Journal Entry: July 25, 2006

So...yesterday was Trish's birthday. As many of you know, we are excruciatingly broke at the moment, but due to good graces, poor filing, and silly forgetfulness, I stumbled across an uncashed check yesterday (for me, not against me), that allowed for a Trish's birthday party.

Here is what I did:

* I bought her a cake.

* I made steak and potatoes.

Hmm...okay, on paper that doesn't look nearly as impressive....

One of Trish's favorite things in the world is ice cream cake (specifically Dairy Queen ice cream cake). The closest Dairy Queen to Oklahoma City, though, is more than an hour away. I'd intended to go there anyway, as a special treat, but the budget I ended up with for the whole affair would barely have covered the gas.

So I got one from Baskin Robbins, and that was equally delicious! Yay.

And the steaks.... Mmm.... They were good steaks. They turned out just right. I'm aching to get a new grill, but the sad thing is that I'm just now actually getting reasonably good at grilling on this one (after years of burnt hamburger patties and generous friends saying, "No, really, it's delicious" between the crunches and the chipped teeth).

Anyway, steaks were great, mashed potatoes were good, ice cream cake was delicious, and we spent something like five straight hours cuddled on the couch watching Buffy. That was my day yesterday. Pretty freakin' sweet (even though I didn't get any WoW time in).

Oh! And major event today in Sleeping Kings! It's one I've been building up to for a while (in my head, at least, if not in the text). Not a happy event, but I'd say a major one. Poor Josh....

And now I'm torn about where to take the story from here. The story feels like it's about to go one way (Josh's character specifically), while there's about a week's worth of stuff that I have in the outline that would be skipped that way. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I have to weigh it. We'll see what happens, eh?

I'm sleepy. Supposed to go over to Shannon's for dinner tonight, and I think Dan wanted to come over for some Strat or Scholo. He'd better bring a snowcone, is all I'm sayin'.

Hope you're all well. I'm going to go spend my lunch break taking a nap in my car.

FAQ

Q: Will P. F. Chang's leftovers stay fresh in an office mini-fridge for a little over a week?

A: Blech.

(Same for delicious leftover grilled hamburger patties, alas.)

Journal Entry: July 17, 2006

1,000 words a day is taxing.

Hmm...that doesn't quite say it strongly enough. I could just add profanity to spice things up, but instead I'll go into a boring level of detail. I am a true protestant.

See, okay, if I sit down and write a 1,000 word story (or essay), then I'd guess that, if I have a general idea ahead of time, it's going to take about four hours. I can compose and type up 1,000 words in about forty minutes. I've found that to be a pretty solid estimate over the course of the last several weeks.

But it takes time to create. It takes time to build the story pieces, and lay them out in order, and fill in the background, and (my method, at least), I put all those pieces together before I sit down to write.

Now, when it comes to Sleeping Kings, I'd say I spend about eight hours per 1,000 word story. Y'know when you're talking to me on the phone, or in-game, or even in person, and you tell me something really interesting, and I say, "Yeah. Hey, what did you think about Josh stabbing the Queen Mum?" or something like that. That's not precisely because I think your story is boring.

It's that I'm obsessing over Sleeping Kings. I'd feel bad about it, but everyone who's actually reading it is pretty excited about it, so I don't.

Hmm, none of that is really new info. Something that is, though: I've posted a story daily now since May 25th. That's 1,000 words (production) every day for fifty-four days. Yeah, Saturday's was only on Saturday by about five minutes. That's actually what got me thinking about this.

I have never written daily. Never. I've heard that all writers write daily. I got pretty close in college, taking Creative Writing every semester, and making time in my time-rich schedule to write. But even then I didn't do weekends, and only very rarely was a day's writing actually production. Most of the time it was notes, or test material, or even just daydreaming, composing, without any words on paper.

One of my goals, back then, was 1,000 words on paper, every weekday. I know for a fact I never hit it, even for two weeks at a time. Closest I came was when I was rewriting Taming Fire, and I'd get on a tear and do four or five chapters at once. But I wouldn't even count that. That's rewrite, not original production.

Of course, as most of you know, I got worse, not better. The whole time I was in Tulsa, I never wrote anything close to a schedule. I'd get the fever for one project or another, and work on that project (and rarely finish), but I never wrote to the calendar.

I'm there, now. Want to know something sad? I think it's sad, anyway. I can't begin to explain why I'm there now. I could name a couple things, little things, but I won't. One day I dusted off the scrawny handful of pages that were the three-year-old introduction to Sleeping Kings, and I posted them on a website, and I just kept going.

It's not easy to write every day. I would encourage all of you to do it, writers or not. Writing is a good discipline. It teaches you to be a better person (I've said that before). It teaches you to be in your world, and to be aware of your world. Even if you're just blogging, journaling, emailing Mom. Whatever it is, write every day.

That's most of my Me. It sounds like something else, but that's my journal for the last week or so, everything I haven't said about what's going on in my life. What's going on, is 1,000 words a day. You'd be amazed how much of my life is wrapped up in that right now. Well, unless you know me, in which case you already know.

Here are some things that have happened, that I should have been paying more attention to:

Brad wrote me, again, after three months of silence following the last email he wrote me. He found my blogs, and he wrote me, and I took forever to respond. I finally did, though. He wants to come visit. I can't say how excited I am at the idea. Yay!

(I continue to have not written Bruce, and my shame piles up. Yea, verily, I am scum.)

Daniel's back from Europe. Hoo-ah! I believe I've already been insulted and flipped off, so life is back to normal. Yay!

We're hosting Trish's two nephews, Tweedle Owen and Tweedle Sloan. Thirteen and eleven, give or take. They're good kids. I kinda dreaded the idea at first, but it's been good. I'm glad Trish has had this opportunity, and I've enjoyed getting to know them better, too. I just hope they're not sick of me shushing them.

One of my secret projects draws near to a close (or at least a functional Release Version, with GUI updates to follow), and I am beginning to urge my evil cohorts to begin on another secret project, with which I am almost as obsessed as I am with Sleeping Kings. Which makes sense, as the two are rather related. Alas, no details yet, as it would be boring without illustrations, and the illustrations are, themselves, the result of the secret project. I'll keep you posted, once it's interesting.

I suppose that's all. I have something I want to tell you, about Archetypes and Social Construction, but that will be a post of its own. Good day. Smile, if you've got anything to smile for.

Journal Entry: July 4, 2006

Happy Independence Day!

I woke up this morning to a cat with an impressive set of lungs on it. Hmm...okay, some of the more literal ones among you are going to be thinking unpleasant things, so I should be entirely clear: it was yowling for some breakfast. At 6 AM. While I'm on vacation. I woke up, and it showed me where they keep the food, so I fed it.

That's my morning routine back home, anyway.

Then I didn't go back to bed, even though I wanted to (also part of my morning routine). I opened up Trish's laptop, and posted today's story on Sleeping Kings, and checked my email. I had a really kind email from Bruce.

(I mean to write a post on here sometime telling the story of how I met Bruce, how he became my king, and how he moved all over the world like the police van in a game of Carmen Sandiego.)

I am on vacation, by the way. Did everyone know that? I ended up getting four days for the weekend (by way of using a day's vacation on Monday), and Heather and Graham had invited everyone to their new home in St. Louis for the Fourth, and we, as a family, have been doing a pretty serious (as in, I can't get out of it) family reunion sort of a holiday on the Fourth for the last several years so, all of those independent clauses combined, Trish and I drove up to St. Louis Friday night. And here we are.

I have to be back at work tomorrow morning, so we're actually missing all the Fourth of July stuff. We're heading home right after lunch today. But, yeah, I've been away for the last three days, in case anyone has missed me.

I have this to say: children are noisy things. They are active things. I am neither of those things. Big sigh.

I'll see you tomorrow. Read Sleeping Kings.

Journal Entry: June 29, 2006

Y'know how I once said that days off during the week have a ridiculously high chance of going bad?

I took the day off yesterday, mostly to hang out with Trish, partly (and specifically) because we had to go to a closing on the refinancing of our house. Well, that last bit was the part that went bad, this time. It was a tiny portion of the day, really, but it went really bad.

In other news, I saw a snake on the drive in to work this morning!

It was...I mean, massive. I work at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, which is this huge sprawling campus with dozens of buildings, connected with city streets (and way too many stop signs). I was already inside the gates, driving 25 mph down one of these connecting streets toward my building, and in the other lane I saw a huge snake slithering toward the curb. There's a grassy area out there, and I assume it was heading for cover. I thought about turning around and running it over, but that seemed too cruel.

But...yeah. Big ol' snake. Yeesh. And that's my walking route, too, when I walk on my lunch break.

I have...well, at the moment I have three stories that I really want to tell: King Jason's War, Sleeping Kings, and Faithful Jake. I don't know if I'll ever actually do a decent version of Faithful Jake. It seems like it might be too heavy for any kind of audience I could write it for. It strikes me as a powerful story, though.

I have about a dozen stories that I really want to write -- the distinction being, these would be more fun for me, even if they'd be less valuable to my readers: The First Myth, Order Knight, Taming Fire and its sequels, someday. Taming Fire is done, after a third rewrite, and at this point I want to rewrite it again into something almost completely different. I'd almost be willing to drop it, like I did my sixth grade stories, but I want to do so much with the sequels, with Daven's family down the line, and readers will probably want to know where he came from. On that note: The Rise and Fall of the FirstKing, or whatever I actually call it. Probably a three-book cycle, but maybe I'd make it one. Somewhere in with that, a book about the Dauric-Elven war, in which the FirstKing's mother died, the city of Elspaur was ransacked, and the FirstKing's ire was first awakened.

There's also my sci-fi, which I'd like to pursue. I got permission to keep working on (and try to publish, even) the stuff I came up with for Eschaton, back in the day. I really liked the world I'd made, the different factions and the underlying mythos. I've got another story idea I like, in a much closer future, about human immortality and nanotech. That could be fun. And there's the Twilight Zone story I mentioned the other day. The one with Idiene.

Is there anything else? I'd kind of like to rewrite The Poet Alexander someday (the story from which I got the username that I use for this blog, and used forever for all my email accounts). And my sixth grade stories...well, I lied when I said I'd dropped those. The story was originally called The Scorekeeper, and more recently The Watcher or maybe The Watcher of the Winds, but that gives entirely the wrong idea. And the focus has changed, considerably, since I first conceived the idea, so it's no longer about the Watcher, but about the characters that he inspires to save the world. The...err...four characters, youngish, all with their lives suddenly interrupted, who go about trying to make the world a better place, in the midst of a terrible war....

Aww, man! That's Sleeping Kings. I just noticed that. Grr. Well, but with more magic. And dragons. Which is probably why I gave up on it. It's hard for me to write magic and dragons anymore, because the people I want to talk to are the ones who aren't interested in that sort of thing. The doctor and the sick people, style of thing.

Anyway, those are some things.

Greatness: Books of Legacy (or "On Fatherhood")

When I was...I dunno, fifteen or so, my family took a long summer road trip. We'd often done summer road trips as a family for my whole life. This one was the whopper, and my parents had probably been planning it for years.

Trish and I were dating at the time, and I faced the terrifying prospect of being away from her for ten days straight. No phone calls, nothing.

I hated it. I resented it. I...even then, I saw it as a matter of perspective. I sat back and looked at the situation from my perspective (where it was a really big deal), and I could see that, from my parents' perspective, being away from a girl I didn't really date yet, for less than two weeks, wasn't that big a deal.

But I was outraged by it. I came up with an idea, and I put it immediately into practice. I wrote Dad a furious letter, telling him exactly how I felt, exactly how important that summer time with Trish was to me, and how much it hurt that I had to be away from her. That wasn't exactly the idea, though. My idea was to keep writing letters like this, to write Dad every time I had something important, something dramatic that I wanted to say to him -- to write it down, and keep them all together, and save that until I had a son of my own. Then read them all, because that would be exactly the words I needed to hear.

I didn't stick to it. I wrote only that one letter. The reason was this: well, first, I really don't stick to very many of my ideas. More importantly, though, everything I had to say in those letters was negative. Because anything positive I had to say, I just said. I've usually been pretty good about that. So it would have just been a bunch of whiny letters in poor penmanship.

There are ways in which I really wish I'd followed that through. There would have been some valuable lessons in there, and some powerful reminders. Mostly they'd probably be reminders about what a whiny brat I was, but even those have their value.

Sometime in college, I got an idea for something similar. I think Daniel or Toby, or someone, was telling me about a cultural group that had this practice, but it might have been an original idea....

Anyway, okay, I'll tell it in story form, because that's what I do.

Within the history of my fantasy world, there comes eventually a line of kings known as the Davinic Kings -- these are the heirs of Daven, centuries later, who reunite and rule over the FirstKing's old realm, and it's a time of prosperity and happiness. They are legendary kings (as the similarity of the name would imply).

And I decided that, among themselves, this family of kings would have a practice of writing Books of Legacy. Each king, when he first learned that he was going to have a child, would write a book containing all of his wisdom, all of his experience -- everything he truly wanted to teach his son. He would spend the nine months or so writing down his message to his son. When his son reached the age of maturity, his father would give him the book, and perhaps teach it to him.

I thought how cool it would be to write those books, to write the collected teachings that each of these great and powerful men (while they were still young) would like to pass on to their sons and heirs. How much could you say, how much imply, about a character and his world, within that particular framework?

I didn't follow through on that. I have a few notes scribbled in one of my scribblebooks that I'd intended as some of the bits of wisdom, and I stumbled across those on Sunday morning. Of course, those are only three years old or so, and they already strike me much the same way that my high school rants at my dad would, if I still had those.

And I think that would be a big part of the message. It's amazing how much we change, from day to day, and I think that's one of the most awesome things about writing, about setting down, at one time, a whole world, that may seem entirely alien when we look back on it tomorrow. Because we carry our memories with us, and modify them, in subtle ways, to match the world we're living in now. It's nice to have something, some hint or snapshot, showing the world as it was, then.

It can be embarrassing. It can be really embarrassing. But that's part of the process, innit? That's the price a writer pays, to do this remarkable thing.

Journal Entry: Big News

Well...I guess now I'll have something else to talk about all the time.