Barreling Toward Me

Hurricane Beryl came in from the Atlantic and shot straight across the Caribbean Sea, messing up several of the southern islands all the way down near Venezuela before moving a little north and thumping Jamaica. The projected track for the storm was for it to continue going west across Mexico and maybe even as low as Guatemala. 

Beryl had other plans, though. She wanted to show us just how little we can actually rely on weather forecasters, I think. She took a hard right turn, and skimmed her way up the coast of Mexico. Originally, it looked like the southernmost regions of Texas might get a little bit of Beryl's outer band moisture. All of a sudden, it looked like Beryl would be coming aground in Corpus Christi. That was close enough that it might inconvenience us all the way up here in Houston.

This morning, I woke up and came out to the living room, and my wife announced that Beryl had continued her drift, and now it was probably coming aground in Matagorda County. Guess what viewing area that county falls in. That's right, Houston. It was all the way up to us now. 

Matagorda County is way over on the west side, and it's not that strong of a storm right now. It was a category five when it hit the Grenadines, but it's not even a hurricane anymore while I type these words. It is expected to be a category 1 hurricane when it hits, which is the weakest it can be and still be called a hurricane. 

It probably won't be anything catastrophic, but it is catastrophic for my weekend.

I got a text from my boss this morning. We're switching to Hurricane coverage mode, and it was requested that I come in Sunday by 8:00 PM to back up the other editor there, and hold the fort down until 2:00 AM. 

The nice thing is that it'll be overtime. I'll get some extra cash for the effort. However, I'll probably have to stay the night at the station. 2:00 AM is right about when the storm will be hitting Houston the hardest. It probably won't be safe to drive home, so I'll be camping out at the station again.

I'm kind of annoyed for some reason. I guess it's because this stupid storm is supposed to be in Guatemala not way the heck up here. Leave me alone, Beryl. I wanted to have a nice weekend, dang it.

Red Rising

The most recent book that I finished was Pierce Brown's Red Rising.

I gave it a shot because I heard Gino Moretto talk about one of the books in the series on Facebook. He was really positive about the book, so I looked it up. It sounded like the kind of annoying dystopia that we have been drowning in for the last fifteen years or so. The premise sounded very much like Divergent by Veronica Roth, and I hated that book. I was reading it to my kids, and I couldn't manage to get through it even for them. They all got tired of waiting for me to read the next chapter and finally just took the book and read the ending themselves. However, Gino had recommended it, so I figured I could give it a shot anyway.

Every time it got formulaic I cursed and swore. To me, it felt like a big amalgamation of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and...yes...Divergent. There's something I can't stand about goofy future worlds where everyone is categorized on arbitrary lines.  Like in Divergent where all the brave people were in one faction and all the smart people were in another, etc. As I learned about people being categorized by what they are and what they do by a bunch of goofy color codes, I groaned and groaned. 

Our hero is the lowest of the low, a red, but then he gets a bunch of surgeries so that he becomes a gold and gets to go to the school for witchcraft and wizardry...or the child genius battle school, I guess you decide what comparison is more apt. I have to admit that I screamed in annoyance when they did their own version of the sorting hat and put all the kids into houses based on their personality traits. Ugh. The school isn't really a school, but rather a place where people carry out war games, and tons and tons of people are killed even though they say you're not really supposed to kill people. 

Once you get over the general cheesiness of the premise, however, the story itself is pretty good. I liked how it twisted and turned and then eventually was taken to another, much higher level than expected, although it seriously undermined the previous bad guy. They had a weird bit at the end where they wanted you to be afraid of an imminent betrayal, but then just swept it away like it was nothing and no, the book is over. Ha ha ha, jolly good fun. That was strange and left me feeling unsatisfied.

The second biggest failing of the book, aside from the derivative feel of the whole thing, was that it was written in present tense. That got annoying pretty quick. It was like listening to some douchebag telling a story about how he beat somebody up..."So, I walk up to this dude, and say, 'You better step off, sucka,' and he gets all puffed up and says, 'What are you gonna do about it?'"...but for a whole 19 hours. Who wants to listen to that? People, I know you think it's neat and makes your book stand out if you write in present tense instead of past tense or in second person instead of first or third, but it just makes your shit annoying. Don't do it.

All in all, though, again, once you get used to the setting and stop rebelling against it, the story is not too bad. I enjoyed it in the end. I actually got to the point where I really wanted to listen to the rest of it, so that's something that I haven't felt in a while. That was nice. So, I guess I still have to recommend it. I may actually go ahead and read the next book in the series as well. So, I guess watch for that review, though it'll probably be a while.

I just checked out Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher because Rish Outfield recommended her stuff. 

So, we'll see if I can like two for two on the friend recommendations. I do hope it will appeal to me more than Red Rising, but we'll see.

Anklecast 68 - Queen Bea Now Available For All

The new episode of The Anklecast is now available for all.

Monty and his friends have always had a lot of fun out in the woods playing near the clubhouse they built, but one day, things change substantially when Bea asks them to catch a butterfly, but they get something else instead...

Afterward, Rish and I talk about framing devices, romanticizing a certain time period, and...how to use a phone while time traveling?

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

You can listen to the episode now on The Anklecast feed or you can right click HERE to download the show. Then again, you could also just take the easy way out and click the play button below and listen right here and right now!

 

Finally Complete

I hinted that this day was coming soon a few weeks ago when I did my post about getting Wilykit. The final member of my Thundercats crew was arriving at BigBadToyStore imminently. In fact, it arrived about a day after I shipped the other one. If I'd known, I could have waited, had them shipped together, and saved a few bucks on shipping. Not to be, though. I suppose that these figures were so much more expensive than they should have been all along that they might as well have gouged me one last time on my way out the door, right?

So, Wilykat arrived and the Thundercats are complete!

I have to admit that other than the fact that I finally have the whole team, I'm not all that excited. Wilykit and Wilykat were my least favorite characters. I think they were supposed to be popular, because they are young, and kids should put themselves in their place, but I never did that. I always wanted to be Lion-O not any Thunderkitten.

It's a pretty nice figure, at least.

It also came with the air surfboard thing like Wilykit. I still can't use it, because I still have too little space on my shelf to display these two on their boards. Maybe if I change up the spot they occupy, but for now, nope.

It also comes with a ton of other stuff...many hands, an extra head, a lasso, etcetera.

I wonder if I'm the only adult collector who wishes that it came with less stuff. Of course, I only want it to come with less if it then costs less. These figures were too expensive. They marketed them as Ultimates. They're supposed to come with so much stuff that you just can't believe it. They mined the cartoons looking for accessories they could give the characters. I don't care, though. I would be happy with just the character and one weapon...and a much cheaper price.

They look pretty good all together on the shelf, though. It's exciting to finally, after years, have the whole crew.

The best part is that I don't have to pay another dime for another overpriced figure to complete the group. I've got them all and I can be done with Super7 Ultimates.

Happy Fourth Of July

Okay, I showed off my flag for Canada Day a few days ago, so I have to do at least as much for Independence Day.

Here's my flags as they are these days, with both the national and state flag. And, this is the Big Anklevich blog post for Independence Day, so there has to be some shots of my toys too. Here's a few of the best pictures to celebrate the holiday with.

Happy Fourth!

June In The Books

It almost feels as though this monthly roundup isn't necessary after posting my writing total every day for most of the month leading up to my eventual eclipsing of my goal for the year as well as posting my audiobook progress every day until I made it to the end of that goal as well. I guess I still should, though. The month kept going after that. Let’s see, here’s the yearly total so far:

So, that’s where my totals stand now, and, as I said at the start and in my blog post from earlier this month, I surpassed my goal of 304,475 words for the year. That makes this officially my best year ever as a writer…at least word count-wise.

I kept going after I hit my goal, of course, and here is what my total sits at with June’s final tally included:

So, I’m another 10,000 words beyond my goal. Something pretty crazy is that I went through and added up just the words that I wrote this year, excluding the words from October, November, and December of last year, and I hit almost exactly 250,000 words. If I wrote 205,000 words in the first half of 2024, I could conceivably get 500,000 for the year. 

I’m tempted to start working toward that goal right now…except that I don’t want to. I am a little bit burned out, to tell you the truth. For the last while it has been difficult to even hit my goal from day to day.  If you look at June a little closer, you’ll see that I missed the mark on three separate occasions.

The second time it happened was mostly because things were out of my control. It was a hugely busy day, and I just didn’t have time to finish what I was doing. In fact, I ended the day’s writing in the middle of a sentence, because I was interrupted and never was able to go back and finish up. However, the other two days that I fell short were because I just plain wasn’t feeling it. Not that I wasn’t feeling very into the story I was working on, but that I was just not feeling like writing.

I may have overdone it a little or something. I may need to start scheduling some time off or something. People take vacations from work. They give themselves a break so that they can return and get back into things with renewed vigor, maybe I need to do that as well. I do this every single day. I don’t even give myself a weekend. Is that necessary? I don’t know if it is.

I have to admit that I am very worried that if I give myself a break, I’m afraid that I’ll go back to my old habits of doing absolutely nothing. I’ve done it before, so I could see myself doing it again. But I might do it anyway if I don’t give myself a break. One day I may just spit out a bunch of curse words and quit, turning my back on the whole effort.

I guess that’s something that I’m going to mess around with this month. I’m not going to give myself any kind of a goal, because I may well take a bit of a vacation from writing for a time. I haven't decided for sure what that will be, but it’s okay…after all, I already passed my goal. I’ve got nothing to prove anymore.

Beyond that, I want to change the way I work up a little bit too. These past few months have been really difficult, because I felt like I wasn’t prepared for what I was writing. I hadn’t gone through and outlined my book out. I just wrote it with a very scant idea of what I wanted. Unfortunately, I think it showed. I don’t think I produced something that was very worthwhile. I want to change that, which means I’ll have to change up my process, and work on putting time into outlining as well as writing.

How to do that? I don’t know. Are you a writer? What is your process? Comment below, please.

I was thinking of either taking a week or two or three off of writing on anything while I spend my normal writing time planning out and outlining the books…or I could lower my word count and spend half of my time outlining the next project while writing on the current one. Something like that, anyway. I’m going to try something out this month.

Presently, I’m writing a story about a haunted car thanks to a push from Rish Outfield. He may write his own version of the same tale. It could be another one of our Broken Mirror stories. Someday, we ought to publish a collection that includes a bunch of those stories together or something. Would such a thing interest you? Comment below, please.

Anyway, moving on to my other goal for the month. I’d fallen a little short on my efforts to finish half of the remainder of the audiobook for A Battalion of Ideas] in May. So, I scaled back my goals and made finishing the audiobook my only other goal. I pushed forward with the recording, slamming it all out really quickly, then jumped on the editing. I had that crap finished by June 21st. I kicked its ass so hard that I was able to go through and write new author’s notes for all of the stories, record them, edit them, and add them to the book as well…all before the month ended.

I submitted the book for review on Saturday, and now I’m just waiting for notice that it’s available. When that happens, I’ll make a post about it. Should probably be a few days.

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

So, I guess I have no list of goals for you, because I’m not pushing for anything this month. I’m just going to do my best, take a little bit of time off, and see what I can do to figure out how to proceed with outlining future projects. I’ll let you know how it went on August 1st or so. Talk to you then.

Lion Diet Carnivore and Exercise | Finally Coming Through On My Goal | Week 57 Roundup

I promised I would stick with Lion Diet for the whole week, not just for a small portion of it. Did I manage? Did I make it? Or did the weekend come along and I fell on my face again? And would it make any difference in my slide into heaviness?

Happy Canada Day!

For all of y'all who are in Canada or have family or friends from Canada...Happy Canada Day!