Trying a new method

So, my writing hasn't been going all that well lately.  I've had some ideas, but by the time I sit down to write no motivation.  Not very productive.  At the same time, I've also started a few crochet projects, started at not come anywhere close to finishing.  I'll be sitting watching TV, laptop on my lap, knowing I should be writing but not feeling overly motivated.  Because I know I should be writing, something, anything, my crochet stays in its bag, not getting any closer to being finished either.

This led me to a totally different idea.  What if I could write, without having to actually type and lose motivation, and at the same time get crochet projects done?  This led me to splurge, quite a bit more than I had originally planned, but so far it seems to have been working out quite well.  I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, preferred because I could get it on sale cheaper than standard, surprisingly enough.  If I'm not mistaken, I think that I actually have done more writing since getting this program Saturday morning than I have done in, I'm not sure how long.  And to top it all off,from the very start, it seems to have been far more accurate than I would have honestly expected.

I know that this program would not be for everyone, there's no way that everyone would be able to benefit from it like this.  But at least for me, at this point in my writing and my life, this seems to be just a perfect.  Pretty much exactly what I need.  I just hope that this keeps up, and I continue to produce as much as I have so far in just a couple days.

And yes, this entire post has been written using Dragon.

The intelligence of...flies?

So, apparently there was a fly buzzing around the house last night.  Luckily, I was at work, so I didn't have to see my husband going nuts trying to catch it.  I did, however, call him in the middle of his 'hunt', and he had a rather interesting idea.

Actually, it started with him complaining that the fly (and flies in general) seem to want to land only on things that either you can't reach, or things you don't want to hit when you're swatting at them, such as a light or the TV.  I replied at this point that I really doubted that flies were that smart, that they probably just landed on the TV because of the light from it.  He asked what if they were that smart, flies have been around for a very long time, after all.

Don't get me wrong, I still don't think that flies are at all smart, but what if?  Flies have been around for such a long time, if they were intelligent, what kinds of things could they be up to?  What might they have created?  Despite their short lives, could they possibly on par with us humans intellectually and technologically, if not even more advanced?

Oohh, the ideas....

Aliens on Earth

So, I'm working on a story in which there are aliens that have been living on Earth for years.  That's the easy part, I've got the the why they are on Earth, how they got there, and what they are doing now that they're here.  The hard part is figuring out how exactly they are blending in with us humans.  I mean, their real form would not look human, however for the story to work, they need to appear to be human and blend in.

I know that this has been done in other science fiction in various ways, but at the moment I'm kind of stuck on a way that works for my story.  Take, for example, the TV show Roswell; the main character aliens had human form because they were hybrids and had human DNA with theirs to get human form, but this won't work fro me because to do this my aliens would have to be 'reborn' on Earth.  The other aliens on the show wore what they called 'skins', but that doesn't seem right for my story, either.

The other main idea that's come to mind so far is holograms of the Star Trek variety.  Now, I'm not sure if the holograms actually worked this way in the show, to be able to change the appearance of actual people, but it seemed like a good idea at first.  Until I started thinking about how they would interact, and I doubt that touching or any kind of physical interaction would work very well.

Or, there's the movie My Favourite Martian, where Martin chews nerplex to take human form.  An interesting idea, but since my aliens have been on Earth for over 20 years by the time my story's going to start, it doesn't seem very practical.  I mean, how much nerplex (or similar item) would they need to last over 20 years?

But this still leaves me with the problem of how the aliens in my story can manage to take on human form.  Hopefully I'll solve this problem soon.