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Oh crud!
I didn't think it would happen this soon but apparently the 1Tetrabyte external hard drive I bought back in late March is now full.
I'm going to San Antonio on Monday and I can't find my MP3 Player charger. CDs are fine and boy are the radio stations far better up there than anything we've got down here but I really would prefer my music. Plus that's a 5 hour drive and it's oh so close to Austin. :::cries::: Austin I miss you! I wish I could steal away for a few hours to drop in on those I left behind, pick up a few burritos from Freebirds or something from Texadelphia, and look something up at the Center for American History but that corridor between San Antonio and Austin becomes a parking lot around the time I'll be there. And gas prices aren't exactly conducive for a quick jaunt to Austin either.
Dean Cain's ahem professor's office. Long before he showed up as an immortal in season 7's "Cure" my dream role for Dean Cain in Smallville was as a one-shot or recurring role as Clark's professor. I desperately want the show to acknowledge in some way other than anvils that Clark Kent will make his living as a reporter for one of the best newspapers in the world. If Clark can run the farm surely he can take a 3 hour journalism course for a semester.
In the world of Forever Knight, I managed to add a bit more to my Tracy fic a while back but I'm stuck again and my one Nick/Nat adult story is still not done. Boy do I feel out of my element with this one. It's just a small section but it's necessary to keep the story from spiraling into a story in which the two of them have a sexual encounter. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :-) Those two stories frustrate me because they're so close to being finished but there's this hurdle that I can't seem to clear. It's very disheartening. Then of course are my two oldest Forever Knight fics, the young Natalie and Richard Lambert story and my present day story. They are the reason why I feel guilty every time I participate in new fic challenges. I take on new shiny projects while my older stuff screams for attention.
It's not that I don't want to write. I do but I'm not happy with what little I do manage to produce. My Masters of the Universe WIP "When Fates Collide" is a good example of this. I haven't updated since late January. That really gets to me. A WIP is a commitment and I've failed to keep up my end of the bargain.
I could just be that I'm forcing it. Back when I only had my WIP to worry about I told myself I was only going to write when the muse was near. If hit happened to to be for the upcoming chapter great. If it was for a chapter near the middle of the story or near the end so be it. I've never really written linearly. I tend to skip around but as a story nears completion its no longer and option.
I've been thinking about perhaps trying fic in a different fandom. I have an X-Files fic that I started back during the show's final season in 2002. I also have a a Friday the 13th: The Series story centered around the decisions made by Catherine Disher's character, a practitioner of the occult, and the effects on her family. Perhaps one of these can help break the slump. Speaking of Friday the 13th: The Series, the first season will be out on dvd in September 23rd.
At first thought 1T seemed so astronomically huge that I thought even with the space consuming vid clips I planned to use it for I figured I might still be able to back up some of my desktop and old laptop's files on it. Yeah not so much and I'm in the middle of clipping Janette clips from Forever Knight. I'm about to start season 2's "Bad Blood". Thankfully this little problem didn't present itself while I was working on my Lois Lane vidlet.
But now it's time to re-evaluate how I'm approaching the 1T space I have at my disposal. Last night I tried zipping the season folders full of episodes but VirtualDubMod doesn't recognize zipped folders. If I went that route I'd have to remove whatever episode I chose to use and place it somewhere outside the zipped file so that VirtualDubMod could recognize it. That would really become tedious and I'd always planned to delete the episode files after I'd clipped everything I could possibly need from them. What I'd planned to do was create a little repository of clips that I knew would be good for vids. I'm nowhere near that point. I have all of seasons 1 & 2 of Forever Knight on the drive so that's a total of 48 episodes. That's a lot and video and audio take up a lot of space. Right now I've only clipped all the Schanke scenes for my WIP Schanke vid but I'm only slightly passed the halfway mark with all the Janette scenes for my Janette vid. Eventually Natalie was going be be next and then Nick. I'm simply going to have to spend some quality time with my hard drive. I don't think I'll be able to touch the episodes themselves because there's still stuff to mine from them. However the clips themselves, even if VirtualDubMod's clip length limit of 3 1/2 minutes keeps things pretty short, can still be trimmed down some more.
A 1T hard drive should be more than sufficient for my needs. I guess this is all about the learning process. Also, even though I really hadn't planned on vidding Smallville I had a lot of fun with my Lois vidlet. I knew at the time that space was limited so I didn't add all of the Lois episodes nor did I clip all of her scenes. Thankfully the concept for the vid was so clear in my head that I could clip directly to my needs. But now the possibility of vidding Lois or even Smallville in general looms so I have to keep my storage needs in mind.
But now it's time to re-evaluate how I'm approaching the 1T space I have at my disposal. Last night I tried zipping the season folders full of episodes but VirtualDubMod doesn't recognize zipped folders. If I went that route I'd have to remove whatever episode I chose to use and place it somewhere outside the zipped file so that VirtualDubMod could recognize it. That would really become tedious and I'd always planned to delete the episode files after I'd clipped everything I could possibly need from them. What I'd planned to do was create a little repository of clips that I knew would be good for vids. I'm nowhere near that point. I have all of seasons 1 & 2 of Forever Knight on the drive so that's a total of 48 episodes. That's a lot and video and audio take up a lot of space. Right now I've only clipped all the Schanke scenes for my WIP Schanke vid but I'm only slightly passed the halfway mark with all the Janette scenes for my Janette vid. Eventually Natalie was going be be next and then Nick. I'm simply going to have to spend some quality time with my hard drive. I don't think I'll be able to touch the episodes themselves because there's still stuff to mine from them. However the clips themselves, even if VirtualDubMod's clip length limit of 3 1/2 minutes keeps things pretty short, can still be trimmed down some more.
A 1T hard drive should be more than sufficient for my needs. I guess this is all about the learning process. Also, even though I really hadn't planned on vidding Smallville I had a lot of fun with my Lois vidlet. I knew at the time that space was limited so I didn't add all of the Lois episodes nor did I clip all of her scenes. Thankfully the concept for the vid was so clear in my head that I could clip directly to my needs. But now the possibility of vidding Lois or even Smallville in general looms so I have to keep my storage needs in mind.
~~~
I think I might have a potential Forever Knight newbie/convert on my hands in my new co-worker. On a slow afternoon she brought up Moonlight as being a show she needed to catch up on. The conversation turned to genre television in general and the different incarnations of vampires on tv. We were talking about the cheesy but hilarious 80s flashback from one of the early Moonlight episodes and she mentioned how much she loved the idea of vampires in the 1980s. That was an opening so huge you could drive a Mack truck through it. Naturally I brought up Nick Knight and it's crazy 80s soundtrack, the Bobby Brown peddling LaCroix, and Janette with her uber 80s gown complete with shoulder pads. And of course the 1992-93 season of Forever Knight still suffers residual effects from the 80s so I threw that in as well as something she should check out. I didn't want to come on too strong with excitement but I offered to bring her my Nick Knight dvd, which she agreed to.
In the spirit of friendly conversion she thought I'd make a good candidate to check out one of her favorite series of novels. It's only fair so I agreed. She test drives Nick Knight and hopefully the first few episodes of Forever Knight and I test drive <drum roll please> "Fantasy Lover" by Sherilynn Kenyon from the Dark Hunter series. Yep. The first edition cover complete with Fabio type beefcake doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. She explained that while it does have it's bodice ripper romance novel aspect it's primarily a paranormal series that deals with vampires, werewolves, and gods. The book is still in the plastic bag she brought it in and I haven't read the back cover although I did see the words "Fun!" and something about how the gods haven't had this much fun since Xena. I would really hate to disappoint her by not liking it but it really doesn't sound like my cup of tea. She seemed so excited too to have someone to discuss her favorite books with. She said none of her friends share her reading tastes
~~~
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I think I've hit a bit of a creative slump ficwise. I've got several fics in various stages of completion and I'm struggling to make any good headway with them. I had such a pleasant betaing experience with "Man Bites Dog" that I hoped that good fortune would carry over to my circa season 6 Journalism!Clark fic. I thought wrong. Poor Clark. For now he'll remain exactly where he is, sitting in In the world of Forever Knight, I managed to add a bit more to my Tracy fic a while back but I'm stuck again and my one Nick/Nat adult story is still not done. Boy do I feel out of my element with this one. It's just a small section but it's necessary to keep the story from spiraling into a story in which the two of them have a sexual encounter. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :-) Those two stories frustrate me because they're so close to being finished but there's this hurdle that I can't seem to clear. It's very disheartening. Then of course are my two oldest Forever Knight fics, the young Natalie and Richard Lambert story and my present day story. They are the reason why I feel guilty every time I participate in new fic challenges. I take on new shiny projects while my older stuff screams for attention.
It's not that I don't want to write. I do but I'm not happy with what little I do manage to produce. My Masters of the Universe WIP "When Fates Collide" is a good example of this. I haven't updated since late January. That really gets to me. A WIP is a commitment and I've failed to keep up my end of the bargain.
I could just be that I'm forcing it. Back when I only had my WIP to worry about I told myself I was only going to write when the muse was near. If hit happened to to be for the upcoming chapter great. If it was for a chapter near the middle of the story or near the end so be it. I've never really written linearly. I tend to skip around but as a story nears completion its no longer and option.
I've been thinking about perhaps trying fic in a different fandom. I have an X-Files fic that I started back during the show's final season in 2002. I also have a a Friday the 13th: The Series story centered around the decisions made by Catherine Disher's character, a practitioner of the occult, and the effects on her family. Perhaps one of these can help break the slump. Speaking of Friday the 13th: The Series, the first season will be out on dvd in September 23rd.