Silence Like A Cancer Grows…

Yeah, I’m feeling a little bit saucy.  Hence the play on Simon and Garfunkel in the title of this post.

It’s been a while since I last posted anything.  And a lot’s happened in the interim.  So why haven’t I talked about it?  Ehh.  Or rather, meh.  No idea.  Didn’t feel like it?  I was doing other things?  Both? 🙂  Regardless, I’m back posting now, so all five of you who come around to read my musings can be happy again.  🙂

So….current events.

1. I mentioned this before, but what the heck, it bears repeating.  I had another kid!  🙂 Or rather, my wife did.  I delivered him, though.  No, seriously.  When our daughter was born, almost five years ago (her birthday is the 26th), we had her at Wentworth Douglass Hospital in Dover, NH.  They are awesome.  State of the art, progressive (in the good way, not the political/economic way), and just all around cool.  Their birthing center was ridiculously nice, and comfortable, and…  You get the point.  Well, they made a point of letting dads assist in the actual delivery if they wanted, as opposed to them standing back, trying not to get their fingers crushed as their wives squeezed on their hands, and feeling helplessly useless.  So naturally, I was all over helping the midwife pull little Sibylla out when she arrived.  Talk about wicked cool.  For the first two boys, though, the hospital staff essentially gave me the Heisman, except they did let me cut the cord.  Yippee.  Not.  ‘Cause that’s not nearly as cool as doing the delivery.  Well, little Kiran (that the new guy’s name) we had at the Naval Hospital here in San Diego.  When they asked if we wanted anything, I piped up that I wanted to deliver.  And awesome of awesome, they said, “Sure!”  So as soon as the Doc got the head and shoulder positioned right, I got the nod, took hold, and voila!  I got to pull him out.  🙂  And then after the cord blood collection, I played with the placenta a little.  😛  Well…ok, I didn’t play with it.  But dude.  It may be the Engineer and the nerd in me coming out, but seriously, if you’ve never seen a placenta before, you’re missing out.  They are really cool.  😉  So anyway, our clan now consists of 4 kids (I say now, but this happened in the middle of September so it’s not all that recent.  Sorry).  And we’ve decided four is enough, so we took steps to ensure we don’t have to worry about it, if you know what I mean.
2. Of far less importance, but still cool, I heard back from Writers of the Future regarding my 3rd quarter submission.  Honorable Mention.  Again.  Now that’s pretty cool.  But it makes 3 HMs now.  And granted, this one is from a new judge, since David Farland took over.  But I would really really like to bust over the HM hump into the higher categories, one of these days.  You know: semi-finalist, finalist.  Winner.  Oh well, only one way to do that: keep writing and submitting.  So I guess I’ll go ahead and do that.  🙂
3. I’m doing NaNoWriMo again.  Last year, if you recall, I wrote Glimmer Vale for NaNo.  I had toyed with writing Glimmer’s sequel this year.  But instead I decided to just crank out short stories.  I did this for a couple reasons.  First, that was what I said I was going to do way back at the beginning of the year.  Second, on the Yahoo Group for writers who have attended Dean and Kris‘ workshops, they have this thing called Club 25 going on: a challenge to epublish 25 titles this yes.  Well I’m currently at ten, but I figured if I could crank out ten 5,000 word stories in November, I could totally catch up.  And three, I kind of fell off the writing wagon for a few months there, between moving to San Diego, settling into the new job, and welcoming a new kid.  I figured NaNo would be a great way to jumpstart myself.  🙂  So…how’s it going?  Well, so far the shorts are all novelettes.  And I’m lagging.  At present I’m something like 9,000 words behind.  So I’m beginning to doubt I’ll get to the 50,000 word mark for the month.  Unless I get a couple 5,600 word days down like I did last year.  Which is possible, so I’m not out of it yet.  🙂  Regardless, I’ll have finished a number of good stories this month so it’ll be a win either way.  And it’s been fun, so that’s what matters.  🙂
4. I discovered some cool music.  This guy calls himself Miracle of Sound, and he writes songs based on games, movies, you name it.  His songs are quite fun.  I picked out two of my favorites to share with you.  The first is inspired by Skyrim, the second by Dragon Age 2.  Check them out, then go to YouTube and give the guy a like or six; he deserves it.  You can also buy his music from his website, quite reasonably.  
5. My friend J E Medrick (you may recall I sung her praises for her first novel, Shackled, a while back) released a new novella the other day.  Youth is a great story about a prescription drug that will restore the elderly to youth and vigor, but at a price: everyone who takes Youth dies within a month.  Now, I’ve only read about half of it, because that’s all she sent me.  But it’s a fascinating concept, well executed.  I recommend you check it out.

That’s about it on the news front.  All in all, things are going pretty well.  I’m beginning to think about my goals for next year, and to evaluate how I did this year.  To be brief: not so good.  That writing hiatus in the summer and early fall really did in a number of my goals.  But that’s ok.  Life rolls happen, and these rolls were good ones, so I’m not going to beat myself up.  I am going to change my methodology for next year, though.  Enact a bit more nerd-ness and statistical tracking, that sort of thing.  It’s going to be great.

So I think I’m going to let you go with that.  I firmly intend to get back to posting with greater regularity, now that things are, more or less, settled here in my world.  Until then, here’s hoping all y’all in internet land have fun.

Just remember what I tell my kids: everyone likes a wino, but no one likes a whiner.  Moral of the story: when in doubt, drink more.  😛

Cheers!