This is a photo I snapped of a barn swallow that wouldn’t leave me alone. Seriously. This thing appeared in the same spot for two days or so, just teasing me to take its photo.

Here is a color shot.

Pretty.

• I rapped about learning action photography on Monday. Includes photos of wet dogs, if you are into that sort of thing.
• The Magic of Eyri Podcast was nominated for two Parsec Awards! These awards honor speculative fiction podcasts (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc)
• Wednesday brought us a brand new Magic of Eyri Podcast. This is the last one until August–I’m taking July off.
• And Wednesday was another wacky edition of LansingNext. We chatted with John Palmer from Michigan Microbrews, and Mike Weber, who reviews Lansing bars. Oh, and we decided to do an “edgy” Fraggle Rock skit. You must listen to believe it.
• Thursday, I talked more photography, this time I blogged about shooting objects through other objects. Yeah.
• Lastly, a story I wrote for Examiner about Dimitri’s closing in downtown Lansing.

Some more big news–starting next week, LansingNext will be live streamed at 9AM on Saturdays instead of Wednesdays. The good news is, this won’t really hurt the podcast side of it, other than it being online a few days later. If you already subscribe via iTunes or RSS, then you won’t miss a thing.

What a week!

Before you gasp and say “499 pages?!”, keep in mind this is the printed out version–double spaced, 12 point font on normal sized pages. The total word count was somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000. To compare, Magic of Eyri was 170,000+ words and 919 pages printed out in the same format.

Yes, I’ve killed quite a few trees lately.

Will I self-publish this one? Nope. I’ll get this baby ship-shape and start shopping it around in a few months (hopefully) to agents, etc.

My first thoughts after reading the last page and setting aside my red pen?

1. There are a few sentences I’m proud of.
2. It certainly is a first draft (as in, a good sized portion is “crap”).
3. I can see its potential.
4. I have a lot of work to do.

The most interesting thing about this novel is that I stopped writing it about halfway through and didn’t start up again until at least six months later (life happened). And it shows in some parts. Getting the story going again was rough, and in some sections it was apparent that I didn’t care how the characters got moving, as long as they were doing something.

But, towards the latter half, I found my groove once again. There are some great ideas that came to me then–ideas that will make me go back and completely change the first half of the book, for the better.

This is why, when asked for writing advice, I tell people to just finish, for better or worse (to wit, see my Ignite Lansing 3.0 presentation). I wrote scenes in the last 30 pages that I didn’t even have ideas for in the first 200 pages. I came up with a huge change for my main character in those last 30+ pages or so, and it’ll make the first part much better.

Had I stopped half-way through, I would have never come to that revelation. Better still, a few lines I wrote in the last few pages may end up going to the BEGINNING of the story. They set up my main character really well.

Sure, going back and rewriting most of the book with this new focus will be a bit of a chore, but I don’t care. It’ll make the story better and honestly, I’m not happy with how I wrote some of the early sections anyway (lots of info-dumping).

Next step: going through and taking all the notes from my marked up manuscript and putting them all in one notebook or sketch book.

Listen-o-tron! :: Downloaderize!

Listen-o-Tron! :: Downloaderize!

I’m not going to bother explaining how a thirteen year old is able to update a website while in a far away fantasy world, because there are other examples of people doing this.  It also gives me something to update in between episodes, and since my episodes are on a bi-weekly schedule (every other Sunday, Ep009 goes online this Sunday), I’m always worried about losing listeners.

And honestly, I’m having fun with it so  far–and it doesn’t cost me any thing, so why not? I’m still figuring out which direction to take it in (like do I reply to people or not, are the updates Magic of Eyri canon, etc), but I think it’ll just boil down to what I have time for and, more importantly, just having fun.