Category Archives: Writing

Summer is Coming

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Whoop!  Whoop!  I have just 13 days of work left for the year and then the summertime is here.  Just 11 of those are days with kids and 3 of them are half days for Exams.  I still have a ton of stuff to do of course.  We still have a yearbook party I have to plan.  I still have to write semester exams.  I still have to teach for about five more days.  But then, I’m a full-time author.

I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog and was doing pretty good at it for the past week or so, but then yesterday, I didn’t get anything written.  Yesterday was the when we were supposed to reenact the Battle of Gettysburg at school and there was a ton of stuff to do for that.  Then it ended up getting cancelled due to unhealthy air– smoke from California wild fires mostly.  Anyway, I’m going to get back on track again this weekend.

I’m still shooting for the end of June for His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  I’ll keep you updated here of course.

Tired

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I don’t think I have ever been so tired in my entire life.  I can barely drag myself home at the end of the day.  Then I type a few words, sit down and watch some TV, climb into bed.  Then I’m back up in the morning and it all starts over again.

I have a little post-it note on my monitor at school that tells me how many school days left.  Twenty days as I write this.  God, I hope I can make it.

I’ve also had a terrible misfortune.  Having managed to avoid it for the past 19 years, I somehow let myself be made Social Studies Department Chair next year.  I’m too old for more work!  I’ll do my best of course, but…  Hey, at least I’m not doing the Yearbook next year.  Always look on the bright side of life.

Also I’ve been having “lubricant” injected into my knee over the past few weeks and my last injection is tomorrow.  Hopefully it will make walking a bit easier.  It’s pretty painful right now.  If you think it’s a coincidence that Mike has knee problems in the next His Robot Wife book… it’s not.

Update: Patience is a Virtue

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His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue

Now that I have Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome in the can, I’m hard at work on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  I’ve written a chapter and a half in the last few days, and am just past the halfway point now.  I’d really like to get the book done by the end of June, and I think that I can.  After June 6th, I’ll be out of school and able to devote all my time to it.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be working on it before though.

I went back last week and read the first seven chapters through and was surprised how much I liked the story.  That may seem weird, but that’s how it is sometimes.  You write and write and you can lose perspective about what you’ve written.  If you can set it aside and come back to it later, it helps.  Although it’s also pretty easy to fall in love with your own writing.  After all, you’re writing a story you would want to read.

Anyway.  I just finished writing a bit of dialog where several characters play The Last Supper game– where you list the twelve people you would like to invite to a dinner party.  Patience has her own unique list.

Now, if I could only stop losing my USB drive.  I lost it last week and it had two chapters of Astrid Maxxim on it.  Thankfully I found it had fallen out of my pocket and rolled beneath the bed.  Today I can’t find it, and it has two pages of Patience is a Virtue on it.  But I think I left it stuck in the computer at work.  I’ll find out tomorrow.

Back to the Grind

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Astrid Maxxim 2I started writing again.  There were about three weeks there when I just couldn’t.  Work was keeping me busy and when it wasn’t, it was keeping me stressed.  When I found I finally had some time, I looked at my stuff and realized I was only a couple of thousand words from the end of Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome.  So, I finished that off.  I’ve already gone through a couple of revision passes.  Now, while I wait for some editing, I’m back at work on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  It would be really good if I could get that done before the start of summer.  I’ll keep you informed.

Still Behind

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Just before Spring Break, I said I was behind in my writing by about 310 pages.  I had set a goal for myself to write eight pages a day for 2013.  Well, it’s almost a month later and I as of right now, I’m… 311 pages behind.

Well, what can I say?  I come home exhausted and try to write as much as I can.  But eight pages?  My goal last year was six pages a day, and I managed to achieve it… just barely.  We’ll have to see how it goes this summer.  As I write this, I have 41 school days remaining.

I was toying with the idea of going back to school this summer– either for the first half of a PhD, or the first half of a second Masters.  But I’m putting that off till next year.  I think I should qualify for a PhD in procrastination.

Anyway, back to work.  This week, I’ve been doing some background work for Senta and the God of the Sky.  Background is part of the work, but I need to get back to putting some words on paper.  See ya.

Brechalon Notes

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Brechalon: Nils Chapman & Karl Drury

While I was reading through Brechalon, I began updating the (ironically incomplete) complete list of characters from Senta and the Steel Dragon.  I included every character with a name and in Brechalon, came up with 65 people.  Fifteen are only mentioned, usually because they are long-dead historical figures.

What surprised me is that only only five of the 50 appearing characters get killed in the course of this book.  Fear not.  Many others get killed in later volumes.

There are a few characters who appear only in book 0, and that seems like sort of a waste.  I think I might resurrect a few in The Sorceress and her Lovers.  I’ve already pulled several lizzies, that I had never intended to use again, from earlier books.  I like to bring characters back like that.  It seems to me to add a little realism to the story, especially when you have a relatively limited setting, like a colony across the sea from the rest of the civilized world.

Update: The Sorceress and her Lovers

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The Sorceress and her Lovers

I’m still working on book one of Senta and the God of the Sky.  I’ve expanded on the two chapters I’ve written, but haven’t finished either one.  Instead, I’ve started chapter three.

The main character for chapter three is Iolana Dechantagne Staff, Iolanthe’s daughter.  This is a great choice for me, because I get to bring some of the older characters back into the mix.

It also occurs to me that where I had Iolanthe, Terrence, and Augie as a sort of trinity in The Voyage of the Minotaur, I now have Iolana, Terra, and Augie though these characters have very different personalities from their elders.

Of course, going back and rereading Brechalon has helped a lot with inspiration for this story.  The rest of that story is coming up right here over the next couple of weeks.

Spring Break

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Well, here we are at last friends.  Spring Break has arrived.  I was so frazzled when I got home, I seriously thought about passing out for the entire weekend.  But I’m not going to.  I’m going to get started on my writing and try to get something done today.

I haven’t gotten any writing done during the last four days, but I have been looking through projects that I’ve started and never got back to– some of which I had forgotten.  I might just post the pieces that I have written, since I don’t think I’ll ever do anything really with them.  There are what I thought (at least at the time I wrote them) some good concepts.  Here’s a sample:

The Olympian gods awake suddenly on an alien world, unaware of how the arrived, and are pitted against similarly powered alien gods.

Famous people appear in “purgatory” after their death, where they fight a war.  The two main characters are Albert Einstein and gunfighter Clay Allison (no relation).

A young woman is kidnapped and held hostage, but is helped by a mysterious “ghost” who has a very limited ability to interact with the real world, but seems to know all about her.

I don’t know.  Any of them sound interesting to anyone out there?

Finished with the Yearbook

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One of the drains on my time has definitely been my work as advisor of our school yearbook.  It’s taken all my spare time at school (which is not much anyway) and has taken a huge amount of my out of school time.    But now it’s done!  For good or ill, the thing is finished.  I can catch up on my grading and planning at school and catch up on my writing (hopefully) at home.

In addition, next week is Spring Break– Free at last, free at last (with respect to Dr. King).  I haven’t looked forward to a week so much since– well, ever.  As I write this, my little log book tells me that I should have 310 more pages written so far this year than I have.  That’s more than a whole book!  I’ll let you know where I am at the end of spring break.

Update: The Sorceress and her Lovers

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The Sorceress and her Lovers

I needed a little change from what I have been writing, so I sat down this week and worked on two chapters of The Sorceress and her Lovers.  I have never worked like this before– switching back and forth between two chapters of the same book.  Like the stories in Senta and the Steel Dragon, this book will have four different main characters and will switch back and forth between them.  The two chapters that I have been writing this week are a Senta chapter and a chapter featuring Hsrandtuss.  The latter is a lizzie that first appears in The Young Sorceress.  I always had fun writing the “Cissy” chapters of Steel Dragon because it gives me a chance to look at human beings from the outside.  Here’s another little teaser.  The Hsrandtuss chapter takes place at the Dragon Fortress (last seen in The Two Dragons), while the Senta chapter takes place in the country of Freedonia.