Finally

Okay, so I'm a little bit drunk right now, finally. Granted, I'm still making about the same amount of errors as I would be sober, and almost entirely still from the way this thing registers the letters I type a second after I type it, rather than immediately. It's annoying, still.

But the good news is that I finally got to get my personal use alcohol, and got to use it. Unfortunately, I barely feel intoxicated. Seriously, I don't know if I'm just missing something about myself, or if I'm just more tolerant than some people. Seriously, in two days, I've downed most of a bottle of sake, and both evenings I've felt only a little bit less inhibited. In fact, I've been just as uninhibited while sober during both those days.

Also, I saw Be Kind Rewind today, and The Spiderwick Chronicles yesterday. Both of them made me feel good. Really good.

Anyway, the biggest news is that I finally discovered my "Captain Quasar" inspiration. I've had this concept kicking around in my head since senior year of high school, of a series of stories about the crew of a starship in a future that could be anything from Star Trek to Star Wars, with a little Firefly mixed in. The crew has always been about the same; the captain is a human dude, a sort of Kirk/Flash Gordon/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo/Spaceman Spiff guy. The pilot is a big amphibious alien brute-looking guy, except he's basically also Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest in terms of his personality. The security officer is a hyperactive monkey-girl, who looks like she's barely old enough to go to school, and actually isn't, but is still able to kill you twelve different ways before you finish blinking. The chief engineer is a robot, though I've never been clear on what kind of robot, except that I've alternated between a masculine robot who is exceedingly stupid, and a feminine robot who constantly matches wits with the pilot. The primary villain is a nasty lizard-man who is the emperor of a Klingon-type empire.

Then something finally hit me while I was working on just trying to write a story earlier this week; I should do Macbeth in space. Now, I didn't finish with this idea, though it is a bit of what I do have right now. What struck me was that I could put my villain in the role of Macbeth. Not completely, but I could copy the two prophecies that Macbeth recieves, and manipulate them into this guy getting a prophecy from what turns out to be an ancient being who has found the trick to traversing the multiverse, and thus can travel through time or something.

Anyway, this was coupled with a worksheet I got for my Drama writing class, which detailed the mythic structure. Now, the key thing here was that I was having a lot of trouble developing the origin story of these characters, and for some reason I was having way too much trouble feeling comfortable with everything I came up with. I think the Macbeth thing, coupled with the mythic structure, gave me the idea that I could make the origin story into something that directly drew on classical sources, suddenly it clicked for me.

So now I've basically been able to write more than I usually can write on this particular project. I've got a plot that I can use, and feel comfortable writing. It's actually made me feel more goofy than any of the sake I've been drinking.

And that really makes me happy.