Category: Daily

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Getting My Celtx On

A friend bought a Mac the other night. The all-in-one jobby that looks like a fat wide-screen monitor. I took over and downloaded Scrivener so I could see it in action. Once we figured out how to install applications on a Mac and figured out that the program actually was open after five minutes of trying to open it I was immediately reminded of Celtx.

Scrivener offered the same template projects. Much of the minimal tour I did reinforced the similarities more then eroded them. So today I thought I’d try writing some here, in Celtx.

You may recall 1000 Days began as a private doc in Google Docs. Following that it became a test of Movable Type until that install mysteriously collapsed and I reverted to my solid standby WordPress. Sometime in there I wrote in MS Live Writer, DarkRoom, and most recently and regularly in Q10. I suppose this illuminates my mercurial behavior more than anything, but when you work on the Internet, there really is something better around the corner.

What I do here doesn’t require all that much. I rarely post pictures and never any other sort of media. Why not just write in the editor provided by WordPress? that question makes me snicker because I really should be. The WP editor does everything I need it to do: align text, highlight colors, create links, insert photos when I need. The whole CMS aspect organizes and stores my daily posts. I don’t know. I just like trying things out.

Other than its similarities to Scrivener, Celtx interests me more now because with this week long theme thing I started–and promptly abandoned–I’m wondering if I have enough mass to start keeping track of similar posts in the same place. I’m wondering if I need to start populating character datasheets and prop information. Celtx lets me do that.

Now to find out if I can format this text or do a word count.

Word count: 339
Day 251

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Carelessly Introducing the Gravity Guitar

All this mess with Jansa and her mother and Jansa’s drama disabuses me of the joy of theme weeks. Especially if you get a dud—or what you work into a dud. I like the serenity of the Juena character too much to ruin any potential by exploring the hotheaded Jansa further at this time. Theme week ends early this week.

In the housekeeping category I should note that I’ll be out of my usual environs for the weekend and into a more challenging writing situation next week. I’ll do what I can to roll with the change-up, but I think any long time reader of 1000 Days knows whats up ahead for 1KD.

I’d planned to leave off of the shanty thread initially and I will after this brief exception to prove the rule.

You post your black-out welding goggles to your forehead to review your work in real light. The welds tighten better near the end, of course they’re not as crisp as Daddy might have done them, but they’ll work for tonight’s gig. And they’ll hold till you get the gravity guitar back to that shop in Tsarko II.

You untie the leather drape across you face to blow out the bits of slag [find out what thats really called] from the pick-ups. However, eager for a warm-up, you begin tuning her out before taking off your coveralls or gogs.

Much better. That soft G wave tightened up and seems gapped better between the D and the B waves—the E’s not hairy. Your tuner-monitor redundantly agrees with your fingers. A few more strums to be sure everything’s heavy and you grind into “House on Fire” by The Oh Johnny! Girls.

Word count: 286
Day 250

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A Shattered Clay Pot

What follows skips ahead of the part where Juena’s unnamed replacement starts taking the tribe in a direction Jansa doesn’t believe (now dead maybe) Juena would have.

“She’s poisoned your thinking. All your thinking!” Sweeping her arm in a half circle for emphasis, Jansa enjoined the polite onlookers in her angry conversation with Shelt. Her rage disallowed eye contact with any one individual in the group till she caught the attention of Tinna at the edge of her gesture. Tinna’s unexpected appearance and gentle face cooled Jansa’s mood some.

Shelt gripped her arm and forcefully turned her back around to face him. He held her hands at her waist for a moment. Jansa mistook his contorted visage for matching anger—this is where he would smack her of course. Instead he sighed.

Jansa realized she’d just seen him make a decision. Then he dropped his head and sighed again—his actions held a strange clarity she’d never experienced before. This time he formed words in preparation for speaking to her. Even before he leaned in and whispered long and definitively she knew it would be devastating.

In later years, Jansa could never recall what happened before or after this moment. This moment however lived sharply and more believably in her memory than many more recent ones. Jansa could describe the thin high clouds in the blue-grey winter sky like a poem, name the tribespeople and place them in order as they surrounded her, angle the sun along the horizon by it’s timorous warm on her neck, and mark the instant the [some bird] stopped whistling in the bush. But now her arms drooped and she stumbled but didn’t fall to the ground when the news was finished.

Her life became a shattered clay pot. She could find all the pieces. She could line them up neatly. She could identify where each belonged and how each joined with another. She could not rebuild it. She could not make it carry water. Jansa wished he’d hit her instead.

Word count: 310
Day 249