Unconventional

I meant to post something about the convention we were at last endweek. It was up in the mountains, not far away to the east. We left the girls behind with my brother and his wife, which they didn't much object to.

On Ullerday, we went out looking for Wil Wheaton. He was one of the reasons we went to the convention, after all, because he was going to be playing the lead role in the movie adaptation of Nicole's novel, Running On Instinct.

The hotel we were staying at only had one floor, but it was very large, and the hallways were all on a slope. We had no idea where Wheaton might be staying, so we decided to try downhill first. Of course, it's not like we knocked on everybody's doors to see who was there; we just hoped that there would be a throng outside Wheaton's room or something.

We must have been on the outside edge of the hospital, because at the corner we could only turn left, which continued going downward. As we continued, there were a number of passages to our right, but we kept going until we found the next corner. We saw a lot of people, striding busily or wandering aimlessly, but no throngs. We asked a couple of people, but they didn't know where Wil Wheaton was staying either.

After wandering around the edges and then through a number of internal intersections, we headed back to our room...where we found Wil Wheaton's room three doors down from our own. There was no throng, but he happened to have his door open, and we glanced in. He was playing some console game on his TV, and we decided not to disturb him.

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The trip home could have gone better. The mountain road from Lloydminster to Vegreville was nice and icy, but once we hit the foothills we kept hitting little patches of gravel in our lane that made it hard to stay on the road. By the time we got to Vegreville we actually had to have one of the car's skates resharpened at one of the service shrines. As you can image, that slowed things down somewhat. Luckily, the rest of the roads back into Strathcona had been well-pebbled by the road crows, and we coasted back into town with no more trouble.

Double Decker

I can see that some of you were taken a bit by surprise by my last post. Especially the bit about the movie and Wil Wheaton. So let me fill in a few of the details for those who may have been out of the curl on this one.

Ever since Running On Instinct shot to the top of the New Amsterdam Times Bestseller List, the clickie studios have been trying to get the rights to it. This led to an armed conflict with a body count that made the publishing bidding war look like a leaf-eating contest in comparison. Eventually, Paranoid Pictures emerged triumphant, and we began working with them.

Now, most of you remember Wil Wheaton as the star of that James Cameron movie "Titan", which was certainly when he shot to national prominence, but my wives and I first saw him on a short-lived TV show called "Star Trek" about 200 months ago. He immediately captured our attention as the neurotic, alienated teenager Wesley Crusher who cut a swath through the women in the show--both onscreen and off. (That's where he met his first wife, Ashley Judd, by the way.)

So we're quite happy to have him on the project. Oh, sure, he's got that volatile temper(which is why we didn't try to interrupt his gaming in the hotel room), but he's a professional all the way. And it's absolutely sheer coincidence that both of his wives are in the clickie too. Well, maybe not sheer coincidence, but they will both do justice to their parts. Wil is of course playing Matt, and Jennifer will be playing Genevieve; Ashley will be playing Penny. We're not at liberty to disclose the rest of the cast yet, but there will be more big names, as well as some promising newcomers.

Nicole will be of course supervising the production closely, and Cameron is falling all over himself to accommodate her every whim. The motographing will be on location, mostly in Strathcona and Brisbois and in the maze of country roads in between.

This means, of course, that we have to stop putting off fixing up the house in Brisbois. We bought it twelve months after we bought our current house in Strathcona, when we got tired of constantly staying in hotels when we went to visit down there. To date we've never stayed in it longer than three weeks, but I think the motographing will change that. At least we don't have to buy a house in Sacramento to be close to the actual studio.

Level Head

It's time to catch up on some of the books I've been reading recently. With all the beheadings at work, I've been pretty busy, but I do snatch the occasional mud break.

The last one I just finished was by an author named Dick Francis, who I'd never heard of before. It was hard to get into at first, because it's one of those books where the author just plunges you into a bizarre new world without stopping to explain a lot. For instance, it took me a while to realize that a "horse" was a type of animal that they apparently used for recreational purposes in this world. I ended up making a list of the confusing terms that I ran across, most of which I was able to pick out from context: "bread"(apparently some kind of foodstuff), "tire"(another word for skate, I gather), "fan"(still no idea), and "vote"(some kind of mass-participation ritual). Still, once I got past all that, the plot was engaging enough, and I find myself cheering for the protagonist to succeed. I wish I could remember the title, but I left the book at work so I can't check.

Now I'm reading a historical novel, set on the rings of Titan in the second century. It seems fairly well-researched, moreso than that James Cameron clickie a few dozen months ago(as award-ridden as it was). I remember vaguely taking the History tapes about this many months ago, but I never rnaboosted it, so it's mostly gone. Still, the occasional name triggers a memory flash that often leaves me disoriented for several minutes. "Tarabostes", for instance. ...Whoa, that one's still pretty strong. Hope that didn't happen for anyone else who ingested that tape...