My Place to Write

"Lemme see your writing space!"

Except to the tune of R. Lee Ermy's line in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 war epic, Full Metal Jack, "Lemme see your war face!"

Yeah, it's a stretch. Lame.

When I attended the Army's Command and General Staff College a couple years ago, my instructor said we needed to create a space where we could read and contemplate in quiet. We needed somewhere away from raging kids and other home-driven distractions, somewhere we could focus on learning and expanding our view of the world.

We bought a new place back in January, first time we purchased a home since 1995. It's taken a few months, but the house is finally starting to come together. Between work, school, and extended family stuff, we only had time to seriously work on the place on every three or four other Saturdays. A pain. But I did finally got around to putting together my little workspace in the back bedroom. The way our floor plan is designed, the only thing better would be a basement or cave (it's Texas, everything is slab).

So I figured a picture was in order.



Let's break it down guy-style:

Apple 13" Macbook Pro Intel 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo ($1,400 USD), 4 GB RAM, 320 GB 7,200 rpm HDD. The 24" Apple LED Cinema Display ($849 USD) lets me tile my work across dual monitors, simplifying all my cutting, pasting, blogging, twitting, and critting.

I'm ADD, it works for me.

The Time Machine backup program goes to two external HDD's, a 320 GB Western Digital My Book and a 320 GB Western Digital Passport Elite (both available everywhere online for under $100 USD). When my laptop went down last week with a bad motherboard and RAM, the Apple Store ended up replacing the entire interior, HDD included. If I didn't have timely backups, I would have been screwed. Fortunately, I keep two, in case either external drive decides to fail (and sometimes, they do).

We all know music is critical for our writing, so hiding behind the big monitor is a pair of Audioengine A2s ($200). Designed with critical listeners in mind, these little dudes bring the Boom, Boom, Pow to your desktop, throwing more bass than anything this small should be entitled.

If speakers aren't your fare, of if you're trying to hide you tunage from a sleeping spouse or baby, hiding in my drawer is a pair of Grado Labs SR225i headphones. The 'cans', made in New York ($225), bring true high fidelity to my iTunes collection. If you've never been introduced to this level of listening, even in familiar music there would be detail you didn't know existed .

The Apple Magic Mouse. If you have an Apple, and you have one of these, you know how cool they are. If you're a PC, and you don't, well, you don't.

Software weapon of choice: Literature & Latte's Scrivener. Word processing and formatting by writers for writers. If you haven't experienced the pain of uniquely formatting your manuscript for different agents, editors, publishers, contests, etc..., save yourself the trouble and drop the $40 on this. A click of the mouse and Scrivener will compile to any acceptable standard for Novels, Short Stories, Screenplays, and more. Oh, it's only available for Mac.

If you're a PC, I'm sorry. (Catch the theme yet?)

Desk, a cappuccino-contemporary piece from WalMart, about $90 USD. Chair, an oak dining special from the original Corps of Cadets Duncan Dining Facility, Texas A&M University, circa 1930's. The candle-stick thingy with colored glass? No clue; wife stuck it there because is looked cute.

Later in the month I'm throwing out the guest bed from the room and installing my Consonance tube amps and Sonus Fabers to add some real warmth to the room. If you can't already tell, I'm a bit of an audiophile nut.

If I were doing it again, I would have added an iMac rather than the Cinema Display. The difference in price and size between the two aren't all that much, and there's an adapter that would allow my laptop to dual-screen with the iMac's monitor, adding a cool computer that the kids could use when the Macbook was travelling with Dad.

So, that's it; my place to create. What y'all got? Anyone? Anyone?

Closing Out May

The arrival of Memorial Day Weekend signals the end of May and the real start of summer. Kids will get out of school at the end of next week, and my wife, herself a teacher, will have to find something productive to do with your time other than doing lesson plans and dealing with other people's children.

I'll keep the Memorial Day comments short: Memorial Day was enacted by Congress originally as 'Decoration Day' to commemorate U.S. service members who died during the Civil War. Over the years it was expanded to include later wars and conflicts. Traditionally, the remembrance is tied to 30 May, but in later decades the observance was shifted to facilitate a Federal holiday and expanded weekend. Traditionalist insist on adhering to the thirtieth of May, while I'm certain there's a good chunk of us who appreciate a couple of days off at the end of the month.

Enough eulogizing.

May was rough on the Deep Strike Battalion. We lost a Soldier and made our way through a field exercise, albeit the latter more by sheer force and willpower than style and finesse. I, for one, am glad to put May in the rear view mirror.

In the three weeks I separated myself from my writing, a new idea struck. Within a couple of weeks, a plot outline appeared. As of yesterday, the first couple chapters stretched across my Macbook.

Already knee-deep in two other projects, a WIP and a rewrite, the last thing I needed was a third novel. But there it is. I've decided to keep fleshing it out as long as the ideas keep coming. Like my second project, it's markedly different than its predecessor. This particular inspiration is another UFYA, but with a third-person narrative and multiple POVs.

I'm comfortable sticking with the first-person narrative, but at this point in my development, I refuse to shoehorn myself into any particular style or format.


By: Twitter Buttons

Last: I discovered Twitter (much to the chagrin of several of my fellow OWG members). After battling a dizzying array or malfunctioning widgets and a stubborn government firewall, what you see in the column on the right is my new Twitter feed, appropriately named 'Bulletwisdom.'
Unfortunately, all variations of my name were already taken.

Aspiring authors and fellow bloggers take note: Within a couple of hours, the traffic to this site jumped. This lends to the lessons that if you plan to utilize an online marketing strategy, including blogs and social networking, you need a holistic approach that includes all of the above. Links are important. You might have an great blog and a thousand followers, but if the two somehow don't meet in the middle, it counts as a missed opportunity.

That's it. Nothing profound. Remember, it's Memorial Day. While you're with your family and friends, take a moment to commemorate the service members who fell while defending our country.

A Memorial

A couple weeks back, our Battalion lost a Soldier. Private First Class Barry Smith left this world far too soon. Only a month in the unit, Barry impacted everyone around him. He was talented, ambitious, creative, and gregarious, possessing a monster work ethic that would have seen him rise to the top of the profession. God decided he was too good for us, and brought him home.

This week my battalion did some platoon-level training and live fire. It was a tiring week. We ran each of our 6 platoons through a thirty-six hours training 'lane' consisting of events that would test their ability to perform basic, required tasks.

No room for error. Because of the tragedy, we compressed what my Brigade Commander called a 'tight timeline' to an insane point where if any of the platoons were hung up, it would adversely affect the training of the entire battalion.

Transparent to each of the platoons, was the tireless work of my Officers and NCOs. They worked tirelessly to make a great training event. We were fielding new equipment, training on new systems, introducing new personnel to the staff, and executing an aggressive.



But we made it, and made the news in the process. When we got back to the rear, we were smoked, completely drained by humidity, frustrating moments, and lack of sleep.

Then I got an email from Jodi Meadows. She posting a critique of my query at her site, (W)ords and (W)ardances. Last fall, I had limited success submitting my YA, EMANARE, with what I considered a train wreck of a query letter. What can I say? I was young. She's the first to look at the redo, so I'm hoping with her assistance and a better overall product, I can move forward.

This is my first weekend home in three weeks. Overall, May has been the toughest month on the job. Can't wait for June.


UPDATE - Jodi's critique of my query letter is up her site here. She provided some extremely helpful observations. Thanks Jodi!