Hey everyone, I just wanted to get on and say that I won’t be updating the Blog and Podcast as regularly for a little bit. With Summer approaching my time is going to be incredibly limited. I have taken on more than usual for this time of year. I want to still focus on my writing and programming amidst my wild schedule, so that means my blog is going to be slower to update. I’ll still stop in from time to time with updates and fun things I’ve found. I am about done with another website to share with you guys.

I will be updating my activity bars on the front page while I work. The last set of edits for THE FOREST AWAKENS is coming along nicely! While I’ve been plotting the next book I was planning to write, another has crept into my interest. So now I’m plotting two books to see which I want to work on next. I think this new idea would be much faster, so it might win out.

I’m also pretty active on Twitter, so if you want updates you can find me there!

Around the start of the new year I added a new update bar for the front page to keep track of this year’s writing goal. It occurred to me the other day that I forgot to EXPLAIN what the darn thing means. It’s really very simple. In years past I have made complex writing goals and I found them stressful.

So instead I took a different approach. I looked at how many words a day it would take to accomplish a book being fully written and edited. I decided on 500 words, enough to fully write and edit a book that is around 75,000 words, and then to still have enough left over to work on my podcast stories.

I get my words two ways:

1. The old fashioned way, you know, actual writing.
2. 3 drafts of edits are equal to the number of words I wrote.

This basically means that the final draft of a 2,000 word story is worth 4,000 words toward my yearly goal (2K written, 2K edited). As I expected, I’m a bit behind on my percentage but I’m not stressing it. Summer is usually when I get a big bulk of my yearly writing done (I just have more time for it). Those days I tend to do far more than 500 words so it will make up for a small bit of slacking the rest of the year.

I hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas. I feel like we haven’t stopped moving this entire holiday season, from Thanksgiving until now, but I expect (or maybe just hope) that things will be very different after this week. I’ll be out of classes until the second week in January or so and it will just be regular ‘ol working for me. That’ll be a nice change. It will also mean two solid weeks of some hardcore writing. Huzzah! I expect I’ll be able to finish The Forest Awakens during those two weeks. And also get a few new podcast episodes written. *fingers crossed*

Christmas has be FUN so far too though. We had my wife’s grandmother for our traditional pre-Christmas chicken enchiladas last night. Yum yum! We opened our presents and got to talk. I think it says a lot about me that my wife bought me a medieval lego set, I got her the new Donkey Kong Country Wii game. Hehe. Today we’re off to the family ranch to spend the remainder of the time with most of my family. That means there will be a whole lot of kids there. There is nothing like doing Christmas morning with a whole lot of little children.

I hope you guys all have a good Xmas too. Feel free to let me know what you’ll be up to! I always like a good Xmas story. And for fun, this is a trailer for the game. Cause it looks awesome and we can’t wait to play it!

The Lands of Draknor is something that has been rolling around in my head for a very long time. I still remember the very first short story I wrote in that world. Ashthranh, mercenary for the Gods, and a murderous task. It was a very simplistic tale back then, written by a 16-year-old Sophomore in high school, but it started something much bigger. Over time that simple plot changed a great deal, but the main protagonist, Ashthran the Dryth, never did. Working on these podcasts, many of them being set at various periods in time in the world of Draknor, has really made me want to get back into the creation of this world. And so I think I will. I am getting close to finishing the final draft of The Forest Awakens, so I believe my assassin novel will have to be put off yet again to make way for something much more significant to me.

Check back next Tuesday for the full audio of Marked By The Dragon!

Hello everyone, Halloween is upon us! Things hiding in the dark and all that. This year is kind of a bummer for me on my near-favorite holiday. *sighs* I’m sick, again. This year has been filled with sickness, I hates it, precious! On top of that, I get to work tonight, yay… I don’t ever get scheduled to work Sundays so I was a bit bummed about it. Samantha gets to go trick-or-treating with my sister and her kiddos. I would much prefer to do that. Oh well…

I’ve been productive lately, in a not-so-bloggy kind of way. I’m sure you guys are used to my quietness by now so I’ll stop apologizing for it. Muahah. But I’ve been reading and writing a lot. The Forest Awakens has an entirely new prologue and a new chapter one has been fully fleshed out as well (the writing has just begun). You may be thinking… your percent bar doesn’t really reflect still working on the first chapter, but, alas, it does. These are the two main goals for this draft. I’ve touched up chapters here and there in no particular order, but this is the meat of what I hope is the final, final draft that brings me an agent.

Pushed to the Edge is coming to a close soon. I’ve been too sick to write this week so it’s going to get delayed a week. I tried (and actually completed) a draft of it. But I hit the magic button and it got DELETED. Trust me, it was for the best. I have about 1000 words of a newer, much better version.

To finish, here are some books I’ve read lately. We’re hyped up for Towers of Midnight coming out Tuesday!

• His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell
• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Things are finally calming down around here. This means part 3 of Adventures Through the Window got finished up for a new podcast episode tomorrow! Huzzah! I’m happy to get back into writing. My other Summer project is to get a lot done of the rewrite of The Forest Awakens. I’m excited about this new take on the book. I’ve figured out places to add much richer descriptions, and more insight into the childrens’ reactions to the events unfolding around them. Multiple agents pointed out these changes to me, making me confident the effort will make the story that much more appealing to future agents, and the kiddos who will hopefully one day enjoy it.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow to listen to the first podcast in over a month!

I wanted to stop by and let everyone know of some changes that are going on in the podcast. Considering that you’ve probably realized this isn’t a usual podcast post, I’ll talk about the most obvious change. We’re going to start taking two weeks between the stories we tell. We’re going to do this for a number of reasons, but mostly it’s for me to have time to plot and the like. It takes me a bit to come up with a new story after the last one ends, I spend a few days working out all the problems and kinks. I would love to be able to make writing my full time job, but sadly that is not the case, not yet anyway!

So, now for the first week following the end of a story, we’ll be posting the story in full as usual. Then, the week after that, I’m going to post about what the next story will be, and use that post as the link on the front page of the site where I track percentages. That way you guys have an idea of what will be coming! So without any further delay, let’s talk about next week’s story!

Because of Alice in Wonderland coming back into our lives, I’ve been thinking a lot about making a story in a fantastical world of nonsense. It’s had me thinking in nonsense a lot, which is quite fun, if I do say so myself (and I do). So next Tuesday we will begin part one of Adventures Through The Window,  a fun twist of Lewis Carroll’s titles.

About Adventures Through the Window

In this story, young James feels like he is just another face in a large school until a mysterious substitute teacher takes an interest in him. Despite his cautious nature, James can’t help his curiosity when he happens to see the man walk through a large glass window on his way home from school one day! Unable to stop himself, James finds himself following his new teacher into a world unlike anything he’s ever experienced. To get back out again, James must not only find his way, but find himself as well.

Samantha made this from scratch!

Well I attempted to write this yesterday, you know, on my birthday, but things kept coming up. It was a great day! For me, birthdays are what New Years is to others. It’s a time to look at what you’ve accomplished this year, and using what you’ve learned to make the next year better. This year, it was mostly about writing for me.

I realized that I haven’t done a writing update in awhile while I was thinking about what this coming year will mean to me as a writer. I’ve gotten behind on it. First of all, The Forest Awakens jumped up to 100% on my editing goal. It’s pretty good, grammatically speaking. The rejections I’ve gotten from agents have made me look at it under a new microscope though. They all like my writing, they all like the story idea, but they all also said they didn’t connect with the main character enough.

I’ve more or less come to the inevitable question that most writers probably go through. My assassin book has been sitting at about 20% completed on the backburner while I edited TFA, and now I have to decide if I want to work on the changes to my YA novel that agents have suggested, or if I want to put it aside for now and finish my new book?

Currently I’m leaning toward another draft of The Forest Awakens. It would be a big draft, basically rewriting many parts of it, although most of the current material doesn’t need to be cut, just have more added to it. We shall see over the next couple days, while I have a podcast to finish anyway.

Happy (now late) Birthday to meeeee!