Current Mood: Sad & Excited

…until the season six premiere. Eeeee! I’m both excited and sad about it. The final season! I decided this morning that it’s the acting I’m so fond of, more than the characters. Even the characters I can’t stand (I’m looking at you, Katie Sue), I can still feel for because the acting is so darn good. None of them have blank faces and monotonous voices, you feel what they’re feeling all the time. The direction on this show is just fabulous.

And I don’t want it to end!

Current Mood: Geeky

So, I love Michael Emerson. I think he is one of the greatest actors of our time, etc. etc. etc., but I only just found out that he won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor. I don’t know where my head is at.

Anyway, I went to YouTube to find video of it. The clip I watched showed the other actors nominated in the category, and an actor named John Slattery caught my eye.

Check out this picture.

I couldn’t help but think, wouldn’t he make a pretty good Isaac? He isn’t English, but as an actor I’m sure he could do an English accent. Right now he’s a bit younger than Isaac, but at the rate I’m going he would be the right age by the time Wilder Side is finally published. Heeee!

Then I went back to YouTube for some video of the guy (I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in anything), and my belief that he could make a good Isaac was reinforced by this fan video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I_DsNIkcps

It reminds me a lot of Isaac and Ursula, after she finally fell in love with him, even though the actress doesn’t look like Ursula.

Anyway, I just had to post this for fun. I still don’t think I’d sell movie rights. I think Wilder Side would require a lot of CGI, and I swear they did better effects in the 60’s than they do now. Some TV shows have better effects than the big budget movies. So, I’m thinking no. But it’s still fun to point out a relevant actor when I stumble across one.

Current Mood: Productive

All right, I’ve recovered from my Dragon Cave drama, but must now complain about other drama that I’ve been mentally grumbling about since it happened.

imeem.com sold out to MySpace Music. Blah. I hate MySpace. So right now all the playlists and individual songs I’ve posted on my various subdomains are an orange void, as you’ve probably noticed. MySpace Music claims they’ll have my playlists back in the next few weeks, but what about individual songs? I’m waiting around to see how all of that will work, mostly out of curiosity, but I’ll probably end up moving on. Guess I’ll have to go back to playlist.com after all. I did like Deezer originally, but you can’t even search on their site anymore. I liked imeem the way it was. *kicks MySpace*

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Ow, my knee! Yesterday I kept getting these horribly sharp spasming pains in it. I think it’s the boots I wear. Leather laceup boots with zippers and buckles are difficult to come by these days (at least locally), so I had to settle for this crappy pair whose toes arch upward. Every winter I wear them, at least one of my knees starts hurting. This year it’s much worse, though. I guess I’ll have to give them up. Crap. I don’t want to wear Uggs or anything that remotely resembles them. Can fashion please recover from the funk it’s been in for the last ten years? Please? Maybe I’ll have more luck finding leather boots online. I just can’t wear those anymore.

I’m hoping my knee won’t have any more of those pains today. *whimpers and begs knee*

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Randomness! The other day my mother and I were leaving the house to do the grocery shopping, when we spotted two birds flying in our direction. I wish I could say how high they were up in the sky, but I’m terrible at estimating things like that. Let’s just say they weren’t flying too low, but it was low enough where I could see some detail in the feathers of both birds, and I have 20/15 vision if that has any bearing on this. One was a seagull, the other was about twice its size. It looked like a bird of prey, a hawk maybe. Anyway, the seagull was chasing the hawk, squealing at and dive-bombing it. It was so strange, I simply had to mention it in my blog.

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I’ve actually been a little productive lately. I finally did some much-needed work on my Finding Faith website. I changed the layout and updated the graphics and information, even though the site and the series are kind of in limbo. Oh well.

I also found and implemented some new WordPress plugins that make improvements I’ve been wanting for a while. I installed one called WP-Smiley so that I can better control emoticons and add new ones at will. I also installed one called Cricket Moods,  and now I have a much better method of assigning moods to my blog posts. So, yay!

Best of all, I’ve been working on Wilder Side book one, In the Blood. The first four chapters, to be exact. I rewrote a scene, and I removed the parts I’ve decided not to use. This is the first time I’ve written anything since May 2008. Dude. And it actually felt good. I forgot that when I’m not writing, I feel lost and a little crazy. I thought that was just how I was now. I forgot the feeling of…normalcy writing brings me. It was nice.

Now I’ve got to prepare to write the new material. There shouldn’t be too much to add, so I’m thinking it will become three chapters instead of four. That’s good. I hope I’ll be able to trim down the final word count, too, but I’ll worry about that after the new material is written.

At least I seem to be working again. I hope it lasts.

Current Mood: Disappointed

Warning: It is time once again for me to moan, whine, and complain about something utterly unimportant so that I can get it out of my system and hopefully feel better.

This year’s holiday event at Dragon Cave.

In two words: Epically disappointing.

Summary: It will be a long time before I can hear the names Holly, Yulebuck, or Snow Angel without experiencing a whole host of negative feelings.

In several paragraphs: Every year Dragon Cave has a new Christmas dragon release. The Hollies, which were from Christmas 2007, are super rare because, apparently, hardly anyone who was around in 2007 is still active at DC. So, the few who are still around this year bred their Holly dragons, and the eggs mostly went out to their friends or people who brown nosed them to death or people who are popular at the site’s forum. I was mostly okay with that–as I acknowledge that I am schizoid and I really dislike forums–and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t snag an egg, but it was a little disappointing all the same.

The Yulebucks were from Christmas 2008, and were abundant again this year because plenty of people who got them last year were around to breed them. I got one of those, planning to freeze the hatchling at Stage 1 because it’s the cutest in my opinion, and I don’t care for the adult (freezing means the hatchling will never grow up). But apparently I froze it too late, because the little $?@*&! grew to Stage 2, which I didn’t want. I acknowledge that was my own fault, as I don’t fully understand the number of views it takes to keep your hatchling at Stage 1 (I’ve never wanted to freeze a hatchling before), but it was still disappointing.

This is the stage I wanted:

This is the stage it progressed to:

There was no sense in keeping something I didn’t want, so I got rid of the little sucker.

Then came the 2009 Christmas dragons, the Snow Angels. This one had several tiers of disappointment. First, you can only have two. That normally isn’t a problem for me, as I don’t want to collect a million of the same kind (except, oddly, the vampire dragons, perhaps), but then I found out via reading the forum that the adult Snow Angels come in three varieties. One would assume that meant you could only ever have two of the three varieties, but I was willing to accept that because I reasoned that if I got two of the same kind, or one I didn’t like as well as the other, I could always ditch it and try again next year. Right?

Wrong. It turns out your account is programmed so that you only get one variety of this dragon. Ever.

This is the one I wanted the most:

This is the one I would have been okay with getting:

This is the one I liked the least:

Can you guess which variety I got? Yes, of course, the one I liked least. I’m not saying any of them aren’t pretty; that isn’t the problem. The problem is that you can only ever have one variety, and that it is predetermined for you.

What a stupid, pointless idea. I thought the point of this game was to collect the dragons you wanted, and have the chance to (eventually) get all the dragons you liked. I guess that isn’t the case anymore.

The Halloween event for 2009 was much better. The new release was the Pumpkin dragon. I got one and named it, then another name suddenly popped into my mind so I managed to snag a hatchling, which just happened to gender correctly for the name that came to me (Jack the Pumpkin Ripper). Also for this event, the Halloween 2008 dragon, the vampire dragon, was given the bite function, so everyone who already had vampires was biting eggs and abandoning them for other people to get. I managed to get two of those, as well, and I thought all of that was handled fairly. The Christmas releases, however, seem to be dumb, and I don’t know if I’ll participate in the future.

It’s a dumb thing to be disappointed over, and in the grand scheme of things it means very little, I know.

Oh, well. I’m just glad the holidays are over. We have way too many in a row. Actually, we have way too many holidays, period.

Current Mood: Mellow

All right, so I’ve seen New Moon, but I’m not prepared to write about my experience because my brain hasn’t quite recovered yet. So I’ll do that next time.

For now, let me clear my Notepad file of the things I’ve been meaning to post here.

First of all, a random occurrence that took place the night after Halloween. It was actually quite a mystical experience, at least for me, and I’m glad I jotted it down because I’d completely forgotten about it by now.

It was after dark, and I heard the neighbor dogs barking outside so I went to the window to see if there was something going on. It was darker outside than I expected (neighbor’s lights weren’t on) so I couldn’t see anything. I did notice the moon though, high up in the sky and almost full. Then I heard a car coming down the street, so I looked back down because I knew the headlights would provide temporary illumination. There in the headlights of the stopped car appeared a wandering dog as it crossed the street, and I was taken aback because it looked like a wolf.

Night, full moon, wolf.

Very visual, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time of year. For me, the first week of November is a special time. I can’t really explain why, but there’s a certain feeling in the air, an atmosphere that I just adore. It feels magical, and…eh, I just can’t put it to words. If I say any more, I’ll just sound strange. So we’ll leave it at that.

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Surprise news! I’m doing a little work on Finding Faith! As you may know, I’ve written a B-story to go into Planning it Right, and I’ve just now finished editing it. So Carla can expect to receive that shortly. I’m still on the fence about whether I should really hand in the new version back to PublishAmerica, or whether I should let my contract with them expire and go looking for a real publisher for Finding Faith. The main reason I want to stick with self-publishing that series is because of the amount of work Wilder Side demands. I’m definitely going with traditional publishing for Wilder Side, and I couldn’t stand being on deadlines for two separate series. I could be on my own schedule with Finding Faith if I stuck with self-publishing it. But you just can’t get anywhere self-publishing. But if Wilder Side took off, Finding Faith could ride its coattails. I don’t know. I keep going back and forth.

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And an art site update. Actually, I updated that site earlier this month, too, but forgot to mention it here at the blog. I should really mention it here, I know, but I’m forgetful. So, you’re better off checking my art site independently, but from now on I will try to remember to mention it here.

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I’mma quit now. Apparently I just cannot spell today. You wouldn’t believe all the spelling errors I had to fix in this short little entry!