Friday, 26 March 2004

My uncle Keith died yesterday. This was the same uncle I visited last Thursday. He'd been fine then. Today, he's gone. I feel so sorry for Aunt Wilma.

After mom called to tell me last night, I called my dad and told him. Then, I spent the rest of the evening making pictures with Terragen. I didn't even save the pictures, I just wanted to do some right-brained activity that would occupy my mind.

Today I came back to the computer and generated an image rather like what I was working on yesterday. I was going for the canyons in southern Utah that I used to go hiking in. It's pretty close.

How should characters change, over the course of a story?

In some of my stories I've had the character change more or less all at once at the climax of the story--sort of an epiphany. One of things they said in the screenwriting workshop I took a couple of weeks ago was that character change should already been well along by the mid-point of the screenplay.

I'm not entirely sure what I think of that. Perhaps it's just a matter of the kind of story--in an epiphany story the change comes all at once, in other kinds of stories the character changes gradually (or not at all, if it's a story of a character who remains steadfast in the face of adversity).

Spent some time this evening brainstorming story ideas. It's time to start something new, but nothing pops out as the obvious next thing I should write. That's unusual. I figure it's just because I've done so little writing the past three months or so. I'm out of practice.

The plan is to write a bunch tomorrow.

Oh, one more thing. Remember the project I was working so hard on for weeks? They're now previewing that phone. Most of the phones I've worked on these past few years have ended up being available only in Europe. I'm really looking forward to people I know being able to buy a phone I worked on.