Tag: fiction

A Childhood Friend
Your score was 38 in Unbelievability!
You are your author’s childhood friend, and a good example of a fun character for fiction writers everywhere. You’re a pretty neat person- but still very real. You are a person of few extremes, but you have your moments of glory. When you’re at your best, people can be wowed by you- but you’re not always at your best. And that’s OK. You’re only human. A novel with you as a character would sell quite well. It might not make the New York Times’ bestseller list, but then again, it might. Who knows? Most people would certainly buy a book with you as a character in it. Well, they might wait for it be available in paperback- but they’d buy it eventually.
A Childhood Friend

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

OKCupid.com OKCupid.com
You scored higher than 17% on Implausibility
Link: The Are You a Plausible Character? Test written by coldrose on OkCupid.com

I’d finished reading all the books and listening to the CD, I borrowed from the library during my previous visit. So last night, I went back to return all of it and get more. After dropping off my returns at the circulation desk (slightly hampered by an old lady’s cane hanging down over the return slot), I wandered over into the fiction section to look for Temple of the Winds (Sword of Truth, Book 4). I first started down the wrong aisle (Goodkind, not Jordan you dolt!) but managed to eventually get myself sorted out and going down the right one.

I got about halfway down the aisle and started to walk around a young lady looking at the shelves when I realized she was standing directly in front of the section I wanted. I excused myself and started looking for Temple of the Winds but it was not to be found. I decided to go ahead and grab a couple of the following books (SotF, FotF and tPoC). As I was turning to leave the aisle, the young lady held up a book (WFS) asked me if it was the first book in the series and if it was any good. I reassured her that it was both the first book and an entertaining read. She then asked if the rest of the series was any good. I replied that of what I’d read (the first 3 books) WFS is the best.

This seemed to disappoint her somewhat and I was going to explain that the other books weren’t bad, when a scruffy looking fellow walked up to me asking for help. He told me that he works for the carnival1 and then went on to explain that he’s not familiar with the Coralville library. I tried to tell him that I wasn’t really familiar with it either2 but he interrupted me saying that he could just tell that I knew libraries and could help him locate a book by Dean Koontz called “Fireball” (he thought). Since the young lady didn’t appear to want to talk any further and I knew Mr. Koontz’s books would just be an aisle or two over; I helped the scruffy guy to find the right section.

When I recounted this story to my wife later that night; she didn’t seem to understand how odd an experience this was for me. After all, I’m 6 foot 5 inches tall and most people don’t talk to me unless they already know me. To me the whole trip to the library had been surreal; but as I started to explain this to her, she interrupted and said…

Oh honey, you just look like a book nerd.

*sigh*

1 Coralville brings in a small carnival every year as part of our 4th of July celebrations.
2 This only being my 2nd visit to check books in probably 6 months to a year.

ICON is a local science-fiction convention that is run by some people I know. In previous years, their website has been a monstrosity built using M$’s Frontpage (similar to their parent org’s1 current website). However for the next ICON2, the comittee (con-com) running the con includes people I personally know and who I was able to con persuade into doing something a bit different. You see, I had this vision of a website that the con-com could log into and update themselves. This would free up their web person to simply cook up a pleasant3 design and allow the site to be updated whenever the con-com needed it vs. whenever the web person could get around to it. Since I know the main man of the con-com for ICON 30; I proposed the idea to him and he seemed interested in the idea. So I cooked up a site that I ran on my little home server to give him something to look at. Later he stopped by for an evening and said that the site looked good to him. Shortly thereafter, I got the site posted and now ICON30 is running WP to keep people informed about the con. There are a few customizations and plugins that have been added onto the site to make it work the way we wanted, but overall I’m very pleased with it.

What my next step? Why to redo the parent org’s website of course! Though, I’m thinking that they might want/need something a bit more involved than what I cooked up for ICON.

1The parent org is Mindbridge
2ICON 30, Slaying the Dragon of Tradition! October 28 – 30, 2005 in Cedar Rapids, IA
3Naturally said design would need to be based on valid XHTML & CSS.