A Time For Everything

I'm writing again, I'm writing again! Well--revising ^ this ^ book. It's been amazing, and it's felt really good to be creative in this way. My goal is to get the book out in the world by my dad's birthday in mid-June. So that's four months to get everything done. That should be plenty of time.

* * * * *

So I got addicted to a stupid tablet game. It's one of those "merge games" where you merge items together to create a new advanced item and then you combine and combine and combine to create items that customers want. The customer buys them for coins and then you use the coins to buy things for the main point of the game. In my case, it's to decorate rooms. At this point, I could care less about decorating the rooms.

But there are a handful of things I don't like about this game and so I started musing--if I were to create my own merge-type game, what would I change? Add? Get rid of? What would be the purpose of the player merging items to sell to earn the currency? So over the course of the last week, ideas have been percolating and I've come up with something I think would be fun.

Now, will all this time and imagination ever produce something? Who knows. But it's a fun way to exercise your imagination, which is never a waste of time.

* * * * *

Victory+

So you may remember that there had been a whole kerfuffle with Diamond Sports who owned Bally Sports which provided the on-air TV programming or at least the air time. I don't understand all the details, but it was a mess and teams from all sports leagues were getting screwed or something.

So in a surprising turn of events, my beloved Dallas Stars--well the organization, not the players, who I'm usually talking about--created their own streaming platform called Victory+. Along with Stars games and related content, the Anaheim Ducks also signed on. Eventually, baseball's Texas Rangers also joined the platform. Rangers fans have to subscribe, but hockey fans can watch either team for free. :0)

But all that to say, back in 2016 / 2017 / 2018, DD and I were always scrambling to find a way to watch games. We didn't have the correct cable package to watch the aforementioned Fox Sports & Bally Sports. And any other platform required a subscription. Eventually we upgraded our cable package to include Fox Sports & Bally Sports and were happy campers.

And now we have this free-to-hockey-fans platform, but these days, DD and I watch less hockey than ever before. Life can be funny, can't it?

* * * * *

Image courtesy of www.chewy.com.

Rascal has finally been fully accepted by DD. She bought him a bed last week.The one above that looks like a slipper. :0) That is not Rascal, although it looks like him.

He loves to curl up inside and under blankets when it's super cold, as it was last week, so...another cozier bed for the Rascal-meister.

* * * * *

And that's it for me. I'll catch you--hopefully--in a couple of weeks. I've been struggling to come up with any interesting tidbits to share. :(

Take care and STAY WARM!

Slowly.

I'm not diving straight into the deep-end. Maybe I am. I don't know...I don't think so really.

After that, I have ideas for at least two additional Linzer trilogies...

Not sure I'll ever get to those, sadly... But I digress...

I love Nate and Wesley, the heroes of hockey book five, called Finders Keepers (cover above), and I do want to tell their story. Nate is a goalie and he finds Wesley and in the end, opts to keep him.

I had two documents--one a revision of the other one with, I thought, a lot of duplicate text.

My first exercise was to read each doc side by side, paragraph by paragraph, and compare. To decide which text, where it's different, I wanted to keep and then to copy/paste into the correct document. 

That process went okay for the first 30-33 pages...then I reached a three-page section that was different and I liked both scenes. So the question became...could I keep both and in what order?

That meant note-carding the scenes. Which I did.

Turns out, not so much duplicate text after all.

As I moved farther through each document after that three-page section, I realized the two documents weren't as similar as I thought. One adhered more to the original plot thoughts than the other, and I was happy to find that that was so. I've often had the thought that I'd veered to far from my original concept.

A resolution to a major plot problem that I'd been struggling with also finally presented itself. When the time comes, I'll be able to rewrite with minimal impact to the dominoes that fall because of that one sticky wicket. I haven't tackled revisions, because I'm still working on the note-carding process, but I know some of what to do now and that's definitely a relief.

I'm working on it a little every day as my brain and my body build up the stamina once again for this kind of work and effort. I had put my writing endeavors in the freezer for safe-keeping when I left for Oregon in mid-March. The thaw and preparation is slow, but that's okay.

Real life has a few things going on that need my attention, I'm still pondering life going forward a bit, and I'm still working in my post-parent-loss grace period.

And fall is lovely; I'm trying spend a lot of time outside enjoying it.

Here's to a lovely weekend for one and all.