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dolariSATURDAY - ROAD TRIP!
In order to just get as much rooms between me and my family as I could, I took I-37 and sped down it for an hour, just to get away. Once I got away, I turned around and tookthe slowest possible way home I could.
From San Antonio to Hilltop to Campbellton.
Once in Campbellton, I turnaround and began the very twisty way back home. Campbellton is actually really strange looking, in that it's a ghost town and a livetown side by side. Downtown is a mix of little stores and business next to burned out old and dying and decaying buildings. The city doesn't look like it's dying as much as it's simply letting the dead buildings die off.
From Campbellton to Christine to the junction of FM 140 and Texas 16.
This little junction in the middle of nowhere means a lot to me, and I need to go back and take pictures. My very first story, Part One of The Polychronicon, takes place at this lonely junction. In recent drafts, I'd moved the main action a few miles away to La Parita because I figured the junction would have been built over with lots of truckstops and the like. It was a pleasant surprise to see the whole area was still as wildernessy as I saw it all those years ago (almost 20!).
I'm gonna move the main action back to this little junction, and take pics this time, so I get the terrain right. There is no forest across the street from where I'd placed the CACT building in the story, but there is a gully - which is just as good for my purposes. It's nice to see one of the palces I'd picked for my stories unchanged.
Went back to Christine. Christine is a sad little town. One business, and a million dirt roads leading away from that one business. Sure enough, it was closed on a Saturday at 8PM. If you want gas, you'd prolly ahve to drive to Campbellton some 12 miles away. There's a reason I picked Christine for the settings of one of my stories. It's so desolate, but only an hours drive from a big city. Good place to hide a company that is doing bad things.
From Christine, I turned towards Jourdanton, on a little tiny county road.
And the impossible happened.
I was driving on County Road 423 towards jourdanton. My map didn't have any numbers on it, but the road seemed to be following the map pretty closely. I was enjoying the trip until I came to a fence with a trillion little padlocks on it. The road had ended where it shouldn't have. I had no idea where I was.
I never get lost. I can count the nubmer of times I get lost on one hand.
But I was lost....Well, not completely. Well, yeah, completely. :) I backtracked and found the next road, turned to what I thought was West, and followed it, hoping to hit Texas 16. It looked like West. The sun was generally seting in that direction. When I cam to a T with a dirt road, I knew I had no idea where I was. I tried looking back at my map (it prolly didn't help that it was a map from 1963) and managed to figure out where I sorta was. I crossed my fingers and turned right. Sure enough, I came to a six way point in the road that I was expecting and entered Jourdanton.
From Jourdanton, I made my way back home via Texas 16...I planned to drive it home and take all the old routes that the new highway bypassed. That was before I beheld the traffic snarl known as the Poteet Strawberry Festival. I took me an HOUR to cross two miles. I had completely forgotten about the strawberry festival they hold there every year, and I was now smack in the middle of it. And they knew it. I was assaulted on all sides by peopel hawking their strawberry wares on the trapped cars. Tempting, but I had NO cash on me. Not a bit. Dammit. And they looked so good.
Seeing traffic on Texas 16 was snarled as far as I could see even PAST Poteet, I put my advanced thinking cap on, pulled out my 1963 map of Atascosa county and finagled a way home that didn't involve a major highway back to San Antonio (they were all snarled).
From Poteet, I hit Rossville to Bexar to Mann Crossing to Macdona back home...A good trip, just to get away and gather my thoughts. Mostly on how to work on The Final Nightmare episode of AWFW.
SUNDAY
Okay, I pretty much sat in front of this computer and worked all day. Doing what, you might ask? Completely revamping the AWFW and Closetspace sites. They are now in a much moer reader friendly format, the tables being more vertical than horizontal, I simplified the navigation, added new counters to the site, a Table of Contents and index pages (with disclaimer for Closetspace) changed the colors of the pages from red to gold and purple respectively. I added a new strip to Closetspace, added Episode 9 to AWFW, and finished up Episode 11 of AWFW. I also went back and FINALLY fixed all the text, which was WAY too wierd now that I couldn't do the text the way I used to. I found a nice compromise, redid ALL the text (painful, let me tell you, when you don't have the digital originals to fall back on).
I took a shower kinda late, and that's when The Final Nightmare solidified. It's a roler coaster ride, and MUCH darker than The Dancing Shadows. We will see Andrea tempted by the Angel's counterparts, the Shadows, we'll learn that Hanna is holding stuff back, and that things are being manipulated on all sides behind the scenes, by both the Angels and Shadows. All inside a nightmare that Andrea has. My only real problem is trying to figure out how to make everything look dreamlike. I will most likely just blur the borders on the strip.
Some of the stuff we'll see:
Hanna stands over the sleeping form of Andrea. "To know good, you must also know evil." Shadow eyes appear behind Hanna.
Andrea looking up at the sun, and seeing a Shadow's head replaceing the bright star.
Andrea confronting the grandmother who abandonned her mother.
Andrea cowers away from the Shadowking, who is towering over her. "My name is Morningstar, and your Hanna is not what she has led you to believe."
"I don't want to be an angel. I am an angel."
In order to just get as much rooms between me and my family as I could, I took I-37 and sped down it for an hour, just to get away. Once I got away, I turned around and tookthe slowest possible way home I could.
From San Antonio to Hilltop to Campbellton.
Once in Campbellton, I turnaround and began the very twisty way back home. Campbellton is actually really strange looking, in that it's a ghost town and a livetown side by side. Downtown is a mix of little stores and business next to burned out old and dying and decaying buildings. The city doesn't look like it's dying as much as it's simply letting the dead buildings die off.
From Campbellton to Christine to the junction of FM 140 and Texas 16.
This little junction in the middle of nowhere means a lot to me, and I need to go back and take pictures. My very first story, Part One of The Polychronicon, takes place at this lonely junction. In recent drafts, I'd moved the main action a few miles away to La Parita because I figured the junction would have been built over with lots of truckstops and the like. It was a pleasant surprise to see the whole area was still as wildernessy as I saw it all those years ago (almost 20!).
I'm gonna move the main action back to this little junction, and take pics this time, so I get the terrain right. There is no forest across the street from where I'd placed the CACT building in the story, but there is a gully - which is just as good for my purposes. It's nice to see one of the palces I'd picked for my stories unchanged.
Went back to Christine. Christine is a sad little town. One business, and a million dirt roads leading away from that one business. Sure enough, it was closed on a Saturday at 8PM. If you want gas, you'd prolly ahve to drive to Campbellton some 12 miles away. There's a reason I picked Christine for the settings of one of my stories. It's so desolate, but only an hours drive from a big city. Good place to hide a company that is doing bad things.
From Christine, I turned towards Jourdanton, on a little tiny county road.
And the impossible happened.
I was driving on County Road 423 towards jourdanton. My map didn't have any numbers on it, but the road seemed to be following the map pretty closely. I was enjoying the trip until I came to a fence with a trillion little padlocks on it. The road had ended where it shouldn't have. I had no idea where I was.
I got lost.
I never get lost. I can count the nubmer of times I get lost on one hand.
But I was lost....Well, not completely. Well, yeah, completely. :) I backtracked and found the next road, turned to what I thought was West, and followed it, hoping to hit Texas 16. It looked like West. The sun was generally seting in that direction. When I cam to a T with a dirt road, I knew I had no idea where I was. I tried looking back at my map (it prolly didn't help that it was a map from 1963) and managed to figure out where I sorta was. I crossed my fingers and turned right. Sure enough, I came to a six way point in the road that I was expecting and entered Jourdanton.
From Jourdanton, I made my way back home via Texas 16...I planned to drive it home and take all the old routes that the new highway bypassed. That was before I beheld the traffic snarl known as the Poteet Strawberry Festival. I took me an HOUR to cross two miles. I had completely forgotten about the strawberry festival they hold there every year, and I was now smack in the middle of it. And they knew it. I was assaulted on all sides by peopel hawking their strawberry wares on the trapped cars. Tempting, but I had NO cash on me. Not a bit. Dammit. And they looked so good.
Seeing traffic on Texas 16 was snarled as far as I could see even PAST Poteet, I put my advanced thinking cap on, pulled out my 1963 map of Atascosa county and finagled a way home that didn't involve a major highway back to San Antonio (they were all snarled).
From Poteet, I hit Rossville to Bexar to Mann Crossing to Macdona back home...A good trip, just to get away and gather my thoughts. Mostly on how to work on The Final Nightmare episode of AWFW.
SUNDAY
Okay, I pretty much sat in front of this computer and worked all day. Doing what, you might ask? Completely revamping the AWFW and Closetspace sites. They are now in a much moer reader friendly format, the tables being more vertical than horizontal, I simplified the navigation, added new counters to the site, a Table of Contents and index pages (with disclaimer for Closetspace) changed the colors of the pages from red to gold and purple respectively. I added a new strip to Closetspace, added Episode 9 to AWFW, and finished up Episode 11 of AWFW. I also went back and FINALLY fixed all the text, which was WAY too wierd now that I couldn't do the text the way I used to. I found a nice compromise, redid ALL the text (painful, let me tell you, when you don't have the digital originals to fall back on).
I took a shower kinda late, and that's when The Final Nightmare solidified. It's a roler coaster ride, and MUCH darker than The Dancing Shadows. We will see Andrea tempted by the Angel's counterparts, the Shadows, we'll learn that Hanna is holding stuff back, and that things are being manipulated on all sides behind the scenes, by both the Angels and Shadows. All inside a nightmare that Andrea has. My only real problem is trying to figure out how to make everything look dreamlike. I will most likely just blur the borders on the strip.
Some of the stuff we'll see:
Hanna stands over the sleeping form of Andrea. "To know good, you must also know evil." Shadow eyes appear behind Hanna.
Andrea looking up at the sun, and seeing a Shadow's head replaceing the bright star.
Andrea confronting the grandmother who abandonned her mother.
Andrea cowers away from the Shadowking, who is towering over her. "My name is Morningstar, and your Hanna is not what she has led you to believe."
"I don't want to be an angel. I am an angel."
