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Journal Entry: June 29, 2006

Y’know how I once said that days off during the week have a ridiculously high chance of going bad?

I took the day off yesterday, mostly to hang out with Trish, partly (and specifically) because we had to go to a closing on the refinancing of our house. Well, that last bit was the part that went bad, this time. It was a tiny portion of the day, really, but it went really bad.

In other news, I saw a snake on the drive in to work this morning!

It was…I mean, massive. I work at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, which is this huge sprawling campus with dozens of buildings, connected with city streets (and way too many stop signs). I was already inside the gates, driving 25 mph down one of these connecting streets toward my building, and in the other lane I saw a huge snake slithering toward the curb. There’s a grassy area out there, and I assume it was heading for cover. I thought about turning around and running it over, but that seemed too cruel.

But…yeah. Big ol’ snake. Yeesh. And that’s my walking route, too, when I walk on my lunch break.

I have…well, at the moment I have three stories that I really want to tell: King Jason’s War, Sleeping Kings, and Faithful Jake. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually do a decent version of Faithful Jake. It seems like it might be too heavy for any kind of audience I could write it for. It strikes me as a powerful story, though.

I have about a dozen stories that I really want to write — the distinction being, these would be more fun for me, even if they’d be less valuable to my readers: The First Myth, Order Knight, Taming Fire and its sequels, someday. Taming Fire is done, after a third rewrite, and at this point I want to rewrite it again into something almost completely different. I’d almost be willing to drop it, like I did my sixth grade stories, but I want to do so much with the sequels, with Daven’s family down the line, and readers will probably want to know where he came from. On that note: The Rise and Fall of the FirstKing, or whatever I actually call it. Probably a three-book cycle, but maybe I’d make it one. Somewhere in with that, a book about the Dauric-Elven war, in which the FirstKing’s mother died, the city of Elspaur was ransacked, and the FirstKing’s ire was first awakened.

There’s also my sci-fi, which I’d like to pursue. I got permission to keep working on (and try to publish, even) the stuff I came up with for Eschaton, back in the day. I really liked the world I’d made, the different factions and the underlying mythos. I’ve got another story idea I like, in a much closer future, about human immortality and nanotech. That could be fun. And there’s the Twilight Zone story I mentioned the other day. The one with Idiene.

Is there anything else? I’d kind of like to rewrite The Poet Alexander someday (the story from which I got the username that I use for this blog, and used forever for all my email accounts). And my sixth grade stories…well, I lied when I said I’d dropped those. The story was originally called The Scorekeeper, and more recently The Watcher or maybe The Watcher of the Winds, but that gives entirely the wrong idea. And the focus has changed, considerably, since I first conceived the idea, so it’s no longer about the Watcher, but about the characters that he inspires to save the world. The…err…four characters, youngish, all with their lives suddenly interrupted, who go about trying to make the world a better place, in the midst of a terrible war….

Aww, man! That’s Sleeping Kings. I just noticed that. Grr. Well, but with more magic. And dragons. Which is probably why I gave up on it. It’s hard for me to write magic and dragons anymore, because the people I want to talk to are the ones who aren’t interested in that sort of thing. The doctor and the sick people, style of thing.

Anyway, those are some things.

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Greatness: Books of Legacy (or “On Fatherhood”)

When I was…I dunno, fifteen or so, my family took a long summer road trip. We’d often done summer road trips as a family for my whole life. This one was the whopper, and my parents had probably been planning it for years.

Trish and I were dating at the time, and I faced the terrifying prospect of being away from her for ten days straight. No phone calls, nothing.

I hated it. I resented it. I…even then, I saw it as a matter of perspective. I sat back and looked at the situation from my perspective (where it was a really big deal), and I could see that, from my parents’ perspective, being away from a girl I didn’t really date yet, for less than two weeks, wasn’t that big a deal.

But I was outraged by it. I came up with an idea, and I put it immediately into practice. I wrote Dad a furious letter, telling him exactly how I felt, exactly how important that summer time with Trish was to me, and how much it hurt that I had to be away from her. That wasn’t exactly the idea, though. My idea was to keep writing letters like this, to write Dad every time I had something important, something dramatic that I wanted to say to him — to write it down, and keep them all together, and save that until I had a son of my own. Then read them all, because that would be exactly the words I needed to hear.

I didn’t stick to it. I wrote only that one letter. The reason was this: well, first, I really don’t stick to very many of my ideas. More importantly, though, everything I had to say in those letters was negative. Because anything positive I had to say, I just said. I’ve usually been pretty good about that. So it would have just been a bunch of whiny letters in poor penmanship.

There are ways in which I really wish I’d followed that through. There would have been some valuable lessons in there, and some powerful reminders. Mostly they’d probably be reminders about what a whiny brat I was, but even those have their value.

Sometime in college, I got an idea for something similar. I think Daniel or Toby, or someone, was telling me about a cultural group that had this practice, but it might have been an original idea….

Anyway, okay, I’ll tell it in story form, because that’s what I do.

Within the history of my fantasy world, there comes eventually a line of kings known as the Davinic Kings — these are the heirs of Daven, centuries later, who reunite and rule over the FirstKing’s old realm, and it’s a time of prosperity and happiness. They are legendary kings (as the similarity of the name would imply).

And I decided that, among themselves, this family of kings would have a practice of writing Books of Legacy. Each king, when he first learned that he was going to have a child, would write a book containing all of his wisdom, all of his experience — everything he truly wanted to teach his son. He would spend the nine months or so writing down his message to his son. When his son reached the age of maturity, his father would give him the book, and perhaps teach it to him.

I thought how cool it would be to write those books, to write the collected teachings that each of these great and powerful men (while they were still young) would like to pass on to their sons and heirs. How much could you say, how much imply, about a character and his world, within that particular framework?

I didn’t follow through on that. I have a few notes scribbled in one of my scribblebooks that I’d intended as some of the bits of wisdom, and I stumbled across those on Sunday morning. Of course, those are only three years old or so, and they already strike me much the same way that my high school rants at my dad would, if I still had those.

And I think that would be a big part of the message. It’s amazing how much we change, from day to day, and I think that’s one of the most awesome things about writing, about setting down, at one time, a whole world, that may seem entirely alien when we look back on it tomorrow. Because we carry our memories with us, and modify them, in subtle ways, to match the world we’re living in now. It’s nice to have something, some hint or snapshot, showing the world as it was, then.

It can be embarrassing. It can be really embarrassing. But that’s part of the process, innit? That’s the price a writer pays, to do this remarkable thing.

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Journal Entry: June 22, 2006

It seems like all I talk about lately is Sleeping Kings. I guess I should feel bad about that, but…I dunno. I haven’t written in so long. And now, this story has me writing again, and remembering why I used to call myself a writer.

Let me tell you, it has nothing to do with my day job.

I once wrote, in a poem, “I write to make a perfect world with words.” That’s funny, under the current circumstances, since (as any of you reading Sleeping Kings knows) I’m in the process of destroying the United States. It’s really pretty miserable for everyone involved.

Trish’s…great second cousin (or something like that) passed away last weekend. She decided to go up to Wichita for the funeral, to be with her family (her Mom in particular). I didn’t really have the leave, and Trish didn’t feel it was crucial that I be there, so I stayed home and worked on Wednesday.

Tuesday night I mostly hung out with Kris and Nicki. We went to some Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner (I had a burger), and I spent the entire time talking about my story. I kept thinking, “Okay, enough, talk about something else.”

I didn’t, though.

So, yeah, same sort of thing is going on here, and I apologize. But, as then, I probably won’t actually change my ways. Sorry.

Also played some WoW with Kris on Tuesday, checked out the new content patch, and then watched Undercover Brother, which I’d gotten him for his birthday. That was a lot of fun. Lynchburg Lemonades helped. I don’t know where Kris learned to make them so well, but he does a fantastic job. Have him make you one sometime. Delish.

And yesterday I worked, and got a day ahead on Sleeping Kings for the first time, and spent all afternoon wanting to post the story I’d just written (the one that’s up there now, as today’s post). Knowing that I have readers actively following the story, it kills me that I have stuff written that I’m not sharing. I’ve got a lot of notes I wrote to myself about what’s going to happen in the story, long-term, and I keep wanting to share those, too, even though they’d be major spoilers.

I’m having to fight down the urge, all the time.

Y’know…I used to feel this way all the time. I don’t really know why I stopped writing. I have some suspicions, and none of them are things I can really control. Which is sad, because it means it could happen again, tomorrow or next week or a year from now. I love it when I’m writing, though. I want to keep it up.

Tonight, I’m going over to Kris’s to play some WoW with everybody (that being Graham, Jeff, Dad, and Kris, natch). Daniel’s not in the list because he’s in Europe, but I think you all knew that.

I’ve been having trouble caring about WoW lately. Kris has never played a lot, and he’s been even busier than normal lately. I’ve got all my characters I care about up to 60 (the level limit), and am close to getting some I don’t care about there, too. And I just don’t think I’d enjoy much of the stuff to do at the end-game. Also, I lost a massive amount of money (in-game) on what should have been a safe investment. So I’m broke, and don’t have much to do, and Daniel and Kris aren’t playing much.

I dunno. There’s still other reasons to play, but too often when I log into the game, I’ve just got nothing to do. So I log back out, but I’ve got nothing else to do. So I log back in. That’s most of my free time, for the last couple weeks.

I’m looking forward to Heroes of Might and Magic V, which might be out already. That could be fun, but I think it’s not an MMO, so I can’t see really getting into it. I’d still like to try Savage, but it came out just before WoW, and WoW distracted me, and by now it’s probably kinda outdated. I don’t really know of anything else on the horizon.

Life is weird. There’s so much, and then there’s so much. You look around, and it’s full of other new things, and they’re all familiar, but if you look close, they’re completely different.

I’m just sayin’, is all.

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Copyright and Me!

Copyright is a tricky thing….

The basic idea is that, by law, you automatically own copyright to anything you create. If I write a poem on a napkin, that poem is copyrighted and I own the copyright.

But what does that really mean?

That means I, alone, have the right to produce, publish, copy, or otherwise distribute the story that I’ve written. If anyone else does, I have the government’s support in suing the offender for any damages I may have suffered (or unlawful gains he may have gotten).

The thing is, the government doesn’t enforce this. They’ll support me, if I try to enforce my own copyright, but the government doesn’t actively enforce anyone’s copyrights.

To make things more complicated, any copyright that is not aggressively defended by its holder will quickly become public domain. That means if somebody steals my idea and starts reproducing it, I can make them stop, but I have to make them stop. The government won’t do it for me. And if I don’t make them stop, then pretty soon I’ll lose the right to do even that.

The process of making them stop requires some sort of proof of original concept. That’s where a lot of people get confused. If I send a cease and desist letter to someone trying to use my story, they might just fire back and tell me to stop using their story, and then we go to court and each try to prove that we started it.

To that end, it’s possible to register a story with the Library of Congress, which is considered pretty definite proof of concept in any U. S. court. That’s about a $250 proposition, if I remember correctly.

I’ve also heard that a reliable (and much cheaper) way to do this is to mail yourself a copy of the story, and not open it. The fact that it’s in a sealed package with a government time-stamp on it makes it a pretty definite piece of evidence. I have no idea if that’s actually true, but I’ve heard it often.

So, here’s the problem with Sleeping Kings. For one, if anyone started to steal it, it would take a while before I found out, most likely, and then I’d have to enlist the aid of a lawyer to try to shut them down (and hope that I could establish proof of originality).

Worse, much worse, would be if someone stole the whole story, submitted it to a publishing house, and successfully sold it. I would hate for someone else to get professionally published off my work, when I haven’t. And, of course, I wouldn’t know about that at all until the book came out. Then I could try suing, but I’d be going up against a major publishing house, and they’ve got good lawyers, y’know? My only real hope then would be to have registered the story with the Library of Congress before the date that the thief entered into negotiations with the publisher.

(Although, if that happened, I’d probably get a lot of money. I doubt the story would ever get published at that point, though, even under my name.)

Ah. And that’s the other problem. Even if no one ever messes with me or steals my story, it’s going to be really hard for me to ever get Sleeping Kings professionally published. Because it already is published.

See, the way an author makes money off his ideas, is to sell his copyright. As I said earlier, for anything I write, I automatically get the right to produce, publish, copy, or otherwise distribute it. The big money is in “first North American distribution rights.” I sell that right to the publisher for a big wad of cash (or a residual contract), and he uses it to print up and distribute copies of my original work. If it sells big, then someday I might want to sell reprint rights, or international rights, or franchise rights (if someone wants to start a series set in my universe).

The internet makes things tricky, though. A publisher could try to argue that this story that I’ve put up on my website is already published, and so he might consider “first North American distribution rights” already used, and his only offer is going to be for reprints, which don’t sell for nearly as much money.

The long and the short of it is that I’m aware of all these things going into the project. Sleeping Kings is not much like anything else I’ve written, or anything else I ever intend to write. It could get stolen from me, and then I’d have a good sad story to put in my autobiography. It could become huge but, because of the way I managed things, I may never make a penny off it. Or it could just be a quiet little weblog, that no one ever reads, and still I can’t sell it because the publisher learns it was posted at all.

Copyright is a tricky thing. I do reserve all rights to everything I post, here or on Sleeping Kings. To an extent, though, I need to be read to keep writing, and if major publishing houses aren’t willing to pick my stuff up, I’ve got to do something. That’s what I’m trying. We’ll all watch and see what happens.

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Journal Entry: June 19, 2006

Back to work.

Yesterday was a good weekend. Actually, taken in combination with the better aspects of Saturday (and ignoring the worse ones), I’d go so far as to say I had a really good weekend.

I’m excited about Sleeping Kings. In the past, I’ve said that because I was just excited that it was still going, that I was still writing daily. Now, I’m more excited about the story itself, and how the characters are coming together and the story is starting to pick up pace.

Y’know… I was talking to Nicki about this before, when she asked me why I stopped writing Sleeping Kings three years ago. It was always an idea I liked. And I’ve always thought it would be fun to write a serial novel.

I worked on one for an ex-girlfriend, actually. I think about that, from time to time. Girl I dated in high school, I would write her four pages every day, and slip them into her locker on my way out of school (for some reason, she stayed later than I did).

I kept that up for the entire time we were dating. She loved the story. We broke up, it was kinda ugly (I brought the drama, go fig), and then I never really talked to her again. Oh! No, this isn’t Lindsey. All of the above was true for Lindsey, too, but I never wrote her a story.

Anyway, I’d given her my only copy of the story, handwritten as I went. I don’t remember anything about the story now. I don’t know if I’d try to rewrite it if I did. But…yeah. That was my first attempt at a periodic novel.

My second was Sleeping Kings. If you noticed, reading the prologue, I got about five installments done. About 2-3 pages per installment. That…that’s really not very much. That’s maybe an afternoon’s work, if I’d done it all at once.

That’s pretty sad.

Here’s the thing about periodic novels: it takes a lot out of you, every single day (or week, or month, depending on the periodicity). Yeah, sure, a couple of my favorite authors wrote periodic novels. They also got paid for them. I can emulate them out of academic and professional interest, y’know, because it’s cool, but I don’t have newspapers looking to support an author for a weekly contribution the way they did.

So, the point is, from now on it’s going to cost you $4.95 every time you access Sleeping Kings. Sorry, but it had to be done.

*Sigh.*

No, not really. That would be way cool, but no. Actually, what I was going to say, is that this time part of what I’m getting out of it is just the process of writing. It had been so long since I really wrote, that I do, to a big extent, feel like getting something published (albeit in a cheap and easy medium) is its own reward, to an extent.

The other thing I’m taking in payment is feedback. Comments. So when I’m bugging you for a response, try to remember that the response is much of what keeps me going. I’m not just trying to be annoying — knowing (or imagining) that I have readers out there anxiously wondering what’s going to happen today is a big part of what makes me post something today.

Also…I commented to Heather earlier about this. I’m trained — college-educated — to take any kind of feedback at all, and make the most of it. So don’t feel like there’s any burden on you to say something special, or something important. Just say anything at all. Whatever you’re feeling after you read a post, that’s useful information to me.

Beh. I don’t mean to sound like I’m coming here begging. Just wanted to share a little insight into my process.

Also: I really hope you like the story. Deep down, I do. Who doesn’t want to be liked, y’know?

Other notes:

Nacho Libre is fantastically good. Go see it, for yeah. Funny. Worth a laugh. On a similar note, Mom and Dad insist that you should go see Over the Hedge. I haven’t been an obedient son yet, though, so I can’t confirm or deny their praise.

*Spoilers* Nate dies in Act II. It’s very sad.

Oh. So, like, three years ago, I spent several months writing a lot of Python scripts for our modded XBoxen. They were moderately useful. The most useful things I made were an emulator so other developers could write XBox scripts on their computers, and a detailed, formally laid-out tutorial for new developers wanting to know how to write Python scripts for XBox. I actually took an existing one, that was very poor English and miserably laid-out, and just tech-writed it.

Anyway, I put these up on my cheesy free website provided by Cox, and out of curiosity I got a counter, and for the four to six months I was working on it, I was getting around ten thousand hits a month, on average.

That’s kind of a lot, for a little thing like that.

Anyway, when we moved, it got chopped down. That was sad, but it had been years since I did anything with it, so I just thought, “Aww, how sad for them,” and forgot about it.

It just occurred to me today, on the drive in to work, that I could really easily re-create the same email address I’d used then, post all of the old website up to the automatically-created cheesy free website, and the entire site would be available again, at the exact same address.

Took me about twenty minutes, and now all those years-old links still work, and everything. I’m glad I did that. Yay me.

That’s all.

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Journal Entry: June 17, 2006

Good morning!

I’m doing a lot better today. I can’t really say why, but yesterday afternoon went a lot better than I’d expected. I watched some standup, which almost always puts me in good spirits, and then my inner demon/angel combo talked me into going to Bennigans and getting a steak and a margarita.

Actually, I had a hot turkey sandwich and a couple Lynchburg lemonades, but the effect was the same. I also took my notebook with me, and anyone reading Sleeping Kings probably already knows that I got about twelve pages written on the unfinished prologue. That had been hanging over my head for about four years now, so getting that done was probably a major part of the pick-me-up.

And then I came back to my hotel room and watched four hours of standup. Fell asleep to the familiar sounds of Jim Gaffigan riffing on Mexican food. It was a great night.

Now, I’m just wishing I was already home. Today’s timetable is going to be pretty weird. I have about two hours left before I need to check out. I’m probably playing WoW until then. I should be writing on Sleeping Kings, but I can’t, for reasons I explained over there.

Then we’re grabbing lunch, driving into Detroit, and probably dropping off the car and going to the airport. I’m still not 100% on that, though. See…we only have one car, and it’s in my name. Laveta flies home at 3:00, so she needs to be at the airport at 2:00. I couldn’t get the same flight, so (as you know) I’m leaving at 7:00. So if I go ahead and go to the airport with Laveta, that puts me there four hours early. Blech.

I’d do it, just for simplicity’s sake, except it means that, come dinner time, I’ll be stuck at the airport. I hate airport food. Sure, yeah, it’s exactly the same as my favorite food when I’m not at the airport, but when I’m there, I hate it. Couldn’t tell you why.

I’ll probably just go to the airport, buy access to the wireless network there, and spend the afternoon writing or playing WoW. That’s what I expect. We’ll see what actually happens.

Have a great Saturday, people.

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Greatness: Story Idea

I took a nap and had a dream.

It was mainly about a little girl, named Ideine, who had a bunch of friends, but wasn’t happy. The actual scene in the dream was kinda something out of Buffy, and the girl was kinda Willow (but, to all of that, not really).

The story would start, “Ideine sat alone, and cried.”

Sometime in the past, an old man gave her a penny and he said, all sad, “You get everything you ask for, and you lose everything you want.” And it was true. The rest of her life, from that point, went exactly like that. Those became the natural laws of her reasonable, ordered, rational universe.

She became a kind of Cassandra, although she had been given no powers. She learned how to know what the universe would be, to see the future, simply by extrapolating based on her two natural laws: “You get everything you ask for, and you lose everything you want.”

Umm…it probably wouldn’t be a very happy story.

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Journal Entry: June 16, 2006

Blar.

I had a late night last night. Finally fell asleep about three-thirty-two-thirty-central. No coffee, last night or this morning. Just…things on my mind.

I spent a few hours last night reading The Invented Reality (a book I mentioned in Sleeping Kings, that I just happened to have on my bookshelf). It’s really good. You should all read it! Well, only the smart ones among you, actually.

Hmm…that’s not quite fair. I really should have said “the academic ones,” because it’s a very academic book. Feels kinda post-graduate level to me, but I’m only in the first essay. Fascinating stuff, though.

I’ve got a headache this morning. Probably has something to do with last night….

Okay, so, through work I get $60 a day for meals and incidentals, whether or not I actually spend that much. That can make for some pretty nice meals on travel, but unfortunately I was able to get that money as a travel advance, and I’ve long-since spent my per diem to pay for, y’know, mortgages and electric bills.

That’s probably a good thing. I mean, it’s not as though I need steaks and margaritas every night on travel, but it would help fill the quiet hours, knowwhatImean?

Oh! Got my numbers wrong, too. I don’t get home at 7:00 tomorrow — my flight leaves Detroit at 7:00. With the time change, I get in at 9:30. Bah.

Bah. Not in a good mood today. I did get done with my course around 11:30, and the rest of today is an optional review session which I don’t need to attend. Good, in that I’m not bored in the classroom, listening to the teacher lady chatter. Bad, in that now I’m just gonna spend the next twenty-four hours bored in my hotel room, instead.

Back to the not-quite-playing-WoW-or-reading-or-watching-TV-or-whatever state. I dunno why I’m in a funk, but I am quite thoroughly in a funk. Gonna go get some Taco Bell, maybe. Who knows, maybe I’ll win the El Presidente contest and get a million pesos. That would lift my spirits more than somewhat….

Live well. Seriously, I do command it.