What's Happening These Days?

I've been pretty bogged down recently and unfortunately I've ignored my blog. It wasn't intentional, I just realized today that it was the middle of September. For some reason the NFL season kicking off wasn't tipping me off that time was flying way too fast. Let me share with you what I've been involved in lately. I filed the paperwork to create my own publishing company. No, it's not just so I can look legit when I publish through this company. The company contracts professional editors and artists, and I've got one other writer signed up to publish with me. So, long story short, I've been swamped with learning all the accounting and little details for running a business by myself. It's a little overwhelming, but I'm starting to get everything into a rhythm and create a schedule that will work to help other writers I know that don't have the connections to get professional assistance with their novels and get published. I don't have big dreams of taking on New York, but someday, this will be my full time job. Hopefully not after I retire from the day job.

Pic by Debra Kristi on WANA Commons

The thing that I need to squeeze into my schedule now is the blog. I have no intention of letting go of this blog. There aren't a lot of comments, but the number of hits is pretty mind blowing considering I'm just babbling my little thoughts about weapons most of the time. I appreciate the number of people who repeatedly return and read the weapons and warriors posts and those who haven't given up on that fanfic piece that will soon be squeezed into my schedule as well. Life feels like I'm carry a fridge up a long stairwell right now, but that's the kind of living that makes us stronger.

You might wonder why I'm so determined to write a piece of silly fanfic in the middle of all this publishing business management, holding down a daytime office job that has nothing to do with writing, and writing my own novels. It's simple. It's discipline and training. If I am going to be a professional published author, then I need to learn to write faster than I have been. I believe that forcing myself to maintain all of this other stuff as well as write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November will enhance my ability to write faster. I spent the last two years reevaluating and relearning my 20+ years of writing experience. Now it's time to enhance my speed. I need these new writing skills to became instinct and less of a thought process.

I'll be back this month with a new weapons post. I'm aiming it at the 27th. The rest of the month is dedicated to work on the new publishing company, which I'm filing a trademark on the title and logo and once that has completed, I'll announce the name here. It's an exciting time for me, and I can't wait to share everything with my readers. This weekend I'm preparing a blog that talks about some celebrity heroes of mine. I should have that up sometime soon.

I have finalized the outline for Terminator: Back to the Future. I never got any response from HISHE on using their amazing video, so I'm going to fill in the blanks for my second outline. That version took the concept but did not use the specifics in the video, which made it a lot more flexible for me and will be easier to write. I will also no longer reference their video, since I'm not sure they are interested in any publicity from my story. If I do happen to hear from them before I finalize the story, then I might consider including the exact scenes in their videos, but at this time I need to begin preparing for Nanawrimo, and I can't wait on them any longer.

See you soon.

Back to the Terminator

Marty McFly, (not the main hero  this time)

I have made progress! I’ve completed two outlines for this story. This summer, I will spend some time fleshing out more details on those outlines, when I’m not writing on other things. In September I’ll finalize an outline. Why two outlines? Well, the video that inspired this project is copyrighted and I have not heard back from HISHE on whether or not I can use their quotes. I’m really hoping they don’t mind. At worst, they’ll get free advertising because I can link their website from my story. This will be offered free as well, so I won’t be making any money off this project at all.

The second outline is in case they never respond to me, or tell me I can’t use their property. The stories are similar but the quotes and scenes that are in the video by HISHE are altered or removed. This whole project is purely for fun. It’s just something to improve my writing and storytelling. So it won’t matter if HISHE approves, fan-fic is not illegal and I will write a "Terminator" and "Back to the Future" mash-up. Don’t you worry.

Terminator: Back to the Fan Fiction

It’s been a year and still there is no real progress on this awesome Fan Fiction idea. I started plotting out a story to match the video and was eventually overwhelmed by the complexity of my story and then by other projects throughout the year.

This is still a project I really want to write up, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. So I decided this year, I will set goals for it, like I am doing for all my other projects. I spent the second half of 2012 rewiring my writing brain to work more strategically and still retain my creativity. Most of that will probably rarely reflect in my blog posts, outside of the Weapons & Warriors posts,  because I usually just ramble a lot.

I skipped Nanowrimo (National November Writing Month) in 2012 because I was neck deep in edits for Devil Dog and Welcome to My Imagination, I still am. I spent a lot of 2012 in the editing phase because I was learning new techniques for writing to help me complete a book without having to rewrite it ten times. While I’m mastering these new techniques I am going to use them to set up a schedule to write out the Terminator vs. Back to the Future story.

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.

Terminator and Back to the Future

I saw this the other day and I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I almost immediately wanted to make this into a real full length movie. It would be epic. Instead, since I’m a writer and not Steven Spielberg, I decided to write a fan-fiction piece. It will be a few months out since I’m trying to figure out how to organize my ideas for it and set them up so they aren’t too long for the blog posts. I already have a theme and a list of several concepts. Now that I’ve gotten that far, I’ll begin plotting out a storyline, just as I would any of my novels. In my spare time when I’m not in the mood to read and I’m stuck on something, I’ll start piecing together the story of how John Connor wants to kill Doc Brown and so on when I can.

The fun part will be mixing the stories together. Since the video mashes up parts of the movies, I’m going to pretty much do the same. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I want it to pretty much follow a time stream that will make sense. Time travel stories get complicated. Every time you do something in the past, you must figure out how it affects the future. Since this might turn out a little campy, I may blow by some minor details and just let the cards lay way they are. “Great Scott!”

Looks like I have to rewatch some movies. I also want to incorporate every scene of this video because I think these scenes would be absolutely hilarious.

Obviously, this is not going to be a priority because I’m juggling three full length novels already, but keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to write this video into a novel eventually. I’ll make it a weekly update, where I actually post what I’ve written for your enjoyment and critiques. It’ll be good practice for me and hopefully entertaining to you. Once it’s complete, I’m going to throw it all into a PDF and put it somewhere for free downloads.

Now, I need to get back to writing, but I couldn’t wait to share this idea. I’m going to make like a tree and get out of here.