October: Things Fall Apart

What's going on in Nathan land, you ask? Wait, do I know you? How can you ask me such personal questions?!

Ahem.

Well, let's get life updates. I bought an 02 Toyota Camry. It isn't in the best condition, and it ended up needing new brakes, rotors, a passenger-side axle, and to be realigned. However, even after all those repairs it was STILL cheaper than the lowest price we could find from any dealership anywhere by a good $2000. So, while still over our budget, it was still UNDER the normal price, so I guess I'm going to just roll with it.

Point being: we have a car that can go places now. Vs our Saturn, which can go for about 20 minutes before one of the cylinders starts misfiring and I start to worry if I can actually get home. I think the fuel injector is doing something wonky (am going to clean it with gas cleaner), but we needed a new car so...now we have one. Yay.

Driving a Camry vs a tiny Saturn is like driving a boat. It's hardly a large car (I guess it still files under "compact?") but it is still bigger than a small car, and so trucking it around feels weird. The plus side is it drives really nice (especially now since the alignment isn't totally off) and everything seems to be in good working order. Plus it's a Toyota, those last forever, right? Knock on wood.

The downside to all this is that we hadn't decided on whether we were keeping it after we bought it. Despite being atrociously cheap, I didn't want to have to deal with repairs (even though our mechanic said we should because it was a good car, it just needed a little love) on a car I just bought. So we tried to resell it, and learned that everybody who wants to buy a car is a total jerk. They'd make promises and break them, try to lowball an already extremely low price, lie, harass me over texts and phone, and generally be despicable people. I can't count the number of times I was promised people would get back to me, demanding I put the car as "sale pending" so nobody else would look at it, and then never bother contacting me again. How is this socially acceptable? I'm a person too, you know. Stop wasting my time.

Also, since I'm a neurotic wreck, I constantly think something is going to be wrong with the new car, despite my mechanic insisting there isn't. So that unnecessary stress (it's genetic; thanks mom :P) has been killer to my productivity as well.

NOW ON TO THE GOOD STUFF: WRITING.

So I'm editing Steelgods still because all this stress ruined my productivity. I'm doing a minimum of a chapter a day, though I'm hitting the point in the book where I'm basically going to have to actually rewrite entire chapters. That might actually end up being easier than trying to edit, but we'll see. The last chapter I rewrote I had to rewrite again shortly after because the new version was awful. Hopefully this isn't the case here (the chapter I'm on I knew I'd have to rewrite when I wrote it, but I'm glad I waited because now that Gears of Anbar is finished I have a tighter grasp on the world, meaning things will piece together better).

I'd estimate I'm about 60% through the book, near the end of Act 2. I'm not setting any goals, but I'm hoping to have it done soon so I can start the next book. Also this would be when I'd start submitting it to people, hopefully people I will also run into at World Fantasy. :)

Now, Untitled Fantasy Project. It was actually getting hung up because I hadn't figured out any magic for it. After looking a the light color wheel (what happens when you mix different colors of light together) I actually figured something pretty basic out. I wanted the magic in this book to be very light but still there, enough to impact society but not enough to completely dominate how the entire world is run. What my wife and I figured out seems to work pretty good: it's simple, the benefits are small but enough to be "magical," and it also is (I hope) interesting enough to be a sort of a hook.

I actually printed off a light color wheel and modified it for the book, so hopefully that'll help. There are still a few parts of the book I need to figure out (it takes place after a hero goes and saves the world, so I need to know the details of that story before I can start this one) but aside from that it's basically waiting on Steelgods at this point.

This will be standalone, and I am going to do my very best to keep it shorter than 150k. Mostly because I don't want another Effulgent Corruption, and also because I don't have the time to write something longer. Plus, that's still in a range that pitching it would be feasible. Considering I thought of the idea for this book while I was reading A Game of Thrones and listening to The Way of Kings, it should prove...weird.

In other news, my wife and I have been playing Eternal Sonata (review on the Backlog Blog), and I recently discovered The Binding of Isaac, which is a really messed up zelda+roguelike+duel stick shooter. It's pretty addicting, and has a wonderfully creepy soundtrack. I'll have to play it while I'm writing something that's supposed to be scary.