Tag: new york

Brand New Day – Week 3 – Caught Between the Bell Curves

It’s Thursday night. I want to knock out a post before I get to bed; I’m going to Queens Comic Con tomorrow with Kenney Broadway and Chaos Mechanica. It’s an outing that was pretty exciting until I 8PM hit earlier and I realized that I somehow didn’t get anything done for my book today.

I know that’s not exactly fair—I made business cards today. And edited a few of next week’s posts. And worked out my schedule for Comic Con. And worked a bit on my big contribution to this year’s Con (a post for Infinite Ammo that’s still incredibly unfinished considering how complicated it’ll be to execute [thankfully Darth Healthcare {we’re just full of code names on that site} volunteered to help, but even the third of its writing portion, which I started months ago, is still unfinished and needs a ton of tweaking]). Still though, the goal was to roll out of bed, lay down on my couch and do that weird thing where I brainstorm by staring up at the ceiling (and maybe dozing off) to figure out exactly how the next chapter is supposed to work (which always leads to me crossing out the first few pages I get from the brain storming session and rewriting them later, after I discover the way the chapter should really go while doing something as unrelated as, say, petting a cat [as far as efficiency is concerned, it’s about as roundabout a way of writing as using brackets within brackets to steer myself away from a point {I swear I’ll stop this now}]). I was set to wake up and write just as I was ready for this whole Brand New Day thing to be relatively simple.

Relatively, as in I knew it would still be hard, yes. But I didn’t know I’d have so much work to do for Infinite Ammo that I’d realize the sun went gone down and wonder where the time went on a daily basis.

It doesn’t help that I feel determined to be unhappy; when I’m home, I wish I was outside. When I’m hanging out with friends, I wish I was out walking (I have a weird thing with taking walks and traveling), or home writing. And it’s not like I’m ungrateful or don’t want to hang out with my friends, I just want to do everything at once and I can’t. It’s really frustrating. Now that Chaos Mechanica and I have made a site that’s still going strong and has gotten nearly 3,500 hits, it’s lost its professional luster; all that there is for me is finishing this novel and possibly starting other ventures I’ve considered lately. There’s now a gratification curve to what I do, which, now that I say it, is possibly the same reason why I probably don’t feel completely gratified when I hang out; it’s not that the people I spend time with are lame or unfulfilling friends. It’s that… Well, you’ve probably loved someone so much that you didn’t know what to do when it didn’t work out with them, no matter how hard you tried.

Well, I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m caught between the bell curves and it’s a silent kind of unhappy that I try not to talk about to anyone. I want to finish more of this book every week. And I love her and miss her so much that I’m writing about it on my blog like this is high school.

Okay. Deep breath. One of those problems I can fix. The other I can ignore.

It’s time for bed; I can brainstorm/write on the train (where, oddly enough, I do my best drafting). I can spend a few hours at this Queens Comic Con, meet up with other friends afterward, hopefully go to Occupy Wall St. like I’ve wanted to. All of that is important.

One day at a time.

Sigh

After chatting with friends I decided to take down the Character Art page. I’ll have it back up when my book is actually out, but for now it’s just me getting ahead of myself. Also, I’d rather have fully colored pieces on show, and not sketches. The Ink Abstracts will remain up and I will post more of those and some of my photography, but I’ll save characters for when everyone will have a book to identify them with.

I was going to write a far, far longer post about all of this, but the internet was out for two days in my building because of the snow storm here in New York.

The good thing about the storm: there’s a car parked on my sidewalk. Well, “parked” is a generous way to put it; it’s on my sidewalk. From the looks of it, someone was trying to turn at my corner but failed and nearly drove straight into my building. And–of course–I’m really glad they didn’t crash, but leaving my place earlier at 4:30 AM and finding a car on my corner, mere feet from the edge of my building, was pretty interesting. A better way to wake up than coffee, I think.

Bannerman’s Castle: History on the Hudson

Whenever I say that I love New York, whenever I tell someone where I’m from, I never think of what I’ve grown up calling “upstate”. To me, the city has always been all there was. It’s not my fault–I grew up in the city; I used to spend my free Wednesdays at the Bronx Zoo, the Saturdays of my summer youth down in the village and drinking at St. Mark’s. Beyond that, I’d say I’ve spent a cumulative 5 days upstate over the course of my entire life, so there’s never been anything endearing for me to remember about it.

That was until I heard about Bannerman’s Island. Allow me to explain with a list:

  • Originally Pollepel Island, it has its own history before it became Bannerman’s Island. Including a legend of the wind goblin that lived on the island and attacked whoever set foot on it. I am not kidding.
  • It was purchased by an arms dealer named Frank Bannerman in 1900. An arms dealer. Allow me to provide another list right here explaining why Frank Bannerman was awesome:

-While he was still in school, he made his own business by collecting scraps from a navy yard and recycling them. And no, we’re not talking college. Or high school. Yeah.

-He designed  all of the residences on his island. Including the castle. Bannerman’s Castle. The one that has cannons and cannonballs sticking out everywhere.

This one.

-He loved castles.

-Also, he was a religious man, so he didn’t drink.

-Oh, and he was considered an American hero by his countrymen.

  • Arms and gunpowder were stored on the island by Frank Bannerman. At least until an accident involving said gunpowder nearly killed his wife with a large piece of storage shed.
  • Also Bannerman’s Castle, the Bannerman’s residence, and the island itself are really pretty:

I was intentionally vague about the island and its history because I wouldn’t tell it half as well as any of the Bannerman Castle Trust tour guides. What I will say however is that last winter, a large part of Bannerman’s Castle collapsed. As sad as it is, there’s a chance this incredible piece of New York history may not see next year. Tours are only running until October, so don’t miss your opportunity to see the Castle before it’s gone, and don’t pass up the chance to learn more about Frank Bannerman himself.

Click here for more information.