Post 8.3.2.0 Journal entry from 2006

This is in the 8 category because I found it while sorting my desk.  It's a journal entry that was made on a palm-sized pad of paper, then removed from the pad and stapled together.  It was possibly tucked into a journal at one point, but it is now a journal-less entry.

It reads:

1/20/2006

The thoughts hide when I'm armed with a pen.  A pen's line is too sharp.  It can cut ideas like a string cuts cheese.

The Velveeta (tm) weeps at the slicing.

Father mailed a flashlight in a Velveeta box, once.  It was our box [my sisters and I].  We had been using it to hold crayons all our lives.

He laughed, thinking of the person at the other end opening it and seeing all the rainbow net of random marks on the inside cardboard.  But it was the right size.  So the flashlight went in with the letter that their batteries had leaked far too soon and ruined the flashlight and what were they going to do?

He was very happy when the new flashlight came.  It was a triumph and a lesson to us.

I don't know that we did with the crayons after that.  I can remember a tin - a round fruitcake tin that was hard to open and pained the fingers.  Perhaps it inspired us to keep crayola boxes intact longer.

It was a better flashlight.  We liked the shiny silver.  And we were getting old enough to want to throw out crayon stubs.
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Engineers are supposed to date their notes.  So I'm getting into the habit of dating every pad as I pick it up, before I forget.
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Lillibell, Ferntickle, and Daffed are a three. [This is notes on a story I was writing.]

So are Narnemvar, Satbada, and Livvy.  They represent two distinct kind of magic.  I think there needs to be another three from the middle. [In the story, one group is starting in the north and traveling south, the other is doing the opposite.]

They'll be engineers - the people who have no way to manipulate magic directly, but who need to cope with it anyway. 

post 8.3.1.0 Types of People

On 9/3/2003, I wrote.

There are two kinds of people in the world.  Those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't.  Corporate seminars have to be more complex, though, so they divide people into four groups.  The details vary from system to system, but there are always four.  

Four is a good number for a one day seminar or workshop.  You have time for definitions and anecdotes in the morning, with testing to see which category you occupy just before lunch.

After lunch you can gather into your four groups for a few group exercises, come back to the whole group to present one exercise as a group, and then talk about difficulties in communication caused by differences in style.

You get donuts in the morning and coffee and bottled water all day.  There are two fifteen minute breaks and half an hour to an hour for lunch, depending on how close the restaurants and snack bars are.

People walk and stretch and chat during breaks.  (Updating for today, a varying number will be on cell phones, making social connections or checking on their work back in the office.)  The bathrooms down the hall and the drinking fountains are in demand. People are usually from the same company or agency and spend time swapping stories and questions about different departments.

But if you want to earn more than a one day seminar can bring in, you have to divide people into more than four categories.  The systems that I am familiar with that do this are enneagrams (9), astrology (12) and the Myers/Briggs assessment (16).  Unless things have changed, the Myers/Briggs is the only one that most businesses and agencies will plunk down cash for.

post 8.3.0.0 Found Part of a Story - Oracle

As I mentioned in a post that I haven't written, yet, I have many journals that I've started writing and then lost track of, over the years.  Today I was clearing my desk and sorting the things in the shelves near it.  I pulled out some notepads, bound college-lines pages, to see which ones could be collected into the available paper area and which had things written in them.

I found one that included a journal started 9/3/2003.  Less than a third of it has writing on the pages.  Two entries are general comments, nothing about me.  The third entry starts the continuation of a story.  I don't think I have that one typed into electronic format. 

There are a couple of things that I liked about that story.  That's not why I'm glad I found it, though.  I'm glad I found it because I really want to get the things that I've written collected together.  I may enter parts of it here.  

I don't have much hope that it will be a sellable story.  (Either Blogger or Safari is starting to upload this post while I write it - interrupting my typing with error messages.  I tried publishing the post and am editing it now.  We'll see if that solves the problem.)  I would consider it a success if I could make it a complete story.  The best writing in the world is no use if I can't complete something.

Talking about the story may be a category 2 topic, but I'm going to keep on, here, because here is where it came up.  The story is a fantasy story and a multiverse story, in that there are parallel worlds and people can travel between them.  It's a story with a low level magic user (female) running from an evil high level magic user (male) and his underlings (various).  

I'm trying to make it a Donkey Story and it includes magic corporations (never called that) and horrible things done to complete magic spells.  Specifically, what has to be done to create and use an Oracle is horrible.  We get used to horrible things when we come to depend on them.  We congratulate ourselves that we're strong enough to do what's necessary.  (I could tell the story of M and the turtles and rabbits.) ((But then it's not my story.))

I have trouble adding conflict to stories, as I've mentioned, and I think that the horrible Oracle magic was an attempt to add some.  I think it will succeed in doing that, not because of the one horrible thing (I've had other stories with other horrible things) but because the person who was used to make the Oracle is related to the woman who is running. 

The Oracle already has motivation to mass with the answers that the magic user(s) seek, but now it has a focus for a specific purpose for disinformation.  I haven't written any direct conflict yet, if I remember and interpret correctly, but there has been a lot of rising tension.

You keep going with your day.  I'm going to take awhile to read what I wrote nine years ago.  Sigh.  Where does the time go?