Space Junk
Old Projects
I’ve decided to start work on my old book project that’s been around from before 2007 and even earlier, so if you haven’t noticed (which is likely), I’ve re-added Chapter 1 of Space Junk to the site, new and improved.
The whole plot is technically done, minus some minor details, however since time has passed from 2007 (and this book technically was to take place already), I’ve had to rewrite large parts of the beginning to push the timeline out even further. I’m hoping to be done with the first book of the series by the end of next year so I can work on something else I have an idea of.
I’ll admit, I find it a bit of a struggle to write the beginning part over again as compared to when I was younger, I really don’t like injecting anything involving political stuff into things, but with how the society is set up in the beginning is kind of a central feature and they kind of tie into the second book in the series with the main characters.
I do have an idea for something besides this story, I kind of want to do some alternate history stories eventually, it’s just a matter of when I can find the time.
Curse my inability to draw
So, being done with college now and having a somewhat more predictable free time schedule, I decided it’s time I attempt to dedicate more time for my very neglected projects.
I’ve never been quite too fond of the current theme I have setup, I wanted something a bit more… neonish, dark but somewhat scifi for a theme. Older versions of this site that I never got off my butt to finish always had a black background with either blue or green text, attempting to mimic the old monochrome monitors of the early 80s. I still want a variation of that, but themeing WordPress seems to take up a bit of my time. I have a prototype theme I think needs a bit more work, so I’ll clean it up soon and launch that as the primary theme.
Next is the logo. I’m a horrible drawer, personally I haven’t done much besides cad drawings and schematics in probably 5 years. Stuff for fun even longer than that. As a kid, a few friends and I used to draw these really embarrassing (in my eyes now) comics depicting humans fighting various alien species and some times humans of the opposite sex or different countries. It was something that led to me being made fun of by people, which I honestly didn’t really care about at the time since I thought they were wonderful. That stuff dropped off in middle school, when I started to gain interest in doing fanfiction and began to teach myself about computers. I rediscovered the comics I drew as a kid a few years later in high school when I was trying to find leftover school supplies. On the back of one of the comics was a plot guideline for the entire series we had planned. That guideline became the rough edges for my incomplete story Space Junk.
As for the logo, the idea is a variation of some of the old Strangeness Networks logos I made on paper back in high school when this site was set up to be an “alternative media” website. It never took off because we all lost interest a week in. Basically, the site was supposed to display a different logo every 24 hours, usually something unusual. One logo was the sites name drawn with a smoke trail of a Saturn V rocket (yes impossible). Another was with frogs. Some were kinda plain, for example one was a schematic drawing for a building but instead drew the site name, whereas some were super unusual as they involved measuring equipment or kitchen utensils. My idea for a logo was a combination of all of the above, each random object representing a letter for Strangeness Blog. I was thinking of a rocket drawing an S, the T being a fork and spoon, the R as a ladle, and so forth. I know I did want the L to be a ruler and the G a extension cord. Think of it like the Google logo when it changes for special occasions. Also, if I could figure out how to integrate the lochness monster for the “ness”, that might be awesome, who knows?
I purchased strangenessblog.net the other day, and I intend to move the site over to that. What happens to strangenessnetworks.com, I’m not sure yet. I intend to set a 301 “Moved Permanently” message for any webcrawler that hits this blog to be sent to the new domain. I don’t intend to do away with the old domain as all my emails go to it, but I’m debating having a go with possibly doing a media hosting site a year or two down the road again. For now it’ll meet the same fate as bigbiteindustries.net, mainly a redirect to this blog. I don’t feel right letting that domain go even though I have no idea what to do with it. I do offer subdomains for strangenessnetworks.com if people are interested, for now.
Speaking of Space Junk, yes, I will actually upload chapters soon. I actually finished rewriting Chapter 1 the other day. A weakness I seemed to notice with my writing from 2007-2008 was it was all damn dialogue, so you had little to no idea what the characters were seeing or experiencing, just what they were saying. I actually have a complete chapter guide, plotline and everything done for one story, and a transition into a second story, but that’s another blog post. I really wanted each chapter polished enough to the point that I don’t have to go back and revise anything as much so I could possibly make a pdf of the entire at the end with little modification and make it look much like a real ebook that can be read on a tablet.
I was in a debate of finishing a old fanfiction series I started writing before Space Junk. I did revise several sections and started uploading them to fanfiction.net a few years ago, but stopped right before the good part. I might possibly work on that a bit for the heck of it. I read back on it last week and noticed some continuity errors that kinda are nagging me now, which is why I’m now considering it.
Strangeness Blog turns One!
Strangeness Blog is now 1 year old. As a way of telling myself to get off my ass and actually post something, I have posted the prologue to my story “Space Junk”.
I wrote this chapter last July, and then forgot about it until the other day. Hopefully from here on out, I’ll at least try to roll out a new chapter a month or so.
I made some changes to my plot line a bit from the previous revision. This was necessary since I’ve kept the sane time and location when I started writing it back in 2007. It was set to take place in the year 2014, but seeing it was a year away, that doesn’t seem plausible, so I set a generic time somewhere within the next twenty years or so. In addition, I’ve pulled a bit more current events in relation, since I want to make the time period seem a bit like the beginning of a very doom and gloom situation.
I’m also in the middle of developing a nice looking theme for WordPress at the moment. For someone who hasn’t touched HTML in the past decade almost with the exception of using very basic tags to do posts on sites elsewhere, getting anything that looks nice seems to be an uphill battle. My goal is to try and get a retro looking theme (think the old monochrome green monitors with a melting text logo). Since my spring break is in a few weeks, I think I’ll try to spend some time working on it.
Curse laziness
So… after throwing out most of my website and switching this site over to a blog where I can do long, drawn out educational rants (usually), I’ve never really bothered fixing hyperlinks across several old pages I had posted. One of which is my book I’ve been writing since 2007, Space Junk. Basically, I copied the old html pages to wordpress pages and never bothered fixing the hyperlinks that listed chapter names. Since I’ve decided to rewrite various parts I’ve already rewritten (this would be revision 14 if I recall), I just decided to disable the links for the time being and hide them from being accessible here on wordpress until I am certain I have most of my errors in the newer draft removed. Seeing that I’m currently working a full time job and doing full time credit hours at school, this basically will take a while like usual. I’m still aiming for a 2014 completion date for getting the whole story written, but for now, I don’t think I’ll get any of it done for the next few months.
Spring break book writing
I neglected “Space Junk” for a full year. That’s nothing new actually. Being that I started writing the actual book itself back in 2007, I only have managed to complete six chapters, totaling about 50 pages, and out of those six, only 3 are proofread and publishable.
Looking back at what I wrote starting in 2007, some things have happened that require me to make some several significant changes to the storyline. First thing is I guess I was somewhat correct about issues involving ISPs and the government being able to disconnect everyone in the United States from the internet. Last year in 2011, Congress passed a law allowing the President of the US to kill the internet in this country during times of national security. Okay, so that seems correct.
Next for the setting of the year 2014, that seems a little unreasonable now. It’s 2012 and a lot of what I predicted in 2007 that would happen in 2014 is not going to happen now. It’s very unlikely that Hilliary Clinton will be president during that time- I assumed in 2007 that she would of been the democratic nominee and would have became president. Oh well.
Instead of revising 6 chapters worth of stuff, I ended up deciding to rewrite a lot of what I had already, although keeping a good majority of it and just massively changing it. This puts me around Revision 14 or so since I came up with the idea of writing this book in 2004. On the bright side, this allows me to do some more experimentation with character views. I decided instead of having the entire story being told in Jim’s point of view, to distribute it across four of the characters. I have absolutely no clue how most book writers do this, so this will be a nice try.
I wonder how book writers take time to write things like this and get them flowing decently.
