Weekly news - 10/9/24

Apparently I'm supposed to believe that the government now controls the weather? Are these people nuts? Seriously, when did real life get stranger than my fiction?

Here we are, less than a month away from the election, less than 10 days away from my New Zealand vacation (assuming they don't hunt and kill me upon arrival for what I've fictionally done to that country) and I've been a mess for the last few months, so I definitely want to apologize and address what we're going to look like for the next month or two.

When I went to the writer's conference, I certainly didn't expect a literary agent to ask me to ask for a full copy of one of my books, 25k words lighter, as soon as I could get it to her, for review for possible representation. I'd not really touched that book in the six years since I'd last done a round of pitching it to people, so my expectations hadn't been that high. (Of course, a LOT has changed over the last six years, obviously.)

As soon as I got back, I set out trying to bring the book down 25k, and the first 22k words were gone within 24 hours. Since then, I have struggled like hell to shave the remaining 3k off, but in doing so, I've also improved the book a shitload, based on all the additional writing experience I've developed over the last two years. I've found quirks in my writing back then that I've hopefully grown past, although in some cases, maybe I'm just spotting them now and will do them less moving forward. (I started a LOT of sentences back then with "So, ..." in an effort to sound conversational, but it just started to get annoying, even to me reading it back!) Seriously, I was a fool to think that just because the first 22k words came easy, the whole thing will be that easy.

I have three different commissions that are, like, halfway done. I'm going to send off the book to the possible agent today, and tomorrow other than going and getting my Covid booster/flu shot, I'll just be writing, trying to get as much caught up as I can. A week from Saturday, I leave for New Zealand with a bunch of my friends, and I'll be on planes and in airports for a while, so I'll try and get writing done there as I can, but I won't make any promises because it is a vacation. Heh. That said, basically all the planning and prep work for that trip is done, and has been done for weeks - all the plane tickets are bought, all the AirBnBs are booked, tour tickets have been purchases, and I did this all for me and a number of my friends. (For all the QT fans, the inspirations for Eric, Phil and Lesser Phil are all going with me.) I'll be sure my newsposts for those two weeks have tons of awesome pictures in them.

All that said, November and December, barring the 5 days I go back to the Midwest to visit my family for Christmas and the single Magic: The Gathering prerelease weekend I know I'm judging, there's nothing on my calendar, and I should be able to get back to reasonable delivery schedules for the month, and maybe even trying to dig out some of the backlog for people I owe things to.

Also, for people asking about my health, I've been basically back to myself for the last couple of weeks, although an unprecedented heatwave here in the Bay has certainly made the last week a challenge. When I'm going to bed past midnight and it's still over 70? Yeah, that ain't right. Last night was the first night this month that actually felt like it was October, even if it was still a bit warmer than I'd expect. There's been a lingering little niggle of a cough that I haven't quite shook, which is the result of some very slow decongestion of my sinuses. I feel fine, though!

I do have two concerts coming up before I leave - I'm seeing Something Corporate again on Saturday, for the first time since their last reunion tour back in 2010. I'm a huge fan of Andrew McMahon in all of his incarnations (Jack's Mannequin and Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness), but I think Something Corporate was always the one that worked best, because he grew up with them, and they're willing to push back and challenge him. There's a show at Red Rocks next year that'll be all three projects playing together. I'm going to see if I can get tix to that.

I promised to start putting music in these posts again, so let me give you the most appropriate Something Corporate song for my life right now, "I Woke Up In A Car." Something Corporate - I Woke Up In A Car - YouTube

The other show I'm going to go to is to see Sunny Day Real Estate for the first (and likely only!) time. I'm not a huge SDRE fan, but I did listen to their first album, "Diary," a bunch in high school. To say the band had a tumultuous history is to undersell it by volumes. I don't even want to get into here, but let me just say, if you want to read the story of a band trying to speed run all the rock cliches, go take a look at SDRE's Wikipedia. I don't know what to expect from the show, but I feel like this is one of those "take it or miss it" opportunities, so I'm gonna go, just a handful of days before I head to New Zealand. If I'm not into it, I can always take off partway through.

For those of you who only read stuff on the public sites, it should be quite the week for you. The chaos of the last few weeks had screwed up my sending stuff to public sites as well, so in the next week, you'll have 6 story drops hitting. After two weeks of complete silence, it's the least I can do.

That chaotic public release schedule looks like this:  10/12 - Neon Stonehenge 6, QTAA 10 (conclusion), Pack 11, QTUM 2; QT2:22, CARP 9; 10/19 - QT2:23; 10/26 - The Stacked Deck (Silversmith 4); 11/2 - QT2:24, Pack 12.

Again, I apologize for the messy few months and promise everyone I'm doing everything I can get to get my shit back on track and get us back into more regular story drops and more stories for everyone to enjoy. This whole Charles Dickens Life is a learning process for us all, me included, and sometimes we stumble before we pick ourselves back up and start walking again. Your unwavering support during the chaos has meant the world to me, and I'm hoping to stop letting you down soon.

All that said, I did drop QT2:32 yesterday. I wanted to drop it sooner, but it needed the writer's room to review it, and one of the notes Break gave me saved me a shitload of rewriting later.

Anyway, I need to finish up sending the book proposal to the agent, and then head off to my last poker game for nearly a month! I'm theoretically back in time to go to the one on 10/30, but I'll have just gotten back from New Zealand at that point, so who knows what shape I'll be in.

Honest to God, folks, I love all of you and thanks for hanging with me through the rough patches. Be kind to each other and I'll see you in the next one.