Bad meat v. good meat....

I don't normally eat Chinese. I'm not that fond of the ingredients used, and invariably the restaurants use the crappiest meat possible. The one Chinese meal I like, incessantly, is the Beijing Beef at Panda Express. A bowl of that over steamed rice and a couple of Spring Rolls, and I'm a happy puppy. Don't even care that it's got garlic. But every now and then I forget how consistent the bad food is at other places and I order something that looks or sounds good.

Did that today. Didn't want a sandwich or pizza and couldn't find a decent salad place, so I tried out the Teriyaki Beef dish at a Chinese joint. I mean, it's Teriyaki, my favorite seasoning after ketchup; how bad could that be? I was able the eat the rice and green beans. The meat was so chewy, it's like I'd popped some Gum. Ugh. It's pretty hard to mess up anything Teriyaki, in my view, but they managed.

So be it...when in Hong Kong, dine at McDonald's.

I'm working on Bugzters, still and slowly beginning to think it will work out to 40,000 words instead of 35,000. Still not enough, but not insurmountable. And I'm going hog-wild with the Chesters. That's 4 aliens slops of goo that form themselves into the exact replica of a fisherman named Chester Harry. He's a schlubby kind of guy, with a hat full of fishing flies, who inadvertently provides the link to Alex's home when the Beige Pair interrogate him.

I moved the Beige Pair from MESCIS to after the cloning, and added in a bit with a driver and his pickup truck running the 4 Chesters down as they jaunt their way towards Alex's home. Then comes the fun of him realizing what they are and helping the Bagh-star fight back. That's going to be tricky, since he's not even there, really.

But that's the kind of story this is - wild and crazy, I hope.

Talk about a needle in a haystack...

Apparently, the European Space Agency did it; the Philae and Rosetta Mission landed on a comet hundreds of millions of miles from earth.

So much for American dominance in space.

UPDATE: Photo from the surface of an asteroid...

Nice trip down...

I took an earlier train than usual -- meaning I had to get up at 6:30 am, which does not please me -- but the trip was actually pleasant and I was able to use the WiFi to handle some problems at work. And prep for other jobs. Looks like I may be in Chicago the Second week of December then go from there to LA for part of the third week. It's still not set...but it's getting there.

I also got some more done on Bugzters. I'm finding aspects of the story that I'd missed in the screenplay, and developing them is adding to the possible length. I'm still going to wind up nowhere near 50,000 without a lot more filling in.

But the story's starting to come together in my mind -- what it's about, I mean. I can't quite articulate it, yet, but it is taking shape. Maybe on my trip to Hong Kong I'll be able to flesh it out, more. It's 15 hours each way on a plane...if I've got power. The great thing about Amtrak is, every seat's got 2 plugs.

Woo-hoo...

It's a neverending political parade

We're 7 days past the election, and already I'm being hit by the DNC for money. I made the mistake of donating some cash to a couple of candidates I liked, progressives who might actually try to do some good. One made it; the other proved herself to be as two-faced and craven as anyone else.

Well...it turned out my name was turned over to the DCCC and DNC and Ready for Hillary people, and the like, and suddenly I was getting dozens of e-mails a day begging me for money. I started noticing the majority of Democrats were running their usual campaigns of timidity, so I started responding to the e-mails, yelling at them to stop being such cowards and run on a progressive platform. Pleading with them to stand for something other than just getting elected.

In answer, the amount of begging and pleading and demands that I sign their pledges and petitions and piss-ant nonsense just increased. Petitions, for God's sake, as if people like Boehner and McConnell gave a damn about what the people wanted. Talk about a waste of effort. I didn't give them another penny.

Now I'm being told I'm ready for Hillary because she is our only hope. Two years from the fucking election, and already the electioneering has begun. What bullshit. So now they go straight to junk and from there, straight to trash; I don't even open them.

I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. I do not trust her. If the Green Party runs a candidate for president, I'll vote for them. If they don't, I'll write in a candidate. And if that means a back-stabbing Republican gains the White House, so be it. Maybe then people will wake up to the fact that the GOP does not give one damn about them.

But knowing my fellow Americans, I doubt it.

Regrouping...

Today I went back over what I've written for Bugzters, so far, and made some shifts that may help the story, later. May add some to it. It's still reading too flat, but now I think I can make it better and more detailed once I get into the serious rewriting stage.

For example, I added some of Mr. Smith's background in, and made it seem like he might retire and move to be near a son in Florida. That added to Taylor's dilemma; she's all too aware that Alex and Mr. Smith are her only two friends, so if they leave she'll have none. She's also coming up with off-beat phrases and ways of looking at the world, using Kant to determine what is and is not right and proper. She even references Machiavelli, once.

That helped me add another thousand words to what I've got, so far, but it's still probably going to come up short. I won't know till I'm done. Oh well, I'm not going to let myself obsess over it. The story will be what it is, and if I don't make it to 50,000 words, I don't. Won't be the first time I crapped out in this challenge.

I think part of my problem is that I've been writing for so long and gotten nowhere with it. Not really. That makes it hard to keep going. I've made a little money off my books, but not enough to mean anything. I've made mistakes and missed opportunities, true, but I only saw them as such once they'd already happened or passed me by. Twenty-twenty hindsight is worse than useless in cases like this. It winds up hurting you and making you doubt every decision you make. How you should have gone left instead of right. How you should have done things differently when you had the chance instead of making a choice which, only later, turned out to be wrong.

I've got so many signposts like this in my rearview mirror. Funny how you can't think of the correct turns you took or the decisions you made, to counter them. I've grown to believe that people are all secretly masochists at heart. Maybe that's why the heroes in my books turn out to be more like sadists; who wants to read about a loser wimp?

Damn, I should charge myself a hundred bucks for venting moments like this.

Crash and burn...

Got nothing to say except I slept till nearly 1pm and couldn't get going on BZ until a little while ago. Just really down all day. I finally watched Topsy-Turvy on my laptop and that broke my mood enough for me to work at least a little on the story. But I'm more sure than ever I'm not going to make 50K with it. I may only hit 35K. How to you pad that out?

No idea, yet.

Needed a break from writing...

I was brain dead, so I piddled up a possible cover for Bugzters, using an old photo of me and some other images. I didn't like changing Alex's name to Lindstrom; that's why I changed my pen name to Michael Hansen. It's the maiden name of my great grandmother, Marie, in Minnesota, on my grandfather's side. She lived to be 95 and was active till she slipped on some ice and broke her hip. She died within a year.

Seems keeping active and working your brain is the way to stay alert and able. If that's the case, I'm in deep shit...except this job I have is forcing me to exercise my mind in ways I'm not used to. So...that part should keep working as I drift into nothingness.

A lot of me is going into Alex, more than I thought I'd do. I won't say I hated moving as much as he does, but there were two instances where I wanted to stay where I was and got taken away because of my parents. One was London, when I was very young. The other, oddly enough, was Grand Forks, ND.

In Grand Forks, we lived on base. It was in the middle of nowhere. Seriously. Nothing but flat plains in every direction, so anything that was happening was happening on base.

Like an amateur theater group. I was planning to be part of it. Had already been to two meetings to discuss plays they wanted to put on. That was the first time I heard of "The Man Who Came To Dinner", a farce about a nasty celebrity who trips on some ice while at a family's home and has to stay, and turns their lives upside down. I was hoping to play the son who wants to be a photographer.

But...my mother had one of her breakdowns (it was either #3 or 4), so we moved back to Texas. Where they don't know nothin' 'bout no theater. I started 8th grade late and never really caught up. Had to deal with the fact that I still sounded British while surrounded by rednecks and their twangs. Never did fit in. And that's coloring Alex's story.

This isn't a great cover, but it's a beginning.

Just over 12,000 words...

I think I'm going to top off at 40K. I'm into act 2 of the story and while I'm zipping through it to get the structure down, and I'm adding back in characters who will fill it nicely -- Mrs. Rutledge is proving to be complete fun -- I don't think I'll make the full count unless I can figure something more out.

I was going to participate in a writing seminar, this evening (one of the prizes I won as a Top 100 in Table Read My Screenplay) but the guy never showed up. It was a call-in conference style and while I chatted with half a dozen other people for half an hour while waiting, and they were all very pleasant and interested in writing, I was after something that would help me fulfill this story. What a pain...and yet another waste of time.

I may use my train trip to go back through what I've written on BZ, to that point, and see if I'm missing any sub-plots that could be expanded upon. Drew's is still a bit anemic. And I could expand Alex's mother's more, especially since she's angry with her husband for putting her in the position of being the bad guy in the move. That's not to say the other characters are deep with meaning, yet...but there has to be something missing.

I know I'll be doing some serious rewriting once I get this first draft completed.

The Democrats wanted to lose...

I stole this from Down With Tyranny blogspot...and it makes too damn much sense, considering.

Steve Israel Failed Miserably This Cycle

Dozens of House incumbents had only nominal-- rather than serious-- opposition this cycle. But only 32 have no opposition at all. Here's the list with each district's PVI:

• Robert Aderholt (R-AL)- R+28
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)- D+20
• Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)- R+7
• Kathy Castor (D-FL)- D+13
• Ted Deutch (D-FL)- D+10
• Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)- R+5
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)- R+2
• Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA)- R+19
• Barry Loudermilk (R-GA)- R+19
• Hank Johnson (D-GA)- D+21
• John Lewis (D-GA)- D+32
• Austin Scott, (R-GA)- R+15
• David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)- D+16
• Tom Graves (R-GA)- R+26
• Richard Neal (D-MA)- D+13
• Jim McGovern (D-MA)- D+8
• Joseph Kennedy (D-MA)- D+6
• Katherine Clark (D-MA)- D+14
• Michael Capuano (D-MA)- D+31
• Stephen Lynch (D-MA)- D+6
• Robert Pittenger (R-NC)- R+8
• Grace Meng (D-NY)- D+13
• Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY)- D+21
• Richard Hanna (R-NY)- R+3
• Bob Gibbs (R-OH)- R+6
• Jim Bridenstine (R-OK)- R+18
• Mike Doyle (D-PA)- D+15
• Charlie Dent (R-PA)- R+2
• Tim Murphy (R-PA)- R+10
• Mark Sanford (R-SC)- R+11
• John Ratcliffe (R-TX)- R+25
• Robert Scott (D-VA)- D+27

You can't blame the Republicans for not fielding candidates against Robert Scott in his D+27 Richmond district or John Lewis in his D+32 Atlanta district. Nor can you blame Democrats for not running candidates against Robert Aderholt in his R+28 north Alabama district and Tom Graves in his R+26 northwest Georgia district. In fact, all of the Democrats with no opponents are in pretty blue districts. The Republicans didn't give away any easy districts. The 2 "weakest" are both Massachusetts districts with identical PVIs of D+6. Obama won Kennedy's district 57-41% and won Lynch's district 58-41%. So... not really competitive seats.

Now, on the other side of the aisle, we have a different story. There are three seats in very competitive districts:

• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen- R+2- Obama beat Romney 53-47%
• Richard Hanna- R+3- a 49-49% tie that Romney won with a handful of votes
• Charlie Dent- R+2- Romney beat Obama narrowly, 51-48%

Ros-Lehtinen, a close friend and political crony of DCCC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has protected her in the past, was a member of Steve Israel's Center Aisle Caucus. Charlie Dent was a member of the same centrist caucus composed of Blue Dogs and other Wall Street-owned Democrats and relatively mainstream conservative Republicans. One of the premises is that the members don't oppose each other-- which was certainly a good enough reason for Nancy Pelosi to have not made him head of the DCCC. But she did. And tonight she's reaping the whirlwind-- and so are more rational Democrats and the American people.

When David Broder first wrote about the determinedly centrist Congressional Center Aisle Caucus in 2005, he almost ejaculated for joy on the editorial page of the Washington Post over the sheer civility of the project. I wonder why they didn't make him an honorary member. Broder claimed there were 47 invited members (which later grew to 60), roughly equally split between the two parties, although that membership roll isn't readily available anywhere, almost like it's being hidden. They meet, or met, secretly, in a Chinese restaurant two blocks from Capitol Hill; no joke. The caucus was founded by Republican Tim Johnson (IL) and the-Blue Dog… Steve Israel (NY) with the stated purpose of bypassing Congress' partisan ways.

Applicants for membership weren't admitted unless they recruited companion members from the opposite party. Caucus members avoided lightning-rod issues and focused only on areas that most likely would produce agreement. Under one unwritten bylaw, members vowed never to engage in political campaigns against other members. That's nice… but does it make sense to appoint the person who came up with that chairman of the DCCC? I'll answer that for you-- NO! These are the exact candidates the DCCC should be going after… but regardless of how vulnerable they are, Israel keeps the DCCC off their backs one way or the other. In a rational world, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen would have been a top tier DCCC candidate, but Steve Israel doesn't live in a rational world; he lives in a Center Aisle world and ignores the fact that Ros-Lehtinen is in a blue district that Obama won-- and by a way stronger margin than just about all of Israel's targeted districts. But Ileana gets a reelection free-pass from Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Last year Wasserman Schultz was complicit in recruiting a cardboard candidate, Manny Yevancey, who no one ever heard of, who raised zero dollars and who campaigned exactly zero days. His only job was to occupy the Democratic ballot slot so no one else could run against Wasserman Schultz's and Israel's BBF.

There are 21 seats like this in the House, winnable seats Steve Israel willfully ignored, even if they were much easier than impossible targets in deep red districts where he ran his handpicked Blue Dogs and New Dems. All of these incumbents represent districts where Obama won in 2008 and/or 2012 but where Israel has refused to back the grassroots local candidate or has frightened off anyone from running against his Republican pals:

• NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo- D+1
• MI-06- Fred Upton- R+1
• WA-08- Dave Reichert- R+1
• FL-27- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen- R+2
• PA-06- Jim Gerlach- R+2
• MN-03- Erik Paulsen- R+2
• PA-07- Pat Meehan- R+2
• MN-02- John Kline- R+2
• PA-15- Charlie Dent- R+2
• MI-08- Mike Rogers- R+2
• WA-03- Jaime Hererra Buetler- R+2
• VA-10- Frank Wolf- R+2
• CA-25- Buck McKeon- R+3
• WI-01- Paul Ryan- R+3
• MI-11- Kerry Bentivolio- R+4
• IL-06- Peter Roskam- R+4
• PA-16- Joe Pitts- R+4
• CA-49- Darrell Issa- R+4
• IL-16- Adam Kinzinger- R+4
• MI-03- Justin Amash- R+4
• MI-04- Dave Camp- R+5

Now that Israel screwed up 2014, can the Democrats win back the House in 2016? In theory, absolutely! With Steve Israel, or anyone like him, running the DCCC-- out of the question.

See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2014/11/steve-israel-failed-miserably-this.html#sthash.b4LqpAr5.dpuf

I voted...

Didn't like it, but I did it. I voted Green or Democrat, not one Republican. I refuse to support anyone who supports a party that wants to hurt me, and if you're part of the GOP that's what you do. No two ways about it. Here's their basic platform -- "Republicans...would ban all abortions and gay marriages, reshape Medicare into a voucher-like program, and cut taxes..." That's what you support if you vote GOP.

My conservative Texas grandmother was right -- The Republican is for the rich man. She never once voted for them, and I thought that was silly. Once upon a time. The older I get, the more sense she makes. Too bad she died 30 years ago...or maybe it's better. She'd be flipping out like crazy if she was still around. December 24th would have been her 110th birthday.

I still got some work done on BZ. I'm up to nearly 8600 words...and starting to wonder if I'll make it to 50,000 with this story. I'm close to the end of act one, which is normally 25% of the story. Wouldn't that be funny? Get it done and it turns out as a long novella. Adding the little brother and school crossing guard back in isn't making enough of a difference. Maybe when I get to the Beige Pair from MESSIS...

Those two would be fun...