What’s New?

It’s nice that I now have people bugging me about wanting to read the next book. It really does help to motivate me to keep working on it. Another thing that helps is that I have a whole series of books plotted out from a high level, all inter-connected.

There’s a work/life balance that I struggle to maintain. I’m obsessive compulsive to a degree, as when I get into something I really get into it. But then some other shiny object attracts my attention, and then I’m off obsessing about something else.

It happens with my day job too, and I really had to go to extremes to counteract that — my continued employment depended on it. But then I find I get so wrapped up in a work-related project that I bring it home and work on it here, too, and that demolishes my “writing time.” And then there’s my health. If I’m sitting all day at work, it’s not good that I come home and sit all night as well working on a novel. Or a blog. Or redesigning a website. Or editing a podcast. Etc.

One of the many rationalizations I’d made about buying a really nice camera is that it would prompt me to go OUTSIDE and WALK AROUND, taking pictures. But that’s sporadic. I go through phases where I’m only interested in photography (hence my writercam.com website). The problem is that I don’t want to go walking around with an expensive camera dangling around my neck all the time. This, of course, led to my rationalization about getting a phone with a good camera. Now I have a camera all the time, because that never leaves my side. Ever. If I don’t have it I break into a cold sweat and worry about it.

What it all boils down to is that I’m apparently obsessed with creating because I do it at home, at work, in my free time, practically during every waking moment. All too rare are the moments where I just relax, breathe, look at something pretty (without photographing or writing about it) and simply exist.

Is anyone else out there that way?

Update: This didn’t happen. More about it here »

Click this:

If 1000 people click the above Earth Hour challenge and accept it by also clicking the big green button that reads “Accept This Challenge” I will dye my hair green and post videos of it. It costs you nothing but a click, and a promise to reduce your plastic usage.

This is why I’m doing this:

I have yet to have anyone convince me that writing a short story hasn’t become a waste of time.

It appears to me that all the paying markets for short stories have become closed-loop systems where the only people buying and reading them are those who are trying to get published in them.

The general reading public (or at least the small part of it I’ve sampled) aren’t that interested in short stories, and if they are, they prefer to read them in anthologies.

Books, I’ve decided, rule.  Even if they’re just electronic.

Speaking of which, I just subscribed to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show on my Kindle.  If there’s anything that can save magazine markets for short stories, it’s going to be an eReader.

Why, suddenly, did I do that?

Well, because I sent them a story, that’s why. 

Actually I’ve always liked Orson – his stories used to blow me away, especially back in the days of Omni magazine – and plus, the publication is edited by Edmund R. Schubert, who I published on Dark Energy SF.  Not that this means anything.  Chances are still overwhelmingly in favor of me getting a rejection slip.

Yes, I still get those.

That’s a bumble bee.

I’ve always considered myself a photographer as well as a writer, but I haven’t worked professionally since I was in my early 20’s, where I walked away from a lucrative career as a wedding photographer … simply because the job sucked all the joy out of photography.  The brides never seemeed to get their perfect wedding. Emotions ran high.  And me, empathetic as I am, it turned out to be too tense.  My blood pressure went through the roof.

On and off I’ve flirted with the idea of going pro again.  I’ve done some pro level stuff here and there in my various jobs.  But … no.  It’s just a hobby.  And as long as it stays that way, I’ll enjoy it.

So what does any of this have to do with a bumble bee?  Only this: I took that picture today, just plinking around in my backyard with my new Nikon D5000.  This shot has to be one of the best I’ve taken in my entire life, and I was just messing around.

This camera is awesome.  And I do think I’ll be playing around with it quite a bit from now on.

In fact, you can now follow my newly revamped photoblog, aptly named PhoBloggery, over at http://phobloggery.jerryjdavis.com

My wonderful day job employer has moved me to the Chicago area, specifically near Naperville, which is yet another in a long string of cosmic coincidences in connection to my good friend Tim from Stockton — because he lives here too.  We run into each other on airlines, we move to the same city at random, it’s just weird.

Good weird, though — not bad weird.

So now here I am in my new little cottage, my back yard literally right up against a forest preserve full of wild animals, with uber high speed Internet and affordable rent.

And now it’s time for me to hunker down and start working on the second draft of my novel.

So that is what I’m doing.

Also, any writers out there in the Naperville, Lisle, Wheaton, Warrenville, Winfield, Glen Ellyn area … a shout out to you.  Let’s either form a writer’s group, or let me know if there’s an opening in an established one.

It may be premature, but I’m going to pause for the moment and celebrate.

When I first started writing novel-length manuscripts, it took 60,000 to 80,000 words to make a novel.  This was imposed by the big publishing houses, and so that is what I used to shoot for.  Now the bar has been raised higher, and the current threshold you need to shoot for is at least 100,000 words.

Let me tell you, not many things in the novel-writing arena suck as much as writing your heart out and finishing a story that you think is perfectly complete, only to find you’ve undershot the word count, and find you have to come up with another 20,000 words to artificially bloat your manuscript to fit the publisher’s criteria.  Sucks, I tell you.  Sucks.  And it can make your novel suck, too.

So I keep track of my word count as I write, just so that I know in the back of my mind where I stand as I go.  If I have a lot of words left, I feel free to add more complications to the plot.  This is counter-intuitive for someone trained to write short stories, where the goal is to say more with less.  And while that’s still a good rule of thumb when writing a novel, you can always expand the story, dig deeper into the characters, give them one more hurtle to jump.  And have it make sense, too.

It’s a lot easier to do that if you keep track of the word count as you’re writing than to try and shoe-horn it in later.  Then again, if you’re one of those writers who effortlessly hits a quarter million words and find you have to go in and trim a third of them out … this doesn’t pertain to you.

Anyhow, you can tell I’m in novel-writing mode now, because I’m being long-winded.  I’ll stop and sum up what I’m announcing:  I’ve reached the point in this novel that I can stop caring about word count.  At over 93,000 words, and quite a bit of story left to tell, I’m definitely going to make the 100,000 words.  No problem.

Not that I won’t celebrate again 7000 words from now, when I actually do cross that threshold.

And yet again when I finish.

It’s all good from here.

For some odd reason I wondered, “What the heck is at Santa.com?” and I typed it in.

Low and behold, along side all the other holiday materialism, I found none other than Santa’s Blog.  I’m not kidding you.  Santa has a blog.

Well, why not?  Everyone else does.

Here’s a snippet of Christmas Eve’s entry:  “Hi Boys and Girls.  At last tonight is my Big Night.  Are you very excited?  Here in the North Pole we are listening to Christmas music all morning, sipping some hot chocolate, and getting ready for the most wonderful and exciting night of the year.”

Well, what did you expect?  It’s Santa’s blog.

At SantaClause.com you get a service where (and I do recall hearing about this a few years ago) you hand over some PayPal money and an address or phone number, and someone you choose gets a letter or phone call from Santa.

Santa.net features, what else, a very busy looking kid’s web site that among other things features a computerized Christmas wish list.

Santa.org features a generic link site.  (Shouldn’t that be illegal?  Especially on a .org domain?)  Other stupid link sites include SantaClause.net, SantaClause.us, and SantaClause.org.

Speaking of which, Christmas.com is also one of those horrid link sites.

Santa.us takes you to a online Christmas Catalog, aptly named Christmas-Catalog.com.  That is such a bargain basement bin URL that it’s pathetic and sad.

Santa.tv takes you to an access restricted video site that, for all I know, houses porn.

Santa.jp is 403 FORBIDDEN!

Someone actually owns GroovySanta.com, which is what I would have used, had I been evil.  Speaking of which, someone also has EvilSanta.com, but isn’t using it for anything.  It’s an Apache web server running on a Mac.

Last but not least, someone set up NorthPole.com, and it’s a virtual Santa’s Village in Adobe Flash form.  Don’t get excited, it’s rather lame.

So, leaving there, I wondered if Santa has a Facebook account.  Well, let me tell you, apparently every shopping mall Santa in the world has a Facebook account.  I didn’t even bother looking at MySpace.