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The TiVo broke the other day.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love TiVo. It’s one of the greatest inventions of the last 20 years, and that’s saying a LOT. I’ve gotten so many of my friends hooked on the TiVolution that I should be a goddamn salesman for the company.

And yet, even I hadn’t realized just how much I depended on that little box until it wasn’t working. What, you mean I have to find out when shows are on, and make time to watch them on the network’s schedule? And sit through the commercials? Like a sucker? Are you kidding me? People still DO that?

It makes me shudder, thinking of how constricting that world was. I only watch an hour or two of TV a day, and I like to do it when I’M ready to, not when the Man says I should.

Not to mention that the TiVo is networked, so I can use it to access pictures and music from my computer, and to transfer shows to my iPod. How am I supposed to stock my iPod with video content? BUY it? Please.

Luckily, we have a spare in the bedroom. It’s a measly 40 hour box (as opposed to the 140 hour box that broke), but it at least keeps the shackles off.

Of course, you need a damned map to figure out the 10,000 wires behind the my TV that keep the Playstation, VCR, TiVo, network router, cable modem, DVD player, and surround-sound system all working in harmony. Took me a while to switch out the boxes, but it’s all running again.

TiVo was even kind of nice about it, offering to replace the faulty box for maybe a third of the cost of a new one. I’m still pissed that it broke after only 2 years, but they could have been dicks about it since the warranty is only for 1 year.

Remember when electronic equipment lasted forever? My boom box from like 1984 still works fine.

Yesterday was no better. Our printer (bought the same day as the TiVo) refused to load paper unless you carefully hand-feed it each page, so my father-in-law bought us a fancy network printer for Christmas. It’s got a scanner and a fax machine and a copier and prints 33 pages a minute, which is key when you write 650 page books for a living.

Of course, it took me TWO DAYS of installing, uninstalling, scanning HP help topic sites, and screaming at the computer before I got the damn thing to work…

Argh. I’m gonna go edit with a pen for the rest of the day. I got through 75 pages yesterday. I could never have managed that much onscreen, when I would have tinkered incessantly and stopped 50 times to check my e-mail.

In all fairness, though, I will still have to key in the tons of red ink on every page, so it’s probably not really a time saver at all, apart from keeping me away from the seductive vice of that interweb-net-tube thing.

Posted on January 17, 2008 at 11:19 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings
6 Comments »

So.

With the baby coming, I am feeling a lot of pressure to finish this second book on time, so I will essentially have two in the can during the panicked period of diapers and late night feedings. Even if the UK goes ahead with their plan to print in August, I will still be a whole book ahead, which is comforting.

That gives me about 5.5 months, which is when the book is due to the publishers anyway. I could almost certainly beg for more time if I needed it, but I really don’t want to. I want to show them (and myself) that I can keep my promises and my deadlines.

The book is maybe half done, and as with any work of art, I have days when I love it and days when I hate it. Days when I feel inspired and days when I have to literally force myself to focus on it, cursing my laziness internally even as I fritter away the hours writing personal e-mails and surfing the web for porn or whatever.

Normally, I judge how much work I have done by word count, since, as I mentioned, hours spent at the computer do not necessarily correspond to hours spent working. I wrote 9200 words last week, which is decent, if not amazing. This week, however, I am going to have to come up with a new criteria, since I will not be doing much writing of new prose. The book has reached the point where all my disparate characters are about to start intersecting, which means I need to go back and do some homework to brush up on the details of the characters I haven’t worked on in months.

Normally, I do my editing onscreen in MSWord track changes mode, so that I can make changes to the document as I go, but I think that would be counter-productive at this stage. I want to see how the book READS so far, and if I give myself the ability to tinker overmuch, I will agonize over every word and not read it as I would someone else’s work.

So I have done the unthinkable, and gone old school. I printed all 400 or so pages out. On paper. I am going to sit and just read the damn thing like writers did in olden times back when they had to put sand on the paper so the ink could dry. If I have major notes, I will scribble them in the margins with a red pen, like they do in the third world. This will (hopefully) take away the temptation to wordsmith constantly, which is best done at later stages of editing.

After that, I will go through the edits my test readers sent me months ago on section one. I want an unbiased look at things before I examine other people’s opinions.

Of course, this will leave my writing itch unscratched, so hopefully I will focus that energy here, and update more than once a week. I have my next entry half-written already!

Posted on January 15, 2008 at 12:19 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Writing
6 Comments »

New pictures of little Squirmy Brett yesterday. Lookit that cute little big-headed monster!

Actually, it kind of looks like Gollum….

Let’s hope that’s all they have in common.

Posted on January 12, 2008 at 11:38 am by PeatB
Filed under Life
6 Comments »

I didn’t make any grand resolutions this year, because I think 2008 will be a year of great upheaval in my life, and I didn’t want to make it worse by posing some undue restrictions on my will.

But I did make a little one.

No matter how juicy the gossip column headlines on my AOL homepage look, I am not going to click on them. No TMZ, no Britney (or Jamie Lynne) Spears, no Paris Hilton. Nothing about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby or Lindsay Lohan’s latest drunk driving incident. I don’t care if Tom Cruise is gay, or how many kids Bradgelina has adopted.

I already refuse to read magazines like USWeekly and People. They and TMZ and the Enquirer and countless other gossip sources are hugely popular in the US and abroad, but I think that it is an industry based on the invasion of people’s privacy, something we as individuals abhor, and I think it destroys lives.

Would Britney and Lindsay and all the others who are self destructing for our viewing pleasure be doing so if they weren’t hounded, day and night, by photographers and reporters? If they could take the garbage out without a thousand flashbulbs and a news report about what they wore doing it?

Maybe. But I doubt it.

People have a right to live their lives without being hounded constantly. Being an actor or musician shouldn’t equate to a willful sacrifice of your private life any more than being gay should get you kicked out of the army. I think that if I were constantly surrounded by paparazzi, bothering my friends and family and eager to do everything they could to make me look like an awful person, I would probably self-destruct, too.

So I’m going to leave Britney alone. That industry that profits off destroying people’s lives can do it without me. I realize I’m a drop in the bucket, but maybe if enough people start taking a stand against it, the next pop princess can go the the bathroom without a photographer hiding in the toilet tank.

I would like to note, however, that I do not necessarily put politicians like Larry Craig in this category. If you make your money singing or playing pretend, it’s one thing. If you make your career off persecuting gay people (look at Craig’s record), or accusing others of corruption, then you had best take full responsibility for what you do in the dark.

John Edwards’ $400 haircut was okay, though. That was a campaign investment. Half his electability is in that hair. If I had hair like that, I would pamper it, too.

Posted on January 9, 2008 at 8:53 am by PeatB
Filed under Musings
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2007 has been an amazing year. Really.

I know we as a culture seem to say that every year, to try and make the endless drudgery of another year seem important, as if Britney’s 16 year old sister getting pregnant is some event worthy of historical note. Sure, there are world events that ARE of historical note, like the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but even that won’t really affect the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

Usually, if we’re lucky, we have one or two Significant Events in our life each year. Got a new job. Got married. Moved. Took an amazing trip. Had a loved one die. Had a child. You know what I mean. Not that project that got screwed up at work, not that movie you saw (usually), not that meal you had, not the final episode of Seinfeld. I’m talking about things that changed your life and/or outlook in a way that was undeniable and permanent.

Some years you have a few, and some years none, but every once in a while, there’s a whopper of a year where everything changes in a HUGE way, and you look around at then end of the year and realize your life is TOTALLY different at the end than it was in the beginning.

2007 has been one of those years for me. It feels like 10 years of stuff happened just this year.

Back in the beginning of the year, I was working as Production Supervisor for a medical communications company, and feeling kind of neutral about it. I liked most of the people I worked with well enough, and liked the company overall, but my job itself was pretty boring. I was also working on rewriting The Painted Man. Joshua Bilmes, my would-be agent at the time, had read the last draft and said that if I fixed a minor handful of holes, he would be proud to represent it. I took a few weeks to do that, and BAM! Suddenly I wasn’t just writing alone at night and on the subway anymore. I had a partner who knew what to do with my writing when I was done with it. I sure didn’t.

I had NO idea what was in store for that. I just started plugging away at the sequel.

Not long after that, I went to the doctor because I was having problems sleeping, and was diagnosed with sleep apnea, mainly due to the fact that the wire-thin, mazelike tendrils of my nasal passages admitted maybe 20% of the air a normal person gets. Before I knew it, I was on an operating table being put under for the first real surgery of my life.

On the heels of this, my aunt, who had been very close to me as a child, passed away. It was very emotional in a lot of ways, and kind of threw me for a loop. Right after that, my sister got engaged, and her fiance and I threw her a giant 30th birthday party. This was followed by the 10th anniversary of my brother passing away. Every anniversary of that day fills me with sad reflection, but hitting 10 years was a slap in the face. Where did the time go? What would my life be like if he was still around?

It was while I was in this reflective period that I started getting a handful of rejections for The Painted Man, which seemed only natural. But then, suddenly, several major US publishers started making offers. It was a storm that came out of nowhere, and I was totally unprepared for it. We signed with one, and suddenly my life-long dream of being a published author came true.

Then my other sister announced she was pregnant. Neither I nor my two sisters have any children; my wife’s brother does, but that doesn’t really affect my side of the family, so this was a major development.

Then, suddenly, we got another whirlwind of offers for the book in the UK. What? Where the hell did that come from? This was followed almost immediately by another bidding war over the book in Germany (yes, I started a war in Germany! How awesome is that?). Then it sold in Japan. How the…? What the…?

Missed San Diego ComicCon this year because my friend was getting married in Greece, and we were saving our pennies for that. We threw a big pool party instead to celebrate my wife’s birthday and our other good fortune. I got very drunk.

After that was the big trip to Greece. I admit to being somewhat anxious leading up to that. I had never been to a country where English wasn’t the dominant language, and was kind of worried about it. Of course, I needn’t have been. The island of Santorini where the wedding was held is possibly the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life, and I will carry that memory with me forever.

Oh, and while I was in Greece, Unicorn publishing on the island of Kos invited me to take a catamaran out to their island and discuss my book. We had a wonderful day there, and they ended up buying Greek rights to the book, too.

Then it sold in France, while I was lounging on the beach in Rhodes. My high school French teacher who threatened to flunk me would have shit herself if she heard. Vive l’Homme de Tatouage!

By the time I got back to the states, Russia had gotten in on the action. Russia! Someone in Siberia is going to be able to go to their local bookstore and read my writing! Ridiculous.

Then my friend Matt, whose best man I was not 2 years earlier, had his first baby. Well, his wife Ursula helped. But still. I used to see a LOT of Matt. Now… not so much.

Dani, who was somewhat unhappy at her job, got a great offer from another company. A big raise and an increase in responsibilities. Suddenly, my goal of writing full-time came within reach. All the international sales had started to add up, and what once seemed impossible was now attainable. I quit my job, and started writing full-time.

None of that other stuff had such an impact on my life as this. Throughout all the other events, I had the constant (if unpleasant) rhythm of my daily commute to Times Square, and hours each day spent worrying about someone ELSE’S projects, instead of my own. Now, suddenly, I was free to walk in daylight, make my own hours, and manage my own projects.

I’m still transitioning.

Not long after that, Division 18 came out. My friends Matt and Jeremy took a bunch of scribbles the three of us had started doing in our downtime at work and turned it into a professional, published comic. I can’t describe what it was like to hold it in my hands for the first time. I had seen the work progress from plot to script to pencils to ink, but I was still unprepared for the wave of euphoria that came from seeing it on the shelf at the comic shop and picking it up. I’ve been reading comics regularly for 25 years, and I never thought I’d see my name on one.

Learn more about D18 here.

Then came more pregnancies. Another of my closest friends. Then #2 for Dani’s sister-in-law. Dani herself.

Oh, I didn’t mention I’m going to be a daddy? Remind me to get into that later. It’s probably going to be part of a running series of blog posts. For now, suffice it to say HOLY SHIT!

But while I was still reeling from that news, Dani’s dad was rushed to the hospital and underwent open-heart surgery. It was like a see-saw of elation and terror, amidst which Dani got laid off from her fancy new job. Now we’re both day people. Her dad came through okay, though, and is on the (long) road to recovery, and Dani is on severance while we plan our next move.

But despite a rocky close, we are heading into the new year WAAAAAYYY in the plus column. 2008 will be filled with babies and weddings and book publications.

And I thought this year was crazy…

Posted on January 2, 2008 at 8:04 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings, Sales
10 Comments »