Tomorrow is August 1! And things are weird!

Why is my computer smoking?

Well, I did not achieve all of my July goals. Which is a shame, because I was really busy anyway. I had planned to write 31,000 words on And the Devil Will Drag You Under, but insead I fell about 6,000 words short of that goal. Which is okay! It just means that I may not hit my word count goal of 60,000 by August 12, the date of my next critique group meeting (WFN, for those in the know). And that means I may have to reschedule things a bit. Which, again, is okay. Besides, when you’re writing a novel, it’s kind of hard to keep track of who’s doing what when, and who knows what when, so I’d have to do a revision pass before giving it to WFN anyway. And again: okay.

I also did not finish up revising “Witness to the Scrouge” or “Sauromancy”. I did attend the Cascade Writers Workshop and got some incredible feedback on “Zombie Processes”, and soon™ I will get to revising that one as well. Lots of irons in the fire, plenty of pie on my plate, and so on.

August 16, school starts up again! Fall semester! Woo! I’m taking, of course, one class, Reference and Information Services, which focuses on how to conduct reference interviews with patrons and so on. I’m not entirely sure yet. I’m looking forward to it. And, of course, to becoming a rich and powerful librarian who travels the world hunting for rare and magical artifacts, rescuing them from the hands of evildoers, and storing them safely in the archives or returning them to their proper owners. I hope that I can start that process soon. But first, Reference and Information Services.

In other news, I started up a Patreon page. Why? Because when I do become a famous writer/librarian, you’ll want to be able to say, “I knew him when”. Whatever. If you want to sign up, the link is to the right.

That’s all for now. I hope to post more than once a month in the future. Still, though, I suppose once a month is better than never, right?

Okay, things may not be as weird as the title of this post advertised.

July Goals (and a mid-year wrap-up)

Gozilla Vs. Kong picture
You go first! No, you! No, you! I insist!

I chose this image of Godzilla and Kong duking it out because it reminds me of how multiple projects demand a writer’s attention. More on that later.

June Update: I did not accomplish everything I set out to do in June, but I came pretty close. I meant to work on And the Devil Will Drag You Under every day, but, of course, sometimes life gets in the way. I meant to fully revise “The BIM” (now “Witness to the Scourge”). I also meant to fully revise “Sauromancy”. Instead, though, I partially revised “Witness to the Scourge”, and I revised “Zombie Processes” and submitted it to a writer’s conference I’m attending in a couple of weeks. I did get quite a bit done, though, so I’m calling June a win.

Mid-year submissions wrap-up: I’ve been submitting short stories to various short fiction markets pretty regularly this past year. Every Monday and Thursday, in fact. I may have missed the odd day here and there, but I’ve always made up for it the following day. So, at this point, I’ve submitted 61 stories. The result? 40 form rejections, 6 personal rejections, 1 withdrawal, 0 acceptances, and 14 pending rejections  submissions. If I can keep this up all year, I’ll have over 100 submissions for the year. I’m hoping to get at least one acceptance over that time.

July goals: I signed up not for Camp NaNoWriMo, but for Dream Foundry’s “Summer Stretch”. I suppose I should sign up for Camp as well, but, well… I didn’t. At any rate, I do have a goal of adding at least 31,000 words to And the Devil Will Drag You Under in July, which will bring the grand total up to 60,000+ words. That means writing at least 1,000 words per day. That’s accomplishable.

The problem of multiple projects: I have several projects that I really want to work on. I’m committed to finishing Devil, but I was reminded recently of a novel I wanted to work on at one point, The Book of Jonah, a genre-centered retelling of the Biblical text of that name. A fun fact: I once stated (on LiveJournal, of all places!) that I considered Jonah to be the funniest book in the Bible. And Guy Consolmagno, the head of the Vatican Observatory, agreed with me! I was so thrilled! I had met him at WorldCon previously, and chatted with him (ever so briefly) about religion and science. Then I read his book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, and when I met him again I mentioned it. And he said, “Oh yes, you’re the one who thought Jonah was funny.” I pretty much melted into a pile of goo right then and there.

Anyway, there’s that project. And my pirate novel, of course, which looks like it wants to be a trilogy. And my horror-themed space opera fantasy trilogy, too.

THEY ALL WANT TO BE WRITTEN. All of them are fighting, Godzilla-vs-Kong-like, for my attention. And the main point I want to tell them is that I need to finish my Devil novel first. Because that’s been my problem all along; I don’t tend to finish what I start writing. So I’m committed to And the Devil Will Drag You Under. I’m gonna finish that.

Of course, one unsung voice in the writer’s head at this point usually says something like, “Yeah, but what if the project I’m working on sucks? What if the next one would be good?” And that, sadly, is a very loud voice in my head. I should learn to ignore it. To a greater extent at least.

In other news: I am writing this on my new laptop! It runs Windows 10. Normally, I would have simply slapped Linux onto this computer and left Windows behind, but in this case, I wasn’t sure if Linux would be compatible with all the laptop’s features that I was interested in: the fingerprint authentication, the touch screen, and so on. But the Kubuntu install disk offered no option for dual-booting. So I went ahead and installed Kubuntu 21.04 in a virtual machine (Virtualbox, for those interested) in Windows. It’s a poor man’s Linux box, I suppose. But why? Because all my writing over the past many years has been done on a Linux computer, and my version of Scrivener is a Linux port, and so on. Besides, I really like Linux.

I’m just a nerd.

Anyway, that’s my update. I hope you’re having a good day. And my reward to you for reading this far is this: a picture of Godzilla stomping through a peaceful Thomas Kinkaide village:

Godzilla vs. Thomas Kinkaide
RAWR!!