Last month was crazy, but I’m back writing once again after our quick trip into France to see the Maginot Line. My daughter was sick and my wife didn’t want to leave her at home, but she begged us to go anyway. By the time we made it to Schoenenbourg it was too late to catch the last tour, so we’ll all end up heading there again in the future. I did see some parts of the line and took a picture of the main entrance. Not to mention a cool pre-World War II flier of the whole defensive idea about the line. It’s posted below. I just love the old World War I & II artwork.

About a month ago I came down with something nasty. Between being sick, throwing my workout program into overdrive and work going into overload with projects and work, we’ll let’s just say I’ve been coming home at night and just crashing. Last week things started to get better. I finally recovered from whatever bug hit me, my body finally got adjusted to the intense work out I’ve been putting it through five days a week and have been getting back into the swing of writing regularly. Work has been too tough to do anything but run around with my head chopped off, and when I get home at night all that I want to do is work on Destiny. Unfortunately, that means my blog has been left without my normal updates for a month, but sometimes that’s how life goes. Things should be getting back to normal, so expect regular blog updates once again.

The climatic final scenes in Destiny are huge. This last week I started writing the beginning chapter that goes into the scene and it took me all week to get it straight. I swear I rewrote the intro chapter four times before I felt like it was write. Even so, I still need to tweak pieces of it to get the full feeling I want, but at least the meat and bones are in place. Trying to make sure all of the elements are in place, makes sense, and will work for the following book series is a juggling act. Sometimes I feel like Destiny is a little bit like Game of Thrones for the fact that there are a lot of characters running around in the story. I’ll post a link below from Honest Trailers about the number of characters in Game of Thrones. It’s pretty funny!

I introduced a lot of characters in Flight, but it was easier to follow what was happening because I killed off so many people off in book one. In my mind this was necessary to make the evil truly evil. You have to hate the protagonists in a story. I didn’t want the evil to be just a little bad or annoying, but to be so horrible that you wanted everyone who was a part of it destroyed to make the world a better place and because they deserved it. In book two the evil is still there and I refer to past deeds they’ve done and current actions being taken, also many of the new characters I introduce make it through the story alive, and I don’t go into as much gory detail as book one. Notice I say “as much”. I mean this is a story with swords, guns, Werewolves, Demon Hordes, Minotaurs, a Paladin, Marine Rangers, Navy Seals and more, so you know there’s going to be a lot of action going on, which also means blood and explosions. I’m just keeping out some of the heart wrenching details that were in Flight, like when the Werewolf pups were slaughtered in front of Novastar Ironwolf.

I struggled over how much detail to put in the story about the evil in book one. Was it any more terrible than some of my favorite writers such as R. A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf Trilogy? I’ve run it past my friends and coworkers who are into Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Not people who love horror, but typical readers who share the love of a good story. They didn’t think my dip into the dark side was too much, but said that it fit the overall story quite well. I did get some people who didn’t like the grittiness, because they were expecting something light and airy like the Twilight or Teen Wolf Series. As long as a number of my readers enjoy my story, that’s okay. It all takes different strokes from different folks.

Driving home on Friday I ran into a six hour traffic jam. Yea, I said six hours. Luckily a friend of mine had given me her left over fajitas to take home with me. I ate them while waiting for the accident to clear up. The good news is I was able to take some cool pictures. The best is the Hell energy drink advertisement that I passed plastered to the side of a tractor trailer. I’m still laughing about it. Anyway, I’ve added them below.

Happy Easter, I hope everyone is having a great holiday and taking time to relax with your families. Since no one else came up with a plan for our quick trip for into France for a day, that left me at the helm. HA HA HA! (Picture an evil triumphant laugh here!) Usually my ladies plans revolve around shopping locations and I have to squeeze my tourist activities of historical sites and museums in-between TK Max and other shopping attractions wherever we travel, but this time it’s all me.

Luckily my new place is only about an hour and a half from the border of France, which gives us some neat options for taking day trips. Today I remembered I’ve always wanted to visit the Maginot Line. Fort Schoenenbourg and a cool portion of the Maginot Line is less than two hours away. How cool is that? Here is some links for the location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line and http://www.lignemaginot.com/accueil/indexen.htm

If you’re a gamer like me or into Sci-Fi and Fantasy, then I expect you’ve seen movies like Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa Valley of the Winds or Castle in the Sky. Hayao Miyazaki is right up there with Mamoru Oshii for me. Mamoru Oshii is the creator of the Ghost in the Shell series along with other fine movies. Anyway, a lot of excellent Sci-Fi and Fantasy movies have taken the Maginot Line and made complete worlds from the concept, aka Castle in the Sky.

Just looking at the fortifications and the concepts behind helps one to understand the world at the time they were created. World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, massive mechanization and weapon buildups. It just gets my gears running in my mind!

Anyway, we might not make it today. Everyone in the family is sick, except for me and the boys (aka my dogs), so the trip might get pushed back until Monday. I just hope that doesn’t mean next weekend I’m sick as a dog too. For now I’m going to link Castle in the Sky & Ghost in the Shell down below. If you’ve never seen either of these films then I recommend checking them out. Awesome storylines and some great artwork. Hayao Miyazaki is more like a cool Disney. Masamune Shirow is a famous artist that did most of the work for Ghost in the Shell, and both of my tattoos are based on his work. 

I decided to take a few days off for Spring Break to spend with my family during Spring Break. My wife always takes some vacation time around this time of year so that she’s home with our daughter. I took Friday and Monday off, which gives us enough time to make a few fun side trips. The plan right now is to swing by France and maybe the Black Forest. My daughter wants to go back to Heidelberg, since the weather sucked so bad the first time we visited. It all depends on how the weather holds out. The last two weeks have been crazy. Two weeks ago it was in the seventies with lots of sun and this week has been sleeting rain and in the thirties.

Supposedly Sunday and Monday are supposed to be decent, but today oddly enough has been relatively nice. I really want to check out the Normandy D-Day exhibit http://www.normandy-france.net/D-Day/D-day.htm , but I just don’t know if it’s too far out of our way for a quick day trip from Germany. I’ve always been a fan of World War I & II. If you’ve ever played the Call of Duty 2 series then you’ve experienced the Normandy Beach storyline. The intensity of the invasion scene was scary intense, especially if you’re an old school gamer like me who tends to hike the game settings up to the hardest levels. I think it took me an entire day to finally survive the landing. I almost had to lower the game settings to get through that battle scene. I’m attaching a link to it below from Youtube.com

Even to an ex-soldier like me the scene is unbelievably realistic. It definitely gave me an appreciation for the accomplishment of the invasion like I never had before. Anyway, this will be my first time in France, which is super cool. I’ll be updating my Trip Advisor maps to show my new country. Looking at all of the areas I’ve been around the globe, it’s cool to see where I’ve been. Although I’ve circled the globe several times now, all of my visits so far have been near the same longitude. Sometime I’m going to have to take a trip to a polar cap to spread out my points a little more.

I’ve been working on the final action packed scenes in Destiny and it’s intense. There is so much going on. Of course I’m doing my best to leave several intense cliff hangers for everyone to be bugging me about when the next book to the series is coming out. I keep on going back to the fight scenes and adding in more detail and story to them. I had initially planned to kind of skip through the scenes quickly, but that is proving to not be possible. It really goes better with the storyline I’ve planned out to have the detail, but it’s a lot of work. Every time I look down at my word count there’s several more thousand words added and still so much left to tell before I get to the final scene.

Anyway, for those of you who are free for Spring Break I hope you have a great time off. Do something fun and memorable.