What a month

Well, It's been one hell of a month. We're probably moving here in the next few weeks. Haven't really worked on the book much as of late... lack of time and inclination.

Just thought I'd drop a quick update.

Where are we again?

Things have slowed down a touch, been throwing ideas around the past week or so, along with going through and making several revisions, most of which were minor though there were some moderately substantial additions.

But, it's shaping up pretty well, on Chapter 3 now, and am presently on page 30.

Fun fact, thus far I have scraped about 15 pages worth of material. And that just whole pages that I highlighted and deleted. This isn't counting the paragraphs lost by way of revision. That would probably add another page or two.

So far though, things seem to be smoothing out, the revision are becoming a bit less frequent and drastic. By and by, it seems to be smoothing out a good deal. Only thing I'm a bit back and forth on is pacing. I want to get into the heart of the story, but I don't want to undersell the introduction ( for lack of a better way to put it.) Other things I'm a little iffy about, but not too badly. I'm trying to get a sort of focus-group organized for the end of the month, hopefully that will help to get a better idea of how other people take to the material I have so far. I'm hoping to get it up to 50 pages by then. Figure the 10%  mark would be a good time to step back and say "is it worth continuing with, or should I start over?"

And then, there was blood.

I worked on Chapter 2 today, and I have it mostly done. Just a few more pages probably and I'll be good to go. Sent it out to my test readers for their impressions. Hopefully they'll like it. This is the first in which the main "bad guys" come into the picture, and I really tried to do them justice. Hopefully the test readers will feel the same.

Suppose I should explain the test readers a bit. I'm trying a (I'm assuming anyways) a bit of an odd approach, in that from time to time I'm sending out the most recent revision of that I have at that point to get some impressions on how it's shaping up. I have a wide variety of people coming from all sorts of demographics and interests so hopefully I can get a good snapshot.

But, that's about it for now. Almost time for work... oh joy!

So it's been a while.

Okay... not really. It's been two days.

But what an interesting two days it has been!

Okay, I need to stop lying now...

Anyways, in regards to the book, I'm (for now) going to continue on using the second draft, and has started into the second chapter. This was after an exhaustive two-day effort (about 25hrs. in total) to flesh out the back story for what is going on.

By the way... do you know how hard it is to come up with a legit story as to what cause Lucifer to rebel, let alone any of the other shit I have going on (yeah... I'm not giving it up here. You'll just have to read it when it's done.) Note: By "legit" I actually mean a version that is at least quasi-original, yet not overly dickish. See, though I'm agnostic, I make sport of arguing with the faithful.

Anyways... I learned some new things today. See, I'm from Ohio originally (moved between Warren and Champion a couple times growing up). It makes my day when I find out that someone interesting is from my neck of the woods. (Such as Neil Armstrong and Dave Grohl). Well, funny story...

I found out about two more interesting people from the area. Maynard Keenan (Ravenna) and Ed O'Neil (Youngstown). Another thing that ties them together? Both are Black Belts in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Some other interesting people from the area: Austin Pendleton, Victor Slezak, Roger Ailes and Dominic Sena.

And we survived!

The storm has now passed, the sun is out and power has stabilized once again. No major damage. Through the storm I decided to rewrite the first chapter. I'm much happier with this version, but sent them both out in an email to some friends for some outside input on it. See how that turns out. So far It's been a bit mixed as to which one they've liked better.

We'll see how it goes.

For now I'm going to continue on from the second version. Onto the second chapter!

Well... here she comes! Our big scary hurricane... just had fun at work. Only had to bake the breads. And carry in all of the outside furniture at Panera.

Newsflash: there's a metric shit ton of outside furniture at Panera.

But this should be fun. Found out just how precious a commodity SPAM apparently is. And D batteries.

Oh well... time to take a shower while I still can.

And on the second day

So here's day two of active writing. Second chapter is coming along nicely, about 4 pages in to it now. It's flowing a lot more freely than the first chapter did that's for sure. The first one just feels, I dunno... really forced. I've gone back several times, rereading it and making tweaks here and there. But I'm still not 100% comfortable with it. Going to pass it onto some of my military friends, see what they think. I may end up rewriting, and changing the format of it, or just scraping it.

Only time will tell.

We're looking at getting hit with a hurricane Saturday... wonder if this is going to be like the others we've had since I moved here. It's been 10 years so far and we've had thunderstorms that have been more severe than the hurricanes we've had in that time. Almost disappointing.

No, I'm not saying I want Wilmington to be destroyed by a hurricane a la Katrina.

Well THAT was fast...

Chapter one is (FINALLY) finished... well, the draft version at least.  As I was finishing it up, we had an earthquake apparently.

Now for the Hurricane later this week...

And so it begins...

Holy shit... you know, it's been upwards of 5 years since the last time I actively blogged? That was back when people actually still used site like Xanga...

Anyways, so here it is, the NEW blog of one Stephen Gillespie (that's me). Largely this is going to be used as a diary of a new endeavor I FINALLY got around to working on. After having talked about doing so for, oh I don't know... 12 years? Something like that anyways... I'm starting work on a novel.

As of writing this, I'm about finished with the first chapter, and have the next two plotted out. Not 100% sure on where exactly this is going to end up storyline wise... but I do have some ideas. I'm trying an approach where I build the book up only a few chapters at a time. I have a lot of my characters designed (nearly 40 of them thus far) some more so than others, and some may not actually play any active role. I'm not going to go into too much detail just yet, but I will post some snippets from time to time.

What I will tell you is that the overall setting in this is going to be the war between Heaven and Hell. I'm hoping to be able to play around with a lot of ideas that I have about religion as a whole. I'm going to incorporate a lot of other religions into it in various ways. So as to help process the HUGE amount information out there in the field of religious mythos and lore, I've secured the aid of a good friend of mine (one Devon Scott), who's a very well versed Religious studies major (I'm pretty knowledgeable, and he can run circles around me). Things are shaping up nicely though, even if a little heady at times.

So I think that's about it for now. Thanks for checking this out, keep and eye out, you never know what I might drop in here.