Welcome to my House

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The last two weekends have been busy. I actually took two three day weekends so I could get a bunch of little things done around hte house, starting with the cleaning.

Gregg and I have been down sizing everything. It started with going through my games, game consoles, and our books. Over the last three months we have gotten rid of five boxes worth of games and books between us, clearing up some much needed space. We also emptied a lot of the things from our storage that we had been saving for when we bought a house. The house isn’t happening any time soon so it is pointless to keep it. That cleared up more space.

You’d be surprised how much scrap leather you get from making leather projects. Gregg has three large boxes of scrap leather that we have been making small projects with. Bracelets, key-chains, etc. But there isn’t enough time to use it all, so we’ve actually been throwing some away, or giving it away in boxes. That cut down on a lot of room.

Then there are my crafting supplies. I consolidated a lot into a smaller section of my storage, got rid of anything I hadn’t been using, or which had dried out or expired, and I’m down to a much smaller selection. Next I’ll be putting a bunch of the beads and charms up on etsy I think just because I’m not going to use them, but someone should.

I also went through out clothing and threw out a lot that didn’t fit, or was worn out. And we had some old electronics that weren’t working, or we bought newer stuff for, so we took the old stuff to be recycled.

The house is so much cleaner. Over all i think we got rid of, recycled, or sold a few car loads of things. It’s made it easier to sort out, store, and keep dusted the things that are left.

Writing wise, I updated the print covers of Flight of the Griffins and Witch’s Stand, and ordered some a proof of each of them. For some reason the cover of Witch’s Stand was really blurry so I completely redid it and got it to a much better size and dpi. Now if you order them you should get a really nice looking set to have on  your shelf.

Speaking of shelves, I don’t have most of my books in print because a lot of them are on the short side, but I still wanted to have a “shelf” of my books available. So I made these two posters for that purpose. Most of my book covers are on here, and I’ll do a third when I get enough books out. For right now you can download this if you like. I have to get more ink before I can print the second one, but it is really nice having them above my desk to remind me to keep writing.

  

Speaking of writing….I’ve almost finished “Ghostly Intentions,” which is a little fantasy ghost story I’ve been working on. I’ve also edited half of book two in my Half Blood Sorceress series. I’m still debating on the name, either Dragon’s Blood, or Dragon’s Touch. Both would be appropriate, and there are several more in the series so it will all have dragon names. Appropriate in a world where magic comes from dragons, I think.

As for art…I haven’t been doing as much of it lately. I did some sketch’s that were kind of cute, but really I do most of my drawing at work, and work has been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to think, let alone sketch or draw. Also another reason I took some time off work. I needed a chance to breath and be myself for a while.

Anyway, I get a new shift starting in a month or two, so I have no idea what’s going to happen after that. For right now I’m just trying to do what I need to do. And writing more, that’s the good part.

Such a good weekend!

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The last three days have been so good! Between being productive, and getting things done, and being more creative, I actually feel much better going back to work tomorrow.

Wednesday was family time. We had lunch with my daughters, who I don’t see very much since they moved out. Then d&d later in the evening, with some cleaning in the middle. So I didn’t get to do much for myself that day, but I was okay with that because it was really good to see my girls, and friends at d&d.

Thursday I woke up in pain. That’s not unusual with me. I have joints that don’t like to work all the time, and some mornings hurt. Bjorn finally talked me into going to the chiropractor and that helped a lot.

Thursday evening I was able to stream day one of my new crafting project. Hopefully I’ll post it to YouTube in a more condensed version soon.

Today I took a mental health day from work. Boy did I need it!

I spent the morning playing games, running a few errands, and just relaxing. Then I spent the evening streaming with Bjorn doing leather work. So much fun! You can find the video on demand on my twitch stream still. I might post some of it to YouTube too.

Then after streaming I edited. It was the first time I had looked at my novel in a week, and I got two chapters finished today. It felt great to get back to work on it.

So, look for me on twitch. I’m enjoying streaming even if I’m not sure what to say on there.

And look for more updates on my novel soon.

New Projects for a New Year

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I bought a book. Well, I’ve bought many books, but this one is unusual. It’s a craft book with 100 small sewing projects.

You see, I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately. I’ve been working on my novel here and there, but I need something else to help fill those creative wells. Sometimes it helps to read. Sometimes play games. Sometimes go on a date with the boyfriend. Sometimes just switching projects helps a lot.

So I’m going to try something totally different. I bought a book called 100 Pretty Little Projects, and I’m going to do them. Once a week, every week, this year. I’m going to stream it to Twitch, then hopefully edit it down and stick it on YouTube. I’m hoping this will get me out of the rut I’ve been in since it is something completely different from anything else I’ve done.

So… Wednesday, here I come. I have the book, I have the fabric, and I have a camera. Now I’m going to tell that little bit of self doubt in the back of my head, the one that has constantly followed me since I was a kid trying to learn my multiplications and it was drilled into my head how stupid I was for messing up. I’m going to prove it wrong.

It’s not going to be easy. It’s really hard for me to put myself out there like this because I’m not just putting a story out there and letting people love or hate the story. I’m putting me out there, and it’s really tough to believe people want anything to do with me most of the time. But I’m going to try. And I’m going to keep trying till I figure out that it isn’t as scary as it seems.

Starting with this Wednesday! Follow me on twitch if you want to watch the mayhem!

Favorite Reads of 2017!

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I set out with a goal of 30 books this year, and managed to read 30. I will admit, I upped my book count because I realized they wouldn’t all be novels. I had a few graphic novels, and some short stories in the mix, as well as a few audio books for my long commutes.

In all I read 16 novels, ten short stories, and four graphic novels.

I’d have to say the Baine Chronicles were my absolute favorite this year. Jasmine Walt spun a fantastic story about a shifter hybrid who gets caught with her magic on display and has to avoid being killed, then ends up rescuing the arch mage. So much allegory for real life in this series. Lots of magic, and mischief. Loved every page and I read the first six books pretty quickly.

Star Nomad by Lindsay Buroker is another favorite. This read very much like Firefly, and Buroker wasn’t afraid to say it up front. That’s what she was going for, and she managed it with flying colors.

Dungeon Crawl by Skyler Grant hit on a second love of mine, LitRPG, which I didn’t even know was a thing until just this month. I’ve been enjoying Sword Art Online, Kilobyte by Piers Anthony, and other movies and books in this genre, but didn’t know it had an actual name until just recently. Dungeon Crawl scratched that itch (so to say) quite nicely, and I’ll be reading more of these types of books this year.

I also read Take Off Your Pants by Libbie Hawker. This is a fantastic book for anyone who wants to make their story telling better. I had to rewrite a lot of chapters because of this book, but my novels are so much better because of that rewrite. Worth it!

Lastly I’m going to say Grizzly Shark is my favorite graphic novel this year. Oh, Heathen and LumberJanes were good, but Grizzly Shark is one of those books that will stick with me for the rest of forever. With sharks swimming through the trees to eat everyone, and irreverent jokes on every page, I loved it. Crass, unapologetic humor that goes out of it’s way to just be itself. Would read again!

Of the other books, there were some good ones, and a few fell short, but nothing really bad. The books I chose just stood out a bit more than the others, either because I loved the series as a whole, it hit that nestalgia button, or it was incredibly memorable (queue the grizzly shark!)

How did your reading challenge go?

What’s with all the games?

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This weekend (my weekend, which is Wednesday and Thursday) was a weekend for being sick. I ended up taking an extra day to sleep the sickness away. It’s now Saturday, and I’m at work drinking my morning coffee and logging into the computer, and I feel much better. So glad I took that day.

But, while out for the weekend I did manage to get a few things done. Not much for my novel because that wasn’t working well. Something about fevers makes thinking difficult, or maybe just being really … REALLY … tired. In any event I did not do much actual story telling this weekend, but I did get some of my other writing, and a little art work done.

Anyone who has been following me for a while probably knows that I’m a gamer. What probably nobody knows is that I have a gaming blog where I do reviews. Not the usual kind of reviews, though, because it feels like everyone reviews AAA titles, and the big indie hits. I like the indie titles that fly under the radar, and mobile gaming. Since if felt like gamers all say “mobile gaming is for casuals” it was only natural for me to share some of my favorite mobile games. After all, Pokémon is a hand held game, it just so happens that handhelds now sit in our pockets and are attached to phones. It’s just really hard to find good games among all the junk.

What started out as “hey, this is a game I love, you should try it,” slowly evolved into a review sight for mobile titles. I started downloading, playing, and sharing my impressions of a bunch of mobile games, some of which are free. Some are bad. Some are good. A bunch of them I paid for through Humble Bundle. Lots of them!

I think I’ll be posting my favorite mobile games of 2017 this week, since that’s the thing to do. I will probably do a run down of my reads for this year on this blog, too, since I completed my reading challenge on Goodreads.

Overall my personal life has been pretty good this year. Bjorn is doing awesome with his new job. We did the trip to LA for Twitchcon. He just set up his new 3d printer last night so soon I’ll be able to do some designs for that. And I wasn’t sick nearly as much this year as previous years. Plus publishing two short stories (Dark Angels and Hidden Treasures) as well as Dragon’s Flame. Plus I’ve written another 100k words on the next two books for The Half Blood Sorceress Series. Just a lot of awesomeness.

Anyway, if you’re also into gaming you might check out the gaming blog over here. I sometimes post commentary on it as well, but mostly I just like sharing good games.

And look forward to some updates about the new Half Blood Sorceress later in the month.

What to do, what to do….

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It’s been a week of editing and cleaning things up. Not just the short story and novel I’ve been working on, but also some artwork.

I’ve been doing the second draft for book two in my Half Blood Sorceress series. I’ve been taking a little more time with this one then I did with the Mermaid’s Curse books because there are a lot more characters. The continuity has to be there, which has resulted in a lot of rereading of the first book, and putting together a writers bible for this series about characters, their looks, and their history so I get things right. I’m sure I’m going to miss things still, but I’m going to do my darndest to get at least the plot right. Then off to an editor, of course, to get the grammar/spelling right.

I’ve also been working on a short story, Ghostly Intentions, about a young man who returns to the his childhood home to find a creature inside it. Lots of magic, and a few ghosts to work with. It’s going to be a novella when I’m done.

Then there’s the art. When it get’s too busy at the day job I can’t really write, so I doodle a lot, and some of those doodles become decent drawings. I’ve been working on things to do with them, pins, stickers, prints, etc. I have an etsy here where you can get digital prints, and a redbubble here where you can get some shirts and cups. I’ve even made some pins and charms, but I’m not sure if they are working out well.

The trick has been time management. I have time. I spend a bit of it playing video games, or procrastinating. So what can I do? Well…I have been wanting to stream on twitch more, and I think it’s time I do that. Once a week for a few hours seems reasonable. (It will be Wednesday or Thursday, depending on what’s happening at the time. Twitter will get you the most up to date info.)

Anyway, this is just a quick update. I’m hoping to finish Ghostly Intentions soon to get that out, while still working on the new Half-Blood Sorceress series.

Review: Bright

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A bright is a being that can hold a magic wand without exploding. Magic wands are so powerful that only a few people can touch them, and everyone else wants to control it because of the immense possibilities of it. And if you get all five in one place you can summon the dark lord, and enslave the humans once more.

So when a wand turns up on the wrong side of town everything goes wrong, and there are only two cops standing in the way of the destruction of an entire city.

The premise had me from the first commercial. An orc cop? Yes, please! Fairies stealing from bird feeders? Okay! Elves and centaurs on LA streets? Sign me up!

I was not disappointed. The story line was good, even if the ending was a bit predictable. The main characters were well fleshed out, and I loved the interaction between the orc and main cop. Of course the orc has problems of his own since everyone wants him gone, especially other cops.

If there was one disappointment it was that magic was mostly window dressing. There are a few integral scenes where magic plays a roll, and the orc civilization is fairly fleshed out, but we know very little about elves (other than they are rich snobs) and other races are only briefly mentioned or seen in a couple frames standing still.

Overall worth watching, and I hope for a sequel.

NaNoWriMo 2017 Aftermath

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It is December first, and NaNoWriMo is over. Now we are all celebrating our victories, or licking our wounds. I am doing both.

For the second time in nine years I’ve failed NaNoWriMo, but boy did I come close. 4365 words from my goal, and I just could not go on. My brain, and my fingers, just gave out. I had been pushing all day long, and I managed to write 7284 words in one day, but I just couldn’t get those last four thousand words.

This was an incredible month, and I learned more about myself, and my novel, than I would have any other time. I threw away chapters, and rewrote a whole synopsis. I got stuck on the novel and went over to write some short stories for the day. I gave up on the original idea I thought I’d write because it just didn’t work. And I got that much closer to finishing book two and three of the new series.

Why did I fail? Well, I had a slow start. I fell into my stride about half way through the month, and finally found what I needed to say. That drove the story forward, and the words piled up. Had I found that story, and my perseverance, a couple weeks sooner I wouldn’t have had that epic writing day at the end.

However, that day writing 7k words was pretty exciting. That shows me that it’s possible, and if I keep pushing myself, and my endurance, some day I might be able to do writing days like that regularly.

I can make excuses about being distracted by life, children getting the flu, and feeling down the first week of this month, but ultimately they are all excuses. The truth is we all have those things happen. Life is not fair, life does not care if you’re trying to write every night. It simply is, and sometimes you have a bad day and you have to write anyway.

So I’m going to be brutally honest with myself, and you, and show exactly why I failed this years writing challenge.

First, for me I know that if I don’t write for a few days it is really difficult for me to keep writing. If I take a week off it takes me a while to get back into the swing of things. If something stressful is going on it’s that much worse.

So here is a chart showing how many words I’ve written every year for the last five years.

I have one month left in 2017, and I am 83,000 words behind my worst year out of the last five. And 48,000 of those words were written in one month. THAT, dear reader, is why I lost NaNoWriMo. Not because the kids were sick and we had to take them to the hospital. Not because I lost the story. Not because I had a couple bad days, or didn’t get enough sleep. It’s because I haven’t written that much this year anyway.

It’s not easy to look at this chart. Writing has been an incredibly important thing for me for as long as I can remember, and it’s upsetting to see how little care I put into my writing this year. Yes, I’ve written 65,000 words just on my new series, but that’s half as much as I wrote on the Witch’s Curse books each year when I was working to get them finished. And the question is why? Why did I give up? Why didn’t I push myself? Why did I choose video games over writing? Or a movie? Or a craft?

I’ve been asking myself that a lot these days. What do I want out of my life? Out of day job? Out of my writing? And I think that’s why I’ve been writing less. I wasn’t sure if it was what I wanted to focus on, because I wasn’t sure if it could get me the one thing I wanted more than anything.

Gregg, my boyfriend, started his own business this year. He works harder than ever, but he’s happier then he’s ever been. And he’s his own boss. No one to be accountable to accept himself (and maybe his audience) and….well no management to look over his shoulder, count the beans, and make sure he’s “doing his job right.” He’s accountable to himself, his art, and fans he’s gathering. And he’s so happy!

That’s what I want for myself, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Writing seems to be the thing that I’m best at, but I’m still pretty horrible at marketing. I know that because I’ve tried a LOT of marketing this year with maybe okay results. But we live, we learn, and we try something new, right?

The world is a strange place. We have adages like “do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” and “fake it till you make it” but no one tells you that someone has to weed the yard. Someone has to fix the plumbing. Someone has to pick up the trash. They probably didn’t want that for their life’s work either, but there they are. Supporting their family and doing a job so they can have a home, and set the table every night. But when you believe those adages and you aren’t doing what you love as a job you start to feel like you’re not good enough. And so here I was, feeling like I wasn’t good enough. Wondering if I should just give up and let writing be a hobby, like video games or crafts, instead of just working my butt of for the next novel, and trying to make a living on it.

And the truth is I don’t know. I don’t know if I will ever be able to make enough so that I can stop working for someone else. I don’t know if I will ever get a book out that strikes a cord with readers. I don’t know…if I’m good enough. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. I love to write, and I’m going to keep doing it.

So, this NaNoWriMo I learned to stop wallowing in my own self pity, and wondering what if, and just enjoy writing the story again.

And that’s what I’m going to do. Starting tomorrow. Today was a day for reflection.

You can’t afford a computer?

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For the longest time I’ve wanted a laptop to travel with so I could write while on the go. Work, breaks, hotels at cons, anything so I didn’t have to stop writing because we were away from home. But laptops seemed pricy, and easy to steal, break, or generally mess up. Plus the laptop we did have was pretty heavy, though I liked the larger screen.

What isn’t heavy, ultra expensive, and doesn’t take up much room? A tablet.

I found a kindle fire for as low as $30 right now for Christmas discounts. Add a folding blue tooth keyboard for $30 and you have a basic computer for $60. There are word processors available on the store, it’s wifi capable, and you’ll even find lots of free games on amazon.

The set up I have was a little more. My keyboard came with a case that folds into a stand. There are also several kindle fires available, some have ads, some don’t, and storage size is different (but remember they take memory cards). You can choose which is best for you. And you may want to purchase or subscribe to a writing program that backs everything up online for easy transfer of files. There is a way to load Google play onto a kindle, that way you can get drop box, but it does take a little work.

If you get an iPad or Android tablet you can possibly avoid the side loading process. Buyer beware though, there are copycat tablets out there that run Android but don’t have Google play, and the one I purchased couldn’t load many websites because it was missing drivers. Then I couldn’t update anything because it wasn’t Google ready.

The word processor I’m using isn’t as great as scrivener, but it gets the job done. In fact I’ve found it’s easier to turn off my internal editor because it isn’t constantly underlining my miss spelled words. Maybe someone will make a scrivener style app for kindle someday. (Hint to any developers out there. I’d pay for it!)

Here is my set up.

The keyboard is smaller so I wouldn’t recommend it for long writing sessions, but it’s perfect for short sessions, or writing down scenes when you are away from home. If you want a better set up there are full size blue tooth keyboards that you can get. They will also work with the kindle.

My set up when it’s ready to go. Light, compact, and flips open. Only thing I’m missing is screen protector.

Challenges

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I’ve been using challenges to learn things about myself, and the world around me for some time. NaNoWriMo for five years, the Bradbury Challenge a couple years ago, and last October I did Inktober and Drawtober,

Both ink and draw-tober are about drawing every day in October. I managed to draw 27 drawings, and ink 24 of them. I even add some color to a few.

For each challenge I put myself threw I try to take something out of it. From this one I learned that I loved drawing strange, and unusual things. I loved pushing my creativity in art as well as words. I hadn’t done more then cute little chibi’s of super heroes and other odd things lately, but this had me drawing steam powered submarines, and spider ballerinas, poison fairies and underwater wraiths. I did things with an ink pen I never would have thought to do before.

It was also invigorating. I did a lot of this challenge while we were traveling for twitchcon. We had days where we only slept for four hours, only to get up and put more leather together to get the armor set done. And yet I still managed to do so much. It just goes to show how much you can get done even when there’s a time crunch. Even when you’re sleep deprived. Even if you’re busy and the world doesn’t slow down so you can get your words, or ink lines in.

And in the end being creative is amazing, whatever creative thing you’re trying to do.

You can see more of the drawings, and pictures from twitchcon, over on instagram.