Ok, I think allyrapixie's wrath has died down by now, so it's probably safe to post. Yes, I wrote less than 2000 words for NaNoWriMo. Frankly, I'm pleased that two out of two of the people that signed up because I encouraged them to actually managed to finish. Can I pick them or what! :)

Anyway, so lately I've been working on some other projects, and I've got a question for you all.

I know that for those of you who are on livejournal it's awfully convenient to keep up with my blog because it just automatically shows up on your friend page.

Ok, so who here would stop reading my blog if it was on another (non-livejournal) site? It will of course have RSS feeds (if you are into such things). I ask, because it's looking likely that I'll be hosting a blogging setup for my entire family. It'll have permissions and such so that my family members can limit who is able to see the posts. The majority of my posts will remain visible to everyone, including those who are not logged in to the site, so that means that you'll all have access. It just won't be quite as convenient as reading your livejournal friends page (unless of course you are into RSS feeds like I am).

Since I'll have the encouragement of other family members posting there (and in fact, Mrs. Kheldar has already made two posts), I will likely be posting about twice a week.

Anyhow, so what do you say? Too much trouble to go to another site, or will you still be reading?

Oh, and in case you are interested, the address is http://www.batishko.net. User creation is turned on if you care to register.

In order to stay caught up with where I need to be for NaNoWriMo I have to write 1667 words every day. Yesterday was one of my normal weekdays where I have something scheduled in the evening. So I was only about to write around 1000 words. Fortunately, I got up this morning and wrote another 600, so in my mind I'm where I'm supposed to be. This evening and weekend I should be able to do a little extra and get myself ahead of the curve. I probably could have made the full amount yesterday, but Guitar Hero III arrived and we had to... uh... make sure it was working properly.

It was.

Anyway, Mrs. Kheldar started into her story. She got about 1800 words done, and she's pretty enthusiastic about it. So that's good. It looks like allyrapixie is off to a good start too.

I'm finding that my scenes are taking a little less than half the expected number of words to write. That means I'm definitely going to be able to go for the longer version of my plot. ...and I'll still probably run out of stuff to write. Ah well, all part of the fun.

Plot synopsis:

In the very first scene, Solomon has apparently tracked down a murderer named Flint. He talks to him briefly from hiding, and then kills him as justice for the murder.

In the second scene, we get a flashback and see Flint trying to get back some money he'd loaned. He gets a bit drunk and runs into the guy and kills him with his shotgun in front of a large group of witnesses.

I just started the third scene, but I haven't finished that yet, so I'll talk about it later.

As I told Mrs. Kheldar this morning, "Two people have been shot dead so far in my story. What about your's?"

She's writing a fun story about an 8 year old intended for kids, so her response was... "I think I like my own fluffy bunny story."

Which reminds me, perhaps I should kill some fluffy bunnies off... Of course, it's ok, because it'll be for food, not just for pleasure... :)

Well, NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. I think I'm reasonably prepared. It looks like Mrs. Kheldar will be giving it a shot, as will gauntman, and another of my co-workers. So, it looks like I'll have plenty of people around to help me stay motivated. Of course it figures that now when this thing is about to start, I suddenly have all sorts of computer game related things vying for my attention. My Guitar Hero 3 preorder has shipped. A friend is picking up Hellgate: London, and based off my playing through of the demo, I'm seriously tempted as well. I have other games I'm playing and enjoying of the PS2 (Shadow of the Colossus serious rocks)... So many possibilities, so little time...

I think I'll update you guys every couple of days on my progress. I'll give you a summary of what new things I've written so that you can slowly "read" my story. After all, given the quantity over quality nature of this thing, I really doubt I'll be making it available to anyone anytime soon. So, to start things out, here's a little bit about my main character and setting...

His name is Solomon Price, and he makes a living as a Dawm Go'el (blood avenger). Essentially, he hunts down those who have murdered and kills them, collecting a bounty as a reward. He is good at what he does, and generally feels a strong sense of satisfaction over being able to bring a little bit of justice to the world.

The world is a post-apocalyptic setting. The common technology level is generally around the late 1800s. So, we're talking the American wild west. Steam trains, six-shooters, horses, etc. Most of the population lives in rural areas or small towns. There are a few larger cities in places. Banditry and lawlessness are somewhat common. Corruption in government is all too common, and might frequently makes right. The "fall" was a longer process precipitated by events that I won't go into at this time. For a period of time during the fall, Israel essentially was the world government. It is still common in this setting to see remnants of Jewish culture, particularly in the rural areas.

That should be enough to get started on.

Well, today I sat down and did a little bit of outlining for my NaNoWriMo story. I think I have a reasonable feel for what needs to be written in the first 3/4s of the story. I'm having some difficulty in figuring out exactly how to end things. I'll have to do a little more thinking and possibly rework some stuff tomorrow. I have to figure out how to provide a reasonable antagonist without expanding the scope of the story too much. The problem is that the "real" antagonist would require a huge scope, so I have to have a smaller antagonist who seems (for the purpose of this story) to be the real antagonist without shutting out the potential for a later story that expands the scope to the real antagonist. We'll see.

I really doubt I'll ever edit this into a shape where I'd actually try to publish it, but I'm planning on writing it as if that were my eventual goal. So, I've figured out a number of things about the setting including some history and ongoing events. Is anyone interested in me throwing out details here and there? Or should I just keep you updated as to my progress and not bother/spoil you with the rest?

Ok, raise you're hand if you're reading this. I want to know who's out there, but I'm too cheap to offer swag like sareth...

I might try to get back in the habit of posting here again (I did so well for longer than I initially thought I'd last). The event that's triggering this is that I'm planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Is anyone else out there going to give it a shot this year? If so, let me know so I can set you as a friend on that account. I suspect I'll need plenty of encouragement. Anyway, I'm planning on recording my progress here on my blog. Hopefully the public nature of it will help encourage me to stick with it.

I've been doing some amount of planning over the last month so that I have a decent idea of what I plan to write during the month. Over the next couple weeks as I continue to nail things down, I'll post here so you can follow along. For now, I'll just say that I'll be writing a story with the working title of "Dawm Go'el", which is the transliteration of the ancient Hebrew term that is translated "Blood Avenger". This will be a post-apocalyptic setting that gauntman and I came up with. It's partially inspired by David Gemmel's "Jerusalem Man" books (part of his Stones.of Power series).

Let's see, what else has been going on...

My Greek studies are continuing at a slow but steady pace.

My wife and I got sufficiently hooked on Guitar Hero (I borrowed it from a friend for a week while my folks were in town) that we ended up buying a PlayStation 2. Instead of buying GH2, we decided to preorder GH3 since it was so close to coming out. To pass the time until then, I picked up some other games that we've been playing and enjoying. Fortunately, I have a friend here at work with a number of PS2 games who has been willing to loan them to me so we can try them out. I'm really enjoying paying only $10-$35 for games instead of the usual $45-$55. I think I'll get more play time out of the PS2 than I did my old XBox...

Other than that, life has been... busy... but then everyone's life is busy, so I guess that's not really news. More posts to follow...

Man it's been a long time since you've read anything here. You shouldn't be so lazy...

Well, last time we played our Monday RPG, we finished up the adventure. The group managed to escape out the window of the Houses of Parliament (into the Thames) and swam down the river to the area where their ship was docked. There was some difficulties with drowning, but pretty much everyone made it. Not a whole lot else happened, and the group managed to leave without much uproar, the ship loaded with a cargo bound for Hong Kong.

Then gauntman (the player of the Professor), took over as GM for the rest of the evening. He'll be running the next adventure in Hong Kong. By the end of the evening, the group (minus me, as my character wasn't introduced yet) got into Hong Kong, and left the ship to do a little shopping for the ship's cook. After an encounter with some pick-pocketing kids, and some inscrutable merchants we finished up for the week.

This week the group finished shopping and had another encounter with a group of kids (who were presumed pick-pockets as well). This time, Brooky caught one of the in the head with a bucket of oysters and knocked him out. The rest of the kids fled the scene. The girls (feeling sorry for the kid) made Brooky take him back to the ship, where Eva did what she could for him. Eva found Brooky's passport hidden on him along with some other papers (mostly in Chinese, although one was obviously a pawn-shop ticket).

Eventually the kid (my character) wakes up, and Eva invites him up to dinner. An entertaining scene ensues with the kid making disparaging remarks about the (French) food (leaving the (French) cook miffed), repeatedly demanding the return of the papers they took from him, and generally getting along very poorly with Brooky.

The evening ending with boarders in black coming over the sides of the ship. Brooky ran outside to deal with them, while the women spent some time trying to restrain the kid (who seemed frightened, and tried to escape). Finally they just let him go and headed for the wheelhouse.

So far, pretty entertaining stuff. Gauntman has some nice ideas about style and story presentation that I'll definitely have to steal when it comes my turn to GM again. For now though, I'm definitely enjoying playing a character (something I haven't done for something like 10 years).

Well, the fact that I missed posting last week doesn't actually mean that you missed out on a campaign update. No, it's been two weeks without playing our WWII supers campaign. Oops, wait... make that three weeks now. Tonight Brooky's player was out, and since his character was kind of central to the action, we decided to do something else instead.

So... we played Capes! This is a wonderful game that is kind of like a super-hero themed cross between a roleplaying game and a board game. This was totally a blast, and I highly recommend it. Go to the web site and pick up a free copy of their Lite rules and try it out next time you're wondering what to do with a couple friends.

In other news, I finally switched my schedule around so that I'm waking up later in the morning (going in to work later) and getting to sleep later in the evening. I was forced to do this because the only way I could start exercising regularly was to fit it in before I left for work, and I sure wasn't setting my alarm for earlier than the 5:00am it was already set at. So, now I'm up at 7:00am instead. I'm adjusting to the new schedule, and it's actually working out fairly well (other than the soreness that comes from getting into running again).

Happy 4th (to those of you who actually live in the U.S. (although I'm pretty sure that's all of my vast readership (but still, as I've already read once so far, non-Americans can get pretty tired of "people" assuming that everyone on the internet lives in the U.S.))).

Guess what? It's a new month. That means a new project! Actually, I hate to say this, but last month I got tired of doing last month's project, so I started this month's project early. It turns out that I was interested in doing the layout for the Fangor book, but not as interested in doing the actual writing. Ah well. At least now I'm "legal" on my project. Anyway, I've already put in an estimated 26 hours on this project. Pretty good for *cough* only having worked a few days on it.

So, this month I'm doing a programming project. I'm working at making a tool/game for GURPS Traveller. For those of you who keep up, one of the two role playing games I'm running is a Traveller game. This would provide some assistance with planning/running that game, and will also fully implement the trade rules from GURPS Traveller: Far Trader as a playable "game".

Things are coming along very nicely, thanks in part to some work I'd done on creating a generic application framework last time I was doing some programming, and in part to the rather nice cross-platform library called Qt (which happens to be available under the Open Source license in addition to having a commercial license). This is the main library I use at work, and I'm very fond of its power and flexibility.

Anyway, expect some screenshots later in the month, and perhaps I'll manage to get far enough along to consider a release at some point...

On Friday, Mrs. Kheldar and I celebrated our 11th anniversary. As you can see from the image, we went to Outback to get some steaks. I ordered a drink called "Wallaby Darned". I thought I should share the receipt with all of you. Either I'm weird, or it's funny. :)

Anyway, 11 years! Wow! The time sure goes by fast. I am so lucky to be married to Mrs. Kheldar. Sometimes I stop and think of where I might be if I hadn't gotten married right out of college. Ugh... It's a horrid thought. My wife brings out the best in me. She loves me, and she takes wonderful care of me. We make a great team. She is my best friend. I'm looking forward to many, many more years together with her.

We have no idea where we might be in 11 more years, but God willing we know that we'll be with each other.

Well, we played on Monday. The session was pretty much taken up by a fight. The Glass Man (from waaaaay back near the beginning) apparently found out they were around and attack while they were busy digging through papers looking for the stuff the Resistance wanted. Fortunately, Brooky was standing guard, and with Eva's ability to see through walls they were able to set up a nice ambush that threw the attacking soldiers back out of the room (props to Natasha for setting up a ring of illusionary soldiers right around the doorway to sow fear and confusion).

After the first wave of Nazis left the room, Brooky went charging out after them, gunned down one, then realized that the Glass Man was standing there. He went sprinting back in the room, warning everyone. General panic broke out (after all, they only beat him the first time because Brooky managed to use the jeep-mounted machine gun on him), and everyone started making for the windows that looked out over the Thames.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, they realized that Len Springett had been watching all this, somewhat bewildered (having never known about their powers).

Anyway, the professor started using his hysterical strength tap to unblock the boarded windows while Natasha kept the Glass Man surrounded by darkness. Brooky (in his excitement) suddenly discovered that he could grow to 9 feet tall, and launched himself at the darkness-shrouded Glass Man, taking him to the floor.

We left off with Brooky frantically getting off the Glass Man (who'd just started trying to encase him in some of the glass which he'd been using as a 4 inch thick full body "power suit"), Natasha preparing to blast him with a fire extinguisher, and the Professor and Eva preparing to follow Len out the window...