Pieces Of My Mind... Thankfully None Are The Last One

What is on my mind?  Things on my mind right now are my glacially slow progress on my book, my "i" conversion, and the sad state of the potential Republican presidential ticket along with the dismal prospect of four more years of the empty suit in the White House.  I'll address each of these briefly.

Where am I in my book?  Only 5,000 words further than the last time I wrote about it.  I crossed the 20,000 work mark a few days ago.  I got nothing done during the holidays except trying to twist the entire storyline into something I thought my potential readers (both of them) would like better than what I have now.  I finally rejected the idea, as it stole a core conflict from the midst of the narrative and the story became weak and uninteresting (to me anyway).  So I am back on my original track, and writing a little here and there.  I have revised more words than I wrote new in the past few weeks and that is bad, as I should be concentrating on putting words in, not taking them out or changing them yet.  I hope to pick up the pace soon.

And now my comments on the sad, sad state of the potential Republican presidential ticket.  We are left with (in my opinion) a somewhat electable candidate with whom I have major policy conflicts and LOTS of doubt about, and two mostly unelectable candidates that I have more common thoughts with, but still have serious misgivings about.  If I have to hold my nose and punch my ticket for Mitt Romney I will, but seriously, I lost all real faith that the empty suit can be tossed out of the White House on his ear when Hermann Cain dropped out.  That was a well-orchestrated attack from liberals and criminals (am I being redundant?) to push him out of the race.  I was excited for him as he picked up steam early on and I was ready to vote for him, but sadly conservatives don't get the free passes in their personal lives like liberals do, so out he went amid the firestorm of accusations.

If Newt Gingrich can gain the nomination, I would vote for him, but I am afraid I would be in the minority and we all would have to endure another four years of economic, political, and judicial failure.  Between failed "stimulus plans" (read tax increases), more weak, sniveling foreign policy, criminals and liars continuing to lead the Justice Department, and the possibility to swing the Supreme Court even further toward the left, Obama's second four years could be even worse than his first four and the bar is astronomically high there.  As someone has already said, Republicans may have to "take their castor oil" and vote for Mitt Romney.  Since there are no real conservatives left in the GOP field with Cain gone, I could almost say one is no better than another so pick the one that can win.

On a more positive and sunny topic, I have recently received an iPad and a MacBook Pro laptop at work.  I actually requested them.  I am VERY happy with my MBP and surprisingly I stay in OS-X most of the time.  I haven't even loaded Windows on it yet.  It is so much easier to do many things I need to do on the network in OS-X than in Windows.  Most of my management interfaces are web-based, so the operating system is not really an issue.  Full-screen applications, intuitive gestures, and excellent performance all have me pretty excited about my MBP.  I am similarly impressed, but not as excited about my iPad.  I requested it so that I could help troubleshoot network issues revolving around them (the number of which seem to grow everyday) and while some things are nice about it, my Viewsonic gTablet is still the tablet I use most of the time.

Well, I have ranted all I am going to for now.  I hope to update you soon and say I have gotten 5,000 more words into my book, but on my other major topic, we will all most likely have to wait until the RNC convention to find out if we have the possibility for a real president for the next four years.

P.S. You might have noticed that I didn't even mention chess... that is because I haven't played since late November or early December.  That is sad.

15,000 words even with the Thanksgiving hiatus

Well, I am 15,000 words into my book even with a serious hiatus for the Thanksgiving break.  I have now (with help) named all of my main characters and also decided to change major plot elements right in the middle of writing.  I know professional writers do this all the time, but it seems so strange to me to make MAJOR plot changes like this.  I know books are living and breathing and growing and morphing things for writers so maybe this means I am on the right track.  I hope so.

Chess games posts still in the works.  I have been neglectful of my chess studies and have lost the last 5 or 6 games I have played online.  My OTB chess seems to not suffer the same fate, as I have won 4 out of the last 5 of those games.

Well, more posts later in the week.  I must survive a cold and probably wet Christmas parade tomorrow.  Probably won't get much writing done.

Later.

And futhermore...

I just wanted to post this now that I have reread my previous post again...  I have been playing chess and I will be translating some of my games from my previous site to this one and posting some new ones, but I am dialed in on my book right now so it may be a while.  I will most likely write/convert these when writer's block creeps up on me (and once I figure out how to display them so you can walk through them here on my new site), so I have no idea when they may appear.  I may write a music review or two in December, but definitely not before.  Thanks for reading and commenting - sorry for the delay in actual content.

Writing, writing, writing

I am 10,000 words into my book now, oh, I didn't mention my book before?  I know, I haven't mentioned it, sorry, but I had to open this post with something interesting.  I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) event about halfway through November, which was kind of silly, since the goal of the event is for people to craft 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.  Yes, that is 1,667 words a day, a somewhat challenging goal for anyone who is not a professional writer or seasoned veteran of journaling (my spell-check tells me that is not a word, but I know some of you do it).  The idea is not so much to have a "finished" work by month's end, but to have that pile of 50,000 words to mold and shape into something potentially publishable.  The event is in its 13th year if I count correctly and has produced many published novels including Water for Elephants, a best-seller.

I am not so egotistical that I think that I will have a best seller (although that would be ultimately cool).  I realize that probably 7,500 of those 10,000 words are either passively rendered, misspelled, repeated too often, or just bad prose, but I am plugging on in hopes that I can at least say I tried.

So, I am 10,000 words into my book/novel/whatever.  I have pieces of several chapters, but no completed chapters.  My goal for the end of the month, since there is no way I can achieve the 50,000 word goal of NaNoWriMo is to have at least once chapter completed with all scenes in place.  As I am a complete beginner at this and have no real idea what I am doing, the book I am writing is constantly morphing.  I see where I am overly descriptive and bog down in details.  So I edit and move and cut and modify so that the novel fits my new mental framework for it each day.  If I don't finish the manuscript it will be because I never quit editing or I get so tired of editing that I finally give up the goal of writing a book.  My attention span is not my strongest character attribute, so I hope that this project gives me a challenge and teaches me to stay with a task until it is complete.

No sneak previews of my book right now.  I will tell you the (working) title is "Opposition" and it is a suspense, thriller, action novel (not sure how much of each will survive the edits) set in present time.  Maybe I will post a snippet of one of the chapters in December.  That is pretty dangerous to do since it could all change before/if it gets published!

So wish me luck on my book if you don't mind.  I will need it.

Heil, BHO! Practice it in front of a mirror...

I really suspected that I would be posting my old articles from my other site here first, but I have been unable to commit myself to converting those articles as yet.  I will, in time, but first I have to comment on our benevolent dictator-in-chief's latest attempts to wield power in a unconstitutional manner.  President Barack Obama's executive orders are a direct circumvention of the proper way to establish law in this country.  If he were to bother to recall any of that U.S. history I am sure he was required to know at some point, he would remember that there are three distinct branches of the U.S. government and his branch is NOT the law-making branch.  Each branch is set up to maintain a group of checks and balances on each other that is intended to insure that the will of the people is expressed and exercised through their elected representation.  Congress creates law, not the president, and this latest, desperate attempt to curry favor from his shrinking pool of supporters is dangerously close to impeachable action.  It displays not only a disregard for the way our government works, but it also displays a complete ignorance of the actual function of our government.

Our government exists to protect us.  It does not exist to make sure we have a job, or to ensure that everybody gets "their fair share", nor does it exist to bail out failing businesses.  Our capitalist economy, when left alone as possible by government, will ensure that those businesses which provide a product for which there is a demand and that demonstrate good business practices will not only stay afloat but will thrive.  It is not the government's job to determine which businesses fail and which ones don't.  There is no such thing as a business that is "too big to fail".  If a business does not observe good business practice, or does not sell a product for which there is demand, it SHOULD fail.  All governmental attempts to prevent this failure makes that company a negative influence on economic health.  The bank and automotive bailouts were a BAD idea and set a disturbing precedent.  And yes, I realize that these were not all BHO's ideas.  That doesn't make them any better in my eyes.

But the fact that Congress will not pass this new jobs bill fast enough, if ever, apparently rubs BHO the wrong way enough that he is willing to attempt to side-step Congress and push his progressive, Marxist ideas through executive orders.  What does that say to the American people and to their elected representatives?  And how does he expect us to respond?  I can't answer this last questions, but to the previous question I can assure you that he thinks he is smarter than we are and he is giving us the metaphorical finger.

Now back to your practicing!  "Heil, BHO!"

Here I go!

The proverbial first post.  Silly. Mostly useless. "Hello, world!" and all that jazz.  I am in the process of moving my current website to here on blogger.com.  It will take a while to do that as I cull through the posts I made there to bring over only the ones that are still pertinent and possibly useful to someone other than me.  I will also be editing them for content and concurrency so that they make sense transported to this new site.

I hope to be more prolific here on blogger.com since I have many more ways to post and share here than I do on my current site.  Keep an eye out for new posts, whether old or new content and let me know what you think in the feedback area.

Thanks for reading and I'll post more soon!