Uhg, home for a week, almost enough time to get caught up enough to leave again tomorrow.  Should be another fun, hot, trip to do the family reunion thing in Atlanta.  I think I liked the 1/2 hour flight on the last trip better than the cross country flying for this one.  Maybe the kids will be feeling mellow and we'll all just read :)

I know, I should probably be doing my part to inform you of the Zombie apocalypse, but I'm good at denial.  The kids started summer break today, so they're downstairs playing video games.  It's another hot day (for around here, at least), so all the drapes are closed to keep out the sun.  No banging on the doors, so I can pretend everything is normal and I just have to get through one more day of work before we head off on our first family vacation of the summer.  We've been looking forward to this too much to let a few undead spoil our plans.  I just hope there are enough pilots around tomorrow, and no latent zombie infection carriers get on the boat with us on Sunday.

Heading off to BayCon in a couple of hours, and I really shouldn't plan to work the first half of the day.  It's a bit hard to concentrate when I keep wanting to do things like pack.  And finish my critiques that I had hoped to have typed so that they'd be legible.
Happy long weekend to those that get it :)

I have what may be my first face to face critique coming up at the end of the month.  This year I payed enough attention to the deadlines to get a story submitted for the Writer's Workshop at BayCon.  I was just happy to have made the deadline before, but I just got the stories that I have to critique for it.  My critiquing experience so far has been pretty limited.  I've only done it for a couple of online workshops, where I had plenty of time to review and reword what I was saying before I'd post my critiques.  I get to make notes and such for this, but it'll be different.  Of course, it'll be different getting my own stuff critiqued this way, too, but I'm more worried about the other side of it.  And so far I've printed them out, but haven't read past the first paragraph on either one to know how much I might even have to say.

I almost missed out, but happy World Book and Copyright Day, everyone!

If I just saw the title of this book on the shelf, I probably would have passed it over.  Looking at the cover, I would have picked it up to check it out.  Having read the prior two in the series, I had it on pre-order.  And I finally got a chance to read it over the weekend.
Jim C Hines (jimhines) has put together another very fun read, closing the trilogy in a way that left me satisfied, while the world and characters have plenty of room left for more when he (hopefully) returns to them.
If you've heard Jim say anything about this book, you've probably about his riff on The Giving Tree.  All I can say is Thank You :)
The characters were all very engaging, and I want to read more about several of them.  In a good way, that is.  Part of the time I was reading in the same room as my wife was working on something, and I started to feel bad that I kept disturbing her with my laughter.  But I figure she'll get me back by reading it in bed while I try to sleep, so I didn't worry about it too much.
For the third book in a series, I think he did a great job keeping it open for new readers.  Although after you read this, you'll want the first two anyways, so you might as well get them all and go in order to get the full enjoyment.

I made it out last night to see Jim Butcher, and I'm glad I went.  I had a great view, too, based on the fact that I was in the first row of standing audience, so I could see over the heads of all those poor suckers that had to sit in the chairs the whole time. 
Based on travel distance and not knowing just how bad the traffic would be that direction, I left with plenty of time, giving me a chance to enjoy my current Audible book, Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik.  As a side note, I can understand why it can happen, but it takes a lot longer to get back into a world when they switch readers for books in a series.  After sitting through not too bad traffic, I got there in plenty of time so I didn't miss anything, which was good, but I had time to kill walking around a bookstore, which was bad (at least on my wallet). 
After a very entertaining and informative Q&A for about an hour (I need to get a writing teacher that I can blame everything on), he signed for another hour.  And of course I didn't take my camera, so I don't have any pictures.  But if I did, my card reader would probably be acting up, anyways.

Well, I got my writing time in while my son played chess again on Saturday, and then I even ended up with some more on Sunday.  And I basically realized how out of practice I am.  I had to keep stopping myself from just summarizing the rest of the story and putting it off till the next revision.  Sure, I did some of that, but I'm talking about wanting to do a paragraph for basically the second half of the story.  Of course, that means I didn't finish the story, but if all I wanted was a summary, I already have that in some notes.  I'm curious about my word count, but this was longhand, and the notepad doesn't have a nice little word count function.  Depending on where I am when I get make time to finish, I may start the typed draft and see if it rolls on better in that form.

Really, it should be a national holiday.  Well, maybe just a work holiday would be good, so I could send the kids off to school and then sit and write all day :)  Ahh, but I guess that's not to be.  But I do have a couple story ideas that have done some good brewing in my brain, and my son has another chess tournament tomorrow, so hopefully I'll at least get a few hours of writing in on one of them.

I was hit by one of those obvious but interesting thoughts the other day, and since I don't post very often, and since it's actually similar to John Levitt's guest blog over at the League of Reluctant Adults, I was inspired to share.
In my day job, I'm a computer programmer.  When I start a project that's more than a decent size, I might start off with a design document, where I figure out the flow of the program(s), and the best form to tackle them with.  And quite often I'll go back to this and make changes as I'm actually writing the code.  I might give the design to some of my teammates to check it out and see where I missed the mark.  I write a version of the code and see if I can get it to work for me.  Then I'll get those teammates to look over this.  Some of them like to pick apart my syntax, others might be good at catching the overall errors, or pointing out simpler ways to do things, or how to make it more efficient.  After taking their comments into account, I send it off to the test team for functional testing, and user testing.  So I sit and wait while they're looking it over.  Then I get back comments about how great it is, or, more often, some tweaks and little changes.  We might go back and forth a few times like that, then it's ready for production.  Before it actually gets there, I have some additional stuff to do to make sure the people that will be using it know that it's coming and so forth, and then it's out for the users.
Any of that process sound familiar to you writers? :)  Of course, with the day job I usually start off with requirements, and they're more detailed than "write something I'll like".

OK, I also think it funny that I just hit spell check and it's giving me options to correct "blog".