Warning: the excerpt is not for the faint of heart. Allusions to serious violence and the like...

Nothing too extravagant tonight, but wanted to put in a little excerpt like Shelle's been doing. This is kinda a random scene just so that I could get to writing something (instead of doing prep work). I kinda think that the scene I just wrote (including this clip) might be the opening to the book. If so, I'll need to do that trick that some authors do - bouncing forward and backward in time through flashbacks and the like. (Think Pulp Fiction.)

*****Excerpt:

I have to get the fuck out of here.

I stand on shaky legs and stumble over to the industrial sink. I turn on the water and start to scrub the gore from my hands.  Next, I splash the icy liquid over my face to try to help me focus. As the water drains away I see that my face too must have been covered in blood.

My t-shirt is in tatters. There’s more holes than material. What little material there is, is stained dark red. Is this my blood? If it’s not, whose is it?

Once the rest of the Diablos hear about this, they will hunt me down and kill me. Slowly.

I scrub faster.

I pull off the t-shirt and go to my bag. I have another t-shirt, but it stinks to high hell. I’ve rinsed it a bunch of times, but it needs to actually be washed. Fuck it, I think as I pull it on - it’s not covered in blood.

(Edited to fix a couple of painfully obvious errors.)

A long time ago, Mark and I had a discussion about movie creation methods, and he said something that I've been thinking a lot about recently as I start to put this book together.
The basic idea was this: There are films that are written, like Gone with the Wind. They're lovingly crafted because there is a story that is crying to be told. Then there are movies that are engineered. Think of any Steven Seagal movie ever. There's a formula to be followed and at the end of the line, you have a "movie" (or in my case, a book) that should be some level of popular based on prior data.
Of course I want my book to be more Gone with the Wind and less Steven Seagal. The problem is that my personal tastes and (I think) writing skill are far more Seagal.
Hell, even as I'm starting to put the book together, the skilled writers among you may have already noticed that there's a sort of assembly happening. Here's the setting points I want to get across. Here's the character development points. Here's what I don't want the book to be.
Not one mention yet of the story's plot. No thought yet to the timeline. Well, not enough thought to put it down on paper anyway.
It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if this turned out a little more engineered than written, but I suspect a good deal of how well I will feel I did will be wrapped up in how far away from the engineered end of the spectrum I manage to get.

Going to just try writing for 1/2 hour today. Been too long, and I need to do more blogging. If I try to keep the time limited, maybe that will help get me to just do it and not procrastinate.

More Thoughts on the Patch Book

• It's the 80s. I really want to create the feel of the 80s in the book. A lot of books that I read 'hold up' really well when compared to t.v. shows. Part of the reason is that there isn't much that provides a sense of the time period. I want to fix that in my book. Reading the Jack Reacher series and the Harry Bosch series of books both have small things: more smoking of the characters, and the use of pagers, for example that denote the era the book takes place in, but even those aren't huge. They don't pull you as the reader into that time period. It's more like stage dressing. For the 80s? I'm thinking about description writing - clothes, hair styles, etc. More zeitgeist-y stuff like opinions on drug use, people slowly becoming aware of AIDs, breakdancing.
• It's Detroit. Here again, I want to give a real sense of the setting. Not just some light "it's a major metropolis" feel like SO many books do. The Dresden Files start to cover what I'm thinking. But there's a catch, and that is:
• Patch is not a rocket surgeon. It's too tempting for many first time authors to make their Mary Sue characters 'perfect'. They think of the right answers just in time. They do the right thing whenever facing a challenge. Yes, Patch originally was based (very loosely) on a teenage me, but I want him to be more compelling than that. One way I hope to do so is by making him far from perfect. He'll have many faults, starting with the simple concept of him not being a genius. No, I don't want to make him a mindless brute, but he's just not always going to put 2 and 2 together perfectly. He will be more in the "If at first you don't succeed, break shit."  mindset. Well, later in the book anyway. At first, he'll be more of a scared runaway teenager mindset. Which brings me to the idea:
• Patch is just a scared, inexperienced kid. There's a ton of YA coming of age stories out there ever since... well, since way back, but I think that the combination of the ubiquity of access to the internet and the Harry Potter books have created a boom in this particular niche. This book won't be within the genre. At least, it won't be in the genre as I currently understand it. It will be graphically violent. It will involve characters making bad choices and having to live with the consequences. It will be... rough. While most of the YA stuff I see out there wants to believe itself most of those things, my sense is that they tip the hat in that direction and then run the other way.
• Depth of character will be important. I kinda hinted at this in my previous post about this theoretical book, but I wanted to bring it up and think about it again. Whether the character is Patch, one of the villains, a random npc, Patch's motorcycle (which he will first encounter here), or the local diner, depth (and arguably breadth) of character will be important to me. I really don't want a superficial/fleeting feel to things. That seems like a clear sign of an amatuer writer. The trick (it may be obvious, but I want to get it down in black and white) will be brevity while creating that depth. I do not want to be grotesquely verbose in order to create non-superficial characters.

Thoughts on How I Want to Write It

• Write fast, revise often, and get good feedback. I'm listening to a lot of writing and self publishing podcasts. One theme that seems to come up frequently when the people being interviewed are surviving on their writing money is the way that they have removed the illusions of the 'traditional publishing world'. An example? Authors who create a series need to write fast. While I really want to avoid my first book having the "Holy crap - he clearly wrote this for NaNoWriMo!" feel, I do want to come up with a process where I could (if I love writing long form as much as I think I will) produce rapidly. This combo (fast, but good) seems to be best done by doing two things:
  • Writing consistently, and fiercely. In truth, I'm thinking of taking a bit of the NaNo mindset here by writing for an hour every day, or at least 5 days (to give myself a 'break' weekly). Maybe more, depending on how my drive holds up.
  • Reviewing / editing a lot. When I listen to these interviews, you can hear what isn't being said. The authors will gloss over things like the editing process. Or rather, how they talk about it tells me volumes.

Ok, I actually want to write more (and maybe I will later tonight) but time's up so I have to put the pen down.

As usual, I have roughly 9,873,407,654,870,923 ideas for projects running around in my head. I will sometime record voice notes for the different ideas while I'm working (it's tough to write while driving, but a voice memo...). Sometimes I even have the focus required to transfer those voice notes to written notes in Google Keep. (Side note: I LOVE me some Keep. If you like Evernote, but want something faster/simpler, I can't recommend it highly enough.)

Anyway. One of the myriad of project ideas that keeps floating to the surface (especially when listening to writing focussed podcasts) is that of writing a Patch novel. It would be a kind of 'origin story' - telling readers how he comes to be the character than many of you already are familiar with. But he's still young. He's probably in his late teens at the start of the book. By the end? He's a werewolf vigilante.

It's the 80s. With the whole DARE campaign (and others of its ilk) in high swing, drug 'pushers' become his primary source of income.

With that basic structure in your mind, I've been working on a list of things that I would like to incorporate into the story. These aren't plot points, or story arc, or... well, they're just elements that I think would help to make my story stand out. In  most cases because I haven't seen these elements anywhere else.

• Patch won't know he's a werewolf. This is usually an element (in most of the wereworf stories I've read anyway) that is glossed over. The character will say something like "I keep waking up with blood on my mouth the morning after the full moon. Holy shit! I'm a werewolf!". Except here's the thing: If that was to happen 'in the real world'? There's no way you would assume you're a werewolf. Werewolves don't exist. You would come up with a large number of (perhaps even more terrifying) reasons, but you would not think you were a werewolf. I kinda love torturing Patch, and this is likely to be a good source of material for that.
• The audience won't be able to say for certain if Patch is a werewolf or not. If I write it correctly, Patch will come up with reasonable enough explanations for things, or there will be enough 'evidence' that maybe he's just really fucking nuts. Well, he is, but maybe that's all that he is. Maybe.
• Patch won't know what he's doing. He's a kid. He'll be up against some very bad human beings. Things won't go well. He'll make a LOT of mistakes. Again - most stories I read, there's a training montage, and suddenly our hero is bullet proof. Ummm... no.
• The villains won't be 2D. This is one which I have seen done well elsewhere, but it's important to me. Mostly because I've never accomplished it properly elsewhere. I've always written about Patch as an outlet for my... aggression. As such, I didn't really want to think too much when it came time to write. That tends to have meant very generic bad guys. This would be a serious effort and thus a little thought/planning is well called for. This brings me to:
• Life is not black and white, but almost entirely shades of grey; Patch, in his youth and ignorance, however, only sees black and white. Again with the idea of realism in the characters, I want to make young Patrick into the brash "I know what's right, dammit." sort that I was in my youth. He's got a lot to learn in a lot of different senses.

There are a bajillion more, but this is a start for the list. Of course now that I'm trying to think of the long list that has been in my head all day, I can only come up with 5.

I lied. Nothing from me tonight. Just got back to the hotel (at 11:30pm) and I still need to hit the gym.

Tomorrow - podcasts. Fer real.

(This was just to keep me posting. Trying folks. Falling off the horse, but...)

For any of you who don't know, my day job consists of driving a car. Lots and lots of driving.

This lead me to start listening to 1. Audio books and 2. Podcasts. Lots and lots of podcasts.

I go through a lot of them both. Audio books I burn through at an alarming rate (alarming because of costs involved in getting good quality audio books) and podcasts I 'go through' because I'll subscribe for a while, find that they annoy me in some form or another, and then I'll unsubscribe.

I've heard/read a number of my friends recently bring up  podcasts of one form or another, so I thought I would do a post to get folks talking about it. I would love to find some new casts that I'm not familiar with, and share what I've found to be good/fun/quality in my own hunt.

In case you're curious, I use Pocket Casts for Android. I download the episodes to my phone overnight using the wifi at the hotels so I'm not killing my data plan (and I don't have data in Canada anyway).

Friends

These are podcasts which friends of mine are actively working on/in.

•  Elvis, And - Some of you may already be aware of this one. Kevin Reagan is working on it, and Hot Breakfast! has contributed their musical skillz. Premise: short improvved 'stories' based on details left by friends of the King. Likes: I love me some improv. The fact that I have friends that are really good at it provides me with a great deal of happiness. I love that this is a new (to me at least) idea/format for telling improv stories. Dislikes: It's hard to say if I'll have any actual dislikes for this show in the end because they're just starting out. I'll keep you posted. Note: some of the dialogue in this can be very NSFW. You have been warned.
• Totally Beverages and Sometimes Hotsauce (TBASH) - My buddy Josh (aka JoJo or Intern Josh on the show) turned me on to this. Kinda a strange premise - a show entirely about beverages (and sometimes hotsauces) but it really actually works. Just try an episode or three. You'll see what I mean. Premise: It's a show about beverages. The hosts bring on a new guest and discuss beverage profiles, sample various drinks live (in the 'shootout' segment) and generally talk about... beverages. Are you getting the theme here? Likes: First of all, these guys are really pros. In a sea of podcasts which have the technical skill of "my buddies and me sat around a speaker phone and made a podcast!", this show has the technical skill of a more traditional radio show. Think NPR as a podcast that err... isn't NPR. If you had told me about the concept, and it wasn't cohosted by a buddy of mine, I probably would have turned my nose up at it. I'm glad that I didn't. Dislikes: I honestly don't have any. These guys make what should be a very dry subject (Ouch. Sorry.) really fun.

NPR

Yeah. They get their own category. I listen to a lot of them. I've subscribed and then unsubscribed to a bunch over time, but here's the current list. Most of these, I will assume you're familiar with (thanks to them being radio shows) but I'll jot notes for the ones I wasn't familiar with prior to the podcast. If you want to know more about any of them, lemme know.

• Freakonomics
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
• All Songs Considered - Great show most of the time. I love the very broad spectrum of music. Sometimes the do a 'life performance' recording, and I get bored with those fairly quickly.
• Snap Judgement - Storytelling with a beat. I lovelovelove the music that tends to back this show. When I first listened to it, I found the mood... over the top. Now? I crave it. It's enough to make me bounce with happiness when I hear the host come on and the music start. Highly recommended.
• Invisibilia - Another storytelling podcast (probably my favorite type) but with a focus on the hows and whys of human experience. Double thumbs up.
• Intelligence2 (squared) - A debate show about current topics. Focus on the debate, not on which side is 'right' or 'wrong'. Interesting listening.
• TED Radio Hour - Clips from the TED talks and a slightly more in depth (or at least from a slightly different angle) discussion with those who gave the talk.

Business / Entrepreneur

What can I say? I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

• Smart Passive Income - Ok. I'm going to go ahead and confess: I'm a bit of a Pat Flynn fanboy. Short version? The guy found himself out of a job, and started trying online business ideas. Once he started seeing some success, he started given what he knew back out to those who wanted to hear it. And then he kept on giving. Now he makes a ridiculously healthy living from his online businesses and posts the income statements and all his tricks and tips for the world to see. One seriously refreshingly open dude. 
• Ask Pat - Another Pat Flynn joint. Super short format where he takes one phone call question and answers it. Simple, to the point, and in typical Pat fashion - fun.
• 1 Day Business Breakthrough - Pat and his friend Chris Ducker take an emailed question / request for help from a fan, and disect that fan's business in an attempt to help them grow. Another fairly short but delightful podcast.
• Home Work -  Hosts Aaron Mahnke and Dave Caolo discuss elements of working from home (or in my case - from the road) whether you're a freelancer or just have the ability to work outside the office. This one can sometimes be a bit 'goofy', but it's always good hearted, often helpful, and I like the show.
• Social Media Marketing - Michael Stelzner hosts this show on - you guessed it - social media marketing. Overall a good show, but it sometimes seems like the show is primarilly there to market his live events. That's not to say that the show isn't useful / helpful.
• Social Good - A 1/month show about using the power of your business to help out the less fortunate. I wish this show got more love / support and was able to produce more episodes.
• Internet Business Mastery - Heard about these guys via Pat Flynn. Enjoy the show, and I have to say that aside from Pat, they're the only folks I've ever considered buying from. And I'm pretty sure I will.
• Startup - Familiar with Alex Blumberg from NPR? Well, he's gone off to create a new company - Gimlet Media - and is producing a whole slew of new shows. Startup is a show about startups - including Gimlet Media. Season One was all about how they created the foundation for Gimlet. This one is a seriously high recommendation. (Especially if you like the NPR format for shows.)
• Freedom Fast Lane - I enjoy this one, but as he's talking about investment real estate (among many other topics) I sometimes get the feeling that he's working with folks on a level that I won't be for... a looong time (if ever).
• Confessions of a Pink Haired Marketer - Pretty much what it says.
• Nomad Together - A show I just subscribed to about families living a location independant lifestyle. Don't worry - I'm still not planning on a family anywhere in my future, but I figured the information (or most of it) will likely be useful to me too.
• The Tim Ferriss Show - The author of The Four Hour Work Week (among others) hosts a show where he interviews 'top performers' and attempts to break down their process / methods and determine what makes them so good at what they do. Everyone from Hollywood stars to athletes to business folks. Great concept, interesting show, and somehow I'm not always thrilled enough to listen to the whole thing. Pretty sure that's my ADHD talking.

You know something? There's a LOT more for me to go through and it's getting late, so I'm going to call it a night. I'll try to do a post tomorrow with the rest.

In the meantime, feel free to let me know what podcasts you're listening to and why. I'm always looking for more...

I swear to you I'm not just going to post links to my blog here. I'm just reaaally focused on spending my time adventuring right now, so what little writing I'm doing...

There will be normal stuff here soon enough. For now, check out the latest post over on ROITS...

A breakdown of the trip thus far...

Friday February 6th, 2015

Left northern Florida (JAX) via Southwest. Stopped in DEN and then on to LAX where I was met by my buddy Jason who swept me off to his place to crash. The slight headcold / congestion did very little to dampen the experience.

The Denver stop was a bit of a tease. I have some really great people in Denver and I've been wanting to go for a visit for some time now. So being in their city and not able to visit was a touch frustrating. I, of course, find this to be one of those scenarios where "If that's my biggest problem in life..."

Saturday February 7th, 2015

I had breakfast with Jason and his family at a place called Country Deli in Chatsworth CA. Delightful family place which serves a yummy sausage breakfast burrito. After breakfast we visited local fish/reptile shop because they were looking for some things to fix their aquarium.

Post pet store, I had a planning session with Mark via Google Hangouts in order to go over some of our plans for the first adventure one I'm in the country. First up? Tropical jungle camping/hiking on one of the southern islands of Japan - Iriomote.

Chilled out with Jason and his son while his wife and daughter were off having some girls only chill time. Then the boys made their way to a swanky steak house for a really satisfying meal.

Funny side note: I'm planning on using Japan as a jumping off point to improve my diet. Content of my diet, sure, but the primary focus is portion control. To that end, I was proud of myself for ordering 'only' the six ounce steak. Of course, the the portions on everything else about the meal were so ginormous as to render my herculean effort null and void. C'est la vie.

At the end of the night, Jason and I watched John Wick starring Keanu Reeves. Stop laughing - it was surprisingly entertaining. (And not in a "I can't believe how awful this is..." sense.)

Sunday February 9th, 2015

Woke up fairly early and reduced / repacked my bags in order to get rid of some of the 'excess' that I had collected. Yes, I felt like I had too much stuff with my two bags loaded.

I explained to one adorable little girl and her very awesome brother that "That Boy" would come back soon.

Jason and I made our way to brunch with some dear old friends (Patty and Mike) at a place called Pann's just outside LAX. Patty and Mike are great human beings. They scratch a very specific itch I have for chatting with crazy creative people who also have more than enough brains to support that creativity. While I'm really blessed with so many folks of that particular mix in my life, Patty and Mike have a different flavor to their creativity that I feel like my life would be greatly reduced without. A chance to hang out with them is something I will never pass on. I also got to  consume one seriously yum Louisiana Omellette. 

Once Jason dropped me off at the airport, my check in went easy on a ridiculous scale. My only objection there was the fact that they forced me to check my backpack because it was a couple kilograms over the weight limit. Not the end of the world, certainly, but I work really hard to keep it to carry on only, so this frustrated me. On the plus side, the woman who checked me in and made the request couldn't have been more gracious. I suspect that's a taste of things to come, and frankly, I'm looking forward to that.

My take off was a different story altogether. My flight was originally scheduled to leave at 2:20pm. Due to some technical issues with one of the engines, and the need to replace some component therein, we didn't actually take off until 6:30pm. End of the world? Far from it. It was  a little bit stressful, but mostly from the fact that my brain wouldn't let go of the idea that "there's something wrong with one of the engines". Still - they fixed the part, the staff was gracious and responsive, and eventually we were on our way.

A side note about the staff of Singapore Air flight SQ011 - I don't know if I simply 'lucked out' or if they have some sort of attractiveness requirement for their staff, but pretty much every crew member on this flight is of model level attractiveness. The men are handsome and the women are beautiful on a 'my chest aches just looking at this human' level. None of this really matters for anything, but as it's a first in my air travel experiences, I thought it noteworthy.

More soon from this Aimless Drifter...

Small post for today. I'm electing to go to the gym now rather than write for multiple reasons. The main being that I can feel the bare tickle at the back of my throat that I always get just before a throat cold/thing. This is something I DO NOT WANT as I prep for Japan. So? Time to beat up my body in a good way and get to bed early.

That said, I didn't want to not post anything, so here's a mini update:

Got a good day's work in. The boss will be happy. Found a new issue with the system that I need to report, though I think it might be an oddity for just my car. (Storage drives not showing newly added sessions despite having recorded them. Rebooting the laptop resolves this. Happened twice. Tested twice. Resolved twice.)

Throat thing. Fraaaaack!

I listen to a crap-ton of podcasts. A large number of them are 'self help-y' enough that I'm embarassed for folks to learn of them. (Though obviously not that embarassed if I'm going to mention them here.) One of those is Michael Hyatt's "This Is Your Life" podcast. While I don't mean to badmouth the man, it's not really my bag. He's a religious dude (I'm not). He's high up the proverbial 'ladder' (I'm not). And he tends to look at things from a vantage point that I don't.

But every once in a while... Like today. Since I took some time away from podcasts (and was listening to audio books only) I have some catching up to do. Today's episode was Season 3 Episode 1: How You Can Better Control Your Time. Given my recent frame of mind / planning efforts, this is an episode I'm likely to listen to more than once. The big thing I took away from the first round: Creating an 'ideal week' in Google Calendar (since I use that anyway) to use in my planning/scheduling of things. Seemed like a Really Good Idea.

There's probably more that I should write here, but I really do need to get my ass into the gym so I'll queue this up and come back to it if there's time.

* * * * *

Back from the gym. 1/2 hour on the hard setting on the elliptical. 60 x 20lb reclined butterflies. 30 x ... curls? (It's a cross chest curl thing that I created.) 30 seconds (in 10 second chunks) of isometric arm extensions with 20 lbs.

Not quite as "Rar!" as I was with Sunday's workout, but good. Now? Shower.

All the things.

All of them dammit.

Looks like I'm getting a jump start on the whole "Write a Crap-Ton in February" thing some of us are doing with L. M. Lopez. 

I want to accomplish a lot. Not just with the writing. With life. When I look back over my lifetime, (yeah - pull up a chair - it's like that) I see a lot of wasted time. I'm not here to make excuses or anything, I just want to fix it. I like to think of myself as a problem solver, and not a 'problem talker abouter'. Sure, I appreciate some good planning, but...

Anyway. I think that I've figured out the reason. Call it ADHD, call it ping-ponging, or call it whatever you like - I don't finish things. All my life I get really excited about some new project or some creative concept, I start it, and then a few things happen:

1. I get bored with it. Really bored with it. And I drop it.

2. I think of some other new project/concept, get really excited about that thing, and drop the current thing.

3. I tell everyone about what I'm planning on doing, feel like I've done it, and say "Ahhh - eff it." and drop it.

Before you say anything - I know that I'm not alone here. The world is chocked full of peanuts. Errr... of people who do the same thing. (Peanuts just goes with 'chocked full'. I had to.)

But that's just it - it's long past time I do something more. It's time I started to accomplish some things. This has been a large part of the end of my last two serious relationships, and each time it... built in intensity. I've made steps since then, but not enough progress for my liking.

I need to keep myself on track. It's way too easy to fall to the side or be distracted by some new shiny thing.

Okay, okay. Shut up already and tell us what you plan to do about it.

You may not have actually said it, but you were thinking it.

So here's the deal: I'm going to re-focus myself. At first, my intent is to do this three times every day. Those times will not be specific hours in the day, but after specific events:

1. First thing in the morning. Before I head out to work every day, I will review my list. Then I will meditate. (Duration TBD.)

2. When I get back to my hotel room, I will review my list. 

3. Just before bed, I will review my list.

So what's on my list?

That's actually what I'm here to discuss. I'm looking for broad categories to put things under.

The format that I'm currently picturing is this: Separate sheets in a spreadsheet. Physical Health, Financial Health, Creativity, and Work/Career. Something like that. Then on those sheets I can do the breakdown of tasks and goals. The details aren't too important for the purposes of this conversation though. I just need to work out the basic 'infrastructure'.

Simplicity is key, of course. I want this to be about doing things, not spending time working on the spreadsheet. I do, however, want to be smart about this start.

So what do you think? Have I covered all the 'primary categories' with Physical Health, Financial Health, Creativity, and Work/Career? If not, what do you feel I'm missing?​