Category Archives: Life

What’s going on?

Life, Movies, Music, Netflix Original, The Darkest Winter

It’s the last day in August and with the holiday weekend this feels like the end of summer. Sure we can expect warm weather for quite a bit longer but mentally when September hits it feels like winter is standing on top of us already.

So with the pending winter blues approaching, what’s going on?

The obvious is my book, The Darkest Winter. I’m waiting to hear back from Amazon about getting approval for the paper book files. When that happens, I order the proof to make sure everything is fine and dandy for public consumption. While I wait for the proof, I’ll get the ebook in order. I expect my business cards to come in next week so I think the end of next week is looking the most likely for launch. There are a ton of moving parts I’m now navigating and I’m itching to show the end result to everyone.

With September hitting, that means TV is about to pop off. Netflix dropped Ozark season 2 today and the first show on the doccet for cable TV is season 13 of Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The promo looks insane so I have high hopes. That’s on Wednesday I think. Then Bojack Horseman on Netflix! There’s a huge list of programming about to start and I’ll do updates as they start (5 weeks away from hockey season!).

Better Call Saul is going well and Ink Master just started so those have been keeping me warm along with some movies and stand up specials on Netflix that I’ve been knocking off my list:

  • Moonwalkers (good)
  • Hardcore Henry (nauseating, turned it off)
  • Wheelman (liked it a lot)
  • Bert Kreicher: Secret Time (hilarious)
  • The Standups- Deon Cole and Kyle Kinane (both hilarous)
  • Train to Busan (loved it)
  • Iliza Shlesinger: Elder Millennial (very good)
  • Demeri Martin: The Overthinker (very good)
  • I Am Not a Serial Killer (good)
  • I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (good)

I’m listening to Twenty One Pilots new track “My Blood” right now and I dig it. Their new album comes out soon and I’m sure it’ll be a smash. Eminem dropped a new album out of no where and I’m about to check that out.

The Darkest Winter Update 8

The Darkest Winter

A major milestone was reached today. I submitted the book to CreateSpace. They are the part of Amazon that does physical book printing. A humanbeing is now reviewing the files to make sure everything is suitable for print. I should be contacted tomorrow. Assuming everything is ok, I order a proof and that gets delivered to me for review.

That proof is the book in my hand. I’ll check it out to make sure it’s printed right and nothing is wrong with the physical copy that will be printed whenever someone orders the book off of Amazon. This step is to insure the book I intend people to hold in their hand is being made.

So this is project is rapidly coming to completion. Release is very close, I’m thinking in a week depend on how fast I get the proof (and it passes my standards).

I still have to prepare the ebook file for Kindle. That’s a separate arm of Amazon. That is a much faster process than the physical book and I believe that will take a day or too to get sorted. Since today is Wednesday, I’ll probably get that done Friday.

Then it’s marketing time. So everything is coming together and I’ll have a release date for you soon.

The Darkest Winter Update 7

The Darkest Winter

I hit my two week deadline and completed my final edits. The text is done! That’s a major milestone, it means the book is done, the story is there, and I’m never going to edit those words again.

It’s been a long journey. I’m so familiar with the story having worked on it for so long that it’s rather mundane to me. These past 2 weeks I took a slow pace to keep myself from rushing and skipping over parts. Even though the story is old hat to me, I still really love the work. I had some much needed help in this last stage from two people to  stomp out typos and continuity errors. I’m very proud of what I’ve written and I think it’s a great first novel.

Yesterday, as I was bringing it to a close I went back to some final notes to make sure I was happy with those parts. I came to realize that those last bits were nit picking. I was looking for things to change based on very little. Can I write this sentence better? Does it need to be altered? Should I change it? Will someone get hung up on this sentence or word choice? Often times when I tried to change something for the better, or an attempt to make it better, I was just changing it to change it. Or, I was making it worse. Stuffing too much detail in and making it more complicated than it needed to be. Overthinking things can make it feel like you’re drowning. With that feeling coming back more and more, I relaized the book was finished.

The cover isn’t complete, but it’s very close. I have a lot of details to hammer out, but the bulk of the work is done. I’m confident I’ll have the book for sale this week and it’ll be a hell of a day to share with you.

The Darkest Winter Update 6

The Darkest Winter

Hit a milestone today. Received the full manuscript back from my editor this morning. The book is in good shape now and this marks the last half of the project starting. I’ve slotted 2 weeks for myself to do my final read through. One last check for typos,  continuity errors and any other small changes I may want to make. It’s content complete, now it’s just the details to iron out.

While I do this last bit of editing, cover work begins. I’m aiming to have that done in 2 weeks as well. Once that’s done all that remains is typesetting and getting the final file to submit to retailers (it will definitely be available on Amazon, I’m going to look at getting it on the iBook store as well, Barnes and Noble Nook too).

That last bit shouldn’t take long. An August release is very much possible and is the goal. Expect an update in 2 weeks.

We’re getting close!

The Darkest Winter Update 5

Life

It’s been way too long since I’ve done a book update but here’s the major milestone: I finished editing yesterday. My first book is content complete. My editor has it now so the bulk of the work is now up to him.

I finished it a week later than I intended due to my computer failing. But that’s all in the past now and I leaned into the work and got it done. I actually finished my main edits just before the computer broke, I was about to do the final pass to catch typos, continuity errors and change anything else I didn’t “like.” It takes a long time to go over 90,000 words.

So, I’m pretty stoked. I’m done writing on this project. It’s taken a long time and I’m ready to let it go. I’ve found that as I’ve gone through it for the last time that I get these waves of bi-polar thought. I suddenly think it’s stupid and that no one is going to like it and then I swing the other way and think everything is the way I want it. And that’s the truth. Going through it this last time, I really like what I’ve written. It’s kinda weird and obnoxious to say it, but I wrote some great shit. I often found that I was impressed with myself, how well some things come off. This is the story I wanted to tell.

So now the last half of writing a book kicks into gear:  getting it ready for you. Another typo check, type setting, get the cover done and put together a launch promo push. I’m behind schedule, I was hoping to have this done in the middle of the month but that’s not going to happen. I’m aiming for early July. I think The Darkest Winter is a great summer read and I really want to get it out there ASAP.

I’ll update as each chunk gets finished.

And Down Goes Frazier!

Life

My 10 year old Dell computer died Tuesday morning and I am now talking to you with a new rig I picked from Microcenter today. I have a lot to organize and this whole thing has put me 2 days behind schedule. Editing of the book is nearly done (I did not lose my documents, I have them backed up!) and I’ll write up my The Americans recap tomorrow.

Biggest bummer so far is that I think I destroyed my Chrome sync so I lost all of my bookmarks. I think I have just about all of my passwords written down though so this isn’t a total disaster. I think it’ll be a few days until I get this set up feeling like mine. It’s fast as hell, that’s for sure (in large part thanks to the solid state HDD).

More soon(ish).

The Darkest Winter Update 4

The Darkest Winter

Another milestone has been hit. I finished editing the 3rd quarter a few days ago. It was much simplier to complete as I didn’t change as much. What I did change didn’t require any major reorganization, I just needed to take care to fix any continuity errors that came up due to the edits. That made my life simpler.

Today I got the next chunk back from Wil today so I’m getting close to the end. I have a bunch of edits in mind but I’m confident I’ll get through it at a good clip. More 3rd quarter changes than 2nd quarter. As I was thinking about getting started today on this new material, I had a realization about a detail in the second quarter that doesn’t make much sense. So I’m going to change one detail about what Tim brings with him on the trip (which will alter 3 paragraphs total, so it won’t take me long to address it) before I dig in on the 4th quarter.

Progress is being made, looking to finish the whole project next month. Book cover design will be starting soon.

The Darkest Winter Update 3

The Darkest Winter

I’m halfway through the final edit of the book. The second quarter took me way longer to do than I ever intended.

A large part of that was procrastination, which I have come to realize is my mortal sin. There’s no good reason for it and it bugs me how easily I can put something off. The strange thing is how great it feels to accomplish a major milestone. You’d think that would always be the main driving factor but my mind doesn’t seem to regard that reward as strong enough. It’s something to work on.

But I digress. The edits I did took way more work to do than I initially thought. Making changes to how Tim gets his plan out turned out to be more complicated. I read the whole section and made notes on where what I needed to change was. I first organized my thoughts and ideas that way. Then I started moving things around. Deleting sections or maybe just some dialog. Move entire sections forward or back.

The first big thing: moving sections makes gaps. So continuity gets broken and the parts don’t fit together. That meant I needed to write new transitions. So that was easy or hard depending on what it is. And whenever I write something new, sometimes I like it a lot, sometimes I know I need to come back to it and sometimes I think it’s good but then I read it and I hate it.

Rewriting those parts happened a lot. Which meant a ton of tweaks which meant I thought and rethought everything. I did a lot of pacing around in my head. For a while there it felt like I was focused solely on punching things up and changing conversations to ensure it makes sense.

So I’m on to the next chunk. I have some serious tweaks to do in this section for the city scene. I have a good idea of what I’m going to and in this part, I don’t think I’m going to have to move anything, it’ll be more like tailoring a suit. Change details to get my intention across better (very important…it’s a sensitive scenario) and do some better world building to bolster that.

Right now I’m thinking it’ll be pretty easy but that’s exactly what I thought when I was going into the section I just finished. So, well see. But it will be done and it will be better.

And We’re Back

Life, NY Rangers, TV

The TV broke last Saturday (backlight problem) and I managed to get it back fixed on Friday. Not something you want to do with a 4 1/2-year-old set but that’s the kind of quality you get with modern TVs now. So I’m a little behind on my programs.

The new season of Channel Zero has started. Butcher’s Block has two female leads as the protagonists again but aside from that, it’s a very different story so far. I like what I’ve seen.

Homeland is back on Showtime! It picks up two months after last season. Carrie is largely on her own and she’s doing everything in her power to live up to the oath she took to defend her country. Carrie lost a lot last year and under normal circumstances, anyone would have a hard time dealing with the loss of someone that close. The new presidency is off to a terrible start and whenever Carrie is on the outside looking in, she tends to make rash decisions that don’t go well. I’m not too sure where they’re headed with this season, but two episodes in and I’m engaged.

Netflix is throwing up new content nearly every day and it feels like I’m eons behind at this point. I finished Punisher which I thought took too long to really get going. Another case of a Marvel show with too many episodes being ordered. Enjoyable in the end though. I’ve started on Black Mirror but I’ll write about that later when I finish the season.

The big one on the horizon for me is the final season of The Americans. The ads have started showing and that’ll start at the end of March, so we’re pretty close. That will get weekly posts as it airs.

The New York Rangers are in a spiral that is painful to watch. It was always a “maybe if they pull things together” they could get to the Cup Finals. That’s always the stretch goal. At the start of the season, I was sure they’d make it to the playoffs, at least continue that years-long stretch. Now? Forget it. What’s happening now is depressing…the team hasn’t played this bad in a very long time so it’s a bewildering experience. I’m hoping at this point for them to get some in the next 6 regular season weeks (!) to finish with a positive win percentage.

The Darkest Winter Update

Life, The Darkest Winter

Yesterday I finished my (final-ish) editing pass on the first ten chapters of my book. I got that material back from Wil just before Christmas and pulled all my notes together from all my sources to do it.

The good news is that it was pretty easy. No major changes in writing. The biggest change is about to be worked on in the next section.

Starting with Chapter 10, there’s a big plot point about the main character, Tim, planning on leaving New Jersey. I’m going to change how those plans come together. It extends through chapter 11 and if I’m recalling my notes right, chapter 12. There are some references to it further on that I’ll have to change for continuity.

This is right now, far and away the biggest chunk of writing I intend to change. There are 2 other things I have in mind to change much further in the book, but those are much simpler.

So I’ve changed things in Chapter 10 and I’m going to wait for the next batch of material from Wil to continue these edits. I think I have it mapped out well, it’s just a matter of execution. I’m confident about it though. I’ve thought a lot about this segment and I’m going to be moving larger sections around so it’s not a total rewrite. It doesn’t feel like a daunting task, more like a refinement that I think will make this part much better. So that feels good confidence-wise.

Outside of this, the one big thing Wil brought up to me is to consider changing the order of the first 7 chapters. Right now, the chapters jump around in time and location. I did that to keep interest up, show what the Event of the book is and to introduce Tim. It works, but it makes the reader wonder what Tim has to do with the story. Going from the hackers to him is a big swing and while it comes together and does click, it takes some reading to get there. By reordering these chapters it should make for a cleaner and faster on-ramp to the story. I think the set up will be much more accessible this way and could end up keeping more readers from bailing on the book early.

So I’m playing with the order now while I wait for Wil to send me the next section. That way I’ll have the beginning all squared away and can move on from there.

Feels really good to be making progress, I’m excited for you to get what’s been in my head for years into your hands.

Happy New Year

Life

2-0-1-8

Since Christmas I’ve been either behind or ahead one day. The holidays landing on a Monday made for long weekends and that screwed up my internal clock.

So it’s been an “off” start to the new year. But it is 2018 and I’m excited for it. I have a lot to work on and I’m looking forward to getting things done. None of that will be done outdoors for awhile as the Antarctic has descended on the east coast.

It’s legit dangerous to be outside right now. The wind is nuts and today’s high of 24F is going to be tops for the next few days. Saturday is looking to peak at 10F and a low of 1F. That is absurd. Good reason to get writing done at least.

Cheers to the future!