February was an amazing month of progress for me. Broken Trust is sitting at over 77,000 words and I am filling in gaps and expanding descriptions, which I am always shy of in early drafts.

I recently had a 4 day weekend and had set my goal at 10,000 words over the four days, which would have been a bit of a stretch from what I had been doing. However a combination of knowing what the scenes I needed were, and being very motivated propelled me to over 12,000 words in the first two days. So I spent the next few days shuffling the six viewpoints into one chronological stor... [More]

Time for my monthly update. In January I attended MarsCon in Virginia Beach. It was a geat time. Saw Christopher Ruocchio, one of my favorite new authors and friends, along with a host of other great people. Got invited to submit one of my manuscripts, so I did that, and dove back into writing the third Rise of the Automated Empire story, Broken Trust.

I took the 36,000 words of scene ideas, snippets, and storylines and broke it up into viewpoint characters. I quickly decided that nine viewpoints was too many. I like my different storylines to interw... [More]

December was a month of reflection, celebration, and diving into an old project to learn new skills.

My situation at work has altered slightly and I need to add to my skillset in order to properly handle the work I see coming my way. So I dusted off the ten year old code for Pocket Empire and began a massive rewrite. I use the same images and the old math used to compile and place the image overlays for the maps and worlds, but everything else has been redone. Instead of an old .NET application both front and back, it is now an angular application with a .NET Core web service. ... [More]

In just two weeks I will no longer be able to loudly proclaim that I am still in my fifties. Something I had been doing more and more frequently these last few years. That is, without making myself a liar. On the 15th of December I shall pass beyond the veil of that sixty year mark. My oh my. How time has flown. Seems like only recently I was joking with a friend that we needed to party as hard as we could because when we reached twenty, life would be over. We would have to get jobs and act like grown-ups.

Sometimes I want to go back just so I can slap that guy up the side of t... [More]

I've finished my most recent round of rewrites on the first Red Ice book, Murder on a Monochrome World and submitted it to a publisher. Well, the first three chapters, anyway. That should take a few months for a response.

I am now making another pass on the first Rise of the Automated Empire book, Final Assembly. I recently had an editor tell me I needed more conflict earlier in the story, so I performed a little surgery on one of the character introductions and will expand it a little as I go. I've been addressing issues people have had as I go, so ... [More]