First surprise of the day was I didn't go to work.

Daughter-unit injured her hand last night (shut in a door). Nothing too serious, but it was definitely painful. She and wishweaver didn't think it was a good idea to go to school where it would probably get bumped into repeatedly over the day, but Wish had something due at work, so I stayed home in case the daughter's hand got worse and she needed to go to the doc.

We used the opportunity to finish an assignment she was late on, but the teacher said she'd accept it up to Friday. We sat down, discussed what needed to be done and hammered it out in a few hours. Course, if she'd done it when she was supposed to, we could have spread the pain out a bit, but what's done is done. I know when her next assignment like this is due, so we'll start on it a tad earlier next time.

Along with her typing, I did get some of my own typing done today and tonight. I revised Chapters 4-6 of Shadows, adding another 2093 words to the story. I almost completely rewrote Chapter 6 and tomorrow, I have to add in a new Chapter 7. This should be the last major revision until I reach Chapter 23. Should be. Will keep fingers crossed.

So, if I mentioned a first surprise, that implies a second one, no?

Well, here it is. The Balticon Program Participant's page. What's so surprising about a standard convention page listing who's attending. Well, I always assumed one would know they were a participant at a convention before it appeared on the Internet.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the thought. Given everything else, I probably will attend it since it's about 40 miles from my house as the beltway turns. Still, either someone was "watching out for me" after the last few times of not knowing whether I was an attendee until the last minute or else there's another Richard White out there who'll be fighting me for the badge.

I wonder what panels I signed up for? *grin*
_______________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

2093 / 1000 words. 209%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

81416 / 80000 words. 102%

Progress on Shadows of the Heart's revisons

6 / 25 chapters. 24%

Words for 2009

72912 / 365000 words. 20%

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%)

Had a fairly good day at work. Much silliness was offset by my unanimous re-election as Vice-President of the Science-Fiction/Fantasy Club at work. And after all the campaigning I did to get someone else elected also. Actually, all the officers were returned to their positions yet again, proving that once you find a sucker who'll volunteer, groups will go to great lengths to keep them there.

Arrived home just in time to find out the Parent's Orientation for High School was tonight at 7:00pm. (insert icon of head banging into desk repeatedly here) However, to my utmost surprise, I found the experience rather enjoyable, met most of the teachers the daughter-unit will have next year when she transitions from 8th grade to Freshman. Class of 2011. AAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH!

O.K., I'm better now.

Got home, gave wishweaver the thumbnail sketch of the meeting and will go over the details with the daughter-unit and her tomorrow night after Fidos. Let's just say, the young one is in for a big surprise next year.

Got started on my Star Trek short story tonight. I know I don't have all the final changes from licensing yet (actually, I don't even have the contract yet,) but with a deadline of 21 Feb, there no sense in waiting until the last moment. I figure it's easier to make changes to a document than create it whole cloth in a few days.

I think this is going to be a fun little story. I already knocked out the opening scene tonight and am looking forward to the part I'm going to be doing tomorrow. Sometimes there's a very good reason not to be a pantser. By having written the proposal and outline for Marco several times already, I'm very comfortable with what has to happen in the story and now it's just a matter of dressing it up and getting it ready to show to the world. I feel like Professor Higgins looking Eliza Doolittle over for the first time. *grin*

But, if I'm going to write tomorrow night, I might want to get some sleep tonight.

Still need to come up with a new name for the story though. Kicking around "Out of Phase" or "Phantasm", but nothing's quite got what I'm looking for yet. Blargle.

Words for Today

1,193 / 1,000 (119.3%)

Progress on Shadows

1,193 / 10,000 (11.9%)

Words for the year

13,354 / 365,000 (3.7%)

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%)

Been a busy week.

We had my daughter's birthday party last Saturday. Luckily, for my sanity, it was only three hours long. But, everyone seemed to have a good time, which is the important thing.

After the party was over, April came by to visit and we were able to discuss a few things about Shattered Mirror. She's going to be looking over what I've written for Chapter 2 and will be getting started on Chapter 3 here pretty soon. I've been working on Shattered Mirror and CSD: Dragon Couchant, but I really haven't made great progress on either of them lately. Not quite certain what my problem is, but I've developed a bad case of the "I just don't wannas". No excuse for it, just being lazy.

I submitted two things to The Muse, Howard Community College's literary magazine, but it looks like I may have submitted too late after all. Sigh. Oh well, I may save them and try to submit them for next year's magazine.

But, the fun part of the week was doing a presentation at my daughter's middle school on being a writer. As I told the students, I've been a journalist, a technical writer, a novelist, a reporter in the Army, a song writer and a comic writer. I talked a bit about how I began writing, what it's like to get your first masterpiece back from an editor with enough red ink on it to drip through the envelope, how to take critique (both good and bad). The kids seemed really interested that I'd done books based on comic characters and video games. (Go, me!)

However, the highlight of my presentation, as far as the English teachers were concerned was my writing philosophy: 1) To be a good writer, you have to be a good reader; 2) Go out and observe life, seek out as many new experiences as you can; and 3) Write a little something everyday. It doesn't have to be good, but you can't edit a blank piece of paper.

Which led to my other part of the presentation I put in just for the teachers. We discussed editing your work. I suggested they try reading their work out loud. I tried to keep it light ("If you run out of breath before you reach the end of the sentence, you probably need a comma in there somewhere, or else you've shoved two sentences together.") I also recommended they get someone to look over their stuff before they turned it in to the teachers, preferably someone who was going to be honest with them. But my third piece of advice really got their attention (amidst a lot of laughter). I told them to read their assignments backwards, starting from the bottom and working up. As I pointed out to them, most people read entire sentences at a shot. We glance at the words and fill in the missing letters because we know what the word should be (not necessarily what it is). By reading from the bottom up, it's like reading a foreign language you're familiar with, but not fluent at. You slow down and look at each word as a single entity, making it easier to spot misspelled words. (Also warned them not to trust a spell checker on their computer any farther than they could throw it.)

Well, from the reports my daughter has brought back to me, I guess I did OK. No one fell asleep and no one threw stuff at me. Now, did I keep the attention of all the seventh graders I spoke to? Of course not, especially when we had combined classes where it was harder for the teachers to keep an eye on them. But there were a number of really good questions about the writing process, about writing news for the radio station (I did the sports desk for the campus radio station at Central Missouri State a long time ago . . . ), how do artists and writers work together on comics, have I met any famous people since I've been a writer, and so forth. They'll keep you on your toes, that's for certain and at that age, they're not exactly shy either.

Hey, I got home and my daughter said I hadn't embarrassed her. That's high praise these days. ;)

The English Department wants me to come back and speak to the 7th graders again next year, probably first quarter, this time. They really liked the emphasis I put on revising your papers. We may make this an annual event if it goes over well again next year.

However, if I want to have any new stuff to show the kids, I'm going to have to get off my duff and actually write some new stuff.

(ties up nagging conscience and rolls it into a corner.)