So in a vain attempt to fix the issues that Firefox was having with blogger, I lost the entire entry I was working on. Tomorrow is my free day. I may sit down and fiddle with it then. If it works I'll eventually have links and pictures and interesting things again. Until then I'll attempt to recapture what I was writing...

My "week" has come to an end. I've managed to get Fridays off for the third semester running. With that free day I can do what I want or need. Run errands. Write. Sleep in. Go to the movies. Whatever strikes my fancy. Leisure time is undervalued and overly wasted in this country. Being able to sit back and reflect, meditate, or do your own thing is very important to maintaining a healthy soul. Maybe I'll go for a run.

I gave the first two chapters of the Center to Lila (my Prose Forms and Fic II teacher) to review. I got that back from her today complete with her series of notes. It's interesting that this is the second piece that I have sent to both her and Mort. I find it amusing that where they differ in their editorial opinions it is mirror opposites. The opening section Lila wanted longer, more fleshed out. Mort on the other hand suggested an edit that would cut the two paragraph section down to about two sentences. When I told Lila this she made a concession and said to follow what Mort says. Other than that her criticisms have been helpful and will be helpful when I finish pounding out the first draft (whatever and whenever that may be), and finally go back to edit.

I'm still caught in the middle of my constant state of traveling from Haslett to Chicago and Chicago to Haslett. Though tonight, for once, feels like a bit of a reprieve from it all. I go back again this coming Wednesday for a wedding. It'll be nice when all that is over so that I can settle into a bit of a routine. I feel like I haven't quite gotten a grip on this summer semester, or this new apartment.

I'm 21.

I had started an entry earlier about the anticipation of turning 21. About waiting for my friends to arrive to go to the pub and share a pint with me. About how life is constantly going. About a lot of things. Then James walked through the door and I closed the window and decided to go life more so than type this entry.

It's now 2AM. I've definitely enjoyed the beginning of my 21st. I'm still relatively sober. And I'm carrying on a conversation with a friend over AIM. We're talking about life, about my philosophy, and about the world in general. The side of me that is pleasantly passed buzzed is saying that I should elucidate on the subject. Ranting for pages and pages and swallowing up enormous amounts of your time. The sober side is saying that no one (who hasn't come to me asking) really gives a wet smack what a half-drunk 21-year-old thinks about life. I tend to lean towards the latter, and have decided that beyond this paragraph I will spare you (for now) the ranting of a philosophical drunk.

I saw the third Pirates on Friday and it was good.

I went to my cottage this last weekend, and it was also good. I had a few beers on tap (figured I'd jump the gun a little bit). I should've done writing, but couldn't bring myself to work. Instead I ran and got some sun and I read.

I'm deep into the third book of Stephen King's Dark Tower cycle. It is very good. As everyone was, I was a little weary through The Gunslinger, and was very apprehensive after the beginning of The Drawing of the Three. The Wastelands is shaping up to be quite a howler. I get far too much time to enjoy my own books now. I have an two hours of commute-time on a train four days a week. I should be able to just hammer through the Dark Tower series over the next month. And probably read Herodotus's Histories through June. That will carry me all the way up to the release of the 7th Harry Potter, which yes I am excited for.

I sent Mort my first chapter of the Center (working title). He liked it. Offered a few good suggestions. I'll keep them in mind, but I am not allowing myself time to go back and edit. Not yet at least. I want to get the first 10 chapters done before I start cycling back. And with that I am off to bed.

I had a fresh idea strike me today. I've been wanting to do a follow up to the story about my character who survives the plane crash over the Atlantic. The one that starts out "he ate my peanuts." The story ends with him alive and floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Where do I go next? I'll tell you...

About a year ago I read this article about a thing called a micronation. These are places like Luxemberg or the Vatican, but smaller. It seems that during World War 2 a bunch of defense platforms were constructed around the border of British Territorial Waters as a defense against a feared Nazi land invasion (Operation Sealion). This land invasion never came. The majority of the platforms were sunk. Back in the 60s this rich couple claimed one of these platforms as their own. The long abandoned and dilapidated platform sits just outside of British Territorial Waters by 12 miles. It's in international water. So this couple takes this platform and declares it the sovereign nation of Sealand. Since then they've set up a government, drafted a constitution, minted coins, sold stamps, and dealt with political oppression from foreign nations. Britain claims that they have ownership of the platform which now (because of expansion, sits within British territorial waters. But, claims Sealand's king, when we declared our independence and sovereignty we were not within British territorial waters, and are therefor a de facto independent nation. It's about 6000 sq ft, and has a population of 500 people. It looks like an oil platform.

How does this factor in?

My narrator is floating out in the ocean. A raft full of peanuts and bottled water. The only survivor of another crashed Oceanic Flight (Lost Junkies feel free to giggle here). Originally I planned to dump him on the European Mainland. Hook him up with some gypsies, and send him on a mad adventure across Eastern Europe. The insanity ensues (and every hater of alliteration groans). That would be funny yes. But what about this? He is passed out on this raft. Floating for days and days. Miraculously he is blown all the way to the North Sea (defying survival logic and probably the Gulf Stream and Oceanic currents). He is on the verge of the death. Food is gone. Water is gone. His wit is starting to run dry. Then one morning he awakens to an odd tapping sound. Finds himself bumped up against one of these forgotten platforms. From there he goes to claim it as his own. And again the insanity ensues...

I dunno. Just a thought. More to come

WOW!

Lost!!

WOW!

More to come tomorrow

I ended up dropping one of my two classes after sitting through an hour of it. I thought it was just a general communications class, but it turned out to be a civil rights communication class. I know I sound like a racist jerk, but I'm fed up of hearing about civil rights. I'm tired of being belittled for being a white middle class male. I'm a firm believer that diversity is the biggest detriment to equality. And now I'm stepping down off my soapbox before rotten fruit gets tossed my way.

So as a result of dropping that class I had a four hour period with which to waste time. I was (for once) able to go out and actually enjoy a bit of this summer weather that Chicago boasts. I walked down to Buckingham Fountain and smoked my pipe with some fresh 50th Anniversary Blend from Campbell's Smoke Shop. I went down to the lake front and watched the sailboats for a while, and then, finishing my pipe, I walked back to the South Campus building. It's funny to me how many people stop to point at you for smoking a pipe. I know that it is becoming a rare sight, especially in today's youth (my generation), but I just think it tastes better, looks classier, and smells amazing.

I now have only one class this semester, Prose Forms. It's with my Fiction 2 Teacher, Lila Jokanovich (I think i brutalized her name (sorry)). I wasn't a big fan of her at the start of last semester, but she really grew on me. It was more of me growing and learning not to be such a self righteous jerk, and realize that, yes, in fact, she can teach me things. The class is off to a good start, but the work load is going to be nothing short of exhausting. That coupled with a tutoring session twice a week.

Lila, my teacher, really enjoyed what I sent her of the center, and is pouring over it, trying to figure out what part to submit to try and get it into Hair Trigger. HT is the fiction dept's anthology published every year of student work selected by the teachers, and then edited by a specific class. I feel like this time I really have a few things to run with. The Center that I gave to Lila I feel really strongly about. And surprisingly my essay from CRW Novelists (a class I took in the spring) also has been submitted. Shawn Shiflett usually doesn't submit stuff from CRW classes, and said that my essay was one of the first things he has submitted in a while. Enough tooting my own horn.

Tomorrow is comic day! I hope it isn't another quiet week. From what my friend Mike was saying tonight at Bar Louie's is that he thinks it is going to be. The only title coming out that is worth noting is The Spirit #6.

Almost finished with the 2nd of the Dark Tower Cycle. Expect a review for The Gunslinger in a few days.

I finished the majority of my moving in today. It was a whole lot of pushing piles in circles. I'd move a couple things where they should be, tuck a few other things away, and the pile would rotate in another circle. It is mostly frustrating. Packing is far easier than unpacking. Especially when you have more space.

I sent Mort Castle the first chapter of the Center. I finished it a couple days ago. It was one of the easiest chapters yet. I'm writing it with the mentality that I am going to just toss a page break when it gets boring, and keep it moving nonstop. Growing constantly to action and to intensity. Maybe I'll send it out to the F Magazine Novel and Short Story Contest. I need to get more things out anyways.

It takes me nearly an hour to commute from my apartment to Columbia. This gives me a lot of time to read. I also have a feeling that I am going to be putting a lot of miles on my iPod over the next year. I'm nearly a third of the way through the second book of The Dark Tower (The Drawing of the Three). I'm hoping to finish that book this week. I'm also hammering my way through the 22 disk epic of the Historian. It is very good. Everything the Da Vinci code should've been, and more. And it's about Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, or more importantly, Dracula.

Class starts tomorrow. I'm taking "The Fundamentals of Communication," and "Prose Forms." There are only 5 people in my prose forms class. This is both a blessing and a curse. I've got 2 days that I am going to want to miss. One is next tuesday because I turn 21. The other is the thursday afterwards because it is a few days before Ben Logan's wedding. If I've got the skips I'm going to use them. Life is just more important than the 12th floor.

I wanted to post something clever here about moving in, and about coming back to Chicago and all, but nothing is really coming to mind. I got a call from my tutor. She described herself as being hard but fair, which I think is a way of saying I'm a jerk, but I give the occasional praise. I realized then that people who describe themselves as hard but fair are a new pet peeve.

Moving out is actually not that exhilarating. It's a whole lot of moving everything out of the room, organizing a bit, and moving it back in. Moving it out, and then back in. Wash rinse repeat. I need a desk, and a midday so I can pound stuff into walls without waking anybody up.

For a change of pace I am going to leave a bit of a piece that I started. Something that I'm not really sure of, but sounds cool when read out loud with traveling music underneath. Here it is

-----------

I was thinking of you.

I've spent a lot of time in cars lately. Driving from here to there. Riding passenger mostly. With my headphones in and a first print run of The Gunslinger with a broken spine in my lap. I should've finished it days ago but I keep nodding off.

I went in to Canada today, no problems on the border. I'm camping for the first tie in years, and I actually saw stars tonight. I know it sounds funny, but when you finally don't see them you really miss them. They twinkled and glowed in the heavens. In the freshly mowed field where I stood, I glowed back. You've never been, and I want badly to take you camping.

When we were gathered in the mess hall, looking at pictures from camps that I missed for work or some other excuse I start to wonder if you got my text, and I want to check it, but international fees are too steep. And for once it feels nice to unplug. Except for my iPod. I can't live without music.

When I get back home I plan on taking you out for coffee again. I keep having this self-important daydream of me pulling into my driveway in two days with my tent in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. And you run across the lawn to greet me. We embrace then, and through your chest I can feel the steady thump thump of your heart. You're alive and that is supposed to mean something to me that I am wholly unclear on.

You should've seen the sunset. With our 20% chance of rain blowing quickly over our heads. The towering thunder clouds, purple mountains from the heavens. The sun burning like a golden doubloon. It was something. I get a lot of sunrises where I'm at, but I'm never up for them. Except for last week when work got so backed up that I put in a seventeen hour day at home Sunday night from noon till five AM, crashed for another two hours, and was back at the office at eight.

I wonder what you're doing right now. Wonder if you think of me. Wonder if you've thought of me at all. I like to hope so. I wonder if I should even want to take you out again. I mean with the big California move coming in a year and all. Is it fair to me? Is it to you? I come home tomorrow for a week before going back to Chicago. Maybe I'll see you then.

Tonight we go out for our annual pie run. It's this little shop on the edge of London, Ontario. Near where I am camping. God my hands are freezing. After a long day of work that pie is starting to sound damn good. It means that need to get out of my tent. More importantly out of my sleeping bag. A down filled mummy sack. It could keep an anorexic supermodel toasty at the south pole...

-----

Anywhoo that is the story. What I've done at least. I can't really think of where to take it next, so I'm going to just let it sit for a long while.

I'm really excited about the fact that Starcraft 2 is coming out. It's been a long time coming, and I think this is an excuse to upgrade my PC. Though I shouldn't be spending the money.

And with that I am back to unpacking, moving and removing, and re-removing, until I'm ready to collapse.

I had a really bizarre dream two nights ago.

They say that dream logic and story logic are two different things. And that while you can use concepts that came to you in dreams it is impossible for a carbon copy of a dream to a story would not make sense in any other fashion than as a dream. I'm starting to question this after the vivid and very structured dream that I had. This is some thoughts and story arc (or at least the beginning of) of the dream that I had...

There was an infection or disease or virus very 28 Days Later-esque that hit the earth. It was coming in waves from community to community, region to region, consuming the people and turning them into very zombie-like monsters that stalked the earth, eating human flesh and generally being nasty. I am in a city waiting for the wave of this plague to approach. It is only hours away from when its going to arrive, and I with my band of college aged cohorts have armed ourselves with whatever we could find. Mostly gardening implements, blunt objects, baseball bats, or anything that can and will find itself in a house or garage, or suburbia. We are among the hundreds of others in our neighborhood who have decided to do what we can to fight back this fast approaching menace.

The wave comes. We manage to hold them back long enough that the straggles of military still around have arrived and give us some actual support, while rounding up the civilians and preparing to ship them (by any means necessary) to safer regions. Kind of a rolling retreat while preparing for an inevitable strike-back. We are then horded away from the barriers the military has managed to set up. The military then gathers the most able-bodied youth. The smart ones, the strong ones, etc. They are preparing to send them to the "colonies" in space. Mind you, that we are not talking colonies like orbiting cities with plants and gardens and such. None of this Ringworld, Gundam Wing bull. These are more like massive MIR's or International Space Stations. Aging hamster tube style, but bigger, and more for science research or mining or for sending us further into space (A la Mars Colony). At first I am passed up, but then I manage to sneak into the group of the next shuttle being sent spaceward.

The ship is a rocket ship. More like a flying bus than anything else. We are loaded on and quickly shot into space. While traveling up one of the guys finds amidst our group a sock that has infected entrails on it. He asks us for a light. Many of the smokers pull out Bic lighters and they torch it into ash. Then we are in space. We dock with the colony station, and are herded off. I'm a bit worried because I am a person who really doesn't like salad. But I have also decided that because I am saved, and that they are going to help me, that I am willing to do anything necessary (including eat salad). I get some help from a Dr. Farrel. And we are sent to an even larger moon base.

We are welcomed on the Moon Colony in a very Hawaiian style. We step off the shuttle and are greeted by throngs of people, dressing us in leis and cheering our "inevitable victory." We mock many of the colonists. From there I meet this cute girl who is going to give me help.

That's all I've got so far. It's not much, it's an idea. It just surprised me how detailed the story was. How thought out. How complete. It was far more vivid, and stayed with me in far more detail into the waking world than did any dream I've ever had before.

And so it begins...

I sent my first story out to be published today. It's amazing the weight that goes along with something like that. You wouldn't think that hitting print, signing an envelop, slapping a check in it, sealing it, and dropping it in a big blue metal crate would be so hard. But I guess that's why not everyone is a writer. I felt really strong about this story. Of course that didn't stop me from running one final spellcheck and syntax edit on it before I finally hit that print button.

It's for the short story contest at The Writer. The ceiling was 2000 words. I peaked at 835. If nothing else, Columbia has taught me to be concise. Gone are my rambling sentences with many commas and adjectives that run on and on and on and on and....you get the picture.

The one that I sent out is "Interlude" which I've talked about in previous entries as the story that I pitched to Mike Lawrence, my director-friend at Columbia. I showed the story to Mort Castle, my teacher whose opinion I trust implicitly, and he said that it needs to be published. So out it goes. And then my heart climbs into my throat and I nearly choke with nervousness.

That's that.

I've been working on revamping The Center. I hate the title now, as it doesn't feel right, but it's going to stay mostly for the ease of conversation. I've discovered that writing really quality action sequences is hard. Really really hard. So I've decided not to allow myself the luxury of doubling back and editing. Just barreling forward blindly. Get the first draft on the page, and then go at it with a chainsaw. I've been bouncing it off my cohort, Duke. He says it is by far some of the best stuff I have written, which is good, because (like most writers) I feel like everything I do is pretentious crap anyways. More to come..

So I was away in Canada all this last weekend. I didn't have internet or phone or TV or any real technology except for the short battery life of my iPod. We were there for the Dorchester International Brotherhood Camporee. This is (like the name implies) a big international Boy Scout (or Scouts Canada) shindig that we go to anually. It is always on Mother's Day.

We left to go there on Thursday. I finished classes on Tuesday, and got all of my other stuff done on Wednesday, and then drove home Wednesday night. We got in late on Wednesday (well, Thursday morning in all technicality) and then Thursday we drove to Canada. Because it was just Matt my Mom and I, we were able to stop at the Labatt Brewery in London, Ontario, where we got to drink a couple of mediocre beers and get a free tshirt and a tour all for about $5.00 Canadian. I also ordered my first legal pint (thank God for the 19 drinking age).

The rest of the weekend was spent staffing DIBC. As was usual for Venture Crew 97, we worked the Botswan's chair (pronounced Boh-suhn) which stretches across the river. This is always highly amusing because we aim to dunk the campers in the river. They don't seem to mind this, considering how warm it usually is, and how cool the water is. As usual we got really muddy from the kids kicking the water and ground into this brown soup.

I finished my first book of the summer, The Gunslinger by Stephen King. It was a spectacular read, and I am intrigued to see where he is going to take it over the next six volumes of the magnum opus, The Dark Tower. I knew a lot about it, and it made much of the highly abstract story a lot more bearable, but even then there were moments which had me scratching my head in a metaphysical contemplation.

I'm back in Haslett for the next week until school starts. Then I'm going to be travelling like a maniac from here to Chicago and back and forth over and over again. I have a feeling that come the end of June, when the majority of my travelling is complete, I'm going to want to shoot myself or blow up a train or something. (For the Dept of Homeland Security that's not true, and is just a means of expressing the exhaustion of travel that I am going to be faced with). Well now, it's off to bed. I've got some stuff I'll be talking about and posting over the next few days concerning writing and projects and the like. G'night!

PS: Sorry about the bland lack of links or pictures. For some reason the Mac internet doesn't like to give me all the options that I get when I use the Microsoft Internet browser, and me being HTML retarded I have no idea how to remedy that. I downloaded a program called firefox, and I think the next few posts may be a little more snazzied up.

Packed up the last of my stuff today and moved out of my dorm room. It was a decidedly melancholy event which I kind of figured was going to happen, but at the same time was a little weirded out by it. We moved the majority of the big stuff this morning and then later this evening I went back long enough to grab my laptop and hat and sign out for good. It'll be nice having that permanent apartment for the year up in Rogers Park.

Yesterday I found this great cafe up near our apartment which looks to be the place where I am going to be doing much writing. It's called Ennui, which makes me giggle constantly. It has this awesome bohemian feel to it, and just sitting there I felt a surge of energy to go and create. When I finally get settled and am not running constantly back and forth I will have to get over there with a laptop and just work.

Now that the semester is over I've started working my way through listening and reading books that I've been meaning to all semester. I started the Dark Tower cycle, which I plan on finishing over the course of the summer, and I started listening to The Historian on CD. The reader is good and I'm already 1/11 the way through it (22 cds, and i'm 2 in, you do the math).

Tomorrow I leave for Canada for the weekend. No Cellphone, No Laptop, no technology. I'm really excited about that. We're going to the Dorchester International Brotherhood Camporee. This is a big international boy scout shindig. Should be a lot of fun, and I'm sure I'll have facebook pictures of it soon enough.

In terms of writing (because that is what this blog I think is supposed to be about), I'm gonna finally send that piece off to the Writer. I've been hemming and hawing far too long, and now that I have a week where I am going to be at home I have no excuse. I started working with the Edmund Willis character from a story idea i'd been kicking around called "The Center." While not pitching the idea of the center out entirely, I am more or less ignoring it, and just writing a tale which I am finding interesting, constantly challenging myself to take it one step further, and to always keep it exciting, and change it up whenever I get stuck. I got 18 pages out in 2 days. I feel really good about this. More to come once I get settled.

I ushered in the sun yesterday morning. It was five in the morning and I'd been sitting at a computer desk for the better part of four hours hammering away at a comic or an essay or something (by the end it was hard to discern which was which). The skiy started suddenly getting lighter and lighter and then BAM! Out across the lake this fireball some thousands of miles away peeked it's head over the water and I wondered why I didn't do this more often.

Like I said I was up doing homework. That joyous end of semester crunch when everything that you've been saying "oh it won't take too long to finish, so I'll do it later," suddenly takes forever to finish, and you have to do it now. I keep thinking they need to flip flop our semester, and put all the major projects at the beginning. It makes logical sense until you realize that you have to have the education in order to do the bigger projects.

Either way I am done. I tapped the last few lines of some pointless essay in last night around 10, and flopped into bed to get my eight hours of sleep, to make up for the two that I got the night before. What's done is done. Ain't got no time, and (slumping on the cross) it is finished.

Went and saw Tim O'brien last night for some event that the school put on.

http://www.colum.edu/cte/

I wish I could've been more awake to enjoy it. He talked a lot about story truth and about real truth. About how "real truth" is being erased as it is lived because it is beyond the capacity of human memory to remember the exact truth. He made some interesting points. Needless to say, as soon as I get done dropping this entry, I zip off to class and get to hear him again. Maybe he'll have some other topics to hit on, and it will be fresh. He's really a well spoken writer.

And with that I need to go take a shower, and get to class...

I'm back in Haslett for the weekend. I get to pack up my life that I didn't bring to the dorm room and move it into my apartment between Sunday and whenever.

I'm under seven days away from being done with this painfully long semester, but I'm worried about being able to get everything done on time. I've got a comic script to write, and I need to find an artist, but I'm out of time to do that (it's due monday). Everything else is really going to take just sitting down and doing it.

Dark Horse has an open submissions policy, so I think I am going to try and shop Hero of the Second City there at the end of the summer when I've had a time to really polish the first novella.

Mostly things have been quiet today in a relative sense. My short story I've been working on, the one about the fat guy eating my peanuts, I've been testing bits of it on audiences of friends and family today, and they laugh pretty good. It's promising, I just need to finish it eventually (ie: 2 days to turn in for a class).

It was really nice getting a chance to see my dog again for the first time in a while. It isn't untill I get away from pets that I realize how much I miss them. I'm really hoping that we are allowed to have pets in the apartment, because I want to get one if we can. A nice kitten. And I want to give it some big greek or norse gods name, or something cool and really unique. I am always open to suggestions.

Well I'm going to start laundry, and probably climb in bed. Tomorrow I get my ears lowered a bit, and have breakfast at Sip n Snack, my favorite restaurant EVER!

More moving today.

My dorm/apartment is looking very bare. All the walls are stripped down, leaving little yellow stains of sticky tack where once there were interesting posters. We're not allowed to nail into the walls, but that didn't stop my roommate who hung a world map which was old enough it still reffered to all of Eurasia, and all of Northern Asia as the USSR. I always found that really funny, just like the framed puzzle he hung up of an underwater scene. I also really disliked looking at that painting because there was a single piece missing from it, and every time I looked at it my eye would gravitate towards that one spot and fixate on it until I was annoyed.

The large boxes on wheels had somehow managed to disappear so it left Matt and I to load in boxes from my room armload by armload, riding the elevator up to the 25th floor and down again....over and over and over... Thankfully I didn't pack everything seeing as I am going to continue living in this dorm room for another week or so in order to finish out the semester and to avoid having to deal with a 40 minute commute to get to my 8 o'clocks on Monday and Tuesday.

Mike got his film back today and he was able to review it. If I hadn't been busy with moving stuff I would've hopped on it and checked it out. He said that, except for a few minor incongrueties that will get left on the cutting room floor, everything they shot was really very good, and this project is going to be a hit. That really gets me excited about the prospect of actually filming and seeing "Interlude" this coming winter.

We also have started kicking around the idea of doing a zombie movie, which we both swore we would never do, but have decided that it would just be plain old fun to go out and experiment with a hack n slash, blood and guts, action movie. I pitched him the idea that it would be interesting to see it done with a winter premise. He fell in love with the visual idea of seeing the blood splatter the snow. So now I am busy brainstorming a whole ton of the ideas that would make it interesting. I keep leaning towards noir titles, like "The Dead Months" or "The Long Dead Winter" or something of that sort.

Going to be back in town tomorrow. Should be interesting. Still wondering how I am going to get all this homework done by next Monday. I've given up on finding an artist, so I think I am going to just slap together a basic pitch, and turn it in on monday, maybe see if I can crank out the excuse that my "artist is going slow" and get a few more days to finish it up. I'm a bad bad person. Anyways it's late, and I've got a drive ahead of me, mostly doing homework while Matt cruises.

I spent the majority of today moving my old friend, and new roommate, Matt, into the apartment that we are going to be sharing for the next year. Today was the first time I saw the place, and it is good to know that I am actually going to have some tangible place to work and live in. Up till this point it has been somewhat of an enigmatic idea. Tomorrow, or today actually, we wake up early load my stuff, and move basically everything I own in Chicago into the apartment, go home for the weekend and do the same to my stuff that's at home that I'm going to need. Should be fun, or at least exhausting and fulfilling.

I talked to Mike a little further about the idea for "Interlude." We discussed character descriptions, should it be a waiter or a waitress, lighting and color schemes. Ultimately we decided that the techniques used in "One Hour Photo" is something that we should try and emulate and that it should be a waiter, seeing as the devil would reserve the feminine form for customers because the character appears to be more passive and lovable as a woman.

One of my teachers gave me this technique that I want to experiment with over the summer. I'm going to get my hands on a roll of paper, maybe from the health department where my dad works, and tack it to the wall. Then I'll get some big markers and just scrawl all over it with ideas, plot outlines, scenes, dialog, everything; creating a map of my novel for me to then piece together and create into something that is (hopefully) publishable and tangible.

I'm going home this weekend. I'm really looking forward to seeing my pets, and I'm hoping that when the time comes for me to move into this apartment that I'll be able to get a kitten. Just the thought of having my own pet is really exciting. I want to give it a cool name. Something like Caius, or Lopt, or something mythological or philosophical... I don't know. Cats are really bizzare and interesting characters.

I started having some interesting ideas for The Center, today while listening to the song "The New Year" by Death Cab For Cutie. Something called the Infinitum kept popping up, and there was also this really vivid image of Edmund (my protagonist or antagonist, depending on how you look at things) standing in the back of the cockpit of a B12 Bomber as it comes through the clouds soaring over one of the 9 cities of the East. He then says quickly to "drop it." The plane releases two bombs that plummet into the city (MASSIVE CITY) and explode in twin mushroom clouds of a nuclear blast. He is also referred to as the Red Horse (which is an obvious tie in to the horsemen of the apocalypse).

Another idea that has been interesting me has been a line from Neil Gaiman's American Gods, where Shadow and Wednesday are discussing who is a "Black Hat" vs. a "White Hat." This is in reference to who is good who is evil. Then a title occured to me. "The Grey Hats." I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'll keep you posted.

Anywhoo I'm off to bed for the evening, to pack and move tomorrow, and then to possibly talk comics with my artist (hopefully) so that I don't get a failing grade come next monday.