Category Archives: Blog Post
Daily Update: Mini Pies.
Last night the wife, my favorite daughter, and one of her friends made mini cherry pies. This morning we made mini breakfast pies. I had gotten the pie maker during Christmas and I’ve only used it twice. I really need to use it more. This little thing is quick and rawks 🙂
Pies are cool.
Update on music on my Xoom. I downloaded the MixZing player. This allowed me to select where my music folder is and only plays music from that folder. It also let’s me choose songs by album or artist, build playlists, all the things the other player did, but were having a problem with. I deleted all the stray music and the Google music player still doesn’t know where my music is and winamp wants to put up to 5 versions of each song in the master playlist. So my music problem, for the time being, has Ben corrected.
Mike Plested and I have started plotting Jack Kane II and it’s going great so far. Once we get this plotting done I’ll begin the edits on the first novel in earnest so we can get it ready for beta readers and submission.
Went to my favorite daughter’s volleyball practice earlier today. They looked good. They have practice again tomorrow. Even though they lost all their games yesterday they were all in good spirits. The coach had them doing some interesting drills and exercises. Some made them laugh as they were doing them so it was a good thing.
I normally do these posts in one sitting. Today has been an up and down day. I’ve managed to get about a paragraph out and I’m called off to do something else. Sometimes life is like that.
Our latest was off to get a rental car because sputtery truck won’t be ready until Tuesday. Now that we have the rental car, we’re off to Sees Candies to get a gift for someone. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Tomorrow I’ll be at an onsite training. I’ll post about that later. Once we get back from Sees, it’s writing time.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Better Nate than Lever
So the title is a shaggy dog story that I’ll have to tell one day. Not today. Brain is just plain wiped out at the moment.
Why?
Went to bed a little late last night and got up at 4:30am so we could drive an hour North to go to my favorite daughter’s volleyball tournament. They lost all their games again, but overall their performance was far better and their attitudes were also much better as well. We stopped, at a big meal and everyone fell asleep on the drive home. Well, almost everyone. I managed to stay awake until I got home and then I took a nap.
Currently watching Fashion Police with the wife, my favorite daughter, and one of the kid’s friends. You either love or hate Joan Rivers and I have always loved her. There are few reality type shows that I watch, but her new show ( the name escapes me at the moment and I’m too tired to Google it) is also quite funny. The only other one that I really like is Gold Rush, but I’m getting into Storage Wars and Shipping Wars for different reasons. Shipping Wars is giving me some great ideas for V&A Shipping II.
Sputtery Truck should be ready on Tuesday. After talking with the gentleman who’ll be replacing the engine I’m feeling much more confident that it’ll be actually running on Tuesday. He’s seen my problem before with other vehicles with the same engine. I think it’ll be money well spent.
Tomorrow I’ll be assembling Lance Encounter and Don’t Use the Phone and putting those up on smashwords.com for free. Very excited to see what people think of both stories and the covers. Dan dan the Art Man did an incredible job with both. I’ve been abusing him a lot lately and he has far outperformed my expectations.
Speaking of tomorrow. I just woke up from a nap and I’m ready to go back to bed 🙂 . We may end up playing some catch phrase first. We’ll see how it goes.
Until tomorrow!
Woo Woo!
Daily Update: Sputtery Truck
Today I’m off to drop off Sputtery Truck with someone who will replace the engine. When I say off I mean I actually took the day off to take care of this. I’m about to head outside and remove all the ‘stuff’ from inside the truck. Call it paranoia, call it caution. I just don’t want anything I have in there to disappear.
I haven’t been sleeping well. I think it’s stress, but it’s hard to know for sure.
My major project at work has gone through testing. I’m now working on requirements for another project while the previous goes through User Acceptance Testing. The truck is about to get a new engine which means I’ll have a vehicle soon. It’s been tough without one. The money we’re spending will be difficult in the short term, but in the long term I think we’re making the right choice.
I was talking with my friend last night. It’s kind of funny. I’ve only ever bought two new cars. The first was when I was in the Navy. I got ripped off and didn’t fully understand that until after I had signed the contract. That one eventually died. The second the wife and I got when my favorite daughter was born. That one ran great, but we eventually needed something bigger and sold it to buy the Tahoe.
All in all I’ve had good luck with vehicles. It’s easy to allow a bad event such as what I’m going through now overshadow all the repair-free years. I haven’t had a car payment in a very long time so it’s not like I’ve been putting money into the vehicle(s) year after year other than standard maintenance. My hope is this repair will get me over the next year without anything else. As far as I know, I’ve done everything else that would cost a large sum of money.
Once I have the truck back I think I’ll sleep better knowing that when I need it, it’ll be there. I just need to relax. Yeah, that’s it. relax. 🙂
Had another decent writing day yesterday. I was going to post weekly updates as to my progress. What I’ll do on my February 1st Daily Update is post my word count for January and show where I am and where I should be in relationship to my yearly goal. I’ll also break down fiction and blog posts. Obviously these daily blog posts have helped my word count. Next month I’m going to try and write far more fiction.
Well, the tow truck driver will be here soon. I need to go get things packed up.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Pumpkin Pie and Words
So I was hungry and old Father Hubbard went to the Cupboard and lo and behold the cupboard was bare. I did, however, find a frozen pumpkin pie in the freezer and it looked like something good to cook. I also found some noodles and some cheese and made some mac & cheese as well as a box of stove top stuffing.
*note: I did go to the store after the wife got home from work
So I cooked a mish-mash of different things. It was pretty cool having pumpkin pie even if it wasn’t fresh or all that good.I love me some pumpkin pie but we didn’t have whipped cream which I should have thought about getting when I went to the store. Perhaps later today.
So I wrote nearly 2000 words yesterday. I feel pretty good about that. I’m hoping for another 2000 word day again today. Tomorrow will be stressful as I need to drop off sputtery truck to get his guts replaced. Nervous about not only having to get it towed, but the process and the money. I’ll get over it.
Saturday my favorite daughter has another volleyball tournament but this one is in Temecula. That’s only an hour away so we won’t be sleeping over this time. That’s a good thing as Friday night they have practice from 7pm-9pm. I’d hate to drive up to LA after practice getting there super late and having to get up early to go to the tourney.
Speaking of my favorite daughter, I’ve been helping her at night practice her volleyball moves out in the parking lot. This hasn’t done good things for the pain in my lower legs. Although the pain is lessening during the day, when I have to chase after the ball it only takes about 30 minutes before I’m in pain and limping back into the house. Next week I’m going to start going up to the gym in the place where we’re renting and start working out again. I now know I cannot do any impact exercises until I strengthen my legs more and maybe not even then. <sigh>
So the picture I posted is of a small, pewter griffin. Yes, yes I know they’re mythical beasts. I bought this a long time ago and it always reminded me of my father. It reminds me of him because the logo for his company, Murdock Laboratory, is a griffin. It’s changed over the years and is more stylized now, but it’s still a griffin. I keep this little figure next to me when I write because it inspires me to write and it inspires me to think about the business of writing. My father always taught me you can never have too much on your plate when it comes to work. You’d rather have too much, than go hungry.
What does all this have to do with angry birds? Oh, wait. I didn’t mention angry birds yet. Anyway. I solved all the Angry Birds latest seasons levels in one sitting. I was sad, but I did. It got me to thinking of my dad in a weird sort of way. As I played the levels I thought they should build an angry birds level builder so people could make their own. I thought this would be so awesome. There would still be the official Angry Birds levels, but people who want to play more could find other people’s levels and those who want to join in the fun could build their own.
Awesome idea, right? Well, there was a game I love way back when called Lode Runner. The idea was to avoid the bad guys, collect the treasure, and a hidden ladder would appear that you’d need to take to the top. Simple 2D graphics. You could burn bricks (but not solid areas). There were hidden bricks that were really traps.
Anyway, the guys of Lode Runner built in a ‘build your own level’ area of the game. I solved all the Lode Runner levels in all versions of the game and played them over and over. I even got my dad addicted to the game. It was great fun. We’d have contests to see who could progress further in say 15 minutes. Things like that. When I discovered that I could build my own levels, it was game on! I’d build a level, my dad would solve it. I’d build a harder level. He’d solve it. I’d build a level with one solution. He’d solve it. I’d build a level with a trap, he’d get angry and say, “Hey! That’s not fair. Not traps on the next one.” I built somewhere around 70 levels and my dad solved them all.
It things like this that run through my head when I send those little birds screaming along to knock stuff over. It’s little things like the griffin that keep my dad in my memory. It’s inspiration like this that have me taking on as much as I can handle…and then asking for more.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: I was annoyed, but now I’m happy
I spent too much time last night trying to figure out why I couldn’t play music like I should be able to. I use my Xoom tablet for almost everything and I had Winamp installed and the latest Xoom update made the generic music player become the Google Music player. Ok, that’s fine.
However when I went to play a song, I noticed that winamp skipped a couple before it played a song. I didn’t think anything of it for the first couple of days until I opened the Music player and it wouldn’t play anything.
See, I like winamp, but the Music Player would allow me to select an album an play only that album in order. I wanted to listen to Pink Floyd – The Wall. For some reason winamp doesn’t think I should be able to do this without creating a playlist.
So I tried to figure out why the Google music player wasn’t playing, got really frustrated, and went back to winamp to play Weird Al – Hardware Store (love this song) and as I’m scrolling through the songs in winamp I noticed that there were three, four, and in some cases FIVE copies of each and every song. Huh?
I have (or had) all my music on the micro SD card. That’s the only place I’ve ever put songs. At some point all the songs got copied over onto the Xoom’s main memory. Ok, fine. That’d account for two, but all the rest? They were pretty much dead songs and I had no way to remove them except to navigate one by one in winamp and remove the offending songs. I uninstalled winamp and reinstalled it thinking that would cure the problem. Well, no. It didn’t
I installed MixZing. At first, yes, it also had the same issue. All songs were listed multiple times even after deleting the duplicate music folder. Color me confused, but MixZing has an awesome feature that allowed me to say “HERE’S MY MUSIC! RIGHT THERE! ONLY THERE!” and I selected only the SD card music folder and magically I have only one of each song again. Color me a happy boy.
I still need to play with it and discover if I can play an album instead of just shuffling the songs, but at this point I think it’s pretty cool. It also downloads and displays cover art which I also think is pretty cool. I’ll keep you updated if I ever figure out what happened. I think Winamp or Google Music created the duplicate folder and/or some bizarre playlist that goofed things up. I’ll have to look deeper into it, but for now I’m a happy music listener.
In other news, Mike Plested and I have begun the plotting of Jack Kane book 2 (title pending) and we had a conversation last night. We had each other laughing which is a good sign. Hopefully we can make others laugh as well. We’re currently doing our plotting in google docs and ‘tagging’ each other as we add a line/paragraph for a given scene and we’ll keep going back and forth until we have an outline. To help with continuity we’ll be doing one chapter at a time and, again, play tag. It’ll be an interesting experience.
I’ve got to run. I’ll ramble more tomorrow.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Oscliations
So I’ve gone back and forth on a number of issues, but first.
I want to welcome all the new readers to the blog. I know you’re out there. I’ve seen the increase in traffic and thank you for the comments. I think you’re all awesome and I love each and every one of you. I mean, really, you’re great.
First issue that’s gone back and forth in my head is regarding sputtery truck. It’s pretty much dead at this point. Well, it’ll start, but only under duress. I’ve not turned it on for over a week and a half. The choice isn’t an easy one. Replace the head gasket and hope that nothing else has gone wrong that I’ll be replacing at a later time or replace the engine. Obviously one is more expensive than the other. After weighing all the options the wife and I decided that it’d be best to go ahead and spend the extra money to get a new engine. Head Gasket jobs cost around $1500. A good friend of mine found a person willing to do the entire engine job for $1900 (that includes the engine). With over 110,000 miles on the vehicle and overheating problems, it just seems like the best option at this time. It’ll hurt, but it’s needed.
The other thing I’ve been going back and forth with is getting back to walking. The pain in my lower legs has gone from annoying to excruciating. I’ve felt good one day, can’t walk down the stairs the next. It’s highly distracting. Suffice to say, I’ve not walked and the good thing is it’s bothering me not to walk. I know once this pain is gone (likely with the rain) I’ll be back out there, just slower. I’ve been doing weight workouts, but I know I need to do some cardio as well.
Writing has been going well. I’m still ahead of schedule with my word count for the year. That makes me happy. I should be ready to toss out the first short story in the Of Gnomes and Dwarves universe by the end of the week. I’m really excited about that. Dan Dan sent me the cover image. I’m SUPER excited about that, but you’ll have to wait a few more days before you get to see it. It’s awesome!
I keep listening to my music for the Action Pack podcast. I still love it. It’ll fit perfectly with the tone of the story.
Speaking of story, I’ve been going back and forth writing on To Fall From the Sky and Gold Rush (still a tentative title). I’m having a blast writing each.
Speaking of writing, tonight I meet with Mike Plested (and maybe Scott Roche) to talk Jack Kane (edits and sequel) and the Action Pack. Life is busy, exciting, and awesome! It takes a lot to get me down. I’ve been a little down, but watch out once I get this sputtery truck issue behind me.
Until tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Progress is progressing
WOO! I have updates today.
1) I have music for my piece of the Action Pack podcast. It’s not what I was looking for. It’s BETTER!
2) I have a cover going for Of Gnomes and Dwarves. It’s looking great! Freaking love it also
This means I really need to get my rear in gear and this week I need to have the first short ready to go for the end of this month. I’ll get on that tonight/tomorrow and start assembly so I’ll have everything ready to go for this weekend. The story will go up on Smashwords.com and be free for the frist 30 days where I’ll post it up on the kindle and nook for .99 and change the smashwords price to .99 as well. At the same time I’ll be releasing the second story up for free 🙂
That’s also the same time that the first Action Pack Podcast will drop. A whole lot of excitement going on around here. I LOVE it. All of this going on has me really excited. I mean, I mean, I mean…
Sputtery truck will go into the shop this week. After much deliberation and discussion the wife and I came to the conclusion that it’s better to fix it and hope for the best rather than drop back ten and punt (buy a new vehicle). It’ll cost. It’ll hurt. But in the long run will be better. Just means we’ll be eating top ramen for a couple of weeks.
My favorite daughter has another volleyball tournament this weekend (Saturday this time) and we’ll be heading back up to L.A. The night before it’s a late practice. 7pm-9pm so we’re torn over heading up late or driving up early. We still don’t have a time for when they’ll start play. My assumption is that it’ll be 8am like the last one, but I’ve been known to be wrong from time to time.
Even though I was up early today, I still feel better. I got a lot of rest over the weekend. The house is clean. I knocked out a few thousand words on To Fall From the Sky. This week is going to be a GREAT week. It’s only Monday and already great things are happening. I’m off to go make sure it stays awesome.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: A weekend alone
So I spent a moajority of the weekend alone. The wife and my favorite daughter took the mother-in-law and one of the sister-in-laws up to Lemoore for the weekend. No, not because of the farmland smell, but because one of the nieces is up there with some of the great-grand kids. They had a wonderful time and I got some much needed rest.
I had great plans for lots of writing mixed in with some laundry and cleaning. I got lots of cleaning and laundry done. I got a little bit of writing done. The odd thing, I clean better alone. I write better when the wife and my favorite daughter are around. I have a tendency to goof off, watch TV, and not do what I intend to do. Still I was about to write a few thousands words over the weekdn so I was proud of that.
I also intened to write this post this morning. Perhaps walk. It did rain much of the weekend which has two effects on me and my head. One is I get really stuffed up to the point of pain. Two is I get drowsy. Compiled with the stress of last week with getting up earlier than normal for work and Sputter truck becoming dying truck, I spelt almost 12 hours each night. I am SO refreshed and my brain is back on track.
I need to do some editing during the week on both Jack Kane, My Action Pack story, and my Of Gnomes and Dwarves story. I have a lot of projects all in the works and I need to make sure they all stay on track. Dan Absolonson said that he’ll have the cover art to me soon. That means I need to get the contents of the book compiled.
I’ve got a couple of stories out in the wild as well as a few books. All I can say is waiting really sucks. I know it’s part of the business and I need to keep pressing forward, but waiting to hear word about a story or book that’ out there is painful.
Speaking of painful. The pain in my shins is subsiding. Walking over the weekend, and by walking I mean around the house, hurt less and less. I’ll start wandering around the neighborhood again on Monday. I’ll slow my pace back down and work up slowly this time. I got a little excited about running that I did what I didn’t want to do and that’s hurt myself.
I also intend to blog on a more positive note. Yes, I’ve been down, but I don’t want to have this blog be depressing. So If I’ve gotten you down, sorry about that. Look for happier posts next week.
Until Tomorrow!
WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Yeah, I’ve been whiny the past couple of days.
I’m kind of over that at the moment. The whining I mean. Posting on this blog is a way to clear my head. Get the cobwebs out. Get my motor running. Get my fingers typing. Get my brain in the writing mode. To get all that bad stuff put aside and just get words flowing.
Sorry if I’ve dumped on you the past couple of days. It’s been a bad week. Yesterday I so wanted to take a nap and stay up late writing. Today I so wanted to get up early and start writing.
The best laid plans…
At any rate, the day is still young. I’m rested, refreshed, ready to rock and roll. I cranked out an episode of Unorthodox Writing Tips for Mike Plested to use on Get published. I had several okay ideas, and all fell flat and I deleted them all about half way through. When it comes to ideas, I can be like that. It either got to resonate with me, or it’s out. I threw out several because they were either weak, or sounded authoritative and mean.
I did say the say was still young, right? It is. As soon as I have dinner here in a few minutes I’ll be back into To Fall From the Sky. I had it end at a certain point, and having slept on it, I’ve decided that point was dumb and I’ll be deleting the last few hundred words or so until I get it back on track. I had a guy show up with a gun at the wrong moment and it was also the wrong guy. I need to put him in the right spot then it’ll have impact. Where I put it, it’s just confusing and really makes no sense. I think I was tired.
I hear the oven screaming my name telling me my food is ready. I better head down there before it burns. I’m excited. I have all night. WOO WOO!
Until Tomorrow!
DOUBLE WOO WOO!
Daily Update: Almost missed it.
I’m super tired. This week was stressful both at work and with the home life. Stress happens. I got a great amount of writing done, and it was all painful and difficult. I wrote my way through it. I didn’t get as much walking in as I wanted to, but that’s due to physical pain. I still did some workouts with my weights though. I didn’t allow anything to actually stop me.
Then came today. I just ran out of energy. I took a little nap thinking I’d wake up and have a little dinner, a shower, and jump into some writing. Well, I took my little nap now I’m more tired than I was before the nap. I’m thinking I’ll be down for the night and try again in the moring.
It’s been a long week. I wanted to do a longer post, but tired brain just isn’t up to it right now. I’ll do better tomorrow.
J.R. Murdock 