Craziness and delirium.  I haven’t posted properly in some time…but I’ve been wading through Craziness and delirium.  But more on that in a bit.  First a word from our sponsor…THE 2007 SLIP N’ SLIDE PARTY!

Firstly, you may be tempted to speak like a pirate at the party, or may want to explore the nuances of the word booty.  Please review the instructional video below…and study it in it’s entirety…it gets particularly informative in the middle.  Go ahead.  I’ll be here when you finish…

Feel educated?  Good.

Hope to see everyone tomorrow at the party.  If you get lost, have to disarm a bomb, or need any other info, you can reach me at 224-627-6836.

So where were we?  Updating.

The last two weeks of my summer job were brutal.  I could not sleep, not to the standard, diurnal beat.  So up early in the morning and no more than 2 hours (sometimes less, sometimes none) sleep a night.  On top of that, I was stressing on the revised outline for my White Wolf novel…due and due and past due to my editor.  Generally, I find the term “Writer’s Block” to be a sham and a BS alibi, but I had nothing…felt pretty useless.

On that last Friday night of the day job, my body shut down—I laid down to take a short “nap” and didn’t wake up for 22 hours.

Now I’m back to comfortably, partial-nocturnal rhythm.  I have my brain back too…and it’s nice–I missed it–just in time for Gen-Con, last weekend.  I went to the gamming convention looking for work, contacts, and ideas.  I hit a bunch of writing and pod casting seminars too.  I imbibed some rum via flask and visited the White Wolf party (it’s the kind of party and the kind of club that Wesley Snipes might walk into and start cutting the heads off of your fellow dancers…only they aren’t dancers…they’re vampires…and holy shit…).

On a happy coincidence, my editor, James Lowder was in Indianapolis, at the convention, doing a writing seminar of his own (on doing freelance work in the gaming industry).  So I braved the early morning after the White Wolf party (ugh!) and popped in the seminar to meet him in person.  I waited (taking notes with all the other hopeful writers) until the seminar was over, before I introduced myself.  He was surprised to learn who I was.  “I’ve got a meeting with White Wolf right after this,” he said, “To talk about you.”  That got the attention of the others in the seminar.  Jim boosted my ego and elevated the worries of my previous, sleepless weeks, telling me that I had nothing to worry about, my writing was good and the things we needed to fix (large mechanical plot structures) were the easiest things to learn, that he could tell we’d work fine together, and that he’d heard nothing but good things from the folks at White Wolf, that they were really excited about the book.  “Just great,” he said in mock alarm, “Now they’re not just expecting a novel as good as their other novels…”

I think I might have beamed a bit.  “Thanks,” I said, “That…helps my hangover considerably.”

This week, I caught the stench of death.  I knew my computer didn’t have much time.  So I made the switch from PC to MAC and have spent much of the week in the laborious enterprise of safely getting all of my files over from one computer to the next . . . just in time for my PC to die on the last load.

That catches us up to now.  There could be more details…but I have a party to prepare.

…one more thing though.

Sometimes one of your own gets their feelings hurt.  Real bad.  And there isn’t much you can do.  Sometimes all you can do is give them an incredibly expensive journal from your own private stores, and let them bleed it all onto the page.

See.

The page is the skin—is the soul.

See.

You bleed out in pen scrawl-slices, spill the bad blood until your humors balance out.

Bleed out long enough and your humors balance out.