Year Ender

I suppose, after all of the talk I've done for this year about my goal for writing, that I have to do a post about this. I'll be a little bit brief, because I will be talking about this in my Patreon Address this month, of course. 

I said last time, that everybody would get access to my Patreon Address just that one time and then it would be for Patreon subscribers only, but then archive.org went down, and that post never went out. So, I'm going to try it again, if I can. I still haven't been able to log into my archive.org account, so I don't think we can upload stuff to it yet. If that does become available again, then my Patreon Address will go out to everybody in a timely manner. If not, then I guess you gotta get on the Patreon to hear it.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about archive.org or anything like that. I'm here, because my one year for my writing effort just passed. I made the goal on my birthday in 2023. My goal was to have my best year of writing ever. Up until this year, that would have been the year from birthday-to-birthday in 2019-2020. That gave me the goofy goal of getting 304,475 because my total for 2019-2020 was 304,474.

Maybe I don't need to talk about reaching the end of this year, because I already talked about beating that goal back in June. After that, I took a big, ill-advised break in July and August, and had to recommit myself to writing in September. I gave myself a new, augmented goal to attempt for the rest of the year until my birthday arrived in late October. Now, I was trying to hit 380,000 for the year.

How did that go? Well, here's my final word count for the whole 2023-2024 birthday-to-birthday year:

Yeah, I hit the 380 goal. I didn't have a lot of room to spare, but I managed. So, my new best year ever total is 381,054. If I want to improve, I have to beat that.

So, what am I doing now? Taking another break and disappearing for months on end? No!

Instead, I'm trying to up it just a little bit more. First of all, I'm doing something I probably should have done a while ago. I'm dumping this whole birthday-to-birthday thing. No more hyphenated years. I'm switching to a standard calendar. And I'll start with this year. I'm taking everything that I've written in 2024 so far, and continuing from there. So, my year looks like this right now:

You can zoom in and see the info on that if you want, but let me show you the important part.

Okay, that's my total for what we've had of 2024 so far. And, as you can see, I gave myself a new goal. I wanted to beat my best year ever, so I'm going to outdo 381,054. I won't do it stupidly this time around by setting my goal at 381,055 though. Instead, this time I'm taking it a a ways above that. I want to see if I can't manage to get to 400,000 for 2024.

As you can see, that means that I have 83,905 words to write in two months and four days. That means I've got to kick it up a notch. I wrote a thousand words a day...aside from my birthday, which I took a holiday from writing...in October. I'll only get a little over 30,000 words for the month doing that, however. What I'm going to need is 40,000 word months in November and December.

That is not out of the realms of possibility, though. If you look at the totals of the months from 2024, I got more than 40,000 words in January, March, April, May, and June.  I know I can do it. I've just got to work a little bit harder. In January, I set my word count goal to 1,250 per day. I think I'll have to do that again. And, of course, I'll have to do it every day of the month, no breaks, probably not even Christmas.

So, we're off. Can I get 80,000 words in the final two months of the year and set a new all-time high benchmark? It'll be tough. It'll be a stretch for me to achieve that, but it's definitely possible, and I believe in myself enough to say that I can do it.

Once I crush that goal, then we can look at what even-higher benchmark I can shoot for in 2025. 500,000? That sounds like insanity, but maybe...

Still Losing? Or Stalled Out? | Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Week 74 Roundup

I've had several good weeks in a row. How long can that go on for? Can it keep progressing at this breakneck speed or does a person's body have to stop to take a breath. Well, watch the show and see how it went.

Ugh! Time For The Switchover

It's one of my least favorite things, but it leads to one of my favorite things, so I guess you have to take the good and take the bad. You take them both and then you have the facts of life.

Yup, that's what I was doing this weekend. That is my study, half-denuded. You can see that there are plenty of holes in the shelves, because I took the Halloween decorations down. Once I can get them packed away safely and stuffed into the closet again, I'll open up the other one of those plastic totes and start unloading my Christmas decorations.

I know, you're not supposed to decorate for Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving, but if I wait that long, I'll only get a week or so with the stuff, because it takes me forever to get it all up. I've got to get started now, or else I will just get despondent and say it isn't worth the effort and never have any decorations at all.

Oh, here's something that I think I forgot to ever include in any of my Halloween decorations posts. I forgot to take a picture of this Halloween decoration and show it off. 

This is a Lego house that my wife gave to me a while back. Okay, it isn't Lego. It's fake Legos...also, it's miniature fake Legos. These things are tiny. They're probably half the size of regular Legos, but it feels like it's more like 1/3 the size when I try to use my fat fingers to assemble the thing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly do. I love Legos. Fake or not.

Ain't Wastin' Time

Only two days past Halloween yesterday, and I was at work recording football games for the sports guys when this commercial came on during one of them.

Please excuse the crappy pictures, but I tried as quickly as I could to get my camera out to get a shot before the commercial ended. Yessir, that is the John Travolta as Santa Claus commercial. Already running while Halloween's corpse isn't even cold yet.

What's in your wallet?

Well, if you're anything like me, there ain't a damn thing in your wallet. Inflation done emptied that thing out. Thanks for asking, Santa.

Do I Really Need To Add Lars Ulrich?

Having Ollie's nearby may not be a good thing after all. I've been spending a little too much money there lately. Case in point, the other day, while I was chatting with Rish on the phone, I was doing my usual trip to Ross. Ollie's is nearby, so it's now been added to my list of places to stop. I went into the Ollies, and to my surprise, among the usual cast off figures that nobody wants were four Figrin D'ans from the Star Wars Black Series. That's the six-inch scale figures. It's mostly what I collect for display. All the 3.75-inch collecting that I do is only for the Ankletown Station setup.

Four of them! That's a lot. That's more than half of the band, and now I could get them all for half of their original price. I wanted to, but had decided against collecting a set of the Modal Nodes, because getting seven figures would be prohibitively expensive. I've got three kids on our car insurance. We can barely afford our electric bill and don't get me started on the prices at the grocery store. But, if the figures are half price...maybe?

I debated it for a while, (They were $10 a piece. That's $40, and I seldom spend that much money at once on toys. I shop at Ross for a reason. Oh, and I did mention how everything costs way more than it used to? I sure haven't gotten a big raise to make up for that disparity, that's for sure), however, I finally gave in and bought the four guys.

They're pretty cool. Each one comes with three instruments, so even though they're identical, they can pass as different guys in the band...they're aliens after all. Who can tell one Bith from another, right?

They look pretty good all lined up blowing their space-horns.

I have an awful lot of leftover instruments though.

I guess I could probably use them in designing stuff on Ankletown Station. So, I'll find a use for all of this.

Now, there's two different figures in the Black Series Modal Nodes. They're both identical figures, but one comes with the three horns, the other one comes with the three larger instruments, and is sold as a deluxe figure. That one's name is Nalan Cheel. 

All I need is one Nalan Cheel, which is selling for a lot more than those Figrin D'ans are going for on eBay right now. I could get one of him, one or two more Figrin D'ans, and have the whole band. That's going be at least as expensive as what I've bought so far. I did run out to the other Ollie's that opened up on my way to work the next day, and they had no Figrin D'ans. So, I may have to pay full-price...or worse...to get the others. 

Is it worth it? Maybe I won't bother. Those four get the point across, right? Star Wars band. Awesome! Who cares about the drummer and bass player and keyboardist in a rock band anyway. All that matters are the lead guitarists and the singers. Quick, without looking on Google, tell me the name of the drummer and bassist on Van Halen...or AC/DC...or Aerosmith. Pretty much the only way a drummer gets his name out there is by being an asshole like Lars Ulrich or by having a huge schlong and giving it to Pamela Anderson like Tommy Lee. I don't see Nalan Cheel managing that kind of fame.

Wizards and Angels Now Available In eBook!

New short story collection available now! It's Wizards and Angels: The Short Fiction Collection, Volume Four.

This will be my last short story collection for a while. I've used up all my short stuff, and it's pretty much all available and out there now. From here on out, I'll have to start publishing my novels. 

This one has a really good mix of stuff. It includes nine stories: From Another World, The Shortest Ghost Story Ever Told, Undo, Unfortunate, Dr. Claw, Pre-owned, Long-Term Memory, Black Angel, and Digital Wizards. A few of those are from many moons ago, such as "The Shortest Ghost Story Ever Told" or "Black Angel" and some of them are from this very year such as "Pre-Owned" or "Digital Wizards." "Digital Wizards" is a novella, and takes up the lion's share of the page count. Rather than describe each story separately, I just linked to the post where I released them in their standalone versions.

So far, Wizards and Angels is only available as an eBook on Amazon. My next order of business is to get the other formats ready for publishing. The paperback and hardcover will certainly be next, and over the next two months I will get the audio recorded and edited. So, depending on what your favorite format is, you can get it now or expect it to be a long shortly. I'll do a post when each format comes online as well so you won't miss it, don't worry. I hope you enjoy.

Halloween Decorations Post #8

Okay, folks. This is it! It's Halloween today, so this is the last one. In today's post, I'm sharing the Halloween decorations I have that don't readily fit into a category.

We'll start with Pez. I have this group:

They're up there with another one of those foam pumpkins. So cute, amiright?

Every year or so, they add more dispensers to their holiday choices while dropping the older ones off. Here's another set of them:

I'm always adding a few every year or so. I even have one bat dispenser that I had to leave off the shelves this year, because I had nowhere for it to go. Maybe next year I'll have a friend to go along with it, and it'll work better.

The last group of Pez is this one:

What better group to put up at Halloween could there be than the Mystery Gang. Next to them is a werewolf figure that I picked up this year. It's from a video game that I don't think I ever played called Altered Beast. I bought it just because it's a werewolf, not because of any appreciation of the game it comes from. I considered getting a few of them, and giving them custom paint jobs so that there could be a whole pack, but I didn't go that far.

Okay, now, we move on.

About ten years ago, my friend gave me this zombie viking statue for my birthday. He got himself the Green Bay Packers version of it and liked it enough to get another for me. It stays up all year round, though it may get supplanted soon. I'm full up on the space, so soon, whenever I get new stuff, I'll have to take old stuff off. Then this guy will go in the box and only come out for Halloween. I gotta be careful, though. He's kind of fragile.

Next is my Knight of Asperity.

That skeleton faced guy is a Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. figure. I was really into these guys for a while, and considered buying tons of them. However, I only ever picked up this single one. It's really cool, and I love it. Also, the bad guy from my book The Gauntlet is based off the look of this guy. Fun, right? Hopefully, this year, I'll get that published so that you can read it if you'd like (he says, knowing that no one will).

Next is Carrot Chomper.

This is an Imaginext guy. They had these Imaginext blind bag figures for sale at the local grocery store by my house, and for a while, Little and I had a good time collecting them. Little was the one who gave him the name Carrot Chomper. I guess seeing all the teeth on the skull face made him think of chomping down on carrots, hence the name.

But wait, there's more. Here's another Imaginext guy names Pumpkin Stealer.

He's a ghost pirate with a pumpkin on his head. You can take the pumpkin off, and he has a translucent green face underneath. Altogether a pretty fun character. Not sure if Pumpkin Stealer is the best name for him, but it's hard to convince a three-year-old to pick something different, so I just let it stand.

Pumpking Stealer has another one of the plastic jack o'lanterns there beside him. It has a light in it, but I don't think the thing has worked for years.

Now, the final Imaginext guy...who doesn't have a name.

This grim reaper came out years later than the other two, and by that time, Little was old enough that he didn't care to bother giving it a name. He does have the cool feature like the old jawa figures from Star Wars back in the nineties. He has that spot on top of his head, and if light shines into it, it makes his eyes glow.

After that, we have the bone spider.

Yes, spiders don't have bones. They're arachnids, and have exoskeletons. That didn't stop people from making creepy Halloween decorations depicting bone spiders. I complained about this once on a blog post many years ago, and Rish thought it would be fun to mess with me, get one of those spiders, and even give it a custom paint job for me before sending it out.

Ever since then, I hang it on my books every Halloween. It's silly, but fun too, I guess.

Now, to the pièce de résistance. Years ago, not long after getting into the Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. figures mentioned above, I discovered Mythic Legions. They were these really well-made, detailed and beautiful figures set in their own little fantasy realm. They were super expensive to buy second-hand on eBay, but if you paid attention and waited for one of their waves to launch, you could buy the figures for a normal price.

Well, one day, they had a special sale of their All-Star figures, the most popular ones, and I was paying attention, so I grabbed some. Particularly, I grabbed skeletons, a demon, and a vampire knight. I made a graveyard for the skeletons to be rising out of, and some spooky trees to be in that graveyard.

This year, I added a couple more skeletons to the group, but I think I've probably taken it as far as I can. I don't think any more figures can fit on this shelf without making it look bad. Here it is, this year's Mythic Legions graveyard scene:

So, there it is, the 2024 decorations. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next month with a whole new exhaustive set of posts detailing my Christmas decorations. They may well be more extensive than the Halloween ones. Sorry.