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Thanksgiving

By On November 25, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Christianity, Personal, Politics, Writing

Today I would like to share with you the text of Abraham’s Lincoln Thanksgiving Day proclamation, given in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War. Presidents as far back as John Adams have proclaimed public days of thanksgiving to God–which should surprise those of us who have believed the myth that our Founding Fathers intended to keep all public references to God out of their politics, but that’s not necessarily the point.

This speech was given during the most trying time of our country, the Civil War. On the surface, it would appear that there wasn’t a lot to be thankful for. And yet, this is the proclamation that made the day into a national holiday, and it reminds us of what we are giving thanks for, and to whom we are giving thanks.

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Challenge Mode: Overdrive

By On August 6, 2011 · 1 Comment · In Writing

I’m just about ready for this book to be done. I can tell because I’m outputting around 2000 words at a time now instead of the requisite minimum of 1000 words. Maybe this is making up for June, who knows? Here’s the stats.

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Challenge Mode: The Mushy Middle

By On July 12, 2011 · 1 Comment · In Writing

June was a unique experience in that I was writing the middle of the book and coming back from a great vacation at the beginning of the month. I managed to write about 4,000 words or so on my vacation, and when I came back I didn’t want to work. So I took the week off.

This feeling of malaise has followed me right up until last week when I finally got the part of the book I’ve been wanting to write. So I suppose you can chalk up the month’s lower wordcount to the vacation combined with writing a part of the book that isn’t my favorite part to write; somewhere between the 50% and 66% mark. Blagh. Let’s take a look at the stats, shall we?

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Challenge Mode: Writing Vacation and ConCarolinas Recap

By On June 5, 2011 · 3 Comments · In Personal, Voice Acting, Writing

I suppose I’m overdue for an update. This is the beginning of June and so far I’ve written about 36,000 words of a 60,000-80,000 word novel. This is well on target for the timeline I published back in March.

I went on vacation last week on the 28th and am sitting in the Charlotte airport awaiting my delayed flight back to Portland. During that time I wrote 4,951 words. This is an acceptable number, it keeps me on track, although I was going for 1,000 words a day, which would have boosted me beyond just an on schedule finish date to an early one. Oh well. At least I tried. Several storms in Kansas (I got my storms! Yay! I love storms.) and of course some unforseen things that took away from my planned writing time diminished the wordcount a bit. I may have also been a bit overzealous.

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Challenge Mode: Tee Has A Kindred Spirit

By On April 14, 2011 · 2 Comments · In SW City, Writing

I’m a little depressed tonight. The two Kansas-style thunderstorms we had tonight perked me up a bit, though. But I’m still a little down. That’s because I was not able to get permission from one of my friends who helped create the SW City universe to use that universe in my novel. You see, a bunch of my friends and I created it collaboratively over the last decade, and so to use it commercially in anything requires I get a license from each one of them by having them sign a contract granting that license. Everyone but one friend agreed to do so. And I needed everyone to agree.

It came down to two reasons. The first is that he doesn’t feel comfortable with signing any contracts whatsoever. The second is the primary motivation, that he considered it a very personal collaboration between us all and he thought any adaptation of the universe would require similar collaboration or it would spoil in his mind what he considered to be the “SW City”-ness of the result.

Obviously collaboration between seven or eight people is not something reasonably accomplished in writing novels.

I’m… well I still don’t know what to say, except that, Tee Morris, if you’re reading this, man, I so totally can relate to you right now.

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