Back home!

(This is a post from yesterday, written on the flight home, with the assumption that we would have internet when we got back, though we did not. So it’s a little late to be posting, but better late than never. Plus, I’ve been neglecting this blog too much).

Well, we’re finally (almost, actually, since I’m writing this on the plane, via Word document) home and it’s time to reminisce about the trip.

All in all, it was great. We got to go to the pool, the beach, the zoo, Disneyland, the old neighborhood, and to just hang out in California for a week. I brought my tablet so I drew a bit (though no animating got done, I’ll have to catch up on that once we’re home and I have an actual drawing setup) and I also continued to work on The Scamble, which I will talk about more in a bit, though just sort of idly messing around with ideas for it rather than trying to work stuff out since most of the time I was too busy with other things.

It was hot, of course, and I could live with the heat but it was not enjoyable. We went to the beach a couple of times, and it was great swimming in the water and being in the waves, and we went to the pool too, though that was less exciting and get-buffeted-around-by-water-y. Basically, we did plenty of water-related things to survive the 95-or-so degree temperatures.  

We visited all the old haunts, the Wild Animal Park (now named the Safari Park and unfortunately very disappointing), went on a walk along the shallow river in Fallbrook (though the paths were eroded and without Fang, who died a couple weeks ago, it was lacking) and, of course, spent a day at Disneyland (which has remained the same and was great).

Oh, and I saw a live coyote, a dead coyote, some big owl with feathery ears (possibly a great horned owl, though I’m not sure what their range is), plenty of lizards and other small birds, heard a rattlesnake, and of course saw tons of animals at the zoo.

Now I’m on the plane to home, gazing out over some dry, tan-colored desert-y place, possibly California or maybe Utah (I suck at geography, however, so if we were flying over the moon I might not know) and thinking about various creative and homestead-related projects.

I’m dreading all the processing work that surely awaits us at home (not to mention my stupid fall allergies), and the backlog of fruits and vegetables to be picked and preserved (there’ll be tomatoes to sauce, raspberries to pick and freeze, zucchini to harvest and dump on unsuspecting neighbors, and maybe even corn or onions or potatoes to process, who knows). We also have the half (or maybe quarter, I’m not completely sure) a pig that we bought from a local small farm here waiting for us when we get home, and while I’m looking forwards to being able to eat pork and bacon and ham and such (since lately it’s been nothing but hamburgers, and for the past week in California I’ve been almost 100% vegetarian*) but it’s going to be a challenge because we’ll have to learn how to make the bacon ourselves (which sounds like a fun and terrifying adventure at the same time) .

 *I’ve been eating meat only if I know where it comes from, nothing store-bought.

We’ll also be home just two days before the Tour De Fat bike race (in which people dress up in crazy costumes and bike around  town) and we have a great group costume theme thingymagig planned, all Doctor Who related, me being Amy, my brother being the tenth doctor (because he has some strange grudge against the eleventh or something, I don’t really know), my dad being a dalek and my mom being a weeping angel (with the TARDIS being pulled behind us on the bike trailer).

However, since we have only two days and we have barely anything done I expect to end up going as Castiel, from Supernatural, (this year’s Halloween costume) since I already have a trenchoat about the right color and of course a tie, white shirt and black pants are easy to come by. I probably shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but at the very least we’ll be able to go as a half-completed Superwho group.

(Sort of) speaking of Halloween, November is coming soon (though I can hardly believe it’s almost fall again) and I was excited to realize that I might have a story to write for NaNoWriMo again (which is great, because I was completely out of story ideas all summer and feeling like I wouldn’t have any stories to write for NaNo), the Scamble!

Of course, I have to finish working on the world and characters and premise and finally plot in two months but now my goal is to have the world and story (though I’m not sure how I’m gonna write it, I was sort of thinking of making it a series-like thing with separate books for all of the Scamblers’ adventures) finished by November. And I think once we get home I’ll have enough time to really work through the current snag I’ve hit! (And even if I don’t get a plotline finished before NaNo, I think this is the sort of story where I might be able to try and write it as I go, without any storyline whatsoever).

Even if I don’t get even the world finished before November, I think I still want to try to write for NaNoWriMo, and I will probably just end up kidnapping some of my half-completed characters and throwing them into some sketchily-built world and hope it works (which, now that I say it, sounds like a horrible idea but a lot of Wrimos write that way, right?).

Either way, I’m pretty excited about November, and heck, even winter (more time for artistic work, and it’s perfect timing as I’ve started to want to work more and more on improving my writing and drawing just this last week) despite the short, cold, greenery-less days it brings.

So, I suppose I should actually introduce the Scamble more now, which is the current name of a story/world mix project I’ve been working on for exactly (unless I am wrong in which case I am extremely sorry about my horrid math skills) eighteen days now.

It started out one day as one of those great flash-of-inspiration things that never actually happens to anyone (except this time it did) where pretty much the whole world and premise for the story and characters just appeared out of the blue (in the case of the Scamble, while doodling a completely unrelated  scribble of the vaguely-mammalian creature at the top of this post) on the 12^th of August at, if I had to guess, 1:00-2:00 PM (I know this because I drew it right as we were leaving to go to a concert). After the initial flash of inspiration I only had to work a bit on the mechanics of the world (which were already thought up, previous little ideas for how magic would work and for how animal-people might look that I’d thought about but never had a world to use them in) before moving on to characters (the current challenge for me and the bane of my existence) and just exactly what the Scamble is.

Ah, the Scamble. I’m not quite sure myself what it is, but I suppose I should explain the basic idea behind it.

It is a sort of, magic store. A junkyard for magical objects, Robert or Maggie might call, but really what they do is they retrieve, find, repair or destroy magical and cursed objects (find or repair in the case of the former and destroy in the case of the latter).

Yes, in the Scamble world (which at the moment is modern-day earth) there is magic (and animal people, called fen), and it is a very valuable thing (or rather, magical objects and other minor magical things like spellbinds and charms are) but also a very dangerous thing, in the case of curses, cursed objects, and pain magic, or even fire and accidental magic.

I still have yet to get all the characters worked out, or exactly what the people at the Scamble do (or what is even needed for people to do) and whether or not they are related to the government at all, and I’ve started to stray pretty close to Warehouse 13 territory, I think, so I’ve been sort of cautiously tiptoeing ahead, afraid to make any big decisions about the story or world (which is like being afraid to go out of the house in case you are locked out even when you have the keys in your hand) but once I get home I’ve promised myself I’ll work on it more, and more seriously, and I’ll not be afraid to be decisive about the world and what goes and what stays.

Basically, California is great, but it’s also gonna be great to be back home, and it’s really, really great to be finally back to working on stories and worlds and writing!

So, as I look out the airplane window over shadowy canyons and red, scrubby hills crisscrossed with winding roads obscured by the occasional white wisp of a cloud (can you tell I love flying and being able to get a bird’s eye view of everything?), I bid you few people reading this goodbye, and good luck writing (or drawing or singing or dancing or sculpting or picture-taking or sewing or anything-ing)!