My latest short story "The Night the Lights Came On"

Friday, August 25, 2017

Dan Dan The Art Man's Book Reviews | Episode 68
Star Wars Lost Stars by Claudia Gray


Download the .mp3

In this 68th episode, I review Lost Stars by Claudia Gray. Listen to hear why I loved the deep emotions and amazing world building in this book. It's one to read if you're a STARS WARS fan, young adult literature fan, both, or neither and you're just looking for a good book. I know you'll love this one. 

Buy the Book on Amazon:
Star Wars Lost Stars


Check out the author's website:
http://www.claudiagray.com/

Music Attribution:
Music by Kevin MacLeod at http://www.incompetech.com
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0


We're Back From the Hiking Trip!


We're back from vacation! It was really fun. We hiked over 30 miles last week. My wife is an amazing planner and we saw some beautiful places. So many waterfalls! If you would like to see all of the waterfalls we did, just pop on over to my Instagram and see the beauty for yourself. I put one of my favorite pics below, but you should really check out my Instagram because it was hard to choose. There is so much natural beauty out there, like that opening picture of the lake I took last night. We had a fun last lake day with family and friends yesterday. The kids start school next week! Where has summer gone?!


As for my revising, that's going pretty well. I'm currently revising chapter 31 of 50 and I think when we left on our trip I was revising somewhere in the low twenties. Once I finish my revision pass this book is off to beta readers. I'll get their feedback, make some more changes and then pass the manuscript off to an editor or two, make one last editing pass from their notes and then publish the thing! It will be my first published full length novel. I'm really excited about it. I need to get it for sale by October so it will be ready to go around Halloween. It's called "Haunted House Flipper," so that would be the perfect time to release it! After that I'm hoping to release my fist ever chapter book called "The Case of the Missing Snowman" around Christmas. That's what I've been up to. Thanks for stopping by!

Friday, August 11, 2017

I'm Gone on Another Hiking Trip!

I'll be gone for a week hiking with my family and our friends around the state of Oregon. I'm hoping in the quiet hours of the night as our kids sleep and we rest our weary feet I'll crank out revisions on several more chapters of my latest novel "Haunted House Flipper." I need to get moving on getting that first draft cleaned up for beta readers if I'm going to release it in October before Halloween! You can become a beta reader right now and read along as I post revised chapters at Wattpad. I'll be sure to thank you in the acknowledgements of the book when it's published in paperback and eBook! Feedback would be much appreciated. You can just leave it in the comments at Wattpad.

As far as our hike, we've had to change our plans a bit thanks to a bunch of fires and heavy smoke in the area. We were super excited to hike Crater Lake, but the smoke in that area is really bad right now so my brilliant wife found another great hike for us to do. If you want to see some gorgeous photos from our hikes of nature, rivers, and waterfalls just follow me on instagram. Check out my kids perched on a rock right above a waterfall before it drops down!


Last year my wife planned our first ever week long hiking trip and those days are some of our best family memories ever. I got some amazing photos and man did we have fun hiking to waterfalls and alongside rivers. This year will be cool because another family is coming with us. They've joined us on a lot of hikes this year and they're awesome traveling friends. So I'll see you in a week! Until then follow our journey on Instagram. I've posted a widget below to show some of the photos right here in this blog post:

Friday, August 4, 2017

Dan Dan The Art Man's Book Reviews | Episode 67
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White


Download the .mp3

In this 67th episode, I review Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Listen to hear why I loved reading this book to my kids. The writing was gorgeous, the story was well crafted, and the topic of death was covered in a beautiful way for all audiences. I can see why this book is a classic.

Buy the Book on Amazon:
Charlotte's Web


Learn more about the late author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White

Music Attribution:
Music by Kevin MacLeod at http://www.incompetech.com
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0


Wednesday, August 2, 2017

It's August! Time to Start Writing Every Day Again!

I've been really struggling to get any momentum going with my writing lately. I have a novel called "Zombie Super Powers" I'm over halfway done writing. You can see the progress bar in the upper right hand corner. As I write this post I'm on chapter 15 of 24 so I'm 62.5% through the novel. I have all the rest of the chapters outlined and ready for me to fill up with prose, I just need to do it. I haven't been doing it because I've been trying to finish revising the novel I finished called "Haunted House Flipper." The first draft of that one is done but I'm not quite halfway through revising it. Once that's done I can: get it to beta readers, make updates from their feedback, get it edited, and then finally publish it! I'd like to publish it in October because it would be a great book to release around Halloween.


The way I finished that book was by writing every day and keeping track of each day I wrote on a calender with a red X. Once you have two days in a row it starts to look like a chain and you don't break the chain. Don't miss a day of writing. So now I'm trying to do that with my novel "Zombie Super Powers." It's the book I work shopped on The Roundtable Podcast years ago and it should have been finished and put up for sale years ago. I'm hoping to finish the first draft this year by writing every day.

Then there's the children's chapter book I finished last year that I still need to do all the illustrations for. That book is just waiting on the illustrations to be done and one last revision pass and it will be ready to publish! It's called "The Case of the Missing Snowman" and I'd like to have it up for sale by December 1st in time for Christmas. For that to happen I need to get my illustrations done! Maybe I should try to start drawing every day too. That could really help my productivity.

That's my update for now. If you're looking for something to read I just released a really exciting short story adventure called "Stiff-Legged Bear!" Check it out for just $0.99 at Amazon, or almost all other online eBook retailers like Smashwords. It would really help me out if you left a review for it. You can also read it for free at Wattpad. You can see the awesome cover for it in the last blog post by scrolling down. Thanks for stopping by!