So, remember a while back when I was posting about Chris Hardwick and the RL-RPG thing? No? Not surprised. It has been ages since I have posted about it. I haven't stopped working on it, but I really haven't been talking about it much either. One of the goals I set for myself was to write and learn how to perform as a storyteller. I have spent a lot of time listening to other storytellers and analyzing their styles. I have worked on writing out several stories. Now I have decided to move on to the next step. I have contacted Kevin Allison from the Risk! Podcast to negotiate one-on-one sessions. The price isn't too bad. I have decided I can afford 2 sessions a month. That will give me time to polish between sessions. Now that I have started the processes, I am a tad freaked out. This shit just wandered into real territory. I will be investing money into getting better at it. Someone else will be listening to my story and telling me what they think. I can no longer hide safely behind my computer, wondering if I could have been or what I could have done. I will have to shove myself out of my comfort zone, out of the little self-coddling cacoon of safety I created for myself while I was feeling it out. I will have to put aside my feelings of self doubt. I will have to stop fearing the possibility I will fail hard, and know that when I fail hard I will have someone to help keep me from failing so hard the next time. it is scary and exciting all at the same time.

I miss the stage. I used to love performing. I still feel at home just standing on a stage. When standing on a stage, my instinct is not to go "oh my god, people are looking at me" but to go "I need to do something". For too long I have let fear take over that rush I get when I am actually on stage. That self doubt that crept in there when I was dealing with abusive situations and difficult people has made it hard to get back to a place where a stage is a stage, and what matters is the performance, not the person. Performing is fun. It is a huge adrenaline rush. Yes, for me performing is a selfish thing. I like to give people a good show, but the rush you get when you have been practicing hard, and the performance is going well, and there is good energy coming from the audience, and you feel it and it feeds your energy, and you finish with a huge applause and this symbiotic energy that doesn't go away for hours, sometimes days. It is the best kind of high. It was the kind of high I thrived on in high school.

Another day of writing. I am housesitting this weekend starting last night, so I thought this would be a great weekend to sequester myself with my computer and write. I have a lot of writing to do. However, now I am here I am having a hard time motivating myself to get started. It's not like I don't want to write. I love writing. As hard as it is, and even with how much I struggle with getting it just right, I love it. This whole frustrating, maddening, wonderful process I call stop motion is love worthy. I admit, no job I have ever had has made me as happy. Or as frustrated. And yet, in spite of the frustration, I still want to do it. I have not the feeling of "Fuck it!" and the urge to walk away, kicking everyone in face as I do so. The frustration does not make me mad. As much as I want to have an income, after experiencing this, I don't want to go back to crappy day-to-day stuff. I am still looking and will take what I can get, but I am realizing more and more that I need to get my butt in gear and figure out a way to make THIS my job. I need to find someone who can help me figure out what is crap and what is good, so I can improve faster.

I feel stupid just figuring out what I want to be when I grow up at age 37. I wish I had figured my life out sooner. Looking back on my life, I don't think I could have. I went from one abusive situation to another. I wasted my 20's on an abusive man who wasn't worth my time, and wasted most of my 30's getting away from the shit he lay on me. Only now am I realizing what I can do, and what makes me happy. Only now can I look at what I do and see the good as well as the bad. I guess I am getting to a point in my life where I really am getting too old for other people's shit, and their negativity no longer completely shuts me down. Granted, I have a long way to go before the fear monster sitting on my shoulder dies. He may never die completely. But it feels good to look back on something I made, even if there are flaws that need to be corrected, and be excited and happy with what I see. It feels good to make myself laugh. It makes me feel like running around yelling "Look what I did!" like a five year old.

Actually, I take that back. I am not just discovering now what I want to be when I grow up. I am only now rediscovering what I wanted to be from a young age. When I was in elementary school I used to write little stories all the time. I used to amuse my teachers with them. One of them even encouraged me to submit one of my stories to the district wide writer's conference. Somewhere there is a published volume of elementary school kid's stories from 1984, and one of mine is in there. I believe it was a story about a witch. I LOVED melodramas, and as an extension British pantos. One summer I wrote a melodrama, and I roped my siblings and my cousins into performing it for all the adults. I think I was 10 at the time. When I was a teenager I wrote books to take with me babysitting. I had what I called my babysitting bag. I found that although kids had books and toys and videos at their houses, usually they had played them all to death and didn't really want to do any of that stuff. So in my bag I put a bag of chocolate chips with which to make cookies, a jump rope, paper and colored pencils, dress up clothes  and cheap McDonald's toys. And, of course books. My mom wouldn't let me take our books out of the house, so I wrote my own and my best friend illustrated them. We made several for my bag and several for hers. So what happened? Several things. There are circumstances I don't want to bore you with, but mainly the end result was me giving up on myself. I honestly thought that the best I could do was be someone's wife and raise kids. (The ironic thing is I still don't have any kids) That I was too stupid and incompetent to be creative. That my ideas were cliche and stupid. And it has just taken me this long to wade through all the bullshit and realize what I have known all along.....that I can do this, and whether or not I am good enough at it NOW for people to pay me for it, it makes me happy. "It" being stop motion animation, storytelling, writing, comedy....anything and everything that I have been working on the last year to keep myself sane.

Because in the end, all THAT,  is what makes me happy and sane.

Well, look at that. I think I just knocked my motivation loose. See ya either when the weekend is over or when I hit another rough patch. Enjoy your weekend. :)

So....audio didn't get finished, and no animation happened last night. I got home from my interview so tired that I just crawled into bed and watched back episodes of the Craig Ferguson show. I didn't JUST interview. I also went to the store and got bulk items, which I had to schlepp home on the bus and carry to the bus stop and from the bus stop to my house. It took 4 hours.  Today I will do something with it. Promise.

I have updated the crappy infographic, though. You'd think I would be farther along than I am. But alas, not even half way to making it to Level 2 in anything. I have done lots of writing, but not so much practicing or tech review. Le sigh. Oh well. I will work on something today that I can post here....something with actual results.

My video at the Douglas Adams Video Contest has bumped down to #2....again. Seriously, this is getting irritating. PLEASE go over and vote for me again. Please? thanks so much. After the 30th the final list for the judges will be compiled, and so I will stop begging for votes.

Here is the latest update to the infographic.

Yeah, this is the post of fail. Main reason I am posting is to get myself to actually do something that has visible results today. I am going to go have breakfast, then get going. One thing I want to do today is try to figure out how to make myself a to-do list app that will actually do what I want. I have tried out 15 of the free apps, and none of them work for what I want them to do. I need an app that lets my missed tasks go, but marked as unfinished instead of overdue. I don't want to be bugged by tasks I didn't get done yesterday, but I want to be able to look at the list and see what did and didn't get done when I am tallying my XP. It isn't like these tasks HAVE to be done. I want a way of nudging myself to do them, and to keep track of which of those I did and didn't do. If I didn't do it today, there is another chance to do it tomorrow with the next task list.  keeping it on my list until I mark it as completed is extraneous and confusing. Most list apps require you to mark a task as completed before it will let it go. Or it deletes it. Not what I want either.

So there we go. Goals for today.

Edit: So I didn't get anything done yesterday either. I did take several hours and I found a site called Buzztouch that is a platform for developing apps. It has several videos to help you learn how to develop apps for both android and ios. I have completed several of them. At the very least I will know more about app development. last night a friend of mine wanted to cheer me up so he took me to the arcade and let me beat his ass at Mortal Combat 2. It was awesome.

Well, I tried to do a little stop mo the other day. Didn't turn out very well. My joints started to ache in the middle of shooting it, so I kept accidentally bumping the camera. Sunday I was down all day with a migraine, and yesterday I was trying to catch up from being out Sunday, so I have been neglectful in my posting duties.

Today I have a job interview, so cross your fingers and hope for the best. Then I plan on coming back here and seeing what I can salvage from the audio I recorded and see if I can get something to happen with it.

The Douglas Adams Video Contest is still taking votes, so if you would be so kind, please go over there and vote highly for me. I keep slipping to #2, (insert poop joke here), and would like to stay at #1 (more sanitary that way).

I have got to go get ready for my interview. Tonight I will give an update on my RL-RPG points and hopefully have some footage - maybe- to post.

Here is a pic from the one I tried to accomplish Saturday:

Yup...it was a short 20 seconds of Mr. Snail encountering the Dalek and running away from it. Probably not worth watching, even if it was steadier. I have a weird sense of humor.

Wow. Four days. That is a long time to go without a post. It wasn't done deliberately. I have been working on A. finding employment and B. my RL-RPG. It has been very disappointing on both fronts. I was told by my temp agency that I am basically unemployable. I have my networking degree, but at this point it is an employers market and they are asking entry level wages for 5 or 6 years worth of experience. That means I am right out of the running. With office work, I have lots of office experience as that is what I was doing before I went back to school, but now I have a degree so they feel I am overqualified for office positions. Employers see my degree and see me jumping ship as soon as possible. So basically I am screwed. Fortunately I was called yesterday by a company here in Eugene who needs someone to do customer liason/ electronic data management, which means that my experience puts me right in their tiny sliver of a niche. They did a phone interview (without scheduling it first) and I was told that I am on for round two of interviews. Yeay? Crossed fingers and all that. :)

The RL-RPG is kicking my butt in ways I had not anticipated. I have been basically following the regime. I have found, though, that walking 6 miles precludes me from sitting at a computer for several hours afterwards. I am hoping that this is just the adjustment period and that eventually the pain will go away. My joints are telling me they do not like the increased exercise. Downing of the ibuprofen and many hot baths are helping with the pain, but not with my waning motivation. I may need to up the XP points for physical activity so I feel like I am getting somewhere. On the plus side, I have submitted several stories to YMI, though nothing has been approved yet for posting. I have been practicing chords transitions on my uke.

And I am currently working on learning better character development. One of my favorite authors is Neil Gaiman. I sat down and looked at his work, and I concluded one of the reasons I love reading his stories is because his character development is so rich. They are so real and you get a great sense of who they are, without long descriptors. You get to know them by getting to know them. Which is also something I noticed I like  about storytelling. I like that style. So I guess I have found my style, I just need to develop it. I will spare you the shit I have churned out so far, but when I get to the point where I feel like I am getting across what I am meaning to get across I will start posting snippets here.

I have sadly neglected my stop mo. I am itching to get some animation done. That was my intention yesterday. I spend a huge chunk of my day looking for employment, so I decided to give myself permission to flake out and play. I took about an hour to decide what I was going to do. Then I realized I needed groceries. As I never go shopping on Saturday, I had to do it yesterday. I have to walk and the nearest store is 1.5 miles away, so that took 2 hours. Then after I got home I had to put food away and divide up the bulk meats I bought so they could be frozen. That took another hour. By that time I needed lunch, as it was 2pm, so I made lunch. Then I got the interview call, which took nearly an hour. Then there was no way I was getting anything done after that call. So the day was shot. I plan to work on it a bit today. My goal is to have something done enough to post here by 10pm tonight. It is 10am right now. That is plenty of time, even if I only end up with a 12 second thingy.

Yes, this a very long and rambley post. No craftiness or stop mo goodness. Sorry. However, you can still vote over at the Douglas Adams Video Contest. New videos can't be posted, but it looks like they are still taking votes. I keep slipping to #2, and I suspect it is because the person who keeps creeping over me to #1 is stuffing votes. Not because her video isn't good, but because no one else is moving spots at all. So...help needed. If you wanna head over there and give me a 10 bookmark rating it would help a lot. Thanks! :)

As I have been working on gaining XP points for my RL-RPG, one of the things I have been researching is storytelling styles. This has really fascinated me. There seem to be as many styles as there are people who tell stories. There are basic similarities, but each one has their own spin and thier own way of doing things.

Tonight I listened to the story The Mayor of Mitchell garden told by Danny Lobell for the Risk! podcast. This was a story about his time working at a retirement home as the person who kept tabs on the kosher kitchen. I liked his style of storytelling, though I don't know that I would adopt it for myself. This story was more of a fond recollection story than one that had a point or a moral to it. He told it well, and you could tell in his voice that he really did care for those people. That is what made the story enjoyable for me. I liked that instead of describing the people, as in how they dressed, what color hair they had, etc, he told about who they were as people- the mean old man, the WW11 veteran. He helped us see them through the stories they told him and the things they did. He told enough detail without overburdening you with too much flowery speech. I like flowery speech, don't get me wrong. But like everything, flowery speech has a time and a place. I also liked how it felt firmed up without feeling rehearsed. It didn't feel like he was telling the story for the millionth time, though that might have been the case.

It also didn't feel like he was reading. One thing that brings me out of a story anyone is telling is when it is stilted and sounds like it is being read. Even if someone is reading a story to me, I want it to sound like they are talking to me, not reading to me. In storytelling that feels very unprepared and unprofessional. If you are going to do this you need to learn how to go without the notes. Yes, that does sound harsh. But storytelling is a performance art. If that person was a professional musician we would expect them to take hours and hours to practice the piece, to be able to play it without stumbling, or at least be familiar and comfortable enough with the piece to be able to hide stumbles. We forgive them the music on the stand, but still expect a practiced performance. I recently listened to a story telling podcast where all of the storytellers (supposed professionals) sounded stilted and like they were reading to a child. I might give them a few more episodes, but seriously, don't present them as practiced if they are not. I can forgive a newbie or someone still getting their feet under them to struggle with that still, but someone who should know better? I will expect no less of myself, which is why I will be recording myself telling stories and listening to them. I have not yet found anywhere in Eugene that does this kind of storytelling. They do children's storytelling at the library on some Saturday mornings, but that is all I have been able to find. Maybe after I get myself going a bit more I will see about possibly organizing a group here.

OK, that is enough about that for now. I spent my hour listening and analyzing. It looks like the voting is still going on at the Douglas Adams Video Contest, so if you feel up to going over there and giving me a vote or two I would appreciate it. The judges will compile a long list of final candidates on April 30th. I am guessing that maybe that is the voting deadline? The rules are really too ambiguous. So if you go there and can vote, please do. If you go there and you can't vote, well, I appreciate the support.