And that's a part of it, I created this with the thought of it being a 'writer's' blog and that I'd post my observations about writing when the honest truth is that when I have that time to steal away to write I'm far more likely to work on whatever story I'm trying to pin down to the figurative paper of my Word program. Therefore, this is my 'writer's' blog but I'm going to be a bit more loose in what I put here.
Now, an update on what I am currently working on:
Gabriel will hopefully be in paper print by the end of the year. The main thing I need to work on is formatting things and making sure it lays out the way I'd like. I may possibly rehash the cover, however, I find myself overly fond of my only mildly touched by photoshop drawing I did for the original Kindle release so it may keep its cover the same. I am my own editor, so I can't promise perfection but I'm also hoping to fix what mistakes I find during a second look over. I will keep you up to date for when it is available in paper form, and my plans are currently to go through CreateSpace for this step.
I am working on the first book of my Providence series still, and it has gone through many re-workings and restarts. The main chunk of the story is all down on paper, but as I discover little things that need to be fixed in the world and that will need to be changed so that later on within the series things flow correctly I find I have to retype large sections and thus the basic rewrites. I have finally reached that point though where all my little details are figured out, and so I have started work on my final draft of the story. As soon as that is done I will jump into the full editing, attempt to rein a friend into helping with a little editing if I find one willing enough, and once that point is reached I can give a better idea of when it shall be released. I will likely follow my path which I took with Gabriel and release it first on the Kindle before moving onto paper print.
A life update:
What have I been doing the last several months? Well, this summer I took a class as I was taking this fall semester off from school. The class and the short 8 week schedule we were expected to learn all the same things most would in 16 weeks kicked my ass a little, but I managed to pull the class off with a B.
This fall semester off hasn't been quite as relaxing as I'd hoped due to work stuff with the day job. It seems to have calmed down some for now so hopefully the next couple of months before classes start up in January will be a bit less stressful.
I went to Scotland, a long time dream of mine, and I thoroughly enjoyed it though I admit that it seemed to pass in an almost detached sort of way. I saw so many beautiful things and learned so much history of this place that I've always felt a connection with yet I felt strangely disconnected during the trip as though it wasn't really happening. I saw Culloden battlefield, took a boat tour on Loch Ness, walked through amazing castles and explored Edinburgh mainly by foot. I spent a peaceful morning at the Clava Cairns and Standing Stones and watched a trio of little old women preform a solstice ceremony in one of the circles not even realizing I had chosen the solstice as my day to visit them. I took two different ghost tours, both with extremely different approaches, and explored the underground of Edinburgh with an EMF meter and a couple who were locals. I took a book lovers tour where we were shown some of the buildings where Sir Walter Scott and Sir Arther Conan Doyle studied and lived, as well as the real coffee shop that J.K. Rowling wrote in as well as the far more publicly known coffee shop that she wrote in but didn't start out in. I climbed up far too many narrow, steep spiral staircases to get the view from up top than is really good for someone with mild claustrophobia and a dislike of heights. (I will say that they at least weren't elevators, something I hate far more than heights and tight spaces alone). It was an amazing trip yet it somehow feels like it happened years ago despite having only taken place at the end of September.
I more recently celebrated Halloween by going to the Shining Ball at the Stanley Hotel up in Estes Park, CO. It was all in one a fun yet slightly disappointing weekend, which managed to be far more eventful than my friend and I would have guessed.
The ball itself was the part we found ourselves disappointed with. Though we had fun and enjoyed seeing the different costumes they made the dance floor extremely too small for people to really dance, and put it all in the same room with the tables which were mainly too close together to dance amongst them if you couldn't find a spot up on the floor. Tickets weren't cheap ($90 with no seating, I believe it jumped to $120 if you wanted seating), and yet you still had to pay for all your drinks and if you weren't seated there was no ordering food. I had one of their specialty mixed drinks where you got to keep the collectors glass, and it was $15 and ended up tasting like High-C mixed with vodka. My friend and I managed to enjoy ourselves still, and even squeezed onto a corner of the dance floor once it got a bit later and some people had cleared out. I owned the joint when they played The Time Warp. I was dressed as a masquerade version of Loki, which I'll post a picture of below. My friend went as a Steampunk Automaton.
I was meant to have a hoop skirt on, but I had forgotten it at home unfortunately so my skirts weren't as full as they were intended. I still rather enjoyed my costume, even if I was one of two people in the entire place that got what I was meant to be.
The rest of the time we spent was the really...interesting part. Stanley Hotel is reportedly haunted, the fourth floor having a number of different ghosts including the ghost children. Room 217 was the room Steven King stayed in that help inspire The Shining. The first night after the ball my friend and I both woke to what sounded like someone pacing restlessly in our room; the floor boards were creaking incredibly loud that I finally sat up and turned the light on at which point all noises simply stopped. I had brought my digital recorder with me as well as my EMF detector so we could goof around ghost hunting. At this point I suggested that we record the rest of the night so that if the pacing sounds started again we could hear them when we listened back. What we got was a little more than floor boards creaking. In fact, we got a male voice saying something along the lines of "Curse you, couldn't get 'free'". We're undecided still on the last word, but we've managed to figure out the first four (which makes far more sense than my initial impression that he was saying "Curse you, cookies and cream). Our door also constantly rattled throughout the night as though someone was trying to open it, something it hadn't done during the times we were awake earlier in the evening.
The second night was the one that really got us though. We were both sitting on the bed listening to try and figure out what the voice had said the night before when out of no where our door opened. The door that lead out of the room and shouldn't have opened without our key from the outside or us opening it from the inside swung wide open with force, and then slowly closed itself again. I went out into the hall immediately and saw no one outside, and we had heard no one approach or leave our door within the time frame that it opened. We also tested to see if it could have been closed but not latched but found that if it hadn't latched all the way it immediately opened by just an inch or two, nothing like the full forced opening and then closing we'd seen.
We recorded that night too, and I am slowly working my way through both recordings to see if we caught anything else weird. Both of us at different points in the night experienced strange things as well, but nothing quite as dramatic as the door. I, at one point, heard my friend get up and go into the bathroom only to feel someone get back into the bed besides me and hear the sheets shuffle. I sat up and turned the light on again only to confirm I was alone and my friend was indeed in the bathroom. At a different point in the night she thought I had gotten up and gone into the bathroom only to then hear me take a breathe as I was still asleep and had never gotten up.
It was an eventful stay that had me giddy with excitement due to my interest in the paranormal and my poor dear friend perhaps a little more freaked out than she had prepared for when she agreed to come along for the weekend.
So, those are the main highlights of the last few months for me really. At this point I am planning on eating some dinner, and then sitting down to write for a while before bed. Hopefully it won't be quite so long before I update again, and I will make sure to update when good progress is made on my projects.
Until next time my darlings...
