Post Thanksgiving wrap-up

First off, yes I know we missed an update on Thursday. To my friends outside the US, this is our Thanksgiving holiday. To my friends in the US, I’m not apologizing for taking it off. I probably should have scheduled a post, but with all that’s been going on I never got around to it and on the day, I decided to just let it go.

Anyhow, I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving. I had a great weekend, though very little of that had to do with the actual holiday….

Thanksgiving doesn’t get me down like Christmas does. Still, I’m not a big fan of family gatherings and made sure my gameboy was charged. My wife made a beautiful dinner for us and my side of the family along with her brother, grandmother and her mom’s boyfriend. At my end of the table we got into a discussion on emulation gaming and repaired to the library after dinner to shuffle through some of the tens of thousands of games on my MAME cabinet.

Friday I found a shredded yellow envelope in my mail along with an apology from the post office for ripping up my mail. Seriously. The note was printed on the envelope. Unbelievably the picture inside was undamaged and autographed. I had given this one up for lost – it was a Madeline cover I had sent to Lauren Bacall in New York city shortly before the hurricane. I suspected it might get lost or destroyed and wasn’t counting on getting it back. As it turns out I was half right. But because I only sent a 5×8 instead of my normal 8×10, it somehow managed to sink into the bottom of the envelope and arrive undamaged despite the envelope’s tattered and torn condition. That one is going right back out in the mail to Christopher Plummer. I don’t think I can get this back for the girls in time for Christmas, but we’ll see. They have better luck with autographs than I do.

Friday I also found myself less  than 4000 words away from my goal for the National Novel Writing Month competition. I decided to try for one big push to finish Sunday night. The story was rapidly coming to a close though, and I wasn’t sure I could stretch it out far enough.

Saturday I found nothing in the mail box except junk, however as we were leaving I noticed a big yellow envelope stuck behind the box. Sometimes the mail lady does that and other times she puts it in the box. I’d missed it when I went out to get the mail earlier and I sprinted out of the car to grab it so I could look at it on the way over to my In-Laws. My wife thought I was being funny as I gasped and forgot to breathe for a moment.

Here’s the thing. You have to actually know who Steve Taylor is for this to be as insanely exciting as it was to me. He was a musician on the Christian rock scene in the late 80’s, right in the middle of the witch hunt period where all rock music was condemed as bad, Christian or secular. He had a revival in the mid 90’s and has gone on to film and directing (much like Rob Zombie). He was the kind of artist you might consider indie rock or hipster if he were a little more mainstream and he’s got a loyal cult following…all four or five of us.

I had to work a little to track him down, it took a while to find an address for him and even then, I wasn’t sure I had the right person. Still, it was worth a shot and I sent out a photo and a letter….a year ago. I checked the date on the SASE stamp. He actually acknowledges it in his letter back! This absolutely made my day.

I finished the novel early on Sunday morning before going to bed. Unfortunately I found myself 1200 words short. Less than I expected, but short nevertheless. I resolved to fix it after Church.

Let me explain one thing to you. I can’t imagine an experience more terrifying than having the pastor refer to you BY NAME at the beginning of the sermon and announcing that he saw something you posted ON HIS DAUGHTERS facebook account. *Facepalm*

It ended up being something positive however so no one drug me out with torched burning….He launched into reasons why he hated Christmas, and while there were no sports illustrations (a surprising thing, that) he did manage to slip in a metaphor about getting into the middle of a fight between Wolverine and Freddy Kruger. You know that one Violent Blue strip where I complain about the minister’s message never being relevant to me? ( http://www.violentblue.thecomicseries.com/comics/105/ ) I take it all back.

I finished my day by diving into the second draft of my book. We finally have a title ; “Coffee, Rock Bands and Superman”. It is a direct sequel (though it can also stand on it’s own as a stand-alone story) to Violent Blue, which means I can’t release it for at least another year, since it references things that haven’t happened yet in the comic strip. I expect the second draft to be done next month, but I got far enough into it that I managed to increase the word count past the required 50,000 words to complete NaNoWriMo. I know what the cover should be and will upload it as soon as I’m finished with it. Give me another day or two.

So all in all, I had a pretty amazing weekend. I hope yours was just as great. We’ll see you back here tomorrow, but untill then, check out what’s going on in todays editions of Violent Blue!

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