My Midnight Muse

Okay, let's see if this is going to work tonight . . . See, I had these great plans - to post the new story and debut the new web page all at the SAME time. Only, as luck would have it, things never seem to go as planned. Take this week in general . . . it's been pretty crappy.

So I finally get the new page up, get everything transfered and uploaded and all pretty and soft and shiny - then come HERE to post about it, and wouldn't you know it, Blogger has crapped out. As I type this, I'm not sure it's going to work.

Been a frustrating couple of days.

So I took today off, and thought I'd just go relax and enjoy Serenity on her opening day - catch the first showing before all the kiddies get out of school. There I was, all happy an excited - been a Firefly fan since day one. Nothing prepared me for what happened.

Let's just leave it at that.

So here I sit, once again trying to post this blog about the new story. Had a few drinks to get over my movie-shock, and I'm thinking this blogger still isn't going to work.

Screw it - time to kiss Grandpa anyway. Posted the new story, and I'm going into hiding for a couple of days (the weekend, anyway) so no one can hurt me. It's like this with every new story posting - toss it up there, duck and hide ! Maybe no one will see me. Maybe everyone will see me. Maybe no one will like it - maybe I'll never know.

Maybe it's best that way.

Maybe it's not.

Hell - maybe someday I'll find my happy place and it won't matter!

In the meantime, you'll find me hiding out at www.mymidnightmuse.com

And if you go see Serenity because you're a Firefly fan - bring a tissue! s'all I'm sayin'.

What's in a name?

It’s the oddest thing . . . I was preparing to update my webpage, and advance it to a real, honest to goodness domain without advertising, and with much more room and available bandwidth for visitor downloading - - Assuming the best, most straightforward name for the page would be MY name, I figured I could register KristineWilliams.com After all, that couldn’t possibly be taken, could it?

Yep, sure ’nuff could !

I can’t see what or who the page is conveying – it’s listed as Under Construction.

Well that just bites, lemme tell ya. My own NAME, and someone else is using it !

Yeah, I know, it’s most likely someone else who’s name that is . . . but seriously, what are the odds?

Now I’m kinda sputtering. My newest story has been given to my reader for review, and I’ve promised people it will be available by the end of September – so I thought it’d be pretty cool to introduce the new domain name/web page with the premier of the new story.

And yes, foggybrain.com is taken, too ! It’s some sort of scam travel page – don’t go there!

What a pain in the sit-upon. Now I either have to forget the whole idea, and keep things the way they are, ads and annoyance and all – or sit here and try, and try, and try again to not only come up with a domain name that sounds good and conveys what the page contains – but one that also isn’t already taken.

That’s harder than it sounds. I’m sure those of you out there who’ve done this before can relate. You have maybe three or four great ideas, and they’re taken. So you relax your ideas of what’s good a tad, and try again, only to find THOSE taken as well. So then you try to get creative, hoping that what you’re coming up with will not only be easy to remember, but easy to use. Then THOSE are taken !

Then, before you know it, you’re naming your page something like www.Ican’tthinkofanythingbetterthanthis.com ! And you get stuck with the less than simple email of me@Ican’tthinkofanythingbetterthanthis.com !

This really REALLY bites !

I have to go pout now, more later.

The Writer I Want to Be

A strange sort of chain-of-events have collided in my mind and reached an interesting conclusion. I’m not sure which is more curiously interesting – the chain of events, or the conclusion they reached, but what better place to muse them than here.

I was watching a DVD the other day, The Transporter with Jason Statham (drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a manly man) because Transporter 2 is out now, and I’d never seen Transporter 1. Well naturally all the reviews went on and on about how vacuous the plot was . . . having seen it I can honestly say “Who cares?!” It was exactly what I was looking for – action/adventure/and a fantastic looking leading man. I wanted a movie that would entertain me, something I could watch while checking my brain at the door, and it filled the bill and then some. I'm even going to watch it again this weekend!

I love men – and I love watching men in action movies. I don’t require plot, or depth, or morally uplifting values. Just good looking men, and action.

It was candy, but with the satisfaction of a steak dinner.

Then this week I was checking up on a television show that premiered its new season on the BBC this week, but I have to wait to see it here on A&E in January. I like spoilers, as I’ve said before, so by the time it airs here in the US, it will have concluded it’s season in England – meaning I can read up on each episode while I wait.

So I’m on the web page, reading what viewers thought of the season opener, and I couldn’t help being surprised by the wide variety in opinions. I mean, these people’s views ranged from loving it to hating it. Some thought it was the most intriguing plot they’d seen in a long time, while others felt it was as empty and boring as most US programs. I marveled at the different things people said, each one practically contradicting the next, as if they’d seen two completely separate programs.

Then I’m sitting here today – having just now completed the corrections on my latest story (it’s going to my reader and her yellow high-lighter and green pen now) thinking back on a conversation I’d had years ago with someone . . . She’d made a comment about how my writing was good, if that’s the audience I was striving for.

Well to be honest, it took me a minute or two to realize she’d been insulting not only my writing, but everyone who reads it. Basically she was suggesting that I write poorly, and my readers mostly likely aren’t intelligent enough to realize this.

After a few days pondering that – and worrying that I really was writing very poor quality drivel, it slowly began to dawn on me that no, I wasn’t. I admit, freely and readily, that I am no genius. I’m not exactly penning out the next Pulitzer prize winning novel, or something you’ll EVER find on anyone’s best-sellers list. But the truth is . . . I don’t care.

In fact, the plain and simple truth – the one that concluded with all of these various chain of thought events twirling around in my brain today – is that I honestly don’t WANT to be. I don’t want to see myself on Oprah’s must-read list. I don’t want to be the subject of college Literature debates.

When I was younger, I loved nothing more than finding those books I could flash through in a summer week. Books full of adventure, characters I could visualize and fall in love with. Books with just enough plot to hold things together, and follow along from paperback to paperback, heavily peppered with action, adventure, mystery (never really been one for romance !)

They weren’t high literature. They were perhaps what some would consider “dime novels”, or serial adventures, and I couldn’t get enough. I’d get excited when I found a new one to read, and couldn’t wait for that one long summer day with nothing better to do that curl up somewhere with that paperback in hand, and dive in – completely immersing myself in the pages until the rest of the world simply faded into grey around me.

Cheap paperbacks you could fit into your purse or beach bag. The kind you read so many times they had a permanent crease in the spine.

These were books that became your best friends. Characters you could daydream about while on long car vacations with the family. Paperbacks you couldn’t buy enough of, and hated to see end each time.

They’re exactly the books this woman was telling me I was “lowering” myself to.

The literary equivalent of an action movie.

A paperback version of the Transporter. All fun and macho fluff – the stuff of daydreams -- no real purpose or insightful thought.

She was telling me that’s all I was going to amount to. All I was ever going to manage. As good as I was going to get.

I’ve decided now to take that as a compliment !

That’s exactly what I strive for. Exactly the type of entertainment I can only HOPE I’m achieving. The kind of writing I'm working to improve upon and make even more adventurous and exciting.

That’s the writer I want to be.

The Fog of it All

I was born third in a family of 3, so as the baby, I admit I was spoiled. Still am, really, only now it’s ME who spoils me.

Perhaps that’s where my love of spoilers comes from – but whenever there’s a TV show or movie I’m following or anxiously waiting for, I’m the type who enjoys finding out what’s to come, reading spoilers and looking at images. For me, that’s not ruining the outcome or spoiling the suspense, but rather BUILDING more excitement of things to come.

And yeah, to a certain degree, it’s because I’m not very patient and don’t like to wait around much !

Which brings me to my point, being that I’ve decided to pick a random segment of a random chapter of my newest piece of fiction and post it on my page as a sort of spoiler, or teaser, if you will. Hopefully to build interest and keep me on my self-imposed schedule of posting the whole thing by the end of September.

Another new idea I had – after Geocities once again informed me the traffic to my free page has consistently caused it to be taken off line for a day – was to purchase an ad-free page with unlimited visiting rights, eliminating down time.

I’ve contemplated this before, and I already have one of their ad-free, pay-for-it pages for the jewelry business my sister and I operate. Sure, there are other options, but for $8.95/month, this is pretty easy and heartburn-free. So I go back and forth, up and down, like an ADD sufferer, trying to make up my mind. It’s not that I can’t keep my mind on one thought – it’s that I have too many thoughts all cramming up, hands raised, demanding to be first.

I couldn’t hope to come up with a decent name for the page, much like trying to decide what – if anything – one would want tattooed on one’s body. So if I take this plunge, the page addy would (hopefully) simply be KristineWilliams.com I figure as a writer, that’s the most logical, sensible thing to do. I could come up with a “name”, but what if I got tired of it? And just trying to name this blog took me hours. All the names I wanted were taken. I’m not completely convinced I’d want FoggyBrain.com as my official, fiction web site address !!

Tempting, and highly descriptive of my actual thought processes . . . but probably not.

Though I’d love to someday have my (jewelry) company logo tattooed, I’m told that would constitute a lot of ink, and I know little of tattoos, making the probability very low-end.

I’ve rambled, haven’t I? Few people know me, but those (maybe 1 or 2) who do, could tell you that rambling is my specialty.

I’ll even let you in on a little secret . . . In the not-too-distant future, I’m hoping to pen a completely different, somewhat humorous tale of a soft-broiled detective, to be titled: Mick Danger; Private Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat. (kind of an inside joke, being that it’s been inside my head for the past 20 years, waiting to happen)

Not only have I lost my train of thought today – I’m not sure I even had a ticket ! So I’ll go wander around for a bit, see if I can gather up some semblance of something and return next week with what we can all hope is something more insightful, comedic, or at least decipherable to post !

Or not.