Is it me, but when I read a story in the present tense, it kind of puts me off.

The stories. I am sure are fine and well crafted, but I am much more comfortable with past tense.

Am I being a silly girl and should I get a life?

Hugs

Worried Sue from the UK.

I know we have a number of sci-fi and space-flight geeks here. If you are one of them, you might enjoy this 45-minute NASA-produced video of shuttle launch footage previously unseen by the general public:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs&feature=player_em...

I was reading my favorite sex-advice columnist this morning and his "letter of the day." One commenter posted a reply that some might find a "bit" pretentious. I liked it. I might do a needle-point of that last sentence. I'd have to learn how to do needle-point first, but...

Apparently a few days ago, the Gawker network of sites was hacked and the perpetrators managed to get hold of the password database of contributors. In amongst the stuff they've republished is an anonymised list of over 188,000 entries from the password database.

In commenting about the characters in a popular serial on this site, I made some rather unflattering, but honestly felt comments about several of the characters in the story. I felt, and I expressed it before, that they were seriously flawed and should not be held in very high esteem. Well, I received a comment to my comment saying that my outlook was far too dark, and that I didn’t understand the characters at all, that my life experience was such that I had no business making the comments I did make.

Lilith has created a Wiki for the Center universe unfortunately neither she nor I are really versed on how to put it together so right now all we have is a main page with a picture and nothing more. I've gotten her permission to write this in hopes that you...our wonderful fans...can tell us what you'd like to see on the Wiki. I know there's already a list of Center characters at http://thecenter.x10.mx/ but this Wiki will help us put down timelines and things like that...helping those lost in the Universe...kinda like me.

I hear various people saying that kudos or kudoses or kudi or whatever they are in the plural, are no signifier of a good writer or anything else, which might question why we have them.

I have been married to a wonderful women for 20.5 years. She and I have always had a very deep connection. Today we finally really talked about divorce.
She has grown so much in the last few yaers, she is ready for her new life now, I will always be there for her when or if she needs it.
We will divorce when our 20 year old son is stabe in his life and our financial selves are seperated.

I must say that looking at my new future it seems frightning yet freeing. I can live as I wish yet who will that be?

So, the last two weeks the respiratory junk has slowly been overtaking me. The sum of it is, I have a bad cold on top of a dry hacking cough, and I'm pretty miserable.

As a result, my mate and I stayed inside yesterday, concentrating of making Christmas presents (quilts, decorative pillows, etc). She sews, I cut, and I do the machine embroidery. All day long I'd been smelling something hot but I just thought it was the steam iron, or the adhesive spray I use when doing embroidery.

Well, I guess I blew it. I "came out" to some of my friends, and I thought it was cool-but none of them will talk to me now. I guess I could have seen that coming. I just feel so down, now. Somedays life just sucks. And people wonder why I'm depressed.

Wren

You know, this story started out as an exercise in just seeing what if? I thought it would be fun to give the evil side of things it's turn instead of doing all that nicey, nicey good guy stuff.

It turns out that I have two good, decent people (Sam and Dylan/Dahlia) stuck with being creatures who are inherently evil in spite of their own personal inclinations. And everyone who sees them in this new world are going to just assume that they are evil because of what they are.

So I have been working on 300 Rains a lot and reading more books on cultural anthropology. I am trying to incorporate plenty of that into the story without overwhelming it. That can be rather tough sometimes, especially when you are in a section where a lot of the dialogue is technical and you have to figure that most readers are not well versed in the specific disciplines speech. That has led to a lot of work trying to make sure things read smoothly.

Well, I'm close to 3000 words into my new story. That's between 2 chapters unfortuantely.

I'm 2 scenes away from closing out Chapter One, and have a good start on Chapter two. The 2 scenes I need for Chapter One are probably 2 of the more important ones for that chapter. The ending scene is already written but those two scenes just don't want to come out, even tho I seem to know in my head what will happen.

Thanks again for all those who welcomed me here and those who have PM'ed me feel really welcome. I've been trying to post where I could, however I lost a lot of my links when my laptop hard drive, just 2 days after my first post. I'm still trying to find all the stories I had linked and say thank you to all the wonderful authors for sharing their stories with us. I will get to you all (I hope) and thank you all.

Also I've been asked I if write ... I have a short story about 500 words that if anyone is willing to proof let me know.