The US calls today Columbus Day, but Canadians more properly refer to it as Thanksgiving. No, it is not a Thursday, and tomorrow is not the official start of the holiday shopping season. And instead of watching the Lions and the Cowboys play football, Canadians are treated to the Blue Bombers versus the Alouettes and the Roughriders versus the Argos. Perhaps I enjoy American Thanksgiving more for the festivities. But I know I enjoy Canadian Thanksgiving more for the memories.
Thanksgivings during my childhood on a farm in Southwestern Ontario always seemed to happen on days where the harvest was in full swing. The soybeans were coming off, and the corn rustled in yellowing rows, waiting its turn. The crisp, cool weather warned that summer was over. Fall had a certain smell to it as the dust of the summer faded, and the world readied for winter. It was, and still is, my favorite season.
If there is anything that I truly miss about my childhood, it is harvest time. I would go back there in an instant, if I could, just to hook up the wagons one more time, to watch the combines dump their golden load into the hoppers, or to smell the earth as the plow turned the ground to prepare for the coming frost. That was a very happy time, and my memories are fond.
But on this particular Thanksgiving, I also mourn for the loss of a dear family friend, Jim Boere. I received news of his passing this morning, and it truly saddens me. Jim was a true gentle-man, and I am so much the better for having known him. When I was sixteen, he let me borrow his red, square-stern canoe for the summer. I loaded that canoe into the back of my dad’s old Dodge pickup truck and took it out a few times. It was heavy, and it was large—probably too large for me to handle properly by myself. I put more than my share of scratches on that old canoe, and some of my trips were probably ill-advised, especially solo. But I have good memories of those trips. Often, when I was writing Nowhere Wild, I thought about that canoe, and the way it handled, and imagined what it would be like to try to haul it over long distances by myself. You could say that those trips inspired a great deal of my first novel.
So on this Canadian Thanksgiving, I give thanks that I knew Jim, and that he was so generous. I only hope that someday I can return the same generosity to someone else looking for adventure. I offer my condolences to his wife, Nancy, their children, and entire family. He will be missed.
No really… I have.
You see, I sat down the other day to start looking at one of the novels I wrote a few years ago… one that I knew needed some work.
I sat down with the intention that I would give it a quick skim, document the major plot points, and make a cursory review of the writing, knowing all the while that would need a little massaging to bring it up to my current standard.
I sat down with the thought that it would take a few minutes to get back inside my characters’ heads.
I sat down with the thought that I would be taken back to a different time in my life, where I pounded out two thousand words a day, where trumpets sounded and crowds cheered at the end of every scene.
I sat down with the thought that this book would need just a little caressing to mold into something I could have in my back pocket as my next book—something I could drop onto my agent’s desk on one of those days where I ‘m suffering from some sort of writer’s malaise and need to get her something.
But instead, I was taken back in time.
Back to a time where all my sentences had multiple conjunctive-and clauses.
Back to a time where some chapters were 4 pages and others were 39.
Back to a time where paragraphs switched points of view multiple times, for no particular reason.
Back to a time where the words told the reader everything, instead of showing them.
Back to a time where entire pages of flashbacks were done from the narrator’s eye, wasting perfect opportunities for the reader to get inside the character’s head.
Back to a time where characters rushed to do the thing the story needed them to do, instead of the thing they needed to do.
Back to a time where “was” was a strong verb.
In short, my review of the manuscript took me back to a time where my writing completely sucked. It nearly made me physically ill to read some of the passages. And since I wrote this book after the first version of Nowhere Wild, I can only imagine how horrible that first version of Nowhere Wild must have been.
Luckily, somehow, I escaped back to the present, where I can undo some of the wrongs of the past. Instead of editing the aforementioned manuscript, I will re-plan it, re-plot it, and re-write it from scratch. I will take my time, and give the story and the characters the justice they deserve. It is the least I can do for them.
I cannot, however, undo the damage that reading that first draft must have done to my beta readers. All I can do now, is apologize and vow to never ask you to endure such trauma again. No person should be treated with such cruelty.
Well, maybe a few people should be, but no one I know.
Finally picked up my copy of CC Humphrey’s A Place Called Armageddon today. It’s the first time I’ve had my name on the outside of a real, published book. See it… there on the back cover?
HOW COOL IS THAT!?!
You could read my full review, or I can save you the time and just tell you (again) that it’s a great book and you should just go out and buy it. Really. Go buy it. Like now.
Megawatt Hour.
Today, the production meter on my solar panels rolled over from 999 kW h to 1000 kW h, which is, unless my math is completely wrong, 1 Megawatt Hour. The generated hours number on the inverter (2nd picture) is a little higher than the production meter because the panels were running for a few days before the production meter was installed.
I actually haven’t thought a lot about the solar panels on the roof since we put them up in June. The great thing about passive energy generation is that it just happens, whether you think about it or not. We’ve also had an extraordinarily sunny summer and fall this year in the Pacific Northwest—so much so that we could really use a good rain to rinse the dust off the panels.
So do I have any other thoughts about solar, and my setup in particular? Two things.
1. Puget Sound Energy has not updated their computer systems to handle small producers such as myself, so figuring out how much I’ve generated and how much I owe per month is a painful and manual process (for them). They really need to get that fixed, and soon.
2. I wish my garage roof faced south instead of west-south-west. With the sun lower in the sky this time of year, the production during the peak of the day really does suffer. I knew it would, but it’s a little bit of a shock to see actually how much it does drop (about 25% lower today than in July).
Overall though, I’m still glad I did it. I hoped that more people in my town would follow suit, but I haven’t heard of any other builds yet. It is a large amount of cash to pay out at the beginning. Hopefully, the incentive structure can be improved to make this affordable for every home owner. It really is a good thing to do for the planet.
I watched nearly the entirety of the US Presidential Debate last night, missing out on the closing remarks because I had to tuck the kids into bed. I am neither Democrat nor Republican, but I am not undecided either. I didn’t expect Mr. Obama to wipe the floor with Mr. Romney, but I did half expect to see Mr. Romney complete what I would call the final “burp” of an implosive campaign.
Instead, somehow, Mr. Obama assumed the look of a deer in the headlights, and Romney rolled over him (and Jim Lehrer) like a Mack truck. I don’t say this out of admiration. I think what we saw out of Mr. Romney last night is exactly what we would see out of a Romney Presidency, and what we saw out of Mr. Obama last night is exactly what we’ve seen out of the Obama Presidency thus far.
In Mr. Romney, we saw a man so determined to win the presidency that he will say or do absolutely anything to get there, even if it means throwing himself (and all his previous beliefs and statements) under the bus. We had a President just as willing to play fast-and-loose with facts no so long ago. He started two wars and divided the country so severely that it will take decades to recover. Please, sir. May I have another?
In President Obama, we saw a man so determined not to lose the Presidency that he is unwilling to call bullshit when he hears it for fear of providing a sound bite that will be used against him. Obama seemed shocked and surprised that Romney would be so blatant in his lies on a national stage. Romney’s “Rove-ish” plan of attack stunned Obama from the very beginning, and he never regained his feet.
During the Republican Primaries, the entire GOP field recognized Romney a flip-flopper, so it should have come as no surprise to Obama that Romney would stray from both the truth and his beliefs during the debate. They should have come prepared for this possibility, and nailed him on it. There were a few occasions Obama could have called Romney on his BS to immediately put him in his place. Here are just a couple:
1. Every time Obama said “middle class”, Romney countered with “middle income”. While ‘class’ is a very subjective term, ‘income’ is not. Obama should have asked Romney to define, there and then, what income levels he defines as “middle”. I suspect it would be significantly higher than what most people in the US think it is.
2. On health care, Obama could have come right out and asked Romney how much he thinks affordable health care should cost a family of four, and countered with the exact costs. This is a set-him-up-and-knock-him-down question. Romney clearly has never had to worry about providing health care for his family while out of work, or getting new coverage while struggling with a pre-existing condition. Romney has never had to worry about losing one of his five houses because he couldn’t pay the doctor bills from a simple accident or the birth of a premature baby. Obama had to put examples to demonstrate this disconnect from reality out there, and he didn’t.
What we also saw, with Romney’s early treatment of Mr. Lehrer, is a clear indication of Mr. Romney’s character. The rules of debate—the rules in general—just don’t apply to him. Lehrer was just there to announce his arrival—as servants do. Sure Obama blew through the time limits on answers as well. Lehrer didn’t have very good control of either side of the debate. But it was Romney’s complete lack of respect for both the moderator and the audience that speaks volumes about the man. And that should frighten the crap out of all of us. We are not his constituents. He is not fighting to represent us. We are his subjects. He is fighting to rule us.
After the euphoria of a “Romney win” wears off for the right and the pain from self-flagellation wounds begins to dull for the left, I expect we’ll see the results of the debates in a different light. The reality will be that Obama was unprepared for Romney’s scorched earth approach to the truth, and that Romney has few principles, and those change as needed.
To win at the next debate, Obama needs to call Romney out on his lies and his flip-flopping. But he also can’t just stand on what he did to “turn things around”. Obama needs to remind people of the obstructionist congress. Obama needs to show that he has a plan to reduce the deficit. Obama, can no longer be passive and wait for Romney to self-destruct. He need to talk in substance about what America needs to do next, and what he will do to lead us there.
But he needs to tell the truth. And part of that truth has to be that Romney doesn’t tell it, and never will.
A lot has happened in the last month and a half. On the TV / Movie side of life, I stopped watching TED Talks, and got addicted to Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Walking Dead, as well as revisiting one of the best shows ever made—The West Wing. Other than that, things are starting to look a little sparse in my queues.
Luckily, the fall TV season is upon us, so new shows are starting fill in the gaps left by the completion of some of these series. My queue grows at this point only because shows like The West Wing and Connections and Inspector Morse aren’t yet available on Instant Watch. Hopefully that will change soon, as they are all perfect shows to watch on a whim (or as an all day, got nothing better I can do, marathon).
So anyway, listed below are the movies and TV series I’ve been watching since Part V of this series:
- [x] = Number of Episodes watched if TV show
- ( y ) = Rating out of 5.
- Items in bold = ones I highly recommend
Instant Watch
- Being Human: Series 2: [2] (3)
-
Breaking Bad: Ssn 2-4: [35] (5) Cosmos:[2] (4) Deep Impact (3) e2: Design: Ssn 1: [6] (2) Eight Men Out (3) Explorers (2) Friday Night Lights: Ssn 1:[3] (4) Ken Burns: The West: [1] (3) Louis C.K.: Chewed Up (3) Mad Men: Ssn 1: [3] (3) Midsomer Murders: Series 11: [3] (2) Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague (2) Star Trek: TNG: Ssn 1: [1] (2) The Conspirator (3) The Cosmos: [2] (4) The Pianist (4) The Planets: [3] (4) The World Without Us (1) DVDs
- Chronicle (3)
Connections 1: [3 Discs] (5) Game of Thrones: Season 1: [3 Discs] (3) Inside Job (4) Leverage: Season 1: [1 Disc] (2) Mirror Mirror (2) One for the Money (2) Safe House (4) The Avengers (4) The Hunger Games (4) The Ides of March (4) The Walking Dead: Season 2: [2 Discs] (5) - The West Wing: Season 1: [3 Discs] (5)
The Wire: Season 4 & 5: [8 Discs] (4.5) (note that Season 4 was amazing. Season 5 more on the meh side) So it’s been a few days since I made the announcement regarding my book deal with HarperCollins Canada for Nowhere Wild. For about an hour after I posted that original blog entry, I had the shakes. My hands wouldn’t stay steady, and I had a hard time talking. The shaking has now gone away, but the excitement is still there. I can’t wait to get back working on that book!
I’ve had a few questions that have popped up, and I’ll answer them here, as best I can.
Question #1: When is the book coming out?
I don’t know the answer to that one yet. It takes an incredible amount of work and coordination to get a book to market, and I still have some work to do on the book itself (i.e. more editing). As soon as the date is locked down, I will definitely post an update here.
Question #2: Are you quitting your day job to write full time?
No. It may come as a bit of a shock to people not familiar with the publishing industry that most writers don’t make very much money. And the money, when it does come in, doesn’t come in consistently until you’ve got a long tail of books earning royalties and a bunch more in the write-edit-publish pipeline. Unless I win the JK Rowling lottery, I will continue to earn the bulk of my income writing software for the foreseeable future.
Question #3: Is the cover image for Nowhere Wild on the site going to be the cover image for the published book?
Probably not. That photo was taken by my Aunt, Anne Stratton. She graciously allowed me to use it to help make my site look more professional. The cover design was done by Jerome Petteys. I think it looks fantastic, and fits the book really well, but the publisher will decide what they want the cover to look like.
Question #4: How did you get a publisher?
Like I said in the original blog entry, my agent, Sally Harding did all the hard work. I just wrote the story. Once we agreed the manuscript was ready for an attempt to find a publisher (which is a huge step from its first draft), we talked about what approach we wanted to take—what market we thought it fit into, what kind of a publisher we wanted, what kind of an editor we wanted. This discussion is just one of the many valuable aspects of having a good agent. Sally did an amazing job of walking me through the process, and presenting options. I think she found the right fit for this book, and for me, with HarperCollins Canada.
Question #5: When will the book be available in <insert country name here>?
The topic of publishing and distribution rights is enormously complicated, and I am just beginning to get a grip on it. Be sure that Sally and I are working hard to make sure that everyone who wants a copy of Nowhere Wild, can get it legally. Again, as we work out the details for each country / language, I’ll post details here. Obviously, the more buzz the book generates in the coming weeks and months in multiple countries, the higher the likelihood it will be available everywhere, so feel free to pass the word to friends and family about my site and my book.
Question #6: Will there be a book tour?
I don’t know the answer to this one yet. I will definitely schedule readings / signings in my local area when the book is released, and do whatever I can to promote the book. But as a debut author, it’s difficult to know this far in advance if the investment in larger scale personal appearance efforts will pay off financially. If you are a bookseller / librarian in the Puget Sound Area, and would like me to appear in conjunction with the release, please contact me.
Question #7: What recommendations can you give to a young writer just starting out?
I could spend hours talking about this, but I’ll just give a few brief points that I think would help every writer (young or old):
- Write every day. I wrote on the train to and from work for the better part of three years. There is always time to write, even if it’s for just twenty minutes.
- Pick up a copy of Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages. Read it. Do the exercises. Work on your book. Read Noah’s book again. Work on your book. Sooner or later, what he says there will become old habit.
- Find a group like the Pacific Northwest Writers Association in your own area. Go to their monthly meetings. Learn about the whole writing / publishing process. You don’t have to know everything about everything. But you should know a little about everything in the publishing process. This is a business. Make it your business, and realize that to get published, you must be good at this business.
- Find a good freelance editor who you trust (i.e. Jason Black). Pay them for a full manuscript review at least once. Listen to what they have to say, even if it is painful to hear.
- Read John Scalzi’s blog entry http://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/04/27/10-things-teenage-writers-should-know-about-writing/. He usually says things much better than I ever could, and this entry should be in his hall of fame.
- Don’t write to become famous or to make a lot of money. Write because you love it. Write because not writing for more than a few days feels like you have abandoned a puppy in a mineshaft. Save the puppy.
Question #8: What’s next?
First, I am finishing up an edit of one of my other manuscripts so I can pass it on to my beta readers. I should be done that today or tomorrow. At some point in the next few weeks, I should receive notes from my editor regarding changes to Nowhere Wild, so then the work begins on that story again in earnest. I also have another completed manuscript that needs a full edit. I have two full length book outlines for future books already done that I want to review. And I have another book that I need to do a major rewrite on. So I don’t think my next few months will be boring.
Other Questions?
If you have any questions I haven’t answered here, let me know. I love writing about writing just about as much as I love writing, so these are really enjoyable entries to put together.
This entry will probably be the most geeky blog entry you will ever see from me on this blog. I used to do stuff like this over on my technical blog, but I’ve pretty much abandoned that site—it’s hard enough to find time to blog in one place, let alone two. But just because this is a geeky entry, doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile for everyone to read. If you have a computer, you need a backup strategy. I thought I had one… until the incident.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a little, red, blinking light on the front of my HP EX490 MediaSmart Windows Home Server. This is usually an indication that one of my laptops has been turned off so long, that a backup hasn’t run in a month, or the virus definitions are out of date. No big deal.
But seeing as this red light followed so closely on the heels of getting hacked, I worried that this wasn’t the case this time. I tried to log on to the server from the client app running on my main PC to check the message list, but I got no response. Ruh-roh. I tried to remote desktop onto the server, and also received no response. Gulp. I tried rebooting. No worky. I tried restoring the OS. Nothing. Oh crap. I pulled all the drives from the box, popped in a brand new 1 TB drive, and tried rebuilding the OS. Notta. Son of a…. This puppy was toast and that meant I was toast.
See, my Windows Home Server wasn’t just where all my PC’s were backed up (which it did really well, and in a super-easy way). It was also the file server where I stored my entire music collection—the hundreds of CD’s I ripped a couple of years ago so I could box up my CD collection to make room in my office… for books. My wife and I stored the backups of our iTunes folders there. Those files were not backed up anywhere, because I worked under the theory that I could always go back to the CDs or to Amazon or iTunes and re-rip them if I needed to.
However, when suddenly faced with spending weeks of my life ripping CDs again, and then trying to figure out what songs we had bought from iTunes or Amazon in the last two years, I decided I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the Home Server. Life saving surgery was needed—a brain transplant of sorts.
Luckily, I stumbled across this article, which describes how to rescue data from a failed Windows Home Server. I suggest you follow it, step by step, if your WHS Server fails. It’s not as simple as just popping the saved hard drives into a drive enclosure, but it is doable. I bought a Rosewill Drive Enclosure, and mounted the drives (one by one) onto my main PC, and began the restore process. It took a couple of days (mainly unattended), but I got all of the data back. Pfhew! I’m not going to go into the mechanics of how to recover the data here, since that article already does that.
But I will tell you how my habits have changed since going through this mess. I didn’t realize how close I had been to losing a lot more than just the music. I had almost lost all the photos and videos of my kids as well. Well, not “almost lost” them, but just about as bad. I found out that I hadn’t been backing them up anywhere. And this is where the story gets interesting (for you non-geeks out there, at least).
You see, a couple of years ago, I installed Mozy on my PC’s and began backing up my critical data (i.e. important personal documents, my writing, etc.). At one time, our family pictures had been in those folders being backed up. But a year or so ago, after I migrated to a new PC, I moved all of the pictures and videos to a USB drive, and that drive was not backed up anywhere. Not on the Windows Home Server. Not on Mozy. Nowhere. Somehow, this fact had escaped me as life roared along. If I lost that drive, we would have lost a heck of a lot of very important memories. So saying I nearly lost everything, isn’t that much of a stretch. If you don’t back something up, you’re nearly losing it every day.
So I spent the better part of a two weekends correcting these oversights. Here is how I now organize my digital life. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than where I was a few weeks ago. I’ll give credit where credit is due. Scott Hanselman’s blog on A basic non-cloud based personal backup strategy gave me many of the ideas I used here to help create a more secure and thorough strategy. I highly recommend reading it.
Current Setup
- My PC’s all have Mozy running on them, backing up the User folders. This includes all my writing and key personal documents that I would need to access should something destroy my home. I debated going to a different service (like CrashPlan or KeepVault or one of the many other backup providers out there), but since I was already up and running on Mozy, it was easier to stick with them, for now. Remember, at this point, I needed to get things backed up before something else crashed.
- I now include my Pictures folder (from my USB rive) in my Mozy backup. I can live without the few videos I’ve taken in my life, but losing all the pictures would be devastating. Adding pictures also doesn’t break the bank on remote storage like videos do.
- I set up a spare USB drive (with the new hard drive I bought to try to fix my Home Server) and the Rosewill Case, and attached it to my main PC. I tried to hook it up via eSata, but my Windows 7 PC kept hanging and I got tired of that, so I converted it back to USB. Seems to work fine that way. I call this drive BackupA.
- I copied all of our music / videos over to my existing USB drive, and organized that drive so it is very obvious where everything goes. I also showed my wife how it is set up, so she can find everything she needs and can add things in the right places when she has new pictures or videos.
- I installed SyncBack on my PC with the USB drives, and every night, the entire USB drive is copied to BackupA, as sort of a delayed mirror. If the primary USB drive fails, no problem. I just swap in Backup A. If I accidentally delete a folder on the USB drive, I have until 1 AM to recover it from Backup A.
- I turned on the feature that allows me to dupe the Mozy backup to my BackupA drive. If my PC fails, I can just grab that drive, switch PC’s and be good to go in seconds.
- I don’t currently bother backing up the OS / Program folders on my PCs because I don’t install a lot of software that I couldn’t get back within a few hours. It’s not that I don’t believe it would be good to back up the OS, I just know that I would never test the backup by doing a full system restore. An untested restore is no better than not having one to begin with.
- I installed DropBox on my PCs to allow me to copy over the really important documents to all my PCs and my mobile device for quick access. I used to use Windows Live Mesh, but Microsoft keeps changing the name of that product, and I never got a good feeling as to whether or not they believed it had a future. It also, (as far as I know) didn’t have an iPhone client. DropBox works really well for what I need it to do.
Next Steps
- I plan on getting another USB Drive enclosure (call it BackupB), and will swap the two drives out on a regular basis and store one of them offsite, just in case.
- I need to set up encryption on all my drives to prevent someone from waking off with my life should they rob the place. Since I run WIndows 7 Home Premium, I don’t get BitLocker by default. I do encryption really sensitive individual documents, but I know there is more room for improvement there.
- We plan to upgrade to Windows 8 after it comes out, as I understand it has some even better file sharing techniques that may simplify our backups strategies, but I still need to study that a bit longer.
Is this solution perfect? No, probably not. But it is definitely better than it was a few weeks ago, when I didn’t even know I had these issues. The Windows Home Server is now just an empty shell, sitting on my office floor. At some point, I’ll recycle it. I’m disappointed it didn’t last more than a couple of years, but stuff like that happens. At least I was able to recover from this near disaster, only losing my time, and not all the memories of my digital life.
I would appreciate feedback from folks on what I might have missed. Do I need to back up my email (I use Outlook)? This blog? Should I scan all my documents/receipts into a OneNote document as part of my backup strategy? Getting better at this sort of thing is an incremental process for me. I need it to not be burdensome. It needs to be as automatic as possible, and to make me feel, at the end of the day, that I am doing everything I need to be doing to protect what needs to be protected.
Sometimes it takes a wakeup call to show you where the gaps are. Learn from my experience. Audit your backup strategy every few months. It takes a little bit of time, but it is absolutely worth it.
Today, I am very excited that I can finally tell all of you something I’ve had to keep very quiet for the last few weeks. This is a big one, so hold onto your hats!
I have a book deal!
My agent, Sally Harding, and I, have sold the Canadian English rights to my debut novel, Nowhere Wild, to editor Hadley Dyer at HarperCollins Canada. This is a huge step in my writing career. I’ve worked on this book for over four years now, and the thought that this will actually get published sends chills up my spine.I cannot begin to express adequate thanks to Sally, as well as Rachel Letofsky and the entire team at The Cook Agency, for continuously pushing me to improve my writing skills, and for finding the right fit for this book. I also cannot wait to begin working with Hadley and her team at HarperCollins to bring this book to market and to make it the biggest success possible.
I must also thank those people who have read the numerous drafts and provided so much feedback, especially Jason Black and Ben Newland. So much of my improvement in my writing skill over the last two years is due to Jason’s amazing editorial feedback, and Ben’s willingness to reread and critique the same book multiple times.
There were many other people who read drafts of this book, and you are not forgotten. Thank you, thank you, thank you so very much for all your encouragement and support.
Last, but not least, I must thank my wife, Lisa, for telling me to buy that laptop back in 2008 so I could use my commute to work for something positive, and for providing so much support (and reading so many drafts) in the last four years. I’ve lost count of how many days she took the kids somewhere so I could write or edit. She believed in me even when my writing was, well, odiferous, always knowing that it would just be a matter of time and hard work. I could not have done it without her.
I will have more information regarding the release date at some point in the near future as the details get ironed out.
Thank you, again, to all who helped me to bring this dream to fruition. I could not have done it without you!
Joe Beernink 