Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A consort has been found...

Well, a subsequent day of mailings introduced me to several possible love interests for Harrissa...
  • James Burns (might edit that, but retain the short, dignified Britishness), spy for the opposite side, not really a love interest, more of a flirtation as a half-hearted attempt to disguise their attacks and counterattacks as spies
  • Aaron Able, a nice guy, somewhat more sensible and realistic than handsome hero Buck. Doesn't have her wits and training, but is able to help her out, doesn't do anything stupid to make her job harder than it is.
  • The mysterious Jeff Flight. I have no idea who he is or what part he's going to play, just that he's on the good side, nothing dramatic.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

It all started years ago, in the sleepy little town of Whitewright, Texas...

So I'm back working light industrial at Acor through the Empower temp agency again. Lucky for me I ended up in Finishing again, unluckily back on 2nd. At least I know some of the people still, although they've had a bunch of staffing changes. So yeah, one of the things I love best about working manufacturing is that you get to see how things get made, from soup to nuts. In Finishing we get printed pages from Printing, and run them through various machines to get catalogs, magazines, pamphlets, and, yesterday, a small trifold-and-glued mailing for the Iron Horse Supply Co. This involved unpacking the finished pamphlets, which involved rotating half of each stack so they all faced the same way (they flip half the stack when packing so it stays even, cuz the folded side always goes higher), feeding them into the machine, which printed the address and barcode on, then packing them into post office cartons, generally one box for each city, with exceptions for bigger cities like Austin and Dallas. It was mostly Texas during my shift. Finally you secure the boxes with tape and skid them. A fellow temp introduced me to the chief joy of mailings: watching for weird names, both of people and cities. This, in turn, led to me keeping an eye out for good names, the kind that would be useful in a story. I ended up with three characters who are going to play key roles in a tongue-in-cheek kinda pulp fiction sci-fi, kinda western, kinda contemporary junior fiction: Harrisa Hassenfluke, Buck Peddicord, and Katie Seematter. Harrissa Hassenfluke's personality is going to have shades of Anastasia Krupnik and the smart girl from Recess, she's the smart girl that isn't as pretty as our heroine, the blonde beautiful oceanographer (or maybe just run-of-the-mill scientist) Katie Seematter, who catches the eye of the stereotypical star of the kiddie westerns, the fairly intelligent cowboy Buck Peddicord. There will be a man for Harrissa eventually, he just wasn't in the mailing. (Hogg, Jr. did not sound like the kind of man for her.) Watch for it.