Cities and Voice for Short Story

I remembered to post this time!  I hope everyone is having a great week.  Mine has been another busy week with pushing out a project.  Anyway, things on the book end are slow.  I've been talking to a PR company to see how I can boost my audience and hopefully share my story with more people.  Hopefully I'll be able to act on that soon if my car will hold it together for a little longer.

I apologize for my short story taking so long.  I've been working on two things for it: cities and voice.  As I was writing the story, I realized that some cities were created after the Dragon War, therefore our hero, Junak, would not be able to go or know of those cities.  I had to pour over pages of notes and mark down which were around and which were not so I didn't have any continuity errors.  I've also been working on the voice of the story.  I have been re-reading a lot of older stories like Gilgamesh, Iliad and Odyssey, and more recently Dante's Divine Comedy.  I like how everything is so verbose and grand when writing.  I think I want to experiment with that for this short story.  One thing I found interesting, especially in the Iliad and Odyssey, is that everyone had a name and history.  There were not a lot of non-descriptive characters.

I have been drawing some images up, but it has been placed on hold, I'm hoping to do more on it soon.  I had my reasons for the style I chose to draw in the book, but for the website, I would like it to be a little more realistic.  Unfortunately, a more realistic product takes a little more time to get right.

On the personal side, we carved pumpkins!  I'll post some pictures.  We carved three, a scary, happy...and a sad one.  My 3-year old was intent on having a sad pumpkin...so we have a sad pumpkin now.  Did I finish my bathroom?  No...I've been trying to get my car to Maryland tags for some time now, but every time I bring it in having fixed the last problem, I get a new one.  In order to save money, I do things myself.  Unfortunately, that takes time.  Last time I had a list of problems ranging from brakes to power steering pump.  Fixed them all.  Now it's down to 3 items: wipers, headlights...and power steering rack.  The wipers and headlights are tivial, but the rack and pinion is a whole other story.  I can do it, but should I let the shop do it and get it over with and just bite the bullet?  We'll see...

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Busy Weeks

Hey everyone, sorry to miss a few weeks it has been pretty busy.  With my HS reunion and then the holiday seasons rolling around the corner, I need to be better about updating.  Lately, I've been attempting to better promote my book.  I missed the Baltimore Book Festival which would have helped immensely.  Next year I will be a little more prepared to do that.  The book, to be honest, is slow getting off the ground.  That's fine and expected.  I'm really new to this game, but hopefully I will be able to get my story out to more people.  

Anyway, enough wallowing.  It's Friday and that means a very busy weekend.  As far as the book, I'm still working on one of the shorts.  I've decided that all of the shorts will be for 99 cents and be somewhere around five chapters each.  This will give the books a set limit.  I was writing well on it until I realized that some of the cities wouldn't have existed during the time of the Dragon War.  I had to backtrack and look at the pages of notes I had written to be sure I don't have any continuity errors.  Yes, I do have a catalog of cities and organizations, their rule, and the year they were established.  You never know when that information will be handy.  So it was going swiftly, but has stalled due to that.  Instead of going through a formal publisher, I will be publishing these myself to Amazon or other e-book sites.  Hopefully next time we speak I will have news of maybe a give-away in a Baltimore bookstore.  Stay tuned for that.

That's all I have on the book front.  Personally, I'm debating whether this will be the weekend I finally put up drywall in my bathroom.  My fear is that I have forgotten something or that my level and plumb-bob have failed me and my walls aren't straight.  I get a little paranoid on it.  If my backboard bends in the shower, then my tile may fall off and that is an expensive mistake to fix.

Other than that my wife and I are planning on taking my son to a pumpkin patch.  I heard from a coworker about an incredible maze of corn and pumpkin patch in Frederick, MD.  Check it out on Google Maps or Earth.  You can see the one from 2015 which had Taylor Swift as the corn maze.  Amazing job.  Look out for photos if this is the weekend that will happen.

Well, I hope everyone has a pleasant weekend and a good Friday.  Remember to follow me on Twitter and Instagram.  I post things sometimes.  Thanks for reading!