Thursday, August 9, 2012

The week

It's been a very busy week to say the least. I'm still busy writing the second book of Sea Witch and I'm making pretty good progress on it. I'm at 4,800 words now after just a few days and have chapter three just about complete. Hopefully, I can have it out by October 1st at the latest so that I can add it to book 1. Altogether, it should be about novel length for the entire first book, about 48,000 words. So far the feedback has been really good especially after rewriting the first book completely.

I also have plans for two other novella's to be added at a later date, possibly as a complete second book. The first of those will fit time wise between the first book and the one I'm writing now. The second of the two should be about 10 years after the one I'm presently writing. Depending on how long these stories are they may also get combined into a complete single book in the correct time line order.


Monday, August 6, 2012

Sea Witch book 2

I had the idea that I was going to write a lot more on From Afar but the muse as fickle as she is had different thoughts. I'm now working on book 2 of Sea Witch which will be added to the present one. It starts 17 years after the first book ended. Here is the rough draft of the opening for the second book.


Caught the third time for smoking weed at school! Jonathan didn't think anyone would find them in the baseball dugout but hadn't thought of the coach coming around.

"Damn it!"

Now, they were all sitting in the coach's office and he was calling the principal. Three heads were bowed in shame and silence, not because they felt they did something wrong. Each of them was thinking about what their parents would say when they got home.

"Yeah, I caught them in the dugout smoking marijuana", he said into the handset watching the boys.

Disgruntled frowns appeared on their faces as two of them looked up, all awaiting sentence. A few more moments the coach set the handset back down.

"Get up, we're going for a walk to the principal's office now."

Silence from the three reigned supreme as they got up from their chairs slowly.

"Come on, let's go", in an attempt to speed them up.

They all headed into the hallway with the coach close on their heels. Passing numerous doors and lockers they wondered if he was going through with it. Turning their heads to see if he was still following they could see the coach’s serious look.

Narrowing his eyes and remembering catching them once before, "I'm sure by now you boys know the way."

It was a small school so unfortunately it didn’t take them long to get to the office. The coach waved them over to the waiting area chairs and said a few words to Principal Atkinson. After nodding to the man inside he went to stand in the doorway to help prevent them sneaking out.

“I’ll see you now one at a time”, came the voice from the office’s doorway.

Jonathan looked over at his two friends and since they were in no hurry he got up and headed in. He figured that he might as well get this out of the way as he was pretty sure that he would be suspended from school today.

Waving Timothy to one the chairs facing the desk, “please take a seat Mr. Hutton”.

He opened one of the file cabinet drawers and selected one of the folders. Setting it on the desk, he began looking through the accumulated papers inside. After taking a look he sighed and began looking intently at the seventeen year old student sitting across from him. Timothy suddenly felt that the room was rather oppressive and wanted to crawl under the chair and then back out the door.

Looking very serious, “you’ve been skipping a lot of school these days and you were just caught smoking that stuff again by the coach. The question is, what do we do with you?”

He paused a few moments to let what he said to sink in a little. “I could make you stay after school but I don’t think that will do much good. Think that I need to suspend you but if I do you probably won’t graduate this year.”

Once again, the principal paused while looking intently at the boy who appeared to be shrinking in the chair. “Okay, your turn. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Jonathan looked at the man behind the desk and shook his head, “no I don’t”.

In a stern tone of dismissal while raising his eyebrows the principal spoke. “Consider yourself suspended then and you can send in the next one I need to talk to.”

Nodding as he got up from his chair and headed out of the door into the waiting area. In passing he looked at the other two, “he wants one of you next”.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

My review for Robyn's Egg by Mark Souza

The book started out pretty slow and I was tempted to put it down. I'm glad I didn't though as it gets pretty good later on. There are definite shades of Blade Runner and Fahrenheit 451 to the story.

Major corporations dictate every aspect of the lives of average people. You don't really have a way to think for yourself since you are connected constantly to the net. In fact, its illegal to think independently. There are of course some that would like to change that not being happy with the status quo. I could see myself wanting shake everything up also.