Finally Finally Finally! Third revision of Ziggy’s first book is done. Now I’m looking for beta readers to read it and give me feedback on strong and weak parts of the story. Synopsis This is an autobiography of a man trying to find his place in the world. That world is the Kingdom of Willis, where Wizards are regulated, elves are under siege, Gnomes and Dwarves have locked themselves away, and an undying tyrant is feared by all.

It’s no secret Ziggy’s book is based off a DnD campaign that I ran many years ago, but due to the miracle of Intellectual Property law, I’ll probably have to obfuscate that in the book. The problem is identifying the legal lines in this situation;Â it’s unclear what I am and am not allowed to use. Let’s take the lowly Rust Monster in my book, Rusty. Wizards of the Coast does not appear to own a trademark on the term Rust Monster, however Gary Gygax did invent the creature for the first edition of DnD.

I appeared to have stalled out on SPoE before I could finish it, so I’m flipping back to the reason for SPoE- Ziggy’s book. After taking a full year off of writing, I’m ready to revise the first of the two books. Last year I stalled out on the 3rd draft and was unable to get restarted; now I think enough time has passed to give me a fresh perspective.

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now. So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him? First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account. Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

I recently crossed the 100k barrier and came to a realization- this book is way too long. I think I’m gonna chop it after section 7 (90k words, 360 or so pages) and split it into two books- The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Fall This means that the first book is technically complete and ready for a revision. I’d like to finish the rough draft of both books before I proceed with a second draft of the first.

muahahahahaha.

So I’ve started on another book- this one however isn’t a novel, it’s a notebook for guitar students. The first two pages contain a layout of notes on the fretboard, commonly played chords (open, barred and power), pentatonic modes, and relationship of the guitar and tablature to standard musical notation. The rest of the book will follow a simple format, allowing notes, sketches and some notation on the left page and the right containing 6 tab staffs similar to this:

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display: It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book: Rough Draft: First complete version of the story. First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked. Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories.

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

You know what I’d like to see? Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” . Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

The series started with Rendezvous with Rama, going on to Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. Since I’m feeling lazy, I’m not gonna write a pretentious review about how the style of the first book was different/better/worse than the following books. The series as a whole was pretty decent, lot of things made you think about how humanity as a whole will probably be cleansed when they meet another intelligent species because they’re too stupid to just be civil.