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28 Wonderful Years

On this day, 28 years ago, my beloved Kelly and I joined together in the adventure of marriage.

Baking a Cake

It was a beautiful, sunny day. We weren’t in the midst of a pandemic and we could gather in whatever sized groups we wanted to.

Today is supposed to be sunny and warm like the day of our wedding, but nobody is allowed to be with us but us. Pennsylvania is still in lockdown for the foreseeable future.

Kelly is helping the kids move furniture into their new apartment.

Allan and I are left home to mow the wacky-looking grass. If it actually stops raining long enough to:

• Get the lawnmower out
• Get the mowing done and
• Get it back in place

…we might actually turn our ragamuffin yard into something a bit more seasonally sightly.

Whether or not the grass gets cut, we will definitely be baking a chocolate cake and icing it with chocolate frosting.

Why?

Because that’s Kelly’s absolute favorite. She doesn’t want vanilla icing or yellow cake or any such thing. It’s got to be chocolate from top to bottom!

Happy Anniversary

Flintstones – Happy Anniversary

Whenever Kelly gets home from the apartment moving journey, we’ll be playing Scrabble because we really know how to get wild.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Serial Killer

Pantsing ain’t great. I have a lot of excellent stuff baked into 93,997 words but the point of view character approach is irking me.

As I said before, using the point of view character compresses the time in any given chapter. Third-Person Omniscient gives a top-down view and wider access to plot and character.

The program I use to write the story exports to a format that lets me edit the document in my word processor before exporting to PDF.

The exported PDF gets moved to my tablet where a TTS program called @Voice Aloud Reader reads it to me in a slightly robotic female voice while I’m resting in bed.

Yes, I suppose that it’s counter-intuitive to let my own story put me to sleep but that’s not the important thing. What matters is that I really enjoy what I’m hearing. It’s good storytelling.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s quite the story I want to be telling, particularly since it needs to fit into a series. The pacing is a bit wonky and I don’t have enough access to the bad guys to put certain key plot points into the scope of the five point of view characters I’ve been focusing on.

As much as my darling wife loves chocolate cake with chocolate icing, she totally hates when I come to the point of realization that I need to seriously retool the story to accomplish the aforementioned goal.

The good news is that I don’t have to scrap what I have. I’ve been looking at different ways to maximize the Sentinels franchise.

Part of independent book marketing includes publishing lead magnets to get people on email lists where they can be notified of new releases.

I’m thinking that, based on what I’ve been seeing from my writing groups, the deep-dive POV chapters can be parceled out as short story teaser anthologies that are related to the novels. It’s a notion in progress. More on that as I get an idea of how to maximize the value and interest for readers.

Furniture has moved. Grass shall be mowed. A chocolate cake with chocolate cake has been baked so love will be growed.