Exploring the World

 The world amazes me. All of it. 

So I'm expanding this blog to hopefully find and talk with other explorers, creators, readers, writers and anyone with something they want to study or examine with friends.

I'll still talk about writing and reading in the indie world because I do that everyday. It's a passion, one I enjoy immensely. I'll still tell you how my WIP is going, good and bad. ;-)

But there is so much more to explore out there! Music, science, history (I love Naval History as you'll see), how governments work and don't work and why, food, health care, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Art and so much more. 

The sand box that is humanity is so vast and interesting. Let's find our childhood plastic buckets and shovels and start making sand castles, one after the other.

Come along while I mosey from castle to castle, exploring all that is US.

Outlining a new book!

 I'm outlining a book this week.

I admit I'm an on again, off again outliner. It seems like some stories will flow better if I just start typing and don't stop to think too hard about the plot. It's happened several times before.

Other times though I find outlining first keeps me focused on the story arc, characters, environment, etc. 

This book has lots of characters, species (yes it's a SciFi story ;-), environments, battles and hopefully a whole lot of fun for the reader! 

Another benefit for the outline is that I get a chance to enjoy the story as well. I get to 'play' with paths and tangents to see if I like them, before I commit to them in the story. It's really hard to back out lots of dialog, characters, etc. in a packed word document. Much easier to do in an outline.

The story involves some WW 2 submarine characters, boats and action. I have a chance to put all that research I've done to good use!

I'll keep you posted.

Do you always outline or always not outline?

Back in the writing saddle!

 I took a short breather after launching 'Arlo and Jake: Special Intel', my 5th book in that series.

It's been pretty well received, I'm thrilled! You never know how a series release will go. I purposefully keep my novels 'minimal', less than 250/300 pages. I find the massive trilogies difficult to keep focused on, even the really good ones like LOTR and the Jack Reacher books. Love them both but I have to take breaks between books.

I'm not ready to start up on book 6 of the series, though I do have the beginnings of an outline that I break open now and again.

So now I'm trying to finalize a couple of short stories that I hope to submit to Analog or Asimov or maybe some other magazine. Wish me luck.

One of the stories centers around mankind's search for life in the Universe. It's something that I've playing with for months. I'm hoping that my unique take on the quest will spark interest from one of the magazines. Selling a story to a magazine would open me up to a much wider readership! Don't really care about the money (right...), but to be able to see my work in a magazine would also be a huge ego boost right now. ;-)

I also have short outlines for books that continue the story line I started with 'Genome' the novel. These stories involve the AI 'Pip' I created to help my main characters look for medical cures. The gymnasium sized holo-deck is a great 'enabler' tool I created to help. With it you can walk around and interact with a hologram of molecules and more importantly with human DNA!

These stories will take off where 'Genome' ended. 

I've also got a YA story based on parts of Genome. I can't decide which to start first. I've never done a YA book, it might be time to try my hand at it!

Keep writing, my friends, and checkout my book links!!