I’m heading into New York City for the day with mom to celebrate your life. Max is having a blast at Cornell.

If you’re intrigued, give it a read by hitting the jump. It’s a bit stream of consciousness, and its pretty quick. I hope you find it interesting!

Limelight

by Jason Rappaport

Limelight.

In the spotlight, huh. A police officer whizzed by on a moped. Sarah looked up at the sky. Cloudless, blue. Pretty boring. Nothing like the limelight. She stood up from where she sat, on the curb aside from a plain road, as if to take in everything around her. There, she was queen.

She stood there. A car passed her by. Nobody looked at her. She was, for all intents and purposes, a statue – a wax figure, sucking up light and air on the side of the road.

Her watch read 4:42pm. She’d been sitting there for nearly an hour. What had she done? She thought back – she couldn’t remember. Could she remember anything from further back? No, it was all a blur. Her name was Sarah. She lived here, just behind her. A suburb.

She looked behind her. It was a city. The outskirts. Her mistake.

Her last name. It didn’t matter. She knew that this was a where she belonged; in here heart, it felt like home. It felt like this place, of all places on Earth, could never abandon her. An unbridled feeling of safety, comfort and warmth rushed over her. She took it in, as a celebrity absorbs the limelight.

Sarah looked behind her again. It was the suburbs. The outskirts of a city. Identical houses, all in a row, content with one another. More of the same.

Another police officer on a moped. That was two within a few minutes. Something must be happening, she thought. She sat back down. Stood up. Without thinking, she began walking along the curb, in the opposite direction of traffic. Tracing their origin. Connecting the dots.

The houses changed design after every intersection. Perhaps, Sarah thought, a different architect had been commissioned for each road. It made the suburbs far more interesting. Or the city. Or whatever this was. Home. That was where it was. A cold breeze rushed by, causing Sarah’s arms to cross and cover her body.

She was wearing a fleece jacket. Her arms felt locked, held in place by the rough fleece. She trudged forward; a car passed her by, then another. All going in the same direction, toward something. Out of sight, far away. On the outskirts of Sarah’s mind, there was a place where all the cars gathered, talked, shared stories of a time long gone by. It was cute, but disturbed. More and more they gathered. Hundreds of them. But there wasn’t much to say.

There weren’t enough stories.

Yellow lights flashed in front of her; more cars were coming. All the same direction. Why did no traffic go the other way? Another cool breeze flew by; Sarah hugged herself ever tighter, hoping to warm up, but the chilliness cut through the jacket and her skin. It was effectively useless.

Home was further away now.

Below her, her shoes covered in mud, she felt the softness of grass coated in fresh dew. The traffic stopped flowing, and she stopped walking. There was no further to go; she had hit a dead end. A cal de sac. Four houses surrounded her, their faces staring intently at her small, shivering form. She pivoted and began walking the other way.

The city was but a distant memory. There was nothing homey about it. Nothing comforting about the city. About the claustrophobia, the haste, the wastefulness; about the smog, the noise. It was quiet here. Sarah appreciated the quiet. Not a single sound, not even her own footsteps, penetrated her tiny ears.

She could see yellow lights flashing off in the distance. Perhaps it was time to turn around. With a quick pivot, she began walking the other way.

Different. It looked different. It was darker, for one. Had it been night this whole time? No, there were dark clouds overhead. Rain, perhaps. But the faintest shadow of the moon lurking behind them, she could see. She followed the yellow lights, around the winding road. The edge tumbled off the side of a mountain. A small stream trickled far below. There was no fence.

Sarah remembered this place. The suburbs. The mountain. The cal de sac. Home. The city. The outskirts. The limelight.

The yellow lights in the distance had all but disappeared. But Sarah knew where they were. Or did she? She had a faint feeling. She looked down the mountain. Houses had been there minutes ago, but now all gone. Everything was mountain. It was a as if the Earth was degenerating before her, reverting to its more natural, undeveloped state.

The further she walked, the more the roads disappeared. The more clouds filled the sky. No more moon. No more houses. No more asphalt. The river was larger, the rush of the water filled her ears and she shivered. Her fleece jacket was gone. Stolen? No, not stolen.

Shivering greater, Sarah looked around for anything to cover herself with. Oddly, there was a a blanket laying against a tree on the side of the mountain. She picked it up, but it continually slipped through her fingers. She tried using two hands to grip the blanket. But no sooner had she grasped it tightly did it disappear from view. There had never been a blanket.

The sun came up. Clouds dispersed. Brightness peaked through the treetops. Grass sprung up from the woe-laden dirt. Rays of beauty warmed Sarah’s body. And yet she still felt cold.

No clothes at all. Everything had vanished. But there was warmth, soon she did not miss her clothes. The warming sun soothed her, and the gentle Earth calmed her. And thus Sarah stood, alone, in the vast emptiness of the world.

Home.

Through the treetops light was shed upon a small marking on the ground, which Sarah observed intently. Seeing her name upon it, she brushed off the dirt and moss, thinking it may be for her, the only man-made substance left in the world. No more than here did she feel at home. And, in the beauty of the limelight, she let that gentle Earth caress her into the ground, at the foot of the marking, so that she could sleep in her bed at last.

Prior to 4.2, there was no way to mute the iPad without unlocking it (hardware volume controls only work once the device is unlocked). Unfortunately, unlocking it makes noise.

The hardware mute switch makes sense on the iPad because there is a purpose to using it with the device in sleep mode and when awake. There is no purpose in the hardware rotation lock when your iPad is asleep – what effect would it have on a blank screen?

Kudos to Nexon for releasing an iOS Maple Story – I hope it does well for them! I haven’t played Maple Story in years myself, but I’m sure lots of people are out there now enjoying the iOS game with my rips in it. ;)

I think I can safely say that jewelry photography has changed the way I think about photography. Everything must be precise, and there are no artsy beauty shots. You show the jewelry. That’s it. That’s a far cry from the food photography I did for Soup Shoppe last summer – food seemed to be what I was made for. Every shot was an opportunity to capture to beauty in food. With jewelry, I’ve come to appreciate that someone already worked hard to make the most beautiful ornaments they could imagine; I’m just there to take a picture of it.

Edward Shapiro, the owner of Diamond Dream, has been giving me tips on how to properly photograph jewelry. When I started, he essentially handed me a light box, an LED light, some props and a tray of jewelry, then told me to get to work. Unfamiliar with the props, I asked him to explain it to me – why the heck did I need wax? What were all these plastic pieces for?

So far, the entire experience has really given me an appreciation for the jewelry industry. Although I’m just a guy in the back room taking pictures, I constantly feel like I’m a part of some family – or maybe I’m just a creepy eavesdropper. But you overhear folks coming in and talking about hiding expensive jewelry from their spouses, or potential spouses, and it’s really touching to hear people looking to get something special for their loved ones.

I’ve never liked jewelry that much – honestly, I’ve always thought it was a waste of money. Then again, that’s coming from a guy who tosses away his benjamins on electronics, which actually lose all of their value. But when I started to look at the jewelry as a way of bringing people and loved ones closer together, I started to like the business a whole lot more.

Edward would laugh with his customers and smile, and it was like they were one big family. Repeat customers were welcome friends. And everyone was excited when the jewelry in question was a surprise gift.

And once the family aspect of it all fell into place, I really started feeling at home in that back room, taking my lonely pictures. And I think the photographs have been better for it.

I’ll post the best shots up in my portfolio when I’m done. And hey, maybe some of you would like to buy these expensive little trinkets! Edward would appreciate it.

Thanks to everyone who put up with my defeating the purpose of having a web design portfolio by letting it get full of bugs. If you see something icky on the site (unintentionally icky, anyway), let me know in the comments! I’m in full spring cleaning mode.

To celebrate my monumental decision to change majors (I nearly transferred schools!), I’m going to give this place a good sprucing up. There’s some code that doesn’t work, and the placement of the search bar has driven me mad for a while. And just look at the footer! A travesty. Well, I’ll fix that – and then some.

My updated portfolio contains selections (the good ones, anyway) from my AP portfolio. You can check it out under the “Artwork” section of the Portfolio tab on this site or click here!

Here you go!

As you can probably tell from the rather poorly made banner above (sorry, I had an all-nighter last night), the tentative title of my next novel is The Collapse. I’ve decided to handle NaNoWriMo 2009 much differently than I’ve handled NaNo in the past. This is the first time I will be returning to a world I’ve already created in order to write a story. If you’ve read my NaNo 2008 novel, The Typist, then the cover above should easily explain itself and lend to what this novel is going to be about. But why am I doing this?

This novel is going to be short. In fact, I don’t plan on breaching 50,000-60,000 words. I’ve determined that, after four years of gradually increasing my novel length, it’s time to cut back a bit and spend more time focusing on what I feel is the work of most merit – and that is, without a doubt, The Typist. I’m well on my way to having a completed and partially rewritten second draft, and I feel that if I explore the universe I’ve created more I’ll get a better grasp on it, ultimately leading to a better novel that I can submit to agents and publishers.

So, The Collapse will be a short novella. In fact, it is a distant prequel to The Typist, set during the time period just before Cydia’s destruction. For those of you who read The Typist, Cydia was destroyed in a planet-wide cave-in caused by excavation of the planet’s core resource, Taconic Slate. There were several key members of the Cydian government involved with the resuscitation and rescue of Cydia’s population after the planet began to collapse – the prevailing plan was to force all inhabitants to abandon their physical bodies to be temporarily stored in a memory bank at the center of the newly destroyed Cydia, to wait until either a new home planet was found or some circumstances made the planet livable once again.

However, I don’t want to dwell too much on the actual collapse of Cydia. Rather, this novel will focus on a new main character – in fact, the entire story will be brand new and unheard of – who works in a Cydian mine. I’m quite sure this novel will also be written in first person, so the main character will lead the reader through an account by which the planet’s collapse was orchestrated, while focusing on a problem far beyond mining.

In addition, the novel will cover several plot elements not discussed in detail in The Typist – such as Cydia’s relationship with Earth in the distant past. This novel will most likely take place right as the Cydia-Earth relationship was blooming, where fetches are new technology and glasses are typically worn on the face – this is not the Cydia that was presented in The Typist by any stretch of the imagination.

A few characters from The Typist will make a return, but they will be limited to those introduced as native Cydians. Specifically, Maiya will make an appearance. She was a character who popped into The Typist and then was completely forgotten about by the end (my huge mistake). I plan to change that in my rewrite of The Typist, but I feel she also needs a greater back story. You’ll find out how Maiya became involved with The Collective, and what her role in the planet’s destruction truly was.

So there you have it – NaNo 2009 will be brief, but hopefully exciting and, for me, eye-opening, allowing me to focus on and expand a universe I feel deserves some more attention and detail to help me create a realistic and engrossing world for The Typist. And, in the meantime, I will continue to work on my second draft of The Typist… and see where things go from there.