​     I’ve been working my ass off to get the editing completed for Destiny in the midst of … well life. I always have several something going on, besides working a full time job in a foreign country and doing my best to get Destiny corrected and released. Usually I practice Zen and do my best to live in the now, while planning the best I can for the future. It’s a good perspective and I usually keep positive, but as with all of us, I have my down times too.
     Most recently that was last Friday. I’d spent the beginning of the week rushing my baby Kanchen to the vet to get him on chemo therapy to slow down the growth of his aggressive nasal cancerous tumor, along with a few other lesser emergencies that hit, when I just had to zone out and get some stress relief reading in. Reading for me is a way to make everything go away. I love a good adventure story, so I recently went to one of my new favorite authors E. William Brown. I just love his Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black Series). You can find the first book here: http://www.amazon.com/Fimbulwinter-Daniel-Black-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00KZ41LHM/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 His Daniel Black Series freaking rocks! I read all three again as I was running around with my head chopped off getting stuff resolved which put me back where I needed to be. Don’t worry; I still took the time to work on the editing of Destiny whenever I was home, except for Tuesday. Tuesday was the day I just completely zoned out after I got home and collapsed.  
     The whole week was crazy and didn’t let up. Friday I was really feeling the strain when I saw I’d gotten two back-to-back before I left work on Goodreads. I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome that made me feel. It was exactly what I needed to go home and spend more eye-bleeding time focused on editing Destiny over the whole weekend, whenever I had a second to sit down. Even after driving three hours into work and doing a full day at the office, I can’t wait to get home get working on finishing p my editing for Destiny. So, this is a big thank you to Demian and TheBADboys for the kudos! It also pushed my Flight’s rating to 4.0!
     That's not to say thank you for everyone else who has given me good reviews, because reviews are the break and butter for any writer. Besides giving you the motivation to keep going, it always lets other people know your book is worth checking out. There's no better advertising then that! So for everyone who has been kind enough to take the extra time to leave a review, I thank you. 
     Although I’m getting better at editing, mostly due to Grammarly.com’s program getting much better at finding mistakes, it is still a lot of work. It’s the “poor man’s” editor. Still, better than paying a professional editor money I don’t have for the same level of accuracy. My goal before I start handing Destiny out is to get a clean read-through without finding any errors. Right now grammarly still has me in the 2000+ critical error range, but like I said, I’m working through them as fast as I can.
     My wife and I spend most of the weekends catching up on watching our shows together. We finally just caught up with Vampire Diaries and just started The Originals. Don’t laugh, I never knew just how good Vampire Diaries were until this last Christmas break where we caught up the whole five plus seasons. Also just as we caught up on that, Arrow, Gotham and Flash just started up again thankfully.
     Anyway, that’s it for now. Just know I’m working hard to get the editing finished. Yea yea, as always I overestimated just how long the editing was going to take, but this is my first 650 page book! 

     Before I start out, I just wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy New Year for 2016. I hoped everyone enjoyed their celebrations and that the New Year brings happiness and joy.
     I made it through my first “flow editing” of Destiny on January 3rd, 2016. If any of you are wondering what the hell a first flow editing is, it’s my terminology for looking at how the story sounds and the paragraphs flow together for the overall storyline of the book. Basically to make sure I’m happy with how everything turned out. That statement might sound a little odd for those of you who don’t write, but it makes more sense once you put it into perspective.
     Planning a storyline for a book out can take months, and that’s after you’ve developed your world and concept. Writing the story itself takes a lot longer. Flight took me a year and a half to write. Destiny over two years and I still haven’t finished all of the corrections. Try to keep track of the entire flow of a story, the quality of the writing and have it all mesh together just right over that kind of time period. It’s not exactly easy. Add on top of that, with Destiny I chose not to re-read what I’d previously written. Why? Because I can’t properly look at the story later on clear enough to correct my mistakes when it comes time for editing.
     Sounds crazy? Trust me, it’s not. Try reading a story twenty or forty times over as do your best to search for the mistakes you’ve made in the story’s flow and grammar. The first time you can see them clearly, but you still have missed a lot. The second time you read through the story you catch another batch of mistakes, but there are still more. The third time you read through the story you find mistakes, but it’s much harder. By the tenth time it’s nearly impossible. Your mind replaced the words that are there automatically without you even realizing it. By the twentieth time you are well past the time you need a second set of eyes.
     This was my problem with Flight. I re-read the chapters so many times as I was writing the story, that by the time I needed to edit the story for final production I couldn’t hardly read through the text to see the errors I’d written. This isn’t only an issue with me. My friends who were helping me with the storyline and editing afterwards had the same issues.
     With Destiny I tried a different tactic to combat this problem. Mainly I’ve done my best not go back to the beginning of the story to re-read what I’ve previously written, until I was finished with the overall story and was at the editing stage. I’ve also mostly have done the same with sharing out the story to my friends. After the first year, I shared out Destiny to some of my friends to see if they liked the general flow of the story to see check my material. Everyone liked what they read and wanted more, but I purposely kept the rest of the story private. From that first test read I was able to get enough feedback to know I was on the right track. I’d decided that the next time I share out the story it would be when it was finished and as cleaned up as I could possibly make it. Only in this way I figured could I get the best shot at getting my novel edited properly before final distribution.

     Finding grammar and editing errors is extremely difficult, for me anyway. I don’t seem to poses the grammar Nazi gene, but slowly and with electronic help, I can fake it somewhat. If not for http://grammarly.com I’d be lost. There is a curve to writing properly and editing itself. What’s awesome with GRAMMARLY.COM is that the program shows you your errors and explains why it is wrong, and then it suggests ways for you to correct your dangling participle or sentence fragment until you get it right. I found that after I’d been using the program that my writing grammar skill altogether had dramatically improved.
     If you haven’t used GRAMMARLY then you’re missing out. They even offer their basic program for free. That doesn’t mean the program doesn’t have issues or is perfect, because it’s not. Still it’s the cheapest editing help that you’ll ever get. When using the program you’ll want to save regularly. It does freeze at times and sometimes completely locks up and you have to restart the program. The worst part about the re-starts is that it doesn’t remember your previous ignores and such, so if you have to either just jump to the page the program locked up on at the point of your last save or quickly go through the previous texts and reselect ignore. Sounds easy enough, but it becomes more time consuming when you’re talking about 6,000 or 10,000 errors you’re trying to correct. Even with all of these small annoying problems, grammar’s program is freaking awesome and is the Poor Man’s … I mean Poor Indie Writer’s editor.
     Even with Grammarly’s help, you’re still going to have pay attention. Not all of the suggested corrections the program makes is always right for what you’ve written. A mistake I learned the hard way when I first used the program on Flight. Later on, I had to go back and correct my mistake, which was time consuming on top of being a pain in the ass. Once you done your best and have re-read the story to the point where you can’t find any additional errors on your read through, that’s when you ask your friends for help. The goal from my own experiences and everything I’ve read is that you want to be able to read through your entire story and NOT find any additional mistakes. Mistakes are not issues where you could write a sentence one way or another and you keep going back and forth. Mistakes are misspelled words, grammar issues or false information, just so we are on the same sheet of music.  
     Once you done all of this you can decide whether or not you want to go with a professional editor. Going with a professional is something all of us would love to do, but the reality is that most of us simply can’t afford it. We just don’t make the return of profit with self-publishing to have this as a viable option. Still no matter what, you need to do your best to clean up your story. If not it really makes your work unreadable and opens your work up to attack, which is something you don’t want in your reviews.
     No matter how good of a job you do at editing your work, Grammar Nazi’s are just a part of life when you’re a writer. I had one reviewer tell me that they would have gave me five stars if not for my Grammar mistakes, so instead they gave me two. Cruel comments like that is just a fact of life for Indie Writers. It’s something that makes me laugh, in a sad way, when other Indie Writers give nasty reviews about editing when they know you tried your best to clean up the story. Even worse is when you have a good story and you’re doing well as a new writer only to have someone who has been published and now has access to a professional editor giving you a hard time. Not that having a professional editor means you won’t have grammar or story content mistakes. I’ve seen both in professionally finished published products. Unfortunately, being attacked by these Grammar Nazi’s and jealous writers trying to put their competition down is just par for the course. Thankfully not all writers are dicks. 

     Anyway, I’m doing the best I can to get through the editing part as quickly as I can so that I can get Destiny published. Once I hand it off to my friends, I’ll have to work on the back cover part, which is another eye bleeding difficult process. I’ll try to give up lots of good information on that process. Overall, I’m really like how the story has turned out. I do have a couple places where I explain a little bit more about the world of Irlendria and the different species and their cultures, but I’ve tried to keep those parts interspaced with the action to keep the story moving and a relevant part of the storyline. I can’t wait to get feedback from my friends and beta readers about the story.
     On a personal note, I have confirmation that my Kanchen has sarcoma cancer of the nose. No matter what, the prognosis is not good. My baby could have anywhere from three months to a year to live, but more than likely we’ll be lucky to get six months more with Kanchen. I heard about a chemotherapy pill treatment that might help slowdown the growth of the tumor. I’ll be meeting with the vet in a week to see if that’s truly an option and something we can afford or not. Also, I don’t want to give my baby chemo if it makes his quality of life horrible before his death. Right now, my wife and I are doing a kind of Hospice for him. Basically making his life as comfortable as possible with lots of walks and treats before he’s taken away from us. For now, he’s mostly happy and eating well. I try to keep his nose clean when the blood starts running down his face and hold him lots. Still, it’s a heart breaking situation. I’ve added a picture of Kanchen after his surgery where they released some of the pressure from the tumor growing over his eyes and trimmed back to tumor as much as they could. 

     Monday night I was finally able to catch the new Star War’s episode with my buddy Alan on the way home after work. It’s kind of funny where we caught the movie. Sitting in a German movie theater and watching the film in English, instead of catching the movie on base. I would have loved to have seen it on opening night, but I’d have been forced to go alone. While I was an option, honestly I’d rather see the movie with a friend. While I’ve gotten my wife into some Sci-Fi and a lot of superhero movies and TV shows, she’s still not a fan of hard Sci-Fi, so basically anything with deep space is mostly out. Did you catch the word “mostly”? I think she would actually enjoy some of the hardcore Sci-Fi stuff if she’d give it half a chance, since she likes stuff like Continuum, Falling Skies, The 100 and Dark Matter. Don’t even ask me how someone can love Dark Matter, but keep on saying they’re not into Sci-Fi. Whatever, I’ve learned to accept her Idiosyncrasies on this, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t drive me crazy when I want to see a movie like Star Wars with her.
     In regards to the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie, I’m of two minds. On the one side, I loved the action and the overall flow and the characters were fresh and interesting. I really liked the character Rey. She’s pretty cool how she’s been surviving on her own on the planet Tatooine. The only thing I didn’t like was how she kept feeling like she had to go back to the planet. Yea they explained the why in the storyline, but even so it didn’t sit right with me. Finn, the Stormtrooper, was another cool character. I liked his story even better and the whole “awaking” made sense enough to complete his character, especially with the whole concept of the Stormtroopers being stolen children raised and drugged into obedience. I guess after the Clone Wars the Empire moved away from the whole cloned soldier thing, not that doing so makes any sense. I mean seriously, why would the Sith Empire move away from cloned Stormtroopers?
     Overall the action in the new movie was fast and the scenes cool, but still there was something lacking. At first I couldn’t put to words what it was. After the movie was finished we sat and talked to a German couple that wanted to discuss the film’s storyline and merits. I was still trying to figure out what didn’t sit right with me about the movie, when something the German guy said struck a chord. He said the movie was very predictable. After thinking about it for a moment, I realized he’d hit the proverbial nail on the head.
     There was no true surprises in the storyline like there’d been in any of the other episodes’ storylines. Yea there was the awakening of Finn, but you knew something was going on and it wasn’t a surprise. Rey flying the ship out into space and being caught by Han and Chewbacca wasn’t a twist. There was a storyline as to why they were there, which worked. The Rathtars in this Han Solo thing were pretty kick ass. Made me think of how an Eye of the Beholder from Dungeon and Dragons would look in real life. Still, it wasn’t a twist in the plot that amounted to anything. Also, Kylo Ren started out the movie super kickass and scary Sith that made Luke Skywalker look like a child playing with the force, but almost immediately turns into a whiny Emo wannabe Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
     Overall the storyline itself and the feeling of desperation was very vanilla. The producer was trying to get that New Hope first Star War’s movie feel, while mixing in the emotional intensity of the Return of the Jedi and not really catching either feeling. There just wasn’t that fear of annihilation from the original Star War and the destruction of the Death Star. More importantly there wasn’t any amazing twist that changed the whole storyline that made sense once you saw it and made you say Wow. It was like they were trying to force too much into one story.
     Now don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the movie. I immensely enjoyed the new Star War’s film. Still the negatives were major enough that it made me think seriously over Destiny’s storyline to make sure I didn’t make the same mistakes. Thankfully so far I am happy with the plot twists and the ending, although I’m still waiting to read through the whole flow of the story to make sure everything is just right.
     Still, being in Germany during Christmas time is not all about Star Wars. Normally it’s about Christmas Markets. Every town in Germany has a Christmas Market and Germans love to go to their local city’s or village’s market throughout the week. Usually vendors come in with these prefab timber shops that they put up to sell their wares, carnival food and warm alcoholic drinks. Usually the drinks are gluhwein, which is a mulled wine served hot. To be honest, it’s not my favorite drink. Thankfully now-a-days they have two other choices: apple juice served warm with a shot of amaretto or a Bailey’s coffee. Being the non-drinking I am, one apple juice with a shot of amaretto is more than enough for me and even better it tastes good.
     The other thing that the Christmas Markets are known for is their carnival food. Different in many way then what is typical for the USA. The core essential food for any Christmas Market is bratwurst on a round bun with mustard. Germans just love their bratwursts, that and their roasted fried almonds. There are some other fun foods like handmade doughnut and a flat bread like pizza covered with cream, bacon bits and onions, which I like best. Lastly there is all of the vendors selling all kinds of hand crafts like any other carnival. All in all fun stuff, except for one thing. They do these markets in the middle of winter, outside and without any heaters to keep you warm. The only thing warm you have is the gluhwein. Frustrating when you’re from Florida. I’ve never been one for standing outside and freezing to death, while eating and drinking. Unfortunately I seem to be the only one of this mindset. Thankfully this year has been unusually warm and my annual visit to the Christmas Markets was actually pretty enjoyable.
     A quick update on my sick boy Kanchen is that the surgery came out okay. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do, except trim back the tumor so that his head doesn’t feel like it’s trying to split open from the pressure. The doctors are doing a biopsy, but it’s really only to see which type of cancer we are dealing with. Hopefully the surgery will give him some more time without severe pain. I spent the day watching over him and working on Destiny. Yesterday during the surgery I ended up reading a new book from Elliot Kay called “Life in Shadows” http://www.amazon.com/Life-Shadows-Elliott-Kay-ebook/dp/B018VBMPTI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1450908392&sr=1-1&keywords=elliott+kay The awesome part of the book is that it’s in the Good Intention’s universe, which I absolutely love. I don’t know how Elliot managed to get the book out while working on his published series Poor Man’s Flight, but somehow he managed to squeeze it out. My hat off to your Mr. Kay! If you get a chance check it out and leave a good review. It’s the only way we’ll motivate him to keep the series going.
     For those of you who keep up with my web site, you know I ran into Elliot Kay by accident. A fan of mine who I’ve become friends with directed me to check out the Good Intention Series, which I just loved. Henceforth that lead into reading all of Elliot’s other books and keeping up with his personal story somewhat. It was awesome to hear that he was picked up by a Publishing company for his Poor Man’s Fight series.
     I try to work on my own writing style a lot by checking out Elliot Kay’s writing and John Conroe’s. Both writers have become two of my favorite authors to keep up with. John Conroe’s God Hammer series is a great example of an overpowered hero that still struggles against overwhelming odds. There is so much to learn from both writers style. For now there is not much I can do but keep writing and getting my content out. Only in that way can I be a writer that does this as their primary job. Making it to that point would be a dream come true.  
     Anyway, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays. I celebrate Christmas, but it’s the Santa Clause and Christmas Tree style of the holiday and the idea of giving flavor. For me, the idea of giving and sharing is very important during this time of year. The way I tend to do this is by baking cookies and sharing them out with people I care about. This year I did eight batches of cookies and five different types: traditional chocolate chips, oatmeal peanut butter chip cranberry, oatmeal banana raisin, oatmeal peanut butter and crushed walnuts and straight peanut butter drop Hershey chocolate kiss cookies. Europeans love the American style cookies and they are a great hit. Best part is I get to share and give in the gift of giving and the ideal of “paying it forward” that I love so much. Christmas Eve will be a Polish style dinner that my wife likes to make. Thankfully I’m off the hook this year for baking a twenty-two pound turkey with all of the sides. We only do that when family is visiting. Everyone always finds it crazy to have such a humongous bird on the table and all of the American style sides makes my wife family think of the American Christmas shows that they see on TV. Fun stuff all around. The best present I have this year is time off with my family and seeing Kanchen feeling much better. He still hurts, but he’s obviously is in less pain after the partial removal of the tumor.
     I hope everyone’s holiday is wonderful and spent with people that you love and cherish.  

     Unfortunately, this is something that I’ve heard going on almost two months now, since one of my black babies have needed several emergency surgeries. It all started in November with a blown ACL for my Kanchen. After his knee surgery there was an abscessed tooth with complications. Just before Christmas we discovered he might have a malignant tumor in his nose that’s eating its way back into his skull, so again we’re trying to do what we can to get him healed up as much as possible and keep his pain in check.
     Even though Kanchen and his brother Rowen are both around nine years old (something like forty in dog years), they will always be my babies plain and simple. They’re both wickedly smart. I always think of them as being around six to eight years old mentally in their human understanding of things. They both traveled with me from Florida to Germany and have been traipsing around Europe with me on my travels, so much so that they even have their own passports.
     For those of you who are pet owners you know how much your dogs can mean to you and your family. For those of you who are not pet owners or who do not have kids, it’s probably something that sounds crazy. For me, they are just as important as any family member. More so in many ways, but that’s coming from someone who’s never have had much in the way of family. I had to laugh because one of my co-workers was talking about the death of his hound being more terrible then that of some of his family members dying. It was a perspective that I could readily understand.
     Anyway, when I found out how sick Kanchen was it kind of knocked me off my feet Tuesday and Wednesday evening. I didn’t get much done in the way of editing Destiny, but slowly I’ve been getting back in the swing of things once again. Tuesday we’ll find out if the tumor is malignant or not, so to keep my mind busy and to not think about everything too much I downloaded Elliot Kay’s books Poor Man’s Fight & Rich Man’s War and read them both. You can find the first book of the series here: http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Mans-Fight-Book-ebook/dp/B00RH1NV4M/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1450542538&sr=1-6&keywords=elliott+kay  It’s a good series btw and was just what I needed at the time to get my mind off of everything. I really enjoyed the basic training in book one. It brought back memories of my own time in the Army.   
     Tuesday my Christmas vacation starts. I’ll be at the vet for Kanchen’s surgery for most of the day, but I’ll be home editing and sitting with him Tuesday afterwards and probably most of Wednesday as he’s recovering, while finishing up the first run through of Destiny. My first check is mostly the story’s flow. Although I’m checking sentence structure and spelling too on this first run through, it’s not my focus. That will be the second check I run using an app from Grammarly.com. Then I’ll be passing it out to people to help me correct mistakes I’ve missed and let me know what they think of the story. Once that’s finished, I’ll run it by a couple of fans who’ve expressed interest in being beta readers and who really enjoyed the series. After making the corrections that people have found, I’ll release the story.
     The only major pain in the ass thing I need to also finish up is the back cover. Something that seems like it would be simple, but it’s really not. The back cover to your book, if done properly, is quite the work of art. It’s your main advertisement to get people to check out your story. I’ll go into the how more once I’m working on getting Destiny’s finished.
     I’ve included some pictures of Kanchen below for those of you who are interested. I’ll talk more about Christmas in Germany in next week’s post. For now I hope everyone has a great weekend.   

​This week I’m supporting a Science, Technology, Engineering, Math conference for my job, which is pretty cool. I love seeing the new technology the kids are working on and it gets me out of the office for a week which is always nice. Checking out the 3D printing and robotics is pretty awesome. It makes me wonder how much better my High School would have been if I’d been able to have options like that for courses to study when growing up. One of the many things I’d love to pick up is serious programming or 3D graphic design skills. Nothing is stopping me except having enough time to squeeze it into my busy schedule, so one day I’m sure I’ll work it in, just not right now.
                During one of the conference breaks I was checking out some of the up and coming movies and ran into the World of Warcraft movie for 2016. I’m not sure what I’d expected story wise. Something like a group of gamers being sucked into their MMO game somehow. I just wasn’t sure how Blizzard was going to approach the storyline. But as always Blizzard kicks ass. Instead of doing what people expected, they just made the story of WarCraft into a movie and it looks freaking awesome. The main human hero is played by Travis Fimmel, who plays Ragnar Lodbrok in Vikings, which I thought was pretty awesome. The hero role fits his looks perfectly. Anyway, I’m supper excited to see the movie and you know they’re going to have the ability to have multiple movies based on their storylines from World of Warcraft, so if this movie is well received we should be seeing a bunch more movies in the same series.
To be honest, so far the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016 is shaping up to be an incredible line of movies that I just can’t wait to see. Some of my favorites are Captain America: Civil War, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and of course Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I also saw another up and coming movie that could be really awesome or suck incredibly, the movie is called Gods of Egypt. Even though I am a huge Egyptian fan in general, I would even have to say the whole “Egypt Theme” has been overplayed throughout the last fifty years of movies. Still I have to say the movie caught my eye. I’ve never seen Egypt pictured like they did in this story, with a battle of the gods. Even cooler is the massive monsters and incredible armor and swords that the gods wear when fighting. The incredible graphics and oversized larger than life monsters alone could make the movie worth seeing. I also included the Deadpool movie in the mix for those hardcore gamers like me. Hopefully all of the good parts aren’t in the trailer. Deadpool is one of those games that either you love or hate, I don’t think there’s much in-between. If they did the story right it could really rock, but either way I have to check out the movie. I was really surprised by the last Captain America movie. I loved how the movie hit many of the current major issues we’re facing today as a society and this new release just looks like it has taken this off the hook. I’m really looking forward for the movie, especially when you know they have crossover heroes like Ant-man in the mix. It’s even better due to the whole Ironman vs Captain America theme coming out at the same time Batman vs Superman is being released, which is another movie I’m jonsin to see. The action and effects just looks awesome. I’m not even going to bother going over my excitement for the new Star Wars movie. I mean seriously, what Sci-Fi freak isn’t excited to see the movie? Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with any of the movies listed, I’ve added them below.
                What can I say, I’m a big fan of powerful heroes fighting against massive oversized evil monsters. When a movie can pull off a great storyline and graphics with both of my beloved stereotypes then I couldn’t be happier, which reminds me of a new book series I’ve just been reading. A friend of my introduced me to John Conroe’s The Demon Accords series, which I absolutely love. Unfortunately, even though John is pushing out novels at a high rate of speed, I still end up having to wait too long for his next book to come out. Same problem with the other writers of the same style that I love to read, like: Richard Raley’s The Foul Mouth, Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files and Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, so I was really excited when I accidentally ran into William E. Brown’s Daniel Black series. I’m just like a kid with a new toy and read three books in three days. By the time I’d finished the last book I was happy and sad that there wasn’t a number four out yet, since I needed a day or two to recover from staying up late reading. If you get a chance definitely check the Daniel Back Series out.  
                I hope that I manage to achieve this same fervor with my own books. From the reviews I’ve received I feel like I’m hitting the storyline right, but I won’t know for sure until I can get Destiny out and see what everyone thinks. I’m so excited about the story and sharing it that I can’t stand it. I did try to put in a little more meat into the storyline, which slowed down some of my balls-to-the-wall action. Still, I believe I’ve kept the action moving fast enough to make everyone happy.
                Anyway, I’m getting lots of time to work on my editing this week. I’m already nearly half way through the manuscript! For now, back to my editing. Hope everyone has a great weekend.   

​     Being an avid fanboy of Sci-Fi/Fantasy in general and a huge gamer for most of my life, the concepts of armor styles, clothing, culture and the reasons behind “why” the characters wear what they wear and act the way they do are very important to me. The stories I grew up with at that time dealt with serious adult themes and moral issues that marked me for life. Movies like the Ralph Bakeshi’s Lord of the Rings Series and Wizards animated movies and even the Saturday morning cartoons I watched had solid stories to them with complete worlds. Cartoon shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, The Herculoids and the ThunderCats, the artwork of Dungeons and Dragons, reading novels like Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity and Xanth Series, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars Series, Jack L. Chalker’s Well World Series, Joel Rosenberg’s The Guardian of the Flame Series, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Series are many of the formative influences that inflamed my love for the genre in my formative years. The heroes, heroines and species that were in these stories varied greatly in their physical appearance and equipment. Some were heavily armored, while others had light to no armor, but it all made sense in regards to the world/universe that they lived in and to the overall storyline.
     Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons. I always wanted to play the campaigns and bought them just to read the stories, but at that time finding other geeks wasn’t so easy. Whoever they were they had to be in range of my bicycle. Also my family, like many adults at that time, thought Dungeons and Dragons was “Satin’s Game”. Sounds crazy now-a-days, but it was a serious concern at the time. Dr. Demento did a great spoof mocking this insanity to break people out of their idiocy at the time. Really, they were just the previews of the modern LAN party. That’s because any “gaming party” or “LAN party” or all night “MMO bender” was always fueled with high caffeinated soda like Jolt Cola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Cola or Bawls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bawls and pizza.
     When I think back to that time, it’s sad to think that playing board games like Risk with total world domination was acceptable, but playing anything with a fantasy theme was considered evil. It makes you question the morality of society at that time, although in reality it was just ignorant people afraid of things they didn’t understand and weren’t interested in understanding. Although I like this graphic rendition better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0 I’ve put the full skit down below, because it has the full skit with the “Den of Satan” intro.

     Growing up as a kid, I never thought about the female heroines in the books, cartoons and movies I watched as being weak or men being super, I never questioned the armor or lack thereof. I just loved the action, the characters and the morality of the stories. I never looked at the female characters in the “Dungeon and Dragons Cartoon” as being oversexualized weak females. Sheila and Diana were strong characters that spoke their mind and fought smartly. In “The Herculoids”, Tara was a woman to be reckoned with who didn’t shirk from a fight and was beautiful to boot. Even in “Thundarr the Barbarian” where wielding a Lightsaber came into vogue before there was ever a Star Wars, there was the main female lead named Princess Ariel who was kick ass and was highly intelligent. Lastly, at least for this blog’s list is Cheetara from the ThunderCats who was an incredible warrior and priestess who was her own woman. For me, these female characters had a major effect on me, drawing me towards strong females in my adult life. For those of you who don’t know the comics or want to reminiscent, I’ve added the trailers to the shows below.
     Between all of these different Sci-Fi and Fantasy influences, I have a twisted perspective on armor styles to a certain extent. D&D basic was my first influence on fantasy art. David C. Sutherland III’s artwork was flashy and cool with fit characters, but it wasn’t the overtly sexualized artwork that you see in modern day MMO’s. I especially loved the iconic character artwork for Morgan Ironwolf. Where did you think Startüm Ironwolf got his last name from? Here are some of the links to the artwork from that time, although basic there is a certain flare to the images: 

​and most especially iconic Morgan Ironwolf

​     ElfQuest was an especially a favorite animation cartoon for me. The story of how Elves combined their lives with wolves to become a new species to survive a savage world explained the Elves clothing style and barbarian. Like any fan I loved the relationship that the Elves shared with their wild wolf companions.

​     This story concept was used in different ways. I loved how in the Dungeons and Dragons Endless Quest book “Return to Brookmere” the story used giant weasels in the story line. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/878980.Return_to_Brookmere I never forgot the story even as I got older. I actually even re-read the story to get a feel for how Return to Brookmere flowed to an extent.
     In many ways the Wild Elves of Irlendria are flavored with many of these traits. The link Argus and Enelya share, the culture of the Wild Elf tribe that was influenced by all of these things, but with my own twist. When I was first developing the clothing and style I found a picture that in many ways exemplified my visual conception of the Wild Elves within my story here: 

​     The recent love/hate relationship modern gamers have with the over-feminization of female characters is new to the genre to a certain extent. I’m not saying that female armor was not oversexualized prior to this, but I think female armor has moved to a level of overt sexual appeal that was before not common to the genre in general and one that I am of two minds about. On the one hand, I have played with many female gamers and know they love to have their character look “HOT” and like sexy armor to a point. Usually until the armor between male and female characters begin to look something like this.

​     While visually pleasing to the eye for many of us guys, I can understand the negative feedback that questions the total impracticality of the armor. To a point, having physically fit female characters makes total sense, so that part of the character design doesn’t bother me. I mean, if you’re adventuring and fighting all of the time, you’re going to be physically fit and muscle mass is reasonably different between the sexes. I think my biggest complaint with the MMO’s move in the direction of skimpy armor for their female characters is the lack of reasoning for its existence within the game’s universe. What is the reason that a female player’s skimpy armor is just as effective as a male player’s total body covering armor? It normally doesn’t make any sense. This lack of following the MMO’s universe’s rules is what I think is so upsetting to a lot of players. Well, besides the fact that the game designers are dressing their female avatars like willowy stripers. I enjoyed Gnoggin’s video discussion on this issue.

​     Here are some of my favorite spoofs on this negative skimpy armor themes. 

     When I was creating my universe this whole concept of armor and reasoning was something that I had to sit down and contemplate. On one side, I wanted some of my characters to be sexy and skimpily clad, while other characters I wanted to be fully armored. What would be the reasoning for this? What would make sense to have this in my storyline? After a lot of thought, I addressed this on three different levels.
     The first was designing my sorcerers/sorceresses and wizards to pull their magic power in through their skin. The more exposed skin they had, the faster they could draw in their magic power to store their mana pool. Another point on power intake rule is that it differs for Paladins and Clerics due to the fact that their power is derived from a “holy” nature. This gave me an excellent reasoning and a beautiful opening to have fun with some of my special characters within the story.
     The second part to the rules within my universe was the incorporation of rune tattoos into the skin that can be used for protection. This “powered tattoo option” gives me a lot of flexibility for my magic welders to show more skin for their magical absorption, while still having an option to protect themselves in battle to a point. Albeit, this protection is not as effective as fully armored warriors with powered runes inscribed into their armor, still the main important thing for me was to follow the rules of my universe and have the skimpy armor worn for a reason.
     The third level I address this difference in armor was culturally. My Centaurs are similar to American Plains Indians/preverbal barbarians. While they use armor to a point, culturally they are not inclined to use much armor in general. This also includes clothing. The Centaurs in my universe are not concerned with nudity. The items they wear are for carrying weapons and equipment and not for modesties sake. On the other hand, the Minotaurs within my storyline wear heavy armor for protection and clothing, because it’s socially expected within their society. Having this “reasoning” was extremely important for me in creating my universe and the various races within the world of Irlendria.  
     Anyway, just to give everyone and update on my progress. The editing is coming along great for Destiny. I haven’t gone back over the story until now, which was something I purposely intended to do. This is because the longer it’s been since I’ve read the story, the easier it is for me to evaluate my writing and find my errors. While I like Flight’s storyline, now-a-days when I go back over my writing I now find areas that I’m not happy with even though I love the storyline itself. I see where I could have done better. This is something I want to try to clean up once I’ve passed on my editing corrections to my friends who are helping to clean up the book, before I publish Destiny. The cool thing is I’m not seeing this now that I’m going back over the words for Destiny. Instead I keep thinking to myself, “Damn this is good!”
     Like I said earlier, I have a lot of stuff I wanted to put out and talk about, but just didn’t have time. I did have to take an evening away from editing to get the post out, but this whole discussion over the universe and characters styles and clothing was pretty fun for me to talk about. For now that’s my update, I hope everyone has a great weekend.

​Editing is always an interesting process. All of your mistakes you’ve made over the entire time of the project get brought into the light of day. Things that sounded like a good idea two years ago are now really bad ideas that you have to correct. Like for example the idea I had to shorten up my paragraphs to give the text a faster reading to increase the speed of the story.
When I read the article on editing, it sounded like a great idea and probably has some truth to it even now, but you need to be really careful on how you implement this into your own writing. I did this for something like the first twenty or so chapters. Now I need to go back over what I did and make sure I didn't chop it up too much. I am trying to be aware of how I build paragraph structures, which is all part of this shorten paragraph concept. I’ll have to now closely re-read the story while I’m doing my corrections to get the full thoughts re-aligned once again as they should be. It’s just something else that I have to focus on along while I’m doing all of my other editing.
I think for any Indie Writer, the best thing you can do is take the lead from the genre of authors that you yourself love and enjoy reading. I take most of my guidance for things like this from my favorite authors like Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, Richard Raley and John Conroe. I observe how they structure their paragraphs; I study how they do their transitions within their stories. Then I try to incorporate those concepts in my own work.
Most importantly, I try to be brutally honest with myself. If something isn’t right or needs work, I accept the criticism and do my best to learn from it. I know I am not perfect. I know that my writing is something I’m teaching myself and that it will be something that gets better with time.
One of the hardest things to get as a writer to get is true criticism from your friends. As a writer, our human nature wants to make excuses for the negative things we might hear about our book. As a friend, we don’t want to hurt our friendship by telling our friend the truth, especially when we know it will hurt our friend or cause a schism in our relationship. It takes effort as a writer to have your friends trust in you enough to tell you the truth of what they really think about your story. The pluses, the minuses and everywhere they think could use some improvement. Then it is up to us, the writer, to take everything we have heard and decide what is good for us to use, what we need to discard and what we need to tweak. Criticism is never easy to take, but I would rather hear this from my friends who are trying to help me improve my story. Because once you publish your story, the readers and critics that read your work aren't going to be gentle and understanding to your mistakes. No, whether or not that they picked up your book free or paid in cash, they're going to compare your story to the current greatest hits on the market. Some will give you the brutal truth, good or bad, while others will simply bash you just because your an Indie writer. 
                I’m adding another trailer of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Opening Cinematic. If you check this out it won’t give you any spoilers like last week’s trailer would have gone. One of the best parts that I love about this trailer is when the two High Templars merge during the battle into an Archon (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Archon). For the Protoss, this transformation is when two High Templars give their lives to form one Supreme Being. In the game, the unit would always transform and immediately say “Power Overwhelming!” in this energy-infused deep voice. Always freaking awesome! In the trailer, Blizzard brings the Archon to life with that same pizzazz.

​I try to bring this same feeling of over the top powerful warriors into my stories whenever I can. It fits beautifully with the whole Werewolf/Paladin concept I have going on in the series. Now I have a Minotaur Species that I’ve brought into the storyline for book two. The species is just as physically overwhelming as you’d imagine a real life Minotaur would be. I also added the whole StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Opening Cinematic for those of you who don’t know the game. I really love the whole StarCraft series. The artwork, the game, the different species, their abilities and the whole storyline is amazing. It’s just so awesome.

​(Content Warning: For those of you not interested in computer gaming and MMOGS, the next several paragraphs are for gamers who enjoy talking about gaming. The subject: Why is WoW dying?)
               
For all of my life I have been a huge fan of anything Sci-Fi/Fantasy and a gamer. For computer games it didn’t matter if it was FPS, Real-Time Strategy or MMOGS, I loved them all. Even now when I find myself too busy to actually find time to play, I still keep up with my favorite video game and my eyes peeled for new titles coming out all the time. Besides helping with ideas for writing, they also just inflame my imagination.
                Unfortunately, over the years I’ve noticed that I’ve found myself less drawn to actually playing computer games for the most part. While part of that is due to a general lack of time and my past history of being a Guild Leader for Black Rook Hold on World of Warcraft’s Llane server and going through a major breakup with my then girlfriend/co-Guild Leader, I’ve come to realize that there is more to my lack of interest in playing MMOGS then just the baggage. I ran into two interesting videos that had some good points on this, which you can watch below. While SignsOfKelani makes some good points in the videos, I disagree with his overall premise to a point.

          While I’m going to say “Blizzard”, I really believe that many of these points could be said for most MMOGS that have been out for the last ten years. Like other MMOGS, Blizzard has tried to respond to the gaming community’s wants and desires to make everyone happy, but in striving to make every type of gamer happy they have ruined the general playability of WoW for the long term. The problem I believe is a general “dumbing down/making the game easier and quicker” then anything else.
          The first big change that I’ve seen hurt many MMOGS is making the game easier to level high level characters. Blizzard is not the first to do this. The first MMOG I ever played was Anarchy Online. Yea … yea, I’m sure you’re surprised it wasn’t EverQuest. It would have been EverQuest if I had a good enough internet connection to play the game at the time. I didn’t, so I hosted LAN parties until my first DSL connection. Anyway, previously Anarchy Online made you save your experience between missions (aka: dungeons). Meaning, if you were in a dungeon and died, you lost all of your experience points gained for the next level. This seems like a horrible idea to the casual gamer, but in actuality it made a lot of sense for the long playability of the game itself. Players didn’t get up to high levels without knowing how to play their class or without knowing how to play with other people in the game world. SignsOfKelani argues that gamers are much more experienced in the mechanics of gaming, while true to a point. Mashing buttons and bum rushing your enemy isn't the strategy of playing your character and working within your team to overcome your enemies. A player's character itself had a certain amount of reputation on the server. Also, if you were an annoying unsociable little shit that couldn’t play well with others; you didn’t level until you learned the above. When you saw a high level character, you knew that person had worked to get that character up to a high level and knew how to play. When they took this away, the game completely changed and not for the better. Over night teams became obnoxious events that made playing with unknown strangers anything but enjoyable. To be honest, I don’t think Anarchy Online ever recovered from their decision to do this. Blizzard over the years has done this in a different way. They have made the games focus on the end game content only and have made it very easy for players to quickly level up a new character and bypass the main content of the World of Warcraft. Although Blizzad’s take on this was different than Anarchy Online, the same comparisons can be made to an extent and also leads into my next point.
          The second big issue is making looking for groups, dungeons, raids and teams easier has created a host of secondary problems. Previously you could follow a storyline for a series of quests that lead to unlocking major game events or you could simply run to the dungeon by exploration and get a certain amount of quests completed. While this might be considered annoying to people who just want to level their character up because their friends are high level, it really is a disservice to the world itself . Just leveling up a character and bypassing this content means these players are missing a huge part of the game and what makes playing an MMOG enjoyable in the first place (Aka the social aspect and the world itself). If these are new players, they are going to get their fix by joining their friends for a quick few games and then leaving the MMOG. They’re not really there for the game itself or for any longevity. Changing the entire world to fit their fleeting gaming habits means you’re removing the playability to your entire player base to a point. The whole looking for groups, dungeons, raids and teams where you’re transported directly to the dungeon automatically is also removing the MMOG’s playable content. No longer do you need to take the time to form relationships with other gamers, ask people how to find the dungeon, explorer the world or learn how to form teams on your own. For the sake of convenience and to speed leveling up your character quickly, you can do this on the fly. All for the sake of getting to the “End Game”, while bypassing again everything that makes a social MMOG worth playing.
          Lastly, games have specialized content for a reason, to give a player something to look forward to and work for. There has been this huge push to make the “End Game” easier for every player, casual/hardcore, to be able to experience the game content easily and quickly, but in doing so the game is over quickly. There is not striving to get through those specialized areas. The casual gamer is angry because to get to these areas takes so much hard work in learning their characters and getting a group of friends together to go through the content that they want it made easier, while the hardcore gamer want to be able to hit this harder content in a challenging way and be considered special for being able to do these difficult dungeons.
          In truth, I think having these specialized areas are essential to MMOGS. Having something to strive to attain makes the earning it so much better. Makes these world events on par with a normal dungeon is like being given a first place trophy for something you’ve never accomplished. What meaning does that have for you if it was just given to you when you didn’t truly earn the accomplishment? I think high content within MMOGS should be similar. When the game designers just hand it to you without any effort, then the desire to strive for it is no longer there. This is why I think many of the MMOGS are struggling to hold onto any type of character base. WoW still has so many because the game is so good, but even they are beginning to loose players in unbelievable numbers.
          I think that’s enough of my gaming philosophy on MMORG for now. I hope I didn’t bore any of you non-gamers out of your mind. Anyway, for now I’m working my butt of getting Destiny cleaned up and ready to publish. Also, I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

I can’t even begin to describe the feeling I get when I finally write “The End”. It’s just incredible. What makes it even better is to know that I’ve written the story that I wanted to write. It doesn’t matter that the book is almost twice the size of Flight. What matters is that it’s the full story I wanted to tell. The only down side is that now I have to edit the story, which is always an eye-bleeding process. Still, every time I get better and faster.
There are several close friends that have offered/volunteered to help edit the story with me and a handful of fans that are interested in giving me their pre-publishing thoughts on the overall story. Expect to be hearing from me soon. I’ve already warned my friends Patrick, Deanna and Leslie. I’m really excited to get their feedback.
About halfway through the book I just went silent and stopped sharing out my rough storyline with my friends. Not because anyone disliked the story, actually the feedback I’d been getting was awesome. No, it was because I really wanted the entire story to be read fresh. I wanted to give my friends a clean, sharp, nearly finished piece of work. Although it helps to be able to read the entire story through from start to finish to get proper feel of the story in its entirety; the other reason was to assist in the entire editing process. You can only read a story through so many times before you stop reading the words and mentally start replacing the mistakes as you read.    
When I wrote my first book, Flight my friends like Patrick and Deanna really help give me the confidence to go through the entire process and let me know my story was a good, fun read. With Destiny, I didn’t need that constant handholding. Now that I know I can write, I focused on creating the best story I could. I can’t wait to get it out and share it with everyone!
Also, I plan to start blogging again now that I’ve gotten the rough draft finished. Who knows, maybe I’ll even do some videos on my Youtube channel. With everything that’s been going, I’ve had to focus on the priorities of work, family and writing first. Unfortunately, that meant blog updates took a backseat until things settled down.
Things are always happening in my life. I rarely get a chance to sit back and catch a breath, but then again I’ve never been one to just sit back and let life pass me by. I always try to remember the feeling of “Being Hungry”. That might sound like an odd statement, but it’s a feeling that I used to live with on a daily basis. Born into an abusive, dirt poor home, I grew up hungry. I grew up trying to be better than the situation I was born into. Sci-Fi/Fantasy, books and movies, I grew up with larger than life heroes and heroines who strove against incredible odds to overcome the evil they faced.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, except that I loved the stories, but as I’ve gotten older I see how those stories have affected my perspective on life. Whatever I need to do, I just do it. I don’t worry about the odds, I don’t worry if people say it’s impossible or there’s no way I can do something. Instead I find a way to make it happen.
The “Being Hungry” thing is something that I realized just recently. I was talking to my friend Domenic back in Florida one day and said to him. I try to stay hungry. If I eat too much in the evenings, I get feeling fat and happy, which means I’m less productive in following my goals. Whatever those might be at the time. Instead, I try to eat less to give me that feeling from when I was young. That needing to do whatever it takes to reach the goal I’m striving for. When I say “do whatever it takes”, I don’t mean being dishonorable. I mean, learn, do or work at whatever I need to reach my next goal.
The funny thing today is that I just had a work colleague send me an interesting video after we were on the topic of working hard and getting things done. Now what he sent me was the video: "Excuses Are For Bitches". Although the language is quite strong, it’s hits the problem most of us has faced at one time or another head-on. The funny part for me came once the video ended and I the follow-up video started playing. This was from Les Brown and his motivational speech, “You’ve gotta be hungry” video. I’ve added both below. If you don’t like a bunch of swearing or hearing it straight, you won’t want to click on the video “Excuses Are For Bitches”, but definitely check out the Les Brown video. It’ll send chills down your spine and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t get into that kind of stuff usually.

​On a side note, I just ran into a music video that I just love. I ran into the song when I was driving my wife’s car. She likes to take out my music and put hers in instead. While I’m usually more into alternative or industrial generally, I do listen to a lot of different types of music. When I like a song, I usually have to look up the video. But when I checked out the video, it just made me laugh. Don’t get me wrong, the ladies are beautiful and I love the eyes of the lead singer, but the video is like an 80’s throwback, which just makes me love it all that much more. What draws me to the song itself is the driving need that underlays the whole song. Anyway, the title is “Pray to God” by Calvin Harris. 

​I’ve got a bunch more youtube videos, books and anime movies and I want to talk about and share, but I’ll save that for the next blog. Especially the whole new StarCraft2 Legacy of the Void that was just released, which I’ll link here too. Hope everyone has a great Friday. 

​The last time I touched base with everyone I’d just finished dealing with having our house flooded for two hours with a river of mud before leaving on vacation. That’s quite the odd way to have a vacation start. I’d planned on having a week and a half to relax at home and get some writing in before our trip, but instead the whole time before we left we worked until we dropped from exhaustion. While that was rough and difficult to deal with, at least I was off of work and had the time to deal with the disaster. Coming back from vacation and heading straight back to office meant that every free moment I had was spent fixing the floors, moving furniture, repainting and etc … etc. It took over a month to get my daughter’s room back together so she could stop sleeping in the living room. Last weekend was the first weekend that things were back to normal and of course that meant coming down with a viral flue for a week. I’m usually not sick and not especially for a week at a time, but maybe it was my body’s way of making me rest after having so many emergencies and things going on at once. It did give me a chance to get some good writing time in, even if I had to take naps in-between. Anyway, I’ve added some picture and video fun for those of you who are interested in seeing what happened, check out the video below. The water coming in from the window is before it got bad. At one point my wife and her nephew were both holding the window closed, while icy cold water shot out from the edges with the strength of a fire hose! Oh, and the white under all the brown is the white tile floor.   

​Surprisingly enough, even with everything going on I was able to get a lot of good writing time in. It looks like I’ll probably be hitting 750 pages by the time I finish this final battle scene. Partly that’s because I had to add to the story to get some people into position, while the other part consisted of getting all the different elements into play. I was watching some Transformer’s 1 and 2 for idea of how I wanted to finish up the final battle scene with the Ukkodians working with the Marine and Navy components that make up Task Force 60. I was especially interested in when how the movie did the Scorponok Desert Battle with bringing in the strike groups and the flipping around of action scenes from the different components within the battle. I know, it sounds like a hard thing to fully incorporate into a scene, but I’ve been trying to get that action packed feel with the flavor of the different types of units involved. I think so far I’ve done a good job in putting the scene together and keeping the action popping. I’ve also been watching some Space Marine 40k videos too, since I think of Paladins and Ukkodians as kind of pre-Space Marines to a point. A great idea gather is the video Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine game walk through video. You can check out both videos below. 

​I just hit a point I had to sit down and figure out how I was going to have the human Ukkodians deal with demon warriors. I’ve set the Scourge as being almost too physically strong for even enhanced humans to go toe-to-toe, at least at this time. Don’t get me wrong, enhanced humans can fight against them, they just can’t meet their full strength head-on. If the Scourge are that physically powerful and they are on the lower end of the spectrum of enemies, than how am I supposed to handle demons? Also, whatever answer I come up with must work with the rest of the series’ storyline. Interesting to say the least.
This was my main thought driving home Friday evening. Over the weekend I’ve just been letting my mind work through different permutations of the battle. Today I think I have the basic mechanics worked out, which needs to be solidly in place before I start writing the last scene to finish up the story. The fighting should be pretty interesting with lots of movement and completely different than how the main hero Startüm fights against these creatures. Also it has to bring all of the pieces I have in play together. So far I really like how it’s shaping up.   
At times I wonder if I should release the book in smaller quarter segments for one or two dollars each like I’ve seen some new writers doing. It’s tempting in one way. It would be nice to get the story out sooner and not make people wait so long for the entire book to be finished, but to finish up any story correctly takes a lot of work. To be honest I’d rather spend less time on that process and more time on writing, because my rough draft needs lots and lots of clean up. It’s easier to just go through it at one time, also cheaper since I wouldn’t have to do new book covers each time either. Also, from what I’ve been reading about some of the top writers is that they are not too concerned about writing more before releasing their book. It seems like they’d rather have a great story and end it where they want to then to worry about a predetermined page or word count. The more I think about it for my own story the more it seems like a good idea and basically explains what I’ve been doing with Destiny. I’m just writing the story I want and ending it at the point where I’ve planned this whole time. If there is more details and pieces of the story then I planned on initially, it’s okay. I’m just letting the story tell itself, even if that means I’m writing a longer book than I’d planned initially. If I tried to rush the story, compress it or leave something out, then I wouldn’t be happy with the results, so why not do it right the first time?
I’ll try to keep up my blog posts better as long life gives me the time. Otherwise the blog gets set to the side as I focus on work, life and keeping the story going. Don’t worry, it’ll be worth the wait. You’ll end up getting two stories for the price of one, even with me pushing some stuff out until book three. Also I’ve added in a couple of our vacation pics from Monte Carlo and France. We ended up driving back through France on our trip back home instead of driving through Monte Carlo, Italy, Milano, Switzerland and then Germany. It would have been cooler to drive the second route, especially since I’m a Civilization V player who has had to takeover Milano in most of my games. What?!? It’s the best way for me to get them to produce the units I want for domination wins. Only a gamer would compare driving through Europe to a Civilization V game. 

I keep on trying to get back into the practice of updating my blog on a regular basis, but every time I turn around something major is happening.

Just before I started my vacation, I found out that Teksyndicate is doing a European Tour. I was getting ready to grill when a friend of mine, Angela, posted on Facebook that Vincent Zain (aka: Ian) was going to be in Germany with his good friend Ward Hale (aka: Logan) and she’d wondered if he’d made plans on visiting me while they were driving through the country on tour. Unfortunately with all of the crazy plans and meeting up with fans from Ward’s website https://teksyndicate.com/, he completely forgot about letting me know when they were going to be in country, so we didn’t get a chance to meet up in Frankfurt when they were on their way to Munich. There was no way I was driving down to Munich Sunday afternoon on a school night … I mean work night. That would have been an eight to ten hour round trip drive for me “IF” there was no traffic and that doesn’t even take into the account hanging out. I would definitely need more time for hanging out with those two since they are still hardcore gamers and metal heads looking to have fun and see the nightlife in Germany. Still, it was a big disappointment.

One of the things that I hate about living in Germany is that I don’t usually get any time to meet up with my old gaming friends. Usually when I head back to Florida I make sure to take some time to visit people one-on-one here and there, but unfortunately there’s no massive LAN party to hang out and BBQ at like old times. Don’t get me wrong, now-a-days I suck ass at playing, but for me it’s no longer about winning. I mean, of course I always want to win and try to win, but it’s not about gaming or winning, but just seeing those good friends I miss. Now for my friends, it might be more about beating my ass, since I was so hardcore to beat in-game when I was into playing.   

Vacation started Thursday when I left work. Even though I had a lot to do, such as picking up my daughter and my wife’s nephew from the airport (a four hour trip), I surprisingly had a chance to get a lot of writing in. The plan was to take a week to relax and pack for our trip and then head to the south of France, but then Monday morning at 2 AM (02:00 for you Europeans) a river of muck decided to take a trip through the bottom portion of our house. Now Tuesday morning (around 00:30) I’ve finally had a chance to get dry and sit down before collapsing.

Coming from Florida, I have a long history with flooding and being declared a disaster zone. My home city of Rosdorf here in Germany would be close to hitting that “disaster zone” level. What I find really odd in comparison between Florida and Germany with flooding is that usually in Florida you get a warning when shit’s about to get bad. In Germany you find out when the shit just hits out of the middle of nowhere. While a lot of rain, a large hill and a farmer’s field might not sound as exciting as a hurricane, surprisingly enough I have learned to have some respect for this combo. It’s amazing how much water can start traveling downhill at once to create a flash flood. My wife sent me up to our backyard (we have a two level house since we live on a hill) and the amount of water I saw waiting to pour into our house made me realize there wasn’t jack I could do to stop it, so instead I came up with a great plan. Open up the back window it was pouring into and the front door. Sounds strange, but there really wasn’t any other choice. The water and mud poured through the house and then things got better. Better is relative. Better meant lots of water damage and a carpet of mud two inches deep, but better than the river that was passing through a moment earlier. Once things calmed down we were able to clean things up. The whole lower level of our house is thrashed and our landlords are going to have some major repairs to do, but it’s clean. Oh, we also found out that the flood insurance we have doesn’t count for natural flooding, only man made flooding. My wife had specifically requested to have full coverage, but the jack who wrote up the policy didn’t add in natural flooding and we missed that point.

Luckily it’s just stuff. The important things, such as our lives and health are good. The other stuff, although upsetting, is just stuff. I’ve lost everything I’ve owned before, this isn’t the first time … more like the fourth … but there is only so much you can do. We are still going to go on vacation. We’d lose too much not going and well staying won’t make things better.    

Story wise tying up this last fight scene is time consuming. I’m not even bothering to worry about word counts or anything like that. I just want the scene written correctly. When of my plans with the Last Paladin Series is to have the story progress somewhat like an MMO’s major dungeon crawl. Each book needs to have a major boss to defeat or deal with that opens up the next book to the series. The “boss experiences” have to be unique and over the top, so I’m trying to come up with a scene that was as cool as the ending climatic fight scene in Flight. At first I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do this adequately, but now that I’m almost completely through the scene I have to say I think I hit it. It’s really sounding good.

Okay, I think that is enough for an update. I need to go collapse in bed. 
I'm adding a link for those of you who are interested in seeing the flooding. The video is in German, but the pictures of the flooding is all the explanation you need. http://www.wetteronline.de/wetter-videos