Just a quick word of thanks to Theresa and the folks at A Book For All Seasons in Leavenworth, WA yesterday for hosting me for a signing. Met so many fascinating people (and sold a bunch of books!). Enjoyed it so much that I will be back on April 30th for Independent Bookstore Day!
I also want to thank Jessica and the folks at the Wenatchee Public Library for hosting me there as well. Turnout was hampered by the first truly nice Saturday they’ve had in quite a while, but the people who were there were great, and, as I’ve said before, I can talk about about writing for hours if you let me. I think everyone enjoyed it! I’ll have to remember to go back when the snow in blowing next time!
I’d never been to Leavenworth before, and I don’t know that this picture truly does the town justice, but it’s an amazing, quaint piece of Bavaria tucked into the Cascades. Had great weather too, which really helped. Definitely can’t wait to go back and explore more of the town.
Just a quick, final reminder that I will be doing readings / signings of NOWHERE WILD in Leavenworth and Wenatchee today.
I’ll be at A Book For All Seasons starting at 11 AM in Leavenworth and then at the Wenatchee Public Library starting at 2 PM.
Let your friends know I’m coming… more of an informational note than a warning, really. I think they’ll have a good time.
Just a quick reminder that I will be doing readings / signings of NOWHERE WILD in Leavenworth and Wenatchee on March 26th.
I’ll be at A Book For All Seasons starting at 11 AM in Leavenworth and then at the Wenatchee Public Library starting at 2 PM.
Hope to see lots of readers out there!
I finally did it. After seven and a half years of iPhones, I took the leap today and bought myself a new Samsung Galaxy S7 Android phone. For the last 3+ years, I’ve been using an iPhone 5, and I liked it, but I absolutely hated iTunes, and I just didn’t want to have another device tied to that horrible piece of software. When the battery on my iPhone started flaking out (lasting less than 2 hours, and would go from 50% charge to dead battery in 30 seconds), I knew I had to have something new.
I narrowed down my choices to the Galaxy S7 running Android, and the Lumia 950 running Windows 10. I really, really wanted to like the Lumia 950. The specs on the phone itself are pretty amazing—especially the image stabilization for the camera. For someone with shaky hands, that seemed like a killer feature. Unfortunately, from everything I’ve heard, the software on the phone just isn’t there yet. I’m not just talking about the apps in the app store. From what I’ve heard from people I’ve talked to, the OS itself is glitchy, will suddenly kill apps or restart, and has BlueTooth issues. I don’t mind being a beta tester on an app or a platform I’m building, but I can’t justify spending $600 on a phone only to be frustrated by it. (Note, yes I do work for Microsoft, but I have no connection to anyone on the Windows Phone or Windows 10 team. I speak for myself here, and not for Microsoft).
The Galaxy S7 is brand new, but it’s a beefed up version of the S6, and solves a few of the problems its predecessor. It’s water resistant, has expandable memory, and very good resolution on the screen. I actually said ‘Wow!’ when I started viewing pictures people have posted in Facebook with my phone. Compared to the iPhone 5, its like night and day. Screens have come a long way in 4 years.
I also like the virtual keyboard a lot better on the Galaxy than the iPhone. Numbers and letters on the same screen! Incredible! Results in much faster typing for me, especially when entering those dreaded complicated passwords.
The only downside I’ve seen for the S7 itself is that the battery can’t be replaced. Hopefully it lasts 3-4 years before I have to buy a new phone. I use my phone all the time, so if you amortize the cost over time used, it’s probably a better deal than my car.
The S7 did present another problem for me. The case is incredibly slippery, and I could see dropping it a dozen times a day. I bought an Otter Box case to go over it for $45 to solve that issue.
Moving to Android from iOS does have a couple of pitfalls for me and my family. We use iMessage a lot. My daughter has a iTouch she can use to text us when she’s at a friend’s house or after school care (via wifi). My wife and I text each other often as well—who’s picking up the kids, what’s for dinner, etc. With iMessage, that has never cut into our text message quota for our cell phone service. Now, my daughter can’t send me iMessages, and any my wife sends to me will count against our quota. I’m thinking of trying an app like TextPlus or kik to see if that keeps the monthly costs down and all of us in touch. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ve only had the phone for a few hours now, but I’ve already got all the essential apps installed and working, my email accounts set up, and my music ported to Google Play (though I’m not sure I can reach all that music when I’m offline). I was worried that it would take me days to get up and running, but it didn’t. In a couple of days, I’m sure I’ll have everything I ever need. I do have a message on my screen from DirecTv that I can’t get rid of, but hopefully I fix that soon.
I did have the fear that Android would be too difficult to learn to get going. I’m one of the least technical software developers I know. I normally don’t care about hardware. I care about productivity and ease of use. For years, Apple was the gold standard. But getting apps installed on Android was incredibly easy. Maybe even easier than on iPhone.
For those of you into pictures of hardware, here’s a shot of my phones history (minus the old brick phones from the late 90’s). Screens have gotten a lot bigger (and need to be cleaned often as well), and at $600, my phone is now nearly as expensive as my last laptop. Hopefully this new one lasts as long as the previous ones did.
Just a quick reminder to add a note your calendar that I will be at the Renfrew Branch of the Vancouver Public Library this Saturday, March 12 at 2:00 PM. It’s my first book-related event in Canada, and I’m excited to head on up. I’ll be talking about my writing process, doing a reading from Nowhere Wild, taking questions and then selling / signing books.
It looks like the forecast is for lots of rain Saturday, so I can’t think of a better thing to do than to talk books at a library! Hope to see lots of people there!
I made a small proclamation of victory back on the 24th of February on Twitter that I had finished my first draft of the sequel to NOWHERE WILD called NOWHERE HOME.
It was one of those things I couldn’t stop myself from doing, even though I knew I had a lot of work left to do on it. A first draft is just that. It’s just a draft, so I knew that I had a lot of work left to do on it, and it was definitely the first of what I presume to be many drafts before I get to the final version.
But before I could even let anyone else see it, I had to do a pass through edit to find what I call my standard “look-fors”—things I’ve learned to look for and revise or remove. I learned most of these things the hard way by making these mistakes in the past, and having a reader or an editor point them out to me. I keep a list of them in a OneNote document for review. Here’s the list as it stands right now:
- Wrong Em Dash
- And Issues search for “, and [a-z ]@ed *. “
- Weak Verbs (get, got, gotten)
- “There was”
- “It was”
- “There were”
- Third person in internal dialog
- Remove extra em-dashes
- Remove “tried to”, “trying to”
- Ensure “Yes,sir” “No, sir” is lowercased “, Sir.”
- Lowercase “he said”, “she said”
- .” said X (should be ,” said X
- “^13 ” remove extra space at the start of a paragraph
- “^p ” remove extra space after a paragraph
- Toward not towards
- Remove double spaces
- Replace .” ([A-Z][a-z]@) said. With ,” ([A-Z][a-z]@) said.
Along with looking for searchable things like that, I also do a thorough read-through to manually search for passive voice, wasted words (the point has been made, get rid of any subsequent wasted words), word territory issues, formatting issues and general sucky writing.
Anyway, a first draft isn’t done for me until I get all of those steps done.
So today, I finished the real “First Draft” of NOWHERE HOME. I hit it hard this week, wanting to get through it quickly enough to keep the story flow in my head so I could also get a feel for the pacing—something I had a lot of trouble with in the early drafts of NOWHERE WILD. The result? I like this book. A lot. I’m also very tired, and my brain is Jello right now. I need a ten day nap.
I started this book in late August 2015 if I recall correctly, so this one took me about six months to write. I wrote mainly in the mornings for 45-60 minutes before starting work, and then any time I was sitting at one of my kids’ after-school or Saturday practices waiting for them. I wrote in a lounge in my office building. I wrote while sitting on bleachers. I wrote while sitting in the passenger seat of my car in parking lots next to ball fields, and on benches in a Karate Dojo and at a baseball training center. I wrote in the waiting room at the car dealership. And, of course, I wrote late at night in my office. If I had 30 minutes somewhere, I put my headphones in, my glasses on, opened up the laptop, and went to work.
This draft came in right around 94000 words which is about 20000 words longer than NOWHERE WILD, and the last page gave me both goose bumps and tears, so I think that’s pretty awesome for a first draft.
What’s next? Well for this book, it starts the rounds through my beta readers, and will likely sit on my shelf for a couple of months. Then I’ll come back to it with fresh eyes and read it through again, and see what I see.
In the meantime, I may go back to some of my previous, unpublished works, and see if they are worth working on. I may even look at one of the other outlines I had started last year to see if there’s any ‘there’ there. Or maybe there’s another idea that’s been stewing all these months, that will demand to be written. But not tonight.
But I also have a ton of stuff going on in the next two months, and I think my brain could use a little down time. My stack of books to read is still getting taller, so I need to spend some time on that, too. If I could spend a week on a beach in Hawaii, right now would be a really good time for it. I don’t see that happening though, so I’ll use the time wisely to dig out from my backlog of other things that need doing, and figure out what happens next in the Nowhere world.
Hey… that’s not a bad title for a book…. hmmm.
Author Diane Les Becquets was at University Books in Bellevue for a reading tonight and gave those of us in attendance us a wonderful reading from her new book BREAKING WILD, a story of a woman lost in the wilds of Colorado and the female ranger who attempts to find her. When I read the blurb, I thought, this book is right up my alley. She was a delight to listen to and I can’t wait to read her book… which, by the way, is now at the top of the stack I wrote about on Sunday.
She was also nice enough to request a copy of NOWHERE WILD as well… so I guess we’re now the Wild Bunch? Or maybe not. Anyway, here we are:
And oh yes, like I said, I can’t go into a bookstore and buy just one book. I also bought Chris Hadfield’s AN ASTRONAUT”S GUIDE TO LIFE ON EARTH—because Chris and I practically grew up neighbors (well, in the same county), and I‘ve been meaning to get his book for a long time, and it was just sitting there on a shelf, calling out to me…. Bookstores see me coming a mile away.
If I have one vice—an addiction we’ll say—it’s that I can’t walk into a bookstore, or go to a signing, without buying at least one book. A couple of weekends ago, I took my kids down to the local Barnes and Noble to get them a couple of books, and I ended up walking out with four of my own. This wouldn’t be a problem (I can afford book buying binges), except that I don’t really have time to read all the books I buy. Want proof? Here is the current stack of books on my shelf I have purchased/acquired over the years that I have yet to read:
By my count, that’s 22 books on pile. Now I remember a few years ago, on this same blog, doing a similar picture of my to-read shelf, and some of those that were on that shelf, are the same ones as the ones here… the bottom five in particular. I bought Rivers of Fire, and then realized it was the second book in the series, and still haven’t picked up the first. I’ve read part of the Jack London compilation, and I think I was in the middle of it when I got sick, and never returned to it.
Many of the middle of the pack are more recent pickups – the three by Bernard Cornwell and One Year after are the ones I got on my last bookstore trip… and will likely be the ones I read next, because I can’t stop my self from reading Cornwell’s stuff.
The four on the top of the pile are, unfortunately, my problem children. I started reading Catch-22 a while ago, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. I may try it again when I have less going on. And I really want to like Terry Pratchett’s stuff, but it reminds me a lot of Dr. Who, and I (I’ll probably be tarred and feathered for saying this), but I’ve seen 4 episodes of Dr. Who, and I just don’t get it.
So this is the stack of the physical books I have, and that says nothing about the hundreds of books my wife has bought over the last few years on our Kindles that I haven’t started on, or the old boxes of Mercedes Lackey novels and other books my wife has stowed away in closets around the house. I could never buy a book again, and I would never get through the stack of reading I have in queue at my current pace.
So since the former is never going to happen (due to aforementioned addiction), I’m going to have to pick up the latter. I’m not sure how or when… maybe I’ll just have to retire early in order for the weight of unread books on my selves from crushing me in a horrible biblio-accident.
If you want to keep up with what I am reading, check out my Goodreads reading list. I’ve been trying to add books that I’ve read in the past, but that’s been a lot of work, so it’s a little behind. I just finished A Canticle For Leibowitz (another book which had been on my stack for quite a while), so now I’m going to pick up something lighter to absorb the rest of my long weekend.
Not only will I be in Vancouver on March 12, but I will also be coming to Leavenworth, WA, and Wenatchee, WA on March 26th to read from, talk about, and sign copies of NOWHERE WILD.
Where: A Book for All Seasons
703 US-2, Leavenworth, WA 98826
When: Saturday, March 26th: 11 AM – 1 PM
Where: Wenatchee Public Library
310 Douglas St, Wenatchee, WA 98801
Saturday, March 26th: 2 PM – 4 PM
Hope to see lots of people there!
Joe Beernink 