This is it. The next-to-last weekend before I have to turn Shadows in to the editor. Trouble is, I was really unfocused tonight. Not necessarily unproductive, but unfocused. Just took longer to get what I did accomplished. I added 2021 words tonight in the new Chapter Seven. I'll try to finish it up tomorrow morning and then edit it on the metro if we wind up going to the Cherry Blossom festival tomorrow afternoon in D.C.

I haven't been to one for years and I'm thinking, if the weather holds out, it might be a lot of fun and a good way to recharge the ol' batteries for the last big push.

Also, I found a new web comic that I really enjoyed tonight. It's called The Dreamland Chronicles. It's a lot of fun and I really enjoy what the creator is doing with this one. I know some people are not fond of 3-D rendering in their comics, but for some reason, this one really works for me. Check it out and see what you think.

Not really much else to say outside of iTunes being stupid tonight. I'm not sure if it and Twitter don't play well together but I'm getting spikes on the CPU which are making iTunes really stutter and drag. Very odd. Didn't do this on the old laptop which had way less RAM. I'm thinking I may need to reload iTunes and see if it clears it out.

*sigh*
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Words for Today

2021 / 1000 words. 202%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

83437 / 80000 words. 104%

Progress on Shadows of the Heart's revisons

6.67 / 25 chapters. 27%

Words for 2009

74933 / 365000 words. 21%

And no, I am not channeling Emeril.

Absolutely beautiful morning this morning. I'd enjoyed being able to ride home yesterday with the top down, taking advantage of 62 degree weather in February. While it was a little chillier this morning due to the winds (averaging 15 mph with gusts up to 50), I was still thinking it would be a fun drive in.

And it was, until I got almost all the way to work. I was on the service road that goes around BWI airport, getting ready to turn left toward the office. There are two lanes that turn left here and I was in the leftmost lane. As I turn, I see there's a repair truck in the right lane stopped. No flashers, no flares, just there. What I almost didn't see was the car in the right-hand lane swerving into my lane to avoid it, but I did and I tapped my brakes until I was sure what she was doing.

BAM

The car following me through the intersection didn't see me brake until it was too late. Needless to say, there was much blue language coming from me at that point and time. He followed me to the local McDonald's where we exchanged information. The lady who swerved into my lane? She took off and was nowhere to be found.

Luckily, his insurance should be paying for this (waiting to hear from the adjuster). The initial estimate of damages (a fist-sized dent in my rear bumper, thank goodness)is right at $1000. Apparently they have to pull the bumper, replace it with a new one and then repaint it to match the car.

This is highly annoying, especially since my MX-5 only has 4700 miles on it. The poor thing is barely broken in and already Maryland strikes again. (If you remember, I got rear-ended Halloween 2007 also.) In my driving career, I'd been involved in two accidents (well, four if you count kamakazi deer jumping into my car at night) between 1977 and 1999. Since moving to Maryland in 1999, I've been rear-ended twice, wishweaver's been hit once, and my old truck had it's bumpers bent back in parking lot hit and runs three times, plus we've lost two windshields due to debris on the roads. I think Wish may have been hit a couple of times in parking lots also, plus my truck had been broken into at least three times.

Have I mentioned I can't wait to move out of this state?

I guess I should be happy the damage wasn't any worse and no one got hurt, but right now I'm not feeling very charitable toward my fellow drivers.

I did get some writing done on Shadows tonight, adding 1092 words. Although I wasn't in the Air Force like the SG-1 team . . . o.k., half the team, I find writing some of the scenes really easy because I can think back to incidents and experiences I went through on exercises or in Desert Storm and express what I was thinking/feeling in those moments. Hopefully it'll help some of the scenes ring true when the readers get to those parts.

Getting ready for bed now, keeping the fingers crossed that the adjuster will call tomorrow.

P.S.: I have to admit I'm surprised I didn't get a single response to yesterday's post. Am I to assume no one on the friends list besides myself reads web comics? Hmmm . . . .
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Words for Today

1092 / 1000 words. 109%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

15586 / 100000 words. 16%

Words for 2009

8032 / 365000 words. 2%

No words tonight, but I knew there wouldn't be.

We had some friends of mine just return from a tour in Japan and we took them out to the Melting Pot for dinner tonight. Enjoyed a couple of nice bottles of wine, some great fondue and a lot of good conversation.

Chris and Jodi are fellow kendoka and over the conversation tonight, Chris and I decided once they get settled, we're going to start working out a couple nights a week so we can both get back into doing Kendo. Looking at how things have been lately, dropping a few pounds and getting a little exercise back into my routine might be just the thing to get me back to feeling like my old self.

Got home in time to listen to the end of the Central Missouri basketball game. The Mules pulled off another victory, raising their record to 18-3, and they're currently ranked 11th in the nation for Division II. Five games left to go until the conference tournament and hopefully, the NCAA playoffs. Let's hear it for March Madness - Div II style.

I mentioned web comics in the last post, so I thought since I didn't have any words to report, I'd list a few of my distractions *grin*. In no particular order, here are the comics I'm currently following:

Kevin and Kell
Sluggy Freelance
Dilbert
Luann
Namir Deiter
Girl Genius
Faux Pas
Fragile Gravity
Gunnerkrigg Court
Penny and Aggie
Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures
The Order of the Stick
The Unspeakable Vault of Doom
No Rest for the Wicked
Undertow
Fey Winds

Yeah, just about as eclectic as my music and other reading tastes.

So, do you have any web comics you follow?

Wow.

Even though the team I was rooting for failed to win the game, it was without a doubt one of the more intense games I have watched years. I have to admit, with the Chiefs latest run of futility, I haven't been big into the post-season as I was earlier in my life, but hey, I used to be a huge St. Louis Cardinal fan also before they ducked out on us and slithered off to Phoenix. Still, I had to root for them tonight for nostalgia's sake at least (plus, the Pittsburgh fans around here are obnoxious enough as is).

I did get some writing in this afternoon, which is good, since it's been very hit or miss lately. Still, I now have a hard deadline for my Stargate SG-1 novel, so it's time to get back to work. It's going to be a sprint more than a leisurely plod, but we have all the contract stuff straightened out (inshallah) and I am going to make sure I hit this deadline. I'll post some word counts tomorrow.

Work is being work. Trying to decipher developer's notes so I can turn them into standards documents is not my first choice of "fun stuff", but hey, that's why they pay me the (semi-)big bucks. I just hope all the writing at work doesn't burn me out and keep me from writing on the Stargate stuff in the evening.

And speaking of other worlds, I read jimhines's book The Stepsister Scheme. If you haven't already you haven't already picked this up, I highly recommend that you do. I picked it up at the local bookstore and thought I'd just read a few chapters yesterday to get a feel for the book. A few hours later, I found myself finishing the book. It takes a lot of what you think you know about fairy tales and turns them on their head. I definitely am looking forward to the sequel. Good job, Jim!

And speaking of fractured fairy tales, I also recommend the web comic, No Rest for the Wicked. Another look at the realm of fairy tales and a surprisingly quick read considering the number of strips he has out. I've been scanning around and adding a few new web comics to my list of things to read, so if you have any favorites, feel free to make a few recommendations here.

And with that, I think it's time I go to bed.

Ever have one of those evenings when you were going to get stuff done, kept getting interrupted and by the end of the day, you'd actually accomplished stuff anyway?

As I had mentioned, I'm doing a little writing on Harbinger at lunch. It's amazing how much fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there adds up. I typed in all the stuff I'd put together at work today and discovered I'd added 2183 words and finished off the second chapter. I'm noticing the chapters I'm writing for new version of the story are longer than my normal 3-4,000 word chapters. This is good, I think. They're a little more meaty, but there's stuff going on that's setting up the rest of the book. As I may have mentioned before, my "throw-away" character from the old first chapter has now morphed into a major character and second only to the "main villain" in importance to the story. His thread in the original Harbinger was there to be a catalyst, but after rethinking what I had done in the story and how I wanted to change it, I think he's going to be the main sub-plot that will bedevil our young heroine as she negotiates the rest of the story.

(cue evil laughter and rubbing of hands here)

Still, as I started transcribing, I spotted someone I needed to speak to on Skype and buzzed them. It turns out they won't be able to go to Archon this year, which is too bad. I haven't seen Thyla since the time I shared the table with the Sluggy Freelance people at Dragon*Con and it would have been cool to get to visit again. I still have good memories of hanging out with them and I think I actually sold more Sluggy stuff at the table than joesunday, Pete and Thyla did combined. I know I sold more of their stuff than I did my own. *sigh*

It was a good talk, but that took almost an hour from my writing. I jumped back into the transcribing and then I got a phone call from a friend. Definitely needed to take this call and we visited for about a half-hour before she had to call someone else. So, I jumped back onto Harbinger one more time. Finished the transcription, saved it, opened the unnamed project and glanced at my clock. Aauugh. I had to think. I had met my quota already with what I'd typed, but that was stuff I'd written earlier and it wasn't the unnamed project which does have a rough deadline.

So, I grabbed my notebook, checked the chapter breakdowns and completed Chapter Two and got started on Chapter Three. Ran a quick word count and lo and behold, I had 1073 words on the Unnamed project done. Don't know where they came from, they just sort of flowed out of my fingers and they all made reasonably good sense. Sure, some may not survive the rewrite, but they're not full of the stink, so I'll take solace there.

Oh, and I completed one of the two big writing projects at work today also. So, I guess this should go down as a "good writing day". I need to see if I can find a Snoopy dancing near his typewriter pic so I can add that for a "good writing day" icon.

That's it for now. Time to finish my glass of water and hit the sack. Tomorrow, I get to wrestle with the monthly financials. My favorite pasttime . . . not.
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Words for Today

3256 / 1000 words. 326%

Progress on Harbinger of Darkness

9880 / 120000 words. 8%

Progress on Unnamed Project: SotH

4796 / 100000 words. 5%

Words for 2008

160508 / 366000 words. 44%

Not a lot to report about tonight.

First off, congratulations to Rich Berlew who's fine web comic, Order of the Stick, won an Eagle Award for best web comic of 2007. He didn't win the best Graphic Novel of 2007, but somehow he didn't mind losing to Alan Moore. Huzzah, Rich and hopefully we'll get a chance to hang out at another convention here in the near future!

Worked with one of the developer leads at work and created a template for his team to use to do all their reports. That took about half the day to get everything "just right". But, it was a nice change of pace from the other assignments I've been dealing with lately. No frantic deadlines, no fate of the world rests on this, just a "hey, if you have a bit, could you work on this?"

While I was getting ready for work this morning, I had one of those blinding revelations regarding Harbinger of Darkness. I understand now where I need to go with its rewrite. Chapter 7 is really Chapter 1, Chapter 1 is probably around Chapter 4, the sub-villain is actually one of the more important villains, the whole church thing needs to come out and be saved for the second book and we can't kill off one of the characters until much later in the book, and he MUST be introduced in Chapter One, not Chapter Four like he is now.

(Yeah, I know, this doesn't mean anything to you guys because I think the only person who's read this thing and my blog is wishweaver, but work with me. I'm on a roll.)

Of course, I'm already stretched for time to write on the various projects I have going, so what the heck am I doing even considering another writing project? Heck if I know. Still, when the answers just reach up and slap you in the face, you have to pay attention. So, I'm going to stick to my current strategy about writing for the rest of the year, but I'm taking copious notes on what I want to do with Harbinger and working on the new Chapter One in my spare time at work.

*sigh*

Have I mentioned I'm a glutton for punishment.

And speaking of projects and stuff, I added another 1,152 words to Steel on Target tonight. I was a bit distracted tonight and it took me a long time to get into the flow of the story. I don't know if it's the changing weather, the rather uncomfortable chair I'm sitting in or what, but I need to figure out a way to try and get more focused on my writing when I'm at the house. If I can do 4,000+ at a coffeehouse, I should be able to do better than just over 1000 when I have two hours plus to write at home.

*grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter*

I think it's time to go to bed.

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Words for Today

1152 / 1000 words. 115%

Progress on Steel on Target

50703 / 95000 words. 53%

Words for 2008

140597 / 366000 words. 38%

Wound up staying home today. Felt bad this morning and since wishweaver was going to be home also, I thought it would be good to hang around in case she needed anything. She spent most of the day finishing up her mid-term, so there wasn't a lot of "together" time, but we enjoyed a nice lunch while we were out running a few errands.

As I'm sure many of you have heard by now, E. Gary Gygax has passed away today. For those of us who're long-time gamers, like the man or dislike him, everyone had to admit the man knew how to market the hell out of D&D, Dragon Magazine, TSR and everything else he was involved in. I never had a chance to meet Gary, but I have met Dave Arneson (his co-creator) and I know their game cost me a lot of sleep and time while I was in college and in the Army. I think there's probably a cause and effect between the game and my decision to pursue a degree in Medieval History.

Rich Burlew posted a great tribute to Gary here. Go read it. If you're a gamer, you'll really get it. If you're not a gamer, you'll appreciate the passion in the strip.

On a good note, though, I more than made up for my brain-deadedness (is that a word? Damnmit, it should be.) by hitting 2950 words on Childhood's Tears tonight. While Wish was downstairs working on her midterm, I was up here typing away to my heart's content, accompanied by either Jimmy (our big black cat) or Crookshanks (the youngest male tabby). It made for some interesting typing, especially when Jimmy would decide I had ignored him long enough and would reach out with a paw and drape it across one of my arms . . . just enough to get my attention without looking like he was begging. You know, one of those, "oh, since you're here, would you mind scratching my belly? That's it, be a good sport."

At least they didn't try walking across my keyboard. (Wish notes, "Yet.")

So, the question is, will it be feast or famine tomorrow night? Stay tuned.
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Words for Today

2950 / 1000 words. 295%

Progress on Childhood's Tears

24799 / 90000 words. 28%

Words for 2008

71752 / 366000 words. 20%