On the Zombie Apocalyse: Weapons

So, based on the in depth discussion at our recent writing meeting, I have felt it necessary to clarify my general strategies for the eventual coming of the zombie apocalypse. After all, one can never be too well prepared for those sorts of things...

In any case, my choices of zombie hunting gear would not, in fact, be a shotgun and chainsaw. Too much (infected) blood flying everywhere. Besides, if you ever find yourself at close range fighting a pack of zombies, you're probably going to go down anyway. Especially if the infection can be spread with just a simple bite. Better to keep things at a distance.

With that in mind, my primary weapon would probably be a kind of sniper rifle. Given my previous predilections, I would probably try to go with a Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle. The accuracy is something that would be needed in a world where bullets are rare and the shots are critical, and it is a very effective gun. And really, could you go wrong with the gun the White Death used? I think not. In addition, the gun could be used for hunting; in Texas that would have meant shooting hogs. In Pennsylvania I don't know, deer maybe? Anything better than going herbivore...

For the occasional, unavoidable close range encounter, I think a splitting maul would work the best. With a zombie, the main threats are the teeth, the numbers, and the fact that they are infectious as a sewer drain. Not to mention the 'dead already' thing. So weapons like knives aren't going to cut it (pardon the pun). Not enough damage done fast enough, the stupid zombie's not even going to notice getting slashed. That's not to mention the fact that the more blood you spray around, the more you risk getting infected anyway.

The best way to down a zombie is with one big hit, hopefully one that does the kind of damage that breaks bones and knocks it down. That way if you need to, you can run without having to worry about it hanging on or coming after you. A hammer doesn't break or dull, and the worst I have to worry about is maybe making a new handle for it. Plus, the sledge/axe combo can help with all kinds of work outside of combat, from splitting wood to pounding (dare I say it) fence posts into post holes or something. Of course, carrying around something that heavy would be a drag, but the benefits would totally be worth it.

So yeah, now you know both my primary and backup zombie apocalypse weapons. Good times, right? Of course, to use either of these two, I would probably need to be more experienced. As in, actually owning the rifle and practicing with it, or not being a scrawny, pipsqueak cross country runner. You know, little details. :) The best defense is probably where you would live during something like this anywa, but that's a post for another day...

Anyway, hope you are enjoying the weekend, and I'll see you around!

On Tweets and Meets

So we're back from the LDS Storymakers conference! It was an awesome experience. We got to meet a lot of people (including Ailsa from our writing group! and Aneeka, also occasionally from our writing group!) and listen to a lot of incredibly interesting lectures on writing. The entire thing took pretty much two whole days, so I will try to distill some of the best parts into a five highlight list.

1. Yes, Howard Tayler, I will work very, very hard. Enough said.

2. Sandra Tayler managed to make finances both scary enough to pay attention to and managable enough that I am not totally panicking. Not bad for someone with a Humanities major.

3. Per David Wolverton, sci fi is about a sense of wonder. I should make an extra effort at including that. Heh heh heh...

4. No matter how well your day went at a writing conference, it will always still suck to come home to water leakage and fans trying to dry out your carpet.

5. I won a door prize! It included a discount for a content edit through Eschler Editing. Now what would I use that for... :) Mwahahahaha!

So those are some of the highlights. It was a lot of fun! I will probably write more about the whole thing later. Just giving a quick update.

Speaking of quick updates, I am now on Twitter. Not sure how I like it yet, but we will see what pithy remarks I can make to win the respect and admiration of the entire world, 140 characters at a time. Shouldn't be hard, right? Muttter, mutter, mutter...

On the End of 2011

Well, somehow we've made it all the way through 2011, and man has it been an interesting year. As seems to be traditional, I will spend this last post of December as a way to run through some of the major events and accomplishments that marked my life this year and express gratitude for the opportunity to have them. None of these things came free, but they are each definitely worth it.

First among them was the birth of my first daughter, Sera. She has been a wonderful blessing to my life, and I have been able to get to know this wonderful little being as she has grown up. So far, she doesn't seem to mind me, which is always a plus; hopefully that continues in 2012!

Second, I managed to start a writing career! Wolfhound was published in December, and has already sold a fairly decent amount. Besides that, I've managed to write over 340k new words in four different novels. Now I have a revision schedule that says I will publish each of those four novels in 2012, while writing four more to follow them up. It has literally been a miracle for me to be able to pursue that dream, and I think I've done rather well getting four rough drafts written in a single year. The revising has gone pretty well too, and I have high hopes to be able to continue the process in the coming months. We shall see if my abilities meet my expectations of course, but so far I think we are doing pretty well.

Third, I finally outgifted my wife for Christmas! Mwahahaha! It took me about four years to put that accomplishment together, but I managed it. Okay, it's kind of a small victory, but I say that it was totally awesome, so there. :P We've also been able to keep the writing group going for over a year now, and I've officially been working full time at the emergency room for over a year as well. We've been able to move forward in a lot of ways, and that has me looking forward to what we can accomplish together in the future. Thanks to everyone for all of your help, support, and love, and I hope that you are all celebrating the accomplishments in your own life and looking forward to the dawn of a new year.

So there's the year in very, very brief terms. Here's hoping that after all the trials and obstacles, all the work and the struggle, we can keep moving forward in the coming year. Thanks again for all of your help, and I will see you in 2012!

On Progressing as a Writer

So I was thinking about it today and I have come to a decision. I think I am a better writer today than I was a year ago.

I know that must sound like a really obvious statement, but you have to look at this in perspective. When you are progressing as a writer it typically comes along very slowly. Your projects often take several weeks at a time, and it takes several weeks more to get most kinds of feedback on it. Often, aside from your own opinions on the subject, you don't have a lot of benchmarks to measure yourself by. It can seem like you are just running on a treadmill in terms of your skill, running and running until you wonder if you will ever have a chance to improve. That and there is this creeping fear that it is just as easy to lose your skill as it is to gain it, and that it could have happened to you.

Fortunately, I don't think that has happened to me. Wolfhound, is my first publishable quality novel. I've made it pretty much as good as it will be, and I feel confident that Jacob Hull will do a very good job of leading the way for my other stories to follow. Kingsley and Iron Angels both came afterward, and I can confidently say that the level of skill I've shown in those books is higher than Wolfhound, which given how good that first book is, really says something. Of course, they are also different types of books, so I could imagine that I was just finding a better kind of story to tell. The tipping point, I would have to say, was Badger, the sequel to Wolfhound. It's the same kind of story that Wolfhound was, though perhaps a bit less heavily structured, but it's just plain better. The characters stand out more, the plot is more balanced and understandable, and is all around a better story. I've gotten better!

I think I have had quite a few advantages that have helped me do that. My writing group has been a big part of that. The advice, suggestions and reactions of my fellow writers in that group have helped me to tweak my own writing style and grow as an author. The fact that I have been working flat out for about a full year on four different stories has helped me continue to improve--I didn't need to remember things that I'd learned with a previous project, because there hadn't been any downtime where I would have forgotten it. Finally, I've kind of had the desperation and determination provided by the fact that in a very short time I was going to have to start selling these things. That kind of need to produce things in order to publish on time breeds plenty of motivation to get better in the craft.

So yeah, I've gotten better at writing. Here's hoping that I can continue that progress as Wolfhound and my other stories start coming up over the next year. We shall have to see!

Guest Post by Joe Vasicek: On Music and Writing

So today we have a guest post by Joe Vasicek, an independent writer who happens to be a friend of mine. His books are already up on Amazon, along with several of his short stories that he has graciously allowed you to obtain for free. Go check them out!

And without further introduction, here's Joe!

I have a mild case of ADHD, which means that I alternate between being hyperfocused on an activity to being distracted by anything and everything. As a writer, this can make things difficult, especially when I’m slogging through the middle of a draft where everything seems to suck. But when I get on a roll, the writing comes much easier, provided I can train myself to focus.

Music has tremendous power to cut through the distractions and focus my thoughts on the story I'm trying to write. For that reason, I usually put together a soundtrack for each of my books, and listen to it repeatedly while writing them. Over time, I gradually come to associate certain tracks with certain characters or scenes, so that all I have to do is hit play and let my mind take off with the story.

The trick is finding the right music. For any given soundtrack, there will usually be only two or three songs that really trigger that state of hyperfocus for me, while the rest just help keep me from getting distracted. It's partially about finding the song that evokes the right emotion, but it's also a matter of personal association and things that might have very little to do with the music itself.



For example, when I was writing an early draft of Bringing Stella Home, I saw this clip from Il Mercenario. The scene struck me powerfully, because it features a downtrodden, defeated rebel who is given a second chance and uses it to face his demons like a man.

In a broad sense, that's very similar to James McCoy's struggle from my book: his older brother and sister have been captured by spacefaring barbarians, and all he wants is a chance to prove himself and get them back. Just like the rebel from the movie, James gets knocked down repeatedly--and always gets back up.

As soon as I'd made that connection, I knew that song would have to be in the soundtrack for my novel. For the next two or three drafts, it became the first track I'd listen to--the one that triggered me to start writing.



This song from the Halo 2 soundtrack makes me think of the mercenary team from the novel, who take James in and give him that chance he's been looking for. I remember listening to this on the Washington DC Metro while I was at my K Street internship, thinking of all the things I would put into the story as I worked on the third draft. Music can be great for focusing my thoughts in the prewriting stage, which is often just as important as the writing itself.



Another major song was this remix of a track from Shinobi III, featured on overclocked remix. I had my mp3 player on shuffle and this track came on just as I finished the last chapter of one of the early drafts of the novel. The bittersweet emotion evoked by the music paralled the emotion of the book's ending so perfectly, I can't listen to this song anymore without thinking about Bringing Stella Home.

A lot of these connections are so personal they probably wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to someone just listening to the music, but that's okay--these homemade soundtracks aren't for the reader so much as they are for the writer. In that sense, finding and listening to the right music can be a great writing technique.

In college, I got most of my music from Overcocked Remix. The site features over two thousand fan-made remixes and arrangements of video game music, and not only is it all free, but the quality is amazing. My favorite remixers are Zircon, bLiNd, and Phr4cture; they've also produced some independent stuff that is quite good, Zircon in particular. Well worth checking out.

Nowadays, I get my music from a variety of places. I've recently taken a liking to trance and progressive, with artists such as Armin Van Buuren, Tenishia, Protoculture, tyDi, Jaren, and others. Trance is all about emotion, and so is fiction--that's why we have genre categories like "romance," "thriller," and "fantasy" which revolve around the emotion the stories are supposed to evoke.

But really, it all depends. Every project is different, as the wide variety of the music in my homemade soundtracks attests. When everything clicks and the story just flows, it's pure magic.

To kick off the release of my novel Bringing Stella Home, I'd like to give away a free copy of the companion novella, Sholpan. When the spacefaring Hameji barbarians capture Stella McCoy and make her a concubine to their chief overlord, it seems as if she is powerless to resist. But by refusing to compromise her values, she finds friends in unexpected places, even as the dangerous world of harem politics threatens to destroy her.

To download a free copy, select your preferred format from the story's Smashwords page and input the following coupon code: SN58S (not caps sensitive). The offer expires in a week, however, so be sure to pick it up before the 13th.

Joe's blog is at www.onelowerlight.com. He has all sorts of interesting posts over there, so check that out as well. In any case, your regularly scheduled nerd stuff will be back on Saturday. See you then!

August Update

Alright, here's the situation before I descend into the morass of writing that has consumed me lately.

You know that 3rd draft of Kingsley I was working on? It's done now, though I will still tinker with it. Thanks again to all of my alpha readers; your contributions were greatly appreciated. Next on my list is a query letter revision and a synopsis that I can send out to some traditional publishing agencies and companies. We'll give the regular market some time to take up the series before I go it alone with Kingsley.

Badger proceeds on schedule, despite constant interference from the opposing forces of over-motivation and procrastination. Distraction has made an occasional appearance as well, but we've broken the 50k mark as of last week, and I intend keeping the book on track for a Sept 10th first draft finish date. The story is going relatively well for a first draft, but I think I've grown to hate the clunkiness of my first pass at the stories I write. Compared to the much more improved version on the second run through, it just seems very much unfinished, which tires me a little. Oh well, such is the process of writing.

Iron Angels is still making its way through the writing group. I think I'll probably continue submitting sections until the first draft of Badger is done, and then revise a quick 3rd draft to prepare it for alpha readers. So far its going pretty well, so hopefully I didn't mess it up.

As for Wolfhound, we have cover art! Or at least, a sketch for it. It looks awesome, but I'm going to wait until it is more finished before I post it up for everyone. After all, I don't like people looking at my first drafts, so why would I do that to the artist? Just rest assured, its super cool! Also, with the 3rd draft of Kingsley done, I'll be switching to a quick 7th draft of Wolfhound in preperation for the copy edit.

In other news, Seraphina now has a neck, a hunger for rice cereal and a temper. Life is always getting more interesting... See ya!

On Romance

Somehow, and without my prior knowledge, I have ended up writing a character story.

This may seem obvious to most people. After all, there are characters in every story, right? What I mean is that in this story, the main driving source of the tension is going to have to be the relationship between two of the viewpoint characters. This will be new to me.

Tension from mystery or plot twists is not a new technique to me. My characters, on the other hand, have typically been awful. Jacob from Wolfhound is a decent character, but the main tension from the story lies in the adventure he's on, not necessarily his character arc. Kingsley and Patricia aren't bad, in fact they are the best characters I've had, but the mystery provides the tension that drives their story. This time, in Iron Angels, Gabriel and Susan have to make the story work a bit more on their own.

That makes me incredibly nervous. How do I keep getting myself into these situations? At the very least the writing group will let me know how well--or how poorly--I manage it. Maybe I'll even be able to salvage it and it won't turn into New Realm, my least successful experiment to date. Sigh.

On Waiting for Alpha Readers

There is a certain kind of horrible anxiety that seizes a writer who has just sent his book out to people for them to read. Are they enjoying it? Did that part suck so much they stopped? Are they recognizing your true, mad genius? Or have they scorned your life's work and tossed it into the gutter, never to see how truly special a find it truly was?

In my time giving people stuff to read, from Brellan to Wolfhound to other stories, I haven't had it quite this bad for some time. Maybe because this is the first readthrough and response I will get on Kingsley. Maybe I simply have fewer distractions this time to amuse me while I wait. Or maybe I've created the greatest book of all time so read it you guys!

Ahem. I will attempt to restrain myself now. Calmly. Calml--It's got plot twists and everything! Genius I tell you!

Sigh. It's going to be a long couple of months.

May Report

Alright, so at the beginning of the month I set about twelve goals that I wanted to accomplish before May was over. Shall we see how I did?

1. Finish first draft of Hector Kingsley. I am happy to report that this goal was definitely achieved! In fact I actually managed to get it done before the month started, which could be considered cheating but oh well...

2. Revise around 48k of Hector Kingsley before the end of the month. Cough cough. I, uh, kind of overachieved on this one. I started out doing around twelve thousand words a week, then I discovered that depending on the situation, I could get that much done a day and well... Let's just say that we have a fully functional, readable draft of Kingsley ready for anyone who wants to read it, okay?

3. Read and revise Megan's book, Contractural Gods. Success! Got it done last week in fact, and already returned it to her. It's a great story, and I am glad to have read it. Now we just need to get it published so more people can enjoy it!

4. Begin IA and write 6k per week on it. So far so good! The first draft of this one has already been a bit sloppier than Kingsley, but given that we are talking about a longer story that has been written far, far quicker than Kingsley was at the beginning, I am still satisfied with how it is developing. Now we just need to hammer out a few more details, and we will be set.

5. Visit the temple. Finally got this one done. I think I shall preserve this goal for future months. Going there definitely brought us some peace and direction that we could all use.

6. Attempt to go home teaching. Well, as long as you count the attempt part I managed it. I mostly just succeeded in getting a new home teaching assignment, but we'll work on that one. (Bows head in shame).

7. Do something social. Surprisingly enough, we managed this one. Actually had a night out with friends, baby and all. See, I can be around people too...kinda...

8. Work out the car licenses and drivers licenses. Ummm, kinda dropped the ball here. Might be able to work some of this in tomorrow, but I will need to continue my efforts in this category next month.

9. Begin my job hunt. I certainly started, now I just need to follow through...

10. E publish 'Killer'. It's up on Amazon as a Kindle book! Four people have already bought it. Shouldn't you? Heh heh heh.

11. Buy some new clothes. Much to the delight of my wife, we managed this one. Mostly got work clothes, since that's what I wear for most of the week, but that's okay. Now we just need new casual/sports stuff.

12. Stay sane. Well, how do you guys think I did on this one? Come on, be honest...

So there's my progress for the month. I think I managed to get a lot done before the end. We shall see how June turns out; hopefully I will be similarly productive, but we shall see. See you around!

On Religion in Fiction

Iron Angels is an interesting, challenging story for me.

At it's heart, IA is about a religious group attempting to avoid destruction. It is a fairly common theme in a lot of works of fiction and non-fiction, as our world has plenty of real life examples of the persecution of minority religious groups. There's plenty of inspiration there.

The worrisome part comes in a little later. First of, IA is science fiction, which means a strong religious element is a little, well, unusual. When a sci fi novel includes a religion, the belief system typically turns out to be one of two things. Either it is flat out wrong and possibly the reason some of the bad guys are bad in the first place, or its inaccurate and technically based on advanced science or alien contact the characters simply lacked the intelligence to understand at first. I think maybe the only time that religion has been introduced in a more positive light that I can think of was in Star Wars (the Force) and the original Battlestar Galactica (written by a Mormon). So it is kind of wierd to be working it in to a genre which very often is not friendly to it.

The second part that has concerned me is the fact that I need to include a character who is basically a prophet. With a character like that,it is very easy to wander into Mary Sue territory. An example I guess could be Galahad, perhaps the first example of the Mary Sue. Dude was just so gratingly perfect that people kind of end up hating him and gravitating towards one of the more human, relatable characters like Gawain or Lancelot instead. I don't want to write a Galahad, but at the same time I want this character to be considered an actual head of a real religion, rather than straying into one of the situations that I mentioned above. It has been a rather interesting struggle, but I think I've done a decent job of working it out so far.

The most ironic thing is that while I've been sweating bullets over this aspect of the story, the initial reaction to the first part of IA in the writing group was that the religious part was the most interesting part of the story. Figures...

On Adjusting the Schedule

As you might probably tell from my lack of ecstatic cartwheels, I didn't win the Suvudu writing contest. The news comes as somewhat of a lack of a surprise, given that nearly 700 novels were submitted and my little science fiction action adventure story was likely lost in the crowd. I would still enjoy hearing about where I placed in the pack (after all, Wolfhound could have come in at number 5 of 700, but they only recognized the winner and three runners up), but I wonder if the fact that I didn't win has highlighted some of the issues of going with traditional publishing. The odds of getting published with any particular label are likely much worse than 700 to one, and it depends almost entirely on getting the right book in front of the right editor who happens to be in the right mood. I know Wolfhound is a good story, and I don't want to see it languish in obscurity simply because agents don't want to take a chance on sci fi, or because the editor who reads it just isn't all that into adventure stories. I might need to look into e publishing it instead.

However, there is a more short term consequence as a result of the contest. I have a pretty good draft of Wolfhound that I would want one last batch of readers to do a quick readthrough on before I send it out to publishers, or before I try and get a copy edit done on it so that I can put it up online. At the same time, I am nearing completion on Kingsley's second draft, and will be looking for alpha readers on that story. I get the sense that my writing group is much more excited about reading Kingsley as well, and that there might be some disappointment over getting stuck with Wolfhound instead. So if I do both I run the risk of asking people to read two of my books fairly close together, which may not work out that well. After all, there's only so much reading a person can take...

So what do you guys suggest? Do I wait on Wolfhound and get an alpha read of Kingsley done first, or do I try to do both at once? Or should Kingsley wait instead? Or maybe divide up the readers into alphas and others as omega readers? Nuts. Decisions, decisions...

On E-publishing Killer

So I actually have a story up on Amazon now, sold through their Kindle Store. It's only 99 cents, which means only about 35 cents goes to me each time anyone buys it, but still, it's up for purchase!

I have to credit Joe Vasicek as an example in what I'm doing, since he got his stuff up long before I did. He has three up on Amazon, From the Ice Incarnate, Decision LZ1527, and Memoirs of a Snowflake. For those of you who somehow read this blog and don't know or read Joe's stuff, go buy his short stories. Decision LZ1527 is one of my favorite works of his, and all three are only 99 cents.

In any case, Killer is a short story I wrote a long time ago. It's based on an anecdote I heard in an immunology course at BYU, where a disgruntled researcher spiked her coworkers' donuts with a bacteria called Shigella. Shigella, if you are curious, has the effect of causing symptoms so bad they probably make the person wish they had explosive diarrhea instead. So naturally I took that story, turned it quite a bit darker and more disturbing, and wrote it up. The resulting story actually got Honorable Mention in the Mayhew Short Story contest, and is one of the more interesting projects I had during college. Formatting it to put it online was pretty good practice for both me and my loving, ever-patient wife, and may serve as a basis for the novels I'm writing now. We'll just have to see how things go.

In any case, it's awesome. So go buy it! Pretty, pretty please... :)

Edit: As ordered Drek.

http://www.amazon.com/Killer-ebook/dp/B0050O7R8Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1305560895&sr=8-1

On the Third Book

So, to review my previous posts, my first and second attempt at writing a novel involved basically two poorly backed up fan fictions for Chrono Trigger and Star Wars respectively. Both ended when my current versions of the novel disappeared, leaving me woeful, discouraged and generally unable to force myself to continue.

Now we will fast forward a few years to high school. I had, alongside my futile attempts at writing, developed a series of progressively-better role playing games which occupied my idle time and that of my friends. The most modern version of that hobby, known as the Game to the one or two people who still read this blog, was one that eventually drew me back to the writing habit.

You see, part of the interesting thing about GMing a game is the opportunity to help your players tell a story. It trains you in how to keep a reader hooked on a plot; players and readers both enjoy twists and mysteries enough that the skills crossed over easily, for me at the very least. The background of the Game gave me a ready made world to work with, along with the worldbuilding skills I had developed in making the Game itself. All I really needed was to put pen to paper, so to speak. So I did.

For all of those groaning in despair at the thought of a book written about a role playing game character, consider your feelings entirely justified. The characters in the story, which went from the name Star Heir to Guardians of the Past eventually, were by all accounts horribly uninteresting. The world, while complex and mildly interesting, was way too overdone, and while the plot contained some interesting twists, I drew the whole thing out way too long for the horrible reason of "because that's the way it happened in the game." Combine that with the fact that it stretched, over the course of a year, to about 300 single spaced Times New Roman pages in Microsoft Word (I estimate it was something like 150k to 250k at least) and we have a recipe made for disaster.

Nevertheless, I would draw your attention to the fact that this was a book that I actually finished. I did not lose this sucker; I had at least one or two backups of the story at all times. I introduced characters, outlined scenes, used dialog and detail. For all intents and purposes, this was like a journeyman's project where I refined my writing style and learned how to make a book work.

Even better, I stayed at it! Once I was finished I came back and rewrote it. And rewrote it. And rewrote it. I would tell you how many times I went through this monster, but I lost track around version seven or so. I think I started working on it, and it was pretty much the only book I worked on until my senior year of college. While I'm sure many would consider that time wasted on just one story, I have to remind you that this was like a learning novel for me. It was this story that brought me to my first writing group in Quark, that introduced me to things like Tolkien, Jordan and Sanderson, not just as cool writers (which they were and are) but as people I could learn from and emulate. When I was on my mission, this was the book that I wrote the outlines for sequels to, keeping some small edge sharpened on my writing skills during preparation days whenever I had a rare, quiet moment. For all intents and purposes, this story was the beginning of my love of writing.

And I still have it. The whole thing still sits on my hard drive and jump drives at this very moment. While I currently have no plans on what to do with it, I don't think I will ever get rid of it. It's kind of like an old friend; you may not talk as much as you used to, but it is nice to know they are still there. That, and there's still some part of me that suspects I may do something with it someday, even if it means reshaping it into something a bit more trimmed.

In any case, here's to old stories and the growth they give us. May we never forget them. See you around!

On Reviving the Writing Group

Well, our last couple of writing groups have been a bit, shall we say, lightly attended. I think part of the issue has been that a number of unique events, from baby births to moves to family issues, have kind of stepped in the way, and now it seems to be hard to get back in the habit of coming.

Still, I hope that I can convince people to keep attending. After all, the group has given all of us a lot of helpful criticism and advice, and it always helps to network a little if you are planning on going into publishing. Besides, the writing group is sadly one of the few social things I do on a regular basis, and it would frankly suck not to talk to my friends every so often, even if they are a few hundred miles distant.

I wonder if we should change the time to have it a bit later in the day. Maybe that would help the people stuck on the west coast at the very least. Another solution might be to find new people to join, though I don't know where I could find any. Crud. Oh well, I suppose we'll think of something. In any case, I'll see you around!