An Amazing Picture

Here is the first picture of my kids! I have to come right out and say that this picture amazes me. I knew they did ultra sounds, I have even seen a few, but who knew that they did 3d imaging of them? Not me. Apparently our pictures aren’t as good as most. The fact that we are having twins kind of messes with the whole thing. But here are the first pictures of James Dylan Roberts and Emily Madison Roberts. She is the one on the right. He is one the left. As for why his picture looks so strange, his nose is being smushed by her rear end, and he has his arm up there trying to push her away. Poor guy.

Since this is supposed to be a writing blog I will also mention that I had a really great writing session last night. I got over three thousand words written in about an hour and a half, which for me is an amazing pace. The novel has quickly veered completely away from everything I outlined. The characters are different, whole new plot threads have appeared, and a minor throw away character is starting to become the antagonist, heck whole new magical races of people have sprung to life. All of this probably means that I need to make a new outline over the next couple of days. I hate that. It means I won’t be able to get any writing done for a day or two.

Stuff and More Stuff

I have a bunch of stuff to write about today, sorry for the weird jumble of info. So in no particular order…

Item: Chicken Pox. I had them, it sucked. Why won’t people stay home when they are sick? Why do they all think the library is a great place to go when they are too sick to go to school or work? I could rant on this one for awhile, but instead imagine running a fever for four days with red itchy spots all over your body, now imagine that you know who did that to you and that they had told you “it is a good thing to take your kids out when they have the chicken pox. Every adult has already had them, and the kids need to be exposed to it.” Imagine what you want to say to that person, then pretend I wrote that.

Item: Twins. It is official we are having a boy and a girl. We had the ultra sound yesterday. It was really fun to watch them swimming around. At one point the ultra sound technician was trying to get a good view of the boy’s face, the girl promptly swam over and rubbed her bottom on his face until we looked at her again. I am not sure what that means but it has to mean something.

Item: Mile High Con. We won’t make it this year, for those of you wondering. Maybe next year but I do not want to try driving six hours with a pair of two month old babies.

Item: Short stories. I think I am done writing short fiction. The last three times I sat down to write one I hit the 10,000 word mark and decided “this should really be a novel”. I am not done forever but apparently the stories in my head have gotten a little more complex over the past few years. I am sure I will have an idea now and then that works better in a shorter format, but for now I am done. I still have five or six stories that haven’t been published, if no one picks them up you might see them here.

Item: Blood plague war. It’s done. WOOT!!! Just finished it last night. I am not sure if I will even put the time into editing it. I have known the story was broken for awhile I just wouldn’t admit it. Maybe if I sit it on a shelf for awhile I will come up with some ideas to fix it during the editing process. The problem is that about half way through the novel it switches from a book about a group of people dealing with a natural event (the blood plague) to a novel about people in the middle of a civil war. It feels like two completely different novels, maybe I can weave in some stuff to make it more uniform but I don’t really want to look at the thing right now. To put it another way, I kind of have a love hate relationship with the stuff I write, and Blood Plague is sleeping on the couch, and if it doesn’t watch it’s P’s and Q’s it might have to find a hotel for the night.

Item: New Novel. Okay, I agree. That is an awful title. But I am only two paragraphs and an outline into it, give me a break.

A New Year

Happy New Year!

Hello, everybody. Sorry I haven’t posted sooner but it has been a busy new year. As some of you have probably read over at the PHP website, over Christmas my wife and I discovered that we are going to have twins in August. We are both really excited, but I have a bunch of stuff to do around the house before August, and with the Summer Reading program in June and July I really need to try to get everything done by May.

I have to make the spare bedroom into a nursery, move the spare bedroom to my office, move office down the stairs and across the house into a room we were using for storage, move my wife’s office into another room we were using for storage, make her old office into a new living room(we picked the smallest room in the entire house to be our living room and we are going to need more room where we hang out), move the stuff from the storage rooms out to the shed or out to the dumpster, paint the old living room…anyway there’s more stuff but I’m sure you get the idea.

Basically “We” decided to rearrange the entire house, I put the quotes around we because while technically I was there, I just said things like “yes honey” and “that’s good idea”. In short I have had a pretty busy few weeks, but I am not minding it at all because I am so excited about the twins.

On the writing front I started yet another new project. It kind of seems like that is all I did in 2011. Every month or so I would start something new. But I made a new year’s resolution to finish writing something before I start anything else and to write at least 400 words a day. I figure 400 words a day is easy, takes me about thirty minutes or so, and I can finish a novel in a little over six months. Plus it is a little slower than the nanowrimo pass so my writing should be a little more intelligible.

I better get to writing.

Oh, and I won the super bowl in one of my fantasy football leagues.