30 April 2009

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

I can't get enough of these. Favorites:

22. Did you make the elves and the dwarves great friends, just to be different?

26. Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like "The Blasted Lands" or "The Forest of Fear" or "The Desert of Desolation" or absolutely anything "of Doom"?

33. Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?

53. Heaven help you, do you ever use the term "hit points" in your novel?

74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?

75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

29 April 2009

Today's Bout of Giggling

The Van Helsing List

Van Helsing Rule #1: All anti-hero types must dress in black, have mysterious pasts, a gruff demeanor, and the ability to crack witty remarks during the heat of battle. No matter how competent they are, or how many people they manage to save, they'll always find themselves hated by the public and mistrusted by their superiors.

Van Helsing Rule #2: If the cool anti-hero gets paired with a sidekick, it'll most likely be a kooky comic-relief gadgeteer who, inexplicably, winds up getting laid more often than he does. Corollary : It is NEVER right when the kooky comic relief gadgeteer winds up getting laid more often than the cool anti-hero. Especially if the cool anti-hero happens to be played by Hugh Jackman.

Van Helsing Rule #3: Lower-ranking clergy NEVER take the whole "obeying the ten commandments" and "celibacy" thing very seriously. (In spite of this, they are almost always more trustworthy and compassionate than the Vatican higher-ups...)

Van Helsing Rule #4: Cool anti-heroes love their hats and will do anything to keep from losing them.

Van Helsing Rule #5: The cooler-looking and "seemingly-more-likely-to-go-out-of-control-and-kill-the-person-wielding-it-than-the-person-it's-aimed-at" a weapon is, the better it works.

Van Helsing Rule #6: All crossbows basically behave like machine guns with arrows.

Van Helsing Rule #7: High heels and a tight corset are considered acceptable vampire-hunting garb.

Van Helsing Rule #8: Powerful supervillains like to keep their friends close, their enemies closer and the one object which is capable of saving the hero and contributing to their own demise in a lightly guarded room located within their own fortress.

Van Helsing Rule #9: All unknown viscous fluids are dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

Van Helsing Rule #10: In Eastern Europe, the full moon occurs approximately once every four days.

Van Helsing Rule #11: You need never keep track of where you're going in a desperate pitched battle, because ALL you need to do is swing on a rope and/or crash through a window and you'll automatically find yourself at the one place you needed to go to next.

Van Helsing Rule #12: The stroke of midnight can, if the plot calls for it, go on for twenty minutes or more.

Van Helsing Rule #13: Female characters who fall in love with the cool anti-hero are invariably doomed. (The fact that they were able to kick *** and survive high falls, beatings and monster attacks for the first 98% of the movie is irrelevant. All it will take to dispatch them at the end is a simple stab wound.)

Van Helsing Rule #14: Cool, creepy art direction and millions of dollars of special effects cannot make up for a script conceived and written by a severely impaired tube worm...


There's a whole long page of fantasy cliches (PG-13, but SO true) and this was at the bottom and made me laugh more than all the rest. It's true. I liked Van Helsing, but it lacked plot and logic. Badly.

27 April 2009

Thought of the day

Blank Word Documents are terrifying.

24 April 2009

Hackneyed 'How are you'

Today I realized just how much hearing, "How are you?" from a casual acquaintance bothers me.

Take work, for example. A lot of these people know me basically by name. They don't know much about me, just who I am, and yet whenever I walk in or happen to be shelving in the same area as them, they say, "How are you?"

And - briefly - these are my thoughts: Say something really clever. Not generic. Find a new witty way of restating 'good' or 'fine' or 'decent'. Make them think! Say how you REALLY are!

What I say: "Good. What about you?"

And half the time they don't even hear me, because when they asked "How are you?" they weren't thinking "How are you," they were thinking, "Oh, I should say something instead of letting the awkward silence stretch."

Yeah, but with awkward silence, you have the opportunity to say something wonky. Like, "Whoa, this book is called, 'The 200 Best Jobs for Introverts'!" or "There's gum stuck to this chair."

I admit it, I say "How are you." What I never know how to tack on is, "How are you? REALLY? What are you going through? What excites you? What are you looking forward to?" But because no one (surprisingly enough, eh?) can read minds, all I ever get is "Good" as well.

I need a new conversation starter. "How are you" isn't cutting it.

20 April 2009

Great West 2009

For pictures go here and here.

It was phenomenal.

phenomenal
adjective

remarkable, exceptional, extraordinary, amazing, astonishing, astounding, sensational, stunning, incredible, unbelievable; marvelous, magnificent, wonderful, outstanding, singular, out of the ordinary, unusual, unprecedented; informal fantastic, terrific, tremendous, stupendous, awesome, out of this world; literary wondrous.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This year, Great West was located at Camp Chamisall (a semi-acronym for Christian and Missionary Alliance), in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is reached, in the last few kilometers, by a 'road' (and calling it a road is like calling a lizard a dinosaur) that is so full of hills and ruts and mud and hairpin bends that my dad said, a little ways in, "If anyone had told me it was this bad, I would have called them a liar."

So that was fun. Unless you're prone to carsickness, but I'm not.

Also, about half an hour out, we completely lost all cell phone coverage. They had warned us about this, but being city folk, we said, "No cell phone coverage? Pfft." Well, they were right. We later learned that if you walked out into the middle of the moraine (new word! Look it up) that hosted the creek, there was a certain spot where there was coverage, but I didn't miss it. The lack of technology was refreshing.

In addition to this, we slept in cabins - ten bunks in each - that boasted qualities such as power outlets that buckled under the strain of a hair straightener (we girls ended up putting one of the bathroom ones out of commission even after they warned us not to use the outlets in the cabin) and heating that made the top bunks sweltering and the bottom ones frigid. I slept like a rock, though. Quizzing is tiring. That was roughing it, all right - nowhere to plug in your hair straightener and fifty feet from your door to the bathroom! (I revel in my city-girl-ness.)

One of the most exciting moments about Great West is finding out the teams. Everyone goes very silent. The coaches all stand in pairs, trying to suppress their grins, and Sandy makes announcements beforehand just to prolong the suspense, ending with, "And if you don't like your team...keep it to yourself" and a grin.

As it happened, I did like my team, which turned out to be an accurate impression because Western Canada Team 2 came home with gold in the championship final. I wore mine all of Saturday evening.

The building they had slated for quizzing was supposed to be done in October 2007. It wasn't. It wasn't done in April 2009, either. But they moved the pallets of drywall and swept the plywood floors and added a couple pairs of floodlights, and really, as long as you can sit at a table and say, "Question number one," who cares? One of the rooms also boasted the location of a furnace directly behind the quizmaster, resulting in many instances of, "Okay, you need to come closer to the table" and "I can't hear you when you look at the floor and talk" and "Enunciate, please!"

Do I sound negative so far? Because I loved it, all of it, and the addition of a trampoline (I'm the one whose head and shoulders are missing. You needed four spotters to be allowed to jump, and that's why) and foosball and many epic games of Dutch Blitz completed the awesomeness.

Oh yeah, and then there was the quizzing.





Listen for the clickers in the first one! That's everyone finding the triggers in their seats and clicking them off juuuust barely so that they can click on again to jump, for those of you who are uneducated.

There were four districts that participated in the meet - Canada Midwest (CMD), Western Canada (us - WCD), Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Rocky Mountain - and sixteen teams (of four or five people each) and seventy quizzers. After the five preliminary quizzes, the top six teams got a bye into the Championship round, the nine below them quizzed off with each other in an XYZ round to see which three of them also went into Championship, and the rest were bumped down into Consolation. After those quizzes, my team (WCD 2) was fourth. All but one of the five WCD teams made it into in the Championship round, and in addition, the three teams that made it into the Championship final were WCD 1, WCD 2, and WCD 3. How's that for being hospitable? We host the meet and crush the competition. Bwaha. As previously mentioned, WCD 2 won, and I answered an interrogative in the final. "We are un-" Unworthy servants. (Luke 17:10.) I was really proud of that question.

As for individual scores, 5 of the top 10 quizzers were from WCD. I placed 20th - in fact, I was one of four people who tied for 19th place, tie broken by errors. That's a huge improvement on last year, when I was 62nd out of 66 quizzers.

Basically, I want to go back and do everything again. Quizzing = awesomeness.


"My name is Grace Ajele, and I live for boys and quizzing. That is all."

09 April 2009

I recommend this Writing Hour thing.

I'm reading The Art & Craft of the Short Story by Rick Demarinis, and he says that writing doesn't have to have meaning when you write it, and any meaning it acquires has more heart if you didn't mean it while you were writing it (at least, I think that's what it meant) and that too many beginning writers have studied too much brilliant literature and try to be brilliant on the first try. He also recommended writing some junk. So I decided to try it, and opened Word and wrote whatever came into my head and, forty minutes later, ended up with two pages about what seems like nothing but a girl named Annaliese (but maybe Anna) and a beach with frost on it and cold toes. But I'm sure it does have meaning somewhere, and I'll come back tomorrow and find it.

I liked that. It was a lot of fun. I'm going to do it every day, and I figure that one of these times I'll come up with something brilliant without meaning to, which will save a lot of thinking. Because the more I think about ideas the more they start not wanting to be written down.

(By the way, I finished the Fionavar Tapestry, and I do eventually intend to review it, and I started both The Book Thief and The Princess Bride, but the latter is far more entertaining so I'm finishing it first. I recommend it.)

07 April 2009

Writing Hour

Currently assigned to between 10 and 11 on weekday mornings. The rule is that I MUST spend at least this hour writing. It doesn't matter what it is. Today it was the end of a scholarship letter and the beginning of an essay on life as a Christian teenager, and now it's a blog post. I could say that I'm done my English course (in which, by the way, I got a 95% on the exam and a course grade of A) and therefore I can drop English, but that would be silly.

This is only one of a whole host of rules I make for myself, too. I never cease to find it entertaining that the moment my parents stopped making rules for me, I started making them for myself. For example, I have to be off MSN by 11 pm, and ideally asleep by midnight. I have to set my alarm for 7 am (though when I actually get up varies). It's best if I'm not on MSN until 4 pm or after, but I can make an exception for myself if I work a 5-9 shift that day. I'm not allowed to do the crossword puzzle in the paper until lunchtime because otherwise I start school late. I am allowed to check facebook while I'm doing school, but only the main page. Strictly speaking, I'm only allowed one cup of coffee per day. I have to record all the money I spend, so that I can add it up at the end of the month (and what? Mostly, think I spent too much, until I check how much I made.) Oh, and I can't listen to music with lyrics while I do school because it distracts me. During piano practice, I'm allowed to skip one piece, as long as I don't skip the same one the next day.

I'm actually sitting here giggling at myself now. This sounds insanely anal. I didn't even know I had this many.

Oh, and I start school at 9, but if I have time before then, I can read. I have to be off the computer 15 minutes before I have to be at work, because that way I have time to get ready and go.

And my closet has to be color-coded. No, I'm kidding, I made that one up.

(That's an idea, though...)