Writerly Updates: First Draft Edits

I finished writing my essay a couple of days ago. It’s been given the main title of, “Exploration vs Dehydration”. I sent off the rough draft to Scott Roche, author of the Archangel Novel(s), for first draft edits. I got those edits back today, made all appropriate edits and then sent them off to my cousin for an extra set of eyes on the second draft. Once the edits, if any, come back from my cousin it will be ready for viewing. Upon it’s release it will be available on this blog, it will also be available in .PDF format for those of you who would rather read it that way. And for those of you who would rather listen to it than read it, I’ll have it available in audio form as bonus content on my show blog.

That’s really all that I’ve been working on so far this month, I’ve done a little bit of research for my NaNo project, and I’ve done nothing for research for this month’s GH prompt. And I might delay my work on that for a bit while I work on an interesting short story prompt from News From Poughkeepsie. Work on that should only take a day max, so I’ll be back to researching and writing that GH prompt soon.

I’m not really sure how much more productive I’ll remain due to the fact that my glasses are broken now. It’s true that I have relatively good eyesiight, but spending most of my day in front of a computer screen gives me massive eyestrain. I use reading glasses to combat this. Just recently, however, the earpiece fell off of my reading glasses and I can’t repair them as they’re plastic and one of the parts that held the screw in place snapped off. So if I wish to use my glasses I have ot hold them in place and they sit on my face at an odd angle, making them quite cumbersome to use. Hopefully I can replace them soon before the eyestrain renders me unable to work.

Reading glasses are very expensive but I’ve come across some problems this month that I believe take precedence over the glasses. I need to change the oil in my car, and that hasn’t been done in over a year and it’s starting to concern me now. Also the weather is getting colder here in Indiana and most of my winter clothes from last year either no longer fit me due to weight loss, are no longer in any wearable condition, or have dissapeared. And with my car no longer having a heater I need to acquire materials that will allow me to bundle up.

That’s about as far as writerly updates go, I didn’t really mean to get all personal, and whiny, on you. But sometimes that is what an update entails. And since I try to keep the majority of my personal life from flavoring this blog, I feel that the occasional insight couldn’t hurt.

You can stay tuned to this blog for more updates on my writing progress over the next couple of months, or you could also follow me on Twitter.

That’s really all that I have to say, I’ve been drinking tonight and it’s starting to get to me, and I’m drawing a blank, so I’ll see you next time.

Reaching for the stars

It’s been a few days since my last update and I figured I’d throw another update on the blog so you know what I’m up to. Hopefully I’ll get into the habit of blogging on this thing a lot more.

Everyday this week so far I’ve gotten into the habit of getting up around seven or eight in the morning for many reasons. One of these reasons, as I’ve learned from my cousin, is that he more regular your sleep schedule is the more dopamine your body produces. This makes you feel better about yourself and makes you more productive. Or at least I think that’s what it means. My cousin was always better with the sciency stuff.

The other reason is that I find when I get up early I’m in more of a productive mood, I check news blogs and do research for the show and other things so I’ve been getting a lot more writerly work done, and more podcaster work done in a couple of days than I do all week.

And to keep me from staying up late, I walk a mile or two a night to keep myself in shape and to expend some excess energy so that I’m ready for bed when my head hits the pillow.

So as far as my productivity for today, I wrote the outline for my essay. The alt-title for the essay will be, “Reaching for the stars while other people starve” or something along those lines. It’s a work in progress and I don’t have a main title yet. I’m open to suggestions. I also caught up on all the blogs in my RSS reader and I also filled out most of the show notes for next week.

Also, since it’s October now, Kyle seems to be showing an interest in the show again which means that he may very well be present for next weeks episode as long as we can get any scheduling conflicts worked out. He seems to want to record over the weekend. I like to get the recording done Wednesday through Friday so that I have the weekend to edit it, have Ben transcribe the show notes and get it uploaded. Which is almost impossible to do by the midnight deadline if we record on a Saturday or Sunday.

Like I said, I wrote the outline for my essay today, I’ll probably work on writing it tomorrow. Depending on how I feel, what other projects I decide to work on tomorrow, and what distractions get in the way of the writing process; I’ll either write the whole thing tomorrow and do the bibliography at a later date, or divide the 4 sections and the bibliography up into different days and have it all done sometime next week. Since I gave myself all of October to work on it I’m not in much of a rush.

As far as other writing projects go I ordered a Koran (or however it’s spelled, Firefox isn’t correcting my spelling and I’ve seen it spelled many ways) online and when it arrives at the house I’ll read through it, and a bible, and whatever else I have handy as research for Octobers GH prompt, creation myths and all.

I haven’t really done a lot of research on my project for NaNoWriMo but I’ve got irons in the fire. My father is sending me some of my grandfathers old military training manuals, and I’ve asked one of my friends to loan me any he has because they’d be more recent. All that would be left was to research bio and nano-tech.

Thats about all I have in the way of writerly updates for you today, but might I mention that now that I’m back on the writing wagon I’m Twittering constantly. So if you’d like to see what I’m up to in real time, feel free to follow me on Twitter. If I can discern if you’re a real person I just might follow you back. Just don’t try to sell me anything. And I’ll see what I can do about adding a twitter widget to the side bar of the blog.

Updates and such

Well, as you can see if you’ve been watching the show blog that season three is up and running again. Four episodes are up already for your listening pleasure and another one will drop next Monday like always. And as the show goes on I’m becoming more interested in varying topics and I feel that I’ll have a lot to talk about until the season ends in either November or December. I still haven’t decided when I want to bring the season to a close.

But enough about the show. This is technically my writer blog, so I might as well entertain you with my writerly pursuits.

I haven’t put any work in to the Great Hites writing prompts for a while. I kind of got sucked into WoW for a while and didn’t do much else but level my hunter and find fotune in the auction house.

I plan on participating in this month’s prompt. That’s right boys and girls, it’s not a weekly prompt this time it’s the whole month of October. The prompt is something along the lines of creating your own creation myth. I’ll mull some ideas over in my head and see what I can do with it. One of the things I like about the GH prompts is that they’re usually never in my writing comfort zone. The prompts have always been about something I’d never written before.

Also, this entire month is going to be spent doing research for two projects. The first one is going to be research for my writing project for November’s NaNoWriMo. I’m going to write a novel based on an idea that I’ve been playing with in my head for over a year now. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s going to be about a mercenary with bio-tech implants to make him a more efficient soldier. With that said I need to do a lot of research on the military as well as bio-tech so that I didn’t get anything wrong. I’m going to write it for NaNo, and after that I’m going to submit the story to some beta readers, edit it, and then I’ll most likely podcast it.

I know that I’ve said before that I wanted, “Checking In” to be the first thing that I podcasted as fiction, but I’m nowhere near finished on that. I think I’ve only put about four or five chapters worth of work into it since I last gave an update about it on the blog. I’m going to put that on the back burner for a while and crack open some bibles as well as a few other religions works either fictional or non fictional as well as some books from other religions as well and see if I can expand my horizons on this novel a bit. So, while that one is on the back burner I’m going to be working on my NaNo project for November and then getting it ready to podcast, so that I can get my fiction podcasting feet wet.

The second thing I’m going to be doing research for is an essay. I haven’t written very many essays but I’ve always intended on it. There’s ways that you can express your opinions and concerns on certain matters in a well researched essay than you can in a blog post. So I’ll be doing research on an essay that will be written somewhere along the lines of all the funding that NASA gets every years to put us in the stars against all the countries in the world that don’t even have clean drinking water, let alone a space program. I’ll be doing research on that and see if I can get that cranked out by the end of October.

I plan on posting the essay here in text form as well as download-able PDF format. And if I’m feeling up to it I might record it in audio form as well and dorp that on the BOaC feed as bonus content for my listeners over there that don’t visit that blog.

And it will inspire those of you that visit this blog and not the show blog in case you’d rather have the essay read to you instead of having to wade through lines of text. I plan to do a lot of writing and research this month and I plan to keep you updated.