I mentioned in an eariler post how I’m back on track in regards to working on my latest novel (working title: “Night of the Lonely Werewolf”).  I started this novel as part of National Novel Writing Month ‘08 and I did great all through November (hit the 50k word goal in 24 days).

Well, like the Magic of Eyri before it (NaNoWrimo ‘05), it took some time for me to work on it after Novel Writing Month. Problems included the holidays, travel, starting freelance writing, starting the Magic of Eyri podcast and other things in my personal life.

Having finally turned a corner, I’m back on track. I’ve been working the novel every day this week, even if only for twenty minutes or so at a time. At least I’m writing every day. I’m at just under 62,000 words and my goal is 80,000 for the first draft (a fry cry from Magic of Eyri’s 170,000+ words).

The problem with getting back into writing a genre novel (fantasy-horror-detective-steampunk, in my case) after being away from it for so many months is that I kind of forgot some of my ‘rules’ and what my characters were doing the last time I spent time with them.

Being a firm believer in “The First Draft Can Be Crap” philosophy, I tried not worry about that problem and just kept going. Still, it can be challenging–especially when you’re dealing with things like werewolves, magic and pseudo-steampunk technology.  If I were just writing memoirs about high school or something, this would be considerably easier.

While kind of breaking one of my first draft rules (don’t read/edit what I wrote), I’ve gone to the beginning of the manuscript and started reading so I can remember what I was doing back in November/December.

I think it’s a good sign that I found quite a bit of it amusing (which is also what I’m going for, I like writing ‘humor’ into my stories). It also helps that I kept notes during the original writing/world building process. Those come in handy.

This draft is far from perfect, but I want a first draft done by Summer’s end (September).  After that, start work on the always important second-draft.

I’m just happy to have my inspiration/writing drive back again.  The last six months were kind of scary.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

It was brought to my attention today that the RSS feed for the podcast was only showing the last five posts, and not the entire run and in the case of the iTunes Store, only the last three episodes.

Well, after some trouble shooting and hair pulling, I solved the problem (and was glad I did before deleting my FeedBurner feed). I had the settings set to only include the last 5 posts in the syndication feed.

Yeah. I’m a moron.

Anyway, it is set to a much higher number now, so that should not be a problem. My apologies to those that this snafu caused any problems for.

I did the same thing to the feed for my blog. Sadly, I deleted the FeedBurner feed for my blog first, as a sort of test…and only realized afterwards that this wasn’t the problem. Well, I have the FeedBurner feed up again and everything will be fine…I just might have to go back and recode some of the FeedBurner buttons that show my blog subscriber stats.

I’m still very upset with myself for making such a dumb mistake in the first place. Live and learn I guess. And it could have been WAY worse.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

A few posts back, I mentioned how I picked up an electric timer to help me stay on task when working on projects at home.  I’m great at meeting deadlines someone else gives me, but I’m not good at self-imposing them (stuff for school/work/freelance is no problem–I always meet deadlines,  but the stuff I do more-or-less for fun takes some serious focus because there isn’t another person telling me to do it).

I gotta say, this is already paying dividends.

Say I’m working on editing a podcast episode. I’ll set the timer for twenty minutes or so, and just work for that period of time and not do anything else (on the flip of the coin that is me, once I get into the zone while working–I don’t stop, so the timer doubles as forcing me to walk away from the computer for a bit).

9 times out of 10, I’ll reset the timer for another twenty minutes (give or take) and keep working, which is great. But other times I’ll work for the allotted time, do something else for a few (see: wasting time on the Internet), and then get back at it.

It is really helping with getting me back on track with novel writing. I’ll say to myself, “Your Royal Awesomeness Self, you’re going to write for twenty minutes and I don’t care if it is genius or crap.” (it is mostly the latter).  To wit, I’ve written more this week than I have in the past few months. Huzzah.

I kind of fell off the creative horse a bit since the New Year while going through a bit of a rough patch in my personal life, but I think I’m back in the saddle (at last).  Yoga has helped with that too.

Speaking of yoga, I’ve only been doing it for only a few weeks and I’ve been seeing results from the get-go. I really started seeing the benefits of yoga when I began doing it in the morning right after getting out of bed (so I’ve been doing it at least once a day, but usually twice a day during the work-week).

It wakes me up and energizes me. I’m also way more toned than…probably ever…and I’m actually developing upper body strength.  And I recently dropped down to 140 lbs*. (what my doc says I should be at for my height), having been at around 160ish a few months ago.  I think the biggest thing I take away from doing regular yoga is getting used to the breathing exercises, which help with stress a great deal and help me settle down after staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

And being swimsuit season, I sure picked a good time to drop twenty pounds.

*now staying AT 140 is the real trick, as I will go up and down a couple pounds daily, but I wasn’t able to get any where close to that for the longest time before starting the yoga stuff.  I do other exercise besides yoga and I try to stick to a ‘lots of fruits and veggies and not too much meat’ diet.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen goes into that category of films that I go to see with zero expectations.  I’ve found that it just makes for a (slightly) better experience.  Watchmen was another recent addition to that category.

To set things straight, I disliked the first film.  A lot. Why would I go see the sequel even though I didn’t like the first? Because, I enjoy seeing action films such as this (crappy or not) on the big screen. Even though I can’t stand Michael Bay films, I’ll confess they are usually worth checking out (at least once) on the big screen.

I won’t waste time with fan-boy nitpicking about how this movie and the first were nothing like the show–because that isn’t the point with these films. When you’re taking a 25+ year old children’s cartoon show designed to sell toys and trying to adapt it to a mass audience film, some stuff just ain’t gonna work. Even more so when you take it from a cartoon to live action.

However, I died a little on the inside when Optimus Prime said “My bad” in the first film.

Thankfully, this film actually featured the Transformers for more than what felt like twenty minutes in the first.  My feelings about the first film are brilliantly summed up in this comic.

But, I’m still not a fan of the character design for the Transformers. Not that ILM didn’t do a great job with the animation, I just don’t like the busy/cluttered design of the robots.  I had heard that ILM’s idea was to make it look as if all the parts from the vehicles fit into their robot bodies, but I don’t like it.  I also have a hard time telling who is who–especially with the Decepticons (Megatron and Starscream are nearly identical).

I also don’t like the ‘human focus’ of the films. But, I did like the idea of humans and Autobots teaming up to hunt Decepticons, that was pretty neat (and made for a pseudo G.I. Joe/Transformers cross-over element).

I could have done with WAY less of the human stuff, it just dragged things out.  But some of the new characters were fun (Jetfire), and some where down right horrible (the Twins). I don’t need to go into details about how bad the Twins were, just read this write up on the whole thing on /Film.

One of the saving graces of this film was John Turturro, who is one of my fav actors—which was the case for the first film.  He’s so great. The other saving points were the inclusion of Soundwave and Ravage–two of my favorites from the show and voiced once again by Frank Welker. Lastly, Starscream (another favorite) finally became interesting and had some great back and forth moments with Megatron, which was a fixture of the original show.

This film defines brainless action–which, hey I have nothing against in general (Commando is one of my favorite movies), but I’m just not a fan of Michael Bay’s directing style, or the focus on the very boring human characters.

And the character of the Fallen, while cool in concept (I enjoy Transformer history as much as the next geek) didn’t really come across as that interesting.

So if you enjoy brainless action, and for some reason enjoyed the first Transformers, check this out…but maybe for a matinee.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

• Working on a freelance article on my balcony, cup of coffee in hand. I love summer.
• Yeah, Transformers was as bad as expected-if not worse. Still hate the character designs: too busy and can't tell some apart.
• My local Kroger supermarket sells copies of the Watchmen graphic novel. I don't know how to feel about that.
• At last, done with my latest freelance article. Huzzah. Off to the Edi-Tor.
• Just started watching Californication and I gotta say, I like it a lot.
• I'm sorry about the 'bug-eye' thing. I'll be in my office.

• twitpic.com/8kkuk - Flier for our band's show last monday, found in east lansing.
• "cricket? You gotta know what a crumpet is before you can play cricket!"
• Debating time travel with friends. I am not making this up.