Saturday May 30th, The Curious Collectors of Baker Street

I Started in the AM writing a couple hundred words for Space Mine, trying to obscure the last enemy that has to last the next 30,000 words, to the end of the book. That trail has to be tougher, has to be the thing that ends the book on.

In the middle of the day it was duty for the Curious Collectors of Baker Street, our local Los Angeles Sherlock Holmes Scion. Which means a group of people who started out loving the works of Conan Doyle and now socialize with Sherlockian themes. I came to them because they started to throw dances. I like dancing. Over the years they have all become great friends.

That really wore me out, I served and cleared and coordinated between the kitchen and the master of ceremonies. My feet are still sore.

Then coming home I wrote some more bringing yesterday to nearly 1200 words for a saturday.

In addition I worked on the first page of the Time Commanders site and recorded video for the Eighth Wonder of the World Park

Read Full Post »

May 29th Friday

My goal for today and the week was met by finishing the additional chapter for Space Mine, and bulking up all the short chapters with scenes that round out the book. At this point, with 10 chapters, Space Mine is just shy of 57K words. Over 190 pages.

I was able to nearly 3300 pages today, and over 11.5K for the week so far. Over 64K in this four week period. I think for the next period after the writing group meets will be to step up to 1250 words a day average. Since each month I add 250 words a day goal.

I got a nice encouraging letter from my writer friend Emma Bull. Her Liavek books were a lot of fun. After finishing watching the first season of Time Commanders, I think a web site for that series is in order. There does not seem to be one on the internet, so I have begun to work on one.

In addition, Cheryl has urged that I do what I have done for our family, making videos and slideshows, as a business. Especially since we are just looking for work. So that is what I am going to do. Besides reply to job postings all day long.

In any event it has been a long day and time to go to sleep.

Read Full Post »

May the 28th

Space Mine got my attention some more today. I got through three scenes in chapter eight. About two more to go. Word count accomplished today of 2761. That was the most writing this week, and brings the week to 8254. I plan to finish the chapter tomorrow. Already this month we have exceeded the writing done last month. So this has been quite productive.

Other accomplishments today was editing all of chapter 1 in Graces. I went to the Coffee Bean to catch up with my friend Tom who likes to hang out there before going home. Took the manuscript down and finished the edit. Now I need to type the changes up.

Saw the Wonder Boys today. It was too contrived. Too much here is what an adult show should be about. Man having a lousy life, everything going wrong… All of a sudden it all becomes predictable. Way too predictable. The only good thing was the cast of so many notable actors.

Finished my audit of the first series of Time Commanders. I really like this in spite of some things that have gotten worse as the series progressed. The lead historian who teaches at Sandhurst has not got nice things to say about the teams when the win or lose. He is arrogant in the extreme as he has studied strategy and all the contestants are amateurs. Now on to series two. It is a shame as Creative Assembly has later period games, the producers were not able to carry the series on to use those games and restage more battles.

On the Rollercoaster Tycoon front, I posted my latest park online at the site

Now it is wait and see if there are people out there who want to enter the competition.

Gratitude Log

1. Cold Iced Coffee Drinks
2. Coffee Houses that are not Starbucks
3. Blue Azure Ink (So much more colorful then just regular blue)
4. Online Banking
5. Gilbert & Sullivan (How can you not be thankful for these guys)

Read Full Post »

May 27th, A wednesday

So my parents have been cruising and shmoozing. They left and flew to Thailand then took a Princess Cruise back to the states as the ship transitioned for the summer Alaska runs. They got back and we went up to see them yesterday. I burned the disk of the 600+ slides I have already digitized for them. More of which I did yesterday.

I also wrote some more on Space Mine yesterday. 1700 words. The week goal of 5000 was met yesterday am. The new goal I put for Space mine is that I expand the chapters that were week, add in some relationship material, add in some engineering material. I have done that. And add an entire new chapter. That last I started yesterday.

Now apples to apples. April was a four week month between meeting of the Brea Borders Writers Group and so that four week cycle ends on friday. Today and tomorrow to meet my new goal of just finishing the chapter. I think i should be able to do it. (I write this on Thursday am) But I do have an entire other week before we meet, so that will be spent on working on the next book. Research, plot structure, etc.

Got home late last night which is why I am posting this today. Saw a movie, Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian, and it was truly a dreadful story. The reasons are that you can’t just buy the motivation of Prince Caspian. Or the little crush he and our heroine in the movie get from three glances at each other during the story.

I have never read the CS Lewis book, but here are the weak points that you just can’t process. The Narnians are hiding in the scarry wood. So they are legend. Our heroes mentor, is half monster, though you can’t tell if you look at him. Our Hero accepts the monsters and wants to use them to regain his throne.

He has no problem about marching into his old home, killing all the guards who would be loyal to him if they knew better, with his monster allies. Our heroes people learn of the monsters, aren’t too frightened (wouldn’t you be if a talking bear, or a minotaur started to hack at you with an axe) and go to war with the monsters right away.

Caspian wins… Of Course, and the people cheer him, and the monsters that have just killed their fathers, their sons, their brothers. It is one thing to kill the bad guys, but the rest of the people certainly are not going to love you when you have killed all the bystanders who were just following orders also.

Gratitude Log

1. Ahi Tuna
2. Parents
3. Trash removal (Can you imagine if you had to get rid of it all yourself? How come in those settler on the range movies you never see that?)
4. Electiricty (Staying up late by candlelight would be a drag too.)
5. Socks (my feet are cold these days)

Read Full Post »

Tuesday the 26th, May

Was able to get the chapter 5 expansion done in Space Mine. I may be giving up all the enemies too early and have to revisit that. In all did more than 2000 words for that. Watched some more Time Commanders, worked on the website videos of Scotland. More slides for my folks. Got a lot of little things done and cleared my desk pretty well.

I was also able to edit a little in Graces, read some in the two books on editing and writing, but to bed another couple Forbes (Only four behind now.)

Read Full Post »

Memorial Day, May 25th, 2009

So what did I accomplish today. I had a list. I did some of it. Almost all that was on it. I read and finished the Forbes I had planned to for the three day weekend. I sent off the lists of all the slides I had been doing from my parents and started on the next box, this time from 1968.

I edit another video and uploaded it to the web. This was more of the Scotland Trip. I did another comic now that I have a great deal more family photos from doing my folks slides. We made a Borders run because we had a coupon. And I wrote in Space Mine. I added a new scene to chapter 4 and expanded it to the size it should have been. Another 1700+ words so I met the daily goal and then some. I also added to some of the other scenes of chapter four. I then edited some more pages in Graces.

A played with some more video of the Eighth Wonder of the World Park and will probably edit that tomorrow.

Gratitude Log

1. Apples
2. Borders
3. Band of Brothers (Benton showed a link to the theme music and it reminded how good this series is. I have watched it twice through)
4. Fajitas (Alton was doing skirt steak on Good Eats tonight)
5. Margaritas

Read Full Post »

Sunday May 24th, Memorial Day Weekend

Had a few goals today. The first was to get to 45,000 words in Space Mine, which I did. That brings the writing for the weekend to nearly 5800 words. Or 23K+ for the week, 52K so far this month. More importantly I finished the 9th chapter this week in Space Mine, fleshed out chapters 2 and 3 that needed them, decided there is another chapter after chapter 7.

For this week I intend to finish the fleshing out of the short chapters, 4, 5 and 8 which need about 4200 words between them, and doing chapter 7a for the 5000 or so words it needs. That would take us to the place that the story should be, and if I do that by the end of this coming week it will be good.

In other goals for the day, I had two. One was to digitize another tray of slides for my parents. Apparently they were in Switzerland, France and England in 1964 when I was almost 2. I didn’t get to go. So I got those from slides into digital pictures. Then I wanted to make some headway on the pile of Forbes magazines. Getting through one so far. And also finally getting the last of the information on my library that I have in Bookpedia into Library Thing.

Finished in time to watch a Time Commanders, where the contestants did horribly. But it is still fun to watch and I am glad YouTube has all these. Then after Cheryl returned from Pet Sitting, we made it over to a friends graduation party. She had just picked up her MBA, (her second masters degree) and so there was a party to celebrate.

Gratitude Log

1. Higher Education
2. Pets
3. Carrot Cake
4. Chocolate Cake
5. Chocolate Cream Pie

Read Full Post »

Saturday, Memorial Day Weekend, May 23rd 2009

My goal today was to get Space Mine to 42,000 words and start looking at some other things on my plate. Scanning another box of slides for my parents for instance. Working on updating the Rollercoaster website here by giving the 8th competition of Small Parks a page. I did so. I updated the scenario file. I placed all the work I have done and been showing here on the demo park there online. So now you can see the ride videos, you can download the coasters I designed for the park, you can download the completed park, you can download the file and make your own park, you can see pictures of the demo park which I call the Eighth Wonder of the World since it is the eighth competition. I also posted a video of the park in operation at YouTube.

As I’ve noted before several of the chapters in Space Mine were short, and thus the entire story at this point is too short for where we are. I identified several chapters that are light, and some subplots that needed to be fleshed out. I wrote 3000+ today and this is a weekend day so the goal was really 0. I revised that zero into wanting to add to my things to do today, including whacking away at the vine covering the back door entryway at the house. Wanted to finish a copy of Forbes thats been hanging around for a while. Wanted to watch a Time Commanders series. Take care of the videos of the Scotland trip so I can replace the page on my website that I had a holder at. You can see the page and video here.

In Space Mine what I have to expand is:
        Love Story
        More of the engineering complications that are slowing up the ability of such a project to go operational
        More plots of the enemies in trying to stop the successes of our heroes.

Things that happened today for me to be grateful for:

1. Forbes
2. Chocolate Chip Pancakes (I may already have been grateful for that)
3. Rome Total War and it’s use in educational TV
4. iMovie ‘09 which I used on the Scotland video.
5. McBooks Press because they make these great catalogs that give me items I want to put on a wish list (and maybe they should have a wish list like at Amazon, so when I have some cash–Like when I get a job again–I could just look at my McBooks List and try and pick what I want most.)

Read Full Post »

Space Mine on May 22nd

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Finished building out the pa​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​r​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​k​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​a​​​​​​​​n​​​​​​​​​d​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​a​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​l​​​​​​​​​​​​​​s​​​​​​​​​​​​​​o​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​a​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​t​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​w​​​​​​​o​​​​​​​r​​​​​​​k ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​o​​​​​​​​​​​​​​n​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​i​​​​​​​​​​​​​​m​​​​​​​​p​​​​​​o​​​​​​​​r​​​​​​​​​​​​​t​​​​​​​i​​​​​​​n​g​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​e​​​​​​​v​​​​​​​​​​​​​e​r​​​​​​​y​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​s​​​​​​​​l​​​​​​i​​​​​​​d​​e​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​m​​​​​​​​​​​​​​y​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​f​​​​​​​​a​t​​​​​​h​​​​​​e​r​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​t​​​​​​​​​​​​​​o​​​​​​​o​​​​​​​k​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​f​​o​​​​​r​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​m​​​​​​​​​​​​​​y​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​p​arents. Found one of me at around 1 year of age. These are torture. Look at my big diaper butt. In the sixties we didn’t have slim huggies or pampers but diapers that made us look like we eat too much grits and come from the south where cholesterol is a way of life or something. Fortunately this picture cuts off just at the right spot. I wonder where my moms Sewing machine ended up? I think they finally got rid of that desk chair.

​

So finished the park and ran it and it did quite well. First park of mine to break 1000 peeps in it. We are going out for dinner to celebrate friends, could be 32nd anniversary in a bit so today wrote 2200+ words, bringing the Space chapter to nears its conclusion. Then did some calculation. Where I am in my plotting of the story, and the other chapters I wanted to have, should be about 2/3rds done. So should have 60,000 words. But not even 40K. Must go and at some more of the subplots that I have put off. Like the love story. Should have some longing with the super seven and the head honchos.

Also the engineering of the task, the science in the science fiction besides the politics and the military activity. The suspense is there, but the other parameters are too light.

​

Read Full Post »

May 21st editing begins

Work a little today on the edit of Graces of Belle Gretain. That is what the name of the Duchy became as I wrote the first draft so I like it better then Brantley which was the dream name I had when the story first came to me. Had some holes in the Prologue and have been reading Self-Editing for Fiction Writers which suggests that perhaps we should look at our stories in different lights. The Prologue chapter which I have placed on line here before is written with a great deal of Narrative Exposition to show the evolving of the beasts and how they venture ever further into the world, encounter men, and come to go cattle raiding during the years when they need to. A process of generations.

I believe that Self-Editing for Fiction Writers suggests that it should have more dialogue, more action that engages the reader rather then a sweeping tale of another time. I couple this with work from Dwight Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer which I am also reading at the moment to help polish my skills.

Today was able to add 1600 more words to the Space Mine story, moving it forward. My output is not as great as I rushed along on Graces, but Space is definitely in the middle of the story. Though so much less has happened to get to the middle. It almost feels like half a story. Missing great chunks. Perhaps I have to add up the love interests or include more political bickering. More scenes of my terrorists and more scenes of agents of counter terrorism. Too little has happened at 37,000+ for us to be where we are.

Today another pic of the my small park, but by no means did I do any work on it today. After I do finish adding in the stalls and the scenery, I will tweak the park file and make it available to all who want to work on an entry during June. So that needs to be finished in just over a week.

Gratitude Log:

1. Fudgcicles
2. Youtube
3. Toothpaste
4. Tivo
5. Ripping Movies

Read Full Post »