Exploring France, the aftermath of a natural disaster and of course writing

​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.