Yeah, I know I said I was just going to update the previous post when I actually had the first draft of Paradise completed, but I said that before realizing I was going to be going home a day earlier. It’s taken me a few extra days to go through the draft I had a couple times (especially since I kept re-writing segments over and over) but this is, officially, the first draft of the first chapter. If you want overviews and such, then just go and read the last post.

Chapter 1 (HTML, DOC, or PDF)

And the general folder where I upload the drafts as I “complete” them can be found at http://www.polycat.net/trent/book/. If you have any general comments, then please by all means e-mail me or just leave a comment to this entry… Or some kind of combination deal if that’s your thing. Currently any feedback on style, pacing, specific or, best of all, general content would be absolutely awesome to the max. Grammatical comments are welcome as well, though preferably not of the “you missed a comma on page 4, sentence 5″ variety unless you have a fairly substantial list worked up.

Alright, hope you enjoy it. I’ll probably start work on Chapter 2 in a week or two. Still drafting some basic ideas for the chapter. It’ll be a good’un. I think it’ll primarily be centered more around the story of what kind of place they’re living in (though I don’t think I’m going to get into the why yet). The real crazy stuff won’t be breaking out quite yet, but I may lay a few of the foundations for it.

The fairly large increase in traffic that I’ve been getting over the last week or two has made the desire to update the site into a reality. So, as of about three hours ago I am working on new site features while will probably take another day or two. There won’t be any huge changes to the overall look of the site, but I do plan to smooth out the overall style; maybe tweak some colors and formats a bit. I’ll be adding a number of miscellaneous features during this time period too, as well as making the site a bit more friendly to commenters and such. I’m also going to be trying to tie together a number of the previously disconnected features of the site into the main page, so hopefully this won’t all crash and burn on me.

If you see any bugs, have any recommendations for tweaks/additions, or anything else then, please, leave a comment and let me know. I’m seeing a lot of new readers to the site lately (along with a lot more spambots, but the increase in traffic appears to be primarily some sort of human), so I’d be very happy to see a move towards a more vocal group of readers.

And due to some life-related stuffs, the update to yesterday’s entry may take a day or two longer than originally planned. I’ll probably just make a new post regarding this when I hit “full draft” status.

That’s all for now. I hope you all enjoy some of the very minimal updates I have planned.

Update: I’m currently updating the old Gallery to Gallery 2 and it’s not going as smooth as one might hope. So, essentially, if you’ve ever linked to anything in that gallery for your own purposes then it’ll be broken until I can get it to cooperate when I wake up tomorrow. All apologies and such.

Update 2: Gallery 2.0 is kind of terrible. And by “kind of terrible,” I really mean that it is so bad that if you actually feel even the most remote inkling of compassion for the software that it will come to your house and piss on your walls, rub honey all of your body, and release a colony of killer African bees into your house. If you still feel sorry for Gallery 2.0, the thing will just continue to torture you until you give it the hate it so rightly deserves. Anyway, so now my unnecessarily extensive Gallery is back in action in the same form we all know and love. And I’m sorry if its downtime caused some sort of problem for anyone. I sure know that the number of hits and unique visitors that had cause to come here by means of a 404 page (Gallery 2.0 liked to change URLs for no reason) made the total hit/visit counter skyrocket, so that at least means that if no one reads the front page that they sure as hell link to the gallery. Anyhoo, more subtle, insignificant, and damn near pointless updates to follow.

Last night I finished what I recently decided would be the full first draft of Paradise and I’m surprised at how well it’s turning out. I have a nice majority of the content I want for the first chapter written in, but it’s still very rough around the edges. Last night I made an initial editing run of the first ten pages of the 1.5-line spaced draft (which stands at thirteen pages right now) and added a few large sections of entirely new content that have yet to be proofread. And tonight I spent a solid few hours just editing the first six pages of last night’s draft… So I still have to get around to doing a first pass on the recently-written content as well as the last few pages that I wrote a week ago. The first full editing pass should be finished tomorrow, and I’ll update this post accordingly once that happens, but I figured I’d write a post now. My eyes are currently too tired to really edit anything else at the moment (though I’m not personally tired enough to head to sleep quite yet), so what better time than now to post the “it’s finished” entry?

Against my better judgment, I’m going to do a little bit of talking about the actual content of the chapter, just so those who haven’t heard me rant about it before can have some semblance of an idea about what they’re going to be getting into if they read it. The basic premise is that the story takes place in a planned “fallout shelter” which has room and supplied enough to support over ten-thousand people for as long as it needs to. The first chapter starts forty-six days after the inhabitants of the shelter (named Paradise; and you thought the name of the story was unrelated. SILLY YOU!) are actually locked in (though they have been living there with a bit more freedom for an unknown-to-even-me amount of time before then). They have no means of getting out of the shelter other than outside help by those “in the know” or an inner-shelter failsafe which I have yet to establish.

The story of how the people in the shelter got chosen will be shown through flashbacks into the main character’s life, for the most part, with the occasional “present time” conversations between characters when it seems fitting. My original intent was to not have any flashbacks until the third chapter or so, as I think it’s a strange enough situation to not warrant immediate explanation, but a number of people felt differently, so I threw in a fairly explanatory flashback just to test out the concept. Whether or not it will actually stay where it’s currently placed, I don’t know, but the early feedback I’ve received about it has been positive.

As of right now, there is very little I actually have in mind as to what I will be working towards. As an example, I have had a fairly fleshed-out sense of what the main character (Adam) is like and what will become of him… But while I was plotting out and writing the first draft I never had any intention of giving him a wife. Then, last night, while I was reading through the chapter, I gave him a wife in the flashback and that’s just how it turned out. That’s pretty much the gist of my knowledge of the actual story specifics at the moment, but I do have a lot of general ideas of what I want to work in, as well as a potential ending scene already completely written out in my head.

And now some more general stuff: this story isn’t science-fiction, so don’t let your imagination go too crazy while you read it. The story is set to take place in an undetermined year (and it will remain that way), though the social and political events that the story is based around could never happen now, or even in the next decade, so the story takes place in the future solely so that these kinds political tension can be safely developed and explained. For all intents and purposes, though, everything in the story will be based off of modern technology and scientific knowledge. The idea of a large underground fallout shelter is reallya bit far-fetched, and I understand that, but as of now I’m really not all too concerned about that.

And now, a WARNING: the introductory chapter contains some fairly detailed description of gore and PG-13 language. On the other hand, the first chapter includes no explicit material aside from a fairly substantial amount of swearing (R-caliber stuff in this case).

Paradise

• Introduction (DOC or PDF) — The introductory chapter is intentionally vague and seemingly unrelated to the first chapter, but I assure that it will eventually find its place in the actual story… And if it doesn’t, it’ll disappear like POOF. Gone. For now, though, just assume it’s related.
• Chapter 1 (DOC or PDF) — This is where the actual story begins and the main character, Adam, is introduced along with Seth who has red hair. Thrilling.

And the general folder where I upload the drafts as I “complete” them can be found at http://www.polycat.net/trent/book/. If you have any general comments, then please by all means e-mail me or just leave a comment to this entry… Or some kind of combination deal if that’s your thing. If you feel the need to make any small grammatical corrections, just refrain for the time being. Currently any feedback on style, pacing, specific or, best of all, general content would be absolutely awesome to the max.

Update: Alright, final draft up. More details here.

Every now and then I feel it my civil duty to ensure that Polycat.net actually has a post or two about cats. And since this very rarely actually happens, I thought I’d write a nice summary post about the first three months with my little kitten Hobbes. Before I get too far into this, though, let’s just all make sure that we know that when I say “summary” I really mean that it’s more of a treatise on the matter. So, that said, don’t blame me; blame my brain for feeling the need to disclose whatever may enter its reign of “freedom.”

It was late on a Saturday night in the middle of November — November 12, unless I’ve forgotten how to correctly read a calendar… Which is a distinct possibility — where I was just starting up a new character in World of Warcraft after my friends had very nearly taken care of all of the work in playing the game (gave me CDs, someone else’s paid account, and were damn near willing to install it for me as well). I was watching the lengthy install process when one of my housemates came into my room and said “Hey, Trent.” Now, this particular housemate and I haven’t been on good terms since he took a turn to the “douche bag” route of life so I didn’t even really feel the need to turn around from my monitor and look back at him standing in my doorway. Eventually, though, his unspeaking presence was enough to make me look back once to see if he was still there, and when this happened, I saw an orange and white ball of fuzz peering at me from the upper, unzipped portion of his jacket.

Quick interlude: if you know me, then you know I love cats. That’s really all there is to it. You don’t even really need to me all that well to come to some kind of understanding of this fact. I mean, I don’t make it a habit to wear cat ears to my classes, or wear shirts with kittens on them, but eventually you just know, instinctively, that I like cats. I like almost all animals, to be honest, but cats have a special place near my heart that no other animal can take away.

Upon seeing the fluffy little ball of cuteness, I emitted some kind of unspeakable high-pitched “zee-oh-em-gee” squeal which, thankfully, has never emerged from my vocal chords since, but I did then. I got up out of my chair and jumped over to the spot where the guy was standing and I caressed the fur on this unspeakably small bundle of cute. One I awoke from my shellshock, I asked the question: “Who’s is this?” My best buddy in the whole wide world gave the answer “Oh, I thought you could have him,” which point I think I hugged him — something which happens about as often as the zomg-squeal. I ran upstairs to one of my friend’s rooms and we played with the really tiny kitten, who everyone save me said was a “girl,” and took a few of these here pixel-collections:

After about ten minutes, little Orange Cat (which was the name at the time) needed to rest:

That night was a very, very long night for me, to say the least. My new best-friend-forever-and-ever brought home food, but other than that we were completely unequipped to keep a kitten in the house. I took Orange Cat down to my room and did my best to kitten-proof the entire thing (which wasn’t too hard), but I still had to try and figure out how to jury-rig a litter box together for the little kitty. After about forty minutes of searching, I found a cardboard box that was roughly large enough for a potty sandbox, but I still had the problem of trying to find something along the lines of litter. At this point, it was roughly 3:00am in the morning, so any stores were out of the question, so I walked outside and just looked around: jackpot. I brought the homemade litter box outside and grabbed a bunch of dirt, doing my best to remove any non-dirt objects, form a big pile recently dug up for reconstruction of a sidewalk near my house, and threw it all in the box. I brought it back in and placed little Orange Cat in the dirt-filled mess of a litter box. He went, I rejoiced.

Next on my list was trying to figure out how to deal with the little guy for the night. My instinct was to just keep him confined in a fairly sizeable box just for the night, but this quickly shown to be the wrong move. I eventually completely cleaned up my room, removed anything that could be considered harmful for a six-week-old kitten, and took him out of the box and gave him free roam of the room for the night. By the time I finally was ready to go to sleep, it was about 7:00am, I was exhausted, and so was kitty. He slept near my head all night… All three hours of it.

Eventually the guy who had given me the kitten to begin with came in my room and, just to make sure, I asked if he was positive that he didn’t want to take care of the cat himself. His response was that he “didn’t have enough time or money” to take care of a cat, much less was his room/lifestyle suited to one in the first place. With these statements in mind, I don’t think it’s all that difficult for you to imagine my surprise when he came into my room later that same day with this:

Having two absolutely adorable little kittens was pretty much cute overload for me (and every other self-respecting male in the house) — it just doesn’t get much better. And it didn’t. My friend realized that his room wasn’t ready for a kitten yet, not to mention that my room was fully outfitted with kitten food and, now, litter. So I had both kittens in my room all night. And if that first nearly-sleepless night wasn’t bad enough, try imagining a similar situation except this time with two dominance-asserting kittens fighting it out all night — the first silence I got was when, after two straight hours of meowing, hissing, and clawing at each other, the two finally slept at opposite ends of the bed. I was awoken by the next round in this epic struggle at 8am the next morning (roughly two hours after I had gotten to sleep). Yeah, that wasn’t going to fly, a thought I relayed to my friend who was already beginning to show the trademark irresponsibility and thoughtlessness that he was known for.

Living with the single kitten in my room most of the time was not a single problem though. I took him to the vet later that week, forgoing giving Orange Cat a name due to the fact that I was afraid for the physical health of the cat (I had no idea what kind of things kittens could have, nor what kind of idea what kind of home he was raised in). Of course, we had tentatively decided on “River” as the name for what was, at the time, a girl kitten by popular belief. The vet trip was both expensive and informative though, as we found out that Orange Cat was actually a dude. He did receive a clean bill of health, however, and that was just all sorts of awesome. We jumped back and forth between names for the cat, and eventually “decided” on “Ender,” which was later changed to my preferred name of “Hobbes” (even if it is a far more common name). For those individuals curious as to how much money you’re talking for a kitten, the food and litter are fairly trivial, but the vet bills are what really cost. For me, it was roughly $130 for the first visit, then $85 for a second visit, and then $200 for the final visit (front declawing and neutering) — so roughly $400 in vet bills. That said, after the first couple of months the vet trips will really cut down to once per year after that. I was also very lucky, personally, because little Hobbes has never really had it in him to “destroy” anything I own — something I attribute to getting him at a young age and, for the most part, spoiling the little bugger.

And while Hobbes is a fairly harmless cat, my friend didn’t get so lucky with Grey Cat. Everyone in the house had their reservations about this guy taking care of the cat, which I relayed most of to the guy himself, and in the end all the reservations were very much justified. The guy did the bare minimum to take care of the cat, never took her to a vet in the two months that had her, and over Christmas break we believe that the cat was stuck in the bathroom with “ample” food/litter to tide her over for however long she was there — which I don’t honestly know. What I do know is that the cat went to town on the entire bathroom; there was thrown-up something, the shower curtain had been cut into fine, clear strands of curtain, and there was litter and food strewn all around the bathroom. At this point, the guy was told by some others to take the cat to the Humane Society. I don’t know what ever became of little Grey Cat, but I do know that pretty much any other place besides in my “friend’s” room was pretty much an improvement. I wasn’t present for the forced ousting of the kitten (or any of the other events which closely lead up to it), but after weeks upon weeks of badgering my friend to do something, I can only think that I should’ve done something about it sooner.

On a far more uplifting note, Hobbes is doing absolutely fantastically in the house. He’s roughly five months old now and has had every kind of kitten booster shot and medicine that a kitten should have and… Well, he’s really only gotten more spunk as time goes on. The little guy has one of the coolest, most unique personalities I’ve ever seen in an animal. He gets free roam of the first floor of the house whenever I’m around (which is fairly often), but at night he stays in my room with me and I wake up every now and then with him sleeping right near my head, and it’s just a really cool feeling. It’s also a cool feeling when he wants me to wake up (which he does by licking my face) to pet and love him, but not exactly the most welcome one.

And here are some random pictures of little Hobbes that have been taken over time. The first row would be in the weeks immediately after I got him, the second would be in late December, early January, and the final row are the most recent shots which were taken mere days ago.

Weeks simply shouldn’t feel as long as this week has. It just should not be allowed by whatever governing force remains in charge of determining the relative length of a week for a certain individual. This is week that a majority of my classes decided to cram the rest of the out-of-class homework into due dates, so I had a nice, full schedule of things due every day of the week that kept me all sorts of busy. Next week, other than reading The Martian Chronicles (and writing a short paper on it), editing and improving upon last week’s draft of Paradise, and a Spanish exam (easy) it’s a very relaxing week; while I list a fairly decent amount of items, I am not being sarcastic in my statement that it’s a very mild week. Though let me say how much of me just died in realizing that I wasn’t being sarcastic… At this point the high point of my existence is going home on Thursday afternoon of this coming week and, oh, how sweet it shall be.

And now that this horrid week has neared it ends I have snagged some time to play some of the amazing games I’ve gotten my hands on recently. I’m only two missions away from beating the Dawn of War campaign (and then working through the expansion, and all I can say now is a continuation of what has been said many a publication before me: damn good game. On top of this, Devil May Cry 3 and Killer 7 came in earlier this week as well. DMC3 is far and wide my favorite of the two as it’s pretty much the action-packed, “Dear God why hath thou forsaken me” kind of difficult game I’m always so quick to fall for… And had I played the original DMC3, and not the recently released special edition, earlier on (say, when it was released), it would’ve probably pushed Battlefield 2 off of the infamous top ten list without as much as a sweaty brow. And as for Killer 7… Well, I think the game is more geared to the anime-watching pothead bizarro gamer crowd than, say, me. Sure it’s a fun game and, at times, it’s truly a marvel to behold its own insanity with open arms (much like I would, if I was a game), but it just doesn’t seem to know what it really wants to be.

Of course now that I have all these great games to play it is the universe’s job to create some kind of hugely “equality” by releasing more awesomeness. Late this week we had Star Wars - Empire At War hit the shelves and I’m currently in the process of trying to track a copy down. I’m not a huge fan of the Star Wars universe, normally, but this game just looks all sorts of cool. I’m a huge sucker for real-time strategy melded with turn-based strategy (what better way to take over a galaxy than with a Risk-like component?) so I’m looking forward to this one. I’m also looking forward to checking out the new DS re-imagining of Age of Empires: Age of Kings which has gone the turn-based strategy route and is receiving, to a bit of surprise on my end, quite positive reviews. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Galactic Civilizations 2 which is due for an unlocking, in a Steam-reminiscent fashion, on February 21 at the rumored time of 3:00pm EST. This game will be the first of this upcoming and recently released batch to receive a written “review” of some sorts by me, with Empire at War being a close second, and then the long-overdue Armada Online preview being the last of the trio to receive my written treatment. These will come, most likely, sometime after I get home.

And speaking of work that needs to be done: I’m going to be retooling (Retooling? Ha! I’ll retool you! — Ten points for whomever gets it) the site around a bit while on break as well. I have some very basic ideas of some minor tweaks I want to make to various aspects of the interface along with some fairly trivial aspects of the site navigation and configuration but, aside from that, there’s not a huge laundry list of tasks to be done. If there’s anything you feel a particular burning desire to have implemented, taken out of, or redone regarding Home, Sweet Home then you best tell me soon-like.

This entry is far shorter than I normally write and I do apologize for this, but when I took a look at the clock directly to my left I noticed that it was about 5:20am. I’m not particularly sure how it happened, but it did. This information helped me really pinpoint that creeping feeling I had that I wasn’t really all there at the moment, so I think I’m going to cure that. As a means to work my way into your forgiving hearts, here are some pretty pictures of kitty: