Happy Thanksgiving ..er..Christmas?

It's Thanksgiving morning and I just got off work.  I love Thanksgiving morning, my wife and I have turned it into a tradition that we work together to get the feast ready together. I cut the celery and the green onions while she fixed some cinnamon muffins, then she preps the dressing while I prep the bird, then we stuff the turkey and put in the oven and clean up together.  This meal is really not a bad one to do, we do much more complicated meals.   After the turkey is in the oven we have several hours to relax and do some fun stuff, like read or write or play video games or call home.  We don't normally travel on Thanksgiving, deciding a long time ago to make the tradition for our children here.  4 sets of parents to visit becomes a logistical nightmare so we just stopped and hope they will visit us occasionally.  

5 Things That Will Make Me Drop Your Book Like a Hot Potato

I read Chuck Wendig’s 25 things that will make me keep reading your story and it made me think, I have WAAAAAYYY more things that will make me STOP reading your story (Okay, I might have overstated that, it's ony 5 things).  And of course he posts about that very thing this morning.  ARRRRGGH!   Anyway, not to copy, but I had this idea in my head, so I’m going with it.

If I see a blurb that I like or a nice cover or get a recommendation from one of my friends, I will pick up your book and give it a fair shake.  Unlike Chuck, I'm not standing in the doorway with a gun in your face waiting to not like it.  If I‘ve gotten as far as cracking the cover and reading the first page I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.  I’ll have the gun tucked into my belt, in back under my shirt, so you can’t see it.  I want to like it.  But there are a few things that will make me pull that gun out and blow your face clean off!

NaNo Fail Whale

NaNoWriMo is never a waste of time in my humble opinion. I’m not going to hit the target this year of 50k words in 30 days, but the endeavor has its own rewards.

Last year I had a great idea and I think it will become my Master’s thesis and I had no trouble moving along. It was a simple idea but very open and I knew where it was going ultimately. I‘ve got stuff on the back burning and a backlog of ideas I want to explore but for this year I decided to try my hand at something completely outside of my comfort zone. The original idea was to try my hand at a YA tie- in to my current novel. But once I conceived of the idea it started to develop its own life. I thought it was just going to be in the same vein as my adult fiction, just from a different perspective, but as the idea started to coalesce it began to morph into more of a substantial piece, and basically even though the setting is several hundred years in the future it is not classic SF. It’s actually literary fiction, which is a completely different animal.

Reconstruction (Revision)

This is a picture of the new intersection by my house. It really looks fantastic. I know, it’s hard to get excited about a road intersection but you have to keep in mind that this busy section of road has been undergoing construction for about a year and it has disrupted all our lives. They expanded the lanes -- completely resurfaced the entire stretch of road and then repainted all of it. It got me thinking how this is a good analogy of building a story. Originally this was a two lane road, with lots of pot holes and patches. Now it is a beautiful multilane road with smooth blacktop surfaces and fresh paint. It looks remarkably different and the traffic flow is substantially better.

NaNo Doh!

I think I've gone and done it ... I've blow an O-ring or something and my motivation has been leaking out in vast quantities.  My wife said to blame it on biorhythms ... and that may be part of it, but in the last week I've barely been on any social media and have written almost nothing.   I've basically been vegging.  I haven't felt compelled to do anything creative, not even play a video game.   I have several projects going at the same time, including NaNoWriMo, and I think initially it may have been a reaction to overloading myself.

NaNoWriMo Take 2

I can see that NaNoWriMo is going to be interrupting my planned schedule for posting this blog.  I had to fly on Thursday evening, so I tried to sneak in some writing at work, but it didn't leave me any blog time.  Posting the blog at work has been a near disaster so far.  The LAN we use is hermetically sealed and I feel lucky I can even get to blogspot at all.  I've also been fighting a cold and an abdominal muscle injury that is hampering my workouts considerably, but that really doesn' effect the blog any, just my demeanor.  But all that aside, trying to keep pace with my NaNoWriMo story is the real culprit.  I could have blogged last night, but I'm doing the exact opposite of what I had planned, which is fall dreadful behind, so I hemorraged words onto the NaNo WIP.

Say hello to the Nemesi!

Today marks my one year anniversary of my blog and it also happens to be Halloween, I thought it would be apropos to introduce my vampires from Clear Ether. I like the caste system and heritage of the vampires developed by White Wolf but I also wanted something with more of a scientific bent to it, so I barrowed elements from all my favorite vampire genre and added a few of my own. My vampires call themselves the Nemesi. Allow me to introduce them…

There are only a few old languages that have words for vampire -- Hungarian is one of them, and for good reason. That was where the vampires had first arisen on Earth.

Welcome to the 28th Century

This is the second installment on stuff about my novel, if you want to catch up the first entry is here.  This week I’m going to talk a little bit about the setting.  One of the major story arcs centers around the Quantum Gates.   I had to make some decisions on how long it would take to get to that technology and then disperse it out into the galaxy.   After some mental gymnastics I decided on setting the story in 2749.  I had some discussions with a couple of established SF novelists and they warned me about the problem of setting the book so far into the future.  The easiest way to deal with this is simply to avoid describing life on Earth in that time-frame, because trying to extrapolate living conditions and politics will invariably miss the mark, with me either going far off in the weeds or maybe only a little way off the road.  But the story starts on Earth, so I decided to add a major catastrophe to slow down some aspects of technology and societal evolution.