Month: October 2022

New Compy Incoming

I’ve been posting too little lately, but my laptop computer, several years past its prime, has recently become nearly unusable. Merely booting it up, wrestling it into opening my browser and staying unfrozen long enough to post, has become a major hassle. You will be unsurprised to know it’s killed my writing productivity as well.

In fact, to avoid the hassle of turning on the computer, I’m writing this on my phone.

But good news: My tax refund finally arrived, so I have purchased a desktop computer, which should arrive in a little over a week. Due to expenses, I decided not to buy the high-end machine I was thinking about and instead went with a refurbished computer with respectable business-level specs and a large solid-state drive. I won’t be doing any hard-core gaming on it, but I was unlikely to do that anyway. And since it’s a desktop, I can upgrade the sucky graphics card later if need be.

In short, I aim to write more in the near future when merely booting up the computer and opening the start menu take less than an hour. This is the first time I’ve bought a refurbished machine, so I’m crossing my fingers.

Writing Children’s Books

My wife and parents have been urging me to produce some child-friendly writings, and I’ve been thinking I really should, especially since experience indicates that kids show the most interest in my work. Besides, I’d like to produce something I can read to my daughter, who’s currently under two. Since she was born, we have taught her to love books, and now that she’s beginning to form complete senteces, she often brings us books with the command, “Read the book!”

Today is the last day of our Covid isolation, and we’re all just about back to full health. We were lucky not to get sick during the height of the pandemic, and to come down with a mild variant that never went into our chests. I am currently working primarily on two projects: I just finished the draft text for a children’s picture book and am also editing and rewriting a more advanced children’s novel. On top of that, I’m working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which runs under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

I don’t have experience writing for kids. My wife, looking over the draft of my picture book, immediately said the vocabulary and sentence structure were too advanced. But that doesn’t surprise me; I was already aware that, as I was writing it, I slipped back into my natural style. That can be fixed.

I’ll be wanting an illustrator in the near future to come in on this project. I’m not sure who to pursue as of yet, though I wish I still had contact with Roffles Lowell, who did the interiors of Jake and the Dynamo, and whose style would be great for a children’s book.

Happy Spooky Month

Happy October, courtesy of my daughter’s plastic-free, Montessori-friendly toy collection.

(My daughter has a huge collection of these toys, thanks to the efforts of my wife, and I credit them for our toddler’s unusually large vocabulary: Around six months, she was constantly picking up these toys and showing them to us to learn their names. And yes, for the record, some of these are here just for the picture: We keep the small ones out of her reach for now to avoid choking hazards.)