Daily Dates

I have decided that there are some advantages to working from home. It helps that I know I will start a new job in a few weeks. The best part of working from home is the fact that I can have lunch with Moose. I was always jealous of my co-workers and siblings when they were dating. Most of them were able to spend a lot of time with their significant others. When Moose and I were dating between his work and school schedule and my work and school schedule we pretty much just saw each other on Sundays. These last two weeks have been so much fun to visit him every day at work. It isn't much. We eat whatever I bring and watch an episode of a cooking show on his laptop. I am pleased to have a job again but I will miss these cute little daily dates.

Geography in Fiction

These come from two different conferences I attended. It always amazes me that I can attend two panels about the same topic, geography, and come away with completely different notes.

Geography is important but the story should be about the characters and not the world. Don't feel like you have to build the entire world, just build the portion that you need. When it comes to maps, only draw the map to tell the story. If you have to have the map in order to understand the story then you've failed.

Don't feel like you are limited to what we have on our planet. Instead of having a frozen north try having a frozen east. So long as you explain why something happens, like water running uphill due to a magical accident several years earlier. You can use geography to determine pints of conflict. In a feudal society people will fight over water rights, fertile land, and trade routes. This is also where you can have here there be dragons. It is motivation for exploration. Geography is not just about the unknown but the unknowable.

Once you have your geography figured out, then there are a few other things to take into consideration. Make sure that the characters where the correct clothing. When traveling make sure you know how much food and water is needed for traveling. In addition to that, make sure you know how far people can reasonably travel with their methods of transportation. You can't have a horse travel as far as a car. Transportation evolves and it isn't always the most effective or efficient. And lastly, communication between cities is just as important as traveling.

*An Apple A Day

Intro: I just read a story about a time machine. I wrote this story while thinking about that one.

The time lapse made Benjamin vomit, just like it did every time. Going to the future was worse, it made his body feel heavy, the weight of the years pressing down on him. The past was opposite, but still uncomfortable. It felt like he wasn't truly attached to the planet anymore. The worst was the constant headaches from being lightheaded.

He rinsed his mouth with the water bottle he always carried. The headache was especially strong this time but he wasn't surprised. Two thousand years tended to be rough on anybody. He looked around at his surroundings taking in the trees and the sounds of the birds. The air smelled of grass. It was worth the headache.

Spending time outside of the predestined time stream wasn't recommend by any physician. There hadn't been any known repercussions on history by people time traveling, but it was the mental distress. People worried and nothing made people worry more than the idea that something they did in the past would erase themselves in the future. Some people argued that if changes were made, when people went back to their own time they wouldn't know if they had changed anything unless it related to them directly. The law prohibited anyone going back less than 100 years into their past trying to reduce the possibility of that happening.

Benjamin moved through the trees, focusing on his mission. He worked for the government and this mission was of the utmost importance. Three other people had already tried but each time they were unsuccessful. He wasn't the normal type of agent. Instead of focusing on the criminology aspect, time travelers often wanted to take mementos from the past, he was on the cultural side of things. He spent a day with Michelangelo and King Solomon. Now he was on another mission. The breeze picked up and he sneezed. Never before had he been plagued by hay fever before. It was an enlightening experience. No wonder people wrote odes to the tortuous effects. But, that meant he was exactly where he was suppose to be.

Though he had more experience in this than the other time agents, he wasn't the perfect person for the job either. He stared at the apple buds intermixed with the blossoms. The anthro-agriculturist had explained the whole process. But he had explained the whole process to every other agent before him. Every time the agent came back it was a failure. His tweezers hovered between the various buds. If he screwed this up they wouldn't try any more.

He stuffed the tweezers back into his pocket. The knife at his back was another tool he always carried. The serrated blade cut threw the whole branch in roughly a minute. He sheathed the knife and activated the return feature on his device.

He handed the branch off as soon as he arrived and just made it to the garbage. This was his third and last mission of the day. He walked out of the office and stared at the buildings. It was a sad day when the government had to make the choice between living space and trees. Now that the colony on the moon alleviated some of the pressure the government was bringing farms back. That, and maybe with fresh food the birth rate would be positive again. If the scientists couldn't figure out how to grow apples from an entire branch, then the humans didn't deserve to have them.

Dear Frankie

with Emily Mortimer & Gerard Butler

I decided to shake things up a little and review one of my favorite movies, DEAR FRANKIE. I was introduced to this movie back in college. I saw a preview for it and I must admit what really drew my attention to it was the fact that it takes place in Scotland. Like a lot of people, I am a sucker for accents. At the same time the accents were fairly strong and it can take a minute or two to understand what the actors are saying. I also just want to add that there is some profanity.

This movie is about a single mother and her son. The son, Frankie, writes letter to his father who is a sailor. He has no memory of his father beyond the letters. Come to find out the mother, Lizzie, is the one who is writing the letters pretending to be Frankie's father. Then the ship docks and Frankie expects to see his father. Lizzie then decides she will find a man to pretend to be her husband and then once the ship leaves that will be the end of it.

This isn't the most original story to ever exist. In fact you may think you know exactly how it is going to end. But in all actuality I like this movie because it doesn't go how I expect it to. I have recommended this movie to more people and all of them have liked it. One of my movie buff friends actually said that it amazed him that this movie had more silence then most movies he'd seen. DEAR FRANKIE is a feel good movie that is just as good the second time.