Rusty's Blog

Just to get a feel fro submitting to a writing contest, I put together a quick story a couple of months ago and submitted it to the Misfits Writing Contest.

There is a bit of an influence of Corey Doctrow in here, as I had just finished reading Little Brother. That said, I would not say that it is fanfic by any means.

I would direct you to the http://www.misfit.org web site for more information on Misfits as an organization, as well as additional information on the writing contest. The feedback I personally received at the 2009 CONvergence convention was that every submission that was received this year was of substantially higher quality than much of the material they have received in the past. I believe it was an effort to say that while what I wrote was very good in their eyes, they did receive even higher quality writing that went forward and ended up winning the contest. I also gather that the top 5 entries in each catagory were all agreed to by the judges, thought there may have been some disagreement on the order.

I tend to limit myself to short fiction. There is a fair amount of writing formats that I do not do well. As an example I know that I Need to do a lot of work on Dialog, as well as character development. Dialog can help the story move along very well. I would have to say that most of my writing at this point is more narrative than anything else. As a result it often will feel that someone sat down and ‘gave testimony’ when reading my writing. That said, I will try to write to a wider variety of styles in the future. I shan’t be submitting novels by any means. I don’t expect the judges to consider such worthy of inclusion. Their time is limited, and should be devoted to being able to review and consider each contestant’s writing.

If you happen to like my writing, or story telling, I would have to suggest finding a copy of the Misfits Writing Contest book, and read some of the other writing as well. I am a poor judge of my own writing. I have been told to continue, and to submit further pieces. I know I will do the former, and I’m hoping to do the latter as well.

If you are interested in a completely separate piece, and I’m not really happy with the ending of it, so I may re-write it in the future, I have published here as well, http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog/2008/10/short-story-time/

Both stories can be considered a bit dark, though I hope you will find humor in them as well.

I know people who have worked for The Department of Homeland Security. I’m pretty sure that if they wished to they could poke holes in this story that you could pilot the Queen Mary through. I do not hate what they stand for, though I don’t always agree with everything they have done so far, and strongly disagree with some of their policies and recommendations. That said, the people of the USA as a group as well as as represented by or representatives and senators, has elected to effectively eliminate certain ‘rights’ that some consider as included in the Declaration, the Constitution and the bill of rights. Whether you agree with those people or not, we will be experiencing issues for some time to come that we can point directly at those decisions, and recognize that what we ended up with was the logical outcome.

Without further foreshadowing, or other writing…

(more…)

We had a rather significant issue happen after convergence wrapped up this year. I had a short, immediate need to create a volunteer card drop box. I had already been handing out t-shirts, and was able to free up a box that I had brought in with t-shirts. I cut a hole in the top, used a marker to flag it a the Volunteer card drop Box, and directed people to drop their cards in the box as things progressed.

Somewhere along 5 pm on Sunday I dumped all the cards that had been dropped off into a separate box that I took home with me Sunday night, and did a first pass sort pulling out cards that had already had a T-shirt for working 15 hours or more as a volunteer at the convention, and left the box on the table.

Note that at no time have I indicated that the box had been decorated in preparation for being a card drop box. It had not.

In the past we had noted on the volunteer cards that the card drop box would be at Cinema Rex, and for whatever reason it was never there. So I advised the Bridge (our operations people) that the box would be available, and while working out where it would be, we ultimately decided to leave it at the volunteer desk. The combination of events turned into a bit of a mistake.

After we completed packing up the rest of the stuff for the volunteer desk, we honored our agreement with everyone and left the drop box at the desk, and left to come back and finish Monday morning.

So this morning, (Monday) I stopped by what had been convergence central, no box.

I stopped by the Bridge on the off chance that it had been moved there, no luck. So I wen tto where we have historically set up the Volunteers at con Monday morning, and waited.

It turns out that after we all left, the hotel cleaning staff made a final walk through and picked up everything that looked like trash. They folded up the tables, stacked and rolled away the chairs, took down all the remaining posters. Yes, anything that looks like trash. Including boxes that were not decorated. Like the Volunteer Card Drop Box.

So If you dropped off a volunteer card after 5:00 pm on Sunday, your card probably didn’t make it to the Volunteer department, as you trusted it would.

I appologize personally for my involvement, and I know that everyone else I have talked with on the board who has been involved has personally appologizes as well.

We would like your help. If you know you dropped off your volunteer card about the time Closing Ceremonies on Sunday, or after, Please send an e-mail to volunteers@convergence-con.org and let us know what badge number you had (if you still remember or have it) we would like to know that as well. Also any breakdown of departments, however

We do expect to be able to recover most of the information for most volunteers, but we know that there will be some people who’s hours are not going to be captured correctly.

So we will be doing things a little bit differently for next year. Granted I’m expecting not to be the head of the department next year. For that it is a given that things will be going a bit different.

Well, it turns out it was not 60 messages to send, but only about 50. Less really at least four people were ones that I could easily group with someone else, or in one case I’m hoping I grouped them correctly. I also had five or six that I was unable to find e-mail addresses for, so those will have to wait a bit. Hopefully I’ll be able to send those out this afternoon.

Time wise, I think I actually spent a bit over 4 hours assembling what I did, and sending it off, so my estimate was not too far off. It may have been 5 hours though, if so, off by 25% which is a bit more than I like. Fortunately I was able to generate a template of an e-mail and then I pretty much copied in an e-mail address, and a schedule entry, and could hit send. I did add notes to a few messages, primarily to well known friends, but also to some of those where I was pretty sure I could get a 2 for 1 result.

Of course the sun is about to rise, I need to get some sleep, but first I think I’ll go for a run, then walk the pooches. I think they would appreciate getting outside in the cool morning air.

…assuming I can figure out who all to write too.

We had a rather large number of people sign up for various volunteer shifts this last weekend. I can tell exactly how many shifts were signed up for, though it will take a bit of time to identify each person by the name they signed up under, and pull up an e-mail address, and get an e-mail sent off for them. It might be easier if I were to script it, but at the moment I don’t have a system I can send scripted e-mail messages from. Fortunately I should be able to get everything out of the web pages I need to identify what shifts people signed up for, and from there I can attach names, so then I just need to sort by name, then add e-mail addresses, and I should be able to mostly cut and paste into e-mail messages to each person.

Well, I can hope anyway. I just spent something like 2 hours formatting the web pages, and adding the requests. So another 4 hours sounds about right for pulling everything back to a point where I can send e-mail.

Then comes the sending e-mail.

I think I’m going to go get some sleep. Good night everyone.