The Week in Words – 03/24/2010

I’ll start off with a very funny exchange between my wife and Reece, as mommy was changing a very poopy diaper last Friday.

“That’s a big poop, Reecie.”

“No mommy, it’s not.  It’s a Good Lord.”

“What?”

“It’s a Good Lord, Mommy.  That’s what Daddy always says.”  He sits up just a bit, looks at the poop, shakes his head a bit, and says in a near perfect imitation of my inflection. “Good Lord!”

Who knew that potty training would become such a religious experience for him?

Moving on.

I finished the novella I was working on last week called “Izzy’s Story”, and merged it into ‘The Forgotten Road’.  It turned out to be about 9000 words long.  I then cut about 2000 back out of TFR, which is sitting right around 90000 now.  That’s a little higher than I want it to be.  There are probably some more places I can chop, but I still have to make sure I’ve wedged the scenes from the novella into the right places in the rest of the story, and then make sure it actually works done like this.   I’m still waiting on replies from two agents who have some parts of my books.  If I don’t hear from them by tax time, I’m thinking of trying out a book doctor (a freelance editor) to do a structural edit to see how far I am off target.  I think it will be a good investment, and I hope to learn a lot from it.

For now though, I’m probably not going to work on that book or that series for a bit.  Until all the aspects of that first book are nailed, I can’t really say book 2 is ready to be called done, and starting on book 3 seems a little premature.  Instead, I’ll explore a few other ideas I’ve been playing around with and see if any of them work out.

Work just got a whole lot busier this week as well, as we’re ramping up on a couple of big projects that will keep me busy through the end of the year.  I’m back to taking the first train in each day, which means waking up at 4:25 each morning.  Tonight I’ve got a 4:00 meeting on site with a client, which means I wont get home until 6:30.  Makes for a very long day.   But with this new project, we’ll be able to do some hiring to fill some open spots, and hopefully that will make my life easier in the long run.

Last weekend we had Lisa’s mom, dad and grandmother over for a day, and went out to a park in Tacoma with two of Lisa’s brothers and their families.  With that many kids running around, there wasn’t much time to sit down and talk to adults.  I don’t know why people say life isn’t always a picnic.  Sure seems that life is always like a picnic:  don’t touch that, don’t eat that, you have to share with your sister, stay away from the water, get out of the mud, don’t you dare throw that stick at her, stay where I can see you, that’s not a pine cone, damn it, does anyone have any antibacterial hand wipes?

Movie wise, we watched a great little movie on Sunday called ‘Saint Ralph’, a story about a 14 year old boy in 1957 at a Catholic school in Hamilton, Ontario who wants a miracle to save his mother who is in a coma and gets it into his head that winning the Boston Marathon is what God wants him to do.  Definitely worth the watch.

Reading wise, I’m slowly working my way out of my reading funk, and in the middle of Orson Scott Card’s ‘Shadow of the Hegemon’, a continuation of the “Ender’s Shadow'” series. 

There’s a bunch of new technology being released by Microsoft in April, and that means I’ll have a whole new slew of tech books to read.  I probably won’t get to read much for fun in the next few months, but maybe all this new stuff will be easy, and the books will be shorter than the last time.  Yeah, right.