How good it feels to write 'The End.'

Ladies and jellybeans, reptiles and crocodiles, I stand before you and sit behind you to tell you something I know nothing about.

Or perhaps I am here to tell you that I have indeed finished my second book. Who knows which it is? It must be one of nature's greatest mysteries!

All right, so I'm a little loopy from having stayed up until four this morning writing and sending the book to the publisher, then getting woken up by one of my professors from the college calling me about an hour and a half before I meant to wake up. But the fact remains that I am done with the initial writing, and will soon move on to the whole editing thing again. The tentative release date for my next book is with the batch MLP releases in April 2011. So it will be just less than a year until the second book is in print.

No reason not to start the next one in the meantime, I suppose... but now there's not as much pressure from various sources. Except possibly from my friend Avery, who has set an artificial due date of next Thursday for my next book. Hmm... Can I write 100,000 words or so in six days? Not very likely, good sir. Try again when I'm even more sleep-deprived. I might be insane enough to go for it at that point, but I could not vouch for the quality of the writing.

So, now I'm off to work, footloose and fancy free, to use the cliché. I also have to get one of my professors a copy of the background check I got for work at Gritman so I can watch a couple of teenagers over the weekend for some sort of conference or something. Shouldn't be too difficult, and I get some food money for it, so woo!

On a completely unrelated note, Monsters vs. Aliens is not only cute, but the character of Galaxar the alien and his clones just remind me so much of a Villain and his Minions that I was rolling on the ground laughing as I was watching it. I then had to dust off my back. Apparently I haven't swept upstairs in a while. I live in the basement, so it's out of sight, out of mind, as they say. They, who is in fact, my uncle Tim. I was so impressed with the movie that I went out an bought a bit of the soundtrack, and made a ringtone out of the song Dr. Cockroach was dancing to to hack the security system on the ship. It's a terrible song, but the one bit of it he was dancing to was so very catchy!

And on the subject of Villainy/mad science, I heartily recommend the web comic "Girl Genius" for those of you who just can't get enough awesome steampunk and mad science. If you ever wanted to see giant walking battle platforms, lightning control generators, hilarious lovable scary monster soldiers, and a love triangle that would make even Lydia Weatherblade's head spin, check it out. It's got a decent amount in the archives too, so even if you're very bored, you're not burning through it in just one day.

That is all. You may now go about your daily business. And buy my book in April!

What'e'er good cometh of far too much coffee, 'tis far outweighed by the cost...

Ne'er have I seen the dangers so clear of the legality, and more importantly, the abundance of caffeine in this country. When a restaurant will sell an endless cup of coffee to someone at 4 a.m., and then bring them a second pot once they have foolishly consumed the first, well, perchance I think too harshly of them, and 'tis the fault of the consumer, not the business.

All right, so I know this is summer vacation and all, but let me note one thing. My days off work are just that. Days off. Not nights stretching into infinity. I do not wish to be kept up until 4 a.m. by the sinister machinations of my friends, nor torn from the security of my own home by the same in an attempt to make me go to WinCo with them. This manner of treachery is only acceptable when leavened with delicious food.

So it was that this befell me. A couple of my housemates drag me out of the house at 4 a.m., ostensibly to go grocery shopping. Now, I'd already been grocery shopping. That very day, in fact, and gotten ingredients to make delicious food for the house. But no, they were not content with this, and off we went. We did not make it to WinCo, as I foolishly mentioned I was hungry, and lamented that even McDonald's wasn't open so late. Or perhaps not open quite that early.

So off we went to the local Shari's, which if you don't know what that is, is kind of like a Denny's. It's a 24-hour diner. Stephen, this adorable no good dirty rotten scoundrel friend of mine, bought me very early breakfast. Stuffed hashbrowns, sausages, eggs and toast, the works. But my mistake was the coffee.

See, another friend who happens to live in our house is allergic to coffee. So much so that we can't even brew any in the house, or the fumes get to her and drive her sinuses nuts and kick her in the head. So when I get the opportunity to have some coffee, I sure as chocolate pudding take some. Yes, that epithet was strange, but it's 2:30 a.m. Cut me some slack.

I drank two pots of coffee all by myself. I'm not sure where the first pot went, but I more or less inhaled it before my food got to me. Also, I consumed enough cream and sugar to power a small European country. Coffee, as it turns out, requires a certain ratio of sugar to cream to coffee for me to tolerate it. And of course, I usually use coffee as an excuse to drink cream and sugar. So with the ratio of four sugar packets and three creamers to one cup of coffee, and an average of four cups of coffee per pot... my goodness, that is a stupid number of sugar packets. Nevermind.

This of course affected my behavior somewhat. I am mildly hyperactive in my normal state of consciousness, and the addition of two pots of coffee to this is not the best of soothing balms. Somewhere between the first and second pot, everything in the world became hilarious. My friends and I chatted about random stuff for an hour while we ate and I drank gratuitous amounts of coffee. And cream and sugar. It makes Stephen sick to watch me doctor my tea, as he's lactose intolerant.

For the record, if you ever go to the Shari's in Moscow, Idaho at night, and you are served by a waitress named Krystal, she is a fantastic person, a paragon of professionalism, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for putting up with my shenanigans.

THE POINT OF THIS STORY IS

It actually doesn't have one, but it produced an interesting side effect. For the next two hours after getting home (6 a.m. to 8 a.m. Thursday morning), I wrote two thousand words per hour. After the caffeine wore off and I crashed for four hours, I got up and wrote even more. Seven thousand, one hundred and fifty-four words are the direct result of two pots of coffee. I'm not sure of the quality, but the quantity is stupendous.

Therefore I am going to bed now to catch up on my much-needed sleep. But I'm on a roll now, folks. With just less than three thousand words to write, give or take, and the story winding up to a conclusion of sorts, I am so very very close to being done it's not even funny. If I wasn't falling asleep at the keyboard, I'd just finish it now. But I have work in the morning, bwaaaaah. Off to clean sheets and fuzzy blankets for the night. Hopefully tomorrow, the book will be done. No promises.

Oh, and by the way, Duncan, thanks for being my first follower. You are the Best. Stalker. Ever.

Thought for the Day: Contemplating the fall of the Bolsheviks, I realize that it really doesn't take much to topple a governmental system and become an evil dictator. Next time you see a ruling regime on the brink of collapse from their own stupidity, would you do me a favor and tell me so I can take it over?

Treading the path long and weary

At the end of this day, three days of glorious freedom await me. Well, freedom from everything but writing, that is. I have yet to make any progress today on the writing front, but my intent is to write 1,455 words tonight at the very least to round out to a nice even 92,000 words.

I'm trying to get an idea in my head as far as title is concerned, and I've only come up with "Hero in Hiding." It isn't very good, but I want to stick with my same "Hero Something" scheme I started with the first book. I'm open to suggestions, but my publisher has the final say, really. I'd welcome other input.

On a somewhat related note, there's an awesome conference going on in Oregon... somewhere. It's the Oregon Christian Fiction Writer's Conference: Journey in the Write Direction. Its title is a pun worthy of myself, and my publisher, Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press, is going to be a keynote speaker there. That means I actually get to meet the guy for the first time, in person. Whee! Now to scrape up the four hundred dollars to pay for it...

So I was also thinking about Heroic Emblems. You know, the ones on the Tokens of Summoning, or emblazoned on armor? I was thinking of a ranking scheme for Heroes, based on their strength and stature in the Guild. Something like Apprentice > Hero > Champion > Defender > etc... I'm not sure. There's be specialized rankings such as Guild Messenger, too, I'm just not sure what to do with them. Ideas?

Well, this was a fun lunch break. Well, dinner break. Time to get back to work so I can earn money to pay rent to stay warm and dry while I write. Toodles!

Thought for the day: Is an envelope called an envelope because it envelops?

And so it begins...

This entry marketh mine second attempt upon the world of blogs. The first was doomed to failure, and ne'er shall it be spoken of again, ever. But now it hath purpose, and purpose brings life to things otherwise without it, such as golems, illusions, and lawyers.

It has been a long week already, and it's only Sunday. My work week this week consisted of six days in a row on, then two or three off. Not to mention last week, where I worked two double shifts over the weekend to cover for a sick co-worker. So I hope you got to enjoy your Memorial Day weekend, and weren't forced to go camping or any of that nonsense, and had a better day than I did.

Also, the previous paragraph just happens to serve as an excuse for just why my next book isn't done yet. No, it isn't, but as of this posting, it is at 90,555 words out of my intended 100,000. Ninety-point-five percent isn't bad when I've been working six out of the last seven days, is it?

Yes, yes, you're right, it is bad. Back to the writing.

Thought for the day: Would you say a "Justice Golem" was a 'social construct?'