A minor benefit of texting at work, and original story thoughts (and what I'm doing with fics too a bit). · 5:22am May 13th, 2016
Is this a "State of the Author" blog? I think it might count as one.
One of the things I like about running the Self-Checkout in the evening at the grocery store I work at is that so long as I do my job, no one particularly cares what else I have going on, and so I maintain an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game with my wife via Skype (currently, two rogues and a bard — the second rogue was an NPC who wound up becoming a major party member — are investigating a cult devoted to Thassilonian rune magic and its (possibly coincidental) connections to the local underground slave trade).
While that's fun and all, it also means these little snippets of work observations get preserved for the future:
[5/12/2016 7:42:33 PM] Rinnaul: (Have had a lot of customers. The handful of clever ones have been able to read, follow simple instructions, and tell left from right.)
[5/12/2016 7:42:52 PM] Asilin: (Lol. Low bar there)
[5/12/2016 7:43:41 PM] Rinnaul: (I wish I hadn't already had multiple examples of failing all three today.)
[5/12/2016 9:25:35 PM] Rinnaul: (And came back to a pile of cleanup, a very confused Hispanic girl trying to use the SCO, and the attempted theft of 12 30-count cases of beer.)
[5/12/2016 11:39:37 PM] Rinnaul: (And this makes two denied alcohol sales for me and two intercepted thefts for Mr. Weiss tonight.)
On the last one, the second denied sale was a trio of maybe college-aged girls, only one of whom had ID. I asked for all three because I didn't believe that the ringleader would be drinking a 36-can case of Miller and a gallon of boxed Zinfandel by herself, and told them as much. The other two girls started to leave and seemed to believe that would solve the problem, but I told them that no, I still knew they were shopping as a group and still believed they were buying for the group. I could hold the purchase if they just needed to go out to a car, but no — the other two IDs were supposedly at home.
So, denied, they departed.
Until I saw the ringleader come back inside, grab a second box of the same cheap wine and head for the beer aisle. I stopped her along the way and told her "I still know your friends are waiting, I still don't believe that's all just for you, and I'm still not selling it to you." She demanded a manager and wanted me to show her where 'carding the whole group' is in state liquor laws. I told her that I could get a manager, but it wouldn't matter, because a cashier can always deny an alcohol sale they're uncomfortable with, and I was still going to deny the sale. And that one is part of the liquor laws.
And thus she was defeated, and hopefully at the next place they hit up for cheap drinks, they tried the "send in the oldest one alone" trick before letting the cashier know it was for the group.
Anyway, on writing stuff.
Remember that Steampunk Fairy Tale thing I wrote a story for? We're gonna do a sequel here in a few months. Where my last entry was basically just steampunk with a plot inspired by a fairy tale, this time I'm going to be doing more "fairy tale adventure that happens to take place amid a steampunk setting." I'm mostly researching a bit for now, but also trying to settle on a voice. Do I do the omniscient "storyteller" narrator common to fairy tales? The verbose third person limited or first person that's typical of Victorian fiction? The more generic omniscient favored by much of the fantasy genre? I'm kind of leaning towards the third-person, but not really decided yet.
And if anyone's read this far despite not caring about any of that, and just wants to know what kind of horsewords I've got coming after this long silence, rest assured, I have been doing some writing. I just want a few chapters put together before I start posting anything. But expect one story with Twilight, Luna, Chrysalis, drama, and shipping. Another with the humanized mane six doing Shadowrun. And that long-awaited rewrite of the first couple chapters of To Be The King where I make it clearer I wasn't really expecting anyone to be rooting for the human too much, and then a continuation of that. And once all that's done, maybe I'll finally go back and fix that one SpikeDash fic I did.
Oh yeah, and I'm getting a number of favorites on REC, But I Wanna Die!, and Final Mashtination lately. Did someone review some of my stuff or something, or is this just random coincidence?