Sometimes you just want to sit back and play Candy Crush…and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Returning to work after two weeks away, I came back to a lot. A lot of emails. A lot of instant messages. A lot of conference calls. Plus, I don’t have an official boss right now and the other two team leads (I’m also a team lead) were on vacation. So everything for the team came to one person. Yup. That was me. Needless to say, it was a little overwhelming. Pile on top it was my birthday and we celebreated a few times, and I didn’t get much of anything done last week.

I’m still very much relaxed and ready to jump back into it. Just doing my best to get my brain back in gear. I’ve got a lot I need to get done. I had hoped to be on track to finishing Almost-Super Heroes 2 before the end of this month. Being that I’m about 40,000 words away from the end, that’s most likely not going to happen. Sorry to disappoint you on that front.

I will be kicking things into gear in July and I’ve set forth a couple of challenges for August and September. I thought May was a challenge? Let’s see what the next two challenges bring. 🙂

First some sad news. I’ll be attending a funeral for a friend. That news hit me rather hard last week as well. He died the day before Father’s day and a few days before his 58th birthday. His birthday is the day after mine and we had celebrated several together. We had grown apart over the years and he’ll be missed.

In other fun news, I’ll be buying a bass. My best friend from high school will be turning 50 next year. We were in a band together in high school with another friend who lives in Long Beach (and is the lead singer in Electric Funeral, a Black Sabbath cover band in LA). The three of us will reunite on stage in February. We’re currently discussing the songs we’ll be playing. I’m really excited to be picking up a bass after…a lot of years. I’ve been thinking of getting one just to noodle around with. Now I have a reason to get one. If I can track down old recordings of us from back in the day, I’ll post them. Our band was S.C.R.O.G. Inc. and we were a bunch of nuts with little-to-no talent. We’ll have to see what shows up.

I’ll also see if I can track down the band my friend and I were in back in the day after I’d gotten out of the Navy and switched from drums (I’d gotten better since high school) to bass. We were Defective and had tons of fun playing in clubs all over San Diego. I’ll have to see if we can convince our old lead singer to come down and join us on stage for a song. That’d be a hoot.

Back to writing. Since I didn’t actually put my hands on the keyboard to create a story, I though up an entirely new series I want to write. This one would be over the top steampunk with a floating city.

But Jay, that’s been done before.

No, it’s a floating castle.

But Jay, that’s been done before.

No, like the entire country is on an airship. I know many of these ideas have been done before, but I think I have a different take on it. I’ve got the setting and characters all fleshed out. I just need to come up with a storyline. For that one, I might just start typing and see where it goes. Man-o-man do I have a lot more books that I want to write now.

Speaking of books, I read a lot. Like, a lot. I try to read a book a week. I haven’t reviewed much because I have so many Facebook Friends who’d I’d like to review their books, but Amazon likes to erase them, so I stopped. I was thinking of teaming up with another person who’s first name it J. and we might start the J & J Book Review podcast. We’ll have to see how that fleshes out. I’ll keep you posted when we start doing that.

Next week I hope to have Golden West 3 released. At least the ebook. The print edition will probably come the following week. I still need to do some editing and redo all the covers. I have some ideas and ran them by my favorite daughter who likes the idea of doing some book covers for me. She’s busy filling out scholaship forms and getting ready to transfer to Newschool of Design and Architecture in the fall. So she’s also a little busy. Again, I’ll keep you posted.

There’s a lot that’s going to happen this year. There are many more stories to come. I know I need to write and this week, I’ll be getting back at that.

Until Next Time

Stay Awesome!