Twenty days since my last post. It isn't that I don't love my readers, I was just distracted by the things that always happen at the end of the year. Work is the first one, since we are coming up to "release season" and I'm spending more time at the office or downstairs remoting into the office than doing anything "fun".

I have been getting some writing down. I have the short serial I've been working on, and while I skipped a week because I got a volunteer editor, I've been pretty much hanging on to the one/week submit schedule. At current rate, it looks like it is going to end around twenty-three chapters, but we'll find out. I'm posting as I go and sometimes people ask for more, sometimes they ask me to skip chapters.

I had a problem with the Flight printing for the third round of edits. I finally got it back a few days ago with a proper print. While I verified the PDF with Acrobat 7 and 8, I didn't with 10. It was foolish of me to assume that if versions 7 and 8 could handle it, 10 could also. And I was wrong. I also didn't want to upgrade to 10 because I have a weekly reboot at work because of patches to 10, they added way too much advertisement, and frankly version 10 is moving toward the custom look and feel which I despise in my programs. I don't want distinction, I was conformity with my application. I don't use Trillian for that exact reason.

But, the world is going to move past me so sooner or later, I'll stop ranting.

Right now, there are eight beta-readers for Flight. None of them are probably going to get me answers until the middle of December at the latest and more likely February. One... I might not trust, but I'm not sure. EDM is currently at his grandmothers, then an aunt, today and tomorrow, so I'm going to do one more pass on the novel, write up the summary which is the last thing I must do, and send out the email to the two people I trust in the writing industry who have made a hint they would read it for me.

I feel guilty about asking professionals to read my stuff. Even if they are friends, I don't like asking the same person more than once to read my stuff. Maybe because I've encountered so many people who have said yes, but later would tell me they regretted it, or simply because I don't want to pressure anyone into anything.

I had a rejection of a short story too. That always hurts, but I hate when the rejection is just a short sentence. And three months after the point they said they would email. This kind of goes back to editors giving feedback, but I'm not quite an editor enough; I know it is hard work.

But, I did managed to do a bit more book editing. One of the submissions was a humorous farmer's almanac. They needed a series of short, silly articles for the weeks of the year, but they were behind by twenty-something articles. Over the last three weeks, I wrote twenty-something articles... and found artists to illustrate the pages. I won't get paid for it, except for a free copy, but I don't mind because I had fun writing them.

I have gotten into a video game for a little bit: Glitch. It is a MMORPG that is just adorable. And non-aggressive. I don't know why, but I really prefer cooperative games over killing games, and cute 2D graphics over 3D anything. My plan for Moonfire Games is to write games that have a non-violent way of winning the game, even if it is harder. Now, the demake of Oblivion that I want to finish won't have that because I'm trying to duplicate Oblivion's general play, but CuteGod and the others do and will have that ending.

Speaking of programming, my goal for next year is to mostly be programming. I'm going to write and finish KK as a novel, but I also want to get Author Intrusion in a usable state before I do that. Since half the novel is already written (from the cuts of Flight), that means I should only need 3-4 months to finish it. If the current trend is right, summers are the dry spells for the writing group, so I have to have a few chapters ready by June, but I should be good.