...to jkahane and summers_place! Glad to see you both dropping in here, and I hope you'll stick around a while...

More news to come about a few things...

My first attempt at professional fiction writing in some time...finally done and submitted tonight.

Now I wait for the verdict...and move on to other stuff while I wait.

Here's hoping.

A lot of times of late, I've been letting the reports of the dead from Afghanistan go unremarked and that's been my mistake.

This time, Afghanistan suffered an undeserved loss, one of many, but this one happened to strike a bell in my memory. Her name was Malalai Kakar.

The part of the story that I know and am angered by thus far is here, thanks to the CBC. You will likely find more on her life in the years from the start of 2002 to its wrongly premature end elsewhere on the Web. My advice, based on half-remembered articles, would be to cross-reference against the Toronto Star.

Humanity lost a good one here.

Talk about an attention-getter of a title, huh?

Anyway. Went to the OSFS meeting, had fun as we discussed the science of finding extrasolar planets. I was mildly surprised by the relative lack of attendance, but it's the first meeting of the fall and the room was smaller than we've gotten used to. Our old space at the Dalhousie Community Centre has been modified with hardwood floors for dance classes to be held. Not good for moving folding tables and stackable chairs.

Feels like the home stretch on the short story SF project, but I'm still trying to nail down a few details here and there. Some of it's trying to listen to the characters, one or two things are research issues.

My camera. My good and loyal Canon A70, after six years...is starting to get cranky about battery pack issues. I know I charged up and loaded a fresh batch not 48 hours ago, and it keeps the auto-shutdown dance. Most recently, just minutes ago in mid-upload to my iBook. Not convenient, and I may have lost all the pictures of the last 2 days in the process. I may just decide to buy one of those discontinued but still being sold models at Henry's tomorrow.

If the day job leads that sprung up on Wednesday and Thursday don't deliver tomorrow, that is.

Whirlwind of sorts.

Finished putting my latest APAzine for Legends together. It's being printed as I type this, although there's some weird and interesting font glitches occurring in the hardcopy. Random characters that should be bold printing as italic, unexpected font substitutions, and whatnot. Not quite sure why this is happening, but at least the actual text is still there, as are the photos and the map. Must've happened when I saved from Pages to PDF.

Rain's coming down here at the moment. Not too heavy, but just enough to make you go for the umbrella. Gentle film noir rain, if there's such a thing.

OSFS meeting tomorrow at the Dalhousie Community Centre on Somerset West and Empress. Details at ottawa_sf for anyone interested, and the topic is extrasolar planets. Given the current count is a little over 300 such objects...ought to be fun for anyone who shows up!

Short story's past 5,500 and closing fast on 6,000. Here's hoping it's coherent when it's done...

Back to you.

Broke the 5,000-word barrier on the short story project. Hoping to actually be done this weekend. Even better, whatever the word count, I hope to have it hold together as a story.

Making further progress on Velvet City, realigning a creek and adding a few streets, and planting an International Airport. More on this anon, but I don't plan on posting every set of changes. Maybe after I've designed the runway pattern, set down the public parks layer, and designed a "freeway interchange" symbol?

Just found out at ComicBloc that there's a revised edition of the DC Encyclopedia out from DC and Dorling-Kindersley. Knew it was in the works, but wasn't sure of the release date.

Something I wanted to do for the Daily Planet Guide to Gotham back in the day was a hack of the Eliot Brown map from No Man's Land # 1, showing where the neighbourhoods - and, as importantly here, the subdistricts of those neighbourhoods - I was talking about in the "City Layout" chapter were in relation to each other. Colour-coded if the budget would allow, but the "B&W + spot colour" scheme that was in effect for the Daily Planet Guide series was certainly flexible enough to allow for it. Alas, that wasn't possible for reasons I won't go into here.

My desire to do such a thing stemmed from an older desire, stemming from my map collection. I've had this collection of maps, atlases and whatnot since I was a grade-school kid. It started with the gas station-issue maps, Esso, Texaco, Conoco(there was this family trip to Yellowstone when I was in grade two or three...long story), and so on. Transit route maps, provincial highway maps, Rand McNally and so on. I look forward to the day when MapArt has every province, territory and USA and Mexican state covered with a volume of its own...ahem.

And that's a longwinded way of introducing you to a project I've been toying with for a few weeks now in a long-abandoned version of CorelDraw: Velvet City.

( See the map below the cut... )

Advise that you all check this out before it goes behind the Globe and Mail paywall:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080919.wbudget20/BNStory/Entertainment/home

Still looking for a day-job, FYI. Meanwhile, I'm also doing other stuff, this being the Age of the MultiTasker.

Examples...

I've gone on a little recruitment drive for viarail_fandom. If you know anyone who might also be of a mind to sign up for that community, either point it out to them, or point them out to me.

Still working between job board checks on a short story project. Hoping to share more when/if I can on that one.

Under "new skills to learn and old skills to relearn", scriptwriting, specifically with Final Draft. Scriptwriting was my best class in animation school, paradoxically, but I had to work with MS Word, WordPerfect and an Amiga-specific word processor available in the animation lab of the day at Algonquin as they were. I didn't have access to a program specifically designed for scriptwriters.

More to follow...

As only Aaron Sorkin could write it, for the New York Times. Thanks to dduane for the pointer!

I lost another piece of my childhood today.

Ron Lancaster is dead.

When I was a kid, Lancaster and running back George Reed were the Saskatchewan Roughriders for me. Sure, there were about thirty or forty other players on the team, and one or two dozen support staff, all of whom did their parts to keep the team ticking over at Taylor Field every year. But those two players personified the 'Riders for me, defined them for me.

That they both moved on to others things in the decades since they wore the Green and White...well, it mattered. Somewhat. Not a whole lot, though.

If you're interested in additional info...

CBC Sports
Canadian Press via Google News
Background via Wikipedia
Background via Canadian Encyclopedia

Thanks for putting up with this.

Well. I go out for the early evening to attend the city's transportation services open house at the Orléans Rec Centre on Youville and Jeanne d'Arc and the world gets a little busier.

My friend Chris Miller's launched a blog to go with his update of the DCU timeline theory site I told you about earlier. I've got a feed set up for it: smartmemes. Add it or visit the site yourself. At the very least you'll be entertained by intelligent arguments.

Not unlike what I heard from various parties at the Open House. The mayor showed up, as did two of the local members of city council. I hope to post pictures, maybe tomorrow if I'm fast and lucky.

Spacecraft design nut that I am, drawn_ca pointed out something that I didn't want to miss: a blog about that very topic in the entertainment industry, apparently: Concept Ships. Looks cool, and you might find some Galactica goodies if you look carefully! (Warning: Bandwidth-intensive!)

More to follow...

So...who else is coming to town for this show?

To hawkward, here's to you having a good one today!

It seems that intersection where Centretown and Somerset Village meet simply cannot catch a break of late. Witness this latest misfortune reported by CBC News for details.

Just sad.

Anyone here know of listings of Canadian-based Trek fan groups?

[*]Political mini-rant: We are all slandered, I believe, by this claim. End of rant.

[*]DCU Continuity Pointer: While this is in no way an official timeline, I find myself feeling more comfortable with this version of the DCU heroes' and villains' shared history as deduced and compiled by one Chris J. Miller than anything else currently espoused. Chris and I have been talking about this subject for quite some years now ever since our days as fellow members of Legends APA began.

[*]Glad to read that Ike has been and gone with less effect upon the Texans that I'd originally feared. Very glad indeed.

Back to you...

Just something I spotted in the hardcopy edition of the Toronto Star today.

Reactions, anyone?

I've been keeping an eye on things down your way weather-wise. I know not everyone there's expecting anything much more than a thundershower, but never mind that for the moment.

Best of luck to you all, and if there's a way I can help, let me know As Soon As Practical.

I read this off of the Newsarama blog re: the next Iron Man movies. Yes, the plural was intended.

It looks to me as if Favreau and company are on a good, solid track for their planned hat trick. I look forward to enjoying the consequences of his choices.

I expect to be busy that night. Explanations can be found here:

http://community.livejournal.com/octranspo/411014.html

I have a concern or two I want to check into re: transit planning over the next couple of decades. Those of you on my friendlist in the Ottawa-Gatineau region may also be interested in checking one of these sessions out.

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose name starts with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

mdg1 gave me the letter "G" in honour of ruckawriter, whose work we both enjoy reading.

So...

1. G.W. Bridge, Agent of SHIELD. Particularly since Matt Fraction set him upon the Punisher's trail over the last couple of years. I think we've learned more about G.W. as a person since the new Punisher War Journal title started than in all the years since Messrs. Liefeld and Nicieza introduced us to him.

2 and 3. Guardian of Alpha Flight. It should count as two people since Heather and James Hudson, that first couple of Marvel Universe Canadian superheroics, have used the alias over the years. And both still deserve better than they got in New Avengers: the Collective. Here's hoping they get it. Especially since it looks like Michael Pointer's determined to be his own man back in his hometown of North Pole, Alaska, since having been used as the unwilling murder weapon against the two of them in that story arc.

4. Garak, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Yes, I know he's got a first name. He was introduced to us all as simply "Garak", and his first name has been so rarely used even by those closest to him, whether on TV or in the novels that have followed, much to my continuing delight. The man is unpredictable in ways that can be both reassuring and frightening all at once in the right situations.

5. Gotham City - a character in its own right in the Bat-franchise. I've already spoken at length on that.

So I'm fiddling with some map design practice - I'm going to have to build one for Shuster, the home city of Local Hero, sooner or later, after all - and I stumble across something that puts me in a nostalgic frame of mind: an article on Newsarama's house blog about the Mayfair Games DC Heroes role-playing game.

An admission: I've rarely played these sorts of games, but the concept fascinates me. More importantly, a lot of the merchandise generated by such games does a lot for me. Particularly the world-building - world-explaining? - material. You see guides to specific characters, groups, places...and you see a lot of stuff that explains where the creators of a given moment are coming from. DC Heroes was very good for that, particularly where they started profiling the cities of the DC Universe. Towards the end of their run with the RPG license, they really ran with Gotham City.


This is part of where my interest in mythical geography began, as much as with the galactic geography debates of Star Trek. It's what prompted me to co-write The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City with Matt Brady a few years back. I enjoyed doing all that digging through the back issues, cobbling together the clues that made Gotham not just a backdrop, but a real place, somewhere you might expect to live or visit. Or avoid visiting, if you could. (Although Gotham is still unwillingly competing with Hub City, Vanity, the remains of Blüdhaven, and so on for the title of "Most Dangerous City in America".)

I just wish I'd been able to do this one thing: color-coding the map by neighbourhood. Gotham's been around four or five centuries, it's got a lot of neighbourhoods on those islands.

So...when am I going to unveil the results of my map design practice? Not sure yet. As soon as I'm done. And then, I'll move on to mapping out Shuster.

To seanchaidh and sew_crafty_girl. Hoping you've both had a good one today...or if the party's been delayed for whatever reason, that it will be a good one!

Best of the day, and may there be many more for each of yez!

Writing a short story tonight, so I'm going to be absent from a meeting of friends and fellow writers. I want to get somewhere between eight and ten thousand words done in a coherent fashion by the end of the month, so speed is of the essence. If I do this well enough and fast enough, I may try to do this a second time. Just because.

tammypierce is celebrating a very notable anniversary today. Congratulations, Tammy!

A happy "Welcome aboard!" to radargrrl! Glad to be friended, and I hope you'll stick around a good long while. (Also thanks for some recent research help! Much appreciated!)

I uploaded some new stuff to my Picasa and Comicspace web-housing, and I expect to add more sooner than later.

More to come...

And almost as if in response to my reaction to Mr. Harper's complaint...the answer of the Major Canadian TV Networks is "No, you can't."

Disgusting.

For some brief additional commentary, I refer you to Justin Beach at publicbroadcasting.ca. Make of it what you will.

Some scribbles about Dr. Nautilus. Please note this is not his finalized deep-sea ops suit...or at least not his only one.

From Local Hero Artwork

Mr. Harper speaks to the question of allowing Green Party participation in the televised leaders' debates to come.

Respectfully, Mr. Prime Minister, you're wrong on this one. The Liberals and Greens are not married politically to each other. They may be engaging in an alliance of sorts here to ensure that both parties have a voice in the next Parliament, but they're not branches of each other. Nor do they plan to become such over the long haul.

It would not, therefore, be "fundamentally unfair" to grant Elizabeth May a podium at the debates.

Let's hear her out.

Soon, please.

As promised, a political post. This one will be short, if not entirely merciful.

Seems to me that the Green Party position on lawn signs makes sense. I've grown tired of seeing the inevitable street corner visual clutter every time an election - civic, provincial, federal - is called. The visual pollution, the wasted raw materials and cash...

And don't think about starting me off on the signage that clusters within line-of-sight of our schools, or we'll be online here all well.

The pencils of the last page of # 2 are now - for the most part - done. There may be some slight correction and reworking of this or that detail, but the bulk of that job is now Over and Done. I'm e-mailing it off to Ian Gould now.

More news to come...and next, a political news posting.

Back to you!