TV Memories | A Week Off

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This week I share how I wasn't able to get the next guest blog post out due to just getting back from vacation.
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TV Memories 12 | Dan AbsalonsonGUEST BLOG POST

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This week is by me again and it's audio only. Sorry there is no blog post to go along with it if you prefer reading, but the audio will be a nice change this week as it's not scripted. Just me talking off the cuff about one of my favorite TV memories. I talk about a summer long ago when I sat as a little boy around a small TV with my parents and neighbors watching the Olympics. I also bring you up to speed on how my novel is coming along. The second draft is almost done! Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend.

An Update on How My Writing is Going

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My novel is a little like this Easter bunny. It's almost done, but there are still a few really good bites left to take care of. I spent a lot of time revising the outline before going back through it. Now I have cut several chapters, moved others around, deleted scenes, written new ones, and planned out a new ending. Even though I'm almost through with revising the first draft, only a few chapters left, and the climax of the novel will remain the same, I will have a couple more chapters to write once that is all done. It's been this way for a couple weeks now. I have many excuses, but more of it should be done. Our kids have been sick, all three of them. We've been to doctors appointments and the ER more times than I have fingers just in the last couple months. That said, I have had stretches of time here in there. The problem is, I'm just too dang tired to write when I get those chances. So lately I have had a new plan. For the first time in years, I'm trying to actively get at least eight hours of sleep. Before I was trying to get things done right before bed, but now when I find the time I'm too tired to be productive. This year is flying past me and I was really hoping to start podcasting and publishing this novel as an e-book soon. Last weekend I bought a brand-new microphone, and it sounds amazing. I have totally revamped my website so that it looks awesome in hopes that putting out a full novel for the first time will bring me new fans. I'm doing all the things to get ready to release this novel except finishing it. It is time to do that, time to buckle down and get the second draft polished up and ready to give to beta readers. Then I can take their feedback on how the story is working, and get it ready to podcast and publish. I cannot wait for that day and I hope it is very soon. Once that's done I have a novella that I wrote during nanowrimo. It is called Dying Wish. It's a fantasy about a kid who's dad dies after a sword fight, saving his kid from being kidnapped. On his deathbed he makes the kid promise to take his ashes back to his homeland. The city, the market that has always been their home is deemed too dangerous by the father so he wants him to go back to their homeland and be with his grandparents and cousins working on the farm. Lots of crazy stuff happens to him along the way, it's going to be a fun adventure. I don't think that one will take nearly as much reworking of the story to be ready to be published. I'm hoping that's the case with all my stories moving forward, but we'll just have to see about that. I am also currently writing a young adult adventure/mystery novella. So far it's going well, and I think it will also be ready for some editing once I finish writing the story. If I can get a rough draft out that doesn't need a bunch of big story edits from now on I will be a very happy man. I like the process of outlining and brainstorming a story, and I hope that it will be a tool that I continue to get better at using to give me books that have a complete story once I'm done writing the first draft. A story that doesn't need to be revised a whole bunch. I need to get these books out, because I have three ideas and outlines for other novels that I'm really excited about. Here's the first line of the next novel I'm going to write:

I learned the truth about zombies when I shot off one of their scalps with my shotgun and saw gears tumble out. It's not polite to shoot your neighbor, but when they shamble in with that dead look in their eyes you have been warned about on the news - you're kind of out of options.

Yeah that's right not another zombie story. Government conspiracy, robots parading as zombies, it will be fun. The other two are also outlined, but only in a very basic rough way. One is about a kid who's dad buys an old school building and turns it into apartments, and it turns out that they are hunted, or are they? The other is about a guy who discovers when he touches certain people, he gets visions of the last horrible thing they did. Some of these men have other people locked away back at home. He becomes a reluctant hero in this coming of age tale I will probably write in like a year :) With our three very young kids, and my wife racing off to work as soon as I get home, I don't have much time to write. Let me rephrase that, I do have time to write first draft material on my commute, but I'm finding that revising a first draft takes a long time. I don't have much time for sitting down with a word processor during my week. I hope that I can successfully start to get up earlier and take lunch breaks at work to do just that. The trouble is that I'm already getting up super early so that I can get home on time for my wife to go to work, and neither my sweetie pie or I are good at going to bed at a decent hour. Maybe I can get better at it, getting some writing done would be more than worth it.

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UPDATE!
Last night I spent a couple hours revising and now I only have 3 chapters of original manuscript left to revise! Then I will write a couple new chapters to wrap the book up all nice and it will be ready for Beta Readers to read through it and give me feedback! I've written 4 books now, but this will be the first time I've completed a second draft on one. I'm really excited!

TV Memories 11 | Richard GreenGUEST BLOG POST

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I Saw Men Walking on the Moon

by Richard Green aka Mainframe

On May 25, 1961 President Kennedy said these words, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

On July 20, 1969, a five year old me joined millions of others in watching those words being made reality. Not only did Apollo 11 send men to the Moon, it took television with it.

On our black and white TV, my family watched from lift off until the astronauts were safe. Walter Cronkite and the rest of the CBS reporters provided a near constant running commentary. These men who spent their early adulthood during the second World War knew that they were chronicling the better side of history.

For that matter, even this small boy knew that this was an incredible moment. I had no context for how relatively soon in human history it was that men built a machine that flew under its own power. I had no idea how many people it took to make the Apollo missions possible. But I did now that it was a world away from life in my little (and I mean little) town in rural Georgia. But I could see that world from the same box that brought my Saturday morning cartoons.

Over the years I watched the other Apollo missions. We even got a color TV somewhere around 1970. Nasa sent a dune buggy to the moon. There was Skylab, then Space Shuttles. I was a child of the Space Age. Science would continue to play an increasingly important role in our lives. I found that I enjoyed computers, so this rural boy became a man of technology.

January 28, 1986 I was in Oklahoma City at a conference on Tinker Air Force Base. I’d just been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant when I graduated from college the Spring before, and I was four months into my first active duty assignment.

At 10:38 AM Central Time, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated into a cloud of smoke and debris. Someone at the conference made the announcement to us. A little while later, I found myself eating lunch where a TV was broadcasting the news. The same medium that shared the news of successes with the space program had to show us this dark day as well. We all knew that space flight was dangerous. It was obvious from every time those giant rockets launched. We hadn’t lost astronauts after lift-off before but we did that day. Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, S. Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory B. Jarvis were gone. There wasn’t another Space Shuttle launch for two and a half years.

TV was there to show the wonder and tragedy of scientific exploration; letting me see it with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. TV would always push my reality beyond my own personal experiences, to at least as far as their cameras could take me.

Richard Green is a system administrator of mainframe and Unix systems. He has been working with computers in one way or another since September 1985 (He will let you do the math since he is reminded enough how old he is). Richard has been reading comic books for as long as he has been able to read, which is significantly longer than that. If his memory were better, he would be considered a comic book expert.

Richard has always enjoyed science, science fiction, history, historical fiction, math, and mathematical fiction. His wife, Jan, has had to put up with his geeky ways since 1997. His daughter, Rachel, has been fortunate to only have had to do so since 1999. If you go to DragonCon you can look him up, ... or avoid him; whichever is best for your personal mental health.

Richard is the podcaster behind the "Geek Out! with Mainframe" podcast at http://geekoutwithmainframe.com (It was a Parsec Finalist in 2011, due to the awesome people he had the foresight to interview). The podcast has been on hiatus, but he's been getting requests to start it back up again. He has written a few short stories over at the "Every Photo Tells" podcast and he's way overdue to write another one. During November 2011, he wrote his first novel for National Novel Writing Month. If we are all fortunate, it will not see the light of day. Finally, Richard likes self-deprecating humor, but considers himself rather poor at it.

TV Memories 10 | Arlene RadaskyGUEST BLOG POST

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My first television memories. Wow, takes me back. I really have a hard time remembering much back that far, but I can remember the hour my brother and I had on weekend nights to watch our programs. We had a tv that has a tiny screen and it was black and white, but the images that came to the screen were fascinating, magic.

I had no idea how it worked and didn't care then, but when it came time, my brother and I would sit, cross-legged on the floor and mom would tune in Rin Tin Tin, The French Foreign Legion, Sky King (wanted to learn how to fly because of this show) or Lassie.

Mom didn't have to worry about the language or the content of these show, the violence was never more than a punch in the nose and the worst language was Gosh, mom, Lassie made me late for school!

Eventually the family shows made their way into our evenings, mom, dad, brother and I would enjoy Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marks and so many others. The earliest detective show I remember is The Naked City. "There are eight million stories in the naked city and this is one of them." That stuck with me. Now it seems that is all that is on tv anymore.

I fell in love with the westerns, Paladin, and GunSmoke. I fell into a serious long time lust for Steve MaQueen watching him in Wanted Dead or Alive. And Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin(David McCallum) in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Oh my goodness, posters of both men covered my bedroom walls.

Today tv is still entertaining, the loss of the world around you, step into the world of the writer and actors and become one with the characters. Leave your stress behind and imagine.

I think there are too many crime fighting shows, a very few are good because of the interaction of the characters, NCIS for one, but I long for the old comedies, the variety shows, and often resort to old movies for a night of escape.

And of course, I want Star Trek to come back......

Arlene Radasky

March 12, 2012

Arlene Radasky loves history. There are so many mysteries in history out there and she would like to provide answers to some. Her first novel, The Fox, is about an ancient couple and modern archeologists. It is available free to download in several places to all readers. She loves to write poetry and short stories and has fun recording them. She has two grown daughters who between them have given her three grandsons. She lives in Southern California with her husband and cats. She often goes to the beach for inspiration. Find out more about Arlene at http://www.radasky.com/.