Shell Creek Publishing

Good Books for Rainy Days

Somehow, in spite of my best efforts, or possibly my worst, it is Christmas Eve, again. There is a box of Christmas cards, waiting to be signed, addressed and stamped. There is a Christmas tree and the stockings that are hung in our living room but the decorations for the rest of the house, not so much. As far as a clean house, well, I’m not the best housekeeper during the rest of the year, it’s probably best to not think too much about the clutter that is strewn about. Or the cat toys that I keep tripping over.

The latest chapter for the Year 2038 Bug is up on the website so time for another set of notes about my writing. This time I’m answering a question about how I plan my writing and the books I work.

The short answer is that I don’t plan or outline my book, I just let the words flow until they run out. However, I do have a climactic scene in mind as I write and a lot of what I do is find out how my characters ended up at that point.

It’s December, the peak of the holiday season, filled with hustle and bustle, a new to-do list along with all of the every day tasks. A magical, fun filled time of year, filled with mirth, merriment and melodies or at least that’s what TV Christmas specials and commercials show us. Yet, it all seems like a distraction, a shiny object designed to pull our attention from the world around us to some  idealistic world that never really existed.

Later than I wanted, but I finished my edit of the next chapter of the "Year 2038 Bug" novel. It is posted on our website, link below.

This was a tough chapter to work on and I'm not sure if it will stay in the final book. I did find the writing better than I remembered but it is very rough and I allowed myself to preach too much in this chapter. However, I needed to write this down so I could define a character's motivation for moving forward. I found out some things and I have a better idea of how the character, Gabrielle, will react in the future.

It is time for another post and I had planned to post another chapter today for my book in progress, “Year 2038 Bug”. I have finished the chapter but I am struggling with editing and cleaning it up before posting. So I will post it a day late, after I’ve had a chance to clean it up.

I was driving into work one morning, my mind wandering, and for some reason I focused on finding the fire hydrants in our neighborhood.  As I drove I started to worry, because I didn’t see any fire hydrants close to our house. I finally saw one, protected by a small brick wall, then another and another. I normally don’t think about fire hydrants though it is an important part of our infrastructure.

Normally I would publish another chapter of my serial novel but I have not finished the next part yet. I wanted to spend a little more time on this chapter to smooth it out and time got away from me. I will see if I can finish it up in the next week and publish next Thursday as an extra post. Instead this post is about our cat so I can post egregious pictures of him.