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No, I’m not actually quitting my job to re-enroll in university for a BA in basket weaving.

Please forgive my ramblings…I blame the vicodin and cold medicine…but here’s whats been going on.

Yesterday, I returned from a five day weekend in Pittsburgh, home of my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon.
It’s been, OMG, twenty years since I graduated from that tiny little school, but it feels like yesterday.  I’ve not been to Pittsburgh for seventeen years, but once I was standing on the cut, looking down the mall at Hamerschlag Hall, the engineering and computer engineering building, well, it call came flooding back.

We arrived in Pittsburgh last Wednesday at about Midnight, picked up our rental car which turned out to be a small SUV and not the compact I’d reserved (no extra charge though).  We checked into the Wyndham Grand downtown, and were delighted to see that it is literally next to point park, the site of Fort Pitt, where Pittsburgh was born.  We had the most amazing view.

The next day, we wandered around downtown.  Strangely enough, I’d never really gone downtown in the four years I lived there.  My friends and I kept to campus, buried under a huge workload, surrounded by a moat of beer flowing from the fraternities.

We found great coffee, shopped a bit (I found some great shoes), met a really cool artist, explored some great architecture, and wandered through an old church graveyard full of revolutionary war veterans.  Cool stuff.  Afterwards, we headed to CMU and explored some of my old haunts after registering and nomming some burgers.

Friday morning, we made it to CMU early enough to catch the last few Buggy races.  Not just any buggy either, but my old buggy team, SDC.  And they kicked butt, ultimately winning (along with Fringe).  Then we grabbed nom at the all campus BBQ, saw the MOBOT races, took a tour of the robotics club (of which I’m an alum), attended a general alumni reception and otherwise goofed around.

Saturday, we headed back and attended the ECE (electrical and computer engineering) alum reception, the LGBT and Friends reception, and finally the class of 1990’s reception.  Lots of fun, but I did manage to hurt my foot pretty bad on the way to the 1990’s reception.  I misjudged when stepping off of a step, ion heels.  Possible fracture, I find out tomorrow.  Yuck.  Oh, and I caught a cold 🙁

A lot of fun and nostalgia packed into a long weekend.

Whew, made it through to vacation.  Actually, I’m a few days into it, as it technically started when I went home Friday.

So far, I’ve:

• Spent a day tending to a sick person…well…a day and a half.
• Spent some time trying to fend off a low-level yuckiness myself.
• Ran back and forth to home depot to get paint, tile, flooring material.
• Played starcraft 2
• Read the first few chapters of Darkness Calls, by Margorie M. Liu
• Had someone come by to fix the fridge, which is having defrost problems, hence problems keeping the fridge side cool
• Fixed the faucet of the downstairs bathtub to no longer leak.  Unfortunately, water collects in the corner by the wall and is leaking.
• Did just a touch of revision on Chapter 2 of my little writing project.

What comes next?  

• More trips to home depot, assuredly.
• Clean up the upstairs closet so Jeffrey can install some flooring
• Maybe some more revision of Chapter 2
• Fly to Pittsburgh tomorrow for my college class reunion
• Cower in the corner as I’m not really getting the rest I need

So, after years of ruminating about this, I’ve decided it’s time. In the next two weeks, we’ll be packing up to prepare to move to New York, where I can further pursue my writing career. All of the big publishers are there, and the opportunities are much higher. It’ll be hard, but I expect all of you to help.

So I was going to donate some money to the Red Cross for their Japanese relief efforts. Then, I came across something really cool. The League of Reluctant Adults, a group of paranormal romance and urban fantasy authors, had placed an auction on ebay with the proceeds going to the Red Cross efforts for Japanese relief. They agreed to critique the writing of the winner. Up to 6000 words at that. Needless to say, I bid. Hey, giving money to the Red Cross and actually having my work critiqued by professional authors…cool stuff. And, I won. So, I’m looking forward to presenting my work to Sonya Bateman, Michele Bardsley, Carolyn Crane, Kevin Hearne, Jackie Kessler, Diana Rowland and Jeanne Stein.
6000 words is enough for a synopsis and the first chapter of my project. Now, I just need to clean it up a bit more and send it off. Shudder…
In other news, plumbing sucks. I’m not suffering from two burns and a sore back from an evening of sweat soldering copper pipe in for a new shower/bathtub. Ouch.

We watched an anime called Summer Wars last night.
I rather liked it. No spoilers, but it involved a large online virtual world, lots of avatars, a bit of cryptography, computer hacking, and an artificial intelligence/robotics professor from Carnegie Mellon.
Interesting, as I went to Carnegie Mellon, studied engineering with a focus on robotics, work in the robotics institute there, went on to work in the security and cryptography group at Microsoft, and currently work as an engineering manager for a rather large online virtual world with lots of avatars.

So in my “ample” spare time, I’m trudging through revising my book. It’s turning out to be a long, slow, somewhat painful process, as this is my first revision of this project, and frankly, I’m rewriting a lot.
The characters have changed and grown. I’m getting rid of plot ideas that are frankly “silly.” I’m adding in new plot directions. And I’m planning on fleshing out more as far as subplots and romance.
So much to do, I feel like I”m starting over again.
However, I’ve also been polishing as I go along. The product of this revision is much more reader-friendly, and I’ve been chopping and cutting so the pacing is more appropriate.
Want to know what I’m writing?
Well, at RADCON, I took a workshop on pitching your project to publishers, editors, agents, whoever. A number of great authors and one publisher sat on the panel, and took sample pitches from the audience, critiquing them.
What’s a pitch? A few sentences describing your project. The fewer words, the better. For the most part, people were a bit vague and long. I had a chance to give my pitch, “Barista chick has trouble with Mesopotamian Demon,” and I was proud to say they pretty much all liked it.
Why? One author liked “Mesopotamian.” Most folk would have just said “Demon” which is somewhat generic. And someone mentioned the pitch gave a feeling of the book and my writing style. Probably the phrase “Barista chick.”
I think now I would extend the pitch to be. “Barista chick has trouble with Mesopotamian Demon. With witches and vampires”
Few more words, but puts it firmly in the urban fantasy genre.
An attendee actually came up to me after the workshop and asked me when it’d be out.
How cool is that.

After nearly 2 years of neglecting my blog, I think it’s time to dig it up, sew the parts together, zap it and bring it back to life.

So, what’s going on with me now.
Last weekend, I took part in Vaginomicon, a mash-up of “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler and Scary stuff. We did it for Women in Horror Month.

How’d this happen? Well, Tori planted the seed, and Jenna took it from there, collecting a rag-tag group of women and men to write and perform scary monologues about scary women doing scary things. How cool is that.

And, the amazing thing. We put this together in under a month. Writing, practicing, planning, acquiring space, advertising, and actually doing the deed. Truly amazing. Everyone was amazingly supportive, we all had a great time, and we’re looking forward to doing it again. And hey. It’ll grow into something much bigger. I’m sure of it.

Aside from that, I’ve picked up my writing where I left off. I’ve declared my first draft as ‘complete’ even though I need to write up a bit of the ending, and I’ve started revising. I’m improving the story, tuning the language, adding more character development, and all that.

I’ve also started attending Sci-Fi and Fantasy conventions where I can mix with other writers, learn from them, and honestly, it’s just been fun. I’ve met some great people, who like me have stories in their head that are desperate to burst out. So far, I’ve attended Rustycon and Radcon.

Next is Norwescon, with a side trip to Comicon.

I’m turning into such a nerd.

Here’s hoping I can keep on posting…

So, we spent the entire weekend (well, part of it at least) weeding the garden. Weeding is generally not a big deal. Pull out a few small plants here and there. Well, the garden was a prehistoric jungle. Huge flesh-eating plants. I think we’ve won though. Had to remove all of the plants, as well as the top few inches of dirt, the dirt with the weed seed.

I did have a chance to pick up a few sword dancing pointers from Brooke, belly dancer par-excellence. I’m looking forward to performing with my new copper dance sword. I’ve a performance coming up after the parade on the 20th of June, and might try to make it to the harem show before then.

Oh, and hey. I’ve been consistently keeping up with 1000 words or more per day in my writing project. I’m 25k in.

Saw the new Star Trek movie last night. While I’m no trekkie, I did spend my childhood watching the reruns of the first series, as and I’ve watched pretty much all of the other ones. As well as the movies. This one definitely kept to the tradition of ‘even movies are the good ones.’
I thought it was great. The actors they found for Spock, Kirk, Uhura, Scottie, Sulu, Bones, Chekov, well they were all right on. I loved the old-school Kirk, getting into fights, chasing women, and so on. And Spock, well, we’ve always known he’s the most emo of the entire crew.
Kirk on earth, living in Iowa, well that was cool. Especially the bar fight and corvette.
The plot, well, it was a bit close to star trek nemesis, the previous movie. Romulans coming to attack earth.
There were plenty of winks to the original series, making it quite fun for long-time fans.

And Vulcan getting destroyed. wow.

I know you’re not supposed to do this, but I’ve started a new story, and my other one isn’t done yet.

I just sorta lost steam on the other story. It didn’t have ‘fun,’ and it was a bit too dark. So, I’ve started off in another direction, writing a fun urban fantasy type o thing. I love the genre, it’s fun, it’s exciting, and it allows for a bit more ‘creativity’ than other more down to earth genres.

I’ve been outlining my story, and that is going well. It’s just pouring from me. If I can get a decent outline done in a few days, I’ll start turning into something more, which should be pretty easy once I have a good idea where I want to go.

Now, if only I can avoid lifes other distractions.