Spam and life goes on

Recently a literary agent Nathan Bransford held a contest to be a blogger for a day while he was on vacation. I am big fan of his blog and entered the contest and sadly did not win (maybe I should have proof read it better and that's why I lost it wasn't perfect content that was for sure) but writing the piece was still fun and reminded me of the days when I used to write an opinion column for my local newspaper once a month. Here is what was written of course edited a little to fit my blog and not Nathan's.

Age is a funny thing. It creeps up on you until one day you go wow where did the last fifteen years go and when the hell did I become thirty two years of age. I got my first computer in 1994, I was eighteen years old and it was like I had discovered sliced bread or someone had invented the wheel. I paid for it myself and I got jacked by the salesman who must have been rubbing his hands saying well there is one born every minute after all. I knew nothing about computers at the time and my exposure had been mostly a DOS class I took in Junior High, wow thanks education board I use DOS everyday now yep I do. He sold me the previous years model at that years price of $2500 and it was a good little computer even if it was outdated the day I bought it, heck it was outdated even if I had bought it a year before. It had a 66mhz blazing processing power and 2 whole megabytes of ram and the darn thing even came with one of those fancy pants CD drives. Also it had a whopping 100 mb hard drive and if you believed Bill Gates you would never ever in your lifetime fill a 100 mb hard drive, wait doesn't Windoes Vista need 2 gigabytes just by itself who knew Bill Gates would lie to us.

Now the best part of this amazing computer is it came with a modem, a 2400 bps modem that was well faster than most DSL connections now days. It's kind of ironic but it truly was faster than a lot of DSL speeds today mostly because we didn't put it through the seven layers of hell like we do now days streaming video and using apps that would have made our modems weep blood. Back then most web pages in 1994 consisted of dancing little images thrown hodge podge on a website and their was oh so little content and more pages about someones dogs then you could shake a stick at. We could check emails, heck we could talk to people from Europe and some Prince from Nigeria who wanted us to help him remove his family wealth in his turmoil ridden country and best of all he would let us keep a cut. Heck if you forwarded an email from Bill Gates to enough of your friends Bill Gates would personally cut you a check and you could be megarich and remember Bill Gates would never lie to us.

Fast forward fifteen years and that poor prince of Nigeria is still having trouble getting his money out and Bill Gates still wouldn't lie to us, heck if your my friend I got some emails I'd like to send you and please forward them or a dancing rhinoceros will take your mother out a date and your dog will be hit by a tractor and your grandparents will disown you and a meteorite will hit your house and your car will explode and you will be forced to ride a bicycle to work in a speedo because that was the only thing not destroyed by the meteorite. I constantly wonder if anyone falls for this spam anymore, I mean fifteen years ago maybe just maybe that Prince of Nigeria was legit but you would think in fifteen years someone would have helped him. So if no one falls for it anymore why does my yahoo email account currently have 491 spam messages (I got tired of emptying it and yahoo does it for me every 30 days so why bother). Sure the spam isn't the same for some reason my yahoo account thinks I am addicted to porn, want to lose weight, slow the aging process, get a nursing degree, buy some life insurance, get dish network, check my credit score and make money on twitter. Wait what was that last one make money on twitter ah so the Nigerian prince has given up and now twitter needs my help poor little twitter.

The internet is great, we can learn so much and it still promises to make all our dream come true and we will be published my Christmas because the internet never lies and all that is important is believing in the internet. Fifteen years has taught us nothing, the Nigerian prince has only been replaced by belief in something else and it still floods are email addresses and poor little twitter needs our help now instead of some nameless prince. Great writing trumps all you can write a query letter on pink paper using smiley face stickers and gothic font with dripping blood and putting hearts on all your I's but if the writing is truly great there is a good chance you might get published. Now actually doing things as agents would suggest and stopping your hearts desire to use that gothic font will actually only help you because the writing was already great now you have just put a pretty bow on a pile of gold instead of covering it in trash and making the agent sift through it to find the gold. You can't believe everything the internet tells you but you sure can take good advice every now and then and you need to learn the difference before its too late. Fifteen years later I now have a degree in Computer Information Technology and that salesman would not be so lucky nowdays and I still don't believe everything the internet tells me or Bill Gates for that matter. My goal is to spend more time writing or perfecting my writing and stop worrying about the Nigerian prince and maybe just maybe I will be published by Christmas just not this Christmas and so could you.

Summers suck!

Ok I am quickly finding out the summers I hate here in the desert can also ruin my writing and schedule. I started writing Funny Ties in February and was onto the editing phase by late April early May. I would take a forty minute walk every night around 5 or 5:30 and be home by 6pm where I could dedicate an hour or two to writing before dinner.

It was perfect, it is the desert so it was never too cold 60-70 degrees and it allowed me to run chapters through my mind and when I got back from my walk I was all primed to write. The words flowed from me and it all went swimmingly. Well it's no June and that schedule simply does not work as at 5pm it is easily almost 100 degrees and not ideal for a walk. I tried to change up my schedule to make up for the summer and write around 4pm and then go for my walk closer to 7 or 8. But that left out the whole creativity process my walk allowed me.

I spent my normal hour and a half writing on Wednesday and then went for my walk and the moment I got home I had to go back to writing as I had a great idea for a chapter. So now my writing is coming in bursts, I am having to write ideas down that I had and write it the next day or taking extra time to write and it is stunting me a little. The process doesn't seem as clean and as beautiful as it did in February.

I wonder if other writers have this problem with the weather and seasons disrupting them and stunting their routines that ends up effecting their creativity.

Summers suck, too hot to begin with and now they are adding insult to injury.

Manuscripts

Today was the day that I printed my first manuscript and it makes me a little giddy despite the cost. It cost me almost $50 to print and bind two manuscripts but it was well worth it because just looking at it you can say hey that's my novel. Now my wife gets to have a go at one of the copies with a red pen as I enter the last stages of editing and getting ready to query literary agents.

Even without the binding and adding a nice protective plastic sleeve to the front and back each copy will end up costing around $17 to print. So depending on how many agents want to see a copy of the manuscript that can get expensive in a hurry so I loving the idea of single page query letters and only having to send manuscripts to agents who are really interested in the book.

But just looking at that pretty bound manuscript you can't help but feel a sense of accomplishment.

Research and finishing up a four month project

Ok I discovered yesterday that I had made a mistake in my research when I was writing Funny Ties. I swear when I googled the Canadian post office that it said they were open for a half day on Saturday's like the US Post Office. This is not true they are closed the entire weekend much to my chagrin. This meant that I spent an hour yesterday combing through 5-6 chapters making adjustments to timelines and dates.

It wouldn't have been so bad had I discovered the error before I was almost done with my 2nd draft edit as I could have easily fixed the problem as I was editing. But I was almost done and was looking forward to Tuesday when I am going to print out two copies of the manuscript. One for my wife to have a go at with a red pen and the other just for sentimental reasons, hey it's my first completed novel and I am proud of it. Now if I had to go back and start and edit all over again to fix just that one problem it would be 3 weeks before I could print again. So with the lovely help of the search function and by skimming 6 chapters I think I fixed the problem and I can still print on Tuesday.

As much as I am proud of the work I am also looking forward to walking away from it for 3-4 weeks while the wife gives me some help on the editing front. Lately I have felt the self doubt monsters trying to consume my soul and if I didn't walk away from it I could be tweaking it for the next decade because of those self doubt monsters. I have had some encouraging words from a few people that I have let read it from a critical stand point (not an editing stand point) and when you hear someone call your novel engaging it is like a knight slaying a self doubt dragon that has been running wild in your mind

So tomorrow I am going back to writing, engulfing myself in a new story and saying goodbye to Funny Ties for the next month, whew. I love the book, and hearing words like engaging makes me very happy. But my new project is going to be so different than the project I just finished and I am thinking that when I come back to it in a month it will be with fresh eyes once more. Funny Ties is a character piece, there is only one major character and his story and everyone else in the novel is just a cameo character. This meant there was little dialogue and it was almost more of an internal novel filled with the actions of my character. My next novel is not like that at all. I can already see four maybe five major characters and lots of dialogue so it is going to be a complete shifting of gears.

Next week I am thinking of posting the first couple pages of Funny Ties on here but for now I am just happy to be done for the time being.

Can't Keep Up

Ever since I started to write in earnest three months ago all of a sudden I am having more and more ideas for books and novels. And I am afraid to lose these ideas before I get around to actually writing them so every couple of weeks of late I am having to stop and hammer out the first chapter of a new novel I want to write.

I had a great idea today and of course I had to sit at the computer and type out the first five pages. Maybe its just a way to procrastinate having to edit my first novel some more, because as said before editing sucks. Or maybe it was because these ideas have been sitting in my head for years and because up until now I hadn't been typing them out they saw the first chance to escape and they are trying to make a mass exodus from my brain to paper where others can read them.

Whatever the reason all of a sudden I feel buried by ideas and doubt I will ever be able to get them to paper fast enough. Oh and I should be editing Funny Ties some more, I am only 5 chapters in on a second draft edit right now.

Where's the Beef?

I originally conjured the idea of Funny Ties more than a year ago but didn't put it to paper until just three months ago. That's not entirely true though, I didn't come up with the story a year ago that eventually became my novel. All I came up with at that time was my hero the main character of my story.

I go for a walk every night and I remember it was a cold wintery day and dark, I am thinking it was sometime in January or February. I came up with the character of Darrell Smith the main character of my story and the moment I got home I poured out two whole pages of the story and subsquently left the project at that point for more than a year. You see I had no middle to my story. I had a clear beginning, a good ending and a great character but not middle. Where's the beef?

I think that is why in the ten years of me actually wanting to write a novel I never actually put pen to paper or fingers to keys. I had good ideas and great characters but I was unsure of that middle part, what happens when you are going from point A to point B. I could have hammered out novellas and short stories by the dozens because truth be told you don't really need that great of a middle in such works of fiction.

But more than a year after the character of Darrell Smith was born as I was taking a walk once more the middle came to me. It had been another idea for a story I had always wanted to write and it fit perfectly with Darrell Smith. No longer did my book lack the beef, it finally had its quarter pound of beef to fit inside its buns.

I wonder if other writers go through this, maybe this is what writer's block is for many writers. So I sit here at 1am typing thoughts as they spill out of my brain and lament the fact that the second novel I wanted to write, a story that has nagged me for a decade still has no beef. I am thinking the novel I dreamt up just two months ago has more beef and I still should be concentrating on editing my first novel before I worry about my second one but I can't help it editing sucks and I want to get back to writing.

Editing Sucks

Saturday night we watched the Shining again following in my recent fascination with Stephen King as a writer. At the same time I am reading his book On Writing and he mentions that he didn't realize that Jack Torrance an alcoholic ex-school teacher was actually based on himself until 1985 eight years after the book was published. But that's not what struck me when watching the movie. What struck me was the typewriter even though all Jack writes on it is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Right now I am finishing up my first draft edit of my own book something that has taken me twice as long as I would have imagined. The first day I did an edit and a read through of the book I got through three chapters and since the book is 24 chapters long the math in me said it would only take a week to get through the rest of the book. But two weeks later I am just hoping to finish my first draft edit today instead of last week sometime. Simply put editing sucks.

But the reason the typewriter struck me while watching the movie is that I could have never written a novel using a typewriter. In just my first draft edit of my own manuscript I have added almost 4000 words and fixed numerous errors. I am just not a clean first draft kind of person. I know some people can hammer out a very clean first draft but that's not me and I am thinking I will need three or four drafts before I am even ready to submit to agents. At that point if I do get picked up I can see another draft being done with an editor.

Now try and imagine doing all those drafts and all those changes on a typewriter the mere thought gives me the shivers. I can't even begin to fathom how they pulled it off. Did you type it out then go at it with a red pen like an over zealous English teacher and then have to retype the whole darn thing once more.

Maybe I am just from a different era an era that had computers where one could adjust ones thoughts as one went along and hence I never learned the dire need to have a clean first draft The thought of having to type and edit a manuscript, a 250 page behemoth, on a typewriter scares me more than the Shining did.

Novels and Dreams

I have been reading On Writing a Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King as of late and he talks about a band him and some fellow writers began in 1992. He said one of the best things about hanging out with other writers is they don't ask you where you get your ideas from because they know that other writers understand they don't know where ideas come from.

I had a dream two months ago and it gave me a great idea for a novel but it was one of those 3am dreams that you wake up from but don't remember much of it by 9am when you get up. I did write a one paragraph synopsis of it though the next morning. Well while taking a nap yesterday I had the same dream or a similar dream again and this time since it was a nap dream I was able to better foster the idea and get it to paper.

So while I should be editing Funny Ties my first novel that I finished last week I found myself today sitting down and starting to write a little of possibly my second novel. The funny thing was I was going to actually write a completely different novel for my second novel as soon as I was done editing Funny Ties.

Its a story that has been nagging at me for ten years now and two years ago I wrote the first ten pages to it and the first chapter. But this morning I hammered out 5 pages of this new idea that has only been with me for two months.

So now I face that quandry of which book to write next, Bonkers or Villain but I really need to get back to editing Funny Ties first.

Star Trek

Ok I have never been that big of a Trek fan and even though I have midnight tickets to see the movie tonight I am not overly enthused or excited by it. My biggest problem with the new Trek is that Kirk with always be William Shatner and Spock will always be Leonard Nimoy. The fact that they are replacing what was a young cast when the series first aired in the 1960's with a young cast in the reboot seems utterly moronic. Sometimes you have to just let series' die, everything has a natural evolution and Star Trek has of late become just a fanboy fascination.

That being said I hunted out and obtained all four Star Trek glasses released by Burger King yesterday.


For some reason the Burger King glasses made me giddy. I have been trying to obtain a complete set of the Star Wars ones released for all three Star Wars movies during the 70's and 80's.

Luckily the lady (a Mexican call me racist but for some reason most fast food restraunts now days are staffed by Mexicans who can barely speak English rather than teenagers that made up the staffing in my day and era) sold me all four glasses even though I only bought one value meal. Which means now I don't have to eat at Burger King three more times to get the whole set. Stupid people can be used to your advantage every now and then.