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Tonight's way to waste time was called Whispers Of The Heart... well actually, I found other ways to waste time today, including watching a lot of basketball on television and then logging into Second Life and spending hours with my needy friend who, to be honest, I've mostly been avoiding for the last two weeks. Well, it's not that I've been avoiding her per se, I was spending my time writing and watching anime rather than playing SL... but also, I was avoiding her.

Anyway Whispers Of The Heart is a wonderful story, like you expect anything else from a Studio Ghibli film. It's about a girl who decides to pursue her dream of writing fantasy stories. Well, the plot's much more involved than that, but that's the basic gist of it. So I avoided working on my own story by watching a story about someone else who was working hard on their story. How's that for irony?

I'll have to watch The Cat Returns again. "The Baron", one of the main characters in The Cat Returns, is also in Whispers Of The Heart. They say that The Cat Returns is a prequel to Whispers of the Heart, but that's not exactly true... The Cat Returns is a fantasy story in which this cat baron is one of the main characters, whereas Whispers of the Heart is a non-fantasy story in which a statue of the cat baron exists, and the main character writes a fantasy novel about him (not the same story as you find in The Cat Returns either). To confuse things further, The Cat Returns was made after Whispers of the Heart, hence the title... but it really is a prequel because the baron is much younger in it. So how can he return if he's being seen for the first time? It reminds me of a scene from that Don Simpson comic, Megaman or whatever it was called, in which the heroes materialize from a time machine after a trip into the past and exclaim, "We stopped Hitler from winning World War II yet again -- for the first time!"

Anyway I've only watched The Cat Returns once, and that was in Longview with two of my nieces. It was too adult a plot for my younger niece Ella. She said, "Uncle Mark, your movie is stupid!" ...and then had to be drug away from it as the credits rolled and her parents were trying to leave and go home.

I bought some barbeque pork at the store yesterday. I've never actually done that before. I couldn't tell for sure if it needed to be cooked or not... well it was precooked but I didn't know that at first, the labelling was kind of misleading. I wanted it to be hot anyway, so I put it in the oven, and it got all dried out and tough on the outside. I then decided to put it in the steamer, which maybe I should have done originally. That helped a little but it was still pretty tough, not at all like the wonderful barbeque pork that I get at Yak's, or even at other Chinese restaurants. Well, I ate it anyway so it didn't go to waste, but I don't think I'll be buying bbq pork from the grocery store again.

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I think I need to work on my Ian story, because my Kismet story is going nowhere, and I know exactly why. I just don't know how to fix it yet.

The problem with my Kismet story is... first of all, I am trying to tell the story of how became a pirate Captain, and how that fell apart, and how he was eventually saved... and went right back to being a pirate. That in itself isn't a plot. I had thought that the plot revolved around why he didn't want to ever return home, but since he never changes his mind about that, it's hard to call that a plot either. It's a secret from the readers until the end of the story, but nobody in the story is working to uncover that secret, so that doesn't drive the story. It's a secret that might cause major problems for his sister if she were to find out -- but she doesn't find out, at least in the version of the story that I have. Nor can I write most of the story from her point of view, so having her be the one who is changed over the course of the story really doesn't work.

Since Kismet is the main character, or the person I want to be the main character, I need to have the plot revolve around him. Only he's not driven to accomplish anything, he's simply avoiding ever going home. He becomes a ship captain not because he planned to, but because circumstances placed him in a position where he decided he could run the ship much better than the current captain, and many others were ready to ditch the current captain as well. I don't see a plot developing out of that.

The other story idea that I'm playing with is that he refuses to call anyone a "friend"... he's more of a lone wolf type who gets along with people but trusts no one... and in the end he does decide that his companion of several years really is a friend. That's not really the plot either, I think, but if I made that the whole point of the story then it could be, because it shows how he changes over the course of the story. But for now, I still don't really think that's my main plot. Maybe it will become that, in the end. We'll see.

So basically I haven't been able to move the plot forward at all because I still don't really have a plot to move. ^_^ But I know there's a story there, I just need to let it sit for a while until I figure out what the story really is.

( more musings )