Friday night we went to watch the Grossmont team stomp all over the Valhalla team. Oh, wait a minute. Grossmont didn’t win. The game was close with Grossmont winning most of the way and Valhalla came back to win. This was disappointing. Grossmont has a great cheering section for their football team so it was a tough loss. The Millican’s son had been brought up from the JV team to play on Varsity, but he was only put in on the last couple of plays. Had he been on defense, there’s a great chance that a couple HUGE plays by Valhalla wouldn’t have occurred and Grossmont would have won. Perhaps the next game.

Yesterday my favorite daughter decided she wanted to have a bonfire (some would same bomb fire which I’m glad it wasn’t) on the beach. Once I’m on the beach I don’t mind being there. It’s all the getting things ready, packing up the vehicle, buying all the food/drinks/misc that drives me nuts. Once I’m sitting down, I’m happy.

We got there late with a few of her friends, set up, and got ourselves a little fire going. My favorite daughter was excited to be wearing a sweatshirt and sweats to the beach. It wasn’t nearly as cold as I thought it would be. We took Tootsie with us and let her run free (there’s a dog section of Coronado Beach and we were close enough to that part. It was great fun. The wife and I took a nice little walk. The kids played with the volleyball and football. We roasted hot dogs, ate donuts, made smores, got rained on.

Yes, it was only a 30% chance of rain and boy did it come down! It started misting which was fine. We packed up the food. But then it started to sprinkle. We were still fine enjoying the fire. Then god decided we shouldn’t be at the beach and the sky opened up for about 15 minutes (felt like much longer). Everything got soaked. We all smelled like wet dog. Of course we waited until after the rain stopped to actually pack up our stuff and head for high ground.

Sputtery truck probably still smells this morning. I’m afraid to go open it up. We’ll see.

Oh, we also went to visit my mother-in-law. She had taken a trip to the hospital. They readjusted her pacemaker and kept her for a couple of days. She’s doing much better now that they made the adjustment. We’ll all be heading over there today to BBQ some burgers and just have a good time with family.

I didn’t write Friday, or Saturday. I’ll write a little today, but probably not much. I have watched a couple videos on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop so I’ll be doing some more playing with those as well. It should be a lot of fun. I’m learning a lot and I love to learn. It’s been a while since I picked up something new and as I said, this will play into a new project I’m going to work on in the coming weeks.

I’m still going to try and finish Of Gnomes and Dwarves before Nov 1st. I need to do a little plotting on V&A II. There is so much to do I’d better get on some of it before we need to leave.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

Yesterday I got a lot accomplished, but not everything on my list. I now have at least two new items to add to that list. One I need to address right away (today) the other can wait a bit, but it still important.

The Tahoe will from now and forever be known as Sputtery Tahoe. Yesterday it got new shoes, new brakes, and an alignment. All went well, but I had this feeling as my friend and I were doing the brakes and I looked at the battery that I haven’t replaced that battery since we bought the Tahoe in 2003 or 2004. Yeah. It was dipping in power last night as I drove to the store and back. I’ll be taking it to get a new battery today.

The other issue is a bent lower control arm. This is what’s making the alignment go out of whack as often as it does. I need to get the part from a junk yard and the shop that did the alignment will put that in for me for a minimal cost (and realign if needed).

Needless to say all the running around yesterday wore me out something fierce. So I decided to watch a movie that I’ll review soon. I didn’t get any writing done save the daily update. Hopefully some will happen tonight.

This morning we’re having breakfast with the Millicans and then I’ll need to get out and do some more with Sputtery Tahoe. My hope is that it won’t be as expensive as Sputtery Truck was earlier in the year. A New battery, an oil change, and a wash and it should be running good once more. We’ll see how that goes.

My body and brain are still waking up. Hopefully I’ll get some writing in today as well as a little photoshop playing around. I also watched a couple tutorials last night and I really want to get in there and play some more. It’s fun to see just how powerful a tool Photoshop has become. I used to have a very old version of the tool and it was ok, but was hard to use. Probably because 1) I didn’t know what I was doing and 2) I didn’t know what I wanted to do and 3) Youtube didn’t exist.

It’s hard to imagine what people did before youtube and all these great forums. I mean, I learned HTML 1.0 from a 5 page print out and a overstuffed book Teach Yourself HTML in 21 days. Both I consumed in a day and I was building web pages. The internet changed faster than anyone would have predicted. Now you can learn to do almost anything you want just by doing a search. That’s what I’ve started to do with both illustrator and photoshop.

So why am I learning? Other than my favorite daughter is taking a class? That’s one of my top secret projects. I’m having fun learning, but I’ve wanted to do this project for quite some time. Just like with my other top secret project and the Action Pack Podcast, it’ll be an ongoing thing.

I’m off to go eat some breakfast and do some more work with Sputtery Tahoe.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

I’m giving thoughts of starting my daily blogging once again. Maybe, I’m not so sure just yet.

I woke up this morning feeling full of vim and vigor. I haven’t been sleeping good…or much. My favorite daughter has 1st period meaning she starts school at 7am. Yes, we only live a couple minutes away, but we’re still getting up at 5am. My body and brain (old as they are) are still adjusting after a couple months. Last night we went to bed early and didn’t have to wake up early this morning. My body woke me up at 6am. <sigh>

I have many things to do today that I’ve been putting off. Here’s the short list

• haircut
• new shoes for the Tahoe
• new brakes for the Tahoe
• wash the Tahoe
• Oil Change on the Tahoe (seeing a theme here?)
• Replace a sparking outlet
• clean the dust off the floor fan

So I’ve got a few things to do. Why am I sitting here typing? I just felt the need. I haven’t been writing much this week. Brain has been exhausted and stressed. Work has been one distraction after another keeping me from my major project. Roofers have been banging away on my roof. The rain we just got caused a few days of crushing pressure.
Despite all that I did manage to knock out a few thousand words, record, edit, and produce an episode of the Action Pack Podcast. Watch my favorite daughter play volleyball. And go eat some sushi with the Millicans. All in all it’s been a good week.

Sputtery Truck, you remember him, it doing great with no major issues. I’ll be getting him an oil change in the coming weeks as well.

Where am I with my writing? I’m quickly approaching the 375,000 word mark on the year. Yes, I’m just as astonished as you are. No, really. I’m floored by that number. I still have 2 1/2 months to go yes so I’m confident that I’ll be able to hit my 450,000 word mark on the year. I’ve already set up my spread sheet for next year, and I’ll share those goals in a future post.

My favorite daughter is taking a digital arts class for school. She needs to learn illustrator and photoshop. Got those for home now and I’ve been toying around with those. I’ve watched a few videos, tried out a couple of things. Just quick things that I’m not going to post just yet, but hopefully in the future I’ll have something for you to look at. Right now it’s just fun to play with a new toy. It has bitten into my writing time, but then so has Angry Birds. Now learning graphics has eating into my angry birds time 🙂

What else have I been up to? What? You mean that’s not enough? Okay, okay. Fine

I’m currently working on two secret projects. I will be producing these under different names under different blogs. I just want to see what happens with them when I’m not pushing or promoting my own work. I will be telling a select few, getting their input, and seeing what happens from there. Both of them will be very different, but fun all the same. Of course this means I’ll have two more URLs to register for these two projects and hopefully they’ll pay off in the end.

What? You want more? Okay then.

Mike Plested and I have completed our beta edits on Jack Kane and the Statue of Liberty. What does this mean to you? It means that if you have a computer, an e-reader, and/or an email address you can send me a message, comment on this post, DM me in twitter, message me on facebook, or however you want to contact me, and I’ll send you a beta copy of the story. There’s no rush to get this back. We’re just looking for readers to get opinions, feedback, and spot any issues that we might have overlooked in the writing. Interested? No? Okay, it’s a YA SteamPunk Super Hero novel. Interested now? Drop me a line.

That about sums it up for what’s going on around here. I’ll try to do this more frequently once again. Now that I’ve gotten on a better writing cycle, I feel better about posting daily (or semi-daily). We’ll see how it goes.
Until Tomorrow (Maybe!)!

WOO WOO!

Wow, it’s been a LONG time since I posted here. This will likely be a brief post. I’m sorry about that. Let’s try and sum up, shall we?

My Favorite Daughter is doing AWESOME with her volleyball. The team had a rocky start, but they’ve really pulled it together and dominated their last few games. They’ve got another game tonight (2 a week) a tournament on Saturday (the second of two) and should end up with a winning record at the end of the season. I couldn’t be more proud at how well she’d advanced over the past year with her playing. As for school she’s taking honors classes, AP classes, has an incredible workload and combined with volleyball is keeping very busy. Even with all that going on she’s holding up an ‘A’ average and, again, I couldn’t be more proud.

The wife has gone back to work. She took her mandatory time off over the summer and is quite happy to be back at H&R Block. She doesn’t do taxes, she does a lot of admin type work so her busy season in now versus after the 1st of the year when people want their taxes done. She’s in charge of things like setting up the hiring interviews, making sure the tax pros have done all their training, setting up the offices, working with the office leaders, and so much more I lose track at times.
My work is about as busy as it can be. I had one major project wind down and another wind up. I’m knee deep in a project that I started two years ago. The first iteration fell into the swamp. Last year we had new requirements and did the same project again. That one burned and then fell into the swamp. This year we’ve taken on more requirements and we’re building on the foundation from the previous two years and hopefully this one will have HUGE tracts of land…er…be successful for what the clients are looking for. Fortunately that issues have never been from my end, but rather due to issues with one of the systems we’re trying to interface with. I’ve got my fingers crossed this will all come together.

On the writing front. Well, I took a good break. I didn’t intend to stop writing, but I did have a large dip when I stopped doing the daily updates. I don’t know that I’ll do them daily, but I might start doing them more now that I’m at a better place with my fiction writing. I didn’t want my blogging to be a major portion of the words I wrote this year and that was happening. I was blogging a lot, and not writing any fiction. I’ve reversed that trend and I’ve gotten so things in the works.

In the time I’ve been silent I’ve written 3 new short stories and have submitted those to pro-level magazines. I’ve also re-written a couple older stories that I loved (one around 15,000 words) and submitted those to pro-level magazines as well. In all I have 7 pieces out waiting for replies. One has been short-listed (meaning it might get picked up) and one has been accepted by an anthology. The others are in various stages of waiting, a couple have been rejected at least once, but I’m keeping them out there until they find a home this time. I would love to self-publish them, but I think I want that validation that my writing is something others are taking seriously and being that I see lots of downloads of my works, I see almost no comments. If you’ve read something of mine, I’d love to hear what you thought.

An interesting note. I had thoughts that the lack of my posting on this blog would mean a complete lack of traffic on the site. I’m amazed to see that people are still stopping by and checking things out. That warms my heart more than you can know. I’ll try to keep posting on a slightly more irregular basis. I have words to write before I start work so…
Until Tomorrow (or next time)!

WOO WOO!

Yes, I’ve had a blast posting my Daily Updates. I’m not sure if they’ve helped or hindered my writing process .For the time being I’m going to stop posting them and concentrate on writing fiction. If I have news, I’ll post about it. If I don’t, you won’t hear from me for a while. Just saying.

Why? I need to get some regular fiction written. I’ve got my eye on a couple of anthologies that I’d like to submit to. I want to get some short fiction out to magazines. I’d like to finish Of Gnomes and Dwarves: Book 1. I’d like to finish To Fall From the Sky. I’d like to write a lot more fiction.

Now, yes, the daily updates only take a short amount of time to write, but I don’t think they’re helping with my over all goal. Yes I ramble. Yes I’m getting words out. But I’m not getting any actual content out there. I need to be doing more of that and less of this.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with my weekly rants and Unorthodox Writing Tips or not. Again, I’m not accomplishing what I want to do with those so I figure, why continue doing something if it’s not working. So the entire blog may go dark. I will post more erratically, but my posts will be more updates on what’s happening and if, as I said, something important happens.

As far as something important: The story I submitted to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has moved from the 1st round to the 2nd round. I think I’ve sent over a dozen stories to them over th years and this is the first to make it past the first round. This is exciting for me. I’m very happy with the story. For it to advance is a huge step. It will sit in round 2 for 2-3 weeks before it gets moved into round 3 where it may sit for 2-3 months before getting picked up to be published. Yes, publishing is a very slow process.

This has been a huge boost to my confidence in that I think I’m finally doing something right. This is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to go dark on the blog for the coming days so I can concentrate on what I need to do to get my blog to where I want it and to get my writing more advanced than it currently is. I need more fiction out there and I want to pick up more publishing credits.

So if you need me, I’ll still be around. Just not as active.

Until Next Time!

WOO WOO!

I was going to write a daily update today. Then I wasn’t. Then I was. I waffled back and forth several times debating if I should just jump into some fiction of clear my head first. I think I need to clear my head first.

First, the good. We had a great day yesterday at the beach. We spent most of the day at the beach having a good time, getting a sunburn, eating too much food, getting full of sand, and watching the fireworks from PetCo Park and Seaworld. We went to the Coronado Beach (crazy trying to find parking) and stayed until nearly 11PM. We had a bon fire and it was warm enough that I didn’t even need a jacket once the sun had gone down. Oh it was a great time.

The bad? I was crazy tired. I mean tired like you cannot believe. I had gotten about four hours of sleep. You’ve seen me post about Duchess and her Kennel Kough. Well, it turns out it wasn’t just a cough. She was breathing heavy and hard for a few days. I was going to take her to the vet Saturday morning due to a crazy busy week because she wasn’t really eating much and just looking very weak and tired. She wasn’t coughing nearly as much so I was hopeful that she was getting better.

That was until you got real close to her and listened to her breathing. It sounded ragged and her lungs were defiantly filled with fluid. Her heart was beating harder than normal and the wife and I knew it was only a matter of time, but still wanted to get her to the vet.

She didn’t want to go up the stairs so I stayed downstairs to keep an eye on her in case she needed to go outside and use the bathroom. I had carried her outside and let he lay down to cool off then brought her back inside and laid her down on her bed. It was around 11PM when we went to sleep and I read for a little bit. Before I went to sleep I went to check on Duchess around midnight because she’d gotten very quiet. She’d stopped breathing. I held her for a bit. Cried a little, and went to wake up the wife and my favorite daughter.

We’d gotten Duchess when my favorite daughter was 2 years old. So she’d pretty much grown up with Duchess over the years. It was her first ‘real’ pet (the mouse and fish don’t really count and we gave way the cats, Hope and Ernie, shortly after my favorite daughter was born). So, of course, she was quite attached. I knew she’d want to say good bye which is why I woke her up. It was a very difficult good bye. We finally got to bed around 2AM after I wrapped up Duchess and placed her outside.

Saturday morning while the wife and my favorite daughter got ready for going to the beach (with little excitement at the time) I went to take care of Duchess. One of our good friend’s, Deb, takes care of older and abandoned dogs and also baby sat Duchess and Tootsie many times over the years. I told her the news and she got me directions to the place she took animals when she needed to. Duchess will be cremated (at a very reasonable cost) and m will have a little box with Duchess’s name on it to keep for as long as she wants.

So it was a very emotional couple of days. I miss Duchess, but I’ve gone through this many times growing up. We had at least 6 dogs I can remember and more than a few cats as well as chickens, rabbits, a goose, and probably more I’m forgetting. I also worked at the humane society where I dealt with putting down dogs and cats on a daily basis. I’m not hard-hearted about animals dying, I’ve just had more than my share is all.

I’ll miss Duchess with her little begging while we ate and the way she would play with her food (getting one piece at a time and going to her blanket to eat it or play with it). She was a great dog and even though she had health problems through the years she had a good life. I’ll miss the little pooch.

I’ve got a lot to do with getting caught up on my writing. I hope you had a great weekend! I did post a new short story/novella up on smashwords; My Teacher is a WereWolf. It’s free unless you want to pay for it. All payments are greatly appreciated! Hit this link right here and you’ll be taken to the purchase page (even free). This is the sequel to My Teacher is a Zombie. You can also find it on B&N and Amazon if you’d like to look over there. The price is a meager 99 cents.

I’m off to go do some amazing writing!

Until Tomorrow?

WOO WOO!

Yesterday was a painful day. I think my sinuses were acting up though I haven’t had a severe headache like that in some time. Hopefully today will be a better day.

I did get a lot of work accomplished before the crushing pain shut me down. Day Job type work, not writing or recording type work. I had also intended to do some reading yesterday. That didn’t happen either. Darn it.

So yeah, that’s what happened yesterday. I did do some looking around the web. I’m not sure why, but I went looking for reviews on some short stories I’d done. One was powerfully negative (a two start review) but more about the plot of the story and not really about the writing. I can live with that. I haven’t had to deal with negative reviews much so I was a little surprised at how poorly the person perceived it. These things will happen I know. Now everyone will love what I write.

Speaking of a story, the one I have on submission at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is still in round one. I’m still the second on the list meaning someone will be getting to it real soon. I still love their submission process. It’s nice to see things changing on the page. Sometimes it’s daily, sometimes it’s not. It all depends. They also do blind readings meaning they don’t know who sent in the submission. This prevents favoritism. I also like that as well. I’m hopeful. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I really wish I had more to say today. Yesterday I went to be super early and slept in as late as possible. Tonight I hope to get a lot accomplished. I should be getting out my review of Sandman #2. This is a weird comic and I think I’m loving it for all its weirdness. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

I’m also thinking of stopping with the daily updates. It’s not that they take a lot of time, but I want to concentrate more on my fiction writing. I might go to every other day with the ‘daily’ updates. We’ll see what happens. I’ll still produce something every day be it a review of some kind or just me rambling and of course I’ll continue with my weekly rants and unorthodox writing tips. Like I said, we’ll just see where this goes.

Until Tomorrow (maybe)!

WOO WOO!