Things have been good… now if I could just keep them going that way that’d be great!
It’s been an interesting and pretty kick ass couple of weeks. The new sci fi book is coming along nicely. The last few days the story as been positively spilling out of my noggin, which is a nice change. I’m well over 100 pages and 25,000 words. Next stop 40k +! Here’s a snippet from the yet untitled sci fi book Read the rest of this entry
I could almost start this post with “It was the best of times it was the worst of times.” but I won’t. It’s been a very strange week though this much is true. First off for any that know me, or have read my bio, I live right outside Read the rest of this entry
I’ve had to put editing and rewrites on hold for a little bit in order to get ready for my appearance at the sci fi convention Arisia next week. I have to admit I am both excited and terrified about all this. I’ve Read the rest of this entry
Normally, I wouldn’t care all that much if an icon of Americana like the Twinkie went the way of the Dodo. I mean yeah I’d be like “Wow that sucks,” or “Damn I never thought that would happen,” but still it wouldn’t bother me as much as this is. Granted, the reason it’s bothering me so much is a completely selfish reason, which is usually why things bother me. Why else would petty stuff bother me if it didn’t effect me personally?
I’m attending a Sci-Fi convention called Arisia 2013 in January and I’m hosting a party one of the three nights to pimp my books. One of the main snacks at said After the Storm the party was going to be Twinkies since one of the characters, George, hoards them after the world ends. See you’d know all this if you’d read the first two books… that are on sale now on Amazon for only $2.99 apiece! 🙂
It’s a new month, and I have a new website! I know I said hello yesterday but it seemed a bit curt. I was busy tweaking this and that and learning my way around the site yesterday so I was a bit distracted. I have yet more tweaking to do today but it should be a bit less hairy. I kinda, know what I’m doing a little bit better than I did yesterday.
I’ll be posting here, keeping you up to date or just annoying you as much as possible. I don’t always have a lot to say and I don’t want to keep posting stuff just to post stuff. So, while I’m settling in here at my new home, please feel free to take a look around and hope you come by to visit every now and again.
Back to work with me. Enjoy your day!
Don
Hi and welcome to my new website! I’ll be doing all my blog posts from here as well as posting updates on new books, events and appearances. I’m still getting used to all this so it may be a while before I get it all down pat. Until I have the great and powerful Rodney helping me out. Thanks buddy for such a great set up and background!
I suppose it’s time to openly admit it. Some of my characters are based loosely on real people. I can’t say they are completely based on these people because I’ve never actually been through the end of the world with any of them so I don’t really know how they’d react to all the things I’ve put them through. A lot of my dialogue in my stories is based on what I believe these people would do and say. To me it helps me make sure my characters are as realistic as I can make them. I’ve always hated books, movies, or TV shows that had horribly unbelievable dialogue. From the very beginning one of my main goals was to have good if not great characters.
I’ve spoken to some of my friends who know this little secret and all have said that the dialogue sounds perfect and can tell who the characters are just by what they say. I take this as a great compliment. Amusingly enough, I was hanging out one day with a group of my friends and somehow a conversation about a tank or driving a tank came up. I let them play out the conversation, only nudging it in a certain direction and then waited. After they were done I started laughing when they asked what was funny I told them that I had basically written that conversation in my first book. It was almost verbatim. Read the rest of this entry
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this lately, but I LOVE writing action scenes. It brings me a certain type of joy and excitement that doesn’t show up in the everyday writing process, at least not in mine. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy writing dialogue and descriptive scenes as well, but there’s something very cool about writing an action scene that actually gets your blood pumping.
You get to get into your characters head in a different way. You see there best and worst traits come shining through when they’re under that kind of pressure. I’ve seen my characters make great decisions and horrible ones. Right now I’m in the middle of an action scene for my third book in which there are war weary vets who have been in countless battles along with rookies who have never been stuck, alone trapped by hordes of people who want them dead. They’re finally getting their first respite and I have a feeling that when they have a bit of time to settle down and realize how big and bad the pile of shit they’ve stepped in is that some of them may not handle it very well. Read the rest of this entry
I’ve been neglectful of my blogging duties the last week or so since I’ve been trying to make sure I get my writing done. So far that seems to be going well. I took a few days off, but now I’m back at it. The third book is at just about 30k words, so that makes me happy. Just 10k more and I’ll have an actual novel. I still would like to have it done by the end of the year, even if I don’t release it then. I still shake my head in disbelief at the fact that I’m writing my THIRD book. Three years ago I would have laughed at the idea of writing one, much less three.
In a couple months I will also be attending my first convention as a writer. I’m gonna be at Arisia 2013 in January for the whole weekend. I won’t be at the dealers table or anything but i will be shmoozing with the crowd and hopefully throwing the best party there. I’m tentatively calling it After the Storm the Party! If you don’t know what Arisia is and live in the Boston/new England area you can check it out here http://2013.arisia.org/ . I’ve been to quite a few of these convention in the past during my stint in a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and they’re a lot of fun! There also tends to be a lot of people interested in the post apocalyptic kind of stuff I write in attendance so I’m hoping it will get my name out there a bit. If you’re interested tickets run around $50 for the whole weekend until December, then I think they go up a bit. Read the rest of this entry
I did a Google search yesterday for the title of my books. It’s been mentioned to me before that I should do this every once in a while to see if someone is using your work for their own purposes. Until yesterday I never found anything out of the ordinary. I came across a blurb on my Google search that said After the Storm Book Trailer. I started to panic. I’ve never made a book trailer! For a very short time I thought the worst and figured I had been pirated. Come to find out I was wrong, in such a cool way.
When I got to youtube I saw that the girl who had made the book trailer had clearly stated that it was for a school project. I was NOT being pirated…in fact it seemed my book was to be someones book report, how cool is that? I watched it with rapt interest the first time, and again right afterwards with giddy enjoyment. It was one of the coolest feelings I’ve ever had to find out purely by accident that someone liked something you did enough to put that much care into a project. I may not have a movie yet and for all I know I may never have one, but I do have a book trailer made by someone beside myself. I now know how great a feeling this was I can’t imagine how awesome it would be to watch a movie made of my work. let’s hope someday I get to see what that feels like 🙂
Have a great weekend!
Don