Submissions, Support and Special Mentions

The word of the week is submission.

October 8 - Guess what I did ALL WEEK LONG?

I'll be honest with you: I've spent the whole of this week editing my novel. Today's entry is a heads-up, as there was little that was exciting or non-novel-related went on this week. Really.

Every single day, I've been up at 7am, in my comfy couch-chair at 8am and editing until at least 10pm at night.

I begrudged myself time to eat lunch or dinner or take a 10-minute sanity break every hour or two. Those were necessary, to keep me focused and to let my brain have a 'processing break' to help the story stay in perspective. Which worked; I came back at it every time with a happy will, working to grind a fine edge onto the tale to make it as perfect as possible.

That's about it… but it's all part of reaching the goal, so read on….

October 9 - Borderlands2 Is Extra Awesome Today

I'm fairly excited to be able to get back to playing Borderlands2 later this month, once I finish editing the second draft of my novel. AND I've been able to give my aching, burning, taut-as-wires wrists a VERY thorough R-and-R period first. BL2 is all that the first Borderlands was, times ten, in my opinion. More of all that you love and lots of things you didn't know you'd love, but once you see them, you're hooked.

Also today: the Mechromancer was released, which is a fifth class for BL2. It may not seem like much, but it's a class designed for people who can't shoot straight - JUST LIKE ME! I was over the moon when I heard about it and I'm VERY excited to get to play it soon. It's a double- excitement BL2 October for me!

Borderlands2 - Gaige the Necromancer and DeathTrap

October 10 - HK from The Terminator is REAL!

I love scale models. I also love scifi. I'm no good at one, but getting better at the other. When you combine the two, I'm in heaven. Somewhere out there, someone who's also really, really good at that one thing decided to build a REAL FLYING HK from the Terminator movies! Watch the video below and be amazed… the best part is right at the end - the thing has LIGHTS!

October 11 - That cheque is for HOW much??

As some of you know, I used to spend a good part of my day cashing cheques for people as a living. I've seen a LOT of different kind of cheques, both good and bad, large and small.

However, I've NEVER heard of ANY cheque as large as the one recently received by Allen Smith, a 22-year old college student in the USA. It was a regular monthly cheque, received as assistance for his tuition costs.

The one this month was for… 690 MILLION US DOLLARS.

The best part? He returned it ASAP.

Obviously, there's no bank in the USA( or likely anywhere else )that would be able to cash that cheque. Considering the hoops I had to go through when cashing cheuqes of somewhat smaller amounts than that, I think he realized right away there was nothing he could do but take a picture of himself posing with it, then do the right thing.

However, you still have to wonder: how could something like that get PRINTED in the first place?

October 12 - Almost Tragedy Averted in 2012

A year ago today, I almost lost my mother to blood clots. And overwork, on my part.

You can have a look at my blog entry for that week - it's the day highlighted all in Red.

It was a watershed day for me, in several ways. First and by far most importantly, I realized how close( and how easily )I almost lost my mother. I'm close to all my immediate family and to have one of them taken from me due to the simple fact I wasn't close enough to get her to the hospital for a 'non-emergency' that turned out to be anything BUT… was shocking.

Second, I realized how insidious my job at MMart had become. That I was so INCREDIBLY fortunate to have my mother's emergency happen on the SINGLE day off I had in over a month showed how overworked I was. It was then that I realized I had to leave MMart, ASAP, to keep not only MYSELF healthy, but my FAMILY.

Thirdly, and I didn't realize this until earlier this year: without my mother, I wouldn't have been able to write my first novel as quickly, efficiently or as well as I did. PERIOD. If I do manage to make a career out of writing, it will because of the massive support and belief in me that she's given.

So every year, my family and I will celebrate 'MomsGiving', to celebrate and give thanks that my mother is still with us today, when all the odds then said she shouldn't have been.

Love ya, Mom. :-)

October 13 - Lucky Day! My Novel is SUBMITTED!

I finished the second draft of my novel today, at 5:05pm PST and submitted it to Harper-Voyager 30 minutes after that. Eleven days of working 12-14 hours a day culminated tonight in my relieved happiness. It's my first novel and first submission for possible publication, so while they're looking for ebooks only, it's still a start on the road to becoming a published author.

However, I'm not going in all starry-eyed: some authors have posted that the call for submissions by Harper-Voyager isn't a good idea in some ways. I'm well aware that I'm inexperienced, that I don't know the publishing business all that well. I have friends that do and I'll be sure to check with them if I do end up getting my novel accepted by this publisher, at any level. So we'll see what happens in less than three months, which is how long the published had posted that it would take to get back to people.

Though it's the size of a phone book, it's MUCH better reading!

In the meantime, here's why I think my second draft is MUCH better than the first:

- I finished it ON TIME! ( and I finished the first one EARLY! )
- I'm HAPPY with it, from prologue to ending
- I'm STILL enjoying reading it, despite being the one who WROTE it!
- It's TWICE as good a story as the first; all the bits tie tightly together now
- I spent 12-14hrs a day for 10 days editing and I enjoyed every MINUTE of it
- I submitted it to a publisher, the FIRST of my works that I can say that about!
- The characters are now so well-developed that they practically wrote themselves
- While I was editing it, ideas flowed so fast that I now have TWO MORE books sketched out!
- I added 15 pages, cut over twice that and still ended up with a smooth story flow
- I don't feel that I have to do a THIRD draft QUITE yet, as this is as good as I can make it without seeking professional help( editorial or possibly psychiatric, if I try ). ;-)

Now I'm going to take a break from writing for a while, and just job hunt.

Not excluding writing jobs, either. :-)

SPECIAL MENTION:

Immediately after I submitted my novel, I spent a few hours attending an online tournament celebrating the 2nd Anniversary of AoN with my friends. I was knocked out early, which is actually when the fun REALLY started: I spent the rest of the tourney being an Announcer Extraordinaire - I was on fire, verbally! So many witty observations came out of my keyboard that I was laughing continuously by the end and so was everyone else. I had an amazing time and I think I helped everyone else to really enjoy themselves too, which is what it's all about. Wonderful!

October 14 - Stepping out

The people upstairs woke me before 8am today( a Sunday )but I didn't mind.

It's probably the last time they'll do that. They've been thumping and crashing since Friday, the sweet sounds of boxes and furniture being moved out of the apartment. They were at it until well after 12am last night, but I didn't care… the sounds of them leaving lulled me to sleep with a smile, for a change.

Speaking of leaving, Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a balloon gondola today from the edge of space today, 39km up…. and survived without a scratch! I watched it live at around 11am today… or tried to. 

Watch that first step...

The feed from the sponsor's website never actually WENT live, so I was flipping back from the TV to my FBook news feed, which is where I heard he'd jumped… AND later on landed safely. So much for technology being able to take on history-making events live without fail. Ah well… at least I knew it was happening AS it was happening, which is something. 

Up next for Felix? Settling down and not scaring his girlfriend with any more hazards like today's. I think that’s a good plan, as it'd be hard to top the last one!

Wow, am I tired… I haven't been this worn out since, well… since I was working 60-hour weeks at MMart this time last year -there's symmetry for you, eh? I imagine I'll still be getting up at 7am for the forseeable future, as it's just too hard to sleep past that around here, regardless. But I think for the next while I'll try to take a few more naps, just to try to get some balance back in my energy levels. See you all next week!

Taking Stock, Twitter and Turkey

The word of the week is social.

October 1 - Time is Flying…

It's a new month: time to take stock of a few things.

Only a few months remain for me to find a job before my EI runs out. I'm starting to sound like a broken record( which is rather dated of me, given than I've not owned a record for decades )when I talk about this, but it IS coming down to the crunch now. In the end, I'll have to take a job of SOME kind; I keep hoping and looking for one that won't drain my creativity during the day so I can write a decent amount in the evening. Definitely not a night job though; been there, done that, never again.

Personally, I'm still coasting along. My social network here in Victoria is an oddly estranged one; I know people but I don't hang out with them on a regular basis. It's strange, but most of the people I know are busy with their lives and if I see them once a month, that's fairly good in the scale of our schedules. It SHOULD be more often, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. Perhaps it is 'natural' for a writer to be isolated to a degree, but in my case I live IN town for a reason: to socialize. A few Mondays a month are spent at the Victoria Writer's Group, true… but too many Friday and Saturday nights I'm homebound. Not having much of a budget to GO out also doesn't help; you can't do much with a ten dollar bill apart from coffee or one beer, and who wants to call it a night early?

Those are my thoughts, for now. I blame the lack of regular sleep for my middling melancholy of late. Heading into the cooler, darker season, I'll be sure to spend more time under my sunlamp - when I'm home, that is. Being out and about in this lovely city is high on my list for the Fall and Winter, now that I'm not writing my novel on a daily basis!

October 2 - How Felicia Day works

One of my favourite people in media today( and in general )is Felicia Day, queen of independent media. Being able to put together The Guild webseries with almost no budget and to grow it into a successful part of a business six years later is a testament to her abilities and her work skills.

Which is why I was very intrigued to see that Lifehacker.com did an interview with her this month, asking her HOW she worked on a daily basis. It was fascinating and only confirms the fact that in order to get anywhere, you have to work hard AND smart. In Felicia Day's case, it also helps to be cute, charming and funny, as well as humble… I can relate to a couple of those, on a good day, I think.

October 3 - Twitter?

For years now, I've resisted signing up for a Twitter account. In my opinion, my life isn't all that interesting compared to thousands of celebrities, so why should I get an account so people can 'follow' me? I post a haiku a day on FBook, which has become a nice outlet for my daily creativity in several ways. Twitter always seemed rather self-indulgent to me.

However, it does work both ways. Since signing up this week, I've 'followed' several people that I find interesting( Felicia Day, anyone? )as well as used Twitter to get a few bonuses for Borderlands2, something I hadn't thought about in terms of media crossovers.

As well, I have to be forward thinking: perhaps one day I'll have a body of work interesting enough for people to WANT to follow me; why not be prepared for that? I can always tweet from my island retreat as the zombies overrun the mainland…

October 4 - Mind Tricks

Way, WAY back in the day, I remember being tested in school at a young age for IQ and such things. I liked a lot of the tests and did VERY well at them, something that surprised my parents; I was less interested in the results than in the tests themselves. I've always had a soft spot for unique tests and puzzles since, though I've become much more interested in the results now; fascinating stuff.

One series of tests I recall doing were visual ones, where I had to identify objects that had several confusing or contradictory factors to them. This test( go ahead, click the link and try it! )is one that mixes up words and colours in interesting ways to show you how your mind works. Again: fascinating!

If YOU have any really good 'test' sites, please add them below in the Comments for everyone!

October 5 - NO MORE NOISE?

For the last five days straight, there's been nary a peep from the people upstairs. Not a thump, crash or trotting chase of little feet has disturbed me, day OR night, for the entire week.

It's been heavenly.

Doubly so because I've been able to work ALL DAY on editing my novel, with a few sanity breaks that also help prevent eyestrain.

According to the superintendent, no new postdated cheques have arrived from these people at his office. I'm hoping that this means they've finally found a place and are using October to move out by degrees, which jives with their activity patterns this week. The last message I received from them said they 'might be moving soon' and I'm clinging to the silence this week in the hopes it will be permanent.

October 6 - Novelicious

One result of being wakened early and often is that my body clock has adjusted to get ME up early.. if not so often. I'm usually asleep now well before 11pm and up well before 7am, sometimes 6am, which is a switch for me. I'm trying to look at it as a positive, as it means if an early-shift job turns up, I won't be bleary-eyed for the first month trying to adjust. As it is, there are bags under my eyes from the last month of stressful not-sleeping-nights in addition to the pressure of the novel and job-search. I'm really looking forward to the time when the bags and I will call a truce and then they'll retreat somewhat.

Today I put in a LOT of time into my novel, from well before 9am to well after 9pm. Breaks for lunch, a nap and a trip to the store notwithstanding, it was still my most productive day this week. I can see the story tightening up before my eyes as I work on many different aspects of it. At times, I do 'passes' where I search out common errors or repetitious words, or replace all instances of a word or name with ones that works better. I'm also adding in pieces from my notes to various parts of the novel, to build up the world more believably and make it less 'flat' as you read along. All this is in addition to the hundreds of tiny corrections I do as I parse each sentence and paragraph to lose a few words or add punctuation to make things really shine. Chapter by chapter, it's getting ready for submission - THIS WEEK!

October 7 - It's Turkey Bacon Stuffing Time!

It was write, write, write from the word go today; as I was up as usual well before 7am, it was a fairly productive day. I made it about 1/3 through the book on a 'fixing structure' pass, tightening things up and chopping bits out, sentence by sentence. I hope to FINISH this pass tomorrow, so that I can make some important additions to the novel to enhance it in many ways. Deepen it, if you will; a LOT of what's in my notes needs to make it into the book in ways that don't look ham-fisted, which takes time… you can't just plunk things down somewhere and hope that people won't notice the addition.

In the evening I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at the invitation of a friend; thanks Merrie! I had a wonderful time, managing to take the bus there AND back without getting lost or waiting for hours. Everyone at the gathering was lovely and fairly g33ky, to my delight. It was one of the best days I've spent out this entire year and I hope that it's the first one of many in the company of these nice folk. Definitely a perfect end to a busy week!

Yes campers, it's CRUNCH time this week! I've set myself a deadline of 10/11/12 to submit my novel manuscript this week. For no other reason than it's a cool date and I need to submit before Oct.14th, which means I'll be writing for at LEAST 12 hours a day until I'm done and hopefully happy with the results. Head down and powering through… now.

Billions, Baggins and Befuddlement

The word of the week is belief.

September 24 - The Hobbit

Only a few months to go until the first half of The Hobbit is released in theaters! I was one of those folks who stood in line for the LOTR trilogy when the movies were released and I have a feeling I'll again be standing in the front ranks come December when the tale of Bilbo Baggins hits the big screen.

The Hobbit is the first fantasy story that fired my imagination as a child. We took it as a class project in Grade Six, having it tied in with the recently-released 1977 animated film along with a copy of the Deluxe Movie book that contained still images from the film:

For me, that film is a wonderful memory and my first step into Tolkien's world as well as the many others that awaited me as I discovered Fantasy literature. It ignited a passion that remains to this day and I'm glad to see others doing their best to pass on these treasures to new generations:

September 25 - Job? Nyet.

I'm feeling somewhat better today, but I still have no energy. I've been napping on and off as best I can, given the activities upstairs and outside. Earplugs, headphones and determination are the order of the day.

Jobs however, seem rather scarce. I've combed through the advertised ones and come up empty, save for the usual basic retail-sales-service jobs that pay a pittance and ask a lot of your soul. To find the jobs that aren't advertised and that I might actually find a better fit to my wants, it's going to be a grind. Networking will be the key, so I'm extending some more feelers this week and seeing what comes up.

Freelance work is always an option, though it won't work well if my wrists can't keep up. The burning pain in my left arm only returns if I type for too long or too often, so the specialist's prediction that it might take up to two years( or longer )to heal seems on the money. Learning to type with my voice means I'll have to find the time to practice more over the next few months and also means I'll be tied to my PC at home; the laptop doesn't have the power to run the voice-recognition software. I'm toying with the idea of recording articles and then having them translated after, but that doesn't work well with the writing process; nobody I know of does a perfect take the first time. It takes editing and time.

So we'll see where I am in a month's time.

September 26 - More Tiny Homes

The trend towards smaller homes continues, as designers and creative folk get on board the movement. One home by designer Jessica Helgerson is used as a weekend home by her family. It's simple and makes use of every bit of space inside as well as integrating a lot of outside space into the home's use.

There's quite a few tiny houses all around the world, but so far it's been hard to get images of more than a few at a time. However, I've found a site that seems to be collecting images of tiny homes from all over the globe: TinyhousesWoon.com. There's quite a few designs in there that I haven't seen; one and all, they look fairly comfortable for a few people to live in - large families excluded, of course.

September 27 - Mail-Order Monsters

You know, it's strange… I had a lot when I was a kid growing up in terms of video game systems, but I never had a computer. At least not until the Coleco ADAM, but that barely counts as such - which probably explains why I was so excited to get an AMIGA 500 in my teens, as it was my first 'real' home computer. My friends all had Commodore64's and Apple IIe's but neither made their way into our household.

So it's doubly strange that my favourite video game of all time( before I discovered NWN, that is! )is Mail Order Monsters for the C64. I loved that game, played it at my friend's houses as often as possible and saved my monsters on a floppy 5.25" disk that I toted with me, which was rare back then. Being able to design monsters and pit them against the creations of my friends was incredibly fun and I went at it with gusto. Which didn't last over a year as I just wasn't any good at it, aside from providing sport for my pals to pummel electronically. Yet the sheer sense of FUN from the game has stuck with me all these decades and I'm hoping that someone out there will update the game one of these days, maybe as a phone app.

I mean, what could be cooler than a dinosaur with a cybernetic brain and a pair of machine guns? C'mon!

September 28 - Fallout

The people upstairs and I have had a falling out, which I'm frankly surprised didn't happen before now. I'm tired of being involuntarily woken around dawn most days and they're tired of my leaving polite notes and / or texts about it. So today I was told not to leave any more notes, just to contact the landlord and / or the police - that's that. I had hoped that opening lines of communication would work, but it seems they can't control their kids well enough or just aren't willing to spend the energy. 

Which, having kids, they likely don't have a lot of; I understand.

Rather than try to sleep past when they usually start banging about, I'm doing the next best thing: modifying my own sleep schedule so that I'm up around the same time as them: 6am. It stinks, no: galls me that I have to cater to THEIR schedule due to THEIR inconsideration, but that's life. They're thinking of their family first and I can't blame them and who knows? By no longer fighting the inevitable, I may get rid of these dark circles under my eyes and start feeling human again. As well as proving the old adage "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" - now I truly know what that means. I might also order one of these to stick my head into and modify it with a lot more stuffing:

I just wonder how long I can hold off until making a noise report. I hope I don't have to, really; they're nice people, just under a lot of stress - same as me. Maybe they'll move soon, as they'd been saying… In the meantime, I'm editing my manuscript despite a lack of decent sleep or a quiet workspace. It's certainly causing me to focus and use what energy I have efficiently, especially in the quiet moments.

September 29 - Progress!

Whew! I managed to get a LOT done on my manuscript today, as for whatever reason the people upstairs were gone for most of the day. I've been using excellent feedback from several sources to comb through my text and correct many minor errors, completing a pass on the first half of the novel by dinnertime today.

It's just write, write, write for the next while. Once I've given the novel a full run through, I'll start to add in parts from my own notes, tighten things up and generally step beyond the technical bits into the 'make the story better and richer' part. I've set a deadline for myself a few days BEFORE the submission cutoff date by Harper-Voyager, to give myself a touch of breathing room. Which means it's heads-down, run-for-the-finish-line every day for the first half of October: I'll be working HARDER than I was at the end of August, to make this work.

I want it to be worth the effort. Here's hoping!

September 30 - A Billion-Year Plan?

I've often thought about the future of the human species, where we'll be in a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million… but a BILLION? That's… a little TOO far for me to conceptualize as any of our descendants bearing any resemblance to the word 'human' after so long.

Yet this was part of the discussion at the recent 100-Year Starship symposium. In truth, the discussion ranged all over the place but this topic caught the attention of more than a few folks, originating as it did on the Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence Blog - a lot of smart banter there, also. Check out the highlights as posted on Centauri Dreams and wonder again at the wonder of our species, that we can look so far away AND so far ahead into our own future.

That's all I have for today, really. I thought about this a fair bit when I was much younger, but I didn't get very far as I didn't have the breadth of reading I do today. After reading through parts of the blog and the Centauri site, I realized yet again I'm still not as widely read as I could be. Maybe when I retire…

It's been a rough, rotten-at-times week that's drained a lot out of me. But I'm facing the new week with new determination, to plug ALL that I have into creating the best damn manuscript I can to submit in a few week's time. Once it leaves, it's literally out of my hands and I don't want to regret wasting a minute on such trivialities as a lack of sleep, no job prospects or a lack of a social life. 

Minor things, all, when it comes to being an author. Right?