Home again, home again.

Yesterday went well. I had a bunch of intelligent questions and stayed late to make sure everyone got some level of satisfaction. This put me into the house at 9:30 PM.

I have a hard time going to sleep after a long drive, so I stayed up for an hour and dealt with blog comments. My plan was tentative at best to sleep in this morning.

The alarm puppy had the good sense to wait until 5:00 am to wake me up. I let her go potty and tried to go back to sleep. This time of morning meant all the dogs had to crawl in with us. It’s cute, really it is, but Otto weighs 65 pounds. He’s like a big rock when he leans against you and steps on the blanket. I tried to sleep, but by quarter to six, I gave up completely.

I fixed their kibble, and they ate like little horses, then went back to sleep with mom. I monkeyed around with blog comments, RSS feeds, Facebook, and Twitter. After that, I knew I had to work on Lisa Burton Radio posts. I assembled next week’s post, but didn’t do much with the week after. I still need to do that prior to Monday.

I also got some material out for a promo I jumped on for October, and another post for The Storyreading Ape’s site. Then I responded to an inquiry about a pet interview. All I have to do is respond to it as one of my dogs.

I glanced over my shoulder. Huh, wife and dogs are still asleep. Whatever shall I do?

I opened a new document and started writing The Hat, a paranormal superheroish origin story. I like the character intro, and I think readers will have some fealty with her right away. She’s been through a tough stretch. I am doubting myself because it needs a bit of backstory. With a two character, buddy type, story it’s almost necessary. I can introduce Lizzie and get everyone up to speed the right way. When it comes to the hat, yes he is a character, I have to dive into some backstory.  He’s ancient compared to Lizzie and readers need to know some things. I already have some plan to get part now, and another part later. That helps to break it up.

All in all, I’m nearing 2700 words. I didn’t plan this as a writing day, so I’m content. My wife has to work tomorrow and Sunday, so I’ll have much more time to dedicate to this project.

This also poses a mental shift to me. All I want to do now is work on the new story. I have to keep Lisa burton Radio moving ahead, and I have edits back on The Yak Guy Project. I want those edits completed by Mid September. — so it isn’t exactly an emergency.

By the end of the weekend, all I need to do is get another Lisa Burton Radio almost complete. Then I need to respond to the pet interview. After that, I can work on whatever I like, and I kind of choose The Hat.

Just for giggles, someone talked me into starting Pinterest boards for my pending projects. I started one for The Hat if you’d like to check it out.

I got some strange message from Twitter about adding my telephone number to my account. I didn’t want to do this, but they make it nearly impossible not to. The process sends you a call and a text from some cryptic number that has nothing about it that says Twitter. Then they ask if I’d like to receive updates and notifications. Oh sure!!! I’d love to have my phone ringing whenever one of my thousands of followers posts something. Particularly love that shit in the middle of the night. I turned all that off, but they said not to worry, I could always text to turn it back on. All I have to do is text to the cryptic number that has nothing about it that says Twitter.

Personally, I think they just want my number to sell to telemarketers. I’m relatively certain I’m about to start getting texts about fake prizes I’ve won, timeshares I need to visit, and vacations I haven’t really won. They make me choose between accepting this, or quit using Twitter. I’m trying to be an author here, but Twitter has rendered itself almost useless. Most of my activity is to support others there.

The Twitter thing only happened after their last update. Did anyone else get this message too?

I’ve been playing with the actual WordPress app on my last few posts. Blogsy is outdated and they have no plans to update it for future versions of iOS. It’s too bad, because they did WordPress better than they WordPress does. Everything was easy, made sense, and came with options even WordPress didn’t have. I checked, and there aren’t any decent blogging apps left in the App Store. This leaves me with the WordPress App. How does this post look at your end?

Getting a Little Work Done

I didn’t gat a lot of time to write today. I forgot to track my word count for a few days and I’m afraid this includes a day of quick edits. I don’t know whether I added or subtracted more words last Wednesday. All I know is The Playground now has 23,037 words. Most of them are from today and it’s 3328 combined with Wednesday.

I’m tracking three separate characters in this story, and may not have the word count woes I usually do. Something tells me I’m going to have too many this time.

My heroine has some idea what’s going on, and what the parasite is doing to her. She got in the Christmas mood and narrowly avoided killing her new friend in a firearms accident. She still hasn’t taken up the mantle of what’s happened to her. This means she’s still in act one mode.

My anti hero learned a bit about the job he was asked to do. He’s going to learn a bit more by debasing himself with a less than beautiful woman. He hasn’t accepted the job yet, so he’s still clearly within act one. I think I’ll have him tear through gang land just to let him learn a bit more before he gets started. Must remember to get back to the butt licking dog.

My next move is to let my victim character, a little girl named Chloe, enjoy her Christmas. Then I’m going to wreck her life even further. She doesn’t get to decide what act we’re involved in. The adults make that decision.

I wrote this post with the WordPress app. I don’t like it as much as BlogPad, but they haven’t updated BlogPad Pro for iOS 8 yet. Fingers crossed.

Some Days are Rocks

I’ve been listening to Tom Petty. You might guess that from the last few titles.

After my Wednesday marathon, where I wrote 6600 new words, today was inevitable. On Wednesday, I moved my plot forward using the outline. Today spent a large number of hours fixing all the crap I wrote.

Now that I’ve taken such a large detour from the outline, a change must be made. This is the big secret about being an outliner. You don’t delete the good stuff – you change the outline.

The characters develop minds of their own. They have a certain way of reacting to the world around them. Think of it this way, a dark and broody woman isn’t going to turn all sugar and spice, just because the outline needs her to. Change the outline.

My outlines are just beats that I want to hit. Sometimes I go directly to them, and sometimes I take the long way around.

There is a writing site that I love. It’s very popular, but I never hear bloggers talking about it. It is the Absolute Write Water Cooler.

Deviation: I see we’ve updated the WordPress App and the ability to link is impaired somehow. It is absolutewrite.com If I can figure it all out, I’ll make a hotlink somehow.

I usually just lurk at the Water Cooler, but today I had a question. I got a dozen helpful answers in the scope of an hour. If you’ve never checked it out before, you should.

Since it’s February, I changed my wallpaper again. I’m an Olympics junkie, so that’s what you get for a month.

I’ll probably post something from the writing cabin this evening. There were a few new words written today, but not what I expected.

Edit: This is all bullshit. I’ve added links to my posts before, and I cannot add a link now. If anyone’s smarter than me, would you mind sharing your decoder ring? All I had to do before was touch the symbol, but now it’s lighter and does nothing. I switched to text mode, and it works there – but it doesn’t display after I update. Then I tried visual again and highlighted a word. I hit the link button and the small menu opened. I added the data and updated. It just vanishes.

Edit X2: after about three hours of trying the same things over and over, I finally added the link. On about the tenth try of highlighting the selected words, it worked. Originally, I was able to do this in the app, without highlighting anything. Any tips are still most welcome.

Stats are weird

As a newer blogger, I check my stats several times a day. They say this is a common affliction, and that I’ll get over it someday soon. I have a stats question for someone smarter than I am.

How can my stats show two or three views for one day, when the article I published that day has six or eight likes? Six or eight people visited in order to like the article, but the stats don’t reflect that. Can anyone help me out here? (I’m not obsessed, or anything. I’m checking stats after I post this.)

My world map continues to fill in, which I think is cool. Welcome to the new visitors from Romania and Ireland. I’m still waiting for someone from the International Space Station, but they’ve been a little busy this week.

The post about internet safety was pretty popular. I updated it and invited everyone to forward it to their loved ones, or re-blog it. I never thought to suggest it when I posted it. No one should be taken by an online predator, and if even one person is helped it was worth writing.

The WordPress app seems to have a flaw, in my opinion. If I want to include a picture, it doesn’t give me the option to choose from my WordPress media folder. It allows me to choose directly from my hard drive. When I’ve done this, it seems like the images aren’t displaying on other computers. My theory is that the image isn’t going out into cyberspace unless it comes from the WordPress media file. I may have to write with the app, then edit the post to include the images. Any suggestions here are most welcome.