A crisis averted

(A note: I really hated titles like the one I've given this blog. I see them turn up all the time, for some reason, on fantasy novels and romance novels. A battle joined, a heart unloved, a man unmarried, a darkness rising. Sigh. They're just boring.)

The situation around here was getting pretty desperate for this past week. Tensions were really mounting, I was coming unhinged and uncertain how I would continue writing, let alone living a life and being an asset to my family. The problem was inescapable and it was swallowing my life.

I'd run out of tea.

It just happened that way. We're too busy for a trip to the Twin Cities, and frankly we're too poor to hit up the one store that sells any sort of loose leaf tea here in town (Byerly's).

So, bit by bit, the tea in the house had dwindled down to the desperate situation I was in yesterday morning: I had some African rooibos, another kind of rooibos that my wife owned and, because my sister was out of town, I could have a pot of her expensive white tea, mostly because she wasn't there to stop me. I was jonesin'! I was even reduced to making pots of tea using b-...ba-...No, I can do this....bags. I was in a real bad place.

(Rooibos tea is delicious and I love it no end, but it's non-caffeinated and, like green tea, is cleansing and calming and relaxing tea. So it mostly makes me sleepy. I'm trying to finish my Rome novel by October 31st! I don't need sleepy and cleansed! Plus, one can only drink so much Rooibos.)

Perhaps you doubt those were the only teas I had? All right, you've got me: I have a tin of Irish Breakfast, and Yorkshire Gold. Both of which produce such a thick, harsh, bitter tea that I find it undrinkable, despite my best efforts. Milk hasn't helped. Neither have a bit of honey. They taste nearly like coffee. They don't count.

Also, I knew that Lori Basiewicz was sending me tea. This was for a bet we had, racing to see how much of our respective novels we could finish in a given amount of time. I was in mortal terror, picturing her as this great machine, rolling and churning and steaming and sending out a constant stream of thousands of words a day. So I kicked into high gear, in terror every time I stopped, and turned out well over twenty thousand words in the week we raced. She, to my chargrine, was apparently a bit busy and wound up writing less and editing what she had.

So she owed me tea and she'd just now mailed it out. So I knew that, on Wednesday of this coming week, I can expect a package with Indian tea in it. I'm delighted, because I've never had Indian tea and have no idea what to expect. But Wednesday is a lifetime away!

Yesterday, a god smiled down upon me and had mercy. I think it was Bacchus.

First, my sister got home from visiting my parents, who live in Washington D.C. right now.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I chortled in my joy. She had brought me tea from a really nice tea store down there. Orange spice. I've had a pot last night and it tastes like love. Which is such a stupid description, but there you go. It's delicious, it's got the sharp undercurrent of spice, a taste of orange which appears on the back of your throat (and as the tea cools) and the whole thing tastes warm and filling and invigorating. Magnificent stuff.

Several hours later, my wife and I went grocery shopping, which was a logical progression from the realization that we had no food. We shopped for the better part of an hour. I had mentioned earlier that I wanted to stop by the tea aisle and buy a box of Constant Comment tea bags, as an emergency supply for the next time I ran out of proper tea.

We nearly forgot. We were almost done and back up to the front of the store. It's an easy aisle to forget: three-fourths of it is full of baby stuff, the last bit is mostly coffee with tea wedged in as an afterthought.

I went down the tea bit, I picked up my box of Constant Comment, and then I looked to my left...

...and discovered that my grocery store all of a sudden sold loose leaf tea.

Not just that! They sell it in the large pouring containers that are common in most grocery stores with coffee beans: you put the bag over the nozzle and tilt the handle and coffee pours out. They have it for tea now! Not the highest quality, I think (I've never heard of the brand) but loose leaf no less and fairly cheap.

They had two rows, perhaps sixteen or twenty varities. So in giggly delight, I got some Earl Gray, because life is better with that, and I got a couple ounces of China Gunpowder tea, because I've never had it and always wanted to try it. They also had Black Currant tea and English Breakfast tea, the other two that immediately jumped out at me. My wife bought some fruity teas which are sometimes not too bad.

If there is a god of tea, he has rewarded my faith well unto this life. I am a saved soul! Or, in the passive sentence theme I started with my blog title, I am A Soul Saved, or A Soul that was to be saved, if we want to get wildly passive.

I can't talk anymore. I have to go drink tea!

Things Sane People Don't Do

As anyone who talks to me on a regular basis -- in a situation where I'm prone to musing -- can attest to, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about fairly insane things which I would love to do and then write an article about them. Vague? Yeah. I have a big series of long articles which would be physically grueling (and a bit dangerous) that I would love to try to do. I don't want to go into detail on that one because I still do hope, someday, to carry it out. My wife, who is sane and patient and has a more normal view of danger than I do, thinks that it's an awful idea and doesn't want me to do it (which is why I'm not, right now). I am ever hopeful.

Anyway. One idea which has just crossed my mind at the moment, which I could feasibly try without too much difficulty -- because it doesn't involve leaving the house -- would be along article chronicling going several days and nights without any sleep at all.

What I've read on the internet indicates that one can actually go a fair amount of time without sleep (one discussion claims thirteen days to a month). This is lunatic and not at all practical. What I wonder about, though, is three days, four nights. Something like that. And while I'm doing that, I would still go about my day to day stuff, see how that changes as I run down on sleep. I would also keep a running document going on the laptop and I add to it now and then, as things change.

I don't know that it would make a valuable article to anyone (for one thing, I bet it's been done), but it would make an interesting blog article. And it would be interesting to try.

Partly because there are shows like Survivorman as well as Morgan Spurlock's fascinating 30 Days series.

(I think that if I weren't a writer-with-family, I would be some sort of weirdo survivalist)

That's the sort of nutty things I come up with and go "Cool, how can I feasibly do that?"

(I'm not completely nuts: My second thought is always how can I do this safely?)

Icky Thud

I just broke the blog layout. Never fear. I'll either repair it, or break it worse. What could go wrong?

Icky Thump

Well, I did it. I shored up my courage and I...canceled God in the Machine.

I was nervous about doing it, I felt ashamed for it, as if I'd given in. In a way I have. These things don't work for a huge number of reasons. For me, the series worked all by itself, but *I* couldn't physically manage it. I talked about it a bit on the site.

Ten minutes after pulling the episodes and writing my apologetic newspost, I felt 1) Relieved at not having to turn out another episode and 2) Excited that I can now spend today, tomorrow, and ever-more time working on my Rome novel. Really excited about that.

I think those two feelings confirm that, shame aside, this was the right thing to do.

...

Yesterday, Rllgthunder mentioned in a comment section that I'd been blogging a lot more. The reason for that is, I have dramatically scaled back exactly what I'm doing on the computer. I have limited myself to E-mail, to posting on this blog, and to posting on Lori's blog. That's it. No IM, no AW, nothin'. If I want to kill time beyond that, I go off onto the internet and read interesting articles and learn things. Or I read...books. Mostly, because none of those things are immediate interactivity required (the things I'm limited to), it means I'm more easily willing to forget about the browser and just write away. I've done nine thousand words in the past two days. I don't know how much I'll get done today, but by Saturday night, I full intend to hit 80,000 words in my Rome novel.

I mapped it out. I was planning for two weeks until the end of October, with a few random days on the side for God in the Machine episodes. Now, I have over two weeks -- almost three? -- to finish writing Rome. I can absolutely do that. Then, for November, I will put Rome totally aside and write the first draft of The Nondescript for NaNo. Then, come December, I will return to Rome to edit and revise and start sending out query letters (don't make me write one. Please? I hate query letters) and trying to sell it.

I figure mid-December, early January, I'll start writing God in the Machine as a trilogy of books, which I can do without losing anything from the story.

So there's my day. I'm going to go have a celebratory drink of tea in honor of failing at the online game. (Smiley face goes here.)

Addendum: I have just realized, with no small amount of irony attached, that in a post made on this very blog in January of this year, I touched upon...well...mostly everything that I'm touching on right now. 1) Robots. 2) AW 3) Trying to get away from technology. Yessir, when it comes to consistently touching, I'm your guy. (Please don't send me to jail.)

I can has no technology plz?

Slowly, slowly, I've been getting more and more disgruntled with technology, something which is fairly easy to do since I'm a technology junkie and have a house full of the stuff. I think a lot of this came about at the same time as my television interests changed, as well as all the mental alterations I talked about below (in Winds of Change, and now I'm whistling it again...)

So, the result is that I have a large volume of technology in the house, all of which I'm finding specific reasons not to have in my life. It's not healthy for me as a writer, and perhaps for me as a human being. Whether or not it's doing you any good either, dear reader, is up to you. This may be a problem only to me.

Let me list technologies and complain about them in turn.

1) iPod - The iPod was a big deal for me. I do not have a driver's license, I never have, as I've mentioned previously on this blog. This is because I had no interest in driving when I was a teenager, so I never bothered to get one. The iPod was big deal because I walk everywhere, which affords me plenty of time to listen to music. HOWEVER... the problem was, I realized that I was going for walks with headphones on and plugging myself into all sorts of noise. This was just an escalation of the problem that presented itself when I got my current cell-phone, a Motorola SLVR, which has a built in MP3 player of sorts. Noise! Noise! Noise! So I stopped bringing the iPod on walks several months back and watched as ideas formed in my head better. Less noise.

2) DVR Cable box - This might be TiVo to you, but we have a local sort of box from our cable company. You know the deal: I can record TV shows, I can pause, fast forward, re-wind live television, all that yaz, right? Right. HOWEVER... several nights ago, when we discovered that we had three television shows set to record at the same time, we knew that the box could only record two shows at once. That meant if we wanted to see the third program, we had to watch it on a different television. So my wife and I went to the bedroom and watched it on the small TV there. THAT cable box has no special features. What we realized was that during the commercial breaks, which we could not skip, we talked more. We got up and did things. In short, we didn't sit there and vegetable in front of the TV all the way through the program. The DVR box is another noise problem. It means I have all the content I want without any pauses, any moments of free thought. That's bad.

3) Napster - Napter is more of the same. The joy and the curse of Napster is that I instantly have a huge library of music right at my fingertips. I don't even download the songs most of the time, I can just add them to my Now Playing box and instantly have tons of things to listen to. HOWEVER... I very quickly realized that I was spending time building playlists and choosing really exciting and fun music at any given moment. That meant that I wasted time choosing music, and when chosen, the music was what I was interested in right that moment and was, therefore, distracting. I have therefore set up a big bulky stereo on a book shelf just next to where I work. It's big and loud enough to fill the house, when I want it to. It's permenantly tuned to my local Public Radio station which plays really enjoyable classical music. That's what I get in my day, when I want music. I can enjoy it, I can work around it. It's not noise, it's an enjoyable background sound.

4) Instant Messaging Programs - This is a fairly small and simple problem, although it was proving to be problematic. I get very tied to the program when I'm talking to someone. Whatever I do around the house, I do it within vicinity of the computer so I can see when a new message comes in. Plus, if it's a good conversation, I wind up spending the day enjoying that instead of writing.

5) Message Boards (forums) - Again, this is a pretty specific problem. I only visit one message board. Absolute Write. I tend to come and go from there in spurts, for reason which I will keep mostly to myself (perhaps you can guess; I wouldn't be surprised). Every now and then, I get too enamored in some conversation, usually an irrelevant one and again, I wind up paying too much attention there. The problem is that, as with all this other stuff, it just becomes noise and I wind up not thinking and not writing.

My head isn't anywhere where I can work with all this stuff. So I wind up losing hours out of my day, miserable and depressed. This in turn affects my relationship with Zach. I have noticed that today, which I spent almost entirely internet and technology free, Zach and I had the first day where we were peaceful. He was never crying, I was never angry and yelling. That's a big step for us. I think they're related.

It's too much noise. Society, if you'll pardon thirty seconds of preachy crap, is just full of noise and instant gratification and noise. We live in the contradictory age where we are absolutely inundated and obsessed with ways to communicate with each other...and yet we are almost incapable of communicating with each other and we avoid thinking.

Mostly, I wind up reading about authors of the past and admiring people like Rudyard Kipling, with his technology-free life, his beautiful estates where he walked, his large desk where he wrote by hand.

I write on computer mostly out of necessity, and this is one piece of the technology addiction I cannot escape: I am painfully aware that it takes me far, far longer to write a thousand words on paper than on computer and I don't always have that luxury. Or I don't have the patience for it. I still write by hand a great deal. Never all. Never enough.

I adore my fountain pen. I like that I go through ink cartridges because it gives the sense of producing something, just like going through sheafs of paper does.

When I had it, as I stated in the comments section of a previous post, I really adored the hell out of my typewriter. Man-o-man.

So there. My technology rant. I'll try not to rant anymore, but I think I've got one more coming. But that one, I think I'll turn into an article and sell for some cashy-money. Yes.

What bits of technology are you aware are an impediment (or beginning to think of as one) in your life and want to get rid of? And are you going to?

No, NOW I'm going to write...

I was just heading offline when I saw, via Yahoo! News that Doris Lessing has won a Nobel prize.

That just makes me happy. I haven't read her most well-known work The Golden Notebook, but I have enjoyed the bits of her material I have read.

So I went off and found an interview with her, from 1999, and I enjoyed that even more. What a wonderful woman. I should love to sit down and talk to her.

Also, Harold Bloom didn't want her to win. So that makes me happy. Because if I haven't mentioned it here before, Harold Bloom is a stuck-up asshole of cataclysmic proportions. He's as snobbish as Nabokov. I am embarrassed by the both of them.

So now, made happier and prouder to be a writer after reading her interview, I'm going to go do some writing myself.

Addendum: And her reaction to winning the prize is charm itself. I hope I'm so charming at eighty-eight years old, but fear that when someone comes round to tell me I've won a prize, I'll be yelling at them to bugger off my lawn while throwing rocks at squirrels, or something. (When you read this article, watch the little video clip available on the left side of the article. She's fun to listen to. What a nice person.)

Brain Games

I've been thinking, off and on all week, that I should discontinue God in the Machine before it gets rolling too far along and I wind up disappointing both readers who enjoy it.

The reasoning is easy: It's not making money. I am a stay-at-home parent and full-time writer, which therefore means I need to Make Money, Damn It. Time spent writing robots is time not spent finishing my Roman novel and getting it out there, or preparing notes for my next novel (which I'm going to talk about a little further in an upcoming post).

On the other hand, I like having a serial, most of the time. The weekly schedule was a horrible idea, because I burned out badly on it (and I quietly think you can tell when you read Voice, Echo, Silence, Part 2; and the difference is huge compared to Voice, Echo, Silence, Part 3, which was written in a much less burnt-out state). But it's kind of fun.

So mostly, I've been indecisive about keeping it, just as I was indecisive about starting it in the first place. I just keep writing. It's the easiest option.

Then, yesterday, as I'm lying in bed wondering why I thought a biiig mug of caffeinated tea was such a super idea before bedtime, the story of God in the Machine arrives in my head, neat and tidy and entirely capable of being told in novel form. A long novel, but a single novel nonetheless.

That was one of the reasons I made it a serial in the first place: Because the story was just too long and too complex to be told in anything less than several novels. Maybe you can get a hint of that through the episodic format, maybe not. Regardless, that was a mighty tempting revelation. I like to think it'd make a pretty good novel.

Which is not to say I'm ending the series or anything. I'm just stewing.

...

I spent three happy hours yesterday writing my Rome novel (have I told you the title of it yet? No? It has one, finally. I'm very pleased). This chapter, oddly enough, is structured like a stand-alone episode, as if the Roman novel were a serial. I'm wondering if the remaining chapters will structure themselves like that. I really wouldn't mind. I wonder if they would have done it anyway, or if this is the result of my other major project being a serial.

If so, that's a good reason to keep doing a serial. I write best in that format (I don't know if you can tell. The robot stories come faster and easier and more confidently. I know when I've written something good. I know when it sings and when it rasps. I can play a serial like a musical instrument. With novels, I'm like a man in an iron lung with a tuba).

...

I am technically Not On The Internet Thank You. This is because I realized, yesterday, that I had gone beyond moderation and was spending all my time online. I don't have good middle gears, so when something like this happens, I just cut myself off the internet almost entirely and go do other things until I can approach the internet with some sensibility. So I am answering my e-mail in the morning and in the evenings (when my wife is home and I am therefore less likely to spend much time online). The only reason I'm posting this is, I'm eating lunch.

I'm still on the computer too much, I just flick the switch that turns off the wireless internet. I wish I had an old electric typewriter, I think I'd do some articles and short stories on that and be a happy camper. Of course, living in an apartment makes this impractical. My neighbors would think I'm firing off guns at 100-shots-per-minute. Then again, if they came and complained, I could dispatch them much easier with a heavy typewriter than with a small laptop. It's the difference between hitting someone with a baseball bat and a loofah.

And now I'm blithering. So I'll head back offline, thank you so much.

Winds of Change

Unlike the song, "Winds of Change," I will not begin this article by whistling at you for a very long time.

What I'm talking about today started when I was eleven years old. I remember it very distinctly, it's been something I've thought about over the years.

One day, when I was in my room, I looked down at my action figures for whatever reason and I realized that I had gone days, perhaps weeks, without playing with them. Moreover, I realized this didn't particularly bother me any.

Prior to this, I played with them constantly. They were my first storytelling medium, before and during my discovery of things like pens and papers, and typewriters, and eventually computers. They were all individual characters with histories and personalities. The adventures and stories were long-running and as episodic and detailed as anything I've done so far with God in the Machine. I never really played with anyone else -- at least, not in this manner -- for probably the same reason I don't collaborate with other writers easily today: Because it's easier just to do it myself, since I already know how it all goes.

But anyway: When I looked at them and realized that I was going lengthy periods of time without being interested in them, I thought very clearly, I have grown out of this and into new things.

Two things came with that: First, the feeling of sadness, the idea that something once loved was now just a memory and a shell. Secondly, the confusion and fascination at actually being aware of this moment.

The first was transitory and passed easily. I remember after this thought occurred, that I sat down on the floor and I played with them...but there was no joy in it. There was no creation. I was just going through the motions of games and stories told years prior, and I knew it. My interests were in new things. I had new books, I was writing steadily (steadily, hell, I was writing prolifically; I wish I could still write as fast and easily as I did when I was eleven). My games were more outdoors. There had been places I'd lived prior where it wasn't really safe to travel around the town, but this wasn't one of those places. This was a pretty good place, despite having the built-in fault of being located in Nevada. I had begun to discover music, as well as television. I was still a few years away from discovering the internet and the delight of multiplayer gaming. I had discovered girls, of course, because boys discover girls thirty seconds after they are born, but girls were still a different planet than me. It would be another three years before I would meet a pretty, funny girl who would eventually become my wife.

The second feeling, the confusion and fascination, is the bit which sticks with me over the years. In hindsight, what has always struck me about it is the awareness of the moment, of realizing "Here, at this moment, I have outgrown this" and knowing deep down that it really was true (and it was. I never played with them again).

Something I talked about at length in a previous article on this blog, Bags, Bones & Heartstrings, was the gifty-curse of self-awareness that writers have: that is to say that you could be crying your heart out and, somewhere in the back of your head, be thinking coldly so this is what it's like...

I think of my moment realization as being part of that same thing. It's the same cold piece saying "And this is where your interests shifted away entirely. You know this."
What got me thinking about this moment actively -- and discussing it here, in turn -- was the movie The Weather Man, with Nicholas Cage.

Bear with me here.

It was a terrific movie, I walked away from it feeling happy and thinking I would have liked to have written that. That was something of a new feeling toward that kind of movie.

This was in tandem with someone recommending that I check out a historical fiction sub-forum, over at AbsoluteWrite. I've been there for years and years and didn't even know it was there, so I happily went over. And while I was browsing, I realized that my current novel -- my Roman novel -- is not exactly historical fiction, but it's closer to that than anything else. And my next novel is set in the '20s and '30s and is very definitely a historical novel. In neither novel is there anything science-fictional, nothing fantasy, nothing really horror (except the mundane, grisly horrors that pop up in life out of certain situations; I mean there's nothing supernatural).

And I thought, very clearly, as if I were eleven again: I am not a science fiction writer.

I've been stewing on that for a couple of days now, and that meant I really thought about it. I've been getting enormous pleasure out of reading Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton, which is a space-opera sort of science fiction novel. Part of the enormous pleasure comes from the fact that I haven't read something like this with any enjoyment in a lot of years. So much of science fiction which I buy, perhaps out of habit, goes unread. Likewise, I don't particularly enjoy huge whallops of fantasy. Harry Potter was the last proper fantasy work I read.

There are still authors of the fantastic I read. Gene Wolfe is perhaps classified as science fiction, but I don't know that he really is entirely. Neil Gaiman writes fantasy, sure, I guess. I have no idea what genre you would put Stephen King into anymore (and don't care, I delight in him wherever he is).

The books I've taken bigger delight in reading, recently, have been things like Eagle in the Snow by Wallace Breem, a novel I began reading because it was about Roman soldiers and a novel which I finished reading because I just couldn't stop, it was too powerful. Or Pompeii, by Robert Harris, which was more or less the same situation. Beyond that, I read non-fiction, or I read much older science fiction and fantasy (where modern sci-fi is so frequently impenetrable to me, Isaac Asimov is still like an easy old friend).

And as I think further about this, I consider my television habits. Very abruptly, at the beginning of the summer which is now abandoning us, I lost all interest in the movie channels we had, in most of the re-runs, in most of the story-shows. I spent the summer devouring the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel. I re-discovered a delight and enthusiasm in deep sea marine biology and watched all manner of programs on the topic, then wandered off to read and study. Science became more interesting to me than science fiction. The science of the future delighted me more than the science of the fantastic.

The disjointing part of all of this -- and the part where you perhaps begin to think I've gone utterly mad -- is the strange feeling in my brain, a sort of off-kilter feeling, as if I can feel the gears of my brain shifting over. It's like a factory that's shutting down so workers can program the equipment for new materials and molds. Is that a cheesy metaphor? Probably. But it's what I've got. I go back and forth on all of this as I think about it, but there's no denying the fact that my short stories -- as those who read them can attest -- grow more and more quietly fantastic and more about people. If there is a fantastic element, a science fiction element, it's deep in the background. And as I look at the novel ideas which I am excited about working on, they really aren't fantastic, except in the sense of people. There's no smash-bang Star Wars novel in my future, for example.

This is so much fun. What fun would writing be if nothing ever changed? I love the big shifts and the weird days of feeling off-kilter. Couldn't be more happy about it.

And now, I've gone on at great length about it too.

I'm still alive, for those who care. :oP

I hate to interrupt Pete's prolific blogging, but I thought I'd pop on and mention that I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. We've had a lot going on lately, and then I ended up with a nasty sinus *thing* that I think was partially due to allergies, thanks to our psychotic PA weather.

I'm mostly feeling better, except for the massive Jupiter-sized Boulder-O-Stress lounging across my shoulders. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that something's gotta give here soon, and it's probably going to be what's left of my sanity.

The Most Dangerous Night of Television!

First off, let me say how utterly hilarious it is that the title of this post is the catch-line of the Sci-Fi Channel. It's so...accurate. What could be more dangerous than watching Flash Gordon? Or maybe a special encore presentation of I was Eaten By A Fifty Foot Atomic Woman Spider 2 or whatever movie they're kicking around that week. Dangerous, even if you've never been inclined toward hanging yourself in the past.

...

The awkward part of having conversations with my friends is the bit where we come around to discussing television. What I, and my wife watch on television are not the things we should be logically watching, based on the rest of our interests.

For example, I do not watch Dr. Who. I do not watch Battlestar Galactica. I have had no inclination, despite the insistence of my friends that I would love them.

My TV tastes wander to the opposite end of the spectrum from the rest of my tastes. My favorite shows are things like House and Shark and my favorite shows are Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe and Survivorman on the Discovery Channel.

Beyond that, I watch other things, mostly with my wife. (On my own, I watch very little television). We watch things like C.S.I and The Biggest Loser and Ghost Hunters and Medium. You get the idea where my tastes range.

In my reading, though, I come across the fascinating idea that we have a whole new collection of sci-fi shows coming out this year...and no one's apparently interested in 'em. They are expected to suck harder than Flash Gordon. And that sucks pretty hard.

Nonetheless, the commercials started to catch my attention. So I watched some things. And here's what I thought.

...

Heroes: Season 2

I was a huge fan of Heroes season one, as mentioned previously on this blog. It didn't work for me for quite a while into the series...until I stopped trying to think about it like a TV series and started treating it like a comic book, with each episode being an issue. Then it works perfectly. The weird pacing problems that bothered me fell into place and I was absolutely riveted.

The ending was weak to season 1, but the story was great and I was a very happy man. I was delighted and overjoyed at each episode and giddy for the next one to come.

Heroes Season 2 starts off strong, following our characters from last season. I really like where they are right now, I like what we're getting to see them do. Hiro is adorable, Nathan is really fascinating and the Clare's dad (I can't remember his name all of a sudden) is the star of this episode just in a couple of scenes. Absolutely wonderful. I can't wait for the next episode.

Journeyman

"It's Quantum Leap," I said to my wife when we first saw the commercials. "It's Quantum Leap, without Sam!"

"It looks interesting," she thought.

So we recorded it. As I saw more and more commercials, I got more and more interested. So I was gently excited when I sat down to watch it.

Absolutely wonderful. I really like a TV episode where the ending has me grinning happily all the way through. The time travel was handled well, the reaction to it was handled logically, and I am looking forward to see where we go from here. I also like TV shows where it ends and the writer in me is busy figuring out where the storylines will go. How will his wife react? How will everyone else handle this? How is HE going to handle this? It's less about time travel and it's more of a character study, and I think that makes it stronger. It also isn't goofy, but there is a mild humor in it.

And the main star has such a cool arched eyebrow. This was a very good show, and I'm really looking forward to where it goes. It ended and I went "Oh wow...that was cool!"

Bionic Woman

The previews sounded cool. So we watched the first episode. It wasn't bad. I wasn't blown away, but there's definitely potential for the future episodes. The pilot episode was pretty self-contained (it was an origin story, all-told).

The special effects were just cool. This show, and Heroes, both really make me wish that Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was being done now, because we'd get a great love story and some killer Superman effects, which we sadly lacked when the show was originally on.

I'm undecided about this one. I need to see where the story tries to go from here before I care, one way or the other. But it didn't actively turn me off and the battle was really cool, toward the end, so I'll come back.

...

So here I am. Someone who has not cared much about sci-fi since Babylon 5 went off the air (sci-fi on TV anyway). Someone who really abandoned it when Firefly went down. I'm interested, I'm enjoying it, I'm waiting to see what comes next.

NBC is suddenly holding the most dangerous night of sci-fi television, and I like that. They do a damn sight better job than the Sci-Fi Network does at anything.

Bits and pieces

Let's see...

God in the Machine is a blast to write and I'm having a lot of fun. I've been waxing nostalgic for quite some time, trying to figure out a way to do a serial story again. Now that I am, I'm having a huge amount of fun. The only part I'm NOT having any fun with is doing it once a week. That is just exhausting. It also means some of the editing is bordering on sloppy, or non-existent, because I'm finishing episodes late-afternoon Mondays. (And the ideal release is late Sunday night).

Still, while doing a two-week schedule gave me the ability to work waaay ahead, as well as edit and tighten each episode (and make them around 15,000 words instead of 10k), it really did seem like two weeks between episodes was just too long to make people wait.

The reason I originally went with a two-week schedule was easy: Back in the day, when there were a big group of us writers who hung out together, and many of us were doing serial work (it was a fad: you started with a fanfiction series and went from there.) that's how it was done. Usually, the series worked together so that they provided a smooth schedule among all of them. I was the 7th and the 14th, I believe.

I'm just unsure if that works any longer. Especially with a series like God in the Machine, where I think that I have to really fight for people's attention. It was a fad, online series, and now it's gone and if I'm going to keep building my readership, I have to give them something to come back for on a fairly frequent basis, I should think.

...

Another not unrelated point: I was really bored with my Rome novel, which is partially why I quit working on it. I know every scene and all the details from now through the ending, but they felt contrived and awkward and I was uncomfortable with it all.

Then, when I was reading the wonderful Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton, I stopped and stared into space for a few minutes and realized that -- unrelated to the Peter Hamilton book -- I'd just solved the Rome problem without even thinking about it. I know how to make it work. I know how to keep all my details exactly the same, from now through the end, and make them work.

It requires really expanding the novel, but that's okay. Fantasy-ish novels aren't generally short. It also requires expanding my locations and my timeline and that's...actually fun. For one thing, it means I have to do more research on Roman society as well as Roman legal affairs, both of which I'm happily looking forward to digging into .

...

(the baby pictures I posted are my secret weapon against Lori's new blog. I have baby pictures, she doesn't. Nyah nyah. Sigh.)

...


So I was going through a journal I have. It's this beautiful red-leather bound book with a nice silk page marker. Very fancy. The first thing I did was scribble in it. My theory is, once scribbled in, it's defaced a little, and therefore I am less intimidated in just letting loose and writing any ol' thing in it. It's still intimidating, but it's also been around the house long enough that it's comfortable and familiar.

I was flipping through it, reading notes on my Rome Novel and bits of earlier drafts. Forty pages in, one draft stops almost mid-sentence on one page. The next page is blank, except for the following line. After that, the next page continues with the draft of something else. This is the line:

A rather perplexed London Times Newspaper announced that it would be a rough year, because the first song of the Cuckoo had been heartbreaking.

I read it and I was floored. I have zero idea what it means. I don't even know what to make of it. Usually when I stumble across something I don't remember writing, it's enough like "Me" that I think of new ideas (or remember old ideas, if this makes sense) based on it. But this...I get nothing.

I don't know what to do with it, I don't know if there's a short story in there, I don't have a clue. But I love that it's here, alone on a page, randomly in one of my journals, found by accident.

...

Right-o. I'm off to read some more and then fall asleep, until 5 A.M. when Mr. Baby decides that it's really time he was fed now, darn it.

Good night.

Photos, instead of content!

Let's look at some baby pictures. Why not. There are women reading this blog. This'll be the most popular post in weeks.

^ This is my son, watching Dancing With The Stars (Seriously. What the hell is that show?)

^ This is my son, totally dissing Marie Osmond's Cha-Cha, or convulsion, or whatever it was.

^ Lazy cat...is lazy. Serious baby...is contemplating ur string theoriez.
(Lazy cat played by Bailey).

^ This is baby's happy look, just after sending Dad to the cornfield. Shudder.

^ VOTE ZACH TZINSKI IN 2008 FOR POOP REFORM!
(Charley The Seahorse For Vice President!)

^ Yes. We are all watched by Seahorses when we sleep. So don't ever close your eyes.
(The seahorse summons the clowns, you see. Who eat you.)

^ You can tell this picture was staged because 1) Baby is not doing his famous screaming/grunting/pooing combo (like a straining Hippo). And 2) Pete is not doing his shouting/gnashing/grousing combo which Dads the world over are known for.
Also, Zach looks like Dr. Evil, just a bit.

There we go. That was way easier than the post I was actually going to write, about the Season Premier of Heroes and the series premier of Journeyman. Those have way more words. This has way more baby pictures. Easy! Peasy! Rice and cheezy! (oh. And now I'm hungry. Sigh.)

Good night.

Blog me a blog, for blogging's sake, blogger!

Been awhile since I've posted.

As many of you know, with the sad demise of Carrie -- who passed away from old age, having recently celebrated her 1,100,000,000th birthday -- it has fallen to me to maintain this blog's high standards. Therefore, before beginning this post, I was very careful to remove my pants. Also, because we are a bit entropic around here, I did not fold them up. They are crumpled! On the ground! Ha ha!

Exciting things which have happened on planet Pete:

1) We entered all of our books into Readerware's wonderful software, and were pleased to find that we have something in the vicinity of 1,200 books. Bliss! But we need more, more damn it.

2) Mister Baby is getting really good at focusing on the world around him. Specifically, he likes to focus on mine and my wife's faces. Sometimes, we get smiles, biiiiiig grins. He's just on the verge of laughing. He makes other sounds, but he's almost there. It's interesting to watch.

3) Other times, he gives me this stern-serious-ominous look which freaks the shit out of me and looks like he's about to send me to the cornfield, and then I give him to Mom.

4) God in the Machine is going well. Episode 5 comes out this coming Monday. It's a complicated series, full of complicated episodes, and I'm having a blast.

5) I gave up working on the first draft of Rome. I failed to start a 2nd draft properly. Lori convinced me that the first draft was fine. So I'm back trying to tool that into something I can enjoy working on. No success yet.

6) I just ate a pound of Jambalaya or so, along with corn on the cob. I am so full.

7) But this delicious Rooibos tea is definitely helping.

8) I love all of you.

9) I'm going to go write.

10) Pete

Hooray! VHV is done!

Yay! Pete & I finally managed to squeeze in a few minutes to finish up Variety Hour V, which I believe has taken us longer to write than all 4 previous Variety Hours combined. Of course, at that time, I wasn't working a job outside the home, and Pete didn't have the adorable little guy in the post below.

I'm relieved it's done and posted, and I feel bad that it took so long for us to finish it. Hopefully our beloved readers find it worth the wait. :o)

I'm really excited to have that done now, so I can work on my new WIP. I'm really excited about it, because it's evolving nicely, and because I'm writing it in first person... something I haven't done before. I did get some work done to it over this long Labor Day weekend, but not as much as I wanted. Unfortunately, the tops of my curtains were all dusty and the windows desperately needed washed, so that took a huge chunk of my weekend.

I hope I can keep ahold of the excitement. My last novel was written when I didn't have this *job* thing hogging up my time.

Ugh. And I have a PTO meeting on Wednesday. Meh.

Maybe if I just don't show up for work... or the PTO meeting... they'll all just fire me. :oD

Because I am surrounded by women

Here! HERE ARE YOUR BABY PICTURES!

*runs off screaming*