So today I’m doing daddy duties 2.o where I’m hanging out with my adoptive daughters while ignoring my own two biological children.

Yeah, life is fun(ny).

Yesterday I almost finished putting together the murphy bed in our guest room.
I have a lot of coals in the fire.

Still haven’t gotten around to writing again. 🙁

I don’t have much else to say so I’m just going to cut it short here. I must admit that part of the reason I’m posting this is to self-train (motivate) myself back into a writing mode.

Tootles all.

Fight the Dwight!

Words are hard.

My daughter has a shirt with those words imprinted on her chest. It’s true, both interpretations. So I was just reading my prior post and I found myself cringing what I had written. I do ramble on. I need to make my sentences shorter and more concise. I need to stop using the word “I” so much in this post.

“Where life happens in the first draft” is the tagline I decided to adopt upon creating my blog. Why? Because life isn’t perfect and neither is my rambling thoughts being spilled out onto this site. I’m not going to say I haven’t done some tweaking here and there, but rather that the bulk of it is raw, exposed, vulnerable, ugly, pure, truth.

** In my feeble attempt at just getting in the above post, I got interrupted twice by my family. Granted I’m supposed to be working from home, but seeing how the virus has everyone stuck in their homes, I’m here and available. My son just did a number of the toilet and caused it to overflow. Yep, beef stew all over the floor. As soon as I got that quasi handled, my wife called me into the dining/living room area to look at the paint she had just applied to the wall. It wasn’t even dry yet, so I couldn’t really determine how it looked knowing it was going to change in color upon drying.

Ughhh.

Ramble

Ramblo

Rambo

If this quarantine doesn’t end soon… something bad is going to happen

😛

** I just got interrupted again by the wife.

Time. Time is the one thing we all wish we had more of and somehow seem to squander what little we get.

So I just got my site back up and running again after switching hosting providers. It took about a month of partial short spurts seeing how with the Corona stuff that all of my time has been sucked up with all this stup-kiderr-errrr.. I mean LIFE STUFF 😉

Having to sit there with your kids (and bonus kids I’ve recently ‘adopted’, but is another story for another time and with the legal stuff still pending so its best I don’t say too much) and telling them repeatedly to not wander off because their pencil lead broke, or they have to use the bathroom for the fifth time in the past hour, or some other asinine reason. I mean how many times can you do the same stupid thing on the same day and not get the hint? My son, as much as I love him, is a dumb ass. He decided to not wear shoes and stubbed his toe on his bike that had been left on its side instead of being picked up. The first time is understandable. Second is just you’re being stupid and you’re asking for it because you didn’t pick up your bike or master the art of walking without causing yourself to trip over. The third time only confirms you are a certifiable dumbass. Yes really. Over the span of five hours, my Einstein son stubbed his toe, the same toe, on the same bike, three times. HELLO McFly!

Yeah, I can’t wait for them to go back to school again.

Writing update: Nothing since the lockdown. 🙁

Nerd update: I’ve been farting around with my raspberry pies and finally figured out that I’ve had a bad board & had some flakey HDMI converter cables that have been the cause of all of my aggravation. I ended up tossing them all into the trash and upon writing this here, reminding myself that I need to go online and purchase some new higher quality cables.

That’s it for today, hopefully all of our lives will start getting back to normal in the coming weeks. Remember kids, be good to each other and don’t be a Dwight.

No, I haven’t had the beer virus. Just being funny cause its all the news lately. In early March my bro and his family came out to Cally for a visit. I took some time off but between his arrival, and premature departure, everything has just been weird. I think the last thing I wrote was back in early March sometime. I’m going to pause to go and look at my files now… It was actually March 5th. I was in the neighborhood.

Man, this homeschooling* your kids thing sucks.

*don’t know if it’s really homeschooling (they are home and it is schooling) but until I hear a better name, it’s going to stick.

Why am I so tired all the time? Oh yeah, no free time. It’s either work, teaching, dishes, etc…

When do I get a day off for myself?

waiting…

🙂

Jessica Day is the name of my protagonist in my Starfall novel.

I’m currently working on chunk 20 of my second draft.

What is a ‘chunk’? Well after I wrote out the first draft  (admittedly I only got to about 90% of the story as the ending wasn’t feeling right, I stopped at around 95,000 words) the story felt like it was fishtailing too much.

Okay Einstein, what is ‘fishtailing’? Its a phrase “I” use (no Copywrite pending) when the end is no longer in line with the bulk of the story. In other words, its flapping ‘this way’ and ‘that way’ and needs to be streamlined. So upon starting up my second draft, and flattening out that wild fishtail, I broke the story into manageable chunks in order for my peers to better review. *Most* chunks are under 3,000 words and should not be considered chapters, though they are linear** to the story as a whole.

**Yes I do have some backstory elements but they take place during the story and are not done as ‘maid and butler‘ event.

Anywhoooo….

I’m currently working on chunk #20. Overall I’ve cut deep into some stuff and expanded upon others. At chunk 20 (2,800ish words each) that puts me at just under 60,000 words overall. I feel as if I’m roughly close to the halfway mark again.

Ohhh… in two nights is the next meetup of my evening writing group. Both of the writing critique groups I’m in are reviewing the same story. One is twice monthly (day group) and the other is just monthly (nightly group).

Okay it’s now 6:35 am and its time I start wrapping this freakshow up and heading into work. I didn’t get much writing in today but the guilt over ignoring my blog was eating at me.

Tootles peeps

Fight the Dwight!

So I was listening to a local radio station in my car on the way home after picking up my kids. They were discussing today’s random topic-

*Dad (I was just interrupted by my son with something stupid… I think it had to do with teaching his cat math)

-which was about waving back at people who

*Dad (interrupted again, by the same child, for the same reason.)

-weren’t actually waving at you in the first place. I had a funny version of that where I was stopped at a light, behind some old bitty and waiting for the light to

*Dad (again, same, more)

-change green. We’ll as soon as the light went-

*Dad (again, same)

green, she started moving but then slammed on her brakes. I was caught off guard from this and couldn’t stop my own momentum having just stepped on the gas myself. My car ended up hitting her bumper-

*Dad (again)

-but thankfully not causing any “real” damage. It turns out the reason she braked was that some guy ahead of her was waving to his buddy who was walking up on the side of the road just off to the side of our two vehicles.

*Dad (the amazon delivery truck just dropped something off outside our door. Is it an emergency or can it wait? Yep, its some emergency.)

So far guy walking towards us was waiving towards his approaching friend. The old bitty got all confused and thought he was flagging her down for something. Yep, that’s the story of how somebody waiving caused me to run into the back end of some old bitty.

True stories, both of them.

I keep telling myself things could always be-

*Dad (son wants me to grade cats homework sheet)

-worse. My kids are relatively physically healthy. The mental, still waiting for those results to come back.

Tootles for now.

Dave 🙂

I took something of an extended break from my novel. I’m both anxious and nervous to be starting back in on the project. Let me tell you there is nothing more motivating than being able to find the time to devote to one’s own mental sanity (I mean by writing of course).

A few nights ago I attended my third meeting with a peer group. Seeing their stuff in its ugly early stages does wonders for one’s ego and de-escalating your own fear about how atrocious your own works are at the early stages.

Oh and I just tallied up my word count for the first draft. I got about 90-95% done with the story and had about 115,000 words. Yeah, I’m going to have to work on trimming some of that with my second draft.

EEK!

That’s it for now, back to the grind of rewriting.

Tootles my bitches!

I’m a slacker.

* GUILT-COMPLAINING POST ENGAGED *

Yes… I’ve not been as prolific as I’ve wanted to be. My kids are still failing in school and need me watching and cleaning up after each of their steps. Those pants of theirs just don’t poop themselves ya know.

That being said… It’s now 2020 and I’m still alive. I FEEL OLD.

You know what’s sad is just yesterday, at work, I found myself watching a youtube video on Amtrack train travel. Yes, hold your horses.. it wasn’t about going anywhere specific that caught my attention, it was just the fact that I would “FREE” of any kind of responsibility and could just stare out a window and possibly find myself again through a number of hours of reflection.

THAT APPEALS TO ME (Yes I’m old)

**

And now were returning from the gripe zone…

So I submitted my chapter 1 of Starfall to a critique group (in first draft form) and boy did they chew it up. I expected as much. That was back on Dec 18th and I still haven’t found the time to go through all of what they did to it. Am I afraid? No. Busy, yes. I took a week off over the Xmas/new-years span and I didn’t write/edit/read a single thing. Why? F-ing busy. My wife’s birthday is nestled in between Xmas and new years so that adds to the domestic duties. Translation = NO TIME.

Currently, I’m editing chapter 2 of Starfall into a second draft so I can submit that to the butchers. (I’m saying that with affection-I swear!) They are an older group and I hope to pick parts of their pearls of wisdom and use the parts that make sense (which means I’m smert enough to understand them as well).

Okay, my lunch hour is almost over…

LEAVE ME THE F-ALONE!

(And get off my lawn!)

Not going to spoil it but the movie kinda soils so much of what came before it.

“Me-za kinda misses Jar Jar now.”