First up was the hallway because it hadn’t been done at all since we moved in five years ago. Honestly the door to the guest room still had some red crayon from the previous renter. Back when we wanted to move in the landlord said it wouldn’t be ready for a couple weeks because it wasn’t painted, etc. Since we had to leave our old place before then we said not to worry…we’d love to paint. Ya..that friggin’ red crayon has mocked us since. But we showed it!

Now the doors are all freshly white and the hall is no longer white. It is much more calming. It has a lot more pictures scattered about as well. It’s easier to decorate walls that are freshly painted. Fresh paint must equate to crack for decorator’s or something. Eureka!

The second room was the main bathroom, which also hadn’t been done before. This one I was a bit skeptical about. I’ll admit it. But Samantha assured me it would be great once the walls were covered. And it was awful before, so it couldn’t possibly be worse. I kept an open mind. She was totally right of course…again. She keeps doing that! I don’t know if you can really see that shade of orange she used, it’s easier if you click on the bigger picture. It came out great.

Next up is my brother-in-law’s room and then the office. My BIL chose a similar color to the hall, but a bit darker. It looks cool and it should cover the current PINK walls nicely. Ya.. uh.. so we never painted that one either. We don’t have the paint for the office yet, but Sam assures me it will be green. Because I’ve always wanted a green room! And the landlord is having someone else come paint the outside of the house. Samantha picked out the colors for that as well. So I’ll have more pics soon.

To start things off, the day was going great. No work. Not much to do. What could be better? Then I realized I needed something from the store. Reality strikes again and ruins everything.

I get dressed, grab my keys and my wallet and I’m off. I only get to the end of the porch before everything starts to go wrong.

There is a branch, thicker around than my waist (which is admittedly growing too large anyway), lying across most of the front yard.

The branch  right next to the car. Dangerously close to the the car.

Upon closer inspection? Yep, all the little branches have scratched their pointy little fingers from the top all the way to the bottom. Like dozens of little claw marks. Trying to be positive, it really could have been a lot worse. Like if the branch had been just a foot over. I shudder to think.

Well that’s enough drama for one day, yes?

WRONG.

A few hours later Samantha comes in to tell me the bathroom is covered in water.

yay! Because I haven’t had enough stress today.

Well, a leaking toilet isn’t the worst thing in the world. You just have to turn off the shutoff valve.

Oh right.. this house was built in the 1950s. It doesn’t have a shutoff valve.

So I get my wrench and head out to the street to cut off the water. I twist the knob and go back inside and the water is still on. Go back outside, twist harder. Still on. So I call the landlord and leave a message. Hours pass. Then I text. Hours pass. Finally he texts back around 1am. “Hey, I’m on vacation. Trying to get hold of a plumber.”

That night I had to set my alarm clock to go off every..single…hour to dump out the leaking water. The plumber eventually comes. I have him add a shutoff valve before anything else. He fixes the toilet and all goes back to normal.

The best part of all this? The plumber said I had been turning off the neighbor’s water. OOPS.

Anyway, Summer is over and I graduate from University of Texas at Arlington  in December. You might think, ack, graduating soon, time to freak out, but I’m only taking two classes. After the Summer I had? This is going to be a breeze. And that’s good because I have a bunch of new projects to work on. I have a couple websites already lined up that should be fun. I got a buddy who wants to record an album with me. And, of course, I have a completely brilliant new novel to write.

So I hope nobody missed the blog too much. I know you guys were checking daily with frowning faces. Don’t worry, I won’t make you admit it. I have all kinds of new adventures to tell you about, new podcasts to release, all-in-all we have some stuff to catch up on.

I will be updating my activity bars on the front page while I work. The last set of edits for THE FOREST AWAKENS is coming along nicely! While I’ve been plotting the next book I was planning to write, another has crept into my interest. So now I’m plotting two books to see which I want to work on next. I think this new idea would be much faster, so it might win out.

I’m also pretty active on Twitter, so if you want updates you can find me there!

So instead I took a different approach. I looked at how many words a day it would take to accomplish a book being fully written and edited. I decided on 500 words, enough to fully write and edit a book that is around 75,000 words, and then to still have enough left over to work on my podcast stories.

I get my words two ways:

1. The old fashioned way, you know, actual writing.
2. 3 drafts of edits are equal to the number of words I wrote.

This basically means that the final draft of a 2,000 word story is worth 4,000 words toward my yearly goal (2K written, 2K edited). As I expected, I’m a bit behind on my percentage but I’m not stressing it. Summer is usually when I get a big bulk of my yearly writing done (I just have more time for it). Those days I tend to do far more than 500 words so it will make up for a small bit of slacking the rest of the year.

The best part of all is how we got to finish it off. The two of us decided over Christmas that we were going to take a trip this year, nothing too fancy, but a chance to get away. We haven’t done that in years. So we rented a log cabin near Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was a short drive and it looked beautiful. It really was everything we hoped it would be.

We’re not really the fancy vacationer types, so this place was a lot of fun. We spent a day mining for diamonds in the only public diamond mine in the world one of the days. Diamonds for us were not in the cards, but we did get a cool assortment of other kinds of gems. It was pretty wet because of all the snow that came before our trip. Some time we want to go back and try the dry mining instead, it seems a whole lot easier.

For our Valentine’s dinner we grilled up some steaks and Samantha made garlic mashed potatoes. I got a fire going and we sat around the fire talking and eating. It’s so nice to just get away from everything and have a meal by the fire. After dinner we walked down to a little wooden boat dock and just looked up at the sky for a bit. Then we sat in the hot tub. Yep, this place really had everything, even a hot tub on the front porch of the cabin. If you like nature and you want to get away this place is fantastic.

All-in-all a terrific vacation!

Thanks for joining us tonight, as always I hope you enjoy the story!

Rewarded With a Curse

When the leader of a small group of wizards discovers the existence of an ancient ritual said to grant vast amounts of power, greed and darkness seem to follow in the wake of its discovery. Roger Gardwhin, a middle-aged man trying to maintain a normal life outside of this magical group, is forced to take part against his will. As the day of the ritual approaches, he’s realizing just what he is getting himself into.

We hope you enjoy the story. As always, feel free to comment on where you think the story might be going. Maybe your ideas will get included!

Rewarded With a Curse

When the leader of a small group of wizards discovers the existence of an ancient ritual said to grant vast amounts of power, greed and darkness seem to follow in the wake of its discovery. Roger Gardwhin, a middle-aged man trying to maintain a normal life outside of this magical group, is forced to take part against his will. As the day of the ritual approaches, he’s realizing just what he is getting himself into.

In any case, I’m glad I stuck with REWARDED WITH A CURSE. I probably never would have gone back to a 1st person story if I’d given up. I even think this turned out to be a pretty interesting idea. So, tomorrow we’re getting back into things with podcast story #9!

When the leader of a small group of wizards discovers the existence of an ancient ritual said to grant vast amounts of power, greed and darkness follow in the wake of its discovery. Roger Gardwhin, a middle-aged man trying to maintain a normal life outside of his Circle of wizards, is forced to take part against his will. As the day of the ritual approaches, he realizes just what he is getting himself into.

Check back tomorrow for part one!

Next Tuesday will start REWARDED WITH A CURSE. This is the tale of a small group of wizards living in the modern world. When the leader of this group discovers the existence of an ancient ritual said to grant vast amounts of power, greed and darkness seem to follow in the wake of its discover. Roger Gardwhin, a middle-aged man who tries to maintain a normal life outside of his magical group, is forced to take part despite many misgivings. As the day of the ritual approaches, he’s realizing just what he is getting himself into.

I hope you join us next week to start the new story!

Now, in our modern world, rain isn’t all that big of deal for drivers. Some go a bit slower, some STILL drive fast with their lights off surely trying to annoy anyone they can *rage*, but getting stuck in the rain is something we mostly don’t have to deal with. Well we spent Christmas at a lake house in south Texas. There are mostly paved roads, but certainly not once you get on to the property where we were staying.

I noticed it immediately. “Sam, I just pulled on to this road and I’m already sliding.” We look at each other nervously and both nod. “Let’s just go really slow.” So we decided to trudge through and keep going. That was when we saw my sister, soaked, barefoot, holding an umbrella, and crying. This does not bode well, I think. We pull up and roll down the window, saying she should get in, which she won’t do because she’s muddy. *sigh*

Her SUV is stuck about 1/4 mile up the road. She has four wheel drive. We do not.

The plan is to call our father to come pick them up, she was with her son and one of my other sisters. Then the waiting begins. We wait, and wait, and wait some more. Happily enjoying Christmas Eve in the middle of a muddy road… We finally get word. He is stuck too. By now we’ve decided we’re NOT continuing down this road (really I think we decided that when we saw the rain-drenched form of my sister in the road, but we said it out loud now).

I put the car into reverse and we slowly move back to the main road. It’s dark, it’s rainy, I can’t see a thing, but we keep moving. Then comes the big hill–which actually turned out to be a very small hill when I saw it the next day–and the tires start spinning. We can move forward, except we can’t, because 2 cars are now blocking the road that would surely get us stuck anyway, but we can’t go back any further. Five family members now line up in front of our car and attempt to push us up this hill. But no, the tires won’t do it. We pull over, and we abandon a 3rd car to the mud monster.

Out of sheer luck my teenage sister has a friend on the way to spend Christmas with her. Her father is bringing her, and he’s just down the road. Victory! We’ve all decided to go in the BACK way, which wasn’t dangerous at all. I didn’t even know there was a back way.

So he arrives while we’re waiting in the rain. My wife and my sister are barefoot because they didn’t have shoes they could wear in the mud, one had flip-flops and the other had suede boots. Samantha refused to wear my shoes, so I made her stay on my back for most of the walk and while we waited on the road.

Finally help arrives in the form of a big pickup truck. Cold wife and directions-giving father get in the front of the truck and the rest of us pile into the bed. And so our drama ends. What else did we have to do while shivering in the bed of a truck, so we sang Christmas carols all the way to the house. Christmas turned out to be pretty great after that questionable start. And hey, what a story to tell.

As always, I hope you enjoy the story.

Christmas has be FUN so far too though. We had my wife’s grandmother for our traditional pre-Christmas chicken enchiladas last night. Yum yum! We opened our presents and got to talk. I think it says a lot about me that my wife bought me a medieval lego set, I got her the new Donkey Kong Country Wii game. Hehe. Today we’re off to the family ranch to spend the remainder of the time with most of my family. That means there will be a whole lot of kids there. There is nothing like doing Christmas morning with a whole lot of little children.

I hope you guys all have a good Xmas too. Feel free to let me know what you’ll be up to! I always like a good Xmas story. And for fun, this is a trailer for the game. Cause it looks awesome and we can’t wait to play it!

Check back next Tuesday for the full audio of Marked By The Dragon!

It looks we’ll be starting a new episode at the start of the New Year! That’s always fun. As always, I hope you enjoy the story. If you’d rather read the story, read it here on the site, or on Goodreads.