I still need glasses

On the 23rd, my glasses randomly broke neatly in half. They were irreparable. So I grabbed them and my vision insurance card and headed out the door in search of a new pair. I went to my usual place, but they couldn't fit me in for an exam. They very helpfully got me an appointment first thing the next morning at the store nearest my house. In my haste to get satisfaction even quicker, I went to Target Optical, you know, the little corner right when you walk in that has the glasses. They had an opening for an eye exam in about 20 minutes, which was much better for me than the next morning.

They were helpful and friendly, so when they said, "They should be done before the new year and I'll put a rush on them, since you're wandering around with your sunglasses on," it didn't bother me much. After wearing my prescription sunglasses around the office for a week and a half and going through Christmas with my prescription sunglasses on, I'm so ready to have actual glasses.

I've been calling periodically to make sure they were paying attention to my glasses and when the day rolled around that they should be done, I went to the store to pick them up.

They weren't there.

Instead, there were two employees who told me they got two of the three shipments they were supposed to have gotten today and there was no way for them to know where my glasses were and why they weren't in the store. The only thing their database told them was that my glasses weren't at the lab anymore--no indication of whether they failed inspection or were stuck on the truck or misplaced or what happened.to them. So I have to wear my prescription sunglasses for another weekend because Target's optical production sucks.

The moral of the story is that I should have stuck with my regular place. If I had, I would have only had to wait until the next morning for my glasses to be done. Instead, I'm going to be waiting for nearly two full weeks for a pair of glasses because Target hasn't figured it out yet.

My handwriting sucks

I haven't posted much recently because I'm deep in the middle of National Novel Writing Month. That's coming along alright, I suppose, but that's not what I want to write about now.

This last week, we were watching the old Miracle on 34th Street and I watched Maureen O'Hara add her little note on the little girl's letter to Santa. That's when I had a realization--my handwriting totally sucks. It's not bad, it's just that her penmanship was so much more fluid and beautifully legible than mine.

I think this next year, I want to work on my penmanship. That's what I wanted to share.

In the trenches

Hey there, ladies and gents. It's the middle of National Novel Writing Month and I'm about in the middle of writing my newest novel. I've decided I hate most of the characters' names, but I'm pressing on with the ones I've got. Names can come later. If you're into robot fights and Abraham Lincoln, you may just like this book. I'm not particularly thrilled with it at the moment, but that's probably because I'm in the middle of grinding away on it. I seem to have no problem writing down enough words but I'm not excited about the story itself. Right now, I'm thinking that I'm most excited to just be done with it. I'll catch you up in a bit.

Help me figure this out

I'm getting ready to start NaNoWriMo in a few days and I've got an idea, but I'm having trouble figuring something out. It's a detail, really, but could end up being a good chunk of the novel. Help me answer this question.

Why would a woman get her breasts done that has nothing to do with being in an adult industry? And don't say "Because she wants to." There needs to be an actual reason for it.

Let me know what you think, all 1 of you reading this.

Are you as excited as I am?

In just about two weeks, we'll be in November, which means that National Novel Writing Month is almost here! I'm so excited for it, I've been updating my profile information, polishing up my notes, making sure I have the most up-to-date version of Scrivener, and looking into the month's festivities. I'm so excited to see where this thing goes. I've got a general direction, but I'm not exactly sure how it'll all happen and who all will show up in the story. If you have suggestions (since no one reads this blog anyway), I'd love to hear them.

Not feeling it today

At the moment, there are a number of things in my house that are dismantled because they're not working the way they should be and I'm not feeling much like writing today. I need to keep in the habit, though, because I decided a while ago that I want to make sure that I'm taking time regularly to do things to exercise this creative streak I have, feed the machine that comes up with ideas like the killer cyborg Abraham Lincoln.

Today at work, I came up with a visual for a kind of internal marketing effort for the big tool I'm helping manage development of. I'm excited about it and wondering how much buzz I can build around this tool.

another week, another update

Here we both are again, rolling our eyes over the same text, but not the same as last time. When I said "same text," I meant you're looking at the same words I'm looking at, but it's different from the last stuff I wrote. Having cleared that up, probably unnecessarily, let's move on.

You know how you have the best ideas in the places where it's not very easy to take notes? Buckaroo Banzai calls them the three Bs: bed, bus and bath. They come to you when you're showering or brushing your teeth, driving or riding on the bus and staring out the window, or while you're lying in bed hoping that you can fall asleep because you have an early morning meeting that you have to be on time for. You know what I'm talking about. They're the best ideas because your mind's relaxed, you don't have to pay attention to what you're doing and your mind is free to make connections between crazy things without fear of being censored. And then you come up with a simple, elegant solution to the problem you've been trying to work out or you've got a great idea that fits perfectly with what you were thinking before.

The only trouble with those revelations is you're in the middle of doing something else and I don't know about you, but I always have to debate whether the idea is worth climbing out of bed for to write down because I know I'll forget it by the time I wake up. Or if I'm in the shower, I have to decide if I mind some water drips on my notebook. Yes, I have some trouble retaining good ideas, probably because they feel all out of place in my head, which probably looks like a frigate in a bottle on the inside. It's not unusual at all for me to be lying in bed and jump out all of a sudden to write something down that I think is absolutely brilliant.

Recently, I've been keeping my iPhone by my bed to take those kinds of notes on. (I have most of my brilliant flashes while I'm in bed.) There are a couple of advantages with that. When I need to write down some notes, it makes its own light. I don't have to turn a light on, like I do with my notebook. The other nifty thing is that the notes automatically make it to the computer I do my writing on, so I have them in one place.

The disadvantages are that I'm less inclined to jump out of the shower to take a note because I don't want to hurt my nifty phone, where with a notebook, I just wipe my hands off and write. A couple of drips on the page don't bother me. The other thing I can think of is that if I have it in the bedroom, it makes noises at me as it gets emails and other things, which is annoying when I'm trying to sleep.

The important thing here, though, is to take the notes. You'll be glad you did.

Boys have bathroom rules

For the women who read this blog, it may come as a surprise to you that men have bathroom rules. We all just know them, kind of like information about tanks and Superman. These rules are very stringent, yet never spoken about; it's just part of being a boy. Also, keep in mind that these rules are standard in the American culture.

Rule 1: No looking around.
This one seems like kind of a no-brainer. You can look straight forward, you can look down. Even looking straight up is seen as a breach of etiquette, but won't earn you the disdain of everyone in the room like breaking some of the other rules will.

Rule 2: No talking.
Talking to yourself is unacceptable, to say nothing of talking to another man. There is an uncomfortable, marginally acceptable exception to this rule, and that is if you're both finished and only washing your hands. Still, that makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable and is generally avoided. If you're taking your kid to the bathroom, you can talk to your kid.

This rule is why that scene in Austin Powers is so uncomfortable. Not only is Austin breaking this rule when the Irish assassin guy attacks him, but the guy in the next stall is breaking the rule as well. And not just any guy. It's Tom Arnold. If you ranked all the guys in the world who would make you the most uncomfortable talking to you in the bathroom, he'd rank up there in the top 5.

Rule 3: No touching.

Do I really need to comment on this one? There aren't any exceptions I can think of that don't involve life-and-death situations. Because if you touch someone, you'll find yourself in a life-and-death situation pretty quickly.

Rule 4: Don't take a spot right next to someone else, if you can help it.
Men will only use half the toilets there are actually installed if they can possibly help it. Obvious exceptions would be sporting events like a baseball game or football game, where you've all got to go at halftime or whatever break in the action there is. The need to quickly be back watching the game outweighs this rule. Another bathroom rule that Tom Arnold broke in the Austin Powers movie, making it that much more uncomfortable.


So why this sudden interest to get these rules out there? Because there are regular breaches in American male bathroom etiquette at work, not to mention other things that make me cringe. I thought I'd share because who doesn't like bathroom jokes?

As a parting gift, here's a list of noises you definitely don't want to hear in the bathroom:

• grunting
• snoring
• panting
• nervous giggling
• laughing
• someone saying "oh, no" or "whoops"

My feelings about Dan Brown

In case you haven't been paying any attention at all to the world of books, Dan Brown's latest book just came out. With that, I thought I'd share how I feel about his writing style, not him as a person. I don't know the guy, but I'm sure he's an interesting guy to talk to. Now, I know that this could be a potentially divisive post, but I'm hoping to keep it fairly level-headed. I'm pretty good at being objective, but if you think I missed something or that I'm way off base, I'm all for considering your point, as long as you back it up with examples. You can't just leave it with, "You don't know anything about anything, poophead." Now that we've got some ground rules for discourse, here we go.

The first thing I want to say is that the man's books are definitely page-turners. They're the kind of books you pick up and read a chapter and get to the end of that chapter and think, "I just can't stop with that," and thumb through the pages to find out how long the next chapter is. "Oh, that's not too long," you inevitably think to yourself and commit to reading for just a few more minutes so you can finish the next chapter. This process continues until you get to the end, realize that you've just missed that meeting you were supposed to go to, didn't make dinner, didn't take the trash out, and missed your usual bedtime by about two hours. Then you kick yourself for getting so sucked in as you think about how many parts of the story could actually be true.

Having said that, he seems to put comic book characters into his books. They tend to be fairly flat, with their defining characteristics aligned the same general direction. Robert Langdon is just a regular guy who's freaky good at puzzles and codes. Langdon also seems like Superman in that it seems like his hair never really gets messed up, he makes his way through the story relatively unscathed. Sure, maybe he gets beat up every now and then, has to run and hide a couple of times, but he's not like John McClane in Die Hard, bleeding all over the place in his cut-up bare feet, doesn't seem to have a dark side that he indulges when he's on the run and "accidents" could happen. I understand that because he's so smart, he gets to stay just a little bit ahead of the physical danger. But that never seems to help Batman. Batman's the World's Greatest Detective, but he has to get his point across to criminals with his bonecrushing fists.

The last point I want to bring up is how many deep, sinister global conspiracies can there be in the world at a time? Holy crap! And a single guy (Robert Langdon) has dug into all of them? Really? I mean, this is more than Mulder and Scully figured out. They only had to deal with the one about aliens. All the other weird stuff they had to figure out were just unexplained, odd cases. And that was their freaking job! They weren't puppeteers by day, mystery solvers when Uncle Sam called the hotline. They were already FBI agents, so it was their job to dig into conspiracies.

All in all, I think the stories are interesting, the characters aren't. And Mr. Brown sells a lot of stories.

getting closer

I've got an idea for something else to include in the next novel, a secondary plot. It involves some heartache, some disappointment, and possibly some ninjas. But not just any ninjas. We'll have to see how that all works out in November.

I know that it's no fun to get teased with no end in sight, no release at all, so I'll totally hook you up. It's just that right now, I don't have anything either. I don't know where it's all going to go or even all the elements I'm going to drag in. I'm almost as in the dark about this as you are. In a couple of months, though, I'll have an idea what I'm doing and I'll get it put together for you as quickly as I can. Since you're all just clamoring for my books anyway. This is a theoretical audience I'm writing to here. Kind of like Twitter feels like I'm posting thoughts to a theoretical group of people who probably don't care much what I have to say, which isn't much at only 140 characters a pop. Pfft.

Flash of Genius!

I was working (no, really) when I had this genius idea I want to include in my next novel. You know, the one I'm going to write in a couple of months. I'm so excited about the idea that I want to share it with you, so you can be excited about it as well. Ready?

A death-dealing, cybernetically enhanced clone of Abraham Lincoln.

Would you want to take that on? I didn't think so. I wonder where he's going to show up in my upcoming book. Have another brilliant idea you wouldn't mind me stealing and working in somewhere? Share in the comments and I'll include you in a Special Thanks section.

Getting back into it

I haven't been as good about updating this blog or maintaining the stuff it connects to as I could have been. One of my goals for the rest of the year is to update this a little more regularly. I know what you're saying--you've heard this before. But really. I want to do a better job of working on this. You know you deserve it.

In the meantime, let me give you one little bit of advice. If you're shooting media around your house, between four computers and searching the internet at the same time, don't try to do all of that with a wireless network with a single router. I've given my poor router fits trying to keep up, and I'm trying to think of a good way to wire as much of it together as I can.

Coming soonish

I've started making notes for my next novel. Just as a teaser, ask yourself this question: How much more fun would it be to read about the Brownings' (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett) love for each other if they were space pirates instead of Victorian poets? Well, this next book will not answer that question at all, but it will definitely be fun. I'll be writing it in November as I take part in NaNoWriMo, so you won't see it probably until next year, but if you're jonesing for something entertaining and not at all heavy to read, you might like to read my effort from last year. You can find it on Amazon or at my own personal e-store at CreateSpace.

Is Number Six the paragon of modern man we think?

Don't get me wrong--I love The Prisoner, and who doesn't want to be as fiercely individual as Number Six, but I had some thoughts on the issue while I was watching an episode the other day.

Number Six is an example of a man who stands for himself. He refuses to cooperate simply for the sake of being a good citizen. He draws boundaries between himself and the community, seemingly just for the sake of having his own thoughts and reasons. To his way of thinking, it shouldn't matter to The Village why he does the things he does. He isn't harming any of the citizens, participates with the community to the extent he wishes (which is very little), and yet the constantly-changing streams of Number Twos keep attempting to coerce him into sharing information he doesn't see as relevant to them. I can appreciate that desire for privacy.

Starting with the idea that The Village is obviously an analog for society in general and Number Six is an example of a man who wants to live his own life within that society. The big question I asked myself then was: How well would a man like that function in real life?

He's unnecessarily harsh with people because he begins every relationship with a paralyzingly high level of distrust toward everyone. They must somehow prove worthy of his trust, which is nearly impossible, since there's some conspiracy theory that could discredit anyone's actions and motives. It just wouldn't work because nothing could get reliably done.

Life depends on some basic level of trust towards each other.

Question about business card titles

I know it's been awhile since I wrote anything on this blog, but I've got a question that's been bugging me for the last few weeks, so I thought I'd post it here, on the off chance that anyone reads it and has any insight for me.

What does one have to do to be able to put "Adventurer" on your business card and not be lying?



You hear that term used to describe people like Steve Fossett or Richard Branson, Shackleton, those kinds of guys. What about Hemingway? Would be be considered an adventurer? It seems like the kind of job title I'd like to have, but I have no idea how to go about it so that it's accurate.