Grateful

This has been one of those spots in my life where things have just been happier.   Even with having two weird flare ups of not feeling well, it's still been a amazing couple of weeks.   On the serious real-life side of things I have an internship with the Church Archives starting in January.  Still only part-time, but it's really interesting work that's going to pay decently.  That combined with teaching for the U and for SLCC actually makes me feel downright employable.  It's an extremely good feeling.

I've also watched three good movies in the last week.  First, Thor 2 last Saturday, then the epic Doctor Who special screening on Monday, and today Catching Fire.  All three of them were respectably clean and thoroughly entertaining.  It was a great run at the movies.  It also reminds me of how grateful I am to be married to the world's best movie buddy.  Tracy isn't nearly as in to Doctor Who as I am, yet he still went with me and we had a really fantastic time. 

There's also been a bunch of other things, both serious and silly that have gone on in the last few weeks.  I got to babysit my friend Pam's little boy this week for a couple of hours, and in spite of going through the terrible two's he was a total angel for me.  My long standing favorite show  (Castle) and my new favorite show (Arrow) had great episodes that were again respectably clean and also mushy.   I had a great chats on the phone with my Mom and my cousin Jennie.  Thanksgiving dinner turned out really yummy.  I got the "Jayne's Cunning Hat" card while playing the Firefly board game with Chris, Stacia and Tracy.  Tracy's Mom and Aunt came for a visit last weekend.   It's almost December and I went outside without a coat today. I got an amazingly sweet note from my friend Becky.  In fact, it's been so awesome, I feel like I'm forgetting things.

And can I just say again that I'm married to the most amazing-perfect-fit husband on the planet!

Like I said it's been a lovely few weeks.  I definitely have a lot to be grateful for. 

Random Silliness

I know as a Superman fan I have no right to say this...but seriously it was about stinking time...

http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/11/19/arrow-oliver-mask-photos/

One Week

I made it an entire week without french fries...a stressful week no less.  There's hope :-)

Changing My World

So since our last visit to Boise in October, Tracy and I have made a pact to give up drinking soda.  For three weeks now we've been successful.  There were honestly times when I really hated it,  but it is finally getting easier.    The next mountain I'm trying to climb is giving up deep fried foods, including chips.   A few years ago I managed to swear off both for a couple of months and it actually started doing some good, so I'm hoping that will be true now and that I can keep it up.

I still haven't figured out exercise, and I know that's the next piece.  My anxiety and depression issues get a bit worse when my brain isn't active, and I don't want to spend any money or look like an idiot.  So someone really needs to invent a way for reading to burn calories :-) Still, Tracy and I have talked about parking farther out in parking lots, and little things like that, so hopefully that's a start.

I know I'm never going to be thin - seriously, in junior high school I was in drill team and track and basically ate the same foods as my size 6 friends and was still a size 13, so I'm not expecting miracles here.  But I would like to lose enough weight to be happy with myself in pictures and to be able to do all of the things I want to do.  

Even writing this on my blog is a little terrifying.  However, I'm comforted by the fact that not very many people read it, and those that do already like me, chubbiness and all.  At least I hope :-)

Surprise in Fiction

So it's National Novel Writing Month, and I thought about giving it go on a new project but instead decided to stick with working on my current project, with a goal of having a complete revised draft by the end of the year.  This work mostly involves writing "glue" scenes, that get things from point A to point B, and working on bolstering the plot and characters.

This got me thinking about my favorite plots and characters, and something that I've realized in the last few months about storytelling - it's terrific when you you're reading/watching a story and the characters do something surprising.  It's extremely annoying when your reading/watching something and the characters do something randomly out of character for the sake of surprise.  So what's the difference?   My two easiest examples of this come from tv show Castle.

The example of something delightfully surprising was in a early episode of Castle, when the two main characters Kate Beckett and Rick Castle end up on separate blind dates in the same restaurant.   You expect the average TV formula that they will get jealous of each others dates and end up sabotaging their own dates.  Instead, the writers did something kinda brilliant.  Instead of caring about each others dates, they both become obsessed with talking about the case they're on, and as they are talking to their dates come to the same conclusion about who the potential killer is.   They then abandon their dates to go and solve the mystery together.  The scene hits all the same emotional notes of the expected scene, and yet manages to reinforce the partnership and the crime drama aspect of the show.

My example of annoying out-of-character surprise also comes from Castle.  In the end of the last season, Kate Beckett got an offer a job in Washington, D.C.  and she took it.  Sounds like a reasonable plot complication right?  Uh-uh.  The show has made an absolute point of the fact that Kate Beckett is ultra-committed to her job as a homicide detective, even at the expense of other career ambitions, making the D.C. job feel like a convenient manufactured drama.   Could there have been a way for this same plot point to be in character?  Oh, I'm sure.  Give Kate a couple really sucky cases, where she feels like she doesn't have enough power to get justice and such a change is at least explainable.

So why am I talking about this?  (Other than the fact that I like talking about Castle.)  Of course, when I'm writing my book I want there to be surprises and things that come unexpectedly to the reader.  I hope my novels aren't predictable, but I do think I could use some work on the whole surprising thing.  It's hard, at least for me, to figure out how to do this.   I've really tried, in my own work to look for those little moments where something amazing happens that even I didn't quite plan for.  As far as I know, I've only pulled it off only once in the current novel.   But I'm hoping I that as I revise this draft I can come up with more ways to build pleasant surprises into my story.

Dangerous Ice Cream

So we had the missionaries over for dinner last night, which turned out pretty fun.  They had picked some walnuts earlier in the day and they and Tracy got some enjoyment out of trying to get the things out of the shell, we have walnut shrapnel in our dining room, but it was pretty entertaining. 

The funny, though quite embarrassing moment of the night came when Tracy offered them some ice cream.  I had bought what I thought was Rocky Road ice cream, but when Tracy went to dish it up I'd bought something else that was coffee flavored.  Luckily he caught it before he'd served it.  I couldn't believe that not only had I not noticed it was the wrong flavor, but that we'd managed not to look at it until we had missionaries there. They gave me a good-natured hard time about it, and it lead to us sharing stories about our other near misses (or not quite misses) with things we didn't want to eat or drink.  And now I've given them a new story to tell (sigh).