Good morning, Readers!

I did not stay up too late last night playing Skyrim resulting in feeling like a bad of slightly warm rubbish, thank you very much.  Anyway...

Yesterday was another fantastic writing day.  I don't mean to brag, I'm just really incredibly thrilled with how this is all going.

I wrote a little longer than my usual two hours.  Not by much.  Just by half an hour.  But I really needed to finish the scene before I headed off to go teach my martial arts class.  And I did.  And I have the next scene ready to go for today.  I don't know why it's going so well, or how I've manage it.

It reminds me a little of writing Skylark.  That was one of the easiest writes I've ever had.  I was so into that book, that I would skip training and stay up late writing.  That book poured out of me like flood waters over a dam.  It was written in, if I recall rightly, just over a month.  I doubt that I'll be able to replicate that quite exactly, but I also the words don't seem to be coming out at a trickle from an overworked pump.

Rock on.

Anyway, I'm still thrilled.  Hopefully I can carry this momentum into next week.

Watch, my first blog post next week will be all about how the magic's gone and everything is hard and horrible again.  Writing is such a roller-coaster... for writers.  I imagine this talk bores the hell out of you lot who aren't writers.  Sorry.  I'll stop now.

... And go write.

On that note, I'm off.

​Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Well, there is nothing really much to report.  Things are continuing along much as they have all week.  I'm writing well (thus far), I'm doing my run training thing, and the weights thing.  I'm day-dreaming about my next tattoo.... You know, the usual.

Speaking of the writing, I'm pleased with my current pace, but my streak of two thousand words a day won't last.  I'm generally happy if I happen to make a thousand words, and I do try to reach at least that.  However, my focus in the last couple of manuscripts shifted from reaching a word count to the number of hours spent in intensive writing mode.  That's two, for the record.  If I'm really feeling it, I might go for three, but two hours is about as much time I can spend in intense focus.  Much more is utterly exhausting, even though I'm only really sitting.

I post my daily word count on Facebook and Twitter, but it's not the number of words on the page that matter to me any more.  That said, I'm absolutely thrilled with the pace that I've managed to achieve these past couple of days, and I hope to continue it for a while yet.  I might start struggling soon, though, as I've only got so many scenes pre-written in my head.  Still, for now, I'm thrilled.

I'm feeling a bit tired today, what with the change in my physical activity levels still needing getting used to and the fact that I might have gotten to bed about an hour later than usual last night.  I had to eat, and then I got caught up listening to some music, which is always my Achilles heel, and suddenly it was extremely late and I needed to be in bed ages ago.

Le sigh.

So maybe my writing session won't go so well today.  Right, I have to go and restart this stupid computer, because the mouse cursor is lagging.  Again.  Gods I hate this computer.

Have a great day.

​Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Yesterday was a brilliant day.  I did my weights, and it went well.  Then I sat down to write, and that went better than I could have imagined.

I have no doubt that the words flowed easily because I've had that particular scene running laps around my brain for the better part of two years.  It's also really stupidly fun to write a character that has hit absolute rock bottom, fully knowing that he's going to claw his way back up in the very near future.  I wish I could tell you more, but that would head into spoiler territory, and so I won't.  Even though it's killing me.

I'm excited about this book in a way I wasn't about Outcast.  There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that it is nowhere near as dark and upsetting as The Great Man series.  This one is, to my mind at least, a lot more fun.  Yes, there is angst, but it's not nearly as deep, nor hits as close to home for me as in The Great Man.  Also, the characters curse a lot, and that is entertaining to write.  I also think the fact that this is a completely new story, not a rewrite of something I had previously written, makes this a lot more enjoyable for me.  I get to explore new things, instead of rehashing old (and terrifyingly depressing) paths.

As usual with the stories I write, I know how this one ends, which is to say, I have the final scene and final line in my mind, but the rest is as yet undiscovered.  Part of the joy of writing for me is going on an adventure with my characters.  I often find myself surprised by what happens, and sometimes utterly blindsided.  Writing does for me the same thing reading does; it takes me away on an exciting, sometimes heartbreaking adventure.  It's part of the reason why I write.

The other reason is, of course, that I have these stories swirling in my head, and they won't leave until I get the down on paper, so if I didn't write, it is very likely that I would go stark raving mad.

Anyway, the point is, I wrote two thousand words yesterday, and it wasn't a struggle.  Granted, starting was a little daunting.  Staring at a completely blank page on a completely new document can be a little overwhelming.  That all faded with the first few words.  It's so nice not to struggle to write.

On that note, I have to get writing.  I'll be finishing chapter one, and diving into chapter two, and I'm excited to get going today.  On that note, I'm off to write.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

Last night I had a really weird dream.

For starters, I was with Viggo Mortensen... so... there's that.

Also, there was some kind of threat.  I can't remember what it was, but it was pretty dire.  Despite this, I decided to buy land, and I converted it into an underground village thingy.  Each building was lined with lead, in case of nuclear threat... or something.

Each underground "home" pod was connected by a small tunnel, and there were several green houses which had timed lights to simulate actual sunshine and day-night cycles.  It was a great underground world.  Good thing too, because surface side was a disaster - dead and dark.  It wasn't like that before I bought the land.  Just after I miraculously built this world underground.

The dream didn't really have a point.  I was heading up to the surface in a spacesuit thingy, and then my alarm went off.  No more dream.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, except that I remembered it, and it was weird and interesting to me.

But the real news is this:  I'm done!  I've finished the rough draft of Outcast last week.  I went through and edited it on Friday (and finished up the little bit left on Saturday, since I had to be near work anyway, and I had the time).  I'm so thrilled to be done with this manuscript.

As I was going through the manuscript, I found that I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would.  Actually, I quite liked it.  I think it still needs a hell of a lot of work, but I'm happy to now be filing it away as done for now, and work on the next manuscript, the second book in the Avalon series.  This one's a lot of fun.  I'm pulling hard from Celtic myth in this one, and turning it into a sort of mythic punk story.  It's really fun, and I'm enjoying much more than the Great Man series.  The Great Man runs deeper in my soul, however.  Le sigh.

Right, I have to get started on book two of the Avalon series.  I still don't have a title for the first book, or this one, to be honest, but I'm excited to get started.  I've had the first chapter stuck in my head for the past two years, and I need to get this stuff written down.

So, I'm off.  Hope you all had a good weekend.

Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

So... I spent yesterday editing my recently "finished" manuscript Outcast.  I got through to chapter twenty, and, well, up until there, it's actually not bad at all.  I'm not impressed with it, per se, but I don't actually hate it as much as I thought I would.

There's no guarantee, however, that it doesn't all fall apart after chapter twenty, but up until then, it's decent enough that I'd happily send that part to beta readers.  We'll see about the rest of it in the next few work days.  As of now, however, I'm not unhappy with it.

Surprisingly.

I honestly thought it was so much rougher than it turned out (thus far... I know there are really rough spots in the later chapters).

Hopefully the rest of the edits will go just as smoothly.  Hopefully.

A short post today, because I really want to get back to editing so I can file this one away for a while.

What are you up to today?

​Ciao!

Good morning, Readers!

I'm blogging over at Black Gate Magazine today.  A good thing too.  I have a manuscript to start editing the hell out of.  Anyway, I'm reviewing the Netflix film Rim of the World​.

I was bored out of my tree last night, and so flipped through Netflix and stumbled across this film.  Remember that my friend Nate had recommended this movie, I decided to watch it. What the hay? It can’t be any worse than Bright. I was correct, it was not worse than Bright. It was a good deal better; a delightful, hilarious science fiction adventure that was a love letter to the films of the 80s that centered heroic children.
​
From IMDB:

If that doesn’t sound like the most 80s of plots, I don’t know what does.

Good morning, Readers!

Yesterday, I wrote the word Fin.

It came immediately after the last sentence of the epilogue.

Guys, I've at last finished the rough draft of Outcast, at long last.  Now, it is a rough draft.  I have a lot of work to do on it yet.  There are scenes missing, abandoned threads that need to be tied up or removed.  The editing pass I'm about to embark on is going to be a rough time.

BUT, I finished the manuscript.  The story is done, more or less.  I am so very relieved.

I'm taking a day to celebrate... by editing a friend's story.

Then I'm diving back in sometime in the next couple of days for the heavy, dear-god-why-did-I-ever-think-this-was-closed-to-finished editing.  Then I can finally file this away and work on the second book of the Avalon series, which I'm looking forward to.

In other news, I'm back to my regular schedule, more or less, in other areas of my life.  Meaning, after a few weeks of being ill where all physical activity fell away, I'm back at it.  Yesterday was a bit of a mess.  I didn't get up to go to the gym in the morning, due to the migraine that woke me before dawn, leaving me in tears.  Determined not to waste more time, I went to the gym during my lunch break.  I'm a bit sore today, which means my run this afternoon won't be great, but oh well!

I'm into week two of my run training, so the easy stuff is more or less over.  Though, to be honest, this next week doesn't seem all that difficult, either.

Right, I have a friend's story to edit.  I'm off to work.

Ciao!