What have I gotten myself into?

I've got a really busy month and a half ahead of me. To start with, I'm planning on taking part in NaNoWriMo, 50,000 words in 30 days. To make it even worse, though, for some reason I decided to take in on myself to become the Bookdriver-in-Chief for the Great NaNoWriMo Book Drive in my city. So not only am I going to be trying my hardest to reach that elusive 50,000 word mark, something I have yet to accomplish, but I'm also going to be working at trying to gather 3000 books for the book drive. At least that's the goal.

So, the last couple days have left me wondering what the hell I've gotten myself into. How did I think I was going to be able to manage all of that? Especially since I work nights.

Another thing that I started wondering just today is whether I've got a good, marketable idea for my NaNo. I mean, of course it's good in that it's got me interested, but I would like to try and sell it, to publish it once I've finished. Problem is, the one that's leading to this uncertainty, is that I've never seen anything like my idea in any books.

It's a vampire story, and there's already a lot of those out there right now. But I'm going to be trying to look at how a person changes when they become a vampire, whether the fact that they become a monster is because of the person they are, because of the nature of the vampiric being, or a combination of the two by looking at a number of different types of vampires. Hopefully it'll draw some attention once it's finished.

I need to push this worry out of my mind, at least until December so I can get through NaNo. Write first, worry about publishing later, I'm going to just have to keep telling myself that. Well, tell myself to stop worrying and simply write.

Quick review

I have to say, it is incredibly nice to have a book about vampires it is not 90% about Dracula and Anne Rice.  That's not to say that Dracula and Anne Rice aren't very important in vampire history and legend, but to be honest, if I'm going to the trouble of researching vampires, I would really like to learn about more than simply Dracula and Anne Rice is vampires.

Because of this, Real Vampires, Night Stalkers, and Creatures from the Dark Side by Brad Steiger  was rather refreshing.  Steiger does have an interesting thought on what "real" vampires, though; that they are parasitic spiritual force that will possess humans and give them vampiric tendencies such as drinking blood, or that they are demons, the children of Lilith, who drain people's blood or energy, thereby working at possessing their souls.

Overall the first 200 pages of the book gives some interesting insights, thoughts and ideas about vampires, the kind that are often difficult to get at in other books because of the focus on the "traditional" vampire in literature.  The end of the book becomes more difficult to read.  In places, the writing seems stilted, though it's possible that these stilted sections are accounts from others in their own words; Steiger doesn't always make these sections clear as to who the writer is, sometimes flipping back and forth between reports sent to him and his thoughts on them.  And at the very end of the book was something I really wasn't expecting, a section on extraterrestrial beings.  Sure, I suppose they could fit into the night stalkers or creatures from the dark side, but I was really not expecting to read about aliens in a book titled Real Vampires.

Still, despite these shortcomings in the end of the book, I am still glad I read it as it gave me ideas for my book.

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....