Tech is extremely important in modern classrooms. It allows educators to….

All in all, it took me about three months to write the first draft of Charlie. It took me two years to edit, and I’m sure he’ll see more revisions still before he gets where he’s going.

I talked in an earlier post about how important it is to write the first draft without a filter. The first draft is for creation. Let the story bubble and burst forth. If there is a particular description you like, include it–if you think there is potential for a funny dialogue, write it. Leave the destruction for the editing phase.

I never plotted Charlie before I sat down to write, so everyday when I sat at my keyboard I would watch as the story unfolded. I rarely thought about what was going to happen in Charlie beyond the next day’s writing, and I believe that it helped keep Charlie fresh and natural. If I had plotted Charlie beforehand, I’d have struggled to make the story fit the contours of my outline. Instead I let Charlie breathe.

And in places I paid for it. The first time I sat down and read my manuscript upon completion, it made me almost sick. I had convinced myself that I’d written something worth writing, but the pages of Charlie were filled with rambling narration and out-of-place dialogue. The story crawled in the beginning, and why not? While writing Charlie, I had no direction in the first 50 pages. I didn’t know where Charlie was going, or why he was going there, and it showed.

But there was a lot of good in the early manuscript. The characters were compelling–even endearing at times. I found myself laughing out loud during long dialogues. And when the story finally revealed itself, it was engaging. What’s more, it was unique. I’d never read a book like the one I’d just written, and even through all the noise, I could see a gem.

So I edited. I knew what I hated about the book, so I struck it. I was heartless. Even pieces that I loved got cut if they didn’t build story. The pieces that did work in the story, I amplified. I worked to broaden characters, sharpen dialogue, and deepen plot. Where I saw recurring themes, I enhanced them.

Everything I lost from Charlie turned into back story. It’s all just something else I know about Charlie’s world that can help me tell his story better. It still exists, but I’m the only one who needs to know.

The main story in Charlie never changed. The arc remained more or less the same, but Charlie’s world underwent severe contractions and expansions. The first draft of Charlie was 95,000 words. The most recent draft is 76,000, but out of those original 95,000 words, I’d be surprised if 25% remain. I would imagine that I’ll lose more of those still before Charlie finds his way into print.

Thanks for reading.

Just a small announcement here on the Front Page today to say that the 1936 Bungalow tab has officially been broken in. Be sure to keep checking back to see updates on our ongoing Home-In-Progress.

The Bungalow page is still due for a bit of tweaking, but things are coming together.

I wish I could say the same about the house.

“I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday.” –Stephen King

Today, I’d like to take this space to talk a little bit about Charlie.

Charlie is my Middle Grade manuscript. It’s in great shape at about 76,000 words, and ready to be represented. I don’t talk about him often, but since this area of the site has been devoted to writing and editing, I think it would be foolish not to talk about how I spend a good deal of my writing time.

Charlie is my fallback. I wrote the first draft of the book as my senior thesis at UW-Madison. It took all three months of the semester, but when the final bound copy was due on my professor’s desk, I was ready with all 282 pages of it. I was surprised by my output. I’d never written anything over 15 pages before, and suddenly I was knocking off 15-20 manuscript pages per day. I’ve talked about the Myth of Inspiration in this space before, but I think that the first draft of Charlie was the first time I ever tunderstood the power of honest-to-god work while writing.

I kept a tight regimen. I wrote six days a week, starting at eight o’clock every morning. I didn’t constrain myself with any artificial time limits, but calculated early in the semester that if I were able to produce five manuscript pages per day, that I’d be able to easily knock out 300 pages through the course of the semester. So I set my goal at five pages.

At first, it took a while to get there. Charlie was in his infancy, and a lot was spent plotting out the details of my characters’ world. I didn’t concern myself with plot, which is evident re-reading the first draft. I had a general direction I wanted to take the story, and was happy to let my characters do the walking. Once the story gained momentum–and once my characters began to take on lives of their own–I found myself burning through my five page goal in my first hour at the keyboard.

So I extended it. I doubled my daily goal to ten pages, and within a week I’d extended it to fifteen. Pretty soon I’d decided that instead of setting a page limit, I would try to write an arc per day. Needless to say, the manuscript pages piled up.

Of course, most of what I wrote was useless. Not useless, useless–but a good deal of early Charlie had no business being on the page. A lot of it was great back-story. Even more of it was built of wonderful little pieces of dialog or character mannerisms that brought texture and vibrancy to Charlie’s world. But as the caretaker of Charlie’s world, I needed to be a filter. Not in the first draft, mind you.

The power and the utility of the first draft of Charlie–the power of all first drafts–is that it was written without that filter in place. The first draft of Charlie allowed me to put all of that world-building dialog and all of those humorous mannerisms down on the page. The first draft of Charlie made those things real, but as the filter between Charlie and the audience, I’m responsible for building an engaging world. That world existed in Charlie’s first draft, but Charlie wouldn’t begin to shine until editing.

Next: Editing.

If it wasn’t clear, I’m taking this site in a new direction. It’s still going to serve as an online resume and portfolio, but I plan to fully utilize it as my corner of the Internet. My platform. I’ve added a tab where Meghan and I will document our home remodel, but this Front Page will ultimately serve for discussions on writing, publishing, and other digressions that cross my path.

This post is a digression. Think of it like an excursion. An adventure.

A very nerdy, very frugal adventure.

I wear glasses. I have since High School, and I’m almost entirely useless without them. Until recently, I would buy a pair of glasses, wear them until the prescription was outdated, and buy a new pair. With eyeglass insurance almost entirely antiquated, buying a new pair–even if every two years–was a significant cost. I wear single-vision lenses, and the last pair of glasses I bought commercially cost over $400. That was during a 1/2 price lens sale.

I essentially destroyed the $400 pair while priming all the new walls in the house. It turns out that primer has some deteriorating properties when applied directly to eyeglass lenses, and shouldn’t be wiped off with a dry shirt. Instead of running back to the mall do drop another fist full of dollars, I decided to search out a more reasonable option.

Enter EyeBuyDirect.com.

EyeBuyDirect is one of many online glasses retailers that boast dirt-cheap prescription glasses. The frames are extremely stylish. They aren’t name-brand, but nobody cares who made your glasses. I heard about the service on The Clark Howard Show, and with prices beginning around $8 for a complete pair, trying it out presented an extremely low-risk high-reward scenario.

I scheduled an eye exam to update my prescription, and requested it in writing when I left. If you have a current prescription you can contact your optometrist’s office and they’ll turn it over without too much fuss. After selecting a good-looking frame from the hundreds to choose from, I was brought to a page where entering the prescription information was idiot-proof.

Ten days later I had my glasses.

They were perfect. They fit well, the prescription was dead-on, and they looked great. I opted for a lot of extras on the lenses, adding scratch-resistance and uv-protection, but even with all the extras the total cost of the glasses was somewhere around $25.

I haven’t looked back. Since my first pair in November of 2009, I’ve ordered four more. I tell everybody who will listen about buying glasses online, and I encourage people to spread the word. Most sites offer bi-focal and progressive lenses, and I’m in the process of ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses–something that will be nice to have, but that I could never justify the cost for.

If you wear glasses, I encourage you to check it out. The risk is virtually zero. If you’d like more information, a fella named Ira runs a great informational site over at GlassyEyes.com. He has retailer reviews, special discount coupons, and hosts a great community in his forums that will be happy to answer any questions.

Otherwise, check out EyeBuyDirect, or one of these other retailers:

• ZenniOptical–Probably the cheapest player in the game.
• 39DollarGlasses–Some prices are lower than $39.
• Optical4Less–Another great site.
• GlassesShop–One of the only sites I’ve found that carries true name-brand frames at a deep discount

Thanks for reading.

“I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

–William Faulkner

I’ve recently had the good fortune of stumbling across JosephHolschuh.com, and was surprised to find a very handsome, very navigable website. I should pay more attention to it.

This site is meant as an online resume, and it works well. There’s a bit about me, some silly photos, and a page full of writing samples with links both broken and unbroken. Still, I’m enchanted with the idea of a corner of the internet to call my own. There’s a compulsion to make it something more than it is. The problem with personal websites–much like the problem with Twitter accounts–is that as much as you want to tell people what you’re doing, for the most part nobody cares.

So I could take this site in a number of directions. If I keep it as an online portfolio, and nothing more, it seems silly to keep posting to the front page. A lot of writers keep a personal website so that they’re forced to write, but I think that time in this space is too often time wasted, and the best way to make yourself write is just to write.

The best advice I ever got on the subject was on the first day of a creative writing course. After a small bit of introduction, the professor talked about what he called The Myth of Inspiration. The Myth of Inspiration, he said, was this false idea that too many writers have that great writing comes in bolts of genius. They expect that like Coleridge with Kubla Khan, great works come to a mind at rest. As romantic as that idea it, it’s absolutely rubbish.

The truth is that good writing comes from nose-to-the-grindstone, honest-to-god work. To be productive a writer needs to write every day. The professor argued–and I’ve found it to be true–that a writer should pick a time every day when they do nothing but write. It doesn’t matter when, just so long as it’s consistent. This accomplishes a couple things:

1. It gives a writer time to do nothing else but write. Find a quiet corner of the house, or a white nose cafe, and stare at a blank screen if you have to. Turn off your cell phone, disable your internet, and let your mind wander
2. After a couple of weeks of this, a writer begins to experience a sort of Pavlovian effect. By writing at the same time every day, it becomes easier and easier to write. Your mind grows restless, and by the time you sit down to compose, your fingers do the walking on their own.

Personally, I write in the mornings. I generally write in a cafe, and I start as early as I can. By the time noon rolls around, my mind has moved on to other things, but if all goes well I have 4-5 hours of solid composition or editing in at that point, and I can spend the rest of the day doing work that is a bit more tangible.

I don’t think people like to hear it, but the hard truth is that writing is work. It is frustrating, and it’s tedious, at it can be mind-numbingly dull–but it’s rewarding as hell when you get it right.

Anyway, I’ve wandered. Keep your eyes to this place to see updates on writing, and the home remodeling project. I wish I’d have started the home remodel documentation a bit earlier, but there’s still plenty to do.

Thanks for reading.

Lately, in these long (too long) stretches between posts, I’ve been doing a lot of everything and not enough of anything. I’m writing, as always, but with the closing date for our new house looming closer with every day, I find myself spending far too much time on the phone hassling mortgage brokers and insurance agents. I hate doing it, but the rush I get from successfully negotiating a bank fee should be outlawed.

I’ve received some interesting mail, lately. Yesterday, I opened the mailbox to find a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a wonderfully alive and detailed reference tome that is as pleasurable as it is useful. I picked it up for what amounted to be a nominal shipping and handling fee, and think it is the perfect addition for my steadily-growing reference collection.

That was yesterday. The mail today was even more exciting. There is a perfectly whimsical online comic called Minus, that ran from February 2006 to July 2008 when the artist, Ryan Armand, abandoned it to move on to other projects. The strip was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2007, and even in its dormancy remains one of the best web-only comics on the tubes.

Minus, the title character, is the name of a little girl who possesses nearly god-like powers that allow her to turn anything she imagines into reality. The intrigue of the comic lies in Minus’ inability to understand the significance of the worlds she creates. There are runs of several strips that follow Minus as she constructs beautifully nuanced universes, complete with their own inhabitants, governments and landscapes–only to destroy them on a whim. The strip is touching, clever, unexpected, and often beautiful.

My exciting mail day came when I found a poster-tube leaning against the inside of my door. I’d ordered a print of a particularly impressive Minus strip, and had forgotten about it until then. Inside the tube I found a full-sized reproduction, signed by the artist. It was cause for celebration, but it wasn’t anything I didn’t expect. The surprise came when from inside the reproduction fell an 8.5×11 piece of printer paper with an original drawing that Armand made just for me. The drawing was of his heroine floating away on the string of a balloon–a reference to another one of his comics I mentioned I liked. On the back of the paper was a scribbled message from the artist.

If I get anywhere near my scanner in the near future, I’ll post a scan of the original piece. Until then, happy hunting. And take a look through Armand’s other strips if you have the time. They’re worth it.

So, it’s been a laughably long time since I’ve updated here, but things have been hectic. I’ve had an offer accepted on a house, have been doing a bit of freelance, and have been actively searching for something more permanent job-wise in the Fox Valley. The PAC is hiring a copywriter, which is perfectly in line with my skill set, but jobs are scarce and competition is stiff.

I’ve been working diligently on my own writing to fill the void, and I’m very near completing the second draft of Charlie. A lot has changed since Charlie was in his infancy, but the spirit of the book remains in tact. I think after I polish the last 50 pages or so I’ll be left with something crisper and cleaner that will be ready to withstand the scrutiny of the publishing world.

This is a brief post after a long lull, I know, but I’ll leave you with the following nugget:

Before William Faulker published his first novel, he was the post master of his college town. As a postmaster he was notoriously fickle, opening the office on days it suited him, closing it on days it didn’t. He acted as jazz-era spam filter. He threw out catalogues and other bulk mailings, and kept the magazines he liked to read.

When it became apparent that his days at the post office were numbered, Faulker decided to beat his bosses to the punch and submitted this–one of his finest pieces of writing in my opinion. Enjoy.

“As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”

If you’ve done any poking around the site you may have noticed a semi-broken link to the “Crosswords” writing samples page. I say semi-broken because the link is functional, but it only brings you to a site that says, more or less, that crosswords are coming soon.

With my recent acquisition of Crossword Compiler, that soon may be sooner than I’d hoped. I haven’t studied the ins and outs of the product just yet, but it promised to help me along in my crossword writing quest. I’m very wary of software that promises to help make people better writers. I’m not a technophobe…I’m particularly enthusiastic about books or audiotapes or videos that promise to make people better writers either. I believe–and I think that any good writer will agree–that the only way to become a better writer is to write. Or maybe read. But definitely, definitely write.

It’s true for fiction, it’s true for journalism, so I can’t think of a single reason it would be different for crosswords. I will say, though, that Crossword Compiler comes with a nifty set of dictionaries and word lookups that I expect will be handy in a pickle.

This program also gives me the ability to save crosswords in an online-publishable format. This means, that with the right software, I’ll not only be able to publish my puzzles in a nice-looking fashion–I’ll be able to publish them in a nice-looking and playable fashion, which should spice things up over at the Writing Samples page.

At any rate, I still need to figure out how to do it, so if you have any suggestions contact me.

Very, very short post today as it’s Meghan’s day off and we have plans to look at a house.

I’ve been wary about home shopping, thinking there is no way we can afford it, but we found a darling little house in our area listed for about $60,000. To me, this seems suspiciously cheap, but the market is weak, interest rates are scraping the bottom of the barrell, and the $8,000 tax credit is very appealing.

With enough saved up for a healthy down-payment, our morgage plus taxes will literally be cheaper than paying rent.

We’re meeting with a loan officer later today to see where we stand. With all of our house-buying knowledge coming from late-night episodes on HGTV, we’re only textbook smart on the subject, and I’m a little nervous for the practical exam.

It doesn’t help that I’m much better at pounding on a keyboard than I am at pounding on a nail. Anything we get in this price range will require a lot of work. Meghan is excited. I’m scared.