One week left

Welp, I've come to this, my final week in Georgia.

I've spent a lot of time in this state, on a number of occasions, and it's a place I consider my home. I hope to move back here one day, maybe to the Athens area, I'm not sure, but that won't be for a while. No, I'll have to drink in my time here while I'm still here to do so.

In one week, I will be boarding a plane with my boon companion, Rylan Wade, and set off for a journey to the Emerald Isle of Ireland. I'm quite looking forward to the trip. Rylan and I, while best of friends for the past decade, have never been on a trip together, so I think that'll be fun (as long as Rylan doesn't get us involved in some sort of shenanigans where we wake up the next morning with a sheep in the room and no memory of how it got there...so yeah, pretty fun overall).

I just did the majority of my packing for the trip, and sort of for North Carolina as well, because if my folks don't find us a house while I'm in Eire, I'll be coming back to our temporary living quarters with whatever clothes I bring with me, plus some I'll set aside before I go.

Also coming up this week: the third episode of the Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling! (Very exciting.) There's some neat mad science in this one, although that really gets ramped up in episodes four and five. (So stay tuned!) And, before we head to Ireland, Rylan and I are going to continue our annual tradition of going to the Georgia Renaissance Festival, always a delightful experience. There's steak on a steak, magicians, jugglers, comedians, axe throwing, my getting freaked out by chickens, the pirate auction, all sorts of good stuff. Plus, this year, since we're going on the final weekend, we'll be going during Free Student weekend. (I.e. student ID = 1 free admission.)

Well, I've done my story editing today but I'm still crafting my pair of prototype decks to take to Ireland so that I can continue play-testing my card game.

Hope your day has been as good as mine (if not better,)

Colin

Whoops!

Hello hello, my internet friends,

Sorry about the belated blog post. I was in Athens yesterday helping my cousin move (and by "helping" I mean "watch as the movers bring in boxes, unload a few of them, then fall asleep on the couch for a few hours") so by the time I got home I was quite tired. Combine that with the fact that I needed to get up at 5AM this morning for work and I decided it'd be best for everyone if I just posted today.

So here we are.

Some news on the card game front: I have successfully play-tested my prototypes a few time and am pleased with the results. It feels like a real game, it's fun, and any time you get to say to someone, "Oh, well, it ended in a tie because he died after I sent my robotic flying velociraptor after him, which destroyed his armor, opening up an opportunity for me to set him on fire with my flamethrower, whose lingering damage killed him at the end of the round, but I was insane at the time, so my head exploded," is friggin' awesome in my book.

I am having some issues with the structure, whether it should play more like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon TCG, but that's the point of play-testing, to iron out those wrinkles.

In other news, I am moving to North Carolina next month. As you may or may not know, I'm living with my folks while I'm in grad school. Since my dad got a new job in North Carolina (the Raleigh area) that means I'm coming along for the ride. I'm in two minds about moving. On the one had, I have to leave behind the friends I've have here, as well as my job (my manager's really cool), and change is always a little scary. On the other hand, I've moved over a dozen times in my life. It's something I'm not thrilled about, but am used to. Plus, it'll be a new adventure! Maybe things will be even better there. Maybe my book will take off and I'll become the next J. K. Rowling.

 Who knows? (OK, maybe not, but still.) I'm optimistic overall. As someone wise once said, "You cannot change the direction the wind is blowing, but you can adjust your sails."

As Jack Sparrow said, "Bring me that horizon."

It's alive! IT'S (almost) ALIVE!

Mwuhahahaha! AHAHAHAHA!
...
Ahem. Excuse me. I've just been working so hard on all my mad scientist projects that I'm a little bit stuck in character. And yes, that's right, I did say project(s). For one thing, I'm working on getting some Professor Jack Baling merchandise ready, which is very exciting. Shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, the works. I have some of the designs already, now I'm just trying to finagle with the price so that I'm not charging upwards of $40 for a single t-shirt. I'll give more info on that when I have it.

I've also been putting a lot of time and effort into a collectible card game that's set in the same world as my novel. It's similar to Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering, in that it's played with two players, each one has a deck of cards and uses creatures and weapons to beat the snot out of each other. Unlike those games, however, there's a bit more to it than that.

First off, these are *mad* scientists, after all, so they are less than stable. As such, the rolling of a die is involved in a number of ways, adding a bit of randomness to the proceedings.

Secondly, each player has a Sanity meter which decreases whenever powerful abilities are used. Go all the way down to 0 and grow temporarily powerful. Go for more than one round in this state, however, and you lose.

Finally, there are random encounter cards that get played each turn, much like Monopoly or Life. These affect both players, positively or negatively, so be careful. What helps you might also help your opponent, and harming them can bring harm down on you.

All in all, I have quite a few plates spinning right now, but once my Automatic Plate Spinning Robot is finished, it should be smooth sailing.

Inspiration (and a plea to the scientific community)

A short entry today, friends, but I remembered to update today, so I'm happy about that.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend on the nature of inspiration. She, also a writer, explained that she gets ideas for characters all the time, but suffers from a dearth of plots. I, on the other hand, get ideas for...if not "plots" exactly, then story seeds. They can be triggered by anything. The other day I was driving to work in the early morning and was thinking about how empty the world was, especially since the area I was driving through at the exact moment in time was bordered on one side by fields and woods. "What if," I imagined, "someone was driving in a similar situation but in a more remote area, and then some great big beastie ran out in front of them and into the woods?"

Would the person stop? Would they crash? What if they made it to work safely, but couldn't help wonder about whatever it was that they saw? What if they got to the end of the day and stopped at that spot on their way home? What if they saw something to indicate that they weren't imagining it, something that made it clear the beastie wasn't normal? Etc.

That's just how my brain works. I get ideas all the time. Unfortunately, I do not get time all the time. I have as much per day as everybody else, and there's no way that I can create during all of it. I can't even focus hard enough to make the best use out of my free time. And that really sucks, because I have so many awesome ideas, but I can't work on all of them simultaneously or I'd make such little progression in each one that it'd take forever to get any individual one of them finished. So that means I have to go the opposite way and shelve them for later, make a list of projects I'm interested in, pursue each one on the list until the item in question is complete, and then move on.

But when I get an idea I'm really excited about I can create a lot of content in a short period of time. That level of excitement doesn't last for very long. The question then becomes: "Is it more efficient to take breaks from a current project to take advantage of a new one if doing so will delay completion of the current project?"

I'm not sure I have an answer, either. I tend to do what I've just described, although I haven't missed a structured deadline yet. Still, how much more work could I get done if I didn't have to sleep?

Scientists! Get working on that. Papa's got some worlds to write.

Marketing Department of One (Plus You!)

Howdy friends!

How is everyone? Good, I hope. So, I just published the second episode of my serialized novel, The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling. The new episode is titled, “Episode 2: Just Because You’re Paranoid…"

Now then, I’m running into a slight problem with this episode, namely: how to get my work out there to the people. I am self-publishing my novel through the Kindle Online Marketplace so my marketing department consists of one employee (me) and our budget is rather slender. Thus, I am relying heavily on social networking and word-of-mouth to spread the news about my story.

So if you’re reading this blog, I am asking you for help. (Please!)

First off, here are the links to episodes one and two:
Episode 1- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q3LV0W
Episode 2- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Z3SRCI

Each one is conveniently only 99 cents (less than a pack of gum or a cup of coffee, and practically nothing when compared to the price of a new car or home. Heck, hold it up next to the national deficit—currently over fifteen trillion dollars, or $15,000,000,000,000—and $.99 is essentially free. Who doesn't love nearly-free stuff?)

I do not yet have a website, but I am working on it. I do have an easily-remembered twitter feed (@colinoboyle) though, so if you don’t yet follow me, you should.

I also have a facebook page at www.facebook.com/hairdryerdeathray (I’m quite proud of the name) so give that page the ol’ thumbs up.

If you have already purchased/read either of my episodes, please leave a review on the Amazon page(s), even if it’s only a sentence or two. Those are really helpful. The more I get, the higher my chances are of popping up on someone's "if you liked this book, you should try..." bar.

Also of great help is linking to that page or this one on your own social networking sites of choice. Every “share” gets me a little bit closer to my goal of becoming a professional author.

As always, I’d like to thank you for reading and hope that you continue to do so in the future.

Thanks for reading

So my intention was to update this blog but every Tuesday. Obviously, since I am doing so today, I forgot. You have my sincerest apologies, dear readers.

Here I am today, though, ready and rearing to go!

The main reason I did not post yesterday was because I pretty much spent the whole time editing. I have Tuesdays off from work, so I woke up at 8:30, promptly set my alarm back a half hour, and went back to sleep. When I did get out of bed, it was 9 o'clock, a fine time to start my day. 

I am very much a morning person, in that I'd rather get all my difficult stuff out of the way at the beginning of the day and have time to rest and relax later on. If it's dark out, I'm pretty much useless.

On Monday evening, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine about Episode 2 (which comes out next week), discussing the its strengths and weaknesses. My biggest problem this time round seemed to be an overuse of the narrative lens. For anyone who hasn't read my first episode (and you really should, it's only 99 cents, here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q3LV0W) the story is told in the first person by the main character, Professor Jack Baling. What my friend noticed, however, was that I was overusing the "I," that is to say, rather than having Jack describe a scene like this: "A fire burned in the grate," I would say, "I saw a fire burning in the grate." See the difference? In the latter, what's happening is being filtered through Jack's perception.

True, the whole story is filtered through Jack's perception--it is first person, after all. The narrator is directly involved in the story as opposed to some distant, omniscient eye in the sky. But as an author, my main goal is to  keep a certain level of fluency in my story, a flow, a rhythm. I need my reader to be so sucked into my work, to see the picture I'm painting so vividly that they forget they're reading at all. The narrative lens can be useful on occasion, but overusing it creates a hurdle for the reader, places a barrier between them and the story, which is to be avoided.

It's funny, because reading the second draft of my story, the same one that my friend read, I got to certain sections of it where I knew that the story wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but couldn't pinpoint why. I knew that it was weak, but couldn't find the weak spots. That's where my friend comes in. She says, "Look. Right here. Fix this," and I say, "Of course! How could I have been so blind?" And I'm completely serious. (OK, maybe not completely serious, but fairly serious.) I read my own work over and over, I know what I'm trying to say, so there's this paradoxical blindness I have toward it. I know the inner lives and secret histories of my characters. My readers do not. So I need to be able to have the characters interact in such a way that who they are syncs up with how I portray them, which is difficult. But that's why we have editors, yes?

A friend of mine told me this morning that he saw a dedication in a book he was reading and thought of me. I can't remember how it goes exactly, so forgive me for paraphrasing, but it was something to the effect of, "People think that writing is a solitary pursuit, and to a certain extent, it is. The writer sits alone at his or her keyboard, and creates a story. But the story as it is first written is much different from the one that gets published. In between those two stages lies a multitude of drafts, each read by a legion of people. In regards to those who have helped me, you are too many to name, but too important to ignore."

And I agree with that. I would not be where I am, my work would not be as it is, were it not for those people who have helped me. You are the bridge between what I create and what I want to create.

Thanks for reading.

I Wonder What "Melancholy" is in Irish?

Hello there, internet. 

So I wasn't sure what I was going to talk about today, but then a friend texted me and I knew what I should write.

This June, I am going to Dublin, Ireland for grad school. One of the features of my creative writing program is that it brings its students to Ireland each June. Last year we went to Sligo, home of W. B. Yeats, and while this year we're headed to Dublin. I've been before, but even so, I am excited to be going back. The trip is going to be bittersweet as well, though. It's my last residency, you see, which means that after this June, I won't be seeing my Carlow colleagues again (at least, not through school, anyway). And these people aren't just my colleagues and fellow writers, they are my friends. But they hail from all over. I live in Georgia now, but who knows where I'll end up? In any case, I'll see them in Ireland, but only for a few weeks.

It's funny, I remember my very first residency in Pittsburgh. I got to the hotel the school was putting out of town students in and was so nervous about my first day of class. But the people I met were so warm and welcoming. By the end of the two weeks I'd spent with them, I was so many friends the richer. Also at the end of that residency was the final dinner. It was delicious. We went to the Monterrey Bay Fish Grotto and I had the best salmon--Rodi grilled with a honey-lime glaze--than I have ever had in my entire life. (It haunts me.) After dinner, the fourth-residency students did their final readings, readings from their thesis manuscript. It occurred to me yesterday that my final reading will be at the end of this upcoming residency. What will I read? I skimmed through my manuscript today, and I haven't found anything I'm psyched about yet, but I still have some time.

Still, it seems weird. I'm sure that I'll be extremely nervous, too. Hell, I got nervous this past residency on behalf of my friends, and I didn't have to *do* anything. I'm just glad the final dinner won't be in Pittsburgh. I doubt I'll actually be able to eat anything before I read. 

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to spending time with my friends and Ireland, as well as meeting the newbies. I hope they like the program as much as I do. I'm certainly going to miss it once it's gone...