Draft 4

Jeigh had one of those jobs where she sat behind a desk and said "Thank you!" a lot. This allowed her to multi-task, something she'd grown accustomed to. All August, she'd been using this time to work on the fourth draft of her novel, Emerican Adventure. Today being her last day of work, she'd just about finished making the first pass at the fourth draft, but she'd left a few things for later. Now she'd have to start poking at this tedious list, which is as follows, in no particular order, though the order it would get done in would most likely be from easiest to hardest.

Get rid of movie references
Separate voices a little more
Emphasize Vaughn voice in his dialogue
Give Wyatt a nervous tick
Smoother transitions (?)
Topaz keeps his goggles
Emerica wears glasses
Develope relationship between Emerica and Earth better
Check over-used words like "probably" "maybe" "like" "moment" "rather" "a bit" "seemed" "completely"
Watch common words like "dude" or "wuss"
Give Maximus more sounds, have him make sounds
Find and replace nodding, smiling, walking, and looking
Apparently there is no such word as contently. Dang it.
In part 8, stop repeating the scene
Maximus' dialogue should be distinct
Someone should notice Topaz pats his pocket a lot
Slow down part 10
More believable disguise -- new way to lose an ear
Mold or Mould?
Is there subtext to the cave? Not intended...

And what the heck was up with the English language? Jeigh was totally confused. She knew you can have "it is," "it was," "it has been," "it had been." Now, if you're going to put must in it, what do you have? "It must be" and "it must have been." That's it? Two musts for four verb tenses? You say "It must be" for "it is" and "it was"? Jeigh didn't think she could cope with this any longer. She wanted someone to comment on her blog and straighten her out. If she was right, then she wanted that person to fix the language so she wouldn't have to deal with it.
Jeigh had also tried to write a log line while sitting at the bus stop. She couldn't believe she needed to wait at the transfer point for half an hour everyday just for her bus to arrive and take her to work. Crazy people liked to talk to her there, so she preferred to look busy. In this act of pretending to be busy, she actually found herself distracted by the difficulty in writing the log line. She'd written log lines before, but this one wouldn't write itself. Log lines usually come in threes. So what were the three points of the story? She narrowed the themes down to religion/purpose and friendship/love. But no one wants to read a log line that sounds like every other book. She realized the reason log lines are so hard is because they do not tell the soul of the book, they lie just to get people interested. So what was the story about on the surface, not the deep stuff?

a man without a home
a universe with a secret
a time machine
a girl with the answers
a man with a time machine

Curiosity, danger, adventure.
Friendships form, secrets of the universe call, time unfolds, adventure on.
Too vague, too universal, too cliche.

Bliss in the Form of Music

Jeigh just peed herself with absolute pleasure. Pee -- everywhere -- but in a positive sense. Some distracted adolescent at Best Buy had told her that the new Josh Joplin CD wouldn't be in the store for three days after it was released. What was this crap? And it just had to take him five minutes to pull up this information?

But all of this was past, for today Jeigh purchased this superb record, Jaywalker. Oh such brillance. This album was so much more happy than the others too. Dancedancedance!

Now if she could only get back to her home town in October for his CD release concert.

Dreaming the Future

Something very few people knew about Jeigh was that she had psychic powers. The most prominent reason no one knew was because Jeigh had only discovered these powers this afternoon. The night before, she'd had a dream about her dog. She'd had many dreams about this five-year-old Italian Greyhound named Frisket lately. In one, she ran in circles around Jeigh, making everyone laugh. In another, Frisket was eight years old and had turned from the blue-seal color she got from her parents to a stark white. In the one last night, something had accidentally caught Frisket's leg and tore the smaller bone in her back leg free. Because of this, her foot fell off. No, it wasn't gory in any sense. There was no blood, just some yellow goo that came from her leg and mouth. The foot just fell off like it had come loose from an old rag toy. Frisket started screaming the way small dogs do, and as a result, everyone in the room started screaming because no one knew what to do. Eventually Frisket got into Jeigh's arms. Somehow the goo got into Jeigh's mouth, and she could still taste the foul substance when she woke up.

Around two o'clock in the real world, Jeigh's mother came home to take her brother to the orthidontist. He did not have his shoes on yet, so he began to run toward the stairs. Frisket jumped from the couch and Jeigh's brother's foot and Frisket's front let connected. Then came the most horrible screaming ever. Most of it was from Frisket, but Jeigh and her brother screamed in unison. Jeigh stopped screaming, realizing this was the second time today that this had happened, but one had been a dream. Jeigh and her mother rushed little Frisket to the doctor just down the street. The X-ray showed two clean breaks, but now Frisket would have to wear a pink cast for another two months (she had an accident with a pruning sheer in June and cut open her back leg). Jeigh would be leaving for college in two weeks and would not be around to take care of her dog, so she hoped that everyone who heard about the accident would pray for Frisket.

True, Frisket's foot did not fall off, nor did it emit strange yellow goo, but her leg did break, just like in the dream. Is there some part in all of our brains that can get images into the future, only channeled into our conscious mind every once in a while by dreaming? Is there some pattern to life that we can't see, but the depths of our brains can sense? Was this just a coincedence?

New Beginnings

Jeigh sat at the computer, the digital clock silently changing it's little white numbers from 11:21 to 11:22. It was so late and she wasn't even tired yet. What's this, a blog? She noted the scribbles on the sheet of her list of things to do, a yellow Post-It with a rough sketch of a sad looking bunny she'd tried to copy from Josh Joplin's new webpage. Today she'd recieved an email from Fast Web that told her they had not chosen her for the job of student blogging. They would have paid her to write a couple times a week during her college adventures, but alas, they picked two other people. I'll show them, she thought. I'll make my own blog, and it shall conquer the Earth! Well, less than the whole Earth, actually. Not even the whole internet, but the fiction world, yes. Absolute power.

Jeigh had a little trouble aquiring this blog as the computer was slow and constantly made her re-type everything, losing her previous entries into digi-space. And then the matter of a word for the website. When it wouldn't give her "artwriter" she decided to make up the word, creart, a combination of creative and art. And the layout. She wanted something dark. Black space always looked so much less cluttered and easier to fill. Now all she had to do was think of something to write as her first blog entry so that she could preview the page.

Jeigh was a writer, more specifically, a creative writer, art writer, fiction writer, the Dutchess of the Pen, the Widdler of Words, Medium to Muses. Yes, sadly, she could not take all the credit for the words that spilled onto the keyboard (and occasionally caused shorts in the system) for someone lived inside her head and told her stories. Sometimes it screamed. Other times she screamed because she couldn't hear it anymore, but she eventually realized that if she'd stop screaming, she could hear that voice again. Patience and relaxation coaxed the muse out. She wrote short stories, even long ones. She'd written two novels and some very bad poetry. She even wrote a song today. She hoped that this raison d'etre of hers would shape the rest of her life. It'd dictated everything so far.

Things were changing for Jeigh, though. She had to move away to college, and no, not an art college -- an athletic college. And unfortunately, Jeigh not only did not do sports, she didn't like them. And she didn't like people that liked sports either -- at least to an extreme sense. Would she be able to find other artists like herself in a campus full of preps? Sports, and raves, and beer, how dull. What about theatre? What about music? And prose, of course. She prepared herself for the journey -- a sole artist in a world of drones.