The mess we're in

All Time's Exodus, book four in Stars of the New Gods, is taking much longer than expected.  Not that many of you are out there waiting with bated breath, but I thought it was fair.  I'm hoping to finish it by the end of the fall and hopefully have it up on Amazon by December or January.  Life has taken the front seat, and unfortunately composition is somewhere between the backseat and the trunk.  Nothing terrible, just find myself watching the hours in the day run out before I can sit down at the computer to start back up on the story.

Composition is a tricky thing for me.  Stephen King wrote a fantastic memoir about his approach to composition, simply titled On Writing.  He stresses trying to get at least 2000 words (roughly 6-10 raw pages) down everyday.  He also stresses trying to do it as fast as you can, in other words, writing at least five days a week.  The Stephen King approach has always worked for me.  Sure, it takes me about a year to turn out a book, but I feel that's pretty good considering I work a full-time job on top of that.  All Time's Exodus has strayed very far during the last year.  Sometimes there were weeks between composition sessions, and the fact that I lost a great chunk of the first draft to a faulty computer made the work pretty demoralizing.  I'm sure I've romanticized that draft in my head and it probably wasn't as great as I thought it was, but I do know I was having a very fun time writing it.  When I came to the conclusion that the many pages and chapters I pumped out with a pretty good cadence were lost, I began the demoralizing work of trying to rewrite them.  It was not fun...it was work.  Stephen King also refers to work as the "kiss of death for many writers".  I was determined and I do feel the story benefited from it, but the pace slowed and I wandered very far from what should have been straightforward composition.

I've always set a deadline for myself.  My goal has always been to start writing a book in the fall and have it ready to go up on Amazon by August or September.  It's almost August and I'm pretty sure All Time's Exodus is not going to be going up.  So, I put my chin up and work toward my new goal of a January publication, as well as a set of short stories I've started working on.

The anthology of short stories will cover the eight year gap between When The Red Moon Runs Dry and The Falling Stars.  Three stories, each one devoted to a single character.  Violetta's is my favorite so far.  Marshal and Charles will get theirs as well, and hopefully it will enrich your enjoyment of the characters despite the fact each story has little consequence on the overall Stars of the New Gods series.

That's all for now.  Hope you all stay sane throughout the fucking farce that is this upcoming election.  Donald Trump is evil.  Hillary will make a great president, and Bernie did a stupendous job bringing his issues to the Democratic convention.  I think that's about the cut and dry of it all.

So long from a very toasty Portland.

Block, Wall, Hit, Writer...All of the Above

It feels like we are coasting out of a very dull winter into an earlier spring here in Portland, Oregon.  The rain is still falling, but the days are starting to feel a little warmer and longer.

I wish I could say the weather has improved my creative energy.  It has not.  To be honest, I've fallen considerably behind in the fourth Stars of the New Gods.  I took a risk– at least in my opinion it was a risk– and the road I took at the crossroads of the story seems to have reached the end of ideas I originally thought it was paved with.  When I wrote Find the Star, I had very little idea where the book was going as I put the chapters together.  It was, more or less, a creative exercise with an underlying ambition to actually finish a novel.  I was pleasantly surprised I could put together a story with a sort-of end.  When the Red Moon Runs Dry and The Falling Stars were all but mapped out when I opened my computer to put them together.  They began and ended how I predicted they would, with only a few changes in the composition and revisions.

This fourth book, at this point it's titled All Time's Exodus, has me up against the wall.  I think I'm a little over halfway finished with the first draft, but I honestly don't know how the story is going to end.  I'm faced with some interesting prospects, but the pages seem to be devoted to justifying the strange turns I've been taking with certain characters.  I don't think I'm ruining anything by saying this, but the fourth book picks up only a few weeks after The Falling Stars.  I often found the time gap between books as way to cheat immediate explanations of how characters reflected on events.

Take Violetta, for example; she suffered a tremendous loss during the events of the third book, so she is still dealing with very raw grief during this fourth story.  It's difficult to navigate her through this fourth story without that grief controlling her every action.  I put her through hell and now the decisions she makes are so greatly shaped by her sense of complete loss, and it's become difficult for me to move the story forward when I continue to address the grief.  For now, I'm just rolling with it and hoping I will find answers in the revisions of this story.  I am very fond and protective of Violetta, despite the misery I've piled on her plate.  I guess me continuing to detail her sense of sorrow in this story is my way of showing concern and regard for what she is going through.

I used to sit down and write at least 2,000 words a day during the initial composition.  That's what I should be doing now, but I just stared at the bits of an unfinished chapter, and decided to step away for a moment.  I figured if I came over to this much neglected blog of mine and aired a few frustrations that might get the wheels turning.  We'll see.

I suppose I should be excited that I don't know the end of this book.  I do not see it concluding Stars of the New Gods.  There will be a fifth book and my little plan is for that one to be the finale.  I'm drafting outlines, making character sketches, and coming up settings.  I figure if I put enough creative energy into the elements of the story then the story will speak to me.

Suppose, since it's that season, I should talk politics.  I support Bernie Sanders.  I have strong feelings about it, but I think people need to get off of their high horses about Bernie.  Yes, I'm proud to support Bernie, but I'm not out to make people who would support another candidate feel like shit about it.  I think Hilary Clinton would make a great president, and if she gets the nomination, I'll gladly get behind her.  Donal Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio scare the living shit out of me.  I think republicans could have done a hell of a lot better and I'm ashamed of our collective American image pretty much every time one of those guys opens their mouth.

Well, not sure when I'll write again.  Hopefully it will be to announce I've finished the rough draft.

Fully staffed

Having a staph infection fucking sucks.  There is no elegant way to put it.  Especially when you are 34 and it is caught relatively late in the game.  The only way to treat it is with a myriad of antibiotics and the prospect of surgery.  Thanks to said antibiotics I have been chained to the porcelain goddess for close to 24 hours now...and that's about as graphic as it gets.

Still...life could be much worse and I'm grateful for my health overall.  A relatively young man named Daniel Fleetwood does not know if he will make it until December.  Among the prospects of not being able to wake-up again within the next 30 days, Daniel is a HUGE Star Wars fan and is not sure he will be around for the almighty Episode VII The Force Awakens.  A huge push has gone on over the last couple days and I encourage anyone reading this to stop and share his story.  You can find it here.

It is a true testament to the staying power of not only Star Wars, but modern-day storytelling and mythology, when so many people get behind a person like Daniel.  Many of us, for our own selfish reasons, can't imagine not seeing The Force Awakens this December.  We take for granted our good health and the prospect of a future beyond 2015.  Daniel has fought a long, hard battle against a disease that is unfortunately winning.  He has not given up and puts one-step forward each day toward small victories.  We should all take a page from Daniel and realize how lucky we are to win our own small victories everyday.  I'm very inspired by him.

Book 4 is well on it's way to completion.  The short story anthology I mentioned last month is most likely not going to happen by late December.  It was a nice thought.  Look for it early 2016.

Though sales of my book are slim at best, I will be donating all of this November and December's sales to Daniel Fleetwood's GoFundMe page.  I encourage anyone reading to make a straightforward donation to his page before buying any of my books, as that $$ amount is a much more direct and economical way to get his family the funds they need.  If you do that and buy a book, the $2.99 you pay for my book will also go to Daniel and his family.  So, make a donation to Daniel your first priority, but if you want to put a cherry on top, buy a book from me and I will make a donation for the retail price amount you pay.

Thanks for reading!

It's been a while

I've been busy, which is a good thing.

Last month I was gifted a semi-used MacBook Pro.  I was able to retrieve a good portion of one book, but the one I was on a roll with was gone.  I've been busy rebuilding it.  Take notes with a pen and paper.  With Scrivener (my word processing and composition software), it offers a pretty fantastic note window, which I luckily neglected by choosing pen and paper.  Using those notes, the reconstruction was not as hard as it could have been.

Holiday is fast approaching.  I'm attempting to finish a small collection of short stories, but the window is closing, so it may not be until after the New Year.  If you do any shopping, make sure to use those handy Amazon windows on my page.  They give me a cut.

Happy Autumn

Back to Google

Well, the MacBook was officially pronounced dead.  There was a great fourth Stars of the New Gods book, not complete, but close to a couple hundred pages.  Along with that, the first novel of my new trilogy, The Order of Devotion.  Those books, what they were, are now gone.

Let's find the silver lining.

I was honestly struggling with The Order of Devotion.  I know exactly what I wanted to happen story wise, but there were so many characters to guide through the narrative it was overwhelming.  Now that I was forced to step away from the story I am beginning to form some more economical ways fo characters to get from chapter to chapter.

It's a damn shame I lost book four, though.  It's always been one of my worst nightmares, and like a motorcyclist putting their bike down at 60 mph, I learned the hard way and it won't happen again.  If you use Scrivener make sure to set up a Dropbox account and back EVERYTHING up.  I can't imagine how many times I will be hitting the SAVE drop down.

Luckily, I still have a pen and paper.  I remember a good deal of what I've written, so once I'm ready I can start shopping for a new computer and step up to the keyboard well prepared.  

Thanks to whomever has been buying stuff through my Amazon widget.  Every bit counts at the moment

Still working...

I've actually put the logic board of my MacBook in the oven.  Hoping to at least get it to turn on.  Until then I've been using my iPad, notepad, and getting a lot of reading done.  Taking this as a sign that I need to write this story the long way.

Pretty sure there will be a fifth book at this point in the outlining.  Yay

Feeling cursed and asking for a little help from my readers and friends

I was off to a great start.  About 200 pages into the first book in The Order of Devotion trilogy, tentatively called Worse Things Than Death; as well as book four in Stars of the New Gods.

A few months ago I decided to start using a composition software called Scrivener.  For everything published up to this point I used a combination of Microsoft Word and Google Docs.  Scrivener is excellent for raw composition.  You can tailor the templates however you like.  The sidebars offer notecards, character descriptions, outline, location descriptions and a nice bar to separate your chapters neatly.  There is even a built in Name Generator, my most used tool! Once finished, the software preps your book with page breaks and a table of contents.  It's amazing and I love it.  I could not give it a higher recommendation.

All that being said, I was so head over heels for this software I forgot to back up my work as I went along.  Partially out of neglect and also taking for granted Microsoft Word and Google Docs have cloud based back-ups that do it automatically.

Two days ago I go to turn on my MacBook and nothing happens. To make a long story short, the black screen of death greeted me.  In all likelihood my MacBook is dead.  There are a few technical possibilities of salvaging it and the parts are in the mail.  We will see, but everything I have read points to the computer being either dead or in the throes.  All I'm hoping for at this point is to boot it up a few more times long enough to get my books (between 200-300 pages of hard work) in Dropbox until I can find another computer.  Time is of the essence because I'm pretty sure I can keep the momentum if I get back in the saddle quick.

Here's where I turn to you, any of my readers who may be listening.  There is an Amazon search window on this site.  It should be in the upper right hand corner above this post.  I'm hoping to buy a used MacBook off eBay, which can run anywhere from $300-400.  That's not too much, but it's more than I can spend in the immediate future due tomonthly budget.  If you feel inclined to share any of my books you may have enjoyed with your friends, please ask them to purchase my books through the Amazon purchase window on this site.  That way I will get a bigger percentage of the sale through Amazon. If you buy anything through that Amazon window, I get a cut.  Yay! They can also click on any ads here and that might put some change in my pocket.

I hate asking this of any of you.  I appreciate your support and any kind words you all have shared with me.  I plan on keeping the stories coming for as long as I can come up with them.  Assure your friends there will be no shortage of creativity.  Any help is much appreciated and I will make my books free to download anytime Amazon allows it (they authorize special sales, not me).

Thank you.  *hat in hand*

^^^world map I'm drafting for the Order of Devotion trilogy