I finished the second draft of Blood Hunt.

Blood Hunt is the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, and the first draft had been hovering over me like the grim specter of death for a couple of years now. I got to 130k words in it, and then just lost the enthusiasm for finishing it, in part because I knew there were major structural errors that needed to be fixed. With the success (so far) of TBTB, it was time to really buckle down and get the thing done. Rather than starting with the first draft, I just restarted the book entirely, rewriting everything (even the stuff I liked), and fixing the issues I had with the original. The finished second draft is 154k long, and I’m currently getting feedback on it from several sources. With that in hand, I should be able to do a final polishing draft and get it out for people to see!

I started brewing my own beer.

Charlotte bought me a book on beer-making for my birthday, and once I read through it, I was anxious to give it a shot. I have one batch done: a nice, if uninspiring brown ale from a kit. I’ve also got one batch bottle-conditioning (my own American Pale Ale recipe), and a third batch in primary fermentation (my own Irish Amber Ale recipe). I’m very excited to try the latter two, because I think they’re going to be bigger, better beers than the one from the kit. In the near future I’m planning on making a Russian Imperial Stout, an American Barley Wine, and maybe a wheat beer as well.

I’m still making cocktails, too.

Got a couple of different ones I’m in the process of perfecting before posting them here. One uses smoky blended scotch (like Jonny Walker Red), and one of them uses three different kinds of rum. Mmmm … rum! I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to distill my own liquor, otherwise I’d strongly consider doing that, too.

I’m setting up and designing cwbuecheler.com

This blog, and many of its associated sub-pages, are going to move there. Writing will be found at writing.cwbuecheler.com and my web portfolio and resume will be found at web.cwbuecheler.com. You’ll be able to easily tab between all three sections with a handy masthead. This is an effort to consolidate my many and varied projects and hobbies under one roof, while making it clear which stuff is a professional offering and which isn’t (at least until I start selling beer, I guess).

Project Fatass

I kind of stopped posting about project fatass since I was basically just sitting at 213 lbs each week. Well, I got my shit together, started eating better, started going to the gym, and I’m currently down from an Indianapolis max of 217 to an Indianapolis min of 194, and dropping. I’ve also put on a bit of muscle and improved my stamina. Yay!

Other Stuff

Still working on Dart Publishing, about to begin the second draft of The Broken God Machine, still publicizing The Blood That Bonds (fairly big news on that coming soon), still playing video games, and still somehow finding time to spend with my wife!

More updates coming once I get this new design finished up. Hoping to put in a lot of hours on that this weekend.

This only affects like maybe 15 real people (out of over 500 user accounts … ugh), but for those fifteen of you, my apologies! Please feel free to re-sign-up, and I promise I’ll never, ever do what I just did again. Thanks!

I’ve got  a few more reviews coming, and then more regular updates will resume once we get into June.

Additionally, I’ve got an editorial in the editing phase for Crispy, so I’ll post when that goes up.

Additionally part two, I’m working on something fairly awesome with my friend Gabe that we’re hoping to launch this month. More on that soon!

Also, here is a picture from the other night’s beer tasting!

Stay tuned. And if you’re American … go vote. :)

• write cDebris Tutorial #3: CSS-based rollover buttons
• add Voices, Chapter 1 to the site
• post some cool textures that people can download and use for website backgrounds

I’ve also been running a test this month, advertising the site on Facebook for a couple of dollars a day. It’s producing views, but I’m not sure if those folks are ever coming back or not. Since I don’t run ads or otherwise make money off the site, it’s not really a big deal how much traffic it gets, but I was curious what kind of folks would click through. I’ll probably stop advertising there at the end of the month, but it was an interesting test.

I am basically all set up on my new PC. Windows Vista is pretty cool. I guess people were expecting something totally revolutionary compared to XP … and it’s definitely not. It’s more like a nice, evolutionary version of XP, so for those who were expecting more, it was probably a huge disappointment. Having read all of the bad press, however, I found myself expecting it to be terrible, and generally speaking I’m quite pleased with the UI changes and improvements.

I still think it’s insane that they haven’t made Taskbar Shuffle a native part of Windows, however.

Oh, and I’m removing the “Latest Photos” sidebar widget until I get a new digital camera to replace the one I left in a cab by mistake. I’d have done it already, but paying for my wedding kinda takes precedence!

Relatively regular updates (at least 3-4 times a week, as has largely been the case since I re-launched this site) will resume as of tomorrow.

Thanks to all who’ve stopped by during the downtime. :)