I started the revision of A Difficult Dinner today. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I’m using the system that Holly Lisle presents on her webpage, One-Pass Manuscript Revision. The woman is just a fountain of good, solid writing advice.

Anyway, the hardest part today was doing the basic discovery part of the process. See I hadn’t really put that much thought into it when I started writing, so I had to reverse engineer all this. Here’s what I came up with.

A DIFFICULT DINNER

Theme:
Love lost and duty realized; the personal cost of saving the world.

Sub-Themes:
Vengeance is a hollow victory.
Bad things happen to good people.
Perseverance trumps power in the long run.

What is the Book about:
Tragic hero hunts feudal vampires amongst the ruins of a depressed future.

Story Arc:
Thane battles vampires, the ghosts of his past, and the lure of love, while destabilizing the vampire heirarchy and losing his charge.

Main Characters: (This was easy)
Roderick Thane, Sherice, Matthias, Olivia, and Demarco.

The Story:
Thane dismissed the ranting of what he could only deem a crazy man, until his wife became a blood sucking fang and killed their family. Now, six years later, he’s still hunting the beasts. Alone now, with grim determination he stalks the hunters. They know he’s coming, but a strange truce with one of them gives him the inside scoop on their daytime resting places. Easy enough, except that now he’s got one fang in his mind, one fang chasing his friend’s son, and one that seems to be aware of his actions and is a bit unhappy about it. Thane needs to figure out why the vampires would give up one another, keep the boy from harm, and avoid the bite of those who would stop him. In the end, he may get dragged before the throne of the most powerful fang he’s ever encountered, but he’ll make damn sure he’s not an easy dinner.

I chewed through the first three chapters today. That’s only 45 pages, but I only ended up with 7 pages that aren’t bleeding red ink. I’ll keep at it and let you know how it goes right here, so keep reading. Later.

Sunday’s game went fairly well. I presented the group with the puzzle and they quickly came to all the right conclusions. They divided the clues up into five groups of five and even deduced that the information had resided on a bulletin board until it had been deposited in the folder they recieved them in. All went well on that front.

Tasha and I had bought a bunch of food to barbeque after the game, and as luck would have it, no one stayed. Doug was gone before I could say, “That wraps up this session.” Jodie had plans. Joel, well he’s got a hour drive home, so he left. Denis didn’t stay. And all in all it’s a good thing because about 7:00 I got real light headed, and strange feeling. Ended up going to bed about 8:00ish. I felt much better when I woke up this morning so I’m not sure what happened.

Today I pulled out all the notes for A Difficult Dinner and looked over the manuscript. I’m going to start the rewrite tomarrow. Wish me luck. Later.

I had dark and violent dreams last night. Such that I’ve been in a pretty rotten mood all day. To aggrevate my mood, the girls report cards came today. The good news is that Karin did better than we expected. Which is REALLY good news. The bad news is that her sister did terrible. She would have failed two courses, but the teacher gave her the gift of a D- in one. Even still her report card was BAD.

This is not good. See, we tried really hard for the last quarter to get them to do their assignments and yet it doesn’t reflect in their grades. I don’t know what to do. Now it’s summer and they’re free. I guess I’ll worry about it next year. The wife and I just need to figure out how to deal with the bad grades, the girls need some sort of repercussions for their lack of effort. Later.

I admit it. I’ve been lax on the entries here. Accept the damn apology so we can get on with it already.

So yesterday I got a letter from the Friend of the Court. I get to go visit them in August. Something about me not having a job and them wanting money. Well, I started paying them when I got my unemployment check, so screw them. I’m not sure if this is my ex’s doing or if it’s the court. Whoever, doesn’t much matter. I’m getting $324.00 a week and they want $110.00 of that, and that’s after asking for it to be reduced due to my unemployment. Thanks guys, knocking less than $50 a week off helps a lot since my income is about a third of what it was.

The god-damned FotC is about useless. I’m sending them what I can, when I can. Why don’t they spend their time chasing people who are thousands of dollars behind. Fuckers.

Needless to say I’m annoyed. But in other news, episode 2 of my new d20 modern game is this Sunday. Shadow’s Play. I’m looking forward to it. The first session was good, but my buddy Doug couldn’t make it so I couldn’t really get into the meat of the campaign. He’ll be there this time and I can’t wait. Well, better get back to real life. I’m not making any promises, but maybe I’ll post again tonight. Later.

So my day started with the usual 3 hour trip to pick up the boys for the weekend. By the time I got back home the drugs the doctor put me on were kicking my ass. I was so fatigued by the simple act of driving that I thought I was going to fall asleep on the way home. Then, because I’m just that way, I went to the store with Tasha. When I finally made it home I crashed out in the bedroom for two hours before dinner. I woke up feeling no better, but suffering from diarrhea. Which the doctor had warned me about, so I wasn’t all that surprised. Another hour of napping after dinner left me feeling better. So I took the birthday-boy shopping. He picked out a game for his GameBoy, which seems to have made him happy. But the trip took what little wind I had out of me. Time to call it a night. Tomorrow is the big day, Father’s Day at my folks, and my grandfather is going to be there. It’ll be nice to see him again, as these visits are few and far between. Gotta crash now. Later.