Growing up in Florida, Easter was one of those strange holidays. It was never one of those holidays you had a day off for, but it was pretty widely marketed. Why having a day-off from work makes a holiday more “real” makes no sense, but none the less that is how the day always hit me. While there always a Sunday church day associated with Easter when I was very young, the main memories I have is of the Easter bunny and looking for colored eggs, dressed in my best clothing and getting chocolate. My child mind always struggled with the concept of how eggs, chocolate and a bunny went together. Not that being an adult has changed that confusion, but I do understand the incredible marketing feat the holiday was made into. The days leading up to Easter was filled with coloring eggs, an activity that should have been filled with family fun and togetherness, but wasn’t the case from the family I came from.

When I was older the holiday lost its importance to me, except for the chocolate peanut butter eggs that always came out at that time of the year. In no way is this meant to disrespect those people that look at this holiday as the day Christ rose from the dead, but please understand not all of us hold the same beliefs.

Moving to Europe to be with my wife, the importance of Easter became much more prevalent in my life. Although some of my wife’s family is Catholic (aka Poland), the importance Easter plays in my life is different on two different levels.

For German people, the holiday plays an important religious role and working adults have two days off, while children get two and a half weeks free from school. Not only that, but the small and large cities prepare for an Easter Fire two weeks before the holiday. In the small village I live in of about five hundred homes, the people at this time of year trim all of their trees and bushes before the holiday. Besides playing an important role in keeping the small village looking clean, it always is the fuel used in the massive bonfire that the village does for Easter along with a little festival. I’m including a video from the group Wolfsheim. In the song Blind there are a few of these strange small festivals with tractors and fireworks in a small village. I ran across it on my trek to learn to speak German. Listening to music and watching movies is a good way to speed up your language comprehension skills. When I saw the music video it always made me wonder if Germans actually do strange little festivals like that. The answer I found out is that they do. The bonfire that is prepared for the holiday is currently thirty yards in diameter and about twenty-five feet high in the middle and there is still one more week for the people in my small village to pull more wood to the massive bonfire. Interesting enough, it’s the one time of year Germans are allowed to have a bonfire.

In Poland the villages don’t follow suit with what the Germans do. While for many Polish people it is an extremely important religious day, for my wife’s family it is more about traditional food and family time. Polish people do get as many holidays as the wealthier countries do like France and Germany, but they do get that Monday free from work. It reminds me in many ways of the American Thanksgiving Day. One year I did a traditional Thanksgiving Day Turkey for the holiday. The twenty-one pound bird barely fit in their apartment’s small oven. It was quite the hit and my wife’s sister usually does a Turkey every Easter following my recipe.  

I would kind of like to add something like this into my book series, since religion plays such an important role for many of the societies I’ve created on Irlendria. It could be neat adding in my own twist by “borrowing” ideas from my time in Europe to enhance the story. I’ll just have to see if I can make some great battle fall on a major Minotaur holiday. When I made my Minotaur culture, I had to form their whole society in my mind before writing about them. Although I based them on Romans, they are a different species and from another world, so some of their culture needs to reflect that difference. In my world Minotaurs’ are mostly a rural farming people. They do have large cities, but still culturally they are setup in Clan farming communities. Their God is Akras, based off the Finish God Akhras. They refer to Akras as the “White Goddess” and she is a female. The symbol for Akras is a hand sickle used in their farming, they use the human “peace sign” as a sign for their horned goddess. An idea I had from the numerous rock videos. I’ll probably get zinged again in reviews for using this “horned” symbolism, but whatever. Some people will find insult in anything you do.

Writing, just like anything you want to be good at, takes hard work. Don’t get me wrong, just because something takes a lot of work doesn’t mean it’s not fun. When I was in my twenties I found computer gaming when I was working sixty plus hours a week as a waiter and taking a full time class schedule in college. There was no time in my life to add something more onto my plate, so I nixed out sleep. I’d sleep four to six hours every two or three days a week. I did that for a year and a half to two years. Yea I had a full-fledged addiction going at the time, but even though I was addicted, I was a functional addict. I always took extra shifts at work to make the money I needed to live and pay my bills and kept my grades at a solid 3.8 GPA. Heh, what could I have done if I weren’t working so hard to live? At the time I’m sure many people would have questioned the sanity of choosing to nix out sleep, deeming it an unwise decision on my part. While that might have been true for many different reasons, life has an interesting way of changing your life.

At the time computer gaming and participating in a LAN party took a lot of work. If you were supporting a LAN party you had to learn networking, computer support and the foundations of IPX/SPX and TCP/IP networking, how to setup your own DHCP or STATIC network and even how to lay cable for a network. To play online was even tougher in many ways. There wasn’t any automatic gaming servers and playing over the internet took some skills to get things to work out, even with an amazing program named KALI that came out a few years after I started. Mostly if you weren’t playing at a LAN party, you were playing via modem. You’d think a direct modem connection would be pretty straightforward, but with Windows 95 and peoples issues with computers and compatibility between games and hardware, modems were a nightmare too. Lastly, to play any FPS, your hardware had to be bleeding edge or as close to that higher end gaming system as possible. This need taught you hardware, building your own systems, installing software from scratch and even building servers to host the games so that your own system wasn’t being slowed down hosting the game for so many people.  

Remember, this was my hobby and although it was incredibly fun, it was also a lot of work. At some point in this process I learned that I knew enough to be a system administrator. The funny thing is that I’d started a COTA AS program because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the job was decent money. When I ended up getting my first corporate job it was as a system administrator. When I think back to this now and compare it to what I’m doing to become a writer, it lets me know that I’m on the right track. I might have ended up working over a seventy hour work week, but I did get some good time in writing on Destiny to finish it up. While every time I think I’m closing to finishing up, I suddenly realize that more detail is needed for this last part I’m finishing up. The changes I believe will make the difference between a good story and a great story, and is needed for it to tell the story I want. Even though I want to get it out sooner rather than later, I can’t let it bother me that it’s taking longer than I’d initially planned.  

I was looking up Elliot Kay yesterday to see if he’d released anything about having a new book for his Good Intentions Series and saw he’d been picked up by a professional Publishing company. I sent him a quick congrats. His Rich Man / Poor Man series is rocking. I’m going to have to check it out since he’s not going to have another Good Intention’s book anytime soon. Reading Elliot’s blog and hearing about his hard work and life learning to write reminds me a lot about myself. I have such huge respect for him after he was kind enough to just talk to me about writing and was just a real person. Seeing success like that happen to an Indie Writer is awesome. It’s all about being willing to work hard for your dreams.

Anyway, for those of you who are aspiring writers or are looking to make a change in your life for the better. Hard work goes a long way to making those dreams a reality. Have a great weekend!      

When you’re an Indie Writer it means you’re always trying to write in-between your normal life and regular job. Sometimes you have no problem fitting in your regular writing times, while other times the time you’ve set aside to write is taken away with life’s emergencies. Then you find yourself squeezing in your writing time whenever you have a moment to actually sit down and write. While that is well and good, it can make it difficult to keep your train of thought going. To help with this fact of life, I have learned a few tricks to make sure I can keep on writing.

The first thing I do, beyond my normal outline that I’ve created, is make chapter notes of what I plan to write next. These notes for the current chapter I’m writing and/or the next chapter are very detailed in the sense I understand the flow of the scene, but not to detailed that I basically have written out the story.

The second thing I do is visualize the scenes for the chapter whenever I have a moment to myself. I find driving in the car to and from work is a great time to do this visualization. Also, when I’m running during my gym time, I usually visualize the up and coming scenes. I’m an angry runner, which I find very helpful when I’m working on the point of view of the Werewolves, Minotaurs, or Startüm Ironwolf. I wonder sometimes what my fellow treadmill runners think of me when they look over and see my face set in a snarl as I work out some battle sequence. I mean, I see the looks I get at times when I’m really worked up on a scene, so I’m sure that my face reflects the rage of my characters at times. Thankfully I don’t care what people think of me at the gym, heh.

The last and most important thing I’ve learned to do, is simply to write it out when I feel stuck or not sure of the scene. Sometimes you just can’t see how it’s working until you’ve written everything down on paper. Normally this works out quite well for me and I don’t have to write out the scene again. This first writing doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to get your general thoughts down on paper. Once you have the general scene you can work at tweaking what you have to make it better. I’m doing that now to great effect.

The end scenes in Destiny are super complex. I really need to focus on all of the action going on, but to be honest I haven’t had much time to just sit and work on the scenes without interruption. There is so much going on between the fight scenes, the inter-relationships between the characters and Startüm. I just can’t catch everything going on the first time through, but that’s not a problem. The technique I’ve been using is to go ahead and write the scene the way I see it in my mind. Then while I’m busy throughout the day I think about everything going on in the scene. As I’m picturing everything I will realize there are additional points, characters and other things going on that if I were a reader I would want to have this additional information in the scene. I might or might not make notes throughout the day, but usually I’ll shoot a quick email to myself to remember what I just thought of (very helpful – you think you’ll remember the scene, but once you get home to write the idea is gone … so write it all down). The next time I sit down I tweak the scene filling in those parts I missed and extend the scene out further, repeating this process until it’s finished.   

Anyway, I hope this is helpful for those of you struggling with your own stories. I see so many blog posts about people running into blocks about what to write next. Hopefully this advice helps. For me life is still full of excitement. Work is crossing over into my personal time yet again as I’m responsible for supporting another off-site conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. I’m supposed to head out on Sunday to prepare everything and then work the conference to its end on Thursday. Many of these conferences are just busy even after normal work hours, so I don’t expect I’ll be back into my hotel room until 1900 or 2000 hours. I probably won’t be able to actually sit down and begin writing until 2130 hours, but at least I should get some writing time in.  In one way it’s cool to get out of the office, but on the flip side it still messes with my writing schedule.

On a more personal note. One of the things I greatly enjoy in Europe is the saunas. (A subject whose relevance comes from the hotel I'll be staying at having an European sauna.) Even though I enjoy the saunas here, the varying rules of appropriate dress between the American and the European sides can be somewhat confusing at times. (I partake in both kinds here due to my unique situation in country.) On the European side, clothing is NOT allowed in the sauna. You’ll see people coming up from the sauna and going to the hotel restaurant with only their bath robe on. Some people bring in a towel to cover themselves somewhat, but normally its “naked” event for everyone. The Europeans think it's unhealthy to wear clothing in a sauna and that might very well be true. After being in a sauna "European style", I have to say I prefer it. I'm sure that being from Florida helps to make me more comfortable around skin then it might be for Americans from other states. To be honest, I find it more difficult when I'm on base using the sauna. We Americans can be so funny when it comes to skin, even same-sex skin. On base a lot of people wear clothing, which I find very humorous in same-sexed faculties. Some people are fully dressed, some have a towel, while some are naked or just have their towel laying over bare-bits. I had a lady friend tell me how she was just sitting naked on the bench inside and a woman entered with her daughter and left when they saw her with only her towel laying across her lap. I’m married to a European, so between that and being raised in South Florida I just missing the point.

Anyway, I’ll write more next week. Again sorry for the sporadic posts, but hopefully in two weeks things will get back to being more normal. 

Life is so amazing and so full of surprises, many of which require your complete focus. This is a thought that always comes to my mind when I think on how I live in Europe as an American and find myself speaking German and Polish were I’d never spoken a foreign language before. Not to mention, Germany is a great location, geographically speaking. It is perfectly positioned in the middle of Europe, allowing for easy access to France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Luxemburg, Poland, The Chez Republic, Denmark, Norway and Hungary are just a few hours away by driving or a cheap Ryan Air flight, hell even Turkey, Africa, Romania and Russia are not too far away. It just makes me love my job even that much more. On the flip side, Germany is more like Washington State weather wise, which takes a little getting used to for a Florida boy such as myself.

Anyway, I’ve myself hunting for a new car to replace my dying hoopty that I’ve been driving around with. One of those unexpected emergencies that come up in life, which has also stolen another two weeks away from my writing. Not to mention, Wednesday was my birthday. My family and I didn’t celebrate it really until Saturday. A friend of ours, Dorota, took us out to dinner. Normally I’m not impressed with the Italian food I’ve had in Germany, even though the restaurants are Italian owned, but this one small hole in the wall in my city has the best Italian food I’ve had so far. Tonight I had something I’ve never eaten before, Gnocchi Rossi con Vongole. I’ve added a picture of the plate. Yes I know the picture is Spaghetti Rossi con Vongole, but I ate the food too quickly to take a picture of the special. Although serving in the Army helped my picky eating habits, I still can’t believe what I’m eating now a days. My Polish wife has a lot to do with that, but as I was eating my birthday dinner with fresh squid, mussels, shrimp and clams I could only chuckle. My birthday dessert was a piece of Tiramisu and a coffee latte.    

Even with everything going on, I’ve still managed to sneak in some time to work on the last few chapters of Destiny. My friends are waiting for the rough draft to be completed so they can check out the story and help me get the editing finished up. Trust me, I’m doing the best I can every night. I’d thought these last few chapters were going to be quick, but that’s totally not the case. There is so much action going on battle-wise, relationship-wise and story-wise that it’s taking me longer than I’d initially expected to get everything written correctly. I have ran the story line past two friends of mine, Leslie and Deanna, they both like the direction it’s going and the interpersonal relationships I’ve been working on between the characters. I won’t lie. There are times I want to rush the story through in one way to get the book finished, but I just can’t do that. I’m not going to let the story out until it’s ready.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Luckily my wife is letting me work on the blog over the weekend, since I just didn’t have time to do that Thursday or Friday night. I think that’s because our seasons of Arrow & Flash are on hold, thankfully Gotham & Blacklist is still running.  

I was shocked to hear about Leonard Nimoy’s passing as I headed home Friday night, February 27th, 2015. My first thought was Sci-Fi lost a great hero. My second thought was to think how much Leonard Nimoy’s acting through his character Spock on Star Trek and the many other shows he played in changed my life. Leonard left his mark on multiple generations around the world, inspiring scientists and engineers that made the Sci-Fi of his day a reality that we now live in many ways. Not only in this way did Leonard Nimoy change the worlds, but through his acting with his character Spock he taught the world that intelligence was cool. He wasn’t just the hero to a generation of geeks, but a fighter for his beliefs in feminism and opposition to prejudice.

For me personally his characterization of Spock taught me valuable lessons on life, expanded my mind and pushed me to become a better person. Being a “latch-key kid”, a gamer and a geek, Spock was one of my personal heroes while growing up and affected my life on so many different levels. Leonard Nimoy was in many of the TV shows and movies that were personal favorites of mine and marked generations of hackers, gamers and Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans through shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Mission Impossible, The Twilight Zone, In Search of …, World of the Unexplained Museum, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ancient Mysteries, narrator of Civilization IV and so many more. It sounds crazy that an actor could have had such a major impact on so many lives and generations of people around the world, but none the less it is true.

Leonard Nimoy’s personal message of sharing such as “The miracle is this. The more we share, the more we have” and his work of giving back to the community throughout his life is another sign of his remarkable character.