Ninth Anniversary

Lately I've been thinking a lot about life: where I'm at, where I'm going, what the master plan is, and so on and so forth, but mostly I'm trying to make sure that I take the time to understand and appreciate how great a blessing it is to be right here, right now.

The picture needs a little explanation. CeCe, my wonderful wife of nine years, and I have kind of a quirky tradition. On our honeymoon, a rubber duck was in the bathtub of our hotel room. We kept it, and wrote the date on it. A year later, we got another one on our first anniversary. And that's our tradition. Each anniversary, we go on a hunt for our new rubber duck. Generally, we look for one that speaks to us, one that summarizes our past year and captures our hopes for the following. This year, we made a move from California to Missouri, my book was released, and CeCe is finishing up a pretty awesome freelancing opportunity. We've kind of felt like stars this year, and during the next year we've resolved to take aggressive steps to kill our debt, so it will be a year of reaching for the stars as well.

We went camping last night, and we got to experience the other thing that the duck represents: that of being able to sleep under a beautiful starry sky, unhindered by smog and clouding by city lights. There were also cows, lots of cows, but that's another story.

One click in the quiet of the night.

...and just like that, Forsaken Realm: The Light Within is out in the world. Capable of being bought, read, loved, hated, and experienced, whether good or bad. I'm very excited to have "my baby" out there for the world to see and experience, but there's also an unexpected vulnerability to the whole thing, a feeling of being very exposed. It's all good and well to say (as I do) that I'm excited to have it out there, because it's too big to live only in the mind of myself or in the minds of a few, and I believe that, but it's scary at the same time.

There was no hoopla, no bells, no whistles, just a few keystrokes late at night after years of work to get it to that point. But that seems appropriate, after all, that kind of quiet intimacy is how books are experienced, and it seems only right that my final moment with the book that had been mine came to an end with an unheard goodbye kiss in the middle of the night before dancing across the minds of others for the first time, quietly, intimately. Forsaken Realm is no longer mine. Not even Mine and Akeem's. It now belongs to everyone who reads it. Everyone who pictures the characters a certain way, and hears their voices with different inflections, sees them strike different poses than I envisioned. I guess that is the beauty of a story--each reader has a singularly unique experience, my static words transformed into a myriad of different realities.

Whoa.

Stand Back-this is gonna make me invincible!

Lately I've noticed a tendency among those that I work with to respond to a question a certain way. The question is "How's it going?"--or something similar. The answers vary a little, from "Just another day in paradise", to "Just living the dream, not sure whose dream it is though," and it bums me out a little. So I've decided not to buy into this. I want my response to the question to be, "I've got another day and another chance to make things right." That's right, cheerful optimism comin' right at ya.

It's a little thing, but I feel better already. Every day is a wonderful opportunity to make things a little better, for those around you, and yourself.

Done and done...almost...

After a ridiculous four-day, pull-out-all-the-stops, do or die, get-it-all-done-or so help me, no holds barred creative session, which Akeem was gracious enough to come all the way out to Kansas City for, Forsaken Realm: The Light Within is complete.

For real.

I'm still looking it over, double-checking for formatting errors and the like, but it appears to be done. Good thing, too, because it will be available for purchase in just a couple of weeks from now. We have learned a LOT from this experience, which is going to benefit the next four books in the series, but let me tell you what I've learned.

Akeem Brown is awesome. I don't say something like that lightly. As the co-creator of the property, he's always ben very invested in making it work. Our huge distance from each other is a testament to that. But this visit was more than that. When I called him over a month ago and said "Dude, I'm really going to need you to come out. I don't see how we can make the deadline." He didn't ask questions, other than when, and he immediately put in to get the time off of work. Like me, Akeem has a job that is crucial to the support of his family. Time off of work is not something either of us takes lightly. So a few weeks later, he showed up for four days of non-stop production. It was amazing. By skipping sleep and intravenously taking his mountain dew, Akeem produced in four days what would normally take four months. It's good stuff. But you'll see, soon enough.

Daily, CeCe is doing work on the trailer for the book, which uses unique pieces of Akeem's art designed for the trailer, and that's coming along beautifully. I will be so excited when you all get to see it.

Changes, self-imposed and otherwise

What we've adopted lately:

Instead of consuming upwards of 40 ounces of soda per day, I now have Soda Saturdays. Instead of soda, I drink water the 6 other days of the week. As a side-effect, the soda is significantly more delicious.

In a cost-cutting measure, we discontinued our Netflix. Not forever, mind you, but we've agreed that we can resubscribe (or buy other movies) once we have watched every single movie and tv series in our collection. We grossly underestimated how many movies and stuff we actually have. This is going to take a while.

Instead of frequently eating out, we may now go out to eat once a month. Like the soda saturdays, this has resulted in us savoring and enjoying the experience much, much more. As an added bonus, I also get to consume a soda during this outing. It's awesome.

Most of this is the liberal application of something called 'creative deprivation' to our lives. The idea is that the more you do something, the more you take it for granted. On the other hand, when you look forward to something, plan around it, and have to wait for it, it's that much better.

Website updated!

After my computer died a few weeks ago, I found myself in the undesirable position of having to rebuild my websites from the pieces that I could salvage. Although it was pretty frustrating, my new web designing interface is much better for doing updates than what I had before, meaning I'll have a much easier time doing news updates and such within the website.

Here's the new site:

www.forsakenrealmseries.com

It looks pretty much like the old one, but is actually a piecemeal reconstruction of he previous.

Outside of Forsaken Realm, I also updated the Painted Monkey Studios website, because it was in the same situation, and it gave me an opportunity to add a whole lot of CeCe's more recent works, including her Squary Monster series, which she painted in collaboration with

Xavier!

CeCe is also now listed with About faces Entertainers, a national gig company. She's worked hard on getting her samples together lately, and I'm so proud of her! You can look at that one here. (Sorry about all the links, guess it's kind of a linky day!)