Weekend Updates

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I got half of Chapter 15 of The Glass Crown written in one sit-down. Not half bad. The end of the first draft is in sight!

On Saturday, Kaye Draper released the first part of what sounds like a sizable serial series. It’s called Moonlight Calls, and is available on both Kindle and the Nook. If paranormal romance is your thing, give it a look-see!

This didn’t happen this weekend, but for some reason I’m just getting around to it. Tom Brazeau, of Fatherhood fame, has had his story Eyes of an Angel picked up by Pants on Fire Press. Not only that, but it’ll be a hardcover, fully illustrated book. Keep up on either his deviantArt page for updates, as I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait!

Three is a lucky number.

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I have this friend, and she’s a writer. She’s a stealth writer, though, and she uses a pseudonym, which makes it all super mysterious and romantic. It works for her, because she writes stuff that’s both mysterious AND romantic.

After trial, tribulation, revision, editing, jumping through the flaming hoops of the traditional publishing world, revision, rinse, wash, repeat, revise, and then three more iterations of all of that, she has decided to self publish. That’s right, instead of collecting digital dust on her hard drive, she has taken the plunge and made her works available for our hungry eyeballs.

And so, there are three novels, available to you, right now, for the Amazon Kindle! And if you don’t have a Kindle, and you want to read them on another device, all I have to say to you is: What, you’ve never heard of Calibre?

Click one of the links below to satiate your ocular organs:

Two Vampires

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Over on my deviantArt gallery, the weekly fiction updates continue with the first part of my short story, Two Vampires. The story follows Megan and her progeny Nicholas through their quest to find the Mother, the prophesied progenitor of their line. They must avoid the Hunter, who is both true to his name and passionate about ending their time on this earth.

Give it a read.

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She loves me!

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Nikki got me a video game. Not only that, but she got me a Dreamcast game. Not only did she get me a Dreamcast game, but she got it at my favorite used video game store.  Not only did she get me a Dreamcast game at my favorite used video game store, she got me my favorite Dreamcast game of all time… HYDRO THUNDER!

And now that I’ve finally given my third-party Dreamcast controller a workout, I’ve discovered that it has not aged well. I sense shopping in the future!

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Proud StepDad

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Hunter is on the honor roll, and I’m taking work off tomorrow to attend the awards ceremony. He worked his butt off to get to this point, and I am incredibly proud.

Tonight is his parent-teacher conference, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for Good Things(tm) there as well.

House

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At every point in this process, I was sure something would fail, and the whole thing would fall apart. It took us so long to find a house that we both wanted, let alone one that we both loved enough to want to live in for twenty years or more. I was convinced, no, I was certain that such a house didn’t exist.

If the universe did break, and such a house did exist, there was no way in hell that it would be in our price range.

It took us months, but we found a house. Neither of us was turned off by it. Neither of us was “meh” about it. We both wanted it. Sure, it didn’t have the bigger kitchen that Nikki wanted, and it didn’t have the garage that I wanted, but what it had made up for that. More than. The price was even doable, though it wouldn’t be the improvement over renting that we had been hoping for. So, we got pre-approved, contacted our landlord about getting out of the lease early, and… we stopped. Our landlord considered “out early” as three months, not eight. We hadn’t communicated how quickly we might want to move, so we put ourselves on pause.

And then the price dropped. We were sure it would get snatched up.

And then the price dropped again. We were biting our nails and pulling our hair out and gnashing our teeth. There was no way someone wouldn’t buy it out from under us. It’s only a mild exaggeration to say that we were wailing and rending our clothes in preemptive despair.  MILD.

And then the price dropped. AGAIN. We couldn’t wait any longer, and so we toured it again. Dad (Remember him? The superhero?) came out too, so he could point out things that we might miss through rose-colored classes. We found some stuff, he found some stuff, and we sent a list of all the stuff off to the owner, in hopes that he’d fix the stuff before we moved in. We got an affirmative response, and were off to the races.

  • Pre-approved again.
  • Came to an agreement with the landlord about getting out of the lease.
  • Offered, counter-offered, and jumped up and down when it was accepted. Pending inspection, of course.
  • Had inspection, pest inspection, radon inspection, FHA appraisal (inspection), and inspection inspection.
  • Sent another list of stuff to the seller, got another affirmative response, more jumping up and down.
  • Jumped through approximately twelve and a half billion hoops constructed from mortgage paperwork and then set on fire. (Way better than my first mortgage, which was FAR too easy for me to get.)
  • Signed on the house.
  • Moved in.

We got it. The universe is well and truly broken, because I am once again a homeowner. The yard is a kid’s paradise, there are enough rooms so that everyone has their own, and there’s an office (read: writing room) for me and Nikki to share.

There’s still some minor things we need to fix (who puts a railing into plaster without anchors?), but they’re minor.  The Bancroft house has been turned over to
the landlord. We really, actually did it.

What really gets me is that while Hunter will remember the house on Bancroft, the younger ones will only ever remember this house as home. I’m gonna do my best to make it a good one.

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In which I learned something.

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Monday, I was wrong. I was grumpy and tired, as I usually get when we lose an hour during the spring Daylight Savings Time adjustment. I vaguely remembered from somewhere in my school career that the clocks were changed for the benefit of farmers. And since I couldn’t remember exactly, I asked Twitter.

I got one response, and I couldn’t really argue with it.

My assumption was that DST was something that only the United States, and maybe a few others, still practiced. A backward, holding-on-to-the-past nonsense custom that we should really get rid of. You know, like our refusal to use the metric system.

Turns out, we’re not. We’re not even one among a few. I found this article, and this map:

The blue bits are where DST is observed. The orange bits are where it’s formally observed. The red bits chuck it to the wind. If you count formal and actual observing, most of the world still observes DST.

So, I learned that one of my preconceptions was not only off, but completely erroneous. The origins of DST have nothing to do with farmers. Farmers lobby against it, in fact. It’s observed over quite a bit of the world. So, in about a year from now, I’m going to try for less grumbling and more coffee, ready at hand.

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Forward Motion

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Chapters 12 and 13 of the Glass Crown are done. Not only that, but some brainstorming with the wonderful wife has driven me to actually come up with the details and the whys of the end. There was a lot of her asking “Why?” and me replying with generalities and hand-waving. And because she is the Nikki, she continued to respond with “Why?” until I came up with some actual answers. I never thought two- and three-year-old questioning processes could produce such useful results. ;)

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