However, after some recent chiding, both from friends and that wall in the photo above, I decided it was time to get back off my ass and get to editing. Again.

If you recall, I’d started the Blue Pen (story, flow, pacing) edits of my novel ages ago. Then life got busy, or editing got hard or whatever excuse I want to come up with. Damn, that was two minutes? Okay, so, long story short, I stopped. And I stopped for a long time, like the better part of a year.

But I’m back now. And I’m cruising through the Blue Pen edits as quickly as I can. That way I can get through the Red Pen edits and then start shopping this book about.

And writing the next.

But, in order to do that, I’ve imposed a strict communications blackout each night. Two hours of solid editing. No Googling. No Twitter. No text messages or phone calls. Just me, that massive timeline above, and Scrivener.

Okay, three minutes. Time to start the tea.

Oh, before I go. I’ve got a title. It’s no longer Project Kingdom. The book is now called “A Heresy In Flames.”

Got the January GoodReads newsletter today, and as per usual, I scrolled through the new releases by genre only to be let down by what is currently being passed off as “fantasy.”

Skim these and meet me on the other side:

Shadow Heir by Richelle Mead

From the description, “The uneasy truce between her and her shape shifter ex-lover Kiyo is endangered by secrets he can’t–or won’t–reveal.”

Silver-Tongued Devil by Jaye Wells

From the description,”Now that the threat of war has passed, Sabina Kane is ready to focus on the future. Her relationship with Adam Lazarus is getting stronger and she’s helping her sister, Maisie, overcome the trauma of her captivity in New Orleans.”

Raven Cursed by Faith Hunter

From the description, “The vampires of Asheville, North Carolina, want to establish their own clan, but since they owe loyalty to the Master Vampire of New Orleans they must work out the terms with him.”

Sins of the Demon by Diana Rowland

From the description, “The homicide beat in Louisiana isn’t just terrifying, it’s demonic. Detective Kara Gilligan of the supernatural task force…”

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

From the description, “She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own.”

Back? Okay, good. Did you catch the trend there? These aren’t fantasy books with tangential nods to the real world, they’re real world books with tangential nods (or thick gloopy swaths) of overlaid fantastic elements.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean no disrespect to the authors of these books (and props for getting through the chain), but I am really disliking the current trend of fantasy that seems like it was put together with shovels.

The publishing industry likes to force some semblance of standardization amongst genres as well as creating finite sub genres (You know, like Supernatural Military Epic Fantasy), all in the name of making books easier to sell. However, when pushing books at the super genre level, can we at least get some damn variety in there?

I think we all know who to blame.

First Draft and Celebratory Champagne

Late in the evening on Labor Day, I finally wrapped up the first draft of Project Kingdom. I popped the champagne, invited over some close friends and threw some steaks on the grill, and promptly put the printed beast onto the shelf with all of my other work.

It wasn’t easy. I wanted to jump right into editing, to maintain the momentum I had built up in August and early September to carry me through the writing period most easily described as “hell.”

But I gave the story some time to breathe and myself some time to recover. Like a cooling off in a relationship, I tried to occupy my time.

I made up for all those late nights drinking and writing by going out, drinking and not writing.

I started playing golf, poorly.

And I got back to reading. I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading, and I put down at least 6 books in the last two months.

But, in the back of my mind, there was always that nagging voice complaining, “Hey man, don’t you have a book to edit?”

You can only shoo that voice away with whiskey for so long (but be damned if I didn’t try.)

So, as November crept into existence, I made up my mind to get back into the process.

I took my manuscript out of the cube shelf it was resting on and moved it to the steamer-trunk-cum-coffee-table. I let it taunt me there for a few days.

I took the cover off the first volume and reverse it, so I could pull printed chapters off individually without unseating the entire work.

And I told myself, repeatedly, “I’ll start editing…right after I finish this television show/movie/book.”

Saturday turned out to be blissfully quiet. I cleaned the house, started the laundry, and did some grocery shopping. Following that, I picked up Project Kingdom and realized just what a mountain I had in front of me.

It has quite literally been years since I read the prologue (which was way too long at 1500 words) and the first few chapters (which failed to introduce the characters and set up the motivations for the remainder of the book…oh and foreshadowing, I needz it).

So, after getting jacked up on coffee, I grabbed my green pen and started carving.

Mighter than a nerdy double entendre

I trimmed and rewrote the prologue, taking it from a bloated and unnecessary 1569 words down to a tight and cracking 400.

It wasn’t so bad, this rewriting thing.

I then immediately jumped into chapter 1, completely rewriting the beast. The rewrite successfully defined the protagonist (and changing the spelling of his name), painted a clearer picture of the initial setting and amplified the violence.

I also used the F word on the first page, which may or may not survive further edits.

I’m hoping to move through Green Pen edits – fixing plot wholes, characterization, mechanical errors and shitty writing – by the end of the year, end of January at the latest. From there, I’ll pick up the red pen and push through heavy copy edits – fixing grammar and cutting down on the word count – and I’ll hopefully be submitting this bad boy to agents in the Spring.

You know, as long as the publishing industry doesn’t collapse by then.

Like a proud parent

The above photo is notable for several reasons:

1. It is photographic evidence of me wearing pants on a weekend
2. Despite having been out of the Army for six years now, I still haven’t found t-shirts more comfortable than Army issue brown tees.
and…
3. Yes, I have the gall to hang a Doves’ Some Cities poster next to a Toulouse-Latrec print.

Oh, and that manuscript in my hand? That’s a large chunk of Project Kingdom. For those of you keeping score at home, I am currently halfway through Chapter 29 out of an outlined 40, and sitting pretty at 77,000 words written.

Formatted for editing – double-spaced 12 point Courier New – I realized that I have given birth to a doorstop. The beast is closing in on 400 pages and tips the scale at more than five pounds.

All of these details, rendered in physical form, amaze me due to one very large fact. I cannot remember starting Kingdom. It has sat dormant for the better part of the last two or three months. I like to think that those months was a period of glorious gestation, where I was somehow becoming a better writer and doing things that will better Kingdom, but honestly? If there was a Manuscript Protective Service, they would have placed Kingdom with a loving foster novelist ages ago.

Kingdom’s a survivor, though. She’s moved computers at least twice. Moved apartments. Out lasted a couple of girlfriends. I’m pretty sure that when I started Kingdom I had both a functional car and television. Hell, the beast has killed a printer and untold ink cartridges.

The index cards used for pre-writing that hang above my desk have yellowed from cigarette smoke. And I don’t even want to think about how many bottles of booze have been sacrificed to Kingdom.

Put to the question, I’d estimate that I started writing Kingdom sometime around spring 2009, but I wouldn’t swear by that.

But now, as I wait for the house to cool, and think about lining my stomach before I start throwing bourbon at it, the end feels so close. If I can crank out a measly 5000 words a week, I can wrap the first draft before September. Then, it’ll just be several hellish months of editing. But at least I’ll be able to hold the entire thing.

And after the last couple weeks, that’s damn huge.

And the problem with fake band names is that once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. You start assigning genres, idiosyncrasies, member names, album art. If you know your music history – this is exactly how Def Leppard started.

Sometime over the past year, I started tweeting the band names I’d find in CAPTCHA codes at Mixx.com. And I wasn’t alone. The volume of CAPTCHA bands started to increase with new discoveries found daily. At Twitter events, I’d end up talking about CAPTCHA bands with other users – Brad Carr, Dean Browell, and Carrie Fleck being the three other local CAPTCHA band spotters.

Yesterday morning I received a DM and Facebook message from, good guy and friend of the blog, Dean Browell. He was taking the CAPTCHA band mini-meme to the next level – a Facebook Fan Page.

The idea is just as simple as the Twitter action we’d been doing for the better part of a year now, albeit in a bit longer form and benefiting from multimedia. I quickly roped Justin into the group, swallowed my rather strong dislike for Facebook, and jumped in.

So far, we’ve managed to get six CAPTCHA bands up, and I’ll include one of them below. If you’re into that whole Facebook thing, and you’d like to Fan the page, here’s a link. It’s still early, but there’s some quality stuff up there.

The Govs
Prison State

Orange County in the late seventies was known more for it’s love of disco and The Eagles than it was of the proto-punk movements developing in Detroit, London, Manchester, and New York City. But when Steve Greer’s disco-glitter band, The Lovelights, signed with Columbia Records, the teenage Lester Greer had enough.

Adopting the stage name “Butch” and teaming up with two fellow teenage ne’erdowells, the younger Greer brother launched what is arguably the first SoCal proto-punk band – The Govs. With much of the band lacking anything close to musical talent, and having spent most of their lives in the well-to-do Los Angeles suburb, the trio overcompensated with profanity and aggression.

The band’s first album, “Screw California”, was twelve adaptations of the Richard Berry classic “Louie Louie” with alternate lyrics and a tempo that clocked each track in a mere ninety seconds. But the messages, deriding the recently ended Vietnam War, the disastrous Nixon presidency, and a perceived Orwellian police state in which “the government collud[ed] with corporate interests to enslave the masses” resonated with the students of Laguna Beach High School.

The lo-fidelity honesty of the first album was quickly lost as parents of band members fronted the money for a true demo, the better known “Prison State.” Under the tutelage of a Benny Stills, a failed musician in his own right, Greer and his cohorts were put through the paces in a real studio, instructed in the use of their musical instruments, and given a basic understanding of song writing.

The experience is believed to have been detrimental to the outcome of not only the album but also the band. Produced to within an inch of its life, the Govs’ second album was derided as derivative, meritless, lacking in real world experience, and nearly causing the death of punk before the burgeoning genre was truly alive.

Several record labels professed an interest in Prison State, and it received a rather wide release. The band, however, broke up shortly after completion and thus never toured in support of the record. The impact of Prison State was far greater than any involved could have predicted, and is seen as a major influence on modern day acts such as Green Day and Nickleback.

However, I kept bumping into the fact that while these ideas are really good, they didn’t quite fit on a personal domain where I wanted the freedom to riff on the latest episodes of television or vent about things I found on the internet. Putting those ideas here would muddle their inherent value, dragging emphasis away from the niche, and creating confusion for readers.

Compound that fact with the pure amount of industry watching I’ve been doing over the past few months, and searching, largely in vain, for a centralized website that caters to fiction writers the way that CopyBlogger caters to freelancers, and I saw a definite need.

After talking with a few friends and about the idea, I decided to make the leap. So, on February 18th, I grabbed another domain name and started outlining ideas. Within a few days, the general idea had started to take shape, and I was putting up the first of the content, as my Twitter friends have likely noticed.

For the name, I’m going with Fiction Matters. I couldn’t believe that the domain was free. I think it’s a great play on words – a statement about the importance of fiction, and a statement on the site’s content.

The method is to leverage the entirety of the knowledge that I’ve learned about blogging, from being a journalist, from my experience writing fiction, and from my experience writing many company blogs and working in SEO. To that end, it’s kind of a culmination of knowledge related to both writing and the web.

The goal? Well, that’s to create a solid resource for fiction writers, which I believe will only become more numerous as our current economic crisis pairs itself with the decrease in the barriers towards becoming a fiction writer.

What to expect from Fiction Matters

Tips – In addition to writing tips, I plan on addressing tips for being a writer, tackling the business and promotional aspects which are only going to be become more important to writers in the new age of publishing.

Tools – Technology is increasingly expanding the methods and options that writers have at our disposal. I’d like to address those.

News – It’s important to know what’s going on in the industry. And news comes from many, many sources. I plan to accumulate all of those into one easy to find location.

Resources – I’ve been slowly assembling a compendium of knowledge which addresses the myriad needs of the fiction writer. From a database of industry people and where to find them online to a dictionary that addresses the plethora of writers terms. The goal is to put it all online and make it all searchable.

Community – This one depends on others. Writing is a lonely art, and talking with other writers is a boon. It’s my hope that when the first four pieces come into place, the fifth will evolve organically.

Call to Action

Yes, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to get everything off the ground. The upshot is that once everything is up there and active, Fiction Matters will be a very valuable resource for those who love fiction. Please let me know if you’re interested in contributing in any way.

But today marked the first day off, of nine. No work, at least not in the paid kind. It’s hard to come to mental grips with, shrugging off the rhythm of life that I’ve grown accustomed to, and as sure as one would expect, I was awake early this morning – weekend be damned. I fought the urge, and managed to roll back over. Sleep came as sleep is wont to, that is, sleep came in fits.

I woke up before my girlfriend, sliding out of bed and grabbing pants without waking her. I made it into my office, checked my email and the news online before popping out for a smoke and settling onto the couch for some quality time with the television.

I had grabbed a couple of movies the night prior, and wanted to get back to watching those, but settled instead for a bottle of Coke and a rerun of Law and Order on TNT.

The girlfriend woke up an hour or two after I did, the footsteps of our neighbor, or as we refer to him – the Elephant Upstairs – too loud for her to continue. The two of us hung out in the living room until she had to go to work. I managed to make my way through both of the movies from Friday night before she had to go to work.

We swung downtown together, and I came back home. Mother called, she’s excited about us coming into town and wanted to discuss sleeping arrangements. I brushed her off after a few minutes, I hadn’t eaten yet today and had a box of fried chicken and a six of Long Hammer waiting for me.

I tried to sit on the couch, but quickly grew bored with that. I shifted instead to my office and watched a movie. But, it wasn’t long before I settled down to what I realized I have to do on my vacation.

I popped open a couple of document windows and started working. So far, day one hasn’t been too bad. I just wish I could shake this black cloud from over me.

• maverick (and extensions thereof)
• change
• folksy
• pro-America
• that one
• reformer
• deregulator
• Hussein
• liberal
• communist/socialist
• approved this message
• The Bradley Affect
• Joe the Plumber