It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Writing Time (#IWSG December 2020)

Mother of god, is this year still going on?

I wrote a lot for the optional December question, so I'm just going to go with that.

December IWSG Question:

Are there months or times of the year that you are more productive with your writing than other months, and why?

Heck, yeah. November and December are usually my busiest writing months. Why? Because I nearly always write a book/story to give as a present to some of my friends/family.

This is one of my favourites. It's Book 3 in a 5-book series, though, so it doesn't make a lot of sense by itself.

I started this tradition back in 2004 when I wrote a book for my wife as a Christmas gift. I wrote something like 60,000 words in 17 days. I was not used to being crouched over my computer so long (I'm a champ at it now) and I ended up needing to get physio on my shoulder in the New Year. I kept it up, with either novels or stories nearly every Christmas since. In 16 years I've written I believe 8 novels, 12 short stories and 3 children's books (the children's books are the biggest pain because they're illustrated). This does not include any other homemade projects I make as gifts (I'm also known for board games and repaints of Christmas village houses as whorehouses), or any other writing I'm doing at the time. So on top of regular life, work and holiday responsibilities, Christmas is usually a crazy stressful time for me.

Sometimes I need a reminder to wear pants, too.

The best part, and the reason I don't know if I can call this writing "productive," is that NONE of those books or stories have been released publicly. A couple of them I've re-worked with the intention of hopefully sharing/selling, but so far only my closest family members and a handful of friends have actually read them. It is very much a labour of love for a very small audience. Most of my relatives have no idea how much work goes into them. My kids don't get it all, which is hilarious. I think they assume everyone's fathers write books. In Grade 1, my son brought one of my kids books to class for show & tell. His teacher loved it and asked if she could get a copy, but my son said he only had one so I would have to write her another one. 

It was the bath water book, by the way.

Yesterday I sent off this year's books to the printers (unsolicited plug - Lulu.com is great for this) and it felt like a large weight was lifted of my shoulders. One thing off my list. Now I just have to wait to see if the other presents I ordered actually come in on time. 

This was last year's book, for my kids and nieces. It was the second-most-time-consuming book I've ever written. Only surpassed by this year's book.  

So anyway, that's my rant(?) about what I do at Christmas time. How about you? When do you write a lot? Or what fun(?) stuff do you do for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/(Insert Holiday of Choice)?

Happy Holidays to all! 

Hugs & Kisses,

-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

Silly Children's Stories (#IWSG January 2017)

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group here.

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Here's something that makes me insecure: sharing something absolutely ridiculous that I made.

Yesterday in my 2016 Year-End Review, I mentioned that I wrote a new kids book for my children and my nieces for Christmas. This is actually my second kids book, the first being a cautionary tale I wrote for my son a couple of years ago describing the dangers of consuming dirty water from the bathtub:

Spoiler alert: It turns you into a green-skinned alien.

My nieces (and many of my other relatives) seemed to enjoy it as well, so I whipped up another one this year. I took a different turn this time - because the ages of my kids and nieces range from 1 up to 10, there was no way I could write something that would appeal to all of them. Don't Drink the Bath Water is a picture book, but the older kids are getting into chapter books now, so I decided to go that way with the new one. I figured that the oldest kids would get it now and the younger ones would grow into it.

And now I'm sharing it with you, to embarrass and shame myself:

The story features all of my kids and nieces, as well as magic and goblins and unicorns and off-brand Pokemon. It's only about 3000 words long so I had to use big fonts to make it relatively book-sized (about 60 pages), and it is illustrated with my trademark crappy artwork. The tale is told from my daughter's point-of-view and is loosely based on our family trip this past summer, where we actually had all 9 kids together at one time. Of course, in real life no one got turned into turnips or rode dolphins, so I freely admit to taking some creative license with it.

The kids loved that they were each featured in the story, each with their own special power, and each got at least one illustration of themselves. For example:

Her next cousin was Taylor, an opthlalmage. Her magic revolved around fish. Talking to fish, summoning fish, riding fish, that sort of thing. At the moment she was being followed around by her favourite fish, a dolphin named Flipperius, whom she was teaching to breathe air and walk on his fins. Yes, it’s true that dolphins are not actually fish, but that made it all the easier to teach him to breathe. 

Let me tell you, it's really hard to write a 3000-word story with nine main characters and give them all distinct super powers, as well as something to do with the plot. By the time I got to my youngest niece all I could come up with for her was that she could explode.

Maisie shrugged and closed her eyes. 

She concentrated very hard.

Suddenly there was a loud pop, and then a much louder explosion and a rush of hot air. The entire castle was destroyed instantly, leaving the Cousins and the turnips standing in a big crater in the ground. Well, the cousins were standing, the turnips were just laying there.

“AWESOME!” They all said.

“I can definitely see the use for that,” said Lydia. “But not in this situation.”

The most fun to come out of the story (for me) is arguing with one of my nieces about Pokemon. In the story she's a Pokemon trainer, but I go to purposeful, exaggerated lengths to not actually call them Pokemon or use officially-licenced Pokemon terms. I even Googled "knock-off Pokemon" to find an off-brand one to use as her pet. Unfortunately, I accidentally used a picture of a real Pokemon as a base (there's like 700 of them, I don't have time to cross reference all of them), but just made it like 100-times bigger than it's supposed to be. 

So now she keeps getting mad at me for drawing Dedenne too big and calling it by the wrong name, while I insist that it's not Dedenne or even a Pokemon at all. It's very hard to explain parody and intellectual property to a 9-year old.

So anyway, that's my dirty little, insecure secret I'm sharing today: I write terrible children's books. I may share some more in the future - I've been instructed I now have to write more of them, and have at least 9 kids to answer to if I don't. Wish me luck.

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December IWSG Question: 

What writing rule do you wish you’d never heard?

Anything having to do with f*cking commas. I've heard a million contradictory rules and I still never use them properly. I just keep getting more and more confused. Now I'm stuck between either using Find and Replace to randomly insert them throughout the manuscript, or somehow find a way to write an entire book without using any.

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The secret catalogue of books by CD Gallant-King that you can't get on Amazon.
You can get these, though.

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My 2016 Year-in-Review

I know most people are already looking forward to 2017, but I'm always late with these things...

2016 was a year, huh?

I don't necessarily subscribe to the narrative that we've had more celebrity deaths this year (I think it's just a case of celebrities being relevant longer thanks to our more connected society), nor do I think the deaths of celebrities are any more valuable than the many, many people regular everyday people who lost their lives for stupid or heartbreaking reasons. That being said, the world really did seem to lose its collective fucking mind in the last twelve months.

But I'm not here to talk about politics or celebrity gossip. I'm just going to stick to my own life, and a few highs and lows of my own year. In no particular order:

1. Kids are awesome. My son, who turns 5 in January, started Junior Kindergarten and continues to astound with his rapidly-advancing skills. He's so sweet and caring and attuned to the emotions and feelings of others (he gets that from his mother, sure as hell not from me). He's also building 500-piece Lego kits with only minimal supervision (I'll take credit for that one). He saw Star Wars for the first time over the holidays and it BLEW HIS MIND. He was making "pew pew" blaster sounds in his sleep that night.

My daughter, who won't turn 2 until March, is amazing. Her vocabulary and motor skills are way ahead of where my son was at that age (she can pick up my wife's iPhone, unlock it, open Netflix and scroll to a specific cartoon). I don't know if it's the difference between girls and boys or what, but she seems like a freakin' genius.

Or I dunno, maybe I'm just easily impressed.

2. In July, I self-published my second novel, Hell Comes to Hogtown. It was a long process that was much longer and more challenging than I was expecting, but I'm quite pleased with the final product. Reception of the book has also not been as strong as I would have hoped, but it's early and I'm looking ahead long-term.

3. Submitted a few stories to magazines and anthologies, getting a head-start on my five year plan I mentioned at the beginning of December. I've gotten one rejection so far but I'm still waiting to hear back from two more, so we'll see how the New Year starts.

4. I actually have several writing projects completed or near-completed that I will be shopping around and/or releasing in the upcoming year. I would love to share some of those with you but after taking like 9 months longer than I planned to release Hell Comes to Hogtown, I'm not counting anything until it hatches anymore. Or talking about it online, whatever. You know what I mean.

5. I wrote another silly kids book for my kids and all my nieces (I have seven altogether) for Christmas. They all loved it because they're in it. That's my daughter on the cover. It features more of my terrible artwork, and I've had several arguments with one of my older nieces about it because of changes I made to her Pokemon in the story. I just keep trying to explain "parody" and "intellectual property" to her but it's hard with an 8-year old.

6. I gained like 20 pounds this year so I had assumed my exercise must have been way off, but after checking my run-keeper app-thingie I realized my routine has been pretty much on the same schedule as it has for the last three years. I guess that just means I've been eating staggering amounts of shit this year. Something to look into in the new year...

7. Life was all over the place otherwise, with two car accidents, my wife starting a new business, ups and downs at work, several illnesses and injuries, and a big trip half-way across the country with the kids and the dog to visit my parents. We're all still here and we're all still breathing so we'll keep plugging along. Life is a series of many steps, some hard, some easy, and there will be trips and falls along the way. There is no ultimate destination though (well, there is, but honestly you're not going to like it) so the best you can do is just enjoy the stops along the way.

Here's to hoping World War III doesn't start in 2017! At least try to hold it off until 2018...

Drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

Okay, I admit I took David Bowie a bit hard, and I'm still processing Carrie Fisher...

Characters You've Never Heard Of: BEN

This is Ben.

He really likes baths.

He loves to splash and play with his bath toys and practice his swimming and then get out all nice and clean and put on his warm comfy jammies.

One thing he doesn't like to do is drink his bath water.

Bath water is full of Ben dirt and soap and it tastes like damp towels from the bottom of the laundry hamper. Ben wouldn't drink bath water, right?

Ben is the main character in the illustrated story book I made for my son as a Christmas present. Being the protagonist of a children's book, he doesn't have much characterization and in fact his entire character can be pretty much summed up in 3 points:

1.  He doesn't wear any clothes (the story takes place at bath time)
2.  He rides a giant goldfish through space, which he calls the Star Fish Enterprise.
3.  He's always trying to drink his bath water.

The loose moral of the tale was supposed to benot to drink the bath water, because it's really gross. Unfortunately, brightly illustrating a little kid trying to drink bath water only made it seem more appealing, and now we can't make my son STOP drinking the damn bath water because he thinks it's hilarious.

The illustrations are also pretty crappy. Did I mention I'm not much of an illustrator? Or that I did most of the work at 4:30am when the rest of the house was asleep, trying to squeeze it in before I went to work? The things we do for our kids...

So for those who missed it, my theme for the A-to-Z Blog-a-thon is "Characters You've Never Heard Of" - characters from unpublished stories that fill up The Closet. You may not care about any of these dudes and ladies, and you many never hear of any of them again after this month (there is after all only one copy of this particular book in existence), but perhaps you will find one of them interesting, and it will keep you coming back to check out my writing and ideas in the future.

2014 - A Pretty Good Year

Looking back over the last 12 months, I've had a pretty busy year. But it's been a good year. I've had some personal ups and down but I've also accomplished a good deal. I'm going to share them now not because I necessary think you care, but because it makes me feel good to know that I've accomplished some stuff.

1. First and most importantly, I made it through another twelve months without seriously injuring my two-year old son, either physically or emotionally (I hope). He really seems to like me so I think I'm doing okay.

2. Wrote/Created/Hacked Two Games - Splatter-Elf and Made to Suffer. In the case of Splatter-Elf (based on the writings of Philip Overby) I actually completely re-wrote the rules 3 times, so it's almost as if I've made four games. You can read all about it on Rule of the Dice - where I've been writing pretty regularly, too, another positive I suppose.

3. I've received a combined 75,000 hits+ on my blog posts and articles (most of those were at Rule of the Dice). That ain't half bad, right?

4. Dredged up, edited and re-worked my novel Ten Thousand Days. It's pretty much ready to publish, but I've only held off for very specific reasons that I will share with you when it comes out hopefully early in the New Year.

5. Reconnected with old friends and made some new ones, and played RPGs more regularly than I have in years thanks to Roll20, Google Hangouts and Skype.

6. Finally got "officially" promoted at work. I'm doing basically the same job and making the same money, but I now have the paperwork that proves it. :-/

7. Jogged over 500 total kilometers in 100 workouts, which may not sound like much to some of you and is almost exactly the same as last year, but considering how busy I was this year I'm glad my numbers didn't go down. And considering that was all done in sub-30 minute blocks on my lunch break, I think that's pretty good.

8. Completed a course in Database Management and am working on a course in Java Programming. Full disclosure: I'm WAY behind on the Java course - I should probably be done by now - but I had to get a couple of months extension.

9. "Wrote" and "Illustrated" my first children's book for my son. The story is silly and the art is crude, but hey, he likes it.

10. And oh yeah, we made another baby. She's due in March!

So that was me. What did YOU do this year?