meanderings

I feel I owe everyone an apology for my insensitive (if honest) query in my last post. I obviously wasn't as ponderous as I usually expect of me, and instead let my frustration and lack of ability to act influence my writing.

Several commentors made excellent point both on, and off the comment threads. One pointed out quiet insightfully that even thought we live with the mistakes of previous generations, we also tend to make our own mistakes of similar gravity. It's easy when one is frustrated to point fingers at everyone else and scream, "Stop fucking things up for me!" This neglects the mess people often make for themselves. Furthermore, the same commentor points out that the available data at the time didn't properly communicate the implications of problems like larger families or burning fossil fuels. 

Perhaps for the first time in civilized history, humanity is dealing with a complex system on a scale we are only beginning to grasp. Chaos theory, memetic evolution, emergence found in weather patterns, alteration of the climate -- all systems we can only begin to simulate with only the most powerful systems on the planet. Most people have a difficult enough time trying to figure out a personal budget let alone fathom what the beat of a butterfly's wings are capable of producing. Maslow's triangle of needs limiting our scope.

Back when I believed in things such as fate, I often wondered what I could do to help prevent the coming downfall of humanity. I'm not terribly skilled in mathematics, or biology, or chemistry. I tried each, of course, as I'm have a love of knowledge. It was, however, only with computers I felt I had skill or any sort of future. From a practical standpoint, the information technology industry is terribly wasteful. Entire landfills compose of old and broken cell phones. Toxic chemicals are used to produce LCDs and etch silicon substrate. Operating systems and hardware are designed around the concept of a constant, cheap power supply, and are no where nearly optimized for power-savings. How can I help? The simple fact is that I'm having enough trouble getting my life in order to say nothing of reducing my carbon footprint.

I'm no better than all the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.

I tend to view myself as a fixer, a cerebral sort of mechanic with a mind full of learning, culture, and cheesy movies. With that world-view, it's difficult for me to sit idling back when things are obviously broken. It's not just that I want to fix it, it's that I'm compelled to fix it. When I'm unable to fix something, it's terribly frustrating to me. Lately, I've been hearing more and more about how seeming everything is breaking. A prominent biologist claims we're on the cusp of a 6th great extinction event. The oceanic dead zones are expanding. Crops fail and energy prices skyrocket. It's not difficult to look at each as a piece of a larger complex system on the edge of collapse. And I can't fix it. 

Hell, I can't even warn people about it by writing or so much as win a political argument. I'm rubbish at both. If I wasn't struggling to support my own Pyramid of Needs, I'd have more time sit and contemplate and research. Perhaps then I could construct a convincing argument. Or maybe not.

When chatting about this on IM with a friend, she conveyed something telling. "We're in a struggle with stupid people," she typed. A century ago, people thought that nature was infinite and boundless. If we clear-cut the forests, it wouldn't matter as there are more forests. Cue the Amazon Rain Forest. How much of that are we still losing today as others support their Pyramid of Needs? "The problem is, there are more stupid people, and they don't want to listen." The culture of this nation (and increasingly other nations) honor and hail the stupid, and denigrate the intelligent. Anti-intellectualism runs rampant world-wide. After all, no one wants to be thought of stupid, nor does any one want to listen to prognostications of doom.

This incident is tangential to a key personal observation, but it's time for me to continue my Atlas and the Pyramid routine.

She had forgotten the simple relaxation of housework. Most of the time, it was a recurring annoyance. Lately she hardly had the time to pick up her apartment, wash the dishes, or even do laundry. Her life had become a blur of airports, hotels, and clients from opposite ends of the nation. The little time she was home, such mundane tasks only got in her way.

Tonight, however, was different. She had received word that she would be home for the rest of the month. She had decided to take advantage of the upcoming spring holiday and put in for an additional day off. No one questioned or debated her request; it was approved without protest. She quietly breathed a sigh of relief when approval came in. She hadn't had a day off since New Year's, and constant parade of rush assignments and last minute clients had worn on her. Everything seemed to slow and stop. For the first time in what must have been weeks, she felt grounded enough to clean her apartment.

It wasn't a complex operation. While the place looked shabby, it was merely disorganized. The dishes had to be done and were. The clothes she had left out to dry on two collapsible racks were ready and were folded. Loose items on tables, chairs, and the floors were gathered and put away.

She didn't listen to music or play a movie to keep her company. Sounds drifted in her open windows of the nearby highway, neighbors in other units, and a small Latino family watching their little boy play ball. Occasionally, between shouts of Spanish came a dull rubber thud as the ball rebounded against the sidewalk.

Nor did she place some topic in her mind for debate. She simply detached it from the worries and frustrations of the day and existed in the now. Slowly, like a knotted muscle, her mind began to relax. The feeling of it was almost too much to bear if she paid it too much attention – the relief of months of pent up stress. She felt tears welling up around her eyes, but put the feeling behind her before they could peak.

One of the consequences of being at an IBM conference is that you run into a lot of people from the Hursley research lab. Hearing so many British accents over the course of several days is making me miss the UK...

The other consequence is that is that you take certification exams. Yesterday I passed the WebSphere MQ Solution Development (996) exam with a 5 question margin. This morning I passed the MQ Administration (994) exam with an 8 question margin -- there were 52 questions instead of yesterday's 49. While that completes what I need for work, there's a problem.

Attendees to IMPACT are given three free certification exams. While I know MQ, I know little of other WebSphere products like App or Process Server. The only one I have any grip on at all is WebSphere Message Broker, and I can barely deploy a message flow unassisted. Despite this, they want me to take a third exam.

Oh well, at least I'll have a better grasp on how little I know. ^_^

It's been two weeks since my last post, public or otherwise. Much of my absence is due to illness.

True to being a workaholic, I tend to ignore sickness and press on with work. Typically if I feel strong enough to ready myself for the day, and strong enough to drive, I'm strong enough to work. Only on rare occasions have I been so ill that simply taking a shower was too much effort. My friends and coworkers aren't very fond of my stubbornness. Many are afraid that I'll hurt myself or worse. I've relaxed that policy a bit with my current job, as I can work from home if I'm not well enough to drive.

Less often will I see a doctor. Despite the fact I'm fortunate enough to be insured (a growing rarity in the US), the average trip to a doctor sets me back $350. Even with my current income, that's quite a bit of my monthly profit. For me to see a doctor, I need to be terribly sick, in unbearable pain, or terrified. My analytical mind doesn't help: Invariably I self-diagnose before seeing a doctor. After all, why go to the expense if all they're going to tell me is, "it's a virus, get plenty of sleep and fluids"?

In the last month I've seen a doctor twice. Needless to say, I've been quite terrified. Sometimes gripping, but more often a vague grinding terror that invades your sleep and drains your energy. The word "cancer" was thrown about, thankfully not by either of the two doctors I've seen (now you see what trouble an analytical mind can be). That word is particularly frightening to me given my family history. My mother, her sister, and other relatives on both sides of my ancestry died after being diagnosed.

The antibiotics I've been prescribed seem to working. I still have trouble sleeping, but I've been improving. Part of my continued sleeplessness is work. Since last Wednesday I've been working at new client in the southeastern 'Cities. The drive is longer, but I'm thankful for a change in work. Since early January I've been in the middle of a massive rewrite of my course material. After writing 6 labs of 30-40 pages each, my writing talent felt stone-dead.

Even though my current task is yet more documentation (up to 37 pages today!), the majority of my tasks are MQ administration and upgrade planning. It's a welcome change from the constant grind of lab writing.

Paper Girl is still on my mind, but it's been so difficult to work up the energy to write. I've been working on a second chapter centered around Miki. I can't quite seem to figure out how to start her story arc. Hopefully something will occur to me soon.

Some years ago I stopped making New Year's resolutions. I forget exactly when this happened, perhaps some time in the last few years. I had become discouraged by making lofty goals and then was unable to keep them. Hurt by my own lack of progress, I decided to ignore the entire thing.

When 2007 was nearing its end, a coworker asking me if I had made any such resolutions. I was rather surprised with my own answer: "I tend not to make resolutions. After all, if you're going to try to improve yourself or succeed at something, why wait until the end of the year?" I felt a distinct tongue of disingeniousness stir within me.

I haven't been living up to my own ideals.

Since the Holiday season began, I've had difficulty returning to creative pursuits. There's no one reason why this has occurred. I was mentally and physically exhausted from nearly three solid months of travel for work. The holidays always leaves me feeling melancholy, draining what little reserves of energy I had left. There was funeral and a family emergency.

Stability seemed to return sometime after midnight on January first. I went to bed sometime around 4am that evening after a lengthy Skype discussion, exhaused but calm. I rested.

Since then I've been thinking a lot about what I would like to accomplish this year. I already have several goals for my career and my life. While I could write about those here, for this entry I'd rather focus on my creative pursuits.

Deninet is my first concern. Last year the server had a hardware failure that resulted in a near loss of the primary data drive. While I managed to rescue the data and slot an alternate drive, I lost 160gb of additional storage capacity. I would very much like to fix that by building a new server with RAID, but there isn't enough money in the budget. That may change if I can find a used system with the proper configuration. Hardware isn't my only concern.

Until recently, the website has been running on Drupal 4.7. While this is technically a supported configuration, since the advent of Drupal 5, and now 5.5, updated modules and installed sites has been falling quickly. Compared to some, aDE is a relatively small site. There was only one dependency that held it to 4.7 -- the Webcomics module. Shortly after I announced I was going to develop my own version of this module for Drupal 5, an upgrade appeared.

I hadn't decided what to do about the module, but I did decide not to delay the upgrade of the site any further. As of last Sunday, A Denizen's Entertainment is running on Drupal 5.5. The upgrade wasn't perfect. There are still malfunctioning features and bugs in the theme, but over all, it works.

I would very much like to develop a new theme for the site. There are several problems with the current "Starlights" theme, including table display and inline images. Much of this is due to the bizarre structure of the center column. A throughly researched update to Starlights will hopefully correct many of these problems. A properly functioning theme is important, as I would like to open the site to additional users.

Technically deninet is already open to multiple users, it has been since I first ported it to Drupal. What was different, however, is that not all users have the same abilities. General users can create forum topics and make comments, but little else. Another group, composed mostly of my friends, has the ability to create book pages, stories, blog posts, and many other things. If you've stopped by the site lately, you may have noticed posts by such individuals.

Why open the site to other users? I don't know really. I like the idea of sharing a site dedicated to the production and consumption of creative media with my friends. Deninet doesn't currently have the proper set for this goal, but I think it's possible with some reorganization.

I hope that Paper Girl finally makes headway both on the site and this year in general. I've been stalled the last few weeks as I lacked a satisfying way to begin the story. I've tried to start the story a few different ways now, but became unhappy with it shortly afterward.

I'm quite apprehensive to tell the story at all. The last time I attempted a big project like this, it had gone down in rather embarrassing flames shortly thereafter. And then I was telling a mere cyberpunk story, not a complex psychodrama involving suicide, gender, and sexuality. I'm intimidated by it. I'm intimidated by what can happen by telling it. Yet, I want to write it and want others to read it. Putting my anxiety aside has been extremely difficult for me and is hampening my writing efforts. I hope I'll find a way to finally work past these issues this year.

I have to definite list of goals for this year. I have many things I would like to accomplish, some I eagerly anticipate as much as fear. Time, however, doesn't seem to notice. It grinds steadily foreward irrespective of success or failure, resolutions or expected accomplishments. The waveform goes on mindlessly, only to be scattered by cosmic dust.

I read today on a friend's blog that yesterday Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay died. The entry was short and scathing. When I first read it I wondered, Is this really called for?

It catches me the way some documentaries are movies catch me about when they exhibit a particular opinion. Shortly thereafter, I was reading the man's Wikipedia entry. Unsurprisingly, the page was not only flagged for recent changes, but also locked to prevent vandalism. Most of the details about him were expected: There was a terse overview of his early life, and his military career up until and after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The details read out like the specifications of the Enola Gay itself, the only details posted next to it's fuselage on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Then I began reading about the acts and opinions of Mr. Tibbets expressed in the last 20 years. I will spare you the details, but I did find them most distasteful. I decided to return to the blog entry and read the short list of comments. Much of what was discussed reminded me distinctly of an exercise in hypothetical history a teacher assigned to me in high school.

The question simply was this: "Was it right to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945?" This gave 17 year old me a great deal to think about. Clearly, the sudden incineration of 220,000 civilians sounded more like genocide than an act of war. Then I recalled my study of Japanese culture at the time. At the time, Japanese citizens were being trained to defend their homeland to the end. Instruction of weaponry and hand-to-hand combat was made available. Perhaps it was even required, I have so little research on this issue. When considering all of this, it begs the question, "Just what is the distinction between military and civilian when both are being trained to fight 'the enemy'?"

Interestingly enough, this question is what is currently being played out in American courts. Only this time the definition at hand is "unlawful combatant". We as a species never seem to learn, do we?

Now I'm at the point in this entry where I have to give my summation. How do I think of Mr. Tibbets? Should we fame him or revile him? Some of his statement are reminiscent of the ending of Dr. Strangelove, rather than a complex, contradicted character. Yet, when looking at the situation facing the Allied commanders in 1945 (and coldly ignoring the incineration of 220,000 people), it seems clear the a ground assault would be a disaster. It may have resulted in even more deaths than Little Boy and Fat Man could have wrought. Or would it?

One particular aspect of my personality flabbergasts people when it comes to these arguments: I believe am not required to give an opinion. I am, after all, not Mr. Tibbets, or the pilot of the Bockscar, or even a member of any armed forces. I have not gone about my life to put myself in the situation to make such a choice. I do not believe myself capable of making it, nor would I want to. Some insist I state an opinion, suggesting I put myself in their place. I also find this a rather silted thing to do. Had I been in their place wouldn't I have gone about putting myself in such a position? Rarely are such life-and-death choices handed out to the proverbial woman on the street. I could only decide from my perspective, and as I've already said, I've purposely avoided putting myself in the position to make those choices in the first place. In effect, haven't I already expressed my opinion?

I can be infuriating at times.

Artsy TessFor the last two weeks I've been on vacation. During that time I've been preoccupied with two things, recovering from work, and Novella.

The last six months have been particularly challenging as a Software Trainer/Consultant. In July I was asked to help update the course material for our flagship product. The course certainly did need it, and I was more than happy to take a break from the project I was currently working on. By November, not only had I updated the material, but I found myself "owning" all the course material for all of our products. This is still the minority of all of the classes taught by my department, but it certainly explains my exhaustion as of late.

Several months ago I assumed that work would eventually slow down. I would find myself working 8 hour shifts at the office, 5 days a week. This sounds absolutely peaceful compared to the whirlwind weeks of criss-crossing the country every Sunday morning and Friday evening. When it did slow down, I thought, I would have enough time to work on Novella. Sometimes I can work on the story while I'm traveling, but it can be difficult when your option during a flight is four hours of writing in close-quarters, or getting some much deserved rest on the way home. When I was finally home, I could start to work on the Novella Script.

I had decided to start the Script as I was no longer making any progress with the Outline. I figured that if I had a few months to write the script, I would be more than prepared to start drawing the comic in January. Unfortunately, work did not let up as I had hoped, but continued to get more and more busy until Christmas. I simply didn't have the energy to develop the script as I had intended.

Over my vacation, I hoped that I'd have the time to catch up. My plan was to write enough script to feel like I could start drawing the comic after New Year's. Little did I realize just how exhausted I was. It took nearly a week for me to feel like myself again. After that, I still didn't have the creative drive yet to seriously confront the comic. Finally last Friday I decided that I had enough sitting around my apartment.

I grabbed my Vaio laptop, and hit a cafe. I ordered a nice lunch and sat down to reread everything I had produced in the last year.

At the time, I didn't realize it, but the project has made significant progress in the last year. I started with only the characters and story I had in my mind, plus the few surviving notes. From there a 40 page Outline was developed as well as a short script. For the first time since I imagined the comic, there was a planned, continuous storyline. The website has also undertaken a dramatic change. I abandoned my own custom written PHP content system for one based on the Open Source Drupal CMS. I decided this because I didn't want to spend time developing the site when I was supposed to be working on the comic. While I was hesitant at first, this is beginning to show itself as the right thing to do.

After I had laid waste to my Chicken Wild Rice soup and my Roast Beef on Cibatta, I reread the Outline. I was disappointed to find that I still did not like the first chapter of the story. To me, it never felt, "grounded". I'm not sure how to describe it, but I can imagine a reader being very frustrated by it. I didn't think it was without any merit at all, but it certainly needed significant tweaking. If only I knew what. Setting that aside I read my short script. Currently, it doesn't enter into the actual story. Instead it's a sort of introductory chapter to explain the first Novella comic, what happened, and why I'm so nervous now.

That, as you may be wondering, is where the above character came from. This is Artsy Tess, a personification of my creative side, also a character in the introductory chapter. Normally, she wears a smock of some sort, but today she snuck into sleeping Anthropologist Tess' room and "borrowed" her kimono. Pessimist Tess, as you might guess, wasn't happy with any of this. She was even less happy when Artsy told her she wanted to start drawing the comic in spite of the untidy state of things.

And that's where I am today. Do I just throw caution to the wind and start drawing the comic? Or to I tuck my tail between my legs and develop the outline and the script for several more months? Neither are a pleasant prospect. If I start drawing now, I'm afraid that history will repeat itself. I'll produce several comics, and then the whole thing will blow up in my face. If I wait, there's nothing to say that work won't become hectic and draining again. If that happens, I'll find myself in the same place months from now.

The development process seems to have exhausted myself. It's forced me to preciface. If the story is to develop further, I need to have an actual story in front of me. Not a Outline, not even a script. I need to know what actually happens. I need to see what is beyond that cliff and what is in the valley below.

The real question is, when I leap off, do I believe I can fly?

Universe; I hope so.

The sound of the nearby highway always comforted her.

She could never explain why, of course. It was something about the sound of activity, of something moving or working that wasn't completely automated. The sound of the highway wafted into her apartment, falling onto the pale blue carpeted floor, a mix of stone and metallic. It was her personal reminder that she wasn't alone.

Except for the fact she was alone. She had barely left the apartment all day. She hadn't even washed her clothes as she often did on a Sunday. She had instead, spent the entire day reading. This was a rare occurrence for her now. She typically frowned upon “media consumption” in lieu of producing something creative. In addition to laundry, the young woman often concluded the weekend writing or drawing.

A while ago, there had been a burst of such activity. For nearly three weeks, it seemed, she had spent most of her time drawing. They seemed like such idyllic times to her now. Tess liked herself best when she spent the majority of her free-time doing something creative. The medium didn't matter. Programming, writing, artwork, music, they were all the same. They were an avenue of expression. Music had always troubled her the most. Even today she can't quite figure out how to create music. Riffs, lyrics, none of it seemed to make sense to her. Somehow, it was a medium she couldn't master. It was a impasse that was aggravated further by nearly 8 years of music education.

A voice wondered in through the windows. Male, young. It sounded English, with a rounded Latino accent. Kids, she thought, to the sound of the security door snapping closed. The voice trailed off into the opposing building three stories below.

Last week she had decided to change her free-time habits. She had discovered that she was spending a great deal of time each evening watching television. This was something new to her, since she hasn't had a television for years – not the boxy kind at least. She did have a television card in her computer. It worked well for nearly two years. Then she decided to buy a laptop. She merged the hardware of her old computer into that of her ancient web server, assembled from donated computer components. She had hoped she would be able to continue using the television card, but somewhere in reconstruction, the sound card failed. It didn't matter much to her anyways.

When a friend had borrowed her his TV for the summer, she became hooked. It was so easy to simply turn it on and watch a documentary, or a science special. Occasionally, she would even watch some science fiction, but rarely anything else. Despite this selective exposure, she had found her creative output dropping, and dropping and dropping. Her imagination was growing weak from disuse.

This is partly why she had spent a great deal of time reading this week. She hadn't read a book outside of an airplane or hotel room for months. When she wasn't traveling, she barely read at all. There was something about travel that made it more attractive. There was something something about travel that also fired her imagination. People-watching at a departure gate always roused her writing muse. The problem was, she couldn't control when the travel was going to occur. The occasion for it simply came up when it was necessary at work. Tess felt a mix of disappointment and frustration at the thought.

Tess was also reading for another reason. She felt she was empty of words. She hoped by reading for several nights in a row would somehow fill that void. After two days, she began to believe she was right. Her muse had woken, and began, as she typically did, to run a monologue in the back of her head. It spoke in her voice, somewhat idealized, of her thoughts and actions at the moment. It was curiously third-person, only with one character.

Tess yawned, deeper than expected, the action causing her eyes to water. I can't be tired yet, can I? It's only 8pm... she thought to herself. Today she had finished one book, Starfish by Peter Watts. It was a near-future novel, similar but less technologically oriented than the cyberpunk novels of Gibson. It had the same dystopian flare that Tess hedonisticly enjoyed. She had read the book before, but too quickly. She barely could remember anything about it. The same was true for her teal copy of Neuromancer, splayed upon her desk. She had also read it before, and read it too quickly. Tess didn't enjoy the novel as much as one of Gibson's later novels, Idoru. That one happened to be her favorite work of his.

The young woman wasn't happy with how her weekend had turned out. No, she wasn't exactly unhappy, she was Guilty, she thought with a sigh. She hadn't done anything creative during the entire weekend. All she did was read. She had hoped that today she should have been able to produce something, but nothing came of it. Somehow, she felt she had been lazy. That she had wasted the precious free time she had been given before returning to work.

Wasted, lazy, guilty, the words swirled in her head. Starfish and Neuromancer weren't the only two books she had picked up this weekend. She had also read a few pages of a philosophy essay entitled, The Hacker Ethic. The essay involved a comparison between the cultural concept of the Protestant Ethic, versus the so-called Hacker Ethic. When Tess had read the book years ago, she had felt she sided with the latter. When she paged through it yesterday, however, she discovered quite the opposite was true. How in the hell did that happen? she asked herself, When did I change so much?

It used to be that Tess would spend hours and hours at a time on a project. It infected her. It obsessed her. She would find herself doodling concept art or UML diagrams in the middle of class in high school. School didn't even matter much to her anymore, she felt she had discovered something enormous. Now, it seemed, projects weren't fun anymore. They were...work. They were obligation. They had become nothing more than a task to be completed, with enjoyment far down a long list of priorities.

She tried to trace this back to when it happened. There was no single event. There seemed to be a collection of events that edged in the direction of responsibility over enjoyment. Even when there wasn't a palpable responsibility to be had, she invented them. If there wasn't a point to something, then it was meaningless. She had said these things increasingly for the last few years, not realizing how much needless frustration she was causing herself. And today, she found herself wondering about those motivations and thought, Man, that's fucked up. Enjoyment should indeed be on the top of the list.

Tess, however, just didn't want enjoyment. She wanted to create something. Enjoyment alone wasn't enough to do that. For that, she needed something else: Passion. She needed the sort of passion she felt for a project as she did in high school. Couldn't that be dangerous?she asked herself. In college she often preferred to work on her projects over social occasions. She regretted many of the missed opportunities. She had been burned by that passion. It became an obsessive sanctuary during some of her more difficult years. That was the problem then, I burned myself out. It wasn't passion I was feeling then, it was need.

The question still remained, carried by the distant sound of the highway. How does one create passion?

Ocean Reflector at DuskThursday night I was chatting with a friend about artwork. She had expressed the desire to teach herself how to draw, eventually in hopes of starting a webcomic. I always love it when people show a desire to learn something new. People, in general, seem far too passive about creativity. We are, after all, a consumer culture. Creating new media can be a difficult role reversal.

During the course of the conversation, we stumbled upon CG and animation. I had done a bit of animation years ago during the InterLock project using Bryce 3 and 4. By today's standards, what I produced was terribly crude. Even today some of the old renders and sketches make me embarrassed. This is not to say that there aren't some images I rather like.

The problem was, I no longer had any of the project files on my machine. When I changed computers in 2004, I decided not to include most of the InterLock files. They instead, resided on a CD backup. I usually make a CD or DVD backup of my files every year. I keep the discs for about three years, and then I throw them away. I had assumed that I had all the files in the last backup, and it wasn't an issue. There was one image in particular I wanted to show her, one that I could see so clearly in my imagination but couldn't externalize it.

I keep most of my immediate CDs in several cases above my computer monitor. In those cases I found three discs, but none of them had the files I was looking for. Determined, I set about digging through every box in my small apartment to see if I had a copy somewhere. a half hour later, I came up empty. Did I really lose the files? Was what little that remained of the InterLock project gone forever? I didn't want to believe it. I had maintained the same file tree for my documents for years now, I even had the path memorized -- or so I thought.

When I went back to the oldest of the discs I had found, I discovered that the files I was looking for weren't in the directory I expected. Instead, they were in a subdirectory of the directory I expected, and curiously overlooked. Inside was a carbon copy of the InterLock website during the height of the project. And there were the images I was looking for.

After so much effort to find them, I thought it would be a shame to hide the images I found. True, they may be old, but some of them were quite nice given the level of technology I was working with. So, I decided to post them in a gallery here.

I first imagined Novella sometime in my sophomore year of college. Actually, I first imagined the character of Novella.

I was returning from a shopping trip with one of my closest friends. We often went on shopping trips on the weekend given the "uncivilized" nature of our college town. We were accustomed to living in the cities, and having a wide variety of capitalist distractions to choose from. To get anywhere near those shops, we had to drive 40 minutes to an hour and a half through corn fields and rural highways. On the return trip we began to toss an idea back and forth, tentatively named "Chaos High School".

The general concept of the idea was a school in which nearly everything was possible. Most of the story involved a group of students which happened to be magic users. It was the very thing that our anime soaked brains would devour quickly and readily. I began to craft my own character for the story. An androgynous character who came into the possession of a special pen that had the power to control fate.

The character is unaware at first of the power this pen conceals. After using the pen to write several journal entries, things begin to happen to several of the students in the school. When the pen is linked to these incidents, the character attempts to correct things with more entries. The results are even more disastrous. In the end, the character breaks the pen hoping to put an end to it all.

After my friend had lost interest in the idea, the character lingered, along with the name "Novella". I decided to develop my subplot into something in or itself. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I began to draw the character, designing clothing, hair, and face. The story might even have been developed, if my life hadn't taken such a dramatic turn at the time.

What followed that time was a terrible year of depression, manipulation, and loss of will to live. The story changed to reflect what I had felt at the time. The original concept of a pen that controls fate was dropped completely. Instead, a suicidal music lover named Akisa, and a gregarious blond girl called Miki were added to the cast. The story wasn't set at a high school of magic users, but in a Midwestern college. Over the next few years the story became darker. Eventually it wasn't so much a story as it was a form of emotional expression.

When I attempted to write the story in the latter half of 2002, it quickly fell apart. There were so many problems with the script that I didn't even know what I was doing with it after 24 short episodes. Now I was a college graduate, and I felt I was at rock-bottom. I had a degree, something few in my family possess, but I couldn't get better work than making donuts at 4am in a gas station. Although I didn't realize it, my life was about to take another radical turn -- but this time it was for the better.

That was just over three years ago. In the last year I've been working on the story once more. It's gone through two revisions, three in just over a few days. While the "3rd" revision was a lackluster affair just to get my thoughts together, the 4th was a palpable effort. I had worked on it nearly every evening without fail for weeks. I released it onto the Internet just before 10pm on my deadline date. I was expecting that revision 5 would be similar. That I'd be able to attain that amount of focus and seriously expand the ouline. Instead, I've been unable to focus. The story doesn't seem as vibrant as it once was.

I've barely been able to work on the outline for weeks now. My mind seems to simply lock up when I make the attempt. "Why?" I often ask myself, "Why does this happen when everything went so well before?"

I cannot connect with the story the way I once did. I've been puzzling over this for a while now, wondering just what I had lost. Throughout the history of Novella, I connected the most with Akisa. She matched so much of my feelings for so long that it was easy to personify them in the form of a character. Likewise, Miki and Novella are personifications of different groups of emotions and experiences. While I identify with these two characters as well, it's still Akisa that reigns supreme.

While I still sometimes connect with her, I admit that it's been more and more difficult the last year. I'm no longer the same person that I was when I first created the story in college. Without that connection, I often feel I should abandon the entire effort. My writing and my artwork seem lackluster when I'm not "good and depressed". One of my friends has encouraged me to think that is nothing but stereotype. While the story is very "old-school Tess", there are "less intense" reasons to continue to work on Novella.

And I agree with her.

The problem, as I've discovered, is that the purpose of the story no longer matches the person I am. My lack of connectivity with the characters is a result of that discrepancy. If I continue to work on Novella in the manner that I did before, I'll never complete it to my satisfaction. What I need isn't a character or a subplot. I need to find a new -- or in the least, additional -- purpose for the story. I need to answer the question, "Why am I writing this?" When I answer that question, I believe the story will be better and more easily written.