Category: General

08/27/13

Pre-WorldCon Ramblings

My work week is finished!  Tomorrow, I get on a plane for WorldCon!!

I find it difficult to express just how excited I am to go to this event.  I expressed it a bit last year, when someone interviewed me and M. Todd Gallowglas after Chicon was done.  In regards to that video, I have to say that I’m glad it came out as well as it did.  I almost said some stuff in it that would have been permanently, irrevocably embarrassing.

Okay, let’s blab about WorldCon in general.

It is the yearly event that I look forward to the most, now.  When I was in the Air Force, it was a different convention, Dundracon, that I looked forward to.  I loved gaming, and I knew that I’d be able to meet up with my good friend David there.  It was a yearly voyage where I’d get to go and feel like I was going home.

Now it’s WorldCon.  Ever since Reno, WorldCon has built up more and more in my mind.

It doesn’t even make all that much sense, really.  I’m not a published author yet.  I’m not a very passionate fan, and indeed, I don’t recognize most of the names of the writers that are in attendance.  I’m not particularly good at the networking aspect.  There might not be that much more information I can get from the panels that I haven’t heard already.

And yet, I still feel like this is Shangri La, or Brigadoon, or some other magical place that I’ll get to visit.  Maybe it’s the open, welcoming community that I feel I have so much in common with.  Maybe it’s the dream that one day I’ll go to a WorldCon and be the guy that people want to see on panels, or sign books.  Maybe it’s the experiences, such as the Kaffeeklatsch where I got to discover just how awesome Hugh Howey is as he served me and the other visitors water, and gave us signed copies of his books.  Or that Tor party where Emma Newman talked with me for more than an hour and a half, giving me the most amazing encouragement to keep on writing.

It’s all of that and more.

Reno was the WorldCon that woke me up and reminded me that I like Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and that I should be writing.  Chicago was the WorldCon where I picked up some advice and started to take to heart the things I needed to actually do the writing.  What does San Antonio hold for me?  I can’t wait to find out!

08/25/13

A Busy Sunday Morning

I’ve been busy and productive!  It’s important to include both parts.  I don’t know how many times I’ve been simply busy, but didn’t actually produce anything.

With the new school year begun, it was time to sit back, wait for the bar to come down, and get ready to ride the roller coaster ride that is Computer Club.  I started it last year, because while I believe in my kids’ school, I find their computer science division to be sorely lacking.  One might even describe it as nonexistent.  So starting last year, I left work early two days a week in order to fill the brains of students with what I know about computer programming, heaven help them.

It went okay.  I made some mistakes, the main one being that I had kids ranging from 6th grade through high school.  The age range was too wide, which lead to the pace of the whole program being too slow and varied, which lost the interest of the serious students.  So this year, I’m narrowing it to high school age only.  I’ll probably wind up with very few students this year, but maybe that’ll be better, too.  We will see.

Here is the new web site I put up for the Computer Club.  My plan is to use it heavily for keeping notes and staying on track in maintaining a solid pace.

In other news, I went to a Shut Up and Write event yesterday and I got a ton of writing done!  In addition to adding about 2500 words to my book, I plotted out some more of the backstory.  I’m not a huge plotter, but it needed to be done in order for the context of what I’m currently writing to make sense.  To rephrase, my characters were entering a place where they’d been before but couldn’t remember, and I needed to figure out what they did while they were there before.  It’s way more confusing to describe than it is to just read.

Tonight, the band I play with has a performance.  That should be fun!  Some of the stuff we’ll be playing should go over really well.  Some of it, I expect to be a bit of a train wreck.

Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll post about WorldCon!

08/20/13

It’s So Meta Even This Acronym

So this is a post, about posting, and comments on posts.  It’s amazingly circular and self referential.  So let’s get to it…

First of all, I have no idea how many people actually read these posts.  I’m not promoting it too terribly much, yet.  At this point, this whole blog is an experiment to try and keep my blood hot about writing, and possibly provide a means for my friends and family to peer into my life and see how things are wriggling.  I don’t mind if I’m not getting a bunch of viewers yet.  Either I will get more traffic, or I won’t.  It’s too easy to lose track of the reason I’m writing this blog, just like it’s too easy to lose track of why I’m writing.  I’m not doing either to get rich or famous, but to satisfy my own desires in pursuit of a dream.

That being said, it is a little bit disconcerting that of the 8 comments I’ve received, 5 of them have been spam trying to get me to promote my site.  One of them looked like it might have been written by a real human being.  The robots are truly becoming cunning linguists.

(If you needed proof I’m doing this blog for my amusement, you need only look at that last sentence.)

I would like to see more genuine comments, and it would be nice to know that other people are reading what I’m writing.  I just have to remember that having people read these words is the icing and the sweetness.  The cake is being able to look back and see that I’ve been sticking with it, and that I’ve continued to write and post to this blog.

So I suppose this is my admission that I’m pretentious, and that I think I’m the most important reader of my blog.  But if you’re not me, and you have been stopping by from time to time, thank you!  You’re a very close second.

(FYI: The title of this post is based on this XKCD post.  I love XKCD)

08/11/13

Describing my World

I heard back from my friend Tim, and he’s willing to do cover art for me.  I’m really excited about it!  Tim is a fantastic artist, and as we were growing up, I always assumed that our stars would rise together, me with my writing and him with his visual art.  He and I both lost our way for a while, but we’re both finding our way back to our dreams.  It would be fantastic if we could help each other achieve them.

He asked me some questions to help him visualize the setting in my story, and it was a good exercise for me.  I had done quite a bit of thinking about what the characters looked like before I launched into the story, but I only had some vague notions as to what the world actually looked like.  There’s some geography in my head, some of which won’t even show up in the book.  But the architecture?  The building styles?  I hadn’t given it that much thought.

As I told Tim, my setting is relatively low fantasy.  There aren’t any elves in the woods, or dwarves in their mines.  The world of A Clean Slate is primarily occupied by dirty, sweaty humans.  They don’t have medicine.  They’re not far off from starving, and if it weren’t for some key elements of the story, they’d be fighting each other and dying more often than living.  You could compare it to Game of Thrones, except I gave everyone a lobotomy and removed sexism.  The book I’m writing is my fantasy, not George’s.

Actually, I really wouldn’t want to live in the world I’m writing about.  I like the comforts of home and the wonders of modern technology.  It’s an interesting world, the way a tragedy is interesting.

I have a really long ways to go, still.  The word count isn’t climbing that quickly, and my focus the last couple of weekends has been almost non-existent.  Maybe I can coax out some more speed by setting a finish date.  I’m hesitant to do that, though.  I’m enjoying the process at the moment.  I just need to slice out more time.

08/8/13

Gaming: My Kryptonite or My Muse?

We drove back from Disneyland last week on a Wednesday, putting us home around 5PM.  As it was a Wednesday, I met up with M. Todd Gallowglas and we wrote together.  I expected to be too tired to get much done, but it was a surprisingly good writing session.

After that, I allowed exhaustion to take me, and I pretty much took a week off from writing altogether.  I mostly studied WiX at work on Thursday and Friday, and I dedicated the weekend to basically doing nothing.  I think it was the right decision.  I needed to rest and recharge.

Since I met up with Mr. Gallowglas again last night and had another fruitful writing endeavor, I thought I’d try to make another post here.

So let’s talk about the thing that got me into writing, and the thing that pulls me away from it: gaming.

I’ve talked a little bit before about what started my writing itch.  I had enjoyed something a friend had written, and thought I’d try it myself.  What I didn’t mention is that often, writing was something I did between computer games.  I’d get a game for the Apple, exhaust it, and then fire up Appleworks because I wanted to do something on the computer.

That was the start of the relationship between gaming and writing for me.  Eventually, that relationship changed because the games moved from the Apple to the Nintendo, and there was no vehicle there to capture my attention once the game was consumed.

When gaming changed from digital games to roleplaying games, there was another shift for me.  I would create characters for the games and then find that I wanted to do something with them between games.  Writing stories for them was the answer, and I wrote bunches of trite short stories starring my characters.  Starting in my late 20s, writing became the means by which I would flesh out a character before playing him.  In fact, one of my favorite pieces of writing is a journal written for a character in a game.

It would seem from this that gaming is a boon to my writing, right?  Well…

I don’t have a lot of people to play roleplaying games with anymore.  That type of gaming requires scheduling.  It often requires commitments of time and money that aren’t always in ample supply.  Most of the people I used to play games with either live some distance away from me now, making regular gaming problematic, or their lifestyles have changed such that they just don’t have room for gaming anymore.

That leads us back to computer games.  The graphics are so much better than when I was my son’s age.  The stories in some of these games can be so compelling, too (I’m looking at you, Bioshock Infinite).  Sometimes, the games themselves serve to remind me of roleplaying games and stories that I enjoyed in the past.

That’s what I wound up doing quite a bit this last weekend.  The bulk of the “nothing” that I did was playing Shadowrun Returns, which did an amazing job of delivering on the world of Shadowrun that I enjoyed so much in the past.  I played through it twice, and I’m hesitant to open the game again, lest I get sucked in to play all the way through a third time.

07/31/13

Disneyland Day 3

I know that I said at the beginning of the last post that it was going to be short.  This time I mean it.  I’m exhausted.  My feet hurt.  My legs have stopped talking to me.  The top of my head (a place I could not put sunscreen) is sunburned.  The back of my neck (a place I should have put more sunscreen) feels like it should be glowing and starting nuclear reactions.  In short, I’m at the end of my rope, and only a fool and a madman would stay up much later, just to write another blog entry for an extremely low-volume site.

So in an effort to keep this somewhat brief, I will list out some of the things we did, without going into too much detail.

  • We started the day in the California side of the park
  • The first ride we got in line for was the Cars themed race one.
  • Chris started feeling extremely queasy just as we got to the front of the line, so he and I bailed on the ride.  Melissa and Bryanna said it was amazing.
  • Bryanna and Melissa did a water ride that looked like a big inner tube twice.
  • We did some other stuff in the park, eventually splitting up.
  • We grouped back up at the hotel to go to Medieval Times.
  • We made it back from Medieval Times early enough to go back to Disneyland and see the Phantasmic show.
  • We did some more rides, and then discovered that there was a second showing of Phantasmic, which we watched.
  • We stumbled back to the hotel.

Now that the listing is done, I want to talk about the scariest part of the whole day.  It was only tangentially related to a ride.  That is, right after we got fast passes for Soar Over California, Chris had a panic attack, hyperventilated, and we had to have park staff check him out.

Yesterday, I said that Chris and I were about on par when it comes to our manliness when it comes to getting on rides.  That is partly true.  We’re both unapologetic wimps.  The difference between us is that I’m 40 and he’s 15, and when faced with the prospect of having to get on a ride and face my mortality (or at least, my fears), I have some experience and wisdom to fall back on to get me through it.  My bowels might turn to water, and I might scream and embarrass myself, but I know that I’ll be okay.

With this ride, Chris had no idea what it was about.  We got the fast passes, and his imagination started going into overdrive.  I can only guess at the things that he conjured up in his imagination, and having the fast pass in his hand was a commitment.  He panicked, hyperventilated, and had to sit for a while.

He eventually calmed down, and was his normal smiling self after that.  And we all did the ride, and he loved it.  We all loved it.  Later in the evening, he faced his fears again, did the Haunted Mansion, and loved that, too.  He and his sister wound up racing around to do that ride 2 more times.

Eventually, Chris and I will work our way up to Space Mountain.  Until then, we’ll face or fears as we can, and have fun where we want to have fun.

Finally, I want to say that this Disney vacation was a complete success.  It was ridiculously expensive.  My credit card is hot to the touch, it’s been used so hard.  But everyone on this trip has been smiling and having fun.  Not even a panic attack could dampen our spirits.  This has been time and money very well spent.

07/30/13

Disneyland Day 2

I’m pretty tired, so I’m not sure how long this post will be.  I think feeling this tired after a day at Disneyland means that we did some stuff right.  I’ll leave the Disneyland experts to decide for themselves.

We knew that we wanted to get up fairly early, so that we could get a hearty breakfast before going to the park shortly after it opened.  I set our alarm for 6:30, thinking that would be too early.  We had a hard time getting up and getting out the door, but we managed to get going towards the line of restaurants across the street from the parks by around 7:15.  We settled on Denny’s because we thought it would be fairly easy and hopefully quick.  It was easy, sure, but service was slow and a bit incomplete.  We didn’t make it to the park until around 8:30.

I think I mentioned before that none of us are very experienced with Disneyland.  I’d been given tips by pros over the years, but I could only remember about half of them.  One of the things I did remember was the pin collecting.  I knew that Melissa and Bryanna would really enjoy that, so I pointed them in that direction.  One of the first things we did was get them starter kits.  I’ll jump ahead and tell you that by the end of the day, Bryanna and Melissa had spent a sizable chunk of their money on more pins throughout the park, and had traded along the way and now sport very impressive lanyards.

The first ride we dove into was Pirates of the Caribbean.  I remembered it somewhat from my visit 20 years ago, but none of the details were clear to me.  I remembered something about a dip that startled me.  Once we were in the boat, and it was dark, I suddenly remembered a few more details.  I clenched just before the dip, let out a girlish yell, and then enjoyed the rest of the ride.

When it comes to rides, I’m a complete wimp.  I just don’t feel comfortable getting slung around out of my control.  Pirates of the Caribbean is not a difficult ride by any stretch of the imagination, but I still let out a startled yelp.  My daughter, on the other hand, was shaking uncontrollably after that same dip.  It looks like she’s as bad or worse than I am when it comes to rides.

That means the only person that would want to do anything like Space Mountain is my wife, much to her chagrin.  Still, that left plenty of stuff for us to do, and we did plenty of other stuff.  We enjoyed Star Tours and Haunted Mansion quite a bit.  We ate at the Golden Horseshoe and enjoyed a show on their small stage.  We sat in with frozen lemonades and watched Mickey and the Magic Map (or whatever the show was called).  There was plenty of shopping done, mostly by Melissa and Bryanna.  We canoed on the river.  We had a full and fun day.

There were some negatives, however.  I, for one, am not very comfortable with crowds, and there were tons of people at Disneyland.  There were always tons of people, everywhere we went.  Getting from one location to another was a matter of navigating through a sea of bodies.  No, it wasn’t a sea, it was a battlefield.  There were armies marching through the filled streets, bearing bags and surly attitudes.  Phalanxes of strollers rolled through the resort, pushing people out of their way.  The pushers of these strollers were mechanized infantry.  Children had been weaponized.

I might be a little hyperbolic when it comes to describing the crowds and navigation of the streets of Disneyland.  I felt drained many times throughout the day.  In the late afternoon, but still before dinner, we all returned to the hotel room and napped.  I never nap, but I easily snoozed for 45 minutes.  Once refreshed, we went to a buffet dinner (which was utterly disgusting) and then returned to the park for a couple of repeat rides and the fireworks shows.  Melissa and Chris caught the Phantasm one while Bryanna and I were on another run through Star Tours.  From what they described, I regret missing that show.

And that was our day.  I’ve left out a few things, but I think what I’ve included is sufficient to describe day 2 of our vacation.  It’s also our 18th wedding anniversary.  It’s been a really fantastic day.  I should sleep well tonight.

07/29/13

Disneyland Day 1

I’ve brought my whole family down to Disneyland!  It’s been about 30 years since I was last year, and it’s the first time coming to Disneyland in California for the rest of my family.  Melissa and I went to Disneyland in Paris about 18 years ago, but that’s a whole different story.

We live in Northern California, and while it might have been faster to fly down south, we chose to drive.  I always prefer to drive, when I can.  About a month ago, I’d made the same trip, vising the Anaheim conventions center for MLG.  Like that trip, I decided we’d best be entertained by listening to an audio book.  We listened to the first half of Ender’s Game.

I was really hoping that Chris would enjoy it.  He’s not much of a reader, and I was hoping exposure to a really well done story would help sway him to the literate side of life.  He enjoyed it some, but he’s not going to pushing to go to the bookstore or the library any time soon.

This reading of Ender’s Game isn’t particularly good, to be honest.  It switches readers, which is a little bit jarring all by itself.  It’s made worse by the fact that the woman reading when it’s from Valentine’s perspective is really terrible.  She stretches out words too long, and ends sentences with overly lengthy pauses.

Our tickets for the parks themselves are for tomorrow and the next day.  We walked together to visit the “Downtown” area, which is full of stores and restaurants.  We acquired starter sets for pin collection and trading from one of the stores for Bryanna and Melissa.  After that, we ate at the Rainforest Cafe.  We concluded our long evening by watching The Wolverine.

All in all, it was a very good day, and a really great start to our vacation.

07/25/13

Out of Go-Juice

I met up with M. Todd Gallowglas (Michael) for our second weekly writing date last night.  It’s amazing how much it helps to have a writing buddy!  Last night was the third time we’d met up, and it was really great to hang out with my friend.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out as well as the previous two writing sessions, and it’s all because I ran out of go-juice, on multiple levels.  I will explain.

First of all, yesterday was a longer day than most of my Wednesdays.  Melissa needed me to drive her to work that morning, which meant I needed to get up earlier than I wanted to.  It also meant my drive was longer than usual.

My workday was somewhat long.  I worked really hard to get a particular project I’ve been working on finished, and I had to troubleshoot some problems that were somewhat daunting, and I needed to give technical direction to one of our temporary programmers.  All these things were a bit taxing.

After that, it was the slightly longer drive to pick up Melissa, and a battle through traffic which involved an accident and road construction along the way.  After we got home, I had just enough time to grab my writing laptop bag and head back out into more traffic, to go to Roseville and meet up with Michael.

None of the things I’ve mentioned are individually taxing or terrible.  I don’t mind getting up earlier than usual.  I don’t mind driving Melissa to work.  It all adds up, though, so by the time I met up with Michael at the Starbucks, I felt a little bit exhausted.

This is not a simple story of defeat, though!  A little weariness isn’t going to hold me down!  I was determined to push through and add some words to my book!

As I said before, though, I was out of go-juice, on multiple levels.  In my hurry to get out my door, I didn’t grab the power cable for my laptop.  I opened it up, started writing, and discovered I had less than 20 minutes of electricity left.  My laptop was out of go-juice.

I’m saving my book on SkyDrive, so that I don’t have to worry about losing a machine and losing all my hard work.  I closed my laptop, and pulled out my phone.  Defeat was not an option!

But then I saw that I had less than 20% batter life on my phone, which generally means only a few minutes of actual use.  I managed to add another paragraph or two to my story, but that was it.  My phone was out of go-juice.

I was tired.  My laptop was dead.  My phone was dead.  So my Writing Wednesday ended early this week.

I said my farewells to Michael, gathered up my things, and went out to my car.  Wouldn’t you know it?  My gas gauge was sitting on “E” as well.

So last night wasn’t the greatest writing session, but it was still a good day.  Words were still added.  This is a marathon, not a sprint.  Next time, I’ll just have to make sure I have more fuel in the tank.

07/22/13

My First Book

The book I’m working on right now is coming along.  This weekend, I added another 500 words or so.  It’s not a huge amount, but since I was basically relaxing and taking the weekend off, I’m happy.

While it will be my first book to put in front of a larger audience, it really isn’t my first book.  My first book is a SciFi-mystery set on the moon, featuring a private investigator named Arthur Kane.  I started it when I was about 16, and I worked on it for a couple of years.  It’s told in three parts.  Also, it’s absolutely terrible.

Through my 20s and early 30s, I really had a difficult time starting another book, partly because I kept telling myself that I needed to fix The Arthur Kane Stories.  I restarted the book several times, but I couldn’t get into it.

I started writing the character of Arthur Kane before I started The Arthur Kane Stories, actually.  I’d visited my friend Doug, and he’d shown me a writing project he’d done for school that featured a detective.  It seemed like so much fun that I thought I’d try to write my own detective stories, and came up with one living on the moon, in the not too far flung future.

The early Arthur Kane was rich, athletic, an amazing marksman, perceptive, and brilliant.  He was also a mechanical genius because, you know, his grandpa had invented the flying car.  He was flawless, and that was the problem.  Every character should have flaws.  But I’m not going to beat myself up too much over that.  I was 12 or 13 when I started, and uneducated in such nuance.

When I was writing those first short stories, it was always fun.  I was just making up stuff, and my hero was defeating the bad guys and being brilliant.  It was a great way to pass the time, when I was playing video games.

Then my dad died on Halloween in 1988, and I stopped writing for a while.

A few months later, when was I 16 years old, I went back to my computer (an Apple IIc), and started a new Arthur Kane story.  My attitude was different, and the story was different.  I wasn’t just having my unrealistic super-detective cruise through life anymore.  I gave Arthur flaws, and I put him through some terrible stuff.  His home was destroyed, his best friend and partner was nearly killed, and the bad guy nearly got the best of him.

I didn’t realize until many, many years later that I was writing in order to help me deal with my dad’s death.  Arthur became flawed, because I’m flawed.  Arthur was going through hard times because that’s what I was feeling.  Arthur was me.

At the end of the first act, Arthur got out his saxophone and played a farewell to his grandfather, and was recovering.  He still had his issues, but he was respectfully moving on from the past, just as I was recovering and getting past the worst of my mourning.

The Arthur Kane Stories was my first book, and it really isn’t a publishable piece of fiction.  There’s a few copies of it out there, printed off with my dot matrix printer.  Maybe, if I become successful as a writer, I will polish it off for real.  Maybe it’d work in the Young Adult market.

I didn’t write it to make money, or to become famous.  I wrote it because I was a kid that needed an outlet for dealing with the death of his father.

I’m not writing my current book to make money, or to become famous, either.  That would be nice, and I’m certainly hopeful, but I don’t think that can be my motivation.  I’m writing now because the kid that wrote The Arthur Kane Stories started calling himself a writer, and I want to make sure that it’s true.