Well, I suppose one benefit to the issues I’ve recently had with my website is that it gave me a good reason to do a much-needed refresh on the whole thing.  Yes, it was a giant pain to have to deal with all of that at this time of year — there are, unsurprisingly, more than a few demands on my time right now — I managed to get the bulk of the changes finished, with only a few things left to fix.  You’ll have to excuse a couple of dead links and some missing info for the time being. I expected to be doing this in January, so some of the content hasn’t been written yet.

NaNoWriMo 2016

After skipping the 2015 event, I registered for my 3rd NaNoWriMo this year.  The reason I skipped last year is that my spouse Crazy and I had only recently combined households, which included her 10-year-old daughter, Lil Crazy.  This is my very first experience living with a kid, so for 2015, my concentration was absolutely not where it needed to be to tackle NaNo  😉

However, we are all sufficiently settled that I felt comfortable taking on the challenge in 2016.  As I mentioned in my Surviving NaNoWriMo article, Crazy is an incredibly supportive spouse and she did everything she could to help me reach my goal again.

This time, the plan was a little different than prior years.  In 2014 I started a project I called Out of the Black, which was a sequel to my 2013 NaNo project, Radko’s War (more on that later).  Though I surpassed the 50,000 word milestone with Out of the Black, the story was far from complete, so for 2016, I decided that rather than starting a brand new project, I would continue Out of the Black.  I started a new document with a zero word count and went to work… and thanks in large part to Crazy taking over the majority of cooking duties, loading the dishwasher, and many of the tasks we usually split 50/50, I was able to win my 3rd NaNoWriMo.

As always with NaNo projects, a metric shit-ton of editing will be required before it’s even close to being ready to share — especially given that the entire project, 2014 and 2016 combined, sits at over 120,000 words.  But I’ve very excited to get on with editing and rewrites.  It was a ton of fun to write and I’m really pleased with the way things have developed for Radko and his associates.

Once more a huge thank you to Crazy for being so wonderfully supportive.

2017, here we come…

How the hell are we already on the cusp of 2017?  Time certainly does fly — in fact, as I write this on December 19th, I turned 40 yesterday — and it doesn’t seem all that long ago that I wrote the first outline of the story that would eventually be titled Radko’s War.  It doesn’t seem all that long ago, but it was actually 2004.  The idea would sit in a filing cabinet, occasionally floating through my mind, for another nine years until 2013, when I registered for my first ever NaNoWriMo.  Thirty days later, I had a first draft.  A lot changed about the story from that first outline, including a gender-swap of the two main characters, but I had a story I loved and I had — by some miracle — written an entire first draft in a month.  I feel I should point out here that I am usually a very slow writer.  Or at least I used to be; NaNo cured me of that.

And now here we are, three years later.  Three years spent adding to, taking from, revising, rewriting, editing, getting feedback, making changes based on feedback… and having more than one glass of Scotch because of this weird, painful and beautiful journey that has brought me here.

The edge of 2017.

About to have a goddamned book published.

Radko’s War, my science fiction story about overcoming prejudice to save humanity from extinction, is being published in 2017.  At times it seems like I’ve been working on this forever and at times it seems like I only just began, but here’s us, at the raggedy edge.  There’s still work to be done — I still have to approve an author proof — but goddamn.  We’re almost there.

So watch this space for more announcements.  I will be sure to let you know when it’s available for you to order your ten copies.

But for now, here’s a big reveal: the final cover design for Radko’s War!

Now I need to get back to work.

– DW