Big Hint: you WANT to read to the bottom of the page, past the references. There’s a hint down there. ⇓
As I try to find names for new characters and ....SQUIRREL!
Do you ever go off on tangents? Find a piece of thread and follow it?
Are bread crumbs enough to get you excited?
Yes, there’s a reason for this. Let me explain.
I love to research. There is a ton of almost useless knowledge hanging out in my cranium. Most of the time it just sits up there, ready to pop out to destroy someone at Trivial Pursuit © (there’s a reason people won’t play with me or Bruce) or on the off-chance I get on Jeopardy.
So, while I get rather OCD about finding out something, it’s also one of those times when I can get really distracted by things. I may be reading up on wars in Spain and France (yes, that’s for something I’m developing right now) and suddenly it’s like “Squirrel!!!” and I’m off following something connected to something out of a obscure line in the Wikipedia about travel spots with vampires.
This results in me opening Word, throwing links and descriptors on a document and saving it in the files online. This is quite a bit like a kid who isn’t listening to the math lecture in school, their eyes are open and they are nodding their head but no one is really home, they’re off in a library pulling old tomes to find the little obscure things for a story they want to tell.
And yes, this whole thing started when I got challenged to write a story and I was trying to do the research.
Yep, that was me. I hated (and still do) math classes and used to get into trouble for “daydreaming” instead of finding out how to divide fractions within algebra statements. The numbers are mixed with the letters and I just….can’t. So I wrote.
I wrote poems (badly). I wrote short little stories featuring me as the main female character in things like Dark Shadows and Star Trek. Those type things are called Mary Sue stories and I became quite fond of writing them.
Of course, real life encroached, with the kids, work, and everything that comes with them. The writing took a back burner to periodic bouts of research for a class project when I was in college, to the grocers list. Oh, I did a bit of writing, and my first foray into publishing. My sister, Lynn and I wrote and published a Star Trek fanzine a couple of times. Fanzines, if you’ve not heard of them, are fan magazines (fan-zine) for things that you share with others, in this case it was Star Trek. You find them for rock bands, football teams, and popular television shows. Check this one out, it’s an online fanzine for the digital dreamers: https://archiveofourown.org/
Back when I was doing Continuum with Lynn, it was Star Trek. We did a couple of Star Wars stories as well. We wrote them on typewriters (this is 1980/84) and we managed to miss the mimeograph (or also known as ditto) era of printing, the Xerox © company had begun to make photocopiers. We didn’t do many because it was very expensive to get them printed, usually something like $.25 per page for black and white. We sold them for $10.00, which doesn’t seem to be very high, but it’s equivalent to $27.11 in 2021 dollars, a huge amount for fans who usually didn’t have much money. And that didn’t cover our costs, but there was a status to having been in a fanzine. It was a big thing back then. The World Science Fiction Association gives awards called the Hugo Awards at the World Science Fiction convention, usually held over Labor Day weekend somewhere in the world. And, in the late 60s and early 70s they started giving out an award for Best Fanzine.
There are a bunch of authors who cut their typing teeth on fanzines too, making the jump to pro-author successfully. I’ve added a reference to this at the bottom in the links.
I never wrote any K/S stories. If you don’t know that term, think the two characters with those first name initials and the “slash” is … well, it’s adult. I’ll say that one. It is explained in another of the links below.
So, where was I?
Oh, yeah, looking up foreign wars (Spain/France/Moors) and trying to figure out some of the vampire stuff to go with it. Pounding my head on the wall as I find all so many other things to read.
And, Bruce just told me that I need to add that I will think I’m going to do “one more little thing—tops 5 minutes—and an hour and a half later, he’s still waiting. I get so focused on chasing the thread/breadcrumb/squirrels and totally forget time and space both.
See, what did I say? Tangents. I’m worse than a working dog who is trying to learn agility but sees a squirrel and breaks training to run after it.
Back to work. I’ll keep you posted on the results of the searches soon. And yes, still working on Book 5, got more done today. 😊
References:
YouTube Music video by “Weird Al” Yankovic performing I Lost On Jeopardy. (C) 1984 Volcano Entertainment lll, LLC
Song–I Lost On Jeopardy
Artist–“Weird Al” Yankovic
Album–In 3-D
Licensed to YouTube by: SME (on behalf of Volcano); LatinAutor – PeerMusic, LatinAutorPerf, rye boy music, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, EMI Music Publishing, Abramus Digital, BMI – Broadcast Music Inc., CMRRA, Well received music, ASCAP, ARESA, and 13 Music Rights Societies
Some fun trivia from the comments on the YouTube page for the song by Weird Al Yankovic to impress your friends:
- Don Pardo was a guest vocal in this song. He was the announcer of Jeopardy in the year 1964-1975
- The parents depicted at 2:36 were Al’s actual parents
- At the end, after Al is thrown into the convertible, he is driving away through Lynwood, CA, his home
- The convertible is being driven by Greg Kihn – the writer and singer of the original song this is based on: Our Love’s in Jeopardy.
- The convertible is Alfa Romeo Spider mk2 from 1969-83.
- The current incarnation of Jeopardy was being developed around the same time this song was released
- When jeopardy was brought back Al was there!
- The equations depicted at 1:45 are called the Lorentz transformation, fixing a few physics equations to deal with relativity
- Art Fleming was host of Jeopardy from 1964 through 1975!
- 1:17 the guys singing and manning the cameras are Al’s band mates
- Dr. Demento has a cameo, he’s behind one of the cameras 3:09 cameraman.
