Yeah... We're going to get to what's in the title... But first...
Yesterday was the re-dedication of the Idaho Falls temple. We attended the first session via the broadcast to our stake center (and we were grateful for not having to deal with two and a half hours of meetings before church and choir practice after...). It was good, and we're glad to have the temple open again!
Lisa is working on developing articles from her dissertation and teaching (again). She's also got some interesting knitting projects going on and just went to a conference (which she can talk about if she wants to...)
Over on my side of the office I'm editing
Going Home the Hard Way, a follow on novel to
Johnson Farm.
And by the way...
The proof for the novel is in and the production run started
this morning... I should have actual books available late next week (No you can't have the first one... That one is staying on my shelf...)
Hard Way is going well. There is a lot of work going on with it, but I think that in the end the story will be stronger than the first one. Some of the subject matter is definitely proving more challenging to write...
Speaking of challenging...
There will be a third book in the series which technically is happening in parallel with the first two. This one will be the biggest challenge yet and is one of the reasons
Hard Way is taking longer to write. As I've said it's a parallel story to
Johnson Farm and
Hard Way, which means I need to
make sure things match up at some points. But that's not the hard part...
Johnson Farm and
Hard Way are told from the point of view of a 14 year old boy. The third book, which currently has the working title of
Jamie's Story (but that may not be the final title), has two point of view characters. That's still not the hard part...
One of the two points of view is that of Jamie, a 14 year old
girl... This is going to make things really complicated. I've done the 14 year old boy thing (some people say I'm still doing the 14 year old boy thing...), but I've never been a 14 year old girl (or any kind of girl for that matter!). This means I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to write this.
One of the steps I've taken is calling in a little help to get me in the right mindset. I've had the daughter of a friend of ours do a little decorating on the notebooks I intend to use for notes and the actual writing of Jamie's part of the story...
Funny thing number one: This is the only blue one I gave her to work on... I never told her I was using blue for notes...
Nothing weird here. This one just fits the subject matter...
Funny thing number two: The footprints actually make sense with a couple things that happen in
Johnson Farm... Again I never told her about them and she hasn't read the book yet... (And you're going to have to read it if you want to know what I'm talking about...)
Again nothing weird here... Just a pretty flower (and you'll have to read all three books to disprove that...)
Once again a young artist does an extraordinary job for one of the books. This time it's something to help me write the book instead of a finisher, but it's still great and much appreciated.
Ok... So... What does any of this have to do with the title?
Well, I did say some people still think I'm a 14 year old boy at heart...
Well, I mentioned Lisa went to a conference (I had work that needed to be done here so I didn't go... )
Well, you may remember these guys from last post...
Well... They kind of did a little construction while Lisa was gone...
Yeah... I was busy even when I wasn't working...
The whole thing has been taken down now, but it would be feasible to do it again (and possibly better!). Of course I'm not planing on doing so (yeah... and I'm not building an aircraft carrier on the table instead...)
That's it for now. See you next post.
After the armed forces were put away...
