Change in the air...

So...yeah. It's been a while.

Sorry 'bout that, but you know, life happens. And in the life around our household, that has meant some serious soul-searching and decision making.

If you look closely, you'll see that the last blog post here was just before Christmas. It was around the holidays, as we were hanging out with family, that Patti and I began discussing "the future".

Relax. Loving Wife and I are as much in love now as we were sixteen plus years ago. No, the future was more along the lines of "what next". You see, last summer, we paid off our school loans, we had eliminated our credit card debt and we were saving our pennies. We started to talk about buying a house.

The looks that came out of that conversation could have been used to make all the negative emotion flash cards for pre-schoolers: shock, horror, dismay, fear. It seemed that despite very little in the way of debt and some good management of our finances, we anticipated it would take more than four years to save the cash we would need to put 20% down on a house here in the OC. And because of the short sale on the house in Vegas, there was no other way to qualify for a loan. We had to have 20%.

Oof. (more)

A Fantabulous Weekend with Loving Wife (and Kevin Hearne)

It's been a while since I have posted, so as I sit by myself in a hotel room in Las Vegas (damn you Blackjack gods for making it a short night!), I thought I would fill you in on what was a weekend of fun and relaxation that Loving Wife and I will never forget.

Waaaaay back in the late spring/early summer, one of my favorite authors, Kevin Hearne, announced that he would be having a release party in Mesa, AZ for his newest book (mandatory and well deserved plug: here is the link to the Iron Druid Chronicles starting with HOUNDED--go get it. No, right now. I will wait.)

Well, seeing as a) I really like Kevin Hearne and b) Loving Wife and I hadn't been on a 'getaway' weekend for many moons, I woke up at 545am on a Saturday morning* and purchased two tickets to the release party. This was done with a bit of hope and wishful thinking, for as I had read and enjoyed all the books, Loving Wife had not and there was no guarantee she would like them.

Kicked in the nuts -- and it was good!

So I sent off my book to someone I trusted. She read the whole thing. Yay! The first person besides Loving Wife (who saw it still steaming and dripping ink off the printer) to read my book.

How'd she like it? She tore that MFer apart and slapped me upside the head with its bloody entrails.

Which is EXACTLY why I sent it to her.

Getting kicked in the nuts about something you have obsessed over for half a year isn't the most pleasant feeling in the world and the very first thing I thought when I read her email was along the lines of 'worthless, bloody hack'. And, indeed, I may be a worthless bloody hack, but within moments of reading her comments the first time through, I also knew she had hit upon those things that weren't sitting quite right but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

The wrong character is the primary villain? Crap
It sounds like cheap fan fiction of a favorite author? Shit (but Yay for having someone compare me to Jim Butcher!)
Your world building is held together with spit and toilet tissue? Dammit.

But quite honestly, I am grateful. More than grateful, I am relieved. I am relieved that while what she pointed out makes for a lot of work, I immediately agreed with her assessment once it was laid out for me.

So, as is often the phrase in the writing world, I am off to kill my darlings. Because DEATH FOOF is going to get a major overhaul. And that is a good thing.

It's the best sort of kick in the nuts a guy can get.

NaNoWriMo - What the what?

Today marks the start of NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Without boring the non-writers out there, it is basically a group effort designed to give writers a nudge/boost/smack in the ass to sit down and just write.

The goal is to write 50k words, roughly the equivalent to 1/2-3/4 of a full novel. Dividing that over 30 days, it's about 1666 words per day. Now, this doesn't seem that much, right? After all, you remember the 500 word essays you wrote in high school and you churned those out on the bus on your way to school.

Well, Aspiring Author is here to tell you that sitting down and writing a little over 1500 words a day can be really hard if you don't have a plan. It's easy enough to churn out writing in discrete chunks-- I am vomiting out a little over 325 words for this blog post right now -- when that writing has a specific purpose. But it is much more difficult to write those words when they are just links in a chain that has to stretch from point A to point B and not become hopelessly tangled like those seventeen year old strings of Christmas lights you are about to break out.

Yours truly will not be participating in NaNoWriMo per se. However, I have decided to do so in spirit. I will not be shooting towards a specific word count goal, but I will be spending the month of November writing the sequel to DEATH FOOF. Yes, that was a 'title reveal' I just did there. Congrats on becoming one of the first to know the name of my first book.

The sequel has been plotted, and has a working title of THE UNDEAD DEAD. So, to all my writing friends out there in interwebland, good luck on NaNoWriMo. Consider this another nudge or boost to get you to write.

If you want a smack in the ass, I will have to ask permission from Loving Wife first.

Cheers.

AA

It's all done but the crying...

Yup. I did it. I not only finished my first novel, I finished the full polish.

Which, of course, doesn't mean jack squat.

I can't tell you how exhilirating it is to say it's done. While I have been working on this non-stop for the better part of the last five months, the idea is really more than six years old. To say that I actually have a complete, end-to-end, yes-it-really-has-an-ending, novel sitting on my hard drive, one that at least a few people think has some potential, makes me giddy.

Of course, I also feel like 40 year old virgin spinster at her first vibrator party--excited, scared, a little confused and wondering what the hell I do with this thing next.

Because in reality, I have only climbed one rung of the ladder. Oh sure, it is the biggest, hardest and most intimidating rung, but there is still a looming climb to becoming a published author. But the thing is, you can't become published if you don't have a damn book!

And I have a damn book!

So, its on to creating the synopsis, polishing the query letter for the 947th time and researching those agents who look like they might give a guy with a beer belly and a penchant for ribald similies a break.

So, while I continue the climb, at least I know I have made it out of the morass of wannabes and pretenders who keep saying they will write a book but never do. I must admit, the view from this level is pretty sweet.

Cheers.
AA

Editing Update - Almost There!

Whew! The Writer Therapy bloghop was a rush. I cruised the interwebs and peeked in on the writing habits of two dozen of my fellow wanna be authors (and an occasional published one). It is exhilarating to see that there is so much support among the writing community.

I also saw more traffic in two days to this little corner of the blogosphere than in the last month. That's very cool. I hope my ramblings, rants and occasional Dr. Suess riff were well-received. Welcome to all those that dropped by and decided to follow.

The blog hop made me peek through previous posts and I realized I hadn't updated on the editing of the Work in Progress (WIP) in some time. I can't believe it was over a month ago that I updated. Time doesn't only fly, it zooms like a friggin rocket, causing whole weeks to disappear. But, I am happy to say that the first full-edit of the WIP is nearly complete. Here are the basic stats:

37 Chapters
91,000 words
335 pages

Three of the remaing five chapters are fairly short (under 2k words) but the 'money shot' chapter where everything wraps up is over 5k, so I am going to end up a little higher than I planned at about 107-110k since I still have to add a wrap up chapter now that I have tidied up most of the loose ends.

The cool thing--and those writers out there know exactly what I am talking about--is that as I move through this section of the work, I haven't seen it in several weeks and as I sit down to edit I get lost in the actual reading of my own book. I wrote the damn thing and yet I find myself clicking through page after page asking 'what happens next?!?!'

I take that as a postive sign. :)

Getting to the end of the edits is a mixture of relief, exhilaration and dread. It is good to get through it, but just like the actual writing, I know I had good days and bad days during the editing process. There are still going to be rough patches that need more work. But the book is on the cusp of query ready and I have already generated a list of agents that I will be sending it out to, broken down into a couple of tiers. That causes the dread. Is the query good enough? Is the synopsis good enough (for those agents that want it)? Can I figure out how to convert the damn thing to .RTF? Will I hit send and hear nothing but crickets chirping for the next two months?

Ah, well, for those that have been following from the beginning (Hi Mom! Again!), you know that I will keep pushing on. Over the past six to eight months, I've come to realize that writing is something I will do regardless of whether an agent moons over my work. But I'll get there. Hopefully before retirement age.

Cheers!

AA

Writer Therapy - How I avoid going postal

Today, the good folks at Writer Therapy are sponsoring a blog hop. The question they presented is what do I use as writer's therapy (see what they did there?) and how do I use it to maintain my writerly aspirations and not chuck the whole computer out the window?*

At first, the question seemed simple. What do I use as therapy so I can continue to press forwad and write. Then I realized there are so many reasons that I might not write. Now, I had a much more complicated question on my hand. After all, one week, I may put in nearly ninety hours at the 'real job' and have no energy or time to write. Is the therapy I need for that the same as when I have plenty of time, but am struggling on developing plot for the newest work? What about like now, when I am deep into edits of a completed work and the writing is not pounding out words, but erasing them and struggling to find better words to say the same thing?

Not so simple a question now, is it? But I've thought about it, and realized that despite the type of problem I am experiencing with my writing, there is one common theme to the therapy I use to combat it: time.

I have never been the type to have a 'go to' means of stress relief. I love massages, but can't afford a biweekly rubdown. I don't have a specific hobby unless you count planting my butt in front of a television the size of a double-wide to watch hockey games (get your act together NHL and NHLPA!) and while I used to play sports religiously, that would be counterproductive now since the aches and pains of moving this old body faster than a brisk walk would prevent me from sitting at a keyboard for more than thirty seven seconds.

But getting away from the writing in some manner always works. Thankfully, it also doesn't require removing myself too far from writing either. For instance, I can jump on Scribophile and edit someone else's work for an hour or dial up the latest Chuck Wendig or Chris F. Holm or Kevin Hearne book and read for several hours. I also love spending time with Loving Wife and the Kiddo and with my son getting heavily involved with band projects, a lot of time is being spent there!

I'm lucky. My personality is such that I don't stress much even in the most critical situations. I also have never put much undue pressure on myself (Loving Wife insists my nervous system is laced with Xanax). However, I do get obsessive about things. As I mentioned in a previous post, the bug is in me and that sometimes has me writing or editing instead of doing some of the other important things in life. All things in moderation!

So for me, the answer of what I do as Writing Therapy is simple: give it time. Sometimes its letting the work percolate for a couple of days, sometimes just getting up and raiding the refrigerator in the middle of an editing session is enough. But in all cases, time is the answer. Time lets the little blue globe of writing mana fill back up and allows the maelstrom of dust I caused in the latest flurry of edits settle back down. This may be a simple answer, but it is wholly and completely me. And I figure if I can't be honest with myself, there is no way I can be honest as a writer.

Cheers!

*Okay, the computer is a 25 lb Alienware. Maybe I can just chuck the mouse?