Stormtroopers are crack shots in Star Wars just like Obi-Wan Kenobi said. They wade through the rebels at the beginning of the movie, taking few losses. Obi-Wan points out specific shots to Luke at the Jawa massacre to prove it wasn’t Sand People. The Stormtroopers want to take everyone alive in Mos Eisley. Even the Star-destroyers could have easily blasted the Millennium Falcon out of the sky, but they don’t. They want those droids. They want to know who’s got those droids and if the data has already been lifted. The Falcon is then treated with kid-gloves at the Death Star. It’s captured. It’s cautiously examined, which is why our plucky young heroes are able to get the drop on a pair of troopers. The Stormtrooper or two in the detention area are taken completely by surprise. Next thing we know, the troopers can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn. Orders, they have to let the rebels escape, but they’ve got to make it look convincing. It has to look like they were really trying to stop them. They have to miss while making it look like they weren’t trying to miss. The Stormtroopers sent to retake the cell block already know the rebels have to be allowed to escape, which is why they keep missing three people standing in a hallway with basically no cover.

Cut to Empire Strikes Back, and the Stormtroopers are cleaning up on Hoth. Then, we get to Cloud City, and they are under orders to take the prisoners alive. Now, I don’t know why they didn’t switch to stun, which they had no trouble doing on the blockade runner in Star Wars, but they don’t on Cloud City. Since stun is blue, it’s possible they knew that stun blasts would encourage the rebels to fight back, resulting in more loss of life. Maybe, it was more efficient to drive them to the hyperspace disabled ship where they would be very, very easily caught by tractor beam. They certainly had no reason to believe an astro-droid would act on its own initiative to re-activate the hyperdrive.

Finally, the Stormtroopers clean up on Endor. An impressively precise shot takes out R2D2. Then, while jumping in and out of cover in an effort to avoid getting hit themselves, they keep enough situational awareness to subdue the main rebel they are under orders to capture without killing her. It’s not their fault the rebel leader is such a badass she takes out two troopers after having been wounded.

Okay, yeah, it's been a really long time since I posted an update. Just haven't had the motivation. Other things to worry about. I could either work on Tourist Hunter or I could post crap on my website. That's what's known as an easy choice. Speaking of Tourist Hunter, it's done. Believe it or not, I'm just waiting on the cover image, which is taking a lot longer than I thought, but since other people are involved, there's really not much I can do beyond pull at my hair and hope I don't rip it all out.

So while I've had nothing I've wanted to write about in this here space, I've been more than a little aware of the fact that it's been lying here rather seriously dead. Not that anybody's been reading, but there's dead and then there's dead. And, this thing has been rather on the above average side of dead for far too long.

Round about six months ago, I had a rather impressive brain storm on how to deal with the death situation. See, there's these terms I've been kicking around in the back of my mind and occasionally using in my Goodreads.com book reviews.

So, yeah, the Tourist Hunter moratorium goes slowly with something resembling two months plus where I have to continue to pretend it doesn't exist, and as shouldn't be too hard to guess, this has left me at something of a loss as to what to do with myself. The plan to fill the interim was to dive headfirst back into music, and it was only after I took that leap into the musical deep end that I realized that the swimming pool was still filling with water. Just goes to show how much mental energy had gone into the writing of words. You reach the end, think okay, relax time, and the mind just goes cool, break time, done. And, you discover just how exhausted you were. Even just trying to think about music, sit at the piano, anything, is more taxing than you can possibly imagine.

It doesn't help that the writing of words and the composing of notes are surprisingly different disciplines in my head. Yeah, go figure, not like I planned it that way. They're like different tracks in my brain, and it is proving to be more than a little difficult to switch from one to the other. Probably doesn't help that I know in just a few short months I'll have to jump tracks back to the wholly word-based side to get some light editing via flamethrower done. In the meantime, everything just sounds like fifty shades of utter crap, and the first week involved the achievement of maybe half a measure over the course of an hour or two swirling around the conviction that I am a hack and a failure.

So, yeah, good times. Slow. Things have improved a bit. I've actually managed a good half-dozen measures at a stretch before the perverse forces of internal disapproval force me to stop. I'm also not trying very hard to produce anything good. It's a transitional phase, and I just need to get the mental gears to line up in the right order kind-of like a ten-speed chain clattering and falling off. I've got to slip that chain back on, pedal a few steps, watch the chain grind back off, and repeat. Yes, I'm aware I'm not trying very hard to make that analogy overly coherent.

Okay, I've finished the first draft of Tourist Hunter, and it is a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would be. Seriously, when I first started, I figured I would be lucky to get fifty thousand words out of this turkey. Maybe, just maybe, it would be as long as Pyrrhic Kingdom, and that was if I was trying really hard. So, I don't know where the hundred thousand and change came from. I even spent the last couple of chapters asking myself why it wasn't over yet. Tourist Hunter had no business being so long even if it was just the first draft.

It's a comedy. Okay, I don't know if I can really go so far as to call it a comedy. I was going more for entertainingly amusing kind-of like String Finger Theatre since I cannot tell a joke to save me life. Seriously, I should not be allowed to deliberately be funny. I can only manage to amuse people by accident, which is why String Finger Theatre aimed for mildly amusing rather than make people laugh with a joke comedy. But, I digress.

Tourist Hunter is supposed to be humorously entertaining, and that's the kind-of thing that should be done in moderation, which means one-hundred thousand words is way over the top. This worries me far more than it should, but screw it. What am I going to do, right?

Yeah, I really wish I had something interesting or exciting to put here. I look back at the archive, and there were journal entries all over the place. They carried on for miles, too. I mean, looking back, how the hell did that happen?

There were two for all of last year. Two! I should be screaming from the streets, jumping off lamp posts, and otherwise just making a big awful fool of myself. A static website is death. Death! I tell you.

So, yeah, I should have something to say. I should be writing something. I should be maintaining the vanguard here. I should be witty and entertaining, but that last bit is never going to happen so I should at least maintain something. Entropy is death, and all of that.