A Hectic Start.

I won’t bore you with the details of why my plan to post for New Year vanished before I even noticed, beyond saying I have two children and a working spouse who put in two consecutive seven-day stretches at work during the holidays.

That’s not to say I’ve been taking it easy.

The Old Man.

I have everything set to begin the second read-through. The plan is to hit it quickly across this upcoming weekend and be ready to get on with the second revision immediately afterwards when everything is still fresh in my mind.

I took an opportunity, while the computer I use to blog has been commandeered by the more junior members of the family, to revisit some of the editing videos I’d found on YouTube and I’ll link those here on my Helpful Resources page.

One of the most important changes I’m implementing over my previous edit cycle is to use a notebook and be more explicit about the changes I want made. For instance, if I write ‘more‘ then I’ll say more what. Referring back to the shorthand notes that I scribbled in the space between the double spaced lines last time often left me wondering what on earth I originally meant, so the more clear I can be, the better off I’ll be when I get back to that comment. Its intent can be no more clear than what I write at the time.

Black Box Factory.

I’m starting to get very excited about this next project, to the point where I plan to start research and getting an initial outline sketched as soon as the second revision of Old Man is complete, potentially irrespective of whether I’m moving into a Gamma Reader phase or not.

I’ve encountered some aspects of what this story means to me in some elements of history that have shown up on my radar lately. I won’t go into too much detail, mostly because it’s still all so much fog that there isn’t any detail to discuss anyway, but given the way the story is evolving I’m very keen on establishing historical precedents for everything that’s going to happen in it.

It’s still centered around the themes that were my takeaway from the stories in Escape from Camp 14, The Jungle, and The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m adding in some more from history and from the contemporary world, both the ‘developed’ Western world and parts of the world where life can be more… complicated.

AIP Reboot.

Pompholyx Eczema

I’ve always thought that starting a health drive in January was doomed to failure. There’s always a ton of sugar, alcohol and otherwise terribly unhealthy treats left over from Christmas and the New Year that unless you’re willing to just throw it all in the trash, any new lifestyle effort has to begin by being hobbled with the worst junk we can stuff into ourselves.

So, I’ve decided to reboot my AIP effort beginning in February.

You might recall my mentioning eczema and that my effort on the Auto Immune Protocol sort of petered out as I didn’t seem to be completely getting rid of that pesky eczema at that time. Well, I’ve been clear from shortly after that until fairly recently and I can’t help but think that the holiday season, with all it’s yummy treats is to blame for that, so my plan is to return to AIP and see how that works out for between sixty to ninety days before trying to reintroduce things.

Up Next…

As the girls go back to school this week, life around the Acres should return to normal and I should be able to get back into what was trying to pass for a routine. The upshot of this will be getting back in front of the blog posting schedule, but the downside of that will be that I won’t have gotten back to the read-through before the next post is written. This means that I very much doubt I’ll be able to write about how the read through has progressed for next week’s post.

There are, of course, many other things going on around here, which, while they’re not ‘author’ related, they give a glimpse into the life of someone who’s busy trying to accomplish other things as well as beat his first novel into some kind of shape.

So, unless there’s something in particular anyone wants me to write about this upcoming week, I’ll deal with life pretty much as it happens. Probably the best way to contact me would be via the Facebook page, but there’s always email or the contact form.

Anyway, until next time, I hope 2019 is off to a great start and everybody has a great, safe week!

Categories: Black Box Factory, The Old Man