Today is the Day is the Day

I haven’t updated the website in a few days. This is not for a lack of trying, on my part. Rather, I work all day and play all night. Well, not really play. By the time I get off work and then do the things I need/have to do (and talk to Erin and her brother) and then sit and think about writing something as an update to the website it is late and I’ve not done anything.

So, as a result, I thought, “Take some time during the day today.”

Here I go.

Last night Erin and I went and paid off the fascist-pig-dogs also known as RC Willey. We no longer owe them money for anything, which makes Erin happy and allows me to move forward with other things in my life. Granted, I would’ve liked to delay that a couple of weeks (next paycheck) but, with all said, I am glad that we didn’t delay it.

After RC Willey we stopped by Petsmart or Petsco or Pets-R-Us or whatever the big box pet store is called near the fascist-pig-dog establishment we were paying off so that Erin could buy some spray in a bottle that would ward off male cats like spray areas to (I have no idea if this is true) mark territory or something.

As we left there I said I wanted to go to Borders and then drove to Borders. While there I was looking for the latest Fables graphic novel: Fables 9: Sons of Empire, that was supposed to have been sent to my from Amazon.com, but wasn’t and when I got tired of them not sending it to me I cancelled the order and wrote them an e-mail informing them that the lack of communication with them informing the public the book was “In Stock” was unacceptable and that I would find (for this one book) an alternate vendor. Which was the reason I wanted to go to Borders last night, you know, levels of alternate vendors. Top level vendor, for books, Amazon.com. They discount and I don’t pay shipping charges. Second level, for books, Borders stores – Borders offers me incentives, like discounts on books (though not as steep) and dollar amounts off when I purchase X amount in books. Third level, for books, is generally Barnes and Noble and other bookstores like Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and used bookstores. Fourth level, for books, are other online book retailers. Final (and this is only as a drastic last case scenario) are the series of eBay companies that are evil and should not be used, ever.

Now, I did buy books at Borders, but that’s not the reason I went. I was looking for a graphic novel (glorified comic book) and I wanted it a week or two ago when it was released to the public. At this juncture, I went to Borders because, well, they are supposed to have stuff like that. They didn’t.

I was bummed.

Erin asked if there was somewhere else we could look. I told her it required us to drive back in to Provo. She said she didn’t care. After we were done we drove down to the comic book shop just around the corner from where I live. It is not intuitive in there, to me, and it is more a game shop than comic books. Comic books look to be a side bit, for them, that allow them to feed a desire for their customer base. As the graphic novel I want is produced by a DC imprint called Vertigo, and Vertigo is less super-hero based and more supernatural oriented with well thought out story telling and more artistic drawing to their work, it didn’t really surprise me that they didn’t have Fables.

We left.

After getting back to Erin’s, and giving her the receipt for my book purchase (I might update y’all on that later – much, much, much later… like months), I proceeded to pull the Borders stickers off the backs of the books. I’ve commented on this before, and I will comment on it again and again and again – I HATE THEM. And yet, they get a bit of my book-buying business. Go figure. It take, what, ten seconds to pull stickers and they don’t appear to leave residue so… I guess I am good with it.

Which then leads to the book purchases from last night. I purchased:

Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark

The Writers Complete Fantasy Reference, by Writers Digest Books with a forward by Terry Brooks

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Crawford Kilian (comes with a CD – not normally a selling point, but one in this case)

Writers Workshop in a Book, edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez with an introduction by Richard Ford

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises that Transform your Fiction, by Brian Kiteley

This, by the by, is career development stuff and inordertowrite.com site development stuff. Combine the two (e.g. I want to write and I want to create a site for writers to gather writing advice, etc) and you get the idea of why I purchased them.

My mission, today, is to flip through and review the information and begin garnering what can be used as material on the website as well as what needs to be done to review the “useful factor” in each book. My mission tonight is to go through some questions Erin wrote yesterday and see what sophisticated, writing oriented, questions we can send to our first author interview… now that I am feeling like I am a week late on that one. He’s agreed to it, I need to e-mail him and let him know why I am running slow (it was hitting my head in the shower) and then get it done.

After all of that (last night) was accomplished I finally gave Jordan a deadline for when I would write a series of five scripts, five minutes each, for a utube thing he is interested in doing. He claimed that I’d already given him a deadline and I hadn’t. Love it when people mis-remember things. I’m very careful about what I promise – and in this area, I don’t make promises because… well… I don’t. I did last night, though, which means I have to go back to wherever I stored the notes for his five scripts and remember the structure of what I was planning on writing for the boy.

I’ll have to let y’all know how that goes.

On a completely different side note, I am going to (I think) add categories to this blog. That is only important if you are one of the … well … no one that uses the category listings to see what I’ve written in the past. The categories will, effectively, be copies of anything I write for other websites. If you are really interested in seeing what comes down the line, check the categories. In Order to Write will be one. There is, at least, another one that I will be marking, soon.

With all that, I hope this appeases some people.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Denny Crane | Bond. James Bond