Halloween 2015

 I love Halloween.

It is how I describe my personality. I am Halloween. I am mischievous fun. I am autumn.

This year I bought a few new toys. The biggest being... Cerberus.

 He spits fog. He lights up. He barks. I love him!
Here's a video:


Cool right?

Looking forward to November

I get so excited about the Halloween season that I start it around August 20th, when the Halloween shops open. Now, I can't stop thinking about Christmas.

I know. I'm ridic. 

But November is going to rock for me. My favorite game-maker, Bethesda, is releasing Fallout 4. As a school teacher, I get Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving (+Friday) off. I took a PTO day on the 18th, as well. Meaning, I only have one 5 day week in November. Two four-dayers, and one three dayer.

There's also a field trip to a circus that Thanksgiving week, so that'll feel more like a 2-dayer. Then it's straight on until Christmas, which is 11-days of paid relaxation. HOW NICE!

But, I love Halloween. I do. It's nice that it's on a Saturday. I'm excited to wear a costume to school (I'm thinking of going as Gargamel, since I have a student that loves Smurfs). Last week, I went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch. There's nothing better than wandering around a pumpkin patch. I might go this weekend, just for fun. 

Still, November is the month I'm excited for.

In other news, last weekend I was a monster in a haunted trail for cub scouts. I do this every year, but it was still really fun. The stars were out that night. I realized that it had been a long time since I've seen them, and it was refreshing. It reminded me how small earth is, in the scope of things. How many planets and stars are out there! 

My time has been freeing up lately. I've been so, so busy since August. It's nice to be able to consider more about life than just work. I have more time for art. I began rereading Half-Blood Prince. Haha.

My Wild Random Road Trip to Chicago

My weekend was wild. Absolutely wild.

a fantastic band

So, a week ago I posted on Facebook that I had a week off from my job (I work at a school, on break between summer and spring sessions). One of my old college friends responded. She had the idea to go to the zoo, so we did. It was great, but that’s not the wild part.

I got another response from my buddy, and he wanted to go on a random road trip. I thrive on weirdness and spontaneity, so I said yes. We left two days later (Thursday). 

touching a manta ray

He had a friend in an awesome band called Jetpack Hotline (check’em out!) and we went to their show, in a bar called Original Mother’s. It was a wild show. Beforehand, we had crawled around the city and rode the train. Somehow, we talked with a hundred locals and laughed with them. Everywhere we went we met people randomly.

The next day we drove out to the Navy Pier and then walked around the city. We drank coffee from a few places, and I had AMAZING donuts from a place called Stan’s Donuts. We walked to the Cloud Gate and then to Shedd Aquarium. We took the water taxi from there back to the Pier and finally partied there for awhile. 

good breakfast

We stayed the night at a friend from high school’s place and jammed out with his roommates. We went to a Spy Store, and checked out a bunch of weird spy gear you can buy. The next day we did coffee and then visited an old friend who used to run ITP (my old theatre company). We caught up, did a random hike, and talked with his fantastic girlfriend about dinosaur sign language and compared swords…

After that, I met my traveling bud’s college friends at a pub, and we ate lunch (I had brussel sprouts). We then went to a hilarious musical comedy called “Cupid Has A Heart On” and then went out clubbing. We danced until 3am and were brought up to V.I.P.P. status, which was crazy. I don’t even want to write all the crazy things that brought us up there. It was a fantastic night, though. 

this exists

Cloud Gate

I finally drove home on Sunday, detouring to a few random small towns, and then went through the hundreds of pictures we took. There are so many things that happened that I don’t want to type out here, but I will say that everything was amazing and random.

It’s just so awesome to have gone on vacation without a single bad thing happening. Nothing went wrong. Heck, even traffic and parking was OK. We did a good mix of touristy and not-so-touristy things. We walked the middle of the city and the neighborhoods in the outer districts. We hiked the waterfront and took a ride on a boat. We ate authentic food and homemade local affairs. We surfed the couches of a different person each night. It was so cool. I will remember this as one of the best experiences of my life. 

I'm in this photo with my hand held up

A big thank you to the awesome people that hosted me and my buddy for the nights we stayed, and also to the roommates (and one friendly dog) who allowed us into your homes. I also want to say how very lucky I feel to have met and interacted with so many new people over the course of the weekend. The bandmates/groupies, the random people at that Irish pub, the girlfriends, the random club bouncers, the college friends, that guy playing Ms. Pac-Man, and everyone else. It was a pleasure.

Gloomy

Lots of storms in the Midwest. A big part of one of my trees fell over.

Much of my life in July has been trying to set myself into a good routine. I've been eating right, working out, and writing every day.

I'm not great at routine, because I love variety. I guess that's the hardest part. 

The only thing that knocked me off my routine (and he would have said it's no excuse) is that I had a friend pass away recently. He had an awful condition. It really hurts me to think that someone the same age as me is gone because of a disease. It sucks, truly. 

I feel like he could pop up on facebook at any moment and say something snarky to me. I will miss him. I'm going to his visitation today. It's going to be so weird. He would hate the whole thing. He was a metalhead, so any emotional shindig would have made him cringe.

This selfie I took is of my new Fallout 4 shirt. I love Bethesda games so I had to jump on this. It's cool looking, but the material is sorta cheap and it doesn't feel like the size I bought it in. Maybe I should just focus on losing the weight, right? Hah.

This month is going to go by fast. July is summer session at the school I work for, so we don't have any Fridays this month. All four-day weeks. It's really nice. Then we get a little break in August. More time to write, for me. It's not all gloom and doom, I suppose.

Reading and Editing in 2015

This past month, my life has been turning pages and scratching out words. A big author posted a critique-friend-connection to her blog, and I found a few people to swap writing projects with. One of those turned out to be a good match, and so I read and gave feedback on her entire novel. That was probably the most enjoyable thing I did this past month. I really love critiquing books, and it’s so much more fun when the book is already quite good. I’ll pimp out that book and author here when she releases it, but I don’t want to say anything now for privacy reasons. 

After that, I reread A Storm of Swords, my favorite of the A Song Of Ice And Fireseries, and then I went to the book store and shuffled through a mountain of paper. Truth is, my favorite type of book is 3^rd person, past tense. It’s getting harder and harder to find new books in that style. I try to read YA books often, since that’s what I want to write, but I get so tired of 1^stperson being used over and over that it’s hard to find anything to want to jump into.

What I ended up reading next was a random pick: Half A King by Joe Abercrombie. I had never heard of him or this book before going into the book store. I judge buying random books on if the title sounds interesting and if the first page grabs me. This book did, so I bolted through it in a few days. It was a good read. Fun. Well-written. Fast-paced. I read it because the book I wrote is about a prince, and I wondered what other authors do differently.

Now I’m reading Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang at the suggestion of the person whose book I just gave feedback on. I just finished the first story last night, and it might be the best short story I’ve read since I, Robot. I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but this was very weird and interesting.

I leave a book at work to read during lunch hours, and that one is currently The Scorch Trials, which is the sequel to The Maze Runner. TMR was a very good book, which I flew through, but I got immediately hesitant to continue with TST because I hate it when characters go through an entire book’s worth of torture only to gain more torture immediately in the sequel. I first got The Scorch Trials right after finishing The Maze Runner, but I only read the first few chapters before needing a break. I like my characters to find a little relief between books. After battling grievers, I felt like the characters deserved a year to enjoy life. I don’t know. I set the book down for 5 months, and I’m just now considering finishing it. I had the same problem with The Hunger Games. I hated the idea of Katniss going through a second game. I never thought that the first book needed a sequel. I thought it was perfect as it was.

So, other than that, I’ve been editing The Unraveler using feedback I’ve been given. I know it has to be perfect when I submit it to have any shot, so I’m taking my time with it. I’ve got other books in the process of writing, but I won’t be focusing on them until I get this one done. The others are great, though! I’m excited!