So I quickly changed the rules to “as many as I need” to fee like I did creative writing.  My group and I, made little rules and min challenges as we went to decide on what we would write on each day. It has been working really well and I think it has been great practice. I have been trying to post blog articles here and post interesting things on my Google Plus profile.

And I have been keeping up on my reading as well. The only problem there is that I was overdoing it a bit. I was actually reading over an hour a day, closer to two hours really. I could have used that time for more writing but I wanted to finish the book I was reading. It wasn’t even that good either. I was reading the book like you pull off a band-aid. My goal was really to just get it done, which I have now. So I need to move on to the next one and try to limit my reading time so I can send more time trying.

Here is the chart I threw together really quick about my words per day. On 5/2 – 5/7, I was doing lots and lots of editing so I didn’t get much writing done during that time. Then I missed a day because I just had too many things going on. Other than that, I have been doing pretty good.

Tracking my progress in a spreadsheet is really helping a lot. I like being able to see how much I did yesterday or even a week ago.  Before it was all subjective, like wow I feel like I did way more this week than last week. Now that I have the data to look at, I can see if that is really a true statement.

Working with other people has also been a great experience. It feels like we are really pushing each other and we are getting better because of it.

Speaking of our creative writing… I just finished one that I am very proud of. So if you want to check out how our writing challenge is going then I recommend that you start here: The Final Choice.

Even though I don’t like the hot that summer brings I do like that it means that it is hiking time! We haven’t really done any hiking in a long time and we’ve been really bad about taking any pictures. So, this summer, I am going to try to take pictures at every chance that I get. I hope that we have the time this summer to get out and explore different trails. My favorite type of trail is one that has something interesting to look at, something that you are trying to walk to. It helps motivate me when I know that we are hiking up a giant hill to see a waterfall or an amazing view.

I am pretty excited to start hiking and taking pictures. It will also give me a little more to write about than the winter does. We’ve got big plans for this summer and I want to make sure that I capture as much of it as I can!

Keep cool, everyone!

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Bookstores and libraries are places that I like going to even if I don’t walk out with anything. I enjoy looking through the books on the shelves and picking up ones that have colorful or attractive covers. Today, to shop for a book for my kindle, I just simply log on and I have the book almost instantly after I click the buy button. Don’t get me wrong, that is pretty awesome that I don’t have to even leave my comfy reading spot to buy a new book. Although I do have a difficult time picking out a book on my kindle because I can’t just easily flip through some pages and see if it might be something that I would like. I do like that my kindle can hold several books, has a lending program and I have decorated it with a pretty decal. Yes, the prettiness of my e-reader is a big deal.

Overall, I like my kindle, especially now that we have the paper-white kindle. It’s a lot easier to handle an e-reader without a big heavy light. Another cool feature I like is the stats at the bottom of the screen. I can have it display how many minutes are left in the chapter and the read percentage. When we bought our kindles I did look at the kindle fire but I already have a tablet so it didn’t really make any sense to buy the fire. At first, I thought that I would read magazines on a fire but then I find myself having the same problem, I like the physical copies more. I’m really crazy about the way I read magazines. I can’t just read it front to be, I start in the middle, the end or the beginning. I may read forward or backwards or skip along pages. I think it takes me about the full month before a new magazine arrives in the mail, for me to finish one magazine.

I would suggest the kindle paper-white to anyone that wants somewhere to store all of their books in a way that they are all portable. I would also suggest that just here and there, buy a physical copy and read it until the corners are worn and the corners of it’s pages are folded bookmarks.

I decided to write this post because we just had a really great game of D&D tonight. It was one of those games where everyone was laughing an the story just flowed together. The enemies were great challenges and the story really seemed to come to life. Now I was the DM so I don’t get the same view of thing as the players but either way, I can at least say they had a great time.

Now to go into the DM side of things. If you are a player then reading this will probably be a little boring. Unless maybe you are thinking about giving being a DM a try. I recommend everyone give in a try at least once by the way. I didn’t think I could do it until I just started doing it. Now I enjoy trying to find new ways to build stories for my players and I think D&D is a game I can see myself playing for a long time to come.

Starting to ramble so I will get back to the DM stuff. So what did I do for the game? For some things, I didn’t do anything. Like I didn’t worry about loot lists, map design, dialog, or NPC backstory. I only spent a few minutes taking notes about the game at all. For my notes, I had written that the party would be headed to a bandit came (something they had picked during the last game) and that there would be villagers who looked to be part of the camp. The secret was that the villagers were actually slaves that needed to be rescued from he bandits.

All in all, I had less than 10 lines describing the story. I leave huge holes in the story that I fill in during the game. I like to let the players lead around the story. If they approach it with their weapons out then the town is a militant town with lots of people to fight. If they try to approach it using stealth than there are paths they can use to sneak in and out without being seen. It is all about adapting the story to the players play style.

One thing I have learned is that you can’t out guess the players. It is really better to not even try. Just roll with the punches and adapt the story to what suits the mood. For tonights game, the players were joking around and were not looking for a fight. They didn’t think their stealth was great but wan’t some alternatives to get into the town. So I made sure that a villager was outside of the town that they could talk to, costumes were hidden around the town to use, and the guards were easily distracted.

The big thing that really helps is to not get too caught up in the rules or trying to rush into the fighting part. The party can have just as much fun with an hour of dice rolling for conversation, scouting, and other mischief as then can with an hour of combat. If you start seeing the party growing bored of the dialog then either spice it up more or throw something crazy at them, like a guard who wonders out of position, giving them a chance to attack… Or talk to them and try to find another way in. Sometimes your players will surprise you on what they would rather do.

Now I guess I should mention what I do prepare. I set out a few stat blocks of creatures that might need to be in the town. I like to make all mine custom using some fancy excel fils I made or scripts in maptools but it is just as easy to find a premade stat block or use Hero Labs. For the bandit camp, I had a bandit leader (who talked like a pirate even though he never got to say anything), a melee bandit, a ranged bandit, and a minotaur. And that was it.

I didn’t have a map so I let the party drawn on the table once I needed one. I said to just add things that would be at a bandit camp. The whole groups yells out a few things and I add in a few things that might help unit placement. The only thing I really had to add was a couple guard towers and a special tent for the minotaurs. Then I just dumped a bunch of tokens out, said they were villages, and asked he party to place them where they thought they would be. Then we did the same with the bad guys (I placed the minotaurs in their tent).

This actually brings me to another thing. If he players knew more about what they were drawing or who we were placing then they would over think it. So we use color dice and I had one person red and one person blue for example. Then after I look at how they are laid out, I can say the blue ones are ranged guys or whatever. This gives me flexibility while still making the placement very random. I just make up the story for why people are standing where as we go.

To summaries, you shouldn’t over plan, always be flexible, and remember to just have fun. If you are having fun then the players are probably having fun. Try to let the players lead the story and if they don’t seem to want to then just ask questions like “hold on, as you want up to the tent, are you trying to be sneaky or do you have your weapon out?” These few simple things can really improve a game.

Well that about wraps it up.  I hope this wasn’t too hard to follow and is helpful for the other DMs out there. One of these days I will make a guide for how I create all my creatures on the fly using excel and maptools to handle any situation that might come up. But for now, I will have to save those for another day.

We did the  80s workout in space this time. You get to choose a workout length and it displays it like plus or minus 10. We started with the 25 minute one to see how we liked it.  The total workout time came to 30 minutes which is our current workout goal so it worked out just right. 

The game goes through some random songs from the category you picked. Each song is classified as Cool or Intense. Or that is what we have seen so far anyway. One of the coolest things is that the cooldown at the end, was actually cool down stretches. I was worried it would just be a slower dance and that they wouldn’t have taken the time to actually program in a different dance. It even involves getting on the floor and doing some different stretches there which is nothing like any of the other dances.

So I gotta say, I am really impressed by this one. At first, I wasn’t a big fan of using it for workouts because it was hard to get a good mix of easy and hard songs. It seemed like just as we got really going, we would accidentally pick a slow song. So using the randomness in sweat mode, we at least don’t have to worry about picking a song that isn’t good for a workout.

The other thing I can say about it is that my arms are definitely tired this time. A lot of the dances involved so much punching and waving your arms that I thought I was doing one of those old Tae Bo workout videos.

If you have not tried it out then I would say that it is worth giving it a shot.  I really am happy with the workout we got and I am looking forward to doing more that way.

We did end up changing the rules a little bit already though.  It turns out that it works better to do 500 to 1000 works for the daily challenges than it did to do 1500.  That might be something we can do later but for now, it is hard for us to just jump into a random story and write that much. We are already seeing some large improvements in our writing which makes it even more exciting. If you want to read the first one we wrote, you can go here.

So far, we have been just setting up some basic rules about the piece we are writing and then we just got for it. The rules are things like a location, an activity, and the writing perspective. We are talking about adding additional rules but what we are using so far is working out really good.

The thing that is really interesting/challenging for me is to be the editor of someone else’s work. I have a really hard time limiting my editing.  I have the same problem with my own writing but that is normally ok because I can’t really offend myself by rewriting a section. I am struggling to just edit and not rewrite large sections just because I would have done it differently.

I think that anyone who is looking to improve their writing style should try this out. It is also pretty exciting to be posting it on the blog for other people to see.  Really puts a weight on the writing, like people are actually reviewing it when we are done.  I am really glad we decided to give it a try.

Time to get back to more writing!

We got a Xbox and a Kinect so that we would be motivated to exercise more because it would be fun. At first, we played Kinect Sports a couple of times and then just stopped exercising. The next game we tried is the Nike Trainer which is an insane workout for me. With it being so difficult and not having any sort of fun game aspect to it, I stopped exercising to the game because it just wasn’t any fun. I know that exercise shouldn’t just be about  fun but it’s the best way for me to get off the couch and do my exercise. I actually want to get up and dance to songs that I know as well as some that don’t. We have a few different dance games to choose from ranging from crazy techno like music to country music. So far my favorite exercise is the Country Music All Stars. I like dancing to songs that I recognize and I know just about every song on the game. However, navigating the menus is very difficult and not made to go easily from one song to the next. It did work as a good aerobics workout that made me break a decent sweat.

We have a few different dance games to choose from ranging from crazy techno like music to country music. So far my favorite exercise is the Country Music All Stars. I like dancing to songs that I recognize and I know just about every song on the game. However, navigating through the menus is very difficult and not made to go easily from one song to the next. It did work as a good aerobics workout that made me break a decent sweat.

So far, exercising every night is not something that I am dreading and try to find some excuse for not wanting to exercise. I really want and need to lose the weight so I am trying to stay motivated and dance my butt off.

Starting Weight: 190lbs

Current Weight: 188lbs

Goal Weight: 160lbs

Feature image source: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3074/2946928548_78e4cf5d77_o.jpg

Now the scary part is seeing how much more I have left. I still need to add in my additional content that I have been wanting to add and then I need to make another big pass through the whole book.  I did better at taking notes this time as I went so hopefully it isn’t so bad. Since this is my first time editing a novel, I am just learning by doing. It is a very interesting experience and it just keeps amazing me how difficult it is.

I guess difficult isn’t  the right word.  Freaken difficult?  Yeah, that seems a little closer. It is crazy how it can take me twice the time to edit a chapter as it did to write it in the first place. I think part of my problem is learning when a section is “good enough” which is a whole challenge all to itself. But with every pass, I get better at it. And speaking of getting better, I have a new idea for my next round of practice.

I decided that since every time I push myself with writing goals, I am able to push myself just a little farther. Then I started to wonder if it works like exercising a muscle and maybe I can speed up the training if I push even harder. So that is how I came up with my new idea. First I should back up a little bit.

So everyone knows I am already working on The Cure and that I plan on writing more. What I haven’t mentioned is that I have a couple friends who are really getting into writing as well. We decided to form a team and possibly even a little self-publishing company in the future. For now we are just testing the waters to see how everything goes. But the big plan is to write a book together. We have been doing some practice writing and it is clear that we each have unique writing skills that the others could learn from.

To make writing together go a little smoother, we decided to go with a “choose your own adventure” type novel. This should make it easy to do in chunks and it won’t matter horribly if we don’t have the exactly same voice in the novel. We are all really excited about writing the novel but we also realized that we are just not ready yet. So this brings me to the plan.

The Plan:

• 30 Days
• 30 Creative Writing Blog Posts(~1500 words) on Team Blog – gofpub.com
  • Each post goes through a review process.  Write -> Review -> Edit -> Publish
• 1 Blog Post (~1500 words) Per Week on Individual Blog – This blog for me
• 1000+ Words Per Day For Novel
• 30 to 60 Minutes Per Day Reading

Total words for the month ~= 10*1500+4*1500+30*1000 = 51k Words

That means it ends up being the same length in terms of word count as Nanowrimo but where nano was a cross country run, this will be speed drills. We will be switching from topic to topic, from writing to reviewing, from reading to editing. It will be a mad dash and hopefully in the end, we will all be better writers for it. Either way it should be very exciting and I am really looking forward to it. I had a blast doing Nanowrimo and I am really looking forward to the challenge of really pushing myself to my limits mentally.

That is all for now. Keep a look out for all the crazy posts we will be doing in the next month. And don’t forget to keep writing!

Iron Man 3 was amazing! There were laughs, tears, and big explosions! The Iron Man movies always make me laugh and Iron Man 3 did not disappoint. Even though we saw it in a sold out theater, touching elbows  with my neighbors, I still enjoyed it. I don’t think I ever really got that feeling where I am wondering “when the movie is going to be over!”

We had some fine cuisine at the theater, theater nachos! They were so good that I thought I should wear them. I poured a bunch of jalapeño juice onto my nachos and it soaked my pants. I tried my best to soak up the disaster with a couple of napkins but failed. So I just spent the rest of the movie smelling like a spicy pepper. It didn’t really matter that I had jalapeno pants because I was watching Iron Man! I think  might start a new line of perfume, starting with Spicy Jalapeno

My favorite part of Iron Man 3 was probably the whole fight at the end. It was very visually interesting with all that was going on and I liked looking at all the different types of Iron Men were flying around. I also like the story between Pepper Potts and Tony especially the giant Christmas bunny! Go see it for yourself, in 3d at the IMAX just because it was awesome!