SeaWorld take 2

    SeaWorld went better the second go around, this time we arrived earlier and focused on the exhibits over the shows. The kids even managed to get in almost every ride, and we hit 3 out of 4 of the restaurants.
    I managed to pick up a few ideas for my writing. (Consider it a bit of research) I was a bit put out over a few things but it was still a better day. Ironically I have only a small 2 centimeter square sun burn on the back of my left wrist. My sister looks like a racoon. lol
    The kids as I said had a ball, my youngest nephew had to get thoroughly soaked near 8pm and then shivered until his father broke down and rented a warming booth for 2 minutes to dry him out. I've got a few images of him standing in the soak zone at Atlantis getting sprayed. The imp used the towel as a shield... and of course couldn't use it to dry off later. sigh. kids.
    Saturday I helped my landlord tear apart the backyard fence only to patch it back together again. Tomorrow he wants to do it again. Sigh.
    Today I did a bit of editing with Ghost Station. I'm trying to improve things, make it easier for Mechmaster to later edit. Hopefully my learning curve is still heading upwards. It would be nice if I could sort out the past and present tense stuff while writing it, not in post. Grrr.

   To finish this post off I'll just toss out a couple Veraxin pics. The colored ones are of Chirby, a character from my upcoming release: Jethro goes to war. It will be released hopefully this week!

If you're wondering he's dressed in some military camo. :)

Oh my aching...

Back.  :p
    Yeah, I screwed it up again. Dad did the same thing over the weekend. I screwed mine up last month trying to open a stuck window, and then again Sunday bending over to scrub cat food stains off the floor.
     Dad did his bending to open his dresser drawer. lol
     It makes sitting a painful experience. Which makes working even harder for me. Hopefully it will clear up soon. I am trying to stretch and exercise and for the first time I turned the spa on and simmered in it last night. Not bad, it didn't help but it was nice. And now I know how long to heat it for! That sucker gets hot fast! 45 minutes to 111 degrees!

    Anyway, I have mad some small progress here and there. On the Ghost Station writing front I've added 11 pages and converted the font to Times New Roman... which dropped my page count by a hundred pages. That's annoying. I've also tidied up a few errors in past and present tense.
    I've also made some progress on the cover art, I managed to do the first 3 layers. After talking it over with Mechmaster I'm going to leave the cyber bit out since it's detracting from the scene.

     This morning I've been listening to Bon Jovi's Blaze of Glory while working on the Scarab Maintenance boat for the scene. I lifted the concept art from Mike Doscher. You can check out his blog spot here:
www.mikedoscher.blogspot.com
    He's a talented artist. Check out his work when you get the time. :) My 3D model will most likely not do the concept art justice since I'm not throwing as much detail at it as he did.

   I've also added a few bits here and there to future stories. Adding a some new plot twists to Plague planet mainly. :)

   I believe Mechmaster is up to chapter 6 in editing Afraid of the Dark. It's a bit of a slugfest, hopefully it gets easier soon.
  
   And finally, we're going to SeaWorld again tomorrow. Wish us luck. Hopefully things will go a bit better this go around. We're leaving earlier, and staying until closing. That is if we can get the group together and moving out on time! Women!
   

This week in writing...

I sent this to Mechmaster. Since I'm being lazy I just cc'd it here. :)

This week I decided to clean up one of my books since people are picking up the new one and then going back and buying the old ones too. I thought I'd do a quick pass with one of them, choosing New Dawn because it's part of the Engineer series.

I thought I'd just do a quick thing, just a synonym filter convert it to Times Roman 10 point... and stuff like that... Take a day tops. But as I started in I saw how many mistakes I made and decided to just keep at it. It took forever! 6+ hours a day all week!

It didn't help that my pc has been overheating a lot lately. Even while Idle it's been running at 65 C. I've been getting all sorts of errors so I've been shutting down in the afternoon. Fortunately I cleaned it this morning and put new thermal paste on the cpu. I didn't have enough but what little I had made a huge difference. It's running 20 degrees cooler if you can believe it!

So, just as I was about to finish cleaning this afternoon New Dawn I was invaded by the brat pack. That's what I get for text tormenting my nephew about lunch! lol

While they were in the pool I managed to finish the last three pages and then convert the file, test it, and then upload it. Hopefully it's better then before.

Well, I mean it is, it's a heck of a lot better than it was certainly, but not nearly as good as what I've sent to you lately. And of course no where near as good as what you send back. :)

I noticed my writing style changed in it. The beginning had a lot of detail, and bits here and there do but the timeline is missing markers and I've got a lot of scenes that are mostly dialog. That's annoying. I need to get back to writing descriptions.

... but the dialog is now split up, it's not all one run on thing with no breaks. I mean, I went was terrible before I went:

- "yadda yadda." "oh," "yeah, yadda yadda..." "No, but..." "Tell me," "yadda..."-

On and on like that. I'm talking about no breaks at all in between sometimes. no he said she said or anything like that. And a lot of sighing and shrugging or smiling. LOT of sighing. lol

Also I had caps:

- "Yaddda." He pointed. -

Small sentences like that through out the book. I fixed a lot of that. Most if not all of it. I hope.

 

It was horrible. I don't really know what I was thinking when I wrote the book. I keep trying to recall... I remember something about having to have proper paragraphs, no one liners.... But I'm not sure.

The interesting thing is that after I converted it to Time Roman 10 point the page count dropped to 185 pages. I just finished it at 235 pages. I added what? 1 page for the appendix and 49 pages just in breaking the dialog up and fixing it?

It's not perfect, to be honest I wasn't aiming for perfect, There are some issues when I uploaded it. I noticed the TOC is broke up again. That's okay. I got it to work now though. I was aiming for a noticeable improvement over what was there before. Hopefully the future readers will appreciate that.

I'm not going to touch Bootstrap with a ten foot pole. At least not until next month or the month after. lol I know the grammar and formatting is horrible. I know the synonyms... the formatting is even worse! shudder. :P I'm just not up to doing this again so soon. I don't blame you for being tired of it.

 

On another note, I figured I should add an image so this isn't so dry. I think I'll go with one of the many aliens I sculpted for the Wandering Engineer Universe this go around.

This is a Garthian, a devolved one called a Dilgarth. They are mentioned in the some of the earlier books and will play a role in book 4 Ghost Station.

It's a raptor style alien, nasty, with those sythes and claws and teeth. Fun to run into in the dark Ghost Station....

 

Progress of a sorts

  Well, I haven't done much in Ghost Station for the past several days, I've spent a lot of time buming around in future books changing the font to Times New Roman at 10 points. I had to since I found I can't use Courier New when I tried to upload Jethro to the B&N site.
    BTW, Jethro is up and ready to launch, I just need to get the B&N AISN number (their version of an ISBN) into it. That won't happen until I launch it. I hate that only RTF works. I've tried other formats, nothing works for me. They either crash during the upload or I get an error. PDF, Doc, doesn't matter. Only RTF seems to work... but it can take an hour to upload a manuscript.
  Back to the future books... there are 26 total (?) so far in the Wandering engineer universe, all broken into 4 story arches from 3 time periods. So far I've released 4 books Jethro makes 5 and I'm finished the first draft of Ghost Station for 6.
    I also have another 16 other books in various levels of development. Most are 3-10 page treatements. Princess Rescue Inc has been at the 1st draft stage for over a year, I want to do some rewriting to it to add some alternate perspectives so that may take another year.
   
  For those of you wondering, I have tried to correct my first 3 books but there is some funky write protect on them that's been preventing it. Between that and not really having the time I've sort of let it slide. I'm going to take another stab at it now. Maybe I can fix some of the easy errors now if I go to an older copy of the manuscript? We'll see.

  I was going to release an image of the starmap but instead I'll throw this out here for now. :)

                  Now, if you'll excuse me I've got to work on some things... :D

  

Zoids

Last week I dug up my last Zoid rebuilds while talking with my old friend Gerraldo, aka Aikanaro. I decided to do some pics... and that lead to an attempt at some spinners. After talking with my friend I changed the poses to less static poses.
Some of the zoids are dirty, I wanted to dirty them up, add a bit of wear and tear to them for reality sake.
It turns out that my PC can't handle it though, I get the blue screen of death when I try. One part overheating (It's 100+ out and 80+ in my room) and I'm getting worrisome clock errors.
Anyway, here are the Zoids.

The Rev Raptor:

The Hellcat:

The factory new blue Shield Liger:

And finally the Command Shield liger:

Destiny's Choice

Here it is!
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/destinys-choice-chris-hechtl/1112006655?ean=2940014574853&itm=3&

Destiny's Choice is going on sale!

   That's right, in 24-72 hours Destiny's Choice will go live on Barnse & Noble as an E-book. The book is the 3rd in the Wandering Engineer series.
    Book 4 is in the works, hopefully it will be fully roughed out in another week or so.
    Jethro goes to War should go live in a month or 2. :)

                                      WAHOOO! Time to celebrate!

How much is too much?

    I am back into Ghost Station but I stalled out after adding only 8 pages today. I'm running into instances of notes that are also descriptive passages. I've been talking with Mechmaster about my writing style. I've really erred on turning such passages into dialog over leaving them bare. He did this, this happened, this happened... etc. But Mechmaster has pointed out that detracts from the story... and so does not having something like that in a story and sticking to pure dialog. When I stick to dialog it seems like you are reading a script or transcript, not a book.
    So, my current quandry, how much is too much? And how much is not enough?

  On another subject...  I just recieved an e-mail from a long lost friend. Well, not loong lost, just missing in action for the past couple of months. he's been busy working on his 3D animation thesis project. It's cool. Check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emVPp9DofSk

Destiny's choice

   Well, about a couple of hours before we were going to leave for Sea World I checked my mail and low and behold Mechmaster had sent me Destiny's Choice back with an after action report that curled my hair. I dropped Ghost Station and I've been plugging away at Destiny, making corrections and adding a few descriptions and tid bits. All the changes added up to an additional 71 pages so I hope it was worth the effort.
   I just passed it back to Mechmaster to take a quick look at. If he gives the thumbs up soon I'll upload it to B&N and then dive back into Ghost Station.

   Sea World was... different. Very different. Disappointing. That made for my fifth time there, but the last time was over 15 years ago and I was dismayed by the rampant consumerism that has overrun the park. ($4.69 for a freakin cup of coffee???)  The emphasis is on getting people to spend money on over priced nasty tasting food, drinks, or cheap junk then it is on the animals.
    It was really annoying to get there so late, we didn't leave until after 12:30 and it's a 2 hour drive to San Diego. The park closes at 10 so it's difficult to get in, ride the rides, see the shows, and stuff in that short a time. Of course it's also difficult to see a show when they air most of them before 2pm and have only 1 or 2 after that time period. Grrr.
    Since we went there in such a large group (16 or 17 of us, I lost count) it was like herding cats. I split off from the group several times because they wanted to take an hour to eat or take multiple pee breaks. (Honestly you just went an hour ago! Argth!) I managed to catch half the shows and see half the park, they managed to see 3 shows and ride 2 out of I dunno, I think 7 of the rides. ($5 to use a blow dryer??)  I also managed to catch up with my grandmother and her friends who had decided to go with us but had gone at an earlier time. The ladies had the right idea, they had arrived at the opening and managed to see the entire park and all but the night shows.
     For dinner I paid $14 for a cold rubber double burger with cold cheese, a handful of greasy cold fries, and a watered down drink. I vowed not to eat there again after that. Apparently just about everyone shared my opinion of the food. So much for using the $30 all you can eat pass. lol
    I can see that they need the money since they charge $10 to feed the animals. You get a handful of food in a cardboard french fry container. One good gulp and it's gone, not that I would eat that! :P
    None of us were impressed with the shows. It was more about the trainers then the animals. There were a lot of aerobatics and stunts by human performers, not one iota of education or conservation. One show didn't have any animals at all! Just tumbling and a trampoline! The dolphin show had a lot of animals but they were only in half of it! The rest was all the human performers and trainers doing stunts and stuff.
    Those people who had gone to the Orlando Sea World agreed that the shows there were much better.
    Each show had groups of vendors going up and down the stairs trying to get you to buy food or junk. ($4.25 for a handful of popcorn?? $50 for a small blanket??? $5 for a bubble gun?) That got annoying fast.
     The fun news is they goofed on the ad so we get to go again in a couple weeks to catch what we missed. This time we're planning on leaving earlier and hopefully we won't have such a big crowd with us. The kids said they will go off with me since I got to see and experience a lot more then they did and had more fun doing it. I don't blame them, they enjoyed a couple of the rides but standing in line for 45 minutes for a 2 minute ride is terrible waste of time. They are also pretty insistent on getting me to ride the splash ride. lol
     Right now the plan is to eat before we get there and to stop on the way home to eat as well. That will hopefully give us more time to enjoy the place. I recommend that to anyone planning on going to a park now.

   Have a great and happy 4rth of July everyone! Stay safe!