makes sense. Which means I'm totally justified in taking it easy for a couple more days. I'm not feeling really bad. I just don't feel all that good.

On the up side, that means I've had time to read. I've been re-reading some of the Terry Pratchett books I read when I first discovered that series, and now that I've read the earlier books, they take on an entirely different meaning. For instance, when I first read Monstrous Regiment I barely knew anything about Sam Vimes because I hadn't read any of the Watch books, so I didn't really get it when the main character ran into him. And when I read Thief of Time I hadn't read any of the Death or Susan books. I suppose it's odd to be re-reading books in a series when I haven't even read all the books in the series yet, but this is almost like reading new books.

Meanwhile, TV has been making me rather happy. I really enjoyed the Stargate movie last week. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed that series and those characters. I got the sense that everyone involved was having fun with it. I suppose that fits into my category of "brain cupcakes" TV. There's another one on tonight, and I'm looking forward to it. Then next week, Sci Fi starts showing Primeval, which I enjoyed on BBCAmerica. That's getting closer to brain candy, but it's still good for a Friday night.

Friday Night Lights got renewed, so yay. That show has an impressive track record for making me cry in every single episode, and for making me eventually love characters I started out disliking. They take types I recognize and know I'll hate and gradually flesh them out into people I can't help but feel sympathy for.

On Life, I have to confess that I like the fill-in partner (while the actress who plays the regular partner is on maternity leave) better than the regular partner. She has great chemistry with Crews, and it's entirely in a non-romantic sense. I love how amused he is by her ambition and how she doesn't let her ambition get in the way of being willing to learn.

I really have to thank my parents for hooking me on NCIS. One thing I find interesting about that show is that a lot of it is non-verbal. I have to actually watch it instead of reading or doing something else to catch everything, because there's a lot of stuff they just show without talking about it and there's a lot of subtext in facial expressions and body language so that you get an entirely different impression of what's going on from watching than if you just listen. As I have a bad habit of reading or doing crossword puzzles while watching TV because I get bored if I just watch, it's nice to find a show where there's a real reason to watch.

I've sort of started watching House again. The last episode or so have been better, and they've been teasing us with yet another shakeup, though I doubt they'd be so kind as to jettison Thirteen for me. Opposite that (thank goodness for OnDemand), I'm loving Chuck more and more, and as much as I think Jayne Cobb was a wonderful character, Casey may be the role Adam Baldwin was born to play. I love the subtle ways he shows that he's actually thawing toward Chuck while he's still the total tough guy. And somehow he can be hilariously funny just standing still.

Finally, in case you missed it, Masterpiece Theatre is doing a nice production of Little Dorrit. The first installment was on last Sunday, but I think you can still watch it online at the PBS site. There's the usual "spot the British actor" fun, with rather high Doctor Who points, but I don't think I've yet spotted any Harry Potter people.

I never did make it out to that movie or to the errands, but I did some cooking, reading and relaxing, and now that it's March (happy Texas Independence Day!), I think I have to force myself out of hibernation mode and get my act together.

In other news, my Friday science fiction viewing is disappointing me again. After the killer mutiny two-parter on Battlestar Galactica, they've gone all talky again, but this time instead of C-SPAN in space, it's Lifetime in space. By the end of the last episode, I was yelling, "For the love of all that is holy, will someone please stop philosophizing and SHOOT SOMETHING!" It didn't help that they've also gone into contemplative thinky mode on Sarah Connor Chronicles, where our friendly neighborhood Terminator is relegated to making pancakes.

Seriously, people, what part of "killer robots" do you not understand? What good is a TV series about killer robots if the killer robots just sit around being pensive and contemplating the nature of existence? The killer robots don't have to be bad guys. Good killer robots can be our friends. But it's nice if every so often they get to do something killer roboty, you know?

So that I can get appropriate killer robot activity levels in my entertainment, I've decided that what I need to do is find the shows where people are shooting things and blowing up stuff and generally being awesome and declare some of those people to be either Cylons or Terminators, and then I'll have some proper killer robot shows.

On Chuck, Casey is definitely a Terminator (really, if Adam Baldwin didn't have a steady gig, he'd have to be cast as a Terminator on Sarah Connor Chronicles -- that is, if they needed a Terminator to actually terminate stuff). His picture is in the dictionary next to "killing machine." He may be starting to contemplate humanity, but he doesn't let it get in the way of smashing, shooting, hitting and otherwise destroying anything in his path. Meanwhile, what is it about Chuck's brain that makes him able to hold all that info? I'm thinking Cylon.

Gibbs on NCIS is clearly not human, but I'm not entirely sure if he's a Terminator or a Cylon. He has a lot of Terminator-like characteristics -- he doesn't stay down if he's hit or shot, and he even eventually reboots when blown up. He doesn't seem to feel pain or need food or sleep. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse or fear, and he will not stop until he's solved the case. He drives like a maniac. And that would explain how Mark Harmon is still so hot 25 years after being the Sexiest Man Alive. But then, wouldn't the metal endoskeleton have been noticed during his military career? Being a Cylon could explain the infamous "gut," because then there would be a bunch of psychically linked other Gibbs models tuned into all kinds of surveillance feeds and sending him information. On the other hand, maybe the military knows he's a Terminator, and he's tapped into Skylink to give him info. I think I'm going to go with Terminator because that explains so much.

However, Charlie Crews on Life is totally a Cylon, one of the more philosophical models. He contemplates the nature of the universe when he's not shooting people. But he does shoot people and commit other acts of violence.

The Winchester brothers on Supernatural do lead a very Terminator-like lifestyle. They go around in a cool car with a trunkload of weapons and kill things. But given their penchant for coming back from the dead, I'm going to have to go with Cylons.

So, there we have it, plenty of killer robots doing killer robot things while the characters who are openly killer robots are boring me.

Now, watch them really get it in gear this week after I've said this, and both shows about killer robots will have action in them. I won't complain, though. You can never have too many killer robots.

As if I needed more reasons to love my local library, now they're doing me the favor of bringing in my writer friends as guest authors for library events, so I can walk a couple of blocks and see writer friends I normally only run into at conferences and conventions. This weekend, the guest was Rachel Vincent, who writes the werecats series. While I was there, I found that they now have my whole series in my neighborhood branch (and they are trying to schedule me to do a guest author presentation, so they're not ignoring the author in the neighborhood while bringing in outside people).

It does seem to be obligatory at almost any book/author event that someone will ask a question about how much the author paid to get her book published. I suppose I have a skewed perspective on this, since I've been involved in writing groups and the publishing industry for going on twenty years, but I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I should have to pay to get published. Even when I was in junior high and first got the idea that I wanted to be a writer, I knew that the idea was to get paid and I knew that something was wrong if you were expected to pay a publisher. In seventh grade, I knew which publishers published the books I liked (at that age, it was mostly Ballantine/Del Rey), and then I found the Literary Marketplace in the school library and looked up information on how to submit a book to them, which told me how much they generally paid. I suppose with computers being more common there are more people trying to write and it's easier to get into "publishing" so there are more scams, and the Internet makes it easier to market scams. But the Internet also makes it easier to research the publishing industry. I just don't see how someone with any interest in being an author could manage to be so oblivious about the business that she might think it's normal to pay a publisher to get a book published. It's terrible that there are scammers out there preying on people's dreams, but authors also have to take responsibility for themselves and do at least a little work to learn about the business they want to get into.

This weekend, I fell back in love with a TV show and out of love with another. I had cooled somewhat on Battlestar Galactica over the past season or so. I liked the space adventure with depth that had good drama and space battles with those cool little flippy Viper ships, or else good chases and gun battles and all that. I got pretty bored when they started focusing on Cylon mysticism and politics. I don't like hearing people talk about politics in the real world where they actually affect me. I certainly don't like spending hours listening to imaginary people talk about fake politics that don't affect me. It was like C-SPAN in space with more attractive people. But the last two episodes brought back so many elements of what I loved at the beginning. Plus, we had Starbuck and Apollo back as a team. In the first couple of seasons, their relationship was one of my favorite TV relationships ever. I don't mean that in a romantic sense. I just loved the idea of them being best friends and comrades in arms, how they could be so badass when they were together in a tense situation but then they could also be silly and act like kids when they were having fun. She was the person who could make him smile and laugh, and he could make her think. They could say horrible things to each other and then get over it and remain friends. And, yeah, they were maybe a little in love with each other but were both afraid of dealing with that, so they didn't. I really hated what they ended up doing with that relationship, but in the last couple of episodes, it seems like we got a bit of that back, with the two of them working as a seamless team, taking names and kicking ass and even being a little funny, in spite of how dire the situation was. It was enough to make me get out my DVD of the original miniseries. Ah, how shiny and new everything looked, and how young and innocent everyone was. It was a little sad knowing what would become of so many of those people, but it was also fun to see the seeds of what was to come. I may move on to season one tonight, since there's nothing else on.

At the same time, I think I've now given up on House. I had remarked when my parents hooked me on NCIS that it was a good thing House was moving because I would have switched loyalties -- but then it turns out that there are two networks rerunning NCIS (ION and USA) opposite House on Mondays, and I'm still catching up, so most of those episodes are new to me, and now Chuck is back in that same timeslot, so House lost. They show the previous week's House on USA on Friday night, and it seemed like the perfect way to chill after Battlestar Galactica, so I thought I'd catch it then. And I actually turned it off in mid-episode. I realized that not only did I not care, but I also found those people highly annoying. It's a little sad because that used to be one of my favorite shows, but they got rid of characters I liked (well, they kept them, but marginalized them), are focusing on characters I dislike, and they've lost track of what made House himself interesting. I guess I may still occasionally try to catch the USA rerun, but I won't worry at all anymore about Monday night VCR priorities. (Plus, they now have Chuck OnDemand, so I can watch it whenever, and the OnDemand version of the 3D episode wasn't in 3D, so it wasn't painful to watch.)

And now I will spend the rest of the day delving into my characters' childhoods.

I felt like I had the magic touch yesterday, or else my electric personality was showing. Everything I touched shocked me. I don't have that problem at home, but in the grocery store, if I take something off the shelf, I get a jolt. It's worse if I pick up a can or try to open the refrigerator case. Yesterday, I went through the store going "Ouch! Ouch!" Then my car got me, and I even managed to get a jolt from my car key. Some of those shocks were pretty severe, and my fingers were tingling up to the first knuckle. I felt like I could shoot lightning bolts out of my fingers.

We've got some pretty good TV coming up. Battlestar Galactica starts again tonight, for the final run of episodes. As much as I love that show, I'm kind of glad to see it coming to an end, mostly because they're doing it on their own terms because the story is coming to an end. That's something that happens very seldom on American television. Either the series isn't an instant hit and gets canceled before the story's told, or it is a hit and it gets stretched out long beyond its natural lifetime. I think this particular series would suffer if it got stretched out indefinitely, so it's good to see it coming to an end with the end of the story.

We also get Friday Night Lights back on network TV tonight. I've heard good things about this season from its satellite airing, but I'm not sure I'm in the mindset to get back into it.

Sunday night, Masterpiece Theatre is doing Wuthering Heights. I have to admit that I don't really get the appeal of that story. I don't see it as all that romantic, but I'll be interested in seeing how this adaptation works. I suspect I'll get inappropriate giggles because I'll be thinking of the Monty Python skit of Wuthering Heights in semaphore, with Healthcliff and Cathy waving flags around. After that, they're going on a Dickens binge, though some of those shows must be from the vault, since one of them is a very nice production of David Copperfield starring a wee little pre-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe as the young David.

I've got yet another busy weekend ahead of me, so I hope it's a little warmer. Today looks like a good curl-up-with-a-book (either reading one or writing one) day.

I am making decent progress on the NaNoWriMo project, sticking to my planned pace of 2,000 words a day. My competitive streak did rear its ugly head when I saw people posting higher totals, and then I reminded myself that I'm not trying to go faster right now because my priority is revising the other proposal. And, besides, weekends are actually busier for me because things happen that require me to leave the house. Plus, the point of all this was to moderate my writing pace, and going all-or-nothing would sort of defeat the purpose.

I suspect the part I've written will require massive amounts of rewriting because at the moment I'm meandering and rambling, since I'm still wrestling with how best to convey this story (which points of view to use, what information to share and when to share it, etc.). Maybe once the proposal is done and once I have enough written to have a better feel for it, I can take the time for more serious planning and plotting.

I did discover that television makes a pretty good motivator for getting the work done. One of my favorite guilty pleasure movies was on SciFi Saturday afternoon, and I told myself that I could only watch it if I got the writing done before it came on. And I did, so yay. The movie is called Dragonsword on SciFi, but on IMDB and Amazon they have it listed as George and the Dragon. It's a moderately cheesy telling of the legend of St. George and the dragon (with many, many liberties taken), but it manages not to be quite as cheesy as the typical SciFi Channel movie. Most of the dialogue doesn't make me cringe and the cast is relatively high quality, aside from Patrick Swayze, who has inexplicably wandered in from another movie. Everyone else is British or at least attempts reasonably well to sound British, or is supposed to be foreign and therefore not supposed to sound British, and then there's Swayze with his Texas accent and not even trying to hide it (though, as we learned from Kevin Costner "playing" Robin Hood, the attempt to hide it can be much, much more painful) even though he's supposed to be from the same place as all the other characters. Still, there's just something fun and sweet about that movie that makes me happy, and since the DVD is pretty cheap on Amazon, I'm seriously tempted to buy it.

I attempted to watch the first episode of Legend of the Seeker, but I had to turn it off about half an hour into it because it was just too painful. Most of it was another language issue, since the lead characters sounded like typical American twenty-somethings, and that threw me totally out of the story. I know that in a story supposedly taking place in one of those fantasy worlds we can assume that the whole thing is being conveniently translated or dubbed into modern English so we can understand it, so there's no reason that can't be American English, but it still just seems wrong. If you're doing a sword-and-sorcery story set in a quasi-medieval European-type place, it seems like the characters should kind of sound at least a little quasi-European. The United States (or Canada) doesn't really have that kind of mythology (except as written by modern fantasy writers). We're too new to even pretend to have that kind of history that's been lost in the mists of time. So it just bugs me to have people running around with swords and magic and armor and castles and all the usual European-based fantasy tropes, and they sound like American college students. I lose that sense of "other" when they talk like people I hear every day. I'm curious as to whether British viewers feel the same way about fantasy, if they expect the characters to sound British or European or if they get thrown out of the story because the characters sound too much like people they hear every day. Are Brits more open to fantasy with American accents, or is that even worse to them than it is to me?

My other issue (and I haven't read the books -- and from what I've heard about them, I don't think I want to -- so I don't know if this is from the books or an invention of the TV writers) is the fantasy trope of the Destined Chosen One (with optional Magical Specialness) who's been hidden away by the Mentor Wizard, who doesn't manage to get around to telling him about his super-special destiny until, oops, that destiny almost gets him killed, and then in the middle of the crisis we have to have the "No, really? I don't believe you!" scene. Mind you, I'm a big fan of the unlikely hero and am all over the stories where the assistant underwater basketweaver turns out to be the long lost heir to the Empire's throne or the great mage who will save the kingdom. My complaint is more with the variation on this story where the wizard knows who he is and is even nearby, watching over him, but somehow never manages to share this potentially crucial information until after the time when it might have been useful (like, you know, before the kid confronts the people who want to kill the long-lost whatever). There certainly are reasons not to share the information, and that can make for an interesting plot if done well, but when it's done purely so that the big revelation can happen during the course of the book/movie and in the middle of the crisis that kicks off the story, I'm prone to much eye rolling. It's also kind of annoying tohave to stop all the action early in the book and go through the "Here's your entire backstory, and this is why these things are happening" scene, which usually involves much arguing about how it can't possibly be true and he doesn't know what to do, but he has this destiny, blah, blah, blah. And then everything else that happens in the book is all because of his Grand Destiny and Magical Specialness.

I actually much prefer the stories where nobody knows who this guy is, and where even the great wizard doesn't know where to find him. Then the revelation of who he really is comes near the end of the book, after we've seen him demonstrate his true worth without the confidence booster of knowing his Grand Destiny or being aware of his Magical Specialness.

At any rate, while I can be a big fan of fantasy cheese, I don't think this series is going to be my brand of cheese.

And now it's time to go rack up some words.