Anytime you can look like a hero

My son is the handsome one

It was career day at my youngest son's school and I participated.

By day I work as a compliance analyst for an insurance company. By night I create worlds, murder characters, and act the peeping tom watching other characters fall in love.

Which career do you think I chose to talk about?

Such a fun time. I did a twenty-minute presentation to four different classes of ten-year-olds. Now there's a magical age. Imagination and fun characterize a major part of the day for a kid in fourth grade. Or it should. I know it does for my son.

This age is also great for a dad because most ten-year-olds haven't realized yet their dad doesn't have super powers. For twenty minutes today as I talked to the kids about writing and being creative, my son was having one of those moments where he wanted to tell everyone that this was his dad. I could see it in his eyes.

Rare moments. I'll take them when they come.

Daily Ambivalence - Slimy bugs

Slimy bugs can be used to scare girls or to feed survivalists being filmed by television crews.

Only, in today's world more and more little girls are not scared by slimy bugs, and pretty much all shows that document survivalists and their gross, slimy bug consumption can only be found on cable. I dropped cable a month ago.

To conclude, most of the slimy bugs I see nowadays are on the undersides of the stones I collect to use as markers when I need to dig a new grave in my backyard.

Slimy bugs . . . eh.

Outline writing

I am familiar with the concept of using an outline first before you start your novel. I've been in an audience and listened to authors discuss the subject, more than once actually, and it seemed that the big-time authors usually were the onces who used outlines.

Which falls in line with my sales figures for the year. Of the nine books I have written, I've used an outline for only one, and that's because the outline was already created. That book isn't out yet. It's called Pocket Hole, and it started off as a graphic novel. I put the graphic novel together with my friend AJ Bell and we released a first issue. Looked great.

We got stalled on the second issue though, so I decided to try and convert the graphic novel into a full-on novel. The thumbnails for the whole story were done, so really, I had more than an outline, I had an outline with pictures. The novel came together quick and easy and it's really a fun book. Like I said, I'll probably put it out in a month or two.

Anyways, since then I've written another book, without using an outline, and now I'm starting the latest, which will be a big book (first in a trilogy) and it won't be set in this world. At least not beyond the first chapter. So, I'm doing a little world creating and I think an outline might help.

Daily Ambivalence - Lightning Tattoos

I saw a guy the other day with a lighting bolt tattooed on the back of his hand. This was something he did on purpose.

I have no experience with tattoo parlors, but what the tattooed guy basically did was allow another guy to stick needles into his hand repeatedly. This second guy had likely been featured recently on a television show where the theme music to the show had words in it like "bad boys" and "what ya gonna do." Money exchanged hands in this transaction, and inexplicably, it was the second guy who got the money.

Women pay doctors to remove varicose veins from their legs, even though many times the veins in their legs look like lighting bolts.

I am going to assume the difference here is a Women are from Mars, Men are from Venus kind of thing.

Lighting Tattoos . . . eh.