Being Pro-Life

Being Pro-Life starts with you, as an individual, and the choices you make. From there it spreads out to your friends and family, to your church, and to your community. It has always been about community activism and giving people information and options to make choices. Being Pro-Life is about loving other human beings and respecting not only their innate and biological life, but the metaphysical workings of their agency. 

When life begins isn't important to these beliefs, only what we do is important. If we are allowing others full access to their agency with the knowledge to use it properly, we are being true to the cause. When we stray from that notion, we stumble and fail. 

The moment we believe the Federal Government can do a better job of taking care of our friends and neighbors than we can, is the moment we can no longer lay claim to being Pro-Life. I think John Koster, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and others are probably having to give their anti-choice notions some thought now. Indeed, I hope the entire Republican Party is thinking about it. 

I personally believe it played a role in them losing the Senate and the White House. 

You can't be anti-choice and a fiscal conservative. It takes money to shake down dealers holding black market oral contraceptives and to kick in the door of every benevolent doctor giving a 12-year-old incest victim an abortion. Worse, this is the last way most police officer want to spend their time. Think! Do you want your community, your church leaders, and yourself responsible for spreading the Pro-Life message? People that really want to be there? Or men with guns that don't? 

Do we really want the Federal Government interfering with a pregnant cancer patient's agency, while she decides whether to fight for her life for her other two kids, or risk all and carry to term? Would you rather have benevolent friends, family, church/community leaders involved, or the Federal Government? 

Hint: The Federal Government tend to deploy heavily armed law enforcement professionals and lawyers with political ambitions to enforce the law. 

The Federal Government can't even balance a checkbook, do we really want them playing doctor with our wives, daughters, aunts, mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens? I think the message to the GOP and the Anti-Choice movement this election cycle was clear. These "Sanctity of Life" and "Personhood" pieces of legislation that have been pushed unsuccessfully since 1995 need to just stop. Put simply, we're wise to it, and we don't want it, push your radical views to your constituency some other way. 

If you want to be Pro-Life, just do it, don't try to legislate it, quantify it, or put it into a legal context. Anyone with a true devotion to their fellow human, derived from their maker or otherwise, knows that doing so is to invite folley and to see one's beliefs cheapened by a soul-blackening political machine. 

If we don't support and love our fellow humans in spite of the choices they make, we are cheapening the significance of having a choice in the first place. Do not erode the greatest gift that comes with life by supporting people who would foster Federal control over the lives of others. These people are not true advocates of the Pro-Life movement, not true fiscal conservatives, and have utterly lost their way. 

July 2012

Everything I feel like I should write for an update sounds hollow to me now.

Suffice it to say, I'm one month closer to my goals. I work steadily according to the schedule I've set up for myself. Most of the time I'm a strange mixture of content and restless as the work proceeds. It's strange to be on the other side of so much text and to go back through it.

I've probably said it before already, but it is worth pointing out again.

One definitely sees themselves and where they were in their work. I can look at the date created for a document, read through it, edit it, and recall how I felt that day. Brutal introspection indeed.

I need to read and reread my own work more.

March, 2012

I'm putting this up for my own benefit, so feel free to skip reading this unless the minutia of my work is interesting to you.

By the end of March I had knocked out 37 solid days of work on my novels and have somewhere around 185,000 words of my 1,000,000 word goal.

I spent a lot of time editing and realizing that I couldn't just continue writing books for two separate series without doing a lot of back reading and editing along the way. I logged nearly seventy hours reading and editing in March.

To stay on track for my goal, I really needed to be at 250,000 words by now. I don't really have time to beat myself up about it. It's of little use at this point. We set goals to better understand our limits.

The video game my partner and I made is in the process of being bounced back and forth between us and Microsoft certification, which I'm really excited about. I also finished the draft for my fifth novel and I am pleased with some of what I've written recently.

Looking ahead...

April:

I broke through six month of writers block on my Storytelling Sciences RPG and I've began revising the system and creating a new and hopefully more final version. I'm going to add whatever I do for it to my word count as I will eventually publish the darn thing.

I made myself a reading list. I don't think I read enough, and it hurts me as a writer and editor.

There are twenty one perfectly good work days in April and if I only add 55,000 words to my total this month, I'll call it a win. I'm going to stretch and try for a lot more but I think the process will get slower as I progress further in each series. Every book I write, is another I have to fact check and edit for the one to follow.

I'd like to finish the third D&E novel, outlined to fall somewhere around 80,000 words. I think I'll shoot for that.

May:

I'll worry about it when I get there.

I have close to 400,000 words worth of material to read and edit between the three projects I'm working on right now. It's my least favorite thing, which means I should probably be doing it right now.

February, 2012

I'm putting this up for my own benefit, so feel free to skip reading this unless the minutia of my work is interesting to you. Okay, doing the math at 1:00 AM...

By the end of February I had...

... knocked out 26.5 solid days of work on my novels and 132,404 words of my 1,000,000 word goal.

To give myself some perspective, I did have a lot of stuff going on in my personal life in February. Also, I needed some time to reread my old outlines, notes, and drafts for the first books to give myself fuel and consistency in the story. Fifteen really good work days is a healthy step up from January, but still not where I need to be to reach my goal.

Looking ahead...

March:

I thought my traveling in March would only cost me two days, but it turns out it'll be three. That gives me 19 solid work days which could add 95,000 words to my total word count. This assumes I rest on weekends and don't push too hard.

This will land me in the 225,000 word range by the end of March, 25,000 words shy of where I need to be, or five days worth of work.

April:

There are 21 perfectly good work days in April. If I continue to increase and maintain my output, I could add 105,000 words to my total. If everything went well in March, and again in April, I could be sitting at 335,000 words, right on schedule.

If I get caught up in April, and I continue to create 100,000+ words a month thereafter, I could reach a million words by mid-November and have the holidays off to edit and prepare for publishing next year. Depending on which books I write first, I could conceivably prep to publish 2-3 books this year.

I'm going to stick to writing whatever I'm inspired to work on to keep output high. If it works out that the right books get written in the right order, so be it. I'm not going to sweat it either way.

Being Masterful At Something

In order to be masterful at something, you must spend a certain amount of time doing it. My brother and I have discussed it more than a couple of times. Apparently there are experts somewhere that say it takes 10,000 hours doing a particular thing to reach that level where you are a master of something.

I've pondered it a lot lately. Just going over the numbers in my head.

I figure I'll spend at least 200 days just writing this year to meet my goal. I calculate that's something like 1600 hours spent just making text. I'm probably being brutal to not consider the writing I've done since the summer following the 3rd grade when I really started to write. I fell in love with the craft within the confines of a program at the University of Idaho, back when people thought I might be gifted in some way.

I filled up an unknowable number of composition books with my (at the time) indecipherable handwriting in middle and high school. As far as I'm concerned, none of it counts because I don't know where any of it is. Those composition books are probably lost somewhere in my parent's house, or more likely, a landfill.

I can build my vocabulary, read the works of others, attend writing workshops, and similar but none of that logs time making text. None of it contributes to that mastery I so desperately crave. It makes me glad I logged my time spent writing since September 2009 and that I've kept everything I ever wrote during that time period.

Technology has really helped give me perspective. Apple's Lion operating system keeps track of every version of the documents I create and the times and dates when I did. I never regret the money I've spent on tools. Well, mostly never.

I've got roughly 29 months doing this now and probably 3700 hours spent making text in that time. That 10,000 hours seems infuriatingly far away as I creep along toward it. It's beyond maddening to think my best work won't see itself fixed in an electronic format for years. Everything I'm doing right now is, hopefully, just somewhat commercially viable practice.

Taking something seriously like this makes you think about every day you spend resting, relaxing or maintaing relationships with people. It's hard because those are hours toward the 10,000 you can't ever get back in this life. However, you can't only be the thing that you do. I've seen a lot of people I know learn that the hard way after their lives became violently lonely or they departed the good things about themselves to be what they do.

I've had my doubts about continuing to blog beyond just being a place to record the monthly numbers to provide statistical perspective. I think everyone needs a little more than that. It's foolish vanity to assume I'm any different.

Writing Advice - Have a routine

Get up in the morning.

Work out, walk or do something physical. Even if it's just cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash, so it's not hanging over you for later.

Eat Breakfast.

Shower. You do this after breakfast in case you got any on you.

Get dressed. Put on your shoes, one right after the other.

Go to your desk and sit down, or stand. I have a standing desk.

Put your hands on the keyboard, one after the other, or both at the same time. It doesn't matter.

Move your fingers on the keys and make words appear on the screen or paper. Do this for 4-5 hours.

Do not reread and attempt to edit while you write. You'll be doing that later anyway. Would you call a "redo" in the middle of a beautiful lay up, or as you were tossing the last M&M toward your mouth? No, and writing is no different.

While you're writing, pay no attention to your word count, misspellings, poor grammar choices, and similar. Gird yourself in the full armor of apathy about the process and just tell a story.

At the end of the 4-5 hours, move away from your desk and do something else. Go outside, pet a guinea pig, or organize your socks.

Later, reread what you wrote, probably over dinner while trying to avoid sauce getting on your copy.

Play video games, watch TV, read a book (important) and get to sleep at a decent hour so you can rise the following day and do it all over again.

Write every single day. The rest will hopefully figure itself out. Even while I was in Alaska, I tried to follow this routine as much as I could, in the morning, on the plane, whenever I wasn't taking pictures and feeling like a time-traveling viking.

Stamina

Even if you've done it many times before, writing something that is 80,000 words or longer is a daunting task. Nothing grants us stamina to that end like having a good group of people in proximity that work at something as hard as you do. Returning to my writing schedule has been really hard because of all the post-holiday distractions, but my friends and family have helped by shouldering some of the burden.

I'm really bad at letting people know when they've done something that helped me. There are the people in my life that politely can't understand why I haven't put my work on the market yet. They help me realize that what I do isn't easy, or easy to understand. Then there are all the people who get it, affirming that the time it takes to write a half dozen really good books isn't a task completed in less than two years. Thanks guys.

Oh, that stack of video games and books people gave me for Christmas I've spend the last two weeks ignoring gives me incentive to reach my daily goals relative to my word count and editing. I will eventually use those as rewards for meeting my goals. Thank you!

Meeting someone for coffee puts my time and my relationships into perspective. Actually wanting to see what people are up to on Facebook and Twitter gives me hope that I've got interesting people in my life that fuel my creativity. Otherwise, those sites would be only the sometimes-used self-marketing tool.

My 27 inch display is rocking several projects, two at a time, across multiple desktops. I think my greatest fear is that I'll die before I get a chance to write down everything that is in my head. Part of me doesn't care if anyone even reads it in my lifetime... only that what I thought was given life in the form of words on a page.

Chances are, my fears will be realized. Something will kill me before my fingers take the last keystroke. I'm hoping for old age and an overactive imagination that couldn't be expressed in the span of one lifetime. Such supreme and foolish vanity.

What gives me a sense of myself is that none of what I'm doing will probably amount to much. I'll write my 20 novels, my wife will get around to helping me edit them, I'll self-publish on Amazon and make enough to cover groceries. I'm too much of a misanthrope for college, a regular job, or even dealing drugs to get by.

People will judge me by the car I drive and the perception of what they think my bank account looks like. Should I (foolishly) decide to send my work into a traditional publisher, I will be rejected, and worse, ignored. I will always struggle with depression, and anger, and a hatred of things I cannot understand. I will never be a "success" by the measure contrived by most people.

I am at peace with that.

Writing on this blog has become painful though, as it doesn't seem to serve any real purpose except to give people insight into what I do. I doubt very much the people that understand why I chose this road would find anything of interest here. They already know what the score is.

Some things simply are.

Why would a guy who can't stand to read 99% of what is considered modern fiction want to write it?

Just, because.

Not everything we are called to do is simply in the service of our passions. There's the Gods we believe to exist, the notions instilled within us by our parents, and the culture of our communities to consider. Our own Agency notwithstanding, it appears to be completely random, until you begin to scratch the surface just a little bit more.

From one of the books I'm writing:

"Doing the right thing isn't about garnering a reward. Making right where all else has gone terribly wrong is thankless, difficult, and runs the risk of being futile."

"That’s no real answer. "

"You would still be out there if I hadn't. You would have continued to suffer in the coils of the Tenebrion and from the pain of your wounds, which thanks to the magic woven by your sisters, haven’t killed you yet."

"Numenarch, I would have done you the same harm when we first met, you owed me nothing."

"Lady Diligence, you are the only one keeping score."

Maybe I read too much Giacomo Leopardi and not enough Marcus Aurelius these days, but I had something of an epiphany after I wrote that. I joke about my "Armor of Apathy" and Royce's "Shield of Someone Else's Problem" (+1) with regard to the obstacles that often appear in my life. Most of what I seem to be angry about are the things where I am the most powerless to act. Where I have the most power to change something, and I do nothing, I seem to be emotionless.

I'm doing something awesome, or terribly wrong. Speaking of terribly wrong, my wife has gone crazy and wants me to cook Spam, gotta go.

Resume Interruption

My return to my old writing schedule has been difficult. I'm impatient, I hate everything I write, and fret about a lot of things that matter. Yeah, I think I said that right, and it's okay.

I spent the last year worrying about my workspace, the tools I use, application I employ and a lot of other window dressing relative to what I do. It's kind of nice to have everything in that realm sort of figured out. Having a routine relative to my workspace is also nice, because even when I have a bad day, it's still better than my worst in 2009 or 2010.

When I need to stand, I do. When I need to sit, I can. When it's time to do a set of fifty push ups, I've got just enough space.

The primary casualty is what I call "my interruptions". I've a stack of books I'd like to read, brand new video games still in the cellophane, and miniatures I'd like to sit in the garage and paint. My blog seems a little neglected as well.

If it's a table top RPG or something involving other people, it's enough incentive to pull me from my work. Everything else seems to be gathering dust right now. I'm okay with that, but my good friend Dave got me a killer driving game for the xBox and I love (love) driving games. Folks that would also fall into the "good friend" category got me some books to read.

I need to blog about my trip to Alaska and post some pics of that journey. I've got some good stories to tell about that trip. It's on the list along with everything else I plan on doing when I'm not working toward my writing goals. Hopefully, I'll get to resume my interruptions after reaching some creative plateau or milestone.

And, I'm rambling on my blog at 3 AM because I can't sleep and my fingers want to move across a keyboard and my brain is too tired for anything productive. Closing the lid on my laptop... now.

2012 Schedule

I decided sometime while I was busy being sick before the New Year that I wanted to keep a stricter writing schedule and craft as many new drafts as I could, making that job one. I'll do my editing and outlining in my "free time" and really just focus on getting the words on the paper. I'd like to have at least one line of books I'd planned for put completely to at least first draft by September and ready for edit.

I had made the Windows Phone 7 application I'm working on with a friend job one for a couple months last year. We're pretty close to being finished and able to move on to other things. Not sure what Dave and I are going to do in the aftermath. It's my intent to manage my time better regardless and make sure that the game remains a true side project and that I focus most of my energies on writing.

We'll see how that goes. I've grown to really like creating text and images for that medium and I'd like to design more user interface for the purpose.

I think the biggest mountain to climb this year will be crafting my own personal website. The one I have now sucks and is in desperate need of some serious love. Web design has been one of those skills I've had to reach out to while being pretty distant from my passions. I find the whole process tedious but being a better artist now, it should be fun to pull together the visual elements for my site.

I've pretty much put Storytelling Sciences on the shelf for now, and it gets my occasional attention but I'm kind of at a loss for how to proceed. Part of me thinks I need a partner to work with on that front, someone that shares my passions for games, but I think my pride is probably getting in the way of seeking out that person. All in good time I suppose.

Healing

I'm printing out a manuscript I deemed unworthy of edit or finish back in October 2009. I wasn't doing very well back then, and may have even described that project's demise in my blog at the time. I wasn't well when I wrote that book, nor when I passed judgement upon it. Because I'm doing better, part of me thinks the book might read differently to me now.

Maybe I can even heal the work with a dutiful editing of its content? I guess we'll find out.

I didn't edit any of my own work back then. My wife had time, and I felt better about asking for help. I think this hurt me as a writer, at least with regard to assessing my own work. I need to go back to what I wrote in 2009 and edit everything forward, with my own eyes and by my own hand.

Hopefully, I can garner some perspective and a skill I sorely lack.

Elephant Ears & Corn Dogs

Been hitting it pretty hard this week.

The rate at which I am able to edit text is frustratingly slow. It's maddening in equal measure to how rewarding it has been. I've been moving quickly to generate content but it's clear I'm not so patient when it comes to going back and doing revisions. I want to eventually give this polish to all my projects.

I want to embody the patience that makes a good craftsman. Right now!

Livestrom and I went feature complete a couple weeks back and we're quickly approaching the completion of our initial offering of content. My Thinkpad e420 is probably confused as heck. It's seen more action than my Macs have this week. Live told me his sister was surprised that we were coming to the end of it. Given how hard it has been to hold that project together, I'm not surprised she's surprised.

We started with a half dozen folks committed to the project and eventually ended up with just Leaf and Live rocking the remainder. I love working with other people that possess the same work ethic I do.

I've done one complete edit on one of my novels and I'm slowly working through my Storytelling Sciences book. It's bigger than my first novel, pushing nearly 100k words. By far, the editing of that project has been the biggest mountain I've had to climb in the two years I've been doing this.

To everyone that has insinuated that self-published authors deserve less respect than commercially published ones... you don't know anything about anything. Writers that take on the task of writing, editing and promoting their own works are titans that come to the craft in the way it was meant to be.

Meanwhile, I have several ideas for novels I'll write next year. I've already done a couple 40 page outlines for each and the concepts are beginning to spawn dreams and impressions while I sleep. This is one of a few ways I know I'm ready to tackle a new piece of writing, when my subconscious is getting in on the game. There are so many landscapes I've had the pleasure and horror of visiting while I slumbered that made for great scenes in my writing.

By the end of the year I hope to have one Novella, one Novel, one RPG Book and one WP7 App (TBS Game) ready for the marketplace. I figure at this point that I've only got about 40 working days remaining. I feel a little bit better about my prospects for reaching my goals now than I did three or even two weeks ago. This week has been awesomely productive put in the proper perspective.

I was complaining to my wife the other night about how it seems like I've done so little in two years. Then I stopped and made a quick mental list of what I'd done and how many new skills and tools I had to reach out to along the way. I spent most of August being my own worst enemy, with an internal monologue that basically kept me going through the most difficult part of chemical depression, my old friend apathy.

My Hunter LARP has been kicked to one side, neglected for the last month. I've been told that the people participating are patient folks that are ready to play when I'm ready to run a session. I hate not being able to do everything I'd like to do. I've written what will probably be the beginning of an epic Classic (1983) D&D game when I shut my Primordium Table down for maintenance.

I have to begin serious play testing for my SS RPG next year and I'm already nervous about whether I'll be able to gather together enough of the right folks. My anxiety makes me feel worthless, and like I should just quit everything and find a nice safe job doing something for someone else that slowly kills my brain. Why are there so many people selling elephant ears and corn dogs beside the low road?

All the best and most noble things in life are the things we do for their own sake.

Negativity

My blog has been pretty negative lately. Not sure why I'm such a cranky man these days.

Maybe I need pills. :-)

Criticism

I spent the day editing text. In the aftermath I sat down to Netflix, loaded up some of my favorite shows, and proceeded to watch. Now, as I sit down to write this, I find myself in contemplation.

After spending the day scrutinizing every word and sentence I wrote, I find it difficult to enjoy any of my favorite shows. Granted, these are new episodes I hadn't watched yet, and maybe Season 3 of "Lie to Me" really does suck. Maybe the folks that produced "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" Season 9 were completely out of their minds. I'm having a hard time discerning whether I'm just being hyper-critical because of what I spent the day doing, or if my favorite shows took a turn for the worse at a certain point.

I started watching "Sons of Anarchy" Season 4 about the same time I started editing this particular document. I like the show less and less as episodes are released. I'm beginning to suspect that taking the mindset required to edit your own work effectively changes and colors your perspective on everything else.

Ending the day with a couple episodes of my favorite TV Shows is relatively new. It used to be I'd just have something playing in the background while I worked and play video games after I'd logged my time. I particularly liked shows that took place in workplaces and were accompanied with the sounds of those workplaces. So much of "Law and Order" takes place on city streets and in an office. I think I like the way the show sounds a lot more than the stories, characters or acting.

I think I need to find some way to unwind after my work that doesn't involve fictional works, staring at a screen or enduring another episode of one of the various "Law and Order" television programs. I spent the weekend painting miniatures and listening to the rain, maybe some combination of that should be my pastime for awhile.

Maybe I'm just cranky because I'm forcing myself to edit text so I'll have an assortment of finished products by the end of the year instead of an ever-growing stack of drafts and manuscripts. That's highly plausible in the wake of dreaming about books I've only outlined and longing for some sort of creative release. Whatever the case, I'll be glad when my two novels and this 90k word piece of non-fiction I'm editing right now is safely behind me.

2012 can't get here soon enough. I want to get back to just creating text and procrastinating recklessly on the task of editing it.

Organized Religion & Fiction

I've largely avoided addressing religion in any of my fictional works. I've always constructed complex belief systems to serve the same function in their place. I've tried to give the protagonists and antagonists powerful ethical and personal reasons for their actions during the course of the story without any particular real world faith being involved.

In outlining a book I intend to write in 2012, I haven't had that same luxury. I will have to include certain elements of real world religions in the story because so much of it is told with our modern world as a backdrop. It's forced me to confront a lot of my own demons with regard to organized religion.

When entering into any sort of discussion about the benefits one finds among the fellowship of a particular faith, people are very quick to point out how they personally benefit. They basically imply that they gain access to celestial benefits everyone else is bereft of because they don't jump through the same hoops they do. They are essentially "better" than other people and derive a great deal of dubious personal worth to that end.

There is rarely mention of how they are able to access opportunities to do good in the temporal realm, and if there are, it's an afterthought. Worse, serving one's fellow man is generally a commandment one is expected to accept blindly because obedience is better than comprehending one's personal agency. For this reason, organized religion has little that appeals to me.

I'm not sure how being part of a traditional religious organization will grant me the contrivances one needs to aid others more than worshipping privately would. I see many of the intrinsic benefits one finds in such organizations, but I also see the long shadow such institutions cast. Looking around our once great nation, there is little benefit in supporting huge monolithic organizations these days, and even less in giving them money.

Then there is all the pseudo-social hoops one must jump through to gain acceptance into religious institutions. Honestly, being a creative person, I already spend enough time worrying about getting the perfect stranger to like and appreciate what I do. Mixing that with my desire to worship seems like a bad plan. I don't need the temporal body of a religion to tell me I have worth and a purpose. These are things I can just as easily provide myself, at no additional charge.

Clearly, I have strong opinions on the issue.

That said, I do not want my fictional works to become a soap box or platform for my views on organized religion. I don't think it would serve others, or my story, in doing so. In trying to be objective, it's made me realize a lot of things about myself and how I quantify faith.

I do tend to make my works something of a message about how important a person's agency is. Preserving one's own ability to choose while infringing no one else's is paramount to seeking Righteousness and the preservation of Justice. Both of those concepts, I believe, are intrinsic and require no validation on the part of men, Gods, or authors of fiction.

Communicating that same message in a fictional setting possessing elements of real world religions, will be a difficult challenge. I already have thousands of words worth of content collecting dust within previous attempts to do so collecting dust. Hopefully my latest attempt will be different.

I think that if I were to push my views in a work designed for commercial consumption I would be just as bad as the religious institutions I try to hold myself separate from. I do want people to know it is equally fine to practice one's faith in private or in the public forum that is organized religion provided they are doing so with their eyes wide open. Of course, the outcome of that choice isn't as important as how you live with and apply it.

Both require that you seek your own ways to be righteous in the world, and as much as it is promised, neither can really guarantee any celestial reward. Doing good while preserving your own agency and the agency of others is a reward unto itself and should be done as a matter of course relative to our very human condition. There need be no promise of ethereal blessings or heavenly protection. Relying on your own power to choose should be enough to navigate our temporal world.

It's easy to communicate this on my blog, but not so easy via a fictional work. It's easier when I take myself out of the equation and cease to worry about being commercially successful or what people will think about me when they read my work. Of course, my Twitter account does nothing to aid me in this endeavor. ;-)

Thank You Steve Jobs

I spent yesterday morning in my bed using my iPad to generate text using the WriteRoom App. I didn't know yet that Steve Jobs had passed away. It wouldn't be until later when I'd pop open Safari and see Apple's site that I'd receive the news, and again when a friend called and left a message on my phone.

My good friend Dan suggested that we have some sort of gathering of our friends, with our Macs and iPads to reminisce about the fruits of Steve Jobs' labor. It felt silly for a moment, I mean it's not like I actually knew Steve Jobs. Then I thought about how much Apple's products had really changed my life.

I got my first Mac in 2009, at Elle Phillip's recommendation, a tool that would be integral to my personal metamorphosis. What a difference it is to have devices that will work as hard as you do. Tools that were crafted with the same care as you would craft things. My work in the last two years is a testament to that synergy.

In the last two years I've written close to a million words (I'm almost there) toward my books, rendered hundreds of hand drawn images, communicated with dozens of colleagues and peers, and done hours and hours of tireless research. My iPad and my Macs helped make those things possible by being incredible tools that redefined my workspace and my workflow.

Steve Jobs is responsible for the company that provided me those tools.

I remember vividly the day my iPad arrived at my home. I'd wanted such a device since there'd been even a hint of them, outside the boundaries of science fiction, back around the turn of the century. Steve and Apple understood what it would take to make such a device "Magical" for me. It wasn't the screen or the user experience delivered by iOS on a tablet, it was the 10 hours of battery life that would allow me to go anywhere I wanted and generate text and images without worrying about finding a outlet.

There are a great many people who do not understand Apple as a company or the type of person Steve Jobs was. The more callous of those folks make jokes about cult-like behavior on the part of their customers and Steve's own ability to warp reality. I think that if all you do is surf the Net, check email and play games, one can appreciate a Mac.

If your work ethic is such that you generate thousands of words of text and/or hundreds of thousands of pixels worth of visual content in a year, you'll come to more than appreciate a Mac. You'll depend on it. When you push your own limits as a creative person, you need tools that have no limits.

For me, Steve Jobs and company provided. I am hopeful that he's planted a seed at Apple that will allow them to continue to provide folks like me with the tools we need. I think for the foreseeable future, his legacy is secure.

-- Sent from my Tech Envy Generator, using the BlogPress App, edited on my MacBook Pro

Illustration Frustration

I started doing some illustrations for a small book I've been putting text toward for a long time. I feel pretty good about what's in the book, but the type of illustrations I want aren't completely inside my skill set. It's nothing fancy, just some small bugs that live in my mind.

I've done a fair number of extremely detailed drawings of these characters but I want what I put into the book to be far simpler and very small. I want there to be little Chitterlings in the corners of the pages, sitting at the edge of the text as though it were a ledge, and similar. I want them to be no larger than three times the height of the text unless they are standing next to a header.

It's a statement about the type of creative person I am in general. I like to make things complicated.

Trying to limit myself to as few lines as possible to craft the little guys on the pages. I'm allowing myself some liberty when it comes to rendering things they are carrying, but otherwise they need to be extremely simple. The book is part of my table top RPG I've been creating over the last five years and I'd like to finish it before the end of the year.

Maybe having illustrations at all is just a bad plan.

Gonna take one of my precious days to craft as many of these little guys as I can just to see if I can render enough of them that I like for the purpose. It feels like I spend way too much time with a tablet pen in my hand already. Being a one man crew on most of my projects requires doing a lot more of what I don't like as opposed to what I really enjoy.

Having some off-the-grid creative license in that regard comes with a price you pay in time.

Dear Me, Look Back Here In 112 Days

Looking in my Things App on my iPad this morning was pretty depressing. I'm writing this entry more to give myself something to look back on in four months than to illuminate anyone else that might read my blog regularly. Going into Fall and Winter my mental health generally suffers if I don't provide myself an even greater degree of focus.

I've got about 124,000 words left to write between two novels to make four total for the year. Collectively it's somewhere around 250,000 words that I'll have to edit and arrange for publish and make covers and such for. I've got a couple of people willing to help me with this but it will be a push to see it all happen before 2011 elapses.

Visting the Raging Rickshaw forums today made me realize just how much is left to complete our App for the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I think Dave and I have reduced the overall complexity of the game but added in several elements that will require a lot of additional artwork. I've got less than two months of real time to make that happen including the work that needs done on my novels into the equation.

I'm very close to completing several works for Storytelling Sciences and I'm not worried about the text required for that project. I've thousands of words waiting to go in and find a place. I've too much content if anything. I'd like to do some illustrations for the books though, something that might push the whole thing into next year. I need to find a play test table for the final form of the game, hopefully some folks that have never played it before.

I do a large amount of writing and creating for the purpose of recreation with my friends playing RPGs. It feels like a stretch to keep it all going and stay on schedule even after putting things into perspective with my Things App (awesome App btw). I would rather my work schedule suffered than my mental or physical health. My LARP crew has already stated that they want the game to continue after the first Chronicle is complete, and my RPG tables continue to contain interested folks.

Then there's the new Space Marine game. I will play through the whole thing on Normal mode before the end of the year. Somatic Dyslexia be damned.

Laying in Bed

My morning ritual since returning from vacation is to lay in bed and make text using either my iPad or my Macbook Air, whichever went on the nightstand before I fell unconscious. As a kid I hated getting up in the morning because some of my best ideas seemed to come to me in that half wakeful state. As an adult, I've typed so many words, I can actually work a keyboard in that same state.

The result is a few thousand words of odd ideas probably inspired by my travels, a fresh perspective and all those potato chips and cottage cheese I ate the night before. Strange and angry dreaming aside, I think that my trip to Seattle wasn't as restful as I would have liked. The Penny Arcade Expo was incredible fun and I hope to make a return visit, but like my typing in bed, it was a somewhat awkward experience.

I mostly abhor any social situation involving more than a half dozen people. To that end, I'm glad we had so many friends present in Seattle with us and a pair of gracious hosts willing to navigate the labyrinthine roads and highways to get us where we needed to go. The weight of the journey always seems to fall sometime after you've returned home.

It's Friday, and tonight I'll get to roll some dice and pretend to be a Lawful Evil Elven Wizard. I have a different outlook on table top RPG gaming than I did previous to visiting PAX. I'm excited to participate for completely different reasons. I guess it takes being in a cramped space with thousands of like minded people to make you realize how much you are part of a culture.

I'd carried a sliver of guilt over the practice because I thought I was leaving myself bereft of more traditional social gatherings. I see now that I'll always have a more intimate connection with my friend playing her Chaotic Good Half-Orc Barbarian than I would passing the salsa at a Super Bowl Party. There's a difference between being on, and rooting for, the same team.

I've laid in my bed typing for almost four hours now, in the dark of my room. It occurs to me, I need to buy better pillows.

Finishing a Book

If you haven't ever finished writing a book, this is what you can expect if you ever do.

Step 1: Stare at the blinking cursor in disbelief. The mind floods with all sorts of chemicals that make you feel awesome and anxious at the same time.

Step 2: Like anything you create, you'll ponder whether or not it will teach others, make friends or just generally cause trouble.

Step 3: You'll want to print the darn thing out as quickly as you can, so you can hold it. The printer will (of course) be out of toner, so you'll have to go to the closest office barn and pay way too much for black gooey stuff for a machine to shoot out onto your paper.

Step 4: The darned thing will get printed out (finally) and you'll realize that you should have gone through it more first, added page numbers and other details that would help in the editing.

Step 5: You'll go and write something ridiculous on your blog or pat yourself on the back via Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etcetera.

Step 6: Suddenly, that sinking feeling will wash over you as you realize it's a first draft. Thousands of words you'll have to go through, over and over again, to make it right.

Step 7: The weight of a few thousand words rests a little lighter on whatever metaphysical force keeps you going. A little of what you were put on the Earth to do... is done.

Step 8: Smile.

The Writing Process

Step 1: Write a 5,000 word outline.

Step 2: Take three weeks using the outline to write a 75,000 word book.

Step 3: Take three months reading your own text and sharing with a few trusted folks to edit and revise the content.

Step 4: Agonize about the content, overburdening your psyche.

Step 5: Rewrite the one chapter you despise setting off a chain-reaction of plot inconsistencies.

Step 6: Spend considerable time assured that you've ruined the work and that it should find a dusty home with "the others".

Step 7: Consumed by the remorse a creative person feels having abandoned one of their children, revisit the work until you've fixed all the plot consistencies.

Step 8: Return to the version of the book written before you rewrote the chapter you hated. Y'know, the one that seems perfectly fine now, in the context of the unaltered plot that makes more sense having revisited the marvelous outline you wrote.

Step 9: Look for rogue and/or absent commas, punctuation and other minutia that 95% of the people who read the work won't notice are amiss.

Step 10: Gaze down upon the finished fictional work and wonder how the devil you're going to get it published and through whom.

Repeat.