Took an evening off from working on strategies for the re-write to indulge myself. I did something I haven't done since 1982.

I attended a concert.

Let me amend that. I actually went out to watch a band not performing at a bar. A real concert.

.38 Special, Styx and REO Speedwagon were performing about four miles from the house and I simply couldn't miss it. I'm a huge fan of all three of the groups and to be able to get them all in the same night was just too much to resist. wishweaver and the daughter-unit decided they weren't interested, but no one objected to me getting tickets for myself. I wound up getting seats about 20 rows back from the stage where I could watch everything.

.38 Special opened the show. I thought of the three groups, their performance was the most consistent. It seemed to take the crowd a few songs to get into the feel of the concert, but by the time they hit their trademark songs, people were starting to rock.

Styx came on next. They were the most uneven of the groups. I really loved their performance of Lorelei, Come Sail Away, Blue Collar Man and other songs, but they seemed almost out of tune performing The Grand Illusion, which surprised me and actually took the crowd out of it for a bit. Also, when they did "I am the Eggman", I think they confused a bunch of people. It was a good cover, but I didn't pay to see Styx cover the Beatles. Couldn't complain about their encore though (Blue Collar Man and Renegade).

REO Speedwagon was the closing act and I enjoyed it a lot but they played a lot of stuff from before I started following them. I enjoyed it and actually added a few songs I want to track down, but it was weird after knowing every song Styx performed. Still, they hit the highlights from "You Can Tune a Piano" and "HiInfidelity". Plus, they closed the concert with the song I knew they would - "Ridin' the Storm Out" (my favorite REO song bar none).

For the final encore, Styx and REO performed a song they'd written just for the concert tour. It was wild seeing eight guitarist out on stage at the same time (Styx's drummer grabbed a guitar and he's got some chops there too). It was a pretty good high-energy song and a great way to close out the night.

Got to the car with minimal amount of pain and the trip home was quick and painless. Time to drink some water, unwind for a moment and get to bed.

Reminder to self: Next time bring camera . . . your cell phone camera stinks.

I expect my hearing will return to normal around the 4th. *grin*

Well, it's been a great weekend here at Casa Blanca.

UCM won their homecoming game with Missouri Western, the University of Missouri (not my alma mater, but I did grow up about 12 miles from there) crushed the high-powered offense of Texas Tech 41-10 and by hook and by crook, the Chiefs slipped past the Oakland Raiders 12-10.

Also, we went back to the Maryland Renaissance Festival today. Got to see the two groups I really wanted to hear perform - Mediaeval Babes and Wolgemut. Also, watched a great Punch and Judy show, saw Shakespeare Scum deconstruct Henry the "V" and enjoyed watching the Fight School demonstrate broad sword, bastard sword, quarterstaff, transitional rapier, rapier and main-gauche, short sword and cased rapier (florentine style).

wishweaver picked up some nice faire garb for next year and I picked up a very nice wooden mug for use both there and when I'm working on my stories, as well as the two Mediaeval Babes CDs I hadn't bought yet. I'll be adding them into my iTunes Library tomorrow night.

Although, I will admit, going to the RenFest meant I blew off my writing for today (bad author, bad author), but I got quite a bit done yesterday and I'm three chapters from finishing the breakdowns. I'll try to make it up tomorrow night while the daughter-unit has her vision therapy. Then it's time to write the first chapter and start editing both.

So, have a good night, Live Journal.

Had a little downtime at work today as we were nursing a recalcitrant database, so I pulled up a word document and minimized it so I would watch the system and type. It was nice to be able to be productive in two realms at the same time.

Got home in time to go to the daughter's Martin Luther King's concert. The school did a nice presentation and the kids did a great job. AND, as opposed to the Winter Concert that Wouldn't Die, this was a short presentation (only a half hour). We spent almost as long prying her away from her friends at the end as it took to listen to the concert. Gotta love eighth-graders.

Got home, popped in some music and got started writing. 1294 words later, I finished for the night. I used a lot of what I'd typed up earlier today, but I had to write a bridging scene and then as I'm typing, I'm rewriting as I go along. I think I have a nice ironic scene set up here, but we'll see if it survives editorial (mine and the real editors). We're starting into the home stretch now on the story. Four scene shifts and we'll be at the end of the story.

It's strange, but I find myself writing this story as if it was a TV episode, with cut scenes and bridges, but all told from one character's POV. It feels like it would be comprised of five to seven minute segments if it was being filmed. I guess as long as I don't start adding in commercials, we're O.K. *grin*

BTW, I've plugged this young lady before, but I've recently picked up one of her CDs and I can not recommend her any more highly than I do. Lisa Furukawa is an outstanding singer and musician. Go to her site and listen to some of the song clips there. (She's the young lady who was selling CDs between my two anime panels at Dragon*Con last year.)

If I can manage to get a little writing in the rest of the week, I may be done with this short story by the end of the week. That'd leave me five weeks to edit it and re-watch a few episodes to ensure I have speech patterns down right. Wow, finishing ahead of schedule? That's very out of character.

Personally, I blame queenoftheskies for setting a good example for me. *grin*

Words for Today

1,294 / 1,000 (129.4%)

Progress on Redshift - new proposed title for the story

5,888 / 10,000 (58.9%)

Words for the Year

18,049 / 365,000 (4.9%)

Probably the best day of the show, so far. Arrived at the show about thirty minutes before my first panel. (There is something to be said for staying at the con hotel versus commuting from home.) The entire mob at the house was coming in to the convention today, so dzeytoun and I took off a bit ahead of the others, so I had time to get my hot tea and get ready for the panel.

(Comment: Drinking hot things at the Hunt Valley Marriott is probably not a wise thing. The rooms have two temperatures, the Ballroom is freezing and everywhere else is sweltering. The AC is working (if you're sitting on top of the register) but it's being overwhelmed by the press of bodies in the rooms.)

First panel was "Working in Other People's Worlds: Media Tie-ins". Bob Greenberger and Will McDermott joined me on this panel. We had a fairly decent crowd for the morning and they asked several interesting questions. I wound up moderating this panel. We discussed the difference in pitching and writing a media tie-in book versus original fiction, the joys of dealing with licensors, fans vs. fanatics, tips on how we keep the characters "in character", and other topics.

Second panel, "Beyond Mansquito and Frankenfish" was supposed to be about the SciFi Channel, what it does well, what it doesn't do well and WHY do they keep making these horrible movies? However, before the panel could get started, one of the audience members got up rather indignantly and left. No, he wasn't a SciFi Channel executive, he thought we were going to be discussing the pros and cons of bio-engineered creatures and made it clear he was unhappy with the real point of the panel. (In his defense, the convention book only lists the names of the panels with no descriptions . . . heck, it even confuses some of us when we arrive to be on the panel and it's not what we thought it was.)

Once we got past this, we did come up with a number of SF/F/H books we thought could be adapted for either movies, mini-series or actual series for the network. One thing we all agreed on was that SciFi Channel seems to be floundering in identifying what it's target audience is. One of the suggestions was for SFC to expand on their SciFi Fridays concept. Say, they had Monday Night Movies (where they showed new and classic SF movies), Tuesday could be their flashback to old SF series (Space 1999, The Time Tunnel, The Land of the Giants, Logan's Run, etc.), and so on.

My third panel was "Where Have All the Heroes Gone" was all right, but not as good as I had hoped. One disappointment was that Tamar Siler Jones dropped the panel, so I missed an opportunity to meet her. Also, since once again there was no panel description, part of the audience was expecting us to talk about anti-heroes not the "upsurge in female heroes" in SF and F. Plus, we had some basic differences in opinion as to what was a "realistic depiction of combat involving males and females." I got some feedback from people who attended the panel and they seemed to like my contributions to the panel, so I'll call this a mostly win.

Spent some time visiting with klingonguy and lady_cinnibar. lady_cinnibar and I attended the "What Do Editor's Want?" panel. However, between the heat and the soft voices of the panelists, it was tough to hear what they were saying. I'm not sure I heard anything that I hadn't already learned from reading several writer's bulletin boards and agent's blogs, but it's still is good to get my own knowledge reinforced.

The highlight of the evening was the Boogie Knight's concert. (kradical is a member of the group and has mentioned them prominently in his own blog.) They did a great job, and the crowd wouldn't leave until they did a second encore, which I think they appreciated, but they weren't expecting. I hadn't heard that they'd been banned from the Maryland RenFest for not being "Renaissance enough". So, they did a filk song dedicated to the PTB of the Maryland Renfest.

I gave lady_cinnibar a ride to the light rail station after the concert. Partway down the Baltimore Beltway, I felt the motor hiccup. A feeling of dread hit my stomach and I looked down at my gas gauge and, yes, dear friends, it was sitting on E. I managed to get off at the next exit and limped down the BW Parkway and just got off on Nursery Road and ran out of gas. I coasted to the gas station, but there was a slight ramp up to the station. I got almost all the way to the top of the ramp before I ran out of momentum. Luckily, two gentlemen pulled in behind me and helped push my truck all the way to the pumps. Just a tad embarrassing!

Talked this morning with April about Shattered Mirror. We're working on the legends behind the world as well as where we want to go in the next couple of chapters. We're really focusing on the character's motivations (not only the main ones but the major secondary characters we've come up with in the first two chapters. Doing a collaboration, we're working from a generic outline, but we're still negotiating a lot of the stuff on the edges, which is very entertaining and frustrating at the same time.

Also been doing a lot of networking at the show. Hopefully, I'll have some interesting news to share with you all in the next month or so. I don't want to say too much now . . . just keep your fingers crossed.

The daughter-unit had her spring concert this evening. Wow! It was an amazing time. The kids (4th and 5th Grade Choir, 6th Grade Choir and 7th and 8th Grade Choir) put some effort into preparing for the concert and it showed. Although I had a "oh no" moment. Let's face it, when music you used to listen to in college is now being performed at a Middle School Choir concert - you're getting old. Ouch. And, not only was the concert good, it was short. From start to finish, to include getting choirs on and off stage, it was 45 minutes long. Huzzah for not having to sit in hard metal folding chairs for 2.5 hours like the winter concert. I think everyone learned something from that.

Started working on an idea for a Star Trek story I'd like to pitch. Yes, I got out the infamous flow-chart and went to it. I started listing questions . . . why was the character there, what caused the incident, who was involved and why, what does the character do to make writing about him/her important, what's the immediate results, what were the long term results. Those were my headings and then I started adding sub-layers and then trying to carry the sub-layers out to their logical (or sometimes illogical) endings. Once I have everything on paper, I can start deciding which thread I like best, which will add enough drama to the story without overwhelming the overall theme to the story, and which ones are just plain silly. I think I've got a good idea now what I want to pitch, but I'm going to go over my ideas with wishweaver to see what she thinks of my ramblings. She's good at going, "So, your point is . . .?", forcing me to defend my thought process. Highly useful before starting out on a project.

Also, I got started back on Harbinger tonight. I'm keeping the first four chapters for now and started on a completely new Chapter 5 tonight. I thought one character in the book needed to be introduced earlier than he had appeared and have more contact with Raven early on. It's been fun writing in this world again. I like Chronicles, but Raven's world is rapidly becoming my favorite milieu.

So, with the rewrite, I know I don't want to exceed 100,000 words, so I picked up the word count with Chapter 5. However, as we go further into the story, you may see the word count bar take major jumps. Those will be when I incorporate stuff from the first draft into this one. But, I'm hoping to get some kind of progress at least five nights a week.

Also, I'm listening to a new music station on Live365.com. It's called In Dark Faith Eternal and it specializes in Darkwave, Ethereal, Gothic, Neo-Classical songs, primarily with female artists. Very nice and very easy to write to this style of music. A little break from the Anime/J-Pop I normally listen to on Live365.

Current Harbinger status

17,910 / 100,000 (17.9%)