About My Absence …

Yes, it has been more than a cou­ple months since I post­ed last, and there’s a rea­son for it.

Well, sev­er­al reasons.

My last post was way back at the end of August, at a time when I was prepar­ing to work on a series of PSA-relat­ed videos for a pro­duc­er friend of mine. The whole sto­ry is told in the post in my pro­fes­sion­al blog here, but the short ver­sion was that soon after I vol­un­teered, I went from edit­ing to active­ly shoot­ing the mate­r­i­al, with the assis­tance of a good friend and his video equip­ment. The edit process took up just about the entire month of August, inter­spersed with some research, leav­ing very lit­tle time left over to car­ry me through into the fol­low­ing months.

Then, instead of writ­ing more blog posts, I was writ­ing oth­er stuff. Among my writ­ing projects:

• First and fore­most was the release of my first offi­cial Word­Press plu­g­in, Uni­code Char­ac­ter Key­board. It was a long process, as the last sev­er­al weeks of devel­op­ment con­tained a con­stant stream of inno­va­tions and addi­tions until I final­ly decid­ed I need­ed to stop dick­er­ing with the code and just release it. That was a cou­ple of weeks ago and I’m already deep into the first revi­sions. This process included: 
  • Upgrad­ing my web devel­op­ment plat­form to Net­Beans (I had been using Home­Site which was bought up by DreamWeaver which even­tu­al­ly got bought up by Adobe) and wish­ing I had done so much, much ear­li­er. Also installing Tor­tois­eSVN in order to inter­face with the Word­Press Sub­ver­sion con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem and dis­cov­er­ing it also plugged into NetBeans.
  • Set­ting up and trans­fer­ring my com­pa­ny web­site (here) because the Word­Press plu­g­in sub­mis­sion process requires some­place to find the plu­g­in to review it before accept­ing and releas­ing it.
  • Blog­ging about some of the var­i­ous issues relat­ed to writ­ing the Uni­code Char­ac­ter Key­board plu­g­in and blog­ging about my video busi­ness and oth­er video relat­ed sub­jects that caught my atten­tion, all of which can be found here.
• Sev­er­al chap­ters of and a host of sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­i­al for a pos­si­ble YA SF nov­el, in a future civ­i­liza­tion that make heavy use of psy­chic abil­i­ties for many com­mon func­tions, includ­ing inter­stel­lar trav­el (tele­por­ta­tion) and telepa­thy. One of the cen­tral char­ac­ters is a pow­er­ful telepath who has par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence in bypass­ing tele­path­ic shields and using a spe­cif­ic tele­path­ic abil­i­ty to put her tar­gets to sleep.
• The start­ing chap­ters and some addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al of what might turn out to be a tril­o­gy set in the Paizo Pub­lish­ing Pathfind­er RPG cam­paign world. Once I get more infor­ma­tion about the cam­paign world and fill out a lot of the details I just might sub­mit it; oth­er­wise, its a back­ground study of the cen­tral char­ac­ter, a kit­sune enchantress. I got the idea from see­ing the race described in the cam­paign source books and if I can’t play the char­ac­ter (I’m still try­ing to locate Pathfind­er cam­paigns local­ly) then I’d like to write about her.
• Notes about a poten­tial man­ga / web com­ic based on the con­cept of a maid cafe where the wait­ress­es are all super­nat­ur­al beings. Three of them are of note: a suc­cubus, a kit­sune and a vam­pire, all of which have hyp­not­ic abil­i­ties. (It some­one wants to pur­sue pub­li­ca­tion, I would be glad to dis­cuss it with them.)
• A pos­si­ble short sto­ry (inspired by a piece of art here) about what was described as a “Sci-Fi Suc­cubus” which sparked sev­er­al scenes and a pos­si­ble plot but no real sto­ry as yet.

(And is any­one else see­ing a pat­tern with the main char­ac­ters in my fic­tion writing?)

Plus, I am, as always, job hunt­ing. I have at least start­ed my reg­u­lar (but part-time, alas) jobs with the Allen Coun­ty War Memo­r­i­al Col­i­se­um and the Fort Wayne Mad Ants so I’ve had lit­tle con­cen­trat­ed time in which to do the nec­es­sary research and writ­ing to pub­lish each week. Whether I will be able do so in the future remains to be seen, but I am hope­ful to get­ting back to my reg­u­lar schedule.