writerly

I am moving home.
I am moving back to the house I left almost thirty years ago.
Then I left for a new life, a new wife and everything else I wanted.
Now, I am moving back for someone else.
My mother is 82. On July 1st she had a sharp pain in her side and was taken to hospital.
She was fine, although in  much pain, for the first few days.
Then I showed up at her bed one morning to discover her pain-free, but also brain-free.
Well, not exactly free. Much muddled.
The doctors don't know what happened.
They also don't appear interested in finding out.
She has some home help, but not enough.

So I am going back home.
I will take up residence, like some troglodyte, in her basement.
Years of stuff accumulated while I had a life.
A son.
Two busted marriages.
Thirty years of acquiring because that's what I was told I should do.

Now it all has to fit in her basement and my father's old office.
It will be a tight fit.
As for managing the interpersonal stuff, I've been at her house since she took ill.
It has gone surprisingly well.
I found that I don't actually mind doing her dishes in her kitchen, just not my dishes in my own house.
Keeping her place neat and tidy is easier because she has expectations whereas I have none.
Keeping tidy makes her happy.
It does nothing for me, but making her happy, makes me happy.
So I'll wash and clean and vacuum and dust. I may even iron.
And, I don't find I mind all this.
I've been a selfish man since I walked out of those doors three decades ago.
Thomas Wolfe said:
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
But the young man's dreams have long ago passed into rueful dust. Fame has proven to be a shallow harlot. I have learned the painful, though not fatal lesson, that change, not the Speed of Light, is the universal constant.
And as my mother loses touch with her time and her memory, perhaps I shall find mine.

The Uncanny Valley will, I believe, be remembered as crossed between "Beowulf" and "Avatar". Oddly we are NOT the only species which has this reaction. Horses, who are mildly un-nerved when facing a predator such as a wolf, freak out completely when faced with an Elk or Moose. Why? Because they look familiar, but are not quite right. Using hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention people, Cameron has bridged the Uncanny Valley forever.
The only thing James Cameron and I share, aside a fondness for women, is film-making. His bank account, despite some expensive divorces, is much healthier than mine. So using his new "Avatar" motion-capture technology for my own animation projects, isn't going to happen for a while yet.
So I am left with either, just having people slightly, or in the case of my writing partner Ash Hunter hugely, creeped out by the animated characters in "Right Royal Bastards" or finding some way to make it less creepy by making it less life-like and more abstract.
I'm not sure which way to go.

The first test uses Moviestorm's built in CellShading. (WARNING LARGE FILE)

www.bookbits.ca/RRBSc6ShCELLSHADING.avi

The second test uses my editing software, Pinnacle 14 Ultimate Collection, to do the cartooning of the footage. (WARNING LARGE FILE)

www.bookbits.ca/RRBSc6ToonedbyPS14.avi 


Comments welcome.