Damn you, holidays. How dare you get in the way of THE WORK. You really are a jerk. Hey, I rhymed! That was totally unintentional.

Despite the massive speed bump of the break, I do have something to report. Just before I saturated myself with cookies and presents, I did hit a milestone. 400 pages! 100,000 words! That was my original estimate, quantity-wise, and I'm kind of psyched that I made it there. If I had to guess, I'm thinking that I've got another 10,000 to 15,000 to go, and I'll stamp this puppy as “kind of finished”!. Kind of, because of the whole editing thing, which of course will be lickity-split, because of COURSE I'm SO GOOD that the manuscript in it's raw form is PERFECT. (Bluster bluster bluster...ego ego ego.)

Okay...maaaaaybe there will still be some work to be done. I've divided the book into three acts, or “books”. The first and third, I think are pretty strong. It's that pesky middle one that's going to need the most work. I am really happy how the third act is concluding...I think things are getting wrapped up alright. Although, I'm sure that when I go back through I'll realize that I forgot something HUGE, like neglecting to mention something really important, like how, in the distant dystopian future, nobody bothers to wear pants. EVER.

Was that a red herring? A ruse? Or, in fact, is it critical plot exposition??? You'll never know. I mean, you will...that is...when I finish this thing and get it the eff out of the factory and into the hands of the consuming public.

I'm pretty happy. February was and is my original delivery time, and I think I'm still going to make it, as long as something horrible doesn't happen. Even if it slips, I can still say that I've done a decent job committing to the progress. Yay, me. (Back slapping sound.)

The funny thing about these posts is that I'm not sure that anybody actually reads them. I haven't really done much to promote myself yet, because I don't like saying things like “Hey, guys! I'm Derek! I'm writing a book! Oh...no...it's not done yet...but if you'll wait a few months I'll have it all ready!” I just figure that people might forget about it, and not come back to paint my greedy hands with their hard-earned greenbacks. (There. You've made me spill my ultimate, evil intentions.) But, if anybody really is seeing this...well...then thanks. :)

The era of “pre-first-book” is a special kind of purgatory. There's nothing to point to, other than the idea of a product. Everything is just preamble and intent...there's nothing concrete, other than a web page and a bio. Sigh. I've wanted this for so long. The last few yards are truly the longest.

But, when it's all written and done, I'll be a world-famous, lambo-driving, surrending-to-excess SOB, and I'll be loving it. Or, the book will suck, and I'll live the rest of my life inside my literal closet.

Or, perhaps somewhere in between. Tally ho!

Back to work.

Twenty more pages written, but more importantly, I think I'm finished with the rough form of acts one and two of the story, tied together with a fancy word bow...

...for I am NOTHING if not...fancy.

That just leaves the third act to be completed. Aaaaaand, it shouldn't be nearly as long as the first. I have a clear idea where I want things to go, and what major stuff has to get done or explained along the way. Spirits are up, happiness reigns...the only thing that would make this better would be a piping hot, brand new apple pie in my lap.

Or, maybe a luke-warm apple pie in my lap. Y'know, with my tender loins and all. (I set out with this post trying to see if I could include the words “tender loins” somewhere. I just won...against...myself....)

I'm having a ball, but even so, I just want to get this thing done! I feel like I've been waiting for this...who knows...most of my life maybe, either consciously or unconsciously. It's almost...almost, mind you...secondary to me if the story is any good or not. Just having something out there with my name on it...the prospect makes me all tingly. Yup. Like warm apple pie on my loins. Callback!

I hope everybody's doing well. Life got really crappy at the end of last week, with the Paris attacks. Can't stop thinking about what's been going on over there. I'm a pretty easy-going, peaceful sort of person, so “assholes with guns” is something that I just can't compute. I have a daughter. She's young, but I despair thinking that this is the world I have to acquaint her with. Let's just hope there's some scientific “peace breakthrough” or something within the next ten or fifteen years. In the meantime, let's try to keep the guns away from the assholes.

Be good to each other, okay?

Back to work.

Hello, milestone. It's me, Derek. I assume that you heard I would be arriving, all fancied up and surfing a handstand along my word wave! Whooshy whooshy. Splashy splashy. And for no apparent reason...honk.

What's that, milestone? Oh, yes, I WILL sit down to your table and have a big old steak of self-satisfaction...raw and ragged, to appropriately symbolize the journey thus far. It might not seem like a lot to some, but to me, 75,000 words of anything is a whole heap of...well...something. Hell, I could just type the word “story” 75,000 times, and although that wouldn't exactly added up to anything of what you might call “narrative value”, the sheer deluge of words alone should be impressive, dammit.

I have two time-lines that I'm dealing with...one in the distant past, and one in the distant future. It's been a challenge to figure out exactly how to present them, whether it be concurrently or separately. I think I've settled on separately, although I realize at a risk of interrupting the flow. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I think it would be less confusing, overall. Also, that way, I get to divide the novel into three “books”, or “acts”, and include cool, meaningful pages that announce each one, like “BOOK ONE: THE BOOKENING” or “BOOK TWO: THE THUNDER BOOK”.

As an aside, The Thunder Book is now officially a project in my idea list. You saw it here first. You can't have it. IT'S MINE.

That's about 300 pages, you guys. 100 or so to go.

Baaaaack...to work.

Yikes. I'm working on a scene in the book that is emotionally charged like crazy. A man and a boy are discussing things they've lost, and finding some comfort in the voids in one another's lives. It's been an interesting look into the differences in the emotional states and dynamics of children and adults. Knowing what I know of myself, and what I know of my own daughter has helped figure out the right things to say.

One thing I've discovered is that the emotions of adults have more inertia than those of children. They don't swing as freely as the hyper-temporary, soup-bubble feelings of kids. Children can feel the most intense loss and the most profound joy before any adult can even begin to figure out what's going on in their own head. Adults' emotions are ships at sea; kids' are leaves in splashed puddles.

Writing about it makes me yearn for that emotional impermanence again. How great it would be to be able to pull oneself out of something dark so quickly, even considering that one could be right back down there in a blink.

I miss being young. I miss that ignorance, that ant-sized perspective.

Ugh. This is a difficult one, especially since I know where the scene is going.

Back to work.

I stand atop a pile of words. 54,528 of them, to be precise.

That is the most recent count, the most recent clump of language and raw ore pulled from the earth, that I've generated for The Footsteps of Cain. Good, bad, and everything in between.

Of my estimation, I believe I'm about half-way to a...deep breath here...finished piece! Since I've been able to focus full-timeish (at least as full time as I can with my 7 year old at school and a perpetual mountain of house work and keep-my-family-alive food preparation that I SUPPOSE I should commit to), I've been able to crank out 20,000 words, or thereabouts. For me, that's about a month and a half of work.

I've passed in and out of a couple different types of certainty on the journey; certainty that part of what I've generated is good, and certainty that part of it sucks in the most cringe-worthy sense. I feel like I have too many one-dimensional puppets, and I know that in my second run through I'm going to try to breathe more life and blood into them...take felt and make it flesh. The view from inside a story, especially for someone like me with little experience, can be a very constricting one; I wonder and fear what fresh eyes will reveal about it when they see it.

Walk forward with fear, old man, and let it keep your eyes open.

Back to work.

I sat down and ran the numbers. 1,000 words a day, 5,000 a week. 400 estimated pages, at 250ish words a page, that's 100,000 words. 45,000 words already written, 55,000ish to go divided by 5,000 words a week, that's 11 weeks until a completed manuscript, assuming uninterrupted progress. Throw in another month for editing, and we're looking at 4 months. Let's say...February.

Holy crap.

Nailing down a date is super scary. Slow-encroaching, deadly-creep kind of scary. First, because I know have to hold myself accountable for something, and if I don't make it I'll pretty much hate myself. Second, because it means that I'll officially be enbarking on a long-awaited, maybe-lucrative career as a bonafide AUTHOR of something, which is terrifying all by itself.

Most people I know don't KNOW that I'm aspiring to this. Most of them know me as the stay-at-home dad that I also am, and that's pretty much it. I feel like there's a metamorphosis of perspective coming, and that soon I won't resemble the guy lots of people think I am. It'll be something to adapt to. It'll probably confuse some, also...I can be occasionally socially awkward with people I don't know very well, and in those situations I can barely string together any type of coherence.

Yet here I am. Writing. Bearing my bleeding soul. When one writes something, it tends to be a direct look into their mental process. It's really personal; there's nothing to hide behind. Sure, one could argue that one could hide behind characters much the same way that one could hide behind a puppet, and sometimes it might feel that way, but ultimately what the puppet does and says is going to reveal a different facet of the puppeteer behind it...their way of thinking...perhaps idiosynchroses they are self-conscious about...their fears and dreams.

But, that's the job, right? When you sell your story, you sell yourself, and all the things that contain you and you contain.

Or do most folks only care about the show? Do they care about the puppeteer at all? I don't know. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the middle, where most answers tend to clump.

Okay, I'm wandering. Back to work.

So I'm sitting here in the middle of a writing day, and I'm buzzing.  And it is occurring to me what is so great about the act of writing; what is so satisfying and exciting and self-actualizing and all that stuff.

I'm not a dancer.  I'm too self-conscious for it.  I don't WANT to be...it's just the shape that nature and experience have pounded me into.  I'm tall, easily seen by everybody in the room, and my feet are bigger than most of the folks around me.  Eyes go the the tall guy; that's what I've learned with my time in this body.  I feel it when I walk into a room or through a crowd, busting the average with my lanky frame.  People look.

Not to mention, for me, there's no room to move on most dance floors.  I have a wing span that could potentially endanger others within its large radius, and so I usually have to pin my arms to my sides and awkwardly shuffle my big man-shoes back and forth and hope I don't knock anybody over.  I don't really get "that feeling" that people who enjoy it get.  Not on the dance floor, anyway.

Writing is a dance.  It's alternating flow and rhythm, sometimes long and descriptive and mechanically dense, complicated and evocative, and other times quick and punctuated.  It's sometimes light and airy like popcorn, fluffy and superficial and meaningless, and then it's a steak slathered in gravy and mashed potatoes, solid and unyielding.  It's quick, quick...slow...quick, quick...slow...STOMP STOMP STOMP!

When done right, like when a master does it, it can pull things out of you, sometimes cradling them and returning them whole, and other times throwing them on the ground and grinding them to delicious powder.

It took me too long to figure that out.  I wish I'd realized it sooner.  Oh well, I get it now.  I suppose that's all that matters.

Back to work.

REAL Life.  REALLY, REALLY Real Life.  Y'know what I'm sayin'?  It can find you through locked windows.  It creeps under doors and slaps you around.  Oh, Real Life, you trampler of productivity, MADE of productivity...you whisperer of obligation and responsibility.  You are the bothersome pseudo-friend that always shows up and nobody knows quite why.  You are the crunchy nut fragments in the peanut butter of what everybody would rather be doing.  (I'm a creamy man.  Well, not a CREAMY MAN, a...you know what?  I think you know what I mean.)

Real Life, you just come in without knocking, sit down in my comfy chair, and start demanding jalapeno poppers.  And I know that you know I don't have jalapeno poppers and would have to make a trip to the store to get some.

Real life, who told you you could borrow my pants?  Why are you wearing my pants?  That also tells me that you've been in my bedroom, and I know for damn sure that I didn't give you permission to be in there.

Real Life, the left side in the toaster isn't popping up.  I know I smelled something toasting yesterday, and I think that you put the toaster away to cover you...y'know...breaking my toaster.  It's frustrating; I know that you have neither A)Money for a replacement, nor B)Toaster repair skills.

Real life...you suck as a person.

But whatever...real life gotta git done.  I forgive you, Real Life.  Let's go and get some froyo so I can show you.  Smooches.

After a relaxing weekend at a volleyball tournament in Chicago (my wife and I are kind of nuts about that sport), I'm back into the swing of things.  Back to work, back to work.  The Footsteps of Cain is coming together, narrative-wise; I think I may have worked through some problems and found a better way to place some hooks in the beginning to pull the readers through.  LOL, I'm sure this is really compelling considering the non-specificity I'm providing.  I guess I'm sadistic.  You shall not know until you know!

If you'll ever know, that is.  I'm trying to hit this thing as hard as I can over the next couple months...make as much progress as I can before the holidays hit with their car trips and multi-Christmases and bustle.  I hate taking breaks from the work...I'd rather live and breath it until it's done.  Yet, as usual, the real world leaks in no matter how airtight my bubble is.  I wonder if there's a solitary cabin at the top of a mountain somewhere that I could get a lease on?  Yeah, just me, an old-timey typewriter, a bear-skin (for some reason) coat, and a scraggly beard, pounding away at an obsession, until one day I could descend from the peaks clutching those precious pages, half-mad.

Nah, I'd never survive it.  No internet connection?  I mean, come on.  The inane, unborn tweets would build up in my brain until I had a mental cave-in.

And so, precious Time and I are fleeting partners.  So why am I blogging when I should be working on the WORK?  Good question, maybe-you and me.  Off I go.  Have yourself a merry little Tuesday.

I am SO sports!  You believe me!  I am not pulling this off.

This is my first of many, thousands, billions of posts on my shiny, brand-spanking new website!  I've never seen my face quite like it looks like here, and I'm quite sure that the exhaustive layers of photoshopping have rendered me, um...viewable?  I just put the finishing touches on the site this past week, and finally got around to dredge up the guts to actually publish it.  It is my first point of exposure, the over-make-upped face of my work.

See, this whole thing is new to me, even though I've been waiting for literal years to get to a point where I can focus on writing all the friggin' time.  No offense to my family; they are a couple of happenin' gals and razor-sharp smart dames and all of that oddly chosen anachronistic fluff, but durn it, this guy needs some writin' time, yo!  I've been the primary care-giver for my daughter, who is now an almost fully-formed seven year old, and this is the first year post-kindergarten, which means I can either wander around the house aimlessly, sniffing and tapping against the windows, eating nothing but Lucky Charms and wearing out the sweat pants of oblivion, OR I can git up on this horse and ride 'er towards whatever burning sunset will light this bonfire.  That would be the bonfire of "the published and wildly successful future", in case that wasn't clear.

Yup.  It's time.

Enter The Footsteps of Cain, my first novel.  I'm 150 pages in, and as I settle into the cushions of the extra time I've been given, I'll be forging ahead as fast as I possibly can to the day I can declare the manuscript done.  I'm planning on self-publishing, and am in the middle of researching options and educating myself on that whole ball of wax.  It's immensely liberating to pound the keys in a manner I feel they deserve, the tips of my fingers sparking off of each and every one like pistons striking down against those chambers in car engines where the fuel goes to combust.  Kaboom chambers!  Yeah, that's what they call 'em.  I'm every bit a car guy as I am a sports guy.

So on and up we go.  I would like to mention the awesome cover image for The Footsteps of Cain...I got it from Binny V A over on Flickr.  I love it...it's the perfect spooky blood-red that reflects the mood of the narrative.  The image of the crow is very important to the story as well...we'll see it often as the story winds on.

If you are here, if you are reading this, then I thank you for your good taste and attention.  I hope you'll revisit every so often to follow the meta-adventure of my journey writing this book.  Let's kick this ball through a yellow "U" together!  Go sports!

I'm sorry; I'll stop doing that, now.