The writing is going… I won’t say it’s going well, it’s just going at this point.  I’m really trying to avoid thinking about whether or not what I’m writing is complete shite, otherwise, that leads to the inevitable slide down the, “omg, this sucks and no one will ever want to read this tripe. i’m doooooomed” path. (Henceforth to be referred to as the Path of Doom)  I’m incredibly fortunate in my friends and family and, even though we’re only 4 days in, they’ve been very willing to stroke and pacify my ego to tell me to keep going.  My sister, Kim, told me today, over the phone, “Oh shut the hell up and just keep writing.  I want to read it when your done.”  At which point, she promptly hung up on me.  She wuves me.

It’s really hitting home for me, just how self absorbed I can be.  Nancy mentioned this past summer that writers tend to be a rather self absorbed bunch but I *pooh*pooh’d* that notion and thought, “Well, some writers, may be self absorbed but surely not me.”

Which brings me to now, where people are sending me inspirational emails and text messages and holding my hand, telling me it’s going to be okay.  You are all awesome and when November is over and I have time to pull my head from my ass, I’ll make it up to you, I promise.

I’m happy that I’ve performed a very large word dump but now I’m plagued with fears that I should have paced myself and what if I run out of things to say, what if I can’t figure out what comes next, what if I want to deviate from my outline, what if I can’t write a cohesive story and each chapter ends up like short vignettes from a neurotic tween’s life and OMFG! I have no idea how I want to end this.

*taking a breath*

Okay, so some things I have realized is that this is going to be more than one book, however, I’m still writing it as if it’s just going to be one big book and it’ll have to be broken up later.  I tend to write in chronological order unless I have some sort of a fab idea that needs to be written at that very moment.  I’ve been using MS OneNote to write in, I really like how i can write chunks of text and rearrange them as I see fit.  I can also really micromanage each paragraph and I can separate things with chapters and subchapters and than I have a completely different sections for stuff that I’ve written but don’t quite know where chronologically they will be placed. I’m content with how things are going at this point and it’s early days yet, so I hope the momentum keeps up.

So, tonight, unless I have a burning desire to write, I will be on Dragon Age.  I picked it up last night, had to leave it IN the car so that I wouldn’t be looking at it and ditch all my writing efforts, I finally broke down at around midnight and retrieved it from the car and began my adventure.

Tonight it continues.

I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo this year.  It will be my first time, and I’m already feeling overwhelmed.  I have a pretty basic outline and cast of characters but … Dragon Age comes out on Tuesday…. >_<

I’m actually contemplating charging ahead and seeing what happens.  I mean, I can do this right?  In between work and school, I can devote every other day writing and the days I’m not writing, I’ll play.

This can work.  Seriously.

“Why, you no go to church?”

This is a question that gets asked of me by my mother every couple of months or so usually after she’s bemoaned her future as a grandmother and quickly follows up with the question, “Why you no have boyfriend?”

You see, her question doesn’t have anything to do with my spiritual health or any type of proselytism on her part, it’s that she assume’s that church is one big meat market and once I find a good church to go to, meeting a nice boy and marriage will inevitably follow.

The logical solution would be to simply tell my mother that I don’t want to go to church but I can see that conversation quickly leading down a slippery slope where I finally blurt out, “I don’t think I believe in God.” I’m not ready for that conversation yet, mainly because it’s still not a conclusion that I’m all that comfortable with. I don’t consider myself a hardcore atheist and every now and then I’ll slip back over to the more comfortable agnostic side of the line. Like many other humans, I’m simply a product of all my experiences and the sum of all my “church” experiences have been bad.

I’ll begin by rewinding the tape back to when I was a child. Growing up, I was never indoctrinated (as many children are) with whatever religious doctrine is dominant in the household. I grew up in an extended family, which meant that, I grew up in my grandparents home with my mother, aunts and uncles and a pretty steady flow of relatives constantly cycling through the house and nobody pressured me to think any which way. It all depended on where I wanted to go that weekend. Sometimes, I would go to to mass with my grandmother who was Roman Catholic. Other times, I would attend church service with my uncle, who was Evangelical Christian or more often, I would go to temple with my great-aunt who was Buddhist. I would go to temple with my great aunt quite frankly because it was much more fun than any of the other options. The Buddhist monks were very indulgent of the children that attended, and I have yet to meet any other monks willing to play tag with a rowdy group of kids. My grandfather did not attend church and he went fishing incredibly early on Sunday mornings, I remember only being able to go with him a handful of times because the rule was if I wanted to go, I had to wake up my myself and be ready to go when he was. I never was a morning person especially at that age.

But each visit was a time for me spend some time with that particular family member as well and there were aspects of each service that I really liked. I loved the theatre and pageantry of the Catholic church, I loved how sociable everyone at my uncle’s church was, I loved the aesthetics and how calm/quiet things were at temple. I loved pulling pranks on the monks even more.

We eventually moved out of my grandparents house and came to the United States and in an attempt at assimilation my parents started forcing me to attend a christian church every Sunday. When your younger it’s not too bad, classes are geared more towards entertaining and fun so that you don’t run off crying but when you start getting older, middle to high school and you start being shuffled through those groups called Young Disciples of Christ, etc. it gets a little bit more complicated. Specifically, I remember having questions, lots and lots of questions. I attempted to find the answers to those questions on my own and being frustrated and so I started asking people that I knew starting with my parents, who directed me to the youth pastor, who in turn, directed me to the head pastor and the solution I received was, “to pray about it.”

I’ve condensed my quest for answers into a few sentences but it spanned a period of about 6 months and so after all of my soul searching and reading and debating to be told that I should “pray about it” was a little frustrating. I do remember telling Pastor Rigsby, “what do you think I’ve been doing all this time?” to which he replied, “Well, this time, your going to pray with me.”

Cue eye roll.

Since then, until I graduated high school, I dutifully went to church on Sundays but kept my questions to myself (unless I was in an argumentative mood). To make a long story short, my church going experiences culminated with a church called Living Faith Fellowship when I was a student at WSU, it’s probably the closest I will ever get to to being in a cult. I’ve been hearing that the church is no longer like that but the things that happened there, while I was there, have still left a scar. After that, I didn’t want anything to do with any kind of church, organized religion, whatever.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve continued my boycott of churches and unfortunately it’s no longer become about doctrine or even belief.  I feel bad and small minded for saying this but it’s become about the people now too.  It’s incredibly hard to find a church that’s accepting of other points of view.  For example, I believe in gay marriage, I’m pro-choice and I have no problem with evolutionary theory and the biggie is that I believe that there isn’t simply one right path to salvation/heaven/nirvana/enlightenment/whatever.  Keeping my mouth shut and my head down are no longer an option. I just don’t want to do that anymore.

Ironically, I can’t bring myself to tell my mother yet even though I suspect her spiritual leanings are somewhat close to mine. Keep in mind, this is the woman, when I was 19 years old finally had the “sex” talk with me.  Our conversation consisted of her saying, “I don’t care if you have sex, just don’t get pregnant.  You can have sex with whoever you want to but if you come home pregnant, I’ll break your legs.” I nodded, and the subject changed.

And she wonders why I haven’t given her a grandchild yet.

I don’t like talking about the fact that I’ve returned to school.  It’s partly embarrassment that I never finished my degree in the first place.  I don’t like revisiting the memory of why I left WSU and I won’t here either.  But needless to say, last year I found myself at a crossroads of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I don’t want to be an office drone.  I don’t want to be unhappy at a job whose sole purpose is to pay the bills but unfortunately my options are limited.  Those limitations are of my own making and I take full responsibility for them but it’s still depressing.

At any rate, I’ve returned to college and am actively taking classes in the evenings and weekends.  Evergreen has a really odd reputation.  Within the state of Washington, most people have a very unfavorable view of it, within the city of Olympia (where the college is housed), locals tend to hate the college and there are always numerous calls to have it shut down somehow.  I mean, it would never happen.  Local businesses would feel the financial hit of not having umpteen college students around to buy their wares but I suppose it makes them feel better to voice their frustrations.  The reason for all the hate is the very small, subsection of students that tend to be very socially radical.  They’ve sat in front of Army tanks that were being sent to the Middle East, they’ve organized numerous marches in downtown Olympia and from their number, an even smaller fraction, like to cause mayhem by throwing rocks into bank windows and trying to start mini riots.

I suspect Evergreen really isn’t all that much different from other very, very liberal arts colleges and it’s nice having a local chapter of naive, young idealists  ready to take on “The Man”.  After awhile, seeing white rastas with dreadlocked hair (I’m still confused how they do that), watching student protest in Red Square by lockstepping with fake prop guns, the vegan cafeteria food, etc . it get’s to be pretty commonplace.

The biggest thing about Evergreen that usually has people scratching their heads, is the whole “no grades” policy.  Evergreen doesn’t give grades.  What happens is that at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year, if you’re taking a year long program is that you write a self evaluation and your professor will also write an evaluation of your work.

It’s harder than it sounds.

The biggest question is always, “Well then how do you know that your learning?”   That question has always confused me, is the receiving of a letter grade acknowledgement that you’ve learned something? The traditional model is that when someone looks over your transcripts and see’s your grades and GPA they come to a general idea of how smart you are in whatever vague area your degree happens to fall.  Now think for a minute how differently an employer or grad school admissions counselor would see you if they actually read in your own words and your professors what you learned.  Or conversely, what you didn’t learn and why you didn’t receive credit for a certain class.  You see, you can receive incredibly bad evaluations too and while I have not yet received one (and I hope to god I never do), I’ve read some from other’s transcripts and personality comes through in writing and some have been very scathing.  And it’s recorded for all time, in your transcripts.  You can explain away a bad grade, it’s harder to explain when it’s written in narrative form,  from your professor, detailing the myriad ways that you failed in their class.

The other great thing about Evergreen is their Individual Learning Contracts.  If you don’t see anything in the course offerings that speaks to you but have an idea of what you want to learn, create your own class! There’s a lot of paperwork to fill out and permissions you must obtain, including the Dean’s but how awesome is that?  You have to create your own syllabus and the amount of work must fall within certain parameters of how many credits your attempting.  I’ll write one at some point this academic calender and see how I fare, it’s something that I really want to experience before I graduate.

I appreciate the flexibility of class schedules, I love that the atmosphere around here is student centered, as opposed to administration centered.  I love how flexible my teachers can be with assignments and how they let me actively explore the material and the passion that they have all shown me for both teaching and learning.  I love how I’ve learned something valuable in ALL of my classes, even if I had reservations about taking it in the first place.  I like how accessible everyone is either in person, or phone or email.

But long story short, I’m loving Evergreen (hippies and  hipsters alike).  I wish that there were more nontraditional schools like this around the country.  I count myself lucky that I happen in live near one.

I’m really disappointed with myself tonight. The disappointment stems from my seemingly inability to open my mouth and speak words in a coherent sentence towards a group of people.

We watched a short 30 minute video tonight about the morbidity/mortality rates of infants born to African American women as compared to white women. The results were that black women were 3 times more likely to give birth prematurely than white women. It was assumed that the cause was due to socio-economic factors such as no healthcare, poor health, poverty, etc. It was posited that the statistics of the more wealthy and college educated black women would align more with the statistics of white women. It didn’t. The gap remained. This surprised and confused the doctors conducting the study. They hypothesized that racism may be the characteristic that caused the numbers.

Afterwards, we went to seminar. And for the first 30 minutes the conversation was a big display of various people playing oppression politics. There were roughly about 25 people in the room, 2 of us were nonwhite. All I kept thinking was, “why is it when the topic of racism within a specific topic comes up, everyone immediately tries to discredit it?” I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to say and so in the end, I said nothing. At some point, the other woman of color, said something like, “well, I’ve never experienced racism directed towards me. I think it’s generational.” and I wanted to ask her, so does that mean it doesn’t exist then? If you haven’t personally experienced something, does that invalidate my experiences?

Part of it’s fatigue. I definitely got the sense that the professor wanted me to jump in and say more but I just didn’t have it in me. I was too sure that my comments would be dismissed. That silencing tactics would be used. That we’d get to play a round of BINGO. And that was wrong of me, I don’t know them. I don’t know that that is what would have happened. I wish I had more faith in people, and I feel guilty that I automatically assume that they’ll let me down.

Class is over for this week, and I have my readings to do for Tuesday, we don’t meet for seminar again until Thursday. I’m hoping that I can find my voice in this class and share my perspective in these issues. I’m always lamenting the fact that black female voices are marginalized, erased or ignored. I have an opportunity to fill that void in my educational environment and I should take it. Til next time…

I get to have a short break before the onset of fall quarter at Evergreen and it’s a much needed and appreciated break from the rigors of college life. The summer writing class, while definitely worth taking, wasn’t quite what I was hoping for in terms of finding meaning in my own writing. The class itself was a little too unstructured for my taste. Nancy had (what felt like a bajillion) many different handouts at the beginning of the quarter meticulously detailing each and every assignment and what they were supposed to entail but it got bogged down with so much information that you didn’t know what was due when.

The hikes were amazing. It made me realize how much I missed doing this like that, just driving and spending the day out of town. I used to do that on a pretty regular basis and I wish I could find the impetus to do it again. I didn’t use to be this person who needed to have someone come with them when they go out and do things and used to in fact, snark at my friends when they exhibited those qualities.

The valuable things that I did learn? Writing a novel is very, very difficult. I was never under the illusion that it would be easy but I didn’t think it would be this hard either. I’m still plugging away at it, and in addition, have a couple of other story ideas gnawing away at me and so I have plenty of writing projects to keep myself busy for quite some time, in fact, I’m scheming to see if I can somehow write an independent learning contract at some point this coming year to include the research I need to be doing for my historical YA novel. I don’t really have any doubts that I’ll be unable to, Evergreen rocks that way.

So… I have about 2 weeks to plan and organize for the coming madness (20 credit hours registered for, yo!), put together the Ikea bookshelf that’s been chillin’ in the guest bedroom (that’s a project for this weekend), and spend as much time I can playing games since I won’t be able to…. actually, I might, there are rumors that a class that I’m registered for is incredibly easy. Next month, Demon Soul’s drops and the month after that, Dragon’s Age.

I received a postcard from Big Fish Games via snail mail with a graphic of the game and the name and website, which intrigued me. The graphic was simple but pretty, the shadowed outline of a small figured girl with a long red scarf. I investigated further by looking at the few screen shots they provided on their website and was started downloading the one hour demo.

One hour later, I was hooked. The storyline is pretty standard and a common trope in these type of point and click adventure games. A young child is to be the heir to a fantastical kingdom and is being thwarted by evil doers (dun, Dun DUN!) She has a magical power, the power to draw things and have them come alive, and has somehow entrapped herself at the top of a cursed tower and it’s your job to rescue her before it’s too late.

I’m a sucker for beautiful, unique or just kick ass artwork in games and playing though Drawn was simply beautiful, I’ve embedded the trailer for it below. Bought it via Big Fish Games for $6.99.

Gameplay is the standard point and click and puzzle solving. The puzzles aren’t very difficult at all, there were a couple of spots where I just couldn’t figure out what the next step was but in that event you have your handy dandy hint guide. The hint system was a little problematic for me, your allowed 3 hints, but it’s usually the 3rd hint that you want because the first 2 will be incredibly obvious but of course you can’t choose which hint to receive (shades of Layton, anyone?). In addition to the hints, to be used only if you are well and truly stuck, because during the course of the game your mouse will change into a hand if you pass it over an object that you need to pick up and the areas that need to be investigated will be glittering for your attention upon entering the scene. The only technical issue that I encountered was right before entering the Kingdom of Ice when you exit the Dragon’s Lair, the game kept freezing. I had to change the settings from fullscreen to windowed for that portion, which seemed to resolve the issue, once I entered the Kingdom of Ice, I switched back to fullscreen and had no additional problems.

I completed this game in about 5 hours, spread out over 2 days because I wasn’t going to deprive myself of sleep because of it but if you have some time and like adventure games, I do recommend trying it out. The ending is such that a sequel is nigh.

I had this idea that I would try live blogging the Penny Arcade Expo and yeah, that didn’t quite go as planned. Too much awesome and too much fun all in one weekend package. I barely took any pictures and didn’t tweet at all. As much as you think that you will be attending as prepared as possible something always goes awry and you end up not as prepared as you think you should be and some things just go to hell in a handbasket.

My party arrived at the Grand Hyatt on Thursday afternoon, and after a minor check-in snafu, they upgraded our room to the king corner bedroom and brought an extra bed for us. I think we might be at the Grand Hyatt every year from now on, the hotel was wonderful and the staff couldn’t have been more helpful and nice.

We settled into our room, unpacked and tried to make a tentative schedule of events of what was to happen over the course of the weekend, a schedule that (of course) we didn’t keep.

First up, was the Pre-Pax Dinner at the Navy Reserve Hall where I was really looking forward to the dinner and meeting a lot of people and just having a good time in general. I guess the dinner had some logistical issues and everyone ended up in a huge line, and caterers were cooking each and every serving,they were much too small for that many people.

Needless to say, it seemed to have turned into a huge mess. We were at the end of the line and Tjada and Carmen were starving and so we cut our losses and headed to the Pike Place Brewery to eat some dinner.

After dinner, we went back to the room, changed and freshened up for the TriWizard Pub Crawl. I had elected to join House Hufflepuff and while we were late and missed the first challenge, we caught up to everyone at Barca for the second challenge against Ravenclaw. My challenge consisted of a shot of tequila and a shot of “polyjuice potion” when we asked the bartender what they used to make it, he replied, ” You don’t want to know.” I didn’t taste bad at first, it was the aftertaste that finally got to me and I had to rinse out my mouth with more alcohol. It felt like something had curdled in my mouth. Ew.

The pub crawl was a shit ton of fun needless to say, I met some new people, I got to meet people that I had spent the better part of year conversing with over Twitter or the forums. Nakki and Isha were doing a bang up job herding the drunk Hufflepuffs from pub to pub with maybe a couple of snafu’s along the way. Snafu’s in the variety of, “Your group of being obnoxiously loud and annoying and please stop them from screaming HUFFLEPUFF! every ten minutes while inside the bar please.” But otherwise it was great. I regret not dressing up at least a little bit in costume, but there’s always next year.

The Expo Hall was amazing! The extra space that Gabe & Tycho added definitely made a difference. It was crowded with loads of people but at no point did I feel that i was hugging the walls to move which is what happened last year. I hear that next year that their hoping to get the Annex again in addition to the entire Convention Center. Someone asked during the Penny Arcade Q&A if they could make PAX even bigger and they replied, “not unless we drill into the earth to carve out our very own spot” and we would blindly follow them to the depths of the earth.

And Oh! the games I played (or watched a video for): I was very disappointed that there was no playable demo for Bioshock 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 but I did enjoy watching the video demo that they presented at their respective booths. I was able to play my beloved Fairy Tale Fights for about 20 minutes because no one was there and had to leave once a line formed (phooey!), managed to get my hands on Scribblenauts after a lengthy wait but I was entertained by watching some obnoxious people at the nearby Rockstar booth do crazy things for swag.

As always I had a lot of fun at this years PAX and there’s also the sense that I missed a lot too. This year was a little weird because I would be walking or waiting or playing and I would inevitably see someone from Twitter but I never said “Hi” or introduced myself because even though we indulge in casual conversation or a spirited debate via Twitter, we don’t really know each other. We’re part of a larger community but we’re still strangers. That, and like most people at PAX, I’m incredibly introverted and don’t speak much. Maybe next year, I can work myself up to at least wave at people.

In all, I had a another great year at PAX and I can’t wait for next year! I know that there’s PAX East in the interim but I don’t think I’ll be able to hang with that this go ’round. I would really like to try to make it to PNWA this summer and that’s a $500 registration fee (ouch!). So the goals, for next PAX go round would be to try to make it to more of the community events and I’m bouncing the idea around in my head of suggesting a panel. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I would be a bit terrified if it were approved and then I had to put it together.

Coming home was a bit of a relief, I never sleep very well away from my own home and bed and I wouldn’t have missed PAX unless it was a dire emergency but there was a sense of relief getting back to Olympia. I think I might actually start calling this place home… o.O

I also got my parents to take some funny pics with some of the things I bought at PAX. Parents, gotta love ‘em.

I’m so excited right now!

PAX happens in 20 days. Badges get mailed out on the 19th.
PAX schedule
and here’s the map of the exhibition floor!

There aren’t that many panels that I’m particularly interested in which is great, since that’ll leave me more room for hanging out with people, getting my hands on game demo’s and all ’round fun stuff!

There seems to be a bajillion games coming out in the next 6 to 8 months that I simply MUST have.  I’ll have to space them out since it will also coincide with the purchase of a new television set (hopefully the Samsung 42″ flatscreen) but we’ll have to wait and see.  I’ve listed the games that I’m eagerly awaiting, sorted by platform:

Nintendo DS:
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
Scribblenauts
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Golden Sun

Playstation 2:
Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy

Nintendo Wii:
Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Xbox 360:
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Bioshock 2

PSP:
Dissidia Final Fantasy
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona

Playstation 3:
Demon’s Souls
Assassins Creed II
Fairytale Fights

PC:
Star Wars The Old Republic <— this is going to be my first time playing an MMORPG
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

And those are just the ones that I know I’m gonna buy, there are others that I know I will buy at some point, I’m just not as squee-ish about them as I am about the ones on this list.