run to the breakers

Well if the word calendar on the right is still functioning, you can see I’ve managed to stay on track all week, hitting 40,000 words so far. And Locks of Clay is coming along pretty nicely.

I had wanted to do some extensive plotting ahead of time, but one thing lead to another and November 1 showed up and I only had some very rough ideas in my head. I like where it’s going so far though, and if it’s a little rough, that’s what second drafts and editors are for.

I also picked up Gears of War 2 last night and ended up playing it until about 3am with a couple friends, as if there weren’t already enough distractions in this world.

I was able to get my daily 5,000 done first though, and that’s what counts.

(I also picked up a little RPG called Valkyria Chronicle, but I doubt I’ll even spin it up before february or so. January is for Persona 4, which I won’t be able to play in december, since I’ll be visiting my sister in Louisiana.)

So just like every year, the nanowrimo site has been down and out for the last two days. The widget I put up here in the sidebar to track my progress is on the fritz too. Rest assured I did NOT write zero words yesterday (in fact I wrote a little over 5,000, which is my daily goal for the month.) If it doesn’t start working soon I’ll just swap it out for a simpler one that reports only the total word count and doesn’t track daily progress

So I got my hands on the new cover art for Skeleton Army today, and personally I think it looks pretty great. Huge recommendation to the guy I hired to do it, Arthur Wang. Link to his elance page, which has some examples of his work. He was great to work with, and I think he ended up with a pretty good final product.

The title and name are just a mock-up and will probably end up different in the final version I sent to print

With October half over and National Novel Writing Month only a few weeks away, I added a new widget to the sidebar. Over the course of November it will track my progress as I write the sequel to Skeleton Army.

Watch in awe as I drop a novel in a month (and then spend the next six months making it worth actually reading.)

I found a fun tool called “library thing” which allows you to input and manage your library of books. I mean we all like to read, right?

To the right you can see I stuck a little script widget that will pull random books from my personal library, if you’re interested in what I’m reading (or what I’ve been reading.)  Check it out, you might like it.

edit: in interest of full disclosure, if anyone chooses to buy one of the fine fine books linked to the right I’ll earn a BIG BIG 4% of the sale at amazon.  I didn’t realize this at first and it was defaulted to librarything, but hey it’s my bandwith and a fellow needs to get paid.

So I got two puppies this summer, and ever since they’ve been engaged in a slow campaign of destroying everything I own. A little over a month ago they broke BOTH of my laptops by knocking them off end tables.  The HP has a busted hinge (which I guess isn’t all their fault, since apparently the hinges on that model are balls to begin with) and the mac… well, the mac was a nightmare.  It actually wouldn’t turn on, and I had to take the whole thing apart to get it working again.  It does, but it’s really touchy and the case is bent.

So with nanowrimo imminent and a pressing need to have an actual working laptop, I hit the streets and started doing some research.

Okay, so I hit google products and the internet in general, not the actual streets, but whatever.

What immediately jumped out at me were the many new ultra-portable “netbooks” that are starting to come out in force these days. Considering the fact that my puppies are likely to knock over any new laptop I get, the idea of a tiny, featherweight device with a SSD was suddenly VERY appealing to me.

The other thing that appealed to me was that a lot of them have a linux option, and while I haven’t really had any huge problems with Vista, I was really interested in the idea of trying out some flavor of Linux.

I wanted a particular model of the Acer Aspire One, but the exact one I wanted wasn’t available anywhere.  So I settled for my second choice - the Asus eeepc 900.  It doesn’t have as much storage as I wanted, the processor I wanted (pentium-m as opposed to the new atom), the battery I wanted (3 cell as opposed to 6 cell). But the differences are so small that I figured I’d go for this one and upgrade later, after they’ve had a chance to get even bigger SSDs, faster processors, bigger batteries, etc.

As it is, the Asus is a very solid little machine and I’m enjoying it a lot. It was a HUGE pain to kill the Xandros operating system it shipped with and actually get Ubuntu working right (with sound, wifi, mic, webcam, osd, etc all working properly.)  But in the process I’ve learned a lot about how linux works. I hadn’t used a terminal for ANYTHING in almost ten years, so it was a huge learning curve for me, but I managed to figure it out and I’ve now got the thing working perfectly.

my busted old hp had a tiny baby

Of course, today I got home from the store and discovered one of my puppies had chewed through the power cord of the new netbook to the point where it was shorting out.

Baby steps, I guess.  Baby steps.

A lot of stuff coming up real quickly: last week I hired an artist to do the cover art for Skeleton Army, today or tomorrow I’m sending off the manuscript to my editor for a run-through, couple weeks and nanowrimo will be upon us (and with it, the writing of the sequel to SA, Locks of Clay.)

Once the cover art is done I’ll probably throw up a little teaser, though I probably won’t FINALIZE the design until december. So far I like the guy I hired and I really like the direction he’s going with the art. Expect a strong recommendation at the end of the job, if things continue the way they’re going.

Looking forward to finally getting the manuscript to my editor too - can’t wait to get it back and get going on the next draft either.

And of course I’m chomping at the bit to get going on Locks of Clay.  I’ve got notes scattered across three different laptops, so I need to get them consolidated.  But so far I feel like this one will be light years better (at least in the first draft) than the first one.

So the nanowrimo webpage is scheduled to go down soon, only to emerge triumphant on 1 October, stripped clean and ready to go.  A month after that and the madness will start again.

If you’re unfamiliar, nano is essentially an event where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of enthusiastic folks from all walks of life (and all over the world) tackle the daunting task of writing an entire novel from scratch in a short thirty days.  It’s humbling to watch the words stack up, and how QUICKLY they stack up, both for total numbers and for the individual regions.

Of course, I have the honor of writing for Seattle (greater seattle really, as we have folks from the east side, folks from the north end, folks from the south, even some from the peninsula who throw in with us) which has put up the most words of any other region for the last two years running.  Of course, two years ago was my first year participating… coincidence?

We also end up with a pretty high per-writer total too though, and a respectable number of completions (people who have reached the goal of 50k words by the end of the month.)

Personally my goal is 100k, and while I fell far short in ‘06 (topped out in the low 60s) I came much closer last year and then came back to it last spring to put on the finishing touches.  This year I’d like to actually FINISH, but the more reasonable goal I’ll be setting is just to hit 100k and finish up later.  (Of course, my editor will be done with the first pass on Skeleton Army halfway through the month, which might end up distracting me.)

Skeleton Army, by the way, is my 2007 nano, and will be the first book published by Roosevelt Books.  The sequel will be written during nano 2008, and after that who knows?  (I have lot of ideas floating around for these characters and this world is what I am trying to say)

This weekend I settled on an editor. In addition to providing editorial services he also maintains a blog in which he discusses different topics relating to the publishing industry and writing in general, in addition to posting book reviews &c. From reading the blog posts and conversing with him via email he seems like a pretty good guy, and I really liked the sample edit he did for me and the ideas he’s already had about the book.

Some of my test readers have expressed confusion as to why I’m hiring an editor. When they do that I laugh and laugh.

Because while the book is perfectly readable, and my friends and family are very nice people, the book has some pretty big weaknesses I need help with. It’s definitely not ready for prime time. I’m super excited for the edit though, because I’m normally pretty terrible at taking either advice or criticism, but in this case I’ve resolved myself to the fact that I absolutely need to, so I’m looking forward to taking that step.

Also, my ISBNs arrived today. Which was a wonderful surprise, since I wasn’t expecting them for another week+. Since it’s going to be a while before I’m ready to publish anything I opted not to pay for rush processing. However, since I needed them in order to apply for for an account with Lightning Source I was more than happy to take early delivery. So I also applied for an account with Lightning Source.

So I’ve got my editor, got my ISBNs, waiting on account activation over at Lightning Source.

And quietly storming ideas for the second and third books.