For the first time in a long time I am willingly submitting myself to the scrutiny of others and exposing my ego to damage. Today marks the day when I make my official first attempt at writing, and not the usual engineering or technical papers that I tend to be involved in. A BOOK, a novel, a long story, whatever you want to call it, I'm attempting to write one. I have kept it a little secret for the past few months because I wasn't sure if what I had was worth anything or if it would just fizzle out. Apparently it has not fizzled, I have been working in the spare time that I have, an hour or two here and there, and have come up with a plot line, seven to ten primary characters, the sketched outline for the first six or seven chapters and the primary ideas for approximately seventeen chapters. The idea came to me, as ideas do to many people, in the shower. I had been thinking about the show Heroes which was short lived and jumped the shark almost after he first season was over in addition to pondering the feasibility of a type of generator I had heard about a while ago and came up with a cool idea: What if there were bio implantable generators? Weird right? then everything started to fall out, the main character, what would happen to her, how it would happen, all the good stuff that make a story.
For the next couple of days every chance I got I kept writing, not on the actual chapters, but background. Character names, story flow, actual ballistics and medical condition research, genetics research, in a short time I had a binder and notebook with hand written notes, typed pages and diagrams. Its been a lot of fun so far.
Recently I had my wife Dr. Maureen read the prologue. The verdict? Amateurish, she didn't really like the stories of that type, not extremely well written. I was crushed. The person I had counted on to give me words of encouragement had eviscerated me instead. [WHAT THE WHAT? I did no such thing. -Ed.] At first I was a little shocked but then she told me she was comparing me to actual written work, stuff that had been published. She also said that she had read stuff like this on the shelves. Keeping in mind that I'm not an author by nature and I was a bit more encouraged. I set about re-writing the prologue and I feel its better now, in fact ready for (queue drum roll) EDITING
I knew I'd reach the point where self editing was not enough so I decided that I would need to find a person who did this for a living. I checked on line and there are plenty of places that will do it but they want you to buy some sort of editing/publishing deal usually and they mostly deal with paper publications. So I went looking for alternatives and found some. Which leads me to today. I have just sent the Prologue and three chapters out for editing. I have yet to decide how I want to release it, there are so many options. I guess it depends on whether the thing stinks like last weeks fish or not. I think, however, I will release the Prologue for all to read and comment on when as soon as it's ready.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Familiarity breeds contempt (Or why I'm Like Julia Child)
Every now and then something happens in your life to make you realize that you are not invincible, that no matter how well you plan or how prepared you are, circumstances can arrive that can toss your well ordered life into complete disarray. Something like this happened to me a little less than three weeks ago. Now you may be wondering why someone would wait three weeks to write about an event of this magnitude, aside from the glaringly obvious reason that I don't post much. Well that was one of the results of life kicking my ass.
The day was going so well, we were at a dual birthday party for my niece and nephew and my sister-in-law was getting lunch ready (Home made chili and pulled pork, mmmm). They were finishing with the garnish for the chili which was to be scallions and shredded cheese. I offered to help with the scallions. Some of you can guess where this is going. To make a long story short, I almost cut off the tip of my finger. Standing at the sink, telling my mother quite calmly that I had cut my finger and would shortly be going to the hospital. I turned to inform my brother, who had come over to see what the problem was, that I would probably be going into shock in about 30 seconds or so. I then proceeded to nearly pass out. When the excitement calmed down a little, I regained enough presence of mind to bandage myself and have someone drive me to the hospital.
Which leads me to possibly the fastest ER visit in the history of Man. I was at the hospital, admitted, treated and released and back at the party in about 2 and a half hours. This becomes more amazing when the drive time from the house to hospital is about 20 minutes.
Now for the amazing part. People take a lot of what medicine can do today for granted, but lets take a minute and appreciate what was done. I had sliced the tip of my finger almost off with a knife sharp enough to cut through fingernails without breaking a sweat. It was literally hanging on by a few millimeters of skin. Here I am three weeks later and my finger tip is attached. My FINGER was reattached with NEEDLE and THREAD. This is really cool. To give you perspective, here are some wonderfully gruesome pictures.Fair warning, these are a little gross.
This is a nice side view where you can see all four stitches that I got. I believe that it is worth mentioning here that these stitches were done by a 4th year med student and apparently she does a wonderful job according to my GP.
As you can see a good portion of the finger nail is now gone, having been removed by the wonderful doctors at the ER after my digital block. The mess where the nail bed should be is actually caused by gause stuck to the finger. I did not know this at the time the photo was taken.
Lastly you can see here that the cut went pretty much all the way through the finger> It was only held on by the small bit of skin at the very tip of the finger. Let it be known, when people say Cutco knives are sharp, they ain't kidding around. Well, that about wraps it up for this episode of gruesome pictures, tune in next week when we'll be showcasing what happens to a toe nail when you drop a 2 pound shower head on it.
The day was going so well, we were at a dual birthday party for my niece and nephew and my sister-in-law was getting lunch ready (Home made chili and pulled pork, mmmm). They were finishing with the garnish for the chili which was to be scallions and shredded cheese. I offered to help with the scallions. Some of you can guess where this is going. To make a long story short, I almost cut off the tip of my finger. Standing at the sink, telling my mother quite calmly that I had cut my finger and would shortly be going to the hospital. I turned to inform my brother, who had come over to see what the problem was, that I would probably be going into shock in about 30 seconds or so. I then proceeded to nearly pass out. When the excitement calmed down a little, I regained enough presence of mind to bandage myself and have someone drive me to the hospital.
Which leads me to possibly the fastest ER visit in the history of Man. I was at the hospital, admitted, treated and released and back at the party in about 2 and a half hours. This becomes more amazing when the drive time from the house to hospital is about 20 minutes.
Now for the amazing part. People take a lot of what medicine can do today for granted, but lets take a minute and appreciate what was done. I had sliced the tip of my finger almost off with a knife sharp enough to cut through fingernails without breaking a sweat. It was literally hanging on by a few millimeters of skin. Here I am three weeks later and my finger tip is attached. My FINGER was reattached with NEEDLE and THREAD. This is really cool. To give you perspective, here are some wonderfully gruesome pictures.Fair warning, these are a little gross.
This is a nice side view where you can see all four stitches that I got. I believe that it is worth mentioning here that these stitches were done by a 4th year med student and apparently she does a wonderful job according to my GP.
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