Looking Back on 2012

The Chinese New Year is drawing to a close, and the time of the Water Dragons will soon be over on Feb 9^th. This year was the time for taking chances. The economy was struggling for many, but hording your money and trying to save isn’t going to put that back on track.

Took this pic from the boat, while passing an island of trees.

I went on that vacation out of the country, although our ship was rained out of the harbor in Canada, so I never set foot on foreign soil. I still got to see Alaska from the mountain tops and a glacier. It was beautiful and inspiring to see. Not even the pictures I took can really express the majestic beauty of those mountains coming right out of the water.

I began the work on starting that publishing company I always wanted and I’ve been helping writers as much as I can, but I never did file the paperwork to make it official. For two reasons, I was worried I’d have to pay some kind of tax after the year was up and I didn’t have anything prepared to publish to pay that tax. That, I’ll get into in a minute.

Write to the Death!

Some of you may know already, but for those who have not heard, my computer was attacked yesterday by a virus. It was a nasty one, real nasty, like the little growly ankle biter dog that gets your calf as soon as you laugh at its diminutive size and turn your back on it. The kind you want to take a shower after dealing with. Or stab yourself in the face for not backing up your work more frequently. Ok, so I don’t really want to stab myself in the face, not only would that hurt, but it would make it difficult to write with my brain pain split open. Don’t worry, my calf will heal, I have thick skin.

Long story short, I spent hours battling the virus to save all of my work, which included the Weapons Weekly blogs I had written for the next few weeks. So this week, I will be very late, if I post a Weapons Weekly at all. I did not win the battle and in the end, I killed the virus, but he took every one of my documents with him. All of the blogs will have to be rewritten and researched.

If not for having two flash drives that I stored a few things on previously, it would have been a total loss. The last thing I want to do is go back to square one on writing Devil Dog. It was 348 pages before today. The backed up copy is only 311, but that not too bad. I’ll have that fixed in no time. The biggest loss was losing all of my work on Devil Dog 2 and mostly everything on the Warlord.

Writer Ramblings: Why Should I Not Publish Traditionally?

I don’t believe I’m the next Stephen King, that’s every writers dream, but few of us can grasp the depth and complexity of Stephen King's abilities to ever compare ourselves to him and not feel ashamed. He’s a prodigy. What makes him even more awesome is that he knows this, but does not flaunt it, although he has no problems at all speaking his mind. Most often in the context of writing and writers, he’s absolutely right (Sorry Twihards).

This is not a King worshipping post. I do have a real point here. What is it? Ok, My point is, I am not Stephen King, I just aspire to be like him. I don’t want to be exactly like him. I am my own person with my own stories and none of them are like King’s stories. About the only thing I know my editor has said to me that King’s has probably said to him was, “Tone down the gore a little. Any more brain matter on a wall and it’s going to be too much to stomach.” Okay, maybe my descriptive voice was better than I had expected, in that someone would actually get sick reading about a bullet wound to the head. I got it, no problem. I aspire to make a living writing, just like Stephen King does. Writing stories and doing all the things that come with writing a book and publishing it.

Fan-Fiction Terminator vs Back to the Future

The time is drawing near. I’m still fixing some plot holes and organizing the story, but the “Terminator vs. Back to the Future” fan-fiction project is getting closer to being written. I’m going to aim for starting the first chapter this summer, so it’s still a ways out. The video that was done up by How It Should Have Ended Team is pretty much what the story is about. John Connor wants to kill Doc Emmit Brown so that the machines can never uncover and use his time traveling technology. I’ll go into more detail on the basic storyline at the end of this post.

The Year of the Water Dragon!

2012 is marked the year of the Water Dragon according to the Chinese Zodiac calendar. Are you ready for it? I know I am. This is the year for the free spirits to prosper and shine. The dragon is wise and a sign of good luck so 2012 should be a great year to take a chance and do something to improve your life. Whatever that may be, whether it’s starting a new business or career, or taking that vacation you’ve always wanted, this will be the year to do it. The New Year begins on January 23^rd and ends on February 9^th in 2013. That is how awesome the Year of the Dragon it, it’s almost 13 months!

Funny thing for me is, before I even realized this was the Year of the Dragon I had already set into motion the process to start a new publishing company to assist technologically challenged Indie writers get published and publish myself through the same company. I also have a vacation planned this summer in which I will leave the USA for the first time in my life.