Walking On Sunshine

And a happy Halloween/Samhain/end of October, everyone! To end the month of Illuminations, let's talk about getting back on our feet.

Injuries to the spinal cord have been seen as major, life-changing issues that can't be overcome. There have been some limited successes in specific situations, but not many and not often.

Cue scientists and EES. The technique is still in process and has a ways to go, but it represents a huge leap forward in treating spinal-cord injuries. In the small study done earlier this year, several of the patients were able to move - and walk - with assistance after as little as a few days' treatment. The treatments, which involve implanting electrodes that allow electrical impulses to bypass the injured portions of the spinal cord, have proven to be effective in animals, but they've been difficult to get just right for humans. The combination of the treatment itself and the additional knowledge of the human nervous system researchers developed are going to lead to bigger and better things across the board.

And on that note, that is day 31 of the month of Illuminations! This has been an eye-opening, exciting, exhausting month, and I think I've got a better handle on how I want to move forward and what I can offer. November starts the month of craziness that is NaNoWriMo, which will be its own kind of entertaining, but I want to keep doing the Illuminations - just not every day. I'm committing to two Illuminations a week, and hope to have some kind of Nano update at least once a week for November.

At any rate, thanks for reading.

Writing a mystery

So I'm probably not going to make my Camp Nano goal for this month, and I'm at peace with that. I've had a chance to dig back into a story that's been languishing for a bit, and I'm enjoying that. However, it's definitely revealing some areas of weakness that I hadn't noticed before.

The story started as an urban fantasy setting, but, well, plot needs to be a thing, too. So my plot became a murder mystery, and that's where things got...interesting. I know who did it, and I have a decent idea of how, but I'm having a hard time 1) figuring out why (other than demons, but even demons need motivation) and 2) giving any of this information to the main characters. They're cops, so there are some things they're going to be able to get pretty easily. They're also cops familiar with the more fantastic elements of this world, so that will help. But what ties the victims together and how the cops will figure that out is still, well, a mystery.

I realize that part of this is what happens when I start writing without a complete, firm outline; at the same time, this is part of why I like the hybrid approach of outlining and winging it. Right now, I've just gotten to a point where I'm stuck after winging it for a bit, and I think I'm going to have to go back and outline from here in order to move forward.

Also, I need to decide just how connected the victims need to be. Victims of circumstance or opportunity are part of our world now, where someone's just crossing paths with a murderer because it's Tuesday or what have you. I'm just trying to figure out if that would be a cop-out - there is no connection, everything's random - or if it would be a bit too on the nose to have everything linked. If any of you have opinions on this, please feel free to let me know.

And now, back to writing. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Steve and Human-Steve

Those of you reading this on Tumblr have probably already seen my initial drabbles on this topic, but I wanted to flesh things out a little more here. This year for Camp Nanowrimo (at least, the one in April), I'm planning on taking some of the various writing prompts related to the "humans are weird" trope.

The general idea is that, if alien cultures were to look on human beings, they would find us decidedly odd. Humans do weird things like try to pet nearly every animal that comes within reach, or collecting worthless objects, or laughing when we're scared or nervous. We talk to ourselves and make up songs and give inanimate objects names. The way we're built, we can do things like throw objects accurately and with force, or continue fighting or running even while injured, or break down and cry at the sight of that cursed Sarah McLachlan sad puppy commercial. From an outside perspective, we are just strange.

It's a bit of fun, and it definitely gives me something to think about. How would a species that never developed sight interact with a species that uses sight as one of its primary senses? How would a species of risk-averse creatures (think the Vulcans from Star Trek) handle a species whose first response to most challenges is something along the lines of "here, hold my beer"?

That's what I intend to find out.