the mother of all tweaks

For a while now I've been working on and off on my first proper novel, Man in the Loop (MitL).

The central core of the novel is sort of about existentialism. The basic idea is that the main character is actually a "brain in a jar" who's plugged into a computer world.

He doesn't know he's a brain in a jar (well, maybe at the end) but the real thing he doesn't know is that actually when he was a proper human he was a serial killer. The idea was that in order to have this man in the loop system, the government has to use psychos because their brains work differently.

The MitL system was designed as essentially an Unmanned Vehicle (in this case planes) with an operator 'in the loop' but not actually on-board. But normal people couldn't operate it properly so they end up using serial killers who have been executed by the state.

So it's also about morality - you've got the US government who are supposedly all "democracy and freedom" using people against their will who they've actually put to death. The US is embroiled in a huge war in the middle east that covers the entire region and represents an escalation of the 'war on terror', but is also really a resource grab. They've had to use things like MitL to 'get the job done', as it were.

To juxtapose this, I had a female terrorist whose entire family had been killed when the Americans had mistakenly bombed her village. The idea was she would be responsible for bombing the MitL facility.

The idea also was to tell her story in reverse, where the other story would be forwards. So at the beginning she seems to be the bad guy, he the good, whereas by the end you realise it's more the other way around.

I've been working away on this for ages now and have loads of it written, but I've been struggling a bit and skirting around some of the difficult bits (meaning dodgy story elements) and I've kinda realised that there's a much better way for me to tell the story.

Essentially I can instead contrast the MitL guy's story against his original capture. In other words, it can be a detective story 'with a twist'. I could have the MitL man seeing what seems to be another person but is actually himself as a serial killer "leaking" into his own computer world. At the same time, the other thread could be the detectives tracking him down.

The problem is that it means totally abandoning at least two thirds of what I've written. It's a lot stronger and simpler way of doing things, though, and won't involve quite so many dodgy stuff.

A lot of what I've written is kinda comic-booky. I mean some of the characters almost have moments where they go "Muhahahaha" in a maniacal laugh stylee :/. But it was the only way I could think of bridging between the plot strands. Plus the terrorst is kinda cheesey.

I guess I need to bite the bullet.

knackered

I'm so knackered today.

Had a meeting yesterday which basically meant I was in the car all day, which is probably the main reason why.


I just don't feel like doing anything - it's the sort of day I wished we worked flexi and I could have had either a lie in or I could go home a little earlier.

kettles

How come kettles are always 1.7litres?

I've never figured that out it's such a random number. Why not 1.5litres? Or 2 litres?

And besides, they never actually take 1.7 litres anyway. If you actually fill them up that much then when it boils, it will bubble out of the spout, which is more than a little dangerous.

It just seems stupid to me - designed but not properly tested.

Well, just got an e-mail telling me newtype, animedia and animage are on the way, so I should have them early next week. I still need to scan the previous two animages, but I'm awful close to clearing the decks for magazine scans, so hopefully I can tackle some of the artbooks.

You never know, I may update scan-city.org with some more scans too at some point.

back to work

Well, w/end off is over, so it's back to work... :(

Achieved quite a bit over he w/end. Moved my stuff around, sorted through a lot of boxes. Got four box-crates of stuff to sell on e-bay, chucked 3 or 4 black binbags worth of rubbish away.

I didn't quite achieve everything I wanted to on that front, though. It's always more knackering than you think it's going to be sorting though stuff. There's all the heavy lifting of course, but when you have limited space like I do you end up shuffling lots of things back and forth to make room and then there's all the thinking things through - "should I keep this, should I sell that?" Ah well, I'm sure there will be more opportunities.

Anyway, I also did a shed load of scanning while I was off. All I have left are two animage mags. Animage is the one that is glued, so I spent time unglueing it rather than scanning it, so it's all ready to go now. The next target is the huge pile of artbooks that are waiting for scanning. There are literally more than a dozen of them, though some have more images than others.

And obviously I've been watching fansubs while I've been scanning. Here are some thoughts:

• Kure-nai: watched a few more of these and I quite like it. It's more of a character piece than an action piece, but seems well realised.
• To Love-Ru: it's a fairly standard hot alien girl comes to earth and causes havoc in a young boys life series, but it's quite well done. Also doesn't seem to take itself too seriously and echii shows are never a bad thing in my particular book.
• Macross Frontier: Yeah, pretty good. This one seems to suffer with the same issue I've always had with macross series, though, being unusual pacing. In macross shows there always seems to be huge action sequences that are really exciting, but then you get equally huge periods of almost nothing at all happening. It unfortunately ends up making the quite bits seem more boring than they actually are.
• Penguin Girl (Penguin Musume Heart): I ended up just not quite liking this one enough. I dunno, it seemed like it didn't quite meet its potential, somehow. I mean, it's a comedy with a character who is anime/manga obsessed and there seem to have been a lot of those recently, so maybe that's why I found it a little disappointing.
• Kamen No Maid Guy: Again, I felt a little disappointed for some reason. This one has a really nice premise of a big tough guy (think fist of the north star chara) whose working as a maid for a hot, young heiress. However, I dunno, it never really seemed to get going. Not there is a slight caveat to that - the translation in the fansub translation was really poor, and also character tend to speak very quickly, so the text would be quite difficult to read anyway, even if it wasn't badly written. So perhaps that hampered my enjoyment.
  
• Nabari no Ou: I didn't find it all that engaging. I was also a bit confused by what it is - I wasn't sure if it was aimed at boys or girls, as it seems to have that classic "yaoi pretty boy" character design, but the subject matter is distinctly shounen in nature (ninjas and hidden powers and prophecies - not really my cup of tea) and there's a couple of female characters that sort of seem like love interests for the male lead. It was a bit sort of jumbled up.
  
• Junjo Romantica: didn't get very far with this. It's, well, let's just say it's not a show aimed at me :). I guess if you're a fan of the whole yaoi/boylove thing this is a good example of the genre, but it's not my cup of tea.
• Vampire Knight: Ugh. It's got vampires and a girl lead - it's like a distillation of all that appalling hormonal teenage girl dribble that I roll my eyes at on Urbis. Sorry, I'm sure it has it's fans and not wanting to slate it - it's probably better than all that - but count me out.

I think that's everything I watched - quite a lot as you can see.

You'll also notice the last three were kinda shoujo type series. There seem to have been a lot of these this year. Maybe it's just that I happen to have watched three of them (I tend to be utterly random when picking what order to watch things in).