At least that is what it looks like until November 1st. Due to communications, half the people thought “for Halloween” though it meant it ended on Halloween and the other half thought took it to start on Halloween. Since there is no formal announcement by now, I’m going to say “for Halloween” means “starting on Halloween”. I’m disappointed, but there really isn’t any reason to pout about it.

So, changing gears. I’m good at that. Naturally, I really won’t work much on the game itself, I haven’t done what I wanted to in September to prepare for it, so I probably won’t take October to prepare for it. I can, on the other hand, finish up the commissions, work on Scroll of the Lands, and maybe get a bit of writing done. And finish my website migration to http://d.moonfire.us/ and do the Moonfire Portal site. Good thing I wasn’t doing NaNoWriMo, otherwise I’d be really frustrated (the same thing happened last year with a game contest and November).

One of my kitties, Paksenarrion (Paks for short), is moving in with me. Of the three, she is having the worst trouble with the in-laws basement and is tearing out large hunks of her fur. Most of her neck and shoulders are bloody from her scratching which is only getting worse as time goes on. Poor stressed kitty. After talking to my landlady, I’m allowed exactly one cat in my studio. Given that, on Friday, I get that roommate–a high maintenance, adorable little roommate who Fluffy won’t mind me sleeping with. On Saturday, I start trying to train said roommate on how to use the toilet. Maybe this time it will work. And if I can get one to use the toilet, then maybe the others will start doing the same.

And then they went out of business.

After that, I realized there was a lot more than just writing to get published. I decided after that first one, that I needed a better goal. Not to be just a published author but to be published with a larger house. Or, more precisely, to get to be a good enough writer I can see my book on the shelf of my local bookstores instead of just on Amazon. So, that is one of the things that lead into Wind, Bear, and Moon and Muddy Reflections. It will also be Case and anything else I write. That new goal.

But, NaNoWriMo turned into another goal that didn’t go too far. I wrote for 50k words. That was my goal and I made it, but I didn’t have the drive to go far enough. And, in many ways, I did Case a great injustice by doing it for NaNo.

I see that with DL. I did the same thing as Case: 50k words in 16 days. But, I didn’t stop. I just hit 90k and I’ll be at the 100k mark by the end of the week. It’s a nice feeling, hitting 100k words which is what I consider the minimum for one of my novels.

And then there is another problem: I still have 16 chapters to go. At an average of 3k words per chapter (only about 7-10 pages per chapter for this one), that puts me in the 150k word range which is getting to the area I think is a bit long for a novel. Yeah, it’s not as long as some of the books I’ve read, but I think this story needs to run a bit long. And it wasn’t a goal of reaching 50, 100, or even 200k words. My goal was to finish a good story. And I think it is a good story. Well, I’m assuming it is good since I’ve gotten about a hundred comments on it already and two pieces of fan art.

… fan art. I’ve only gotten fan art for one other story in my life. And, for DL, I’ve gotten two! That part floored me. Yes, they are from the same person, but I inspired someone to draw the characters I’m creating. In a story I’m not editing, just posting as I write it. It’s an absolutely amazing feeling, you know, to realize that someone likes a character so much they want to draw them for you. Its scary, exciting, and I’ve been floating off the ground for a week because of it.

And the best part? That wasn’t a goal for DL. DL wasn’t written to inspire or anything besides just be a good story, from beginning to end. Given the feedback, I think I’m doing that. And it feels so much better than just making 50k words for NaNoWriMo.

I have 85 days left for 4E6. I have 15 days until Kitteh Braik goes into contingency plan. I am hitting a wall right now. I hate that wall of these large projects, when you stare up at them and find anything else in the world to do besides that. There are a bunch of them, right now, some that really scare me and others that I just don’t want to do. Right now, I’m trying to find a polygon library so I can merge some polygons to get the physics shape. If I can’t figure it out by Sunday, I’ll go to plan three. I also need to get the graphics in and get a damn figure to stand up instead of having his body parts explode in all directions.

One person formally withdrew from 4E6 that I was looking forward to seeing their game. But, the reasons were echoed in myself, and that is the annoying part. I want to succeed at this. I gave up 4E5 because I had to make a choice between Wind, Bear, and Moon and the game. I ended up picking WBM, but I wanted so badly to do this. Part of me wants to burn myself out to finish it, to stay up long hours and work until I figure it out, another part wants to just curl up in the blankets and surrender.

I read a pretty good blog post about writing a novel in two months. Some of the points they made were the reasons I feel that I failed Case of the Morning Zombies. Another project, but long after 4E6. :)

Kitteh Braik (12%)
Scroll of Lands update (35%)

This year is probably the year I started to really blogging on two of my major themes of life: writing and programming. I will, of course, blame the the other Dylan for getting me into writing about writing. After meeting with him at GenCon 2006, it really pushed me to finally take that step toward trying to be a “real” writer again instead of just hanging my hat on my one relatively minor success. I’ve been a lot of really cool writers in this last year and I’m pretty thankful for making that step. Now, I just have to follow their footsteps and get published again. On the programming/gaming side, I haven’t really done much with networking, but I blog about it almost as much as my writing. Even if I occasionally give “too technical” details as more than one said. Oh well, just who I am.

The end of the year is the time when I look at my major projects for the year. I plan them ahead of time, sometimes even figure out when I’ll work on it, but mainly it is a framework for my personal projects throughout the year. I also like to remember what I have succeeded at.

Probably the largest accomplishment this year is that I wrote a game. After my father taught me to program at the age of six, I’ve been trying to finish a computer game since. At the age of thirty-two, I actually got close to succeeding at that goal with CuteGod. Yeah, someone else came up with the design document and the graphics, but I actually sat down and started to write it. And I got it to a playable state. For something I’ve been struggling with for over twenty-six years, I think that is a major thing.

Following up, I’d have to say My Father’s Bike and Case of the Morning Zombies. I manages to get a first draft on two novels this year, one that has had major significance in my life already even though it never got published and the other because I wrote it for NaNoWriMo.

Everything else was kind of minor compared to those: friends, games, and novels. In this next year, I have quite a few plans and it is going to be a very rough and packed year:

• The Master Plan: This is the year where Fluffy and I finally get into the end of the plan. In the following year, I’m going to try finding a job in Iowa, move to Iowa, and start to have a family. This is the part that has terrified me for the last five years and it is finally time for it to happen.
• College: I start college for my Masters in five days. Eight classes and eight 30+ page essays before I get it. Then the joys of deciding if I want to keep on going to finish up a doctorate, which I’m also considering.
• Ponies Among Us: This game is due by April 2 and I’m hitting the struggle point. Only three more full months of working on it and I’m nowhere near the completion point or even the midway point for that project. Related to that is Kitteh Braik which is a proof-of-concept game that I’m suppose to have done by the end of January or thereabouts.
• My Father’s Bike: At this point, I think my dad knows that this book exists, but I don’t think he knows what’s really in it. I don’t keep secrets in general, but I want to give it to him for his birthday in January 2009. So, I have to find a new way of organizing it and finally finish it and get it bound for him.
• Case of the Morning Zombies: I want this story to succeed, so I need to edit it and clean it up. That way, I can start the submission grinder on it and hope that this one will also succeed.
• Muddy Reflections and Wind, Bear, and Moon: I got some really good feedback on both of these novels, but I’ve been sitting on them. So, in the next couple of months, I need to polish them off and get them back out.
• Somewhere in the middle of all this writing, I plan on writing another novel of course. It’s initials are QoF, and the first draft is already done, but I want to polish it up and get it out. This is for my other byline.
• Stories: I want to write 24 short stories this year. Half for each byline. This is including commissions, but I want to write six to publish directly on http://moonfire.us/ and the other six for submissions. It was a really nice feeling to get Thomas the Baker published and I want to do it again.

And that is my goals this year. Some of them are huge, like the Master Plan, while others are relatively minor, but its going to be a very busy year for me. And it doesn’t even talk about my Debian work or the games I run. It also doesn’t talk about my web comic. I’m not sure how I’m going to juggle all of this, but at least I have a goal.

Obviously, I’m not planning on putting a progress bar for each one on my postings. That would be silly and they wouldn’t change nearly enough, but I want to figure out something to poke me every time I post that I need to keep moving forward.

Character Builder (91%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Braik (7%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

It isn’t the same as my normal writing. My normal time to write a novel is three months (92 days with a standard deviation of 3 actually) but the draft comes out much smoother. That is me going back, rewriting a chapter and going into the next. Then editing the prior chapter and working on the next, overlapping my writing almost constantly to come up with a well-crafted first draft. Morning Zombies is not polished. It has all the important parts of a novel, a story, a plot, hopefully interesting characters, and not nearly enough descriptions. It isn’t read for the Wizards call for submissions by a long shot, but I still think it is a viable story. It just means that December will have some interesting editing rounds as I try to clean up the story, fix the plot holes, and flesh out some of the sections that I rushed through.

I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I could sit down and come up with a novel in almost half a month. It is an accomplishment I didn’t think I could really do. Will I do it next year? Probably not. But, you never know. A lot can happen in a year.

My mother said an interesting thing today. She mentioned that I have a gift, the gift of creating stories. But, I’m focusing on specific accomplishments, like speed-writing a novel or trying to get published. But, it all comes down to I create stories. I create stories that make people cry and think, I make them feel good and loved or even see the world in a different way. As one friend said, I can make even the disgusting interesting. I’m sure she’s bias, but maybe I needed to be reminded that I’m a writer. Pure and simple. It doesn’t matter that I keep track of how many hours I write or how many words per hour I do. Tricks like NaNoWriMo won’t really change the fact I love to write and I will succeed, its just a matter of time and effort. But, just like NaNoWriMo and just like Shane (the zombie in my novel), I won’t give up.

Hey, thanks for reading and for the encouragements.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 55,108 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (37 of 37 chapters)

Already thinking about the changes I want to make to CuteGod next week and Ponies Among Us the week after. Some of them are pretty simple, a update tool for CuteGod though I might use the strength of PhysicsFs a bit more and package the assets into a zip file; that should simplify the update process and make it a bit easier to do the changes I need to do.

For Ponies, if things go well, I might be creating a couple secondary programs as part of the “steps” for finishing the game. From appearances, I think I’ll create a character creator for Glorious Saber since I”m using the same graphics style for both. Plus, it would speed up the process of making characters for that comic. If I put a poser in there, it would really simplify things. I also might make a fighting game for Glorious Saber, mainly because the jumping and fighting engine for Ponies would be a superset of what you expect in a simple three round fight game. Not sure, but it seems like a reasonable start.

Well, another two days like today and I’ll have Case of the Morning Zombies wrapped up. Another day tomorrow and I should hit my NaNoWriMo goal. Overall, I’m having a good day.

And, sadly, I think the main reason I had so much luck today is because I sat down and played a damn game instead of working all night!. *sigh* I hate it when the obvious smacks me in the head.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 47,389 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (47,389 of 75,000 words)

Nothing.

I’ve managed to play twelve game demos, listen to a bunch of soundtracks, think about a game system I killed a long time ago, and slept an average of twelve hours a day for the last five days. I’ve run one Changeling game and get ready for my Sepia Throne. I’ve also played in Fightertype’s Exalted game.

I’m struggling, as I always do, with too many projects at the end of the year. Too many things I want to get done verses too many things I committed myself to getting done. Right now, I give it a 0.4 chance that I’ll get Case of the Morning Zombies ready for submission by the end of December, but I’m still going to try for it. I also really, really want to get Ponies started, even if I break it up into multiple sub projects.

Only fourteen thousand words until I hit my NaNo goal and eleven chapters left until I finish the book. I hate the story and yet I like it, I hate how I seemed to have lost my voice partially from feedback I got and partially because I lost how I write. It seems… flat. I think my writing style is changing recently and Case is really showing it. I don’t want to put in the twelve paragraphs of descriptions, but I still yearn for the flowing descriptions that set up my scene. I hate that somehow I forgot how to type and constantly swap letters I know shouldn’t be swapped. It’s like my fingers forgot how to type and I’ve gone through three keyboards this month trying to find one that is comfortable on my fingertips.

Well, got to finish this story and get Glorious Saber done.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 36,059 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (36,059 of 75,000 words)

… driving your wife home from work. Fluffy got sick this week. Really sick. Two days ago, she tried to come back to work but ended up going home early. I drove her home, then since I lost some time, worked late. Just because her getting home was more important.

… seeing your name on someone else’s website. Today, Twisted Ink went live and nestled on the stories page is Thomas the Baker written by yours truly.

… convincing your mother that she needs to exercise more to be healthy and, after five years of worrying, have her finally make that first step. My mom has suffered with the same trials I have when a desk job gets too stressful. She considered surgery, but the drawbacks scared her, so she asked me and the rest of her friends to help her get better. It isn’t everything, but it is finally a good step.

… spending two days getting the satellite working again. I wanted to work on NaNo, honest, I did. But, the satellite went out and I spent most of last night and probably a good hunk of tonight tracking down why one cable no longer has a signal, but the other one attacked to the same hardware does.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 26,930 of 75,000 words)

I have doubts about Case of the Morning Zombies. Doubts about the story working out and how I’m framing it. My novels start slow, one of those things I think cause trouble with my reader. I’m also not sure about the main character. Do I hide the fact he’s the zombie for the first third of the book? Not sure about lying to the reader, if you know what I mean. The 25k word point is the beginning of the meat part of the story. Zombies are shown, people get their brains eaten, and a mystery is afoot. Somehow, I got a mystery into this story and I wasn’t originally planning on that. Telepathy with the eaten brains was also not planned, but it made a slightly better story so far.

Fluffy read it and… didn’t have really positive comments about it. Too many holes, but I needed a bit of a pick-me-up (which I didn’t exactly get). Doesn’t mean I’ll stop, but it makes it harder to keep up a good rate when it isn’t one of those amazing, wonderful, cannot-put-down books.

Speaking of slightly depressing reviews, I got my feedback from scienceprincess. Again, it wasn’t really a positive review. I mean, she had good things to say about it, but “if I bought it, I wouldn’t feel that I wasted my time or money” isn’t exactly the type of review I hoped for. But, it is honest and frankly, I want honesty. I’ve been trying to get Wind, Bear, and Moon published for almost two years now (January). Do I give it more time, or do I self-published and work on another novel? Or do I keep trying and write another novel (one a year) and hope that it pans out? In some ways, self-publishing is an end of life (EOL) thing for me. Once I self publish, I can’t get it really published by another publisher.

Not really sure. Parts of me worry that I’m putting too much effort into WBM and parts of me tell me I have a chance, just as I do with Muddy Reflections.

Thoughts to think about, I guess.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 25,160 of 75,000 words)

Now, you might be wondering what that has to do with anything. You might even be curious why I’d rather talk about oatmeal instead of the fantastic Exalted game I had on Saturday, or my struggles to install Debian Sid for AMD64 today (didn’t boot, downloading the DVD boot disk for testing now), or even how me and Fluffy seem to both be sick. But, I want to talk about oatmeal.

I like it. I have it for nearly every breakfast. The only time I don’t have oatmeal for breakfast is when I don’t have any or me and Fluffy made breakfast together on Sunday. I know lots of people that love oatmeal, just not quite as much as me. However, two of them, Fluffy being one of them, feel that I ruin my oatmeal.

I like lots of different types, specially the Fruit and Cream types, or the Maple and Brown Sugar. I even eat the Raisin, Date, and Walnut kind. These are all appreciated by my friends and kin, but they still feel that I ruin oatmeal.

How?

Because I like it as soup. I put it in a huge bowl or cup and fill it with water. Little oatmeal flakes floating in it like a snow globe. Then, because I don’t eat hot foods, I let it cool to room temperature, and drink it. Every morning. Every morning for five years I’ve done this.

Somehow, drinking your oatmeal makes it disgusting. I get the faces as if I am talking about Fluffy’s Canadian bacon, pineapple, and sauerkraut pizza. I get the faces when I am trying to nauseate someone by talking about disgusting things. I get the same face as when baby poop comes up over the lunch conversation. Somehow, people think my oatmeal soup is as disgusting as what comes out of a baby.

It’s amazing how something people can be made horrible by just putting in three times the amount of water they tell you to.

Now, I have reasons for it. One, I like to put it in a cup and it doesn’t need a spoon. The other is because I don’t eat hot foods. Since I have to leave it alone for about an hour, it turns into a brick of oatmeal if I followed the directions. I don’t like bricks. They require forks and knives to eat. But soup, soup just requires a good pair of lips to properly enjoy.

So, in summary: I like oatmeal soup.

And, as of about ten minutes ago, I’m halfway done with NaNoWriMo.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 25,160 of 75,000 words)