So I have been not doing two blogs a week, sorry for that.  I was on a tear the last week or so with the project in the picture.  I just got into a groove and wrote.  When you get in that zone you don’t really want to let much else get in your way, because it is kind of rare to hit that 5,000+ word days in which it all seems good.

These are just proof copies.  I have actually written an additional chapter and rewritten another in it, but the first draft was done.  I like to edit a hard copy and I’m not a fan of Binders.  I did that with my last one, Wired Thoughts, and it gets messy.  I can get a proof copy for under $5.  It also gives me something nice to give to test readers.

I have to confess though that it did take precedence from my other project, my fantasy sequel.  So ya know, have to get back to that.  Just started chapter 8 with that and chapter 5 of my thriller.  So those are ongoing, one is at 11k words, the other is at like 6k.  Not that any of my two readers care.

I actually found out who one of you are. So beware, WOOT!!!!

Back to my finished one though.  It’s kind of short, but basically an autobiography.  I haven’t had the most exciting life, so not to long.  But the title “The Fictitious Memoirs of a Jarhead in the Suck”, was just too fun not to use.  So I rolled with it  and made it so.  On the bright side that is book seven done.  That’s the third this year, so I feel it has been a good year so far.  Sure only one published, but you have to start somewhere.

I am thinking if this one is low on the editing scale I might roll it out before Inheritance, but it shouldn’t delay it too much.  Just saying.

Anyway, new chapter from Emporium is up on Royal Road, link at the top.  It has a 4.5 start rating so far……..  That will fall as more chapters roll out.  But go and enjoy!!!!!

Not really feeling like doing a proper blog today, but I need to do stuff to keep up content.  So i thought I would pop in and drop some words here in the digital realm to let all two of my readers know I am still around.

I am getting engrossed in my new thing.  I guess you could call it my memoirs, or my time in the Marines.  I talk about it a bit, mostly just in passing.  But it has had a huge impact on me, the way I think, and what I write about.  So it seemed that I should get it out of my system.

I have been writing basically essays on things that have bothered me.  The crap that gives me nightmares and all that jazz.  Initially it was a therapeutic technique recommended by my counselor.  It was good stuff.  Even though I knew what was wrong and the very events that aided in that, explaining it as compared to taking the time to think about it as you write are two vastly different things.

It was just generic at first.  Then the more I did it, it evolved into more of a style.  Well after a while I decided to see how much I had actually done.  I printed it all off.  There was like 50 pages of stuff.  Wow, I thought  I could almost do a book with this.  A lot of it was disjointed and just focused on specific things.  If I added the not serious stuff and added connective material i might actually be able to to a 150ish page book.

After revising the first twenty or so pages, I did manage to put it in some kind of chronological order, and filling in some gaps I am up to about 90 pages now.  I still have a lot to write about as well, good and bad.

I will say right away that it’s nothing as riveting as Lone Survivor or that crap.  Its just a story, mine, but still just a story.  I do rant on it though.  I find it helps me settle my mind, just like most writing does.  The main thing is that trying to get others to understand what goes on in a person’s mind can be vastly different than they way they present themselves.

The main difference with combat vets is that their minds are far darker and more confusing.  With no frame of reference most people just blow off when they say they have conflicts in their minds.  So my tale is not so much to tell some crappy heroic tale, its more to give people a poor facsimile of an idea of what we go through.  I am hoping the use of words on paper can paint a better picture that just talking about it.

The actual conflicts of the mind vary from person to person.  Mine  are a whole other thing, I have a whole book pegged for those that I’ve started.  It’s going to be dark as shit.

I should have had another chapter from Emporium pop up on Royal Road today, delayed posting, WOOT!!!! SO for a bit of light fare head over there and check it out.

I’m going to try and post two blogs this week for all two of my fans…….  This one is just a lot of rambling.  On the good note I just finished The Emporium of Awesome, the bad side, it’s not as cool as I had hoped.  I am posting the chapters over on my Royal Road page (link at top of page) one per week, cause why not?

The other bad thing, is what do I work on next?

I have a bunch of stuff I am wanting to work on, start, finish, etc, but I find that new ideas keep popping up and old ones are screaming to be worked on.  So far I have the following started:

1. “The Fictional Memoirs of a Jarhead in the Suck” – Tales from my time in the service….. totally engrossing, or not. I think I have about 30 pages of stuff so far. I am actually just doing stories as I remember them and am hoping to cobble them together in some semblance of a book when done.
2. “The Vengeful” – The second book in a potential trilogy. Fantasy based, four chapter in.
3. “First, Second, Third” – A Sci-Fi writing experiment. I am trying to do three perspectives from the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd person perspectives. Yeah, fun I know.  I am about four chapters in to this as well.
4. “Angels & Demons” (working title) – So I had a cool idea and am trying to work on it, but the plan is to have one large story end it, but using short stories to establish world, characters etc. Not theological, but just using it as a mythology based on something alien.
5. “Murder by Proxy” – A psychological over the top thriller I guess? Not sure but 15 pages in, so there is something there.

Then I have a bunch of treatments:

6. “Small Town Murder” (working title) – A mystery based in a small town and false accusations.
7. “The Road Less Traveled” – About a wannabe musician that has a normal life, then gets everything he wanted.
8. “His Eyes Opened” – A man awakens to find he has incredible powers but no memory.
9. “The Bearers of Truth” – A powerful artifact can change the life of those who possess it.
10. “Magical Permutations” – What is magic was real in our world? I actually have this concept up on my Royal Road page.

Then there are the ideas that keep popping up:

11. “Retaliation” – Sequel to another book I finished last month.
12. “Soulless” – I have been watching too much Anime lately and had this pop up. Still a rough one.
13. “Revelation” – a contemporary sci-fi that could be a stand alone or even round out a possible trilogy with Wired Thoughts and Retaliation, not sure which.

Of course the editing and other misc stuff:

14. “The Apt” – The first book of my fantasy series.
15. “Wired Thoughts” – My modern Sci-Fi book.
16. “Emporium” – I get to wait for some feedback via royal road, but then again starting now wouldn’t hurt.

They key being is I need a few good days of solid writing, like 5K or higher to keep on track with what I want to accomplish this year.  I’ve finished two books so far, and should be on track to get a third in before the end.  I’m being greedy though and am hoping to finish four this year.   I want to make up for a slow year last year, I only finished one, but I am averaging three since I started in November of 2016 if we are just going from Nov to Nov, but I like Calendar years, which means I should be at nine by the end of this year, but I am just fooling myself.

I go back to school next month, and taking 18 credits, so good luck to me trying to fit all this writing in.  My real hope is that I can write some of my stuff for class, I am taking Non-Fiction and Fiction writing, so that would be a two birds with one stone thing.  Not using what I have already written but writing for class that so happens to be what I want to write.  Not sure how that will go over with professors, we shall see though.  Worst case I get some ideas and stuff for even more projects.  Cause all the ones I’ve listed aren’t enough?

Feel free to comment and tell me what you think I should be working on.

For all two of my readers I have to apologize for the absence.  it was just one of those weeks……  and looks to be another of that type as well, but not as bad but just as busy.  Well, last week really wasn’t busy, but it started that way.  You see I was working on my time travel book, the one I am slowly rolling out over on royal road (link in the top menu) last Monday.

Then later, I having a really productive day, like twenty pages good.. then it happened.  I actually remember to eat and left the computer. It went to standby, like these things usually do, then when I got back it was running slow as hell.   I tried to log back in and nothing…. so I waited.  Then I after about thirty minutes I just shut it off, thinking a reboot would solve it, as it usually does.  Then it went into a diagnostic loop.  The kind where it enters repair mode, then tries to diagnose, and finally fix the problem.

I waited more, and it kept doing it.  Then I went to sleep while it continued.  I woke up and it was still doing it.  So I did the normal, created the windows boot drive , etc etc.  It was starting to piss me off.  More so because I hadn’t backed up my work for the day.  Now, any writer, student, or person working on the big presentation will tell you what it feels like to lose that much work.  Needless to say the last thing on my mind was writing now.

So when I exhausted the breadth of my tech knowledge I took it to the geek squad.  Now say what you will about these guys, the weird uniforms and the overpriced services, the one thing they didn’t do was patronize me.  I told them what I had done and they wrote it down and went from there.  I think it sped up the process.  I hate it when I go somewhere and they treat me like a moron even though I have some idea of what I am doing.  Anyway, I got the $200 year of service once I found out that the diagnostic and potential data retrieval was gonna be like $170 alone.

I figured what the shit, the plan covers all of my stuff.  With 2 laptops, a desktop, 3 tablets, a kindle and two phones I figured why not?  I’ll just bring in all my stuff over the course of each month and milk it.  Plus I got descent virus and malware programs, not that I need them, but my kid likes to surf uncharted waters, so it’s not a bad thing to have.  Back the tale though.

They tried to save the device, but the hard drive was damaged, they did manages to save the my work.  So bless them for that.  I will never buy a cheap ass laptop/tablet hybrid again.  I am just gonna get the real deal.  It was my spare laptop though.  The one complaint I did have though was that then never tried to do the boot drive, I mean I gave them the one I had made.  I managed to get the system kind of started when I got home, but after an hour I got pissed and introduced it to my coffee table a couple of times.

Then the beeping started.  This is where it got fun.  I took it to the garage and introduced it to a hammer.  I mean if it isn’t working, why not have some fun and take a week’s worth of worry and frustration out on it.  Well I guess the compact nature of the device and hitting the battery compartment make for a good show.  It flamed up and let out a ton of smoke.  It was actually kind of cool.  And so close to the fourth.

The point is, I was so distraught at potentially losing 5,000 words of work (almost 10% of the total at this point) that nothing else as far as writing even appealed to me.  Needless to say, now I am paranoid about it.  Even though I have another laptop, I am using my tablet for writing.  it has a USB port and I open and autosave to that directly.  Not the best approach and the smaller keyboard is annoying, but I would rather be annoyed than lose that much work again.

So this week, I’ll be posting two chapters to Royal Road.  Not the best treat, since I am just playing catchup.  With any luck I can actually finish this friggin book this week.  Needs more action though.  I seem to have that problem a lot though.  I also have to haul 1000 miles to get my clone, then 1000 back, in two days….  Not because I have to, but because I want to.  I hate the drive, but I can do it in about 13-14 hours.  Man I can’t wait till he ‘s old enough to drive…..

I usually try to toss out some drivel twice week.  Sorry if I haven’t been doing that for all three of my readers, HI MOM!!!!  But with it being a holiday and all I have been preoccupied with family and fun.  So I am just dropping by to say hi and say I am going to be slowly rolling out the newest POS I have been working on over at my Royal Road page.

A time traveling nerd with a store.  If you could go back and get those mint in box Star Wars toys and sit on them for forty years, would you?  What i you didn’t have to wait those forty years?  So that is going on.  There is a bit more to it than that, but that’s the beauty of it all.  You have to read it while I am writing it.

It’s actually almost done, as far as the book form.  But I have other projects going on as well.  Also up over there is the second chapter in my Fantasy trilogy’s second book.  I still have to edit that…….  Oh editing, so much fun.

I still have to edit Book 2 of my Sci-Fi trilogy and prep it for release this fall.  As well as book 3.  Then there is the one I just finished about two weeks ago.  All fun and games until you have to fix continuity errors…..  That one is part of a planned trilogy as well, though I might slim it down to two books.  I don’t see it having enough material for a third, but who knows.  Sometimes when you are into writing it something just pops up and off you go.

I also have a darker toned story on my brain and outlined already.  As well as a hard science fiction tale from a different perspective.  So much typing ahead.  Anyone know of a good Talk to Text program?  Might make my life easier, though I do like to type for some weird reason.

And to think I am back to school in just over a month to try and finish this pesky writing degree.  The credential never hurts, and not like I’m paying for it.  Also if i keep up my pace I might finish three books this year.  I tell you what it gets a lot easier to do once you find your rhythm.  That doesn’t mean any of them will be any good.