Dart Publishing

Dart Publishing, Ltd. is the official name of the business I’ve been trying to get started with my friend for a while now. We’ve made huge leaps recently, thanks in part to having some extra time due to the Crispy Gamer implosion. I’m very nearly done with the first draft of the business plan, and will be sending it out to a few folks I know with way more business experience than I have, in order to get their feedback on it. From there, it’ll be revisions, and then probably applying for some local grants. Investor money is good, but free money is even better. Might as well look for that first, right?

Writing

Last month I finished not one, but two novels — my NaNoWriMo projects from 2007 and 2009, “The Broken God Machine” and “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters,” respectively. If anyone out there wants to read the first draft of The Broken God Machine, it’s ready for criticism. Just get in touch. I still need to make some tweaks to Monster Hunters before I open it up for critique from the outside world, but that should be happening soon. I’m also making some progress on the second draft of the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, currently titled “Blood Hunt.” I expect work on that to speed up significantly once I’m no longer spending my coffee shop time filling out competitive analysis forms and burn-rate spreadsheets for Dart. Speaking of TBTB …

The Blood That Bonds

I haven’t had too many responses in my agent search, and so far the responses I’ve had haven’t been positive. I’m not particularly discouraged — people are still reading the eBook and sending very positive feedback — but I’m beginning to wonder if I should revise the first chapter a little to make it a bit more attention-grabbing right from the start. There’s a little too much opening exposition and I think it’s turning agents off. We’ll see.

Photography

Unfortunately, the broken 18-55mm lens that I fixed with superglue for a while has broken again, so we’re stuck only using a distance lens on our camera, which is a pain in the ass, so we’re not taking many pics at the moment. I need to get off my ass and either re-fix the lens using a better piece of plastic (and more superglue), or just cough up the ~$140 it costs to buy a new one. Why does everything have to be so damn expensive these days? Blargh! Rotten kids … GET OFF MY LAWN!

Cocktails

I went on a bit of a beer kick the past few months, trying lots of craft beers and really strengthening my understanding and appreciation of the different types available (turns out I am way more of an ale guy than a lager guy, with a particular fondness for brown ales, porters, and stouts). I’m coming out of that now though and getting back to crafting new cocktails. I’m still experimenting right now, but when I come up with something good, I’ll post it here.

Video Games

I went out and picked up BioShock 2 the other night at my wife’s urging (one of many reasons why I married her!) and have been playing through it. I’ll post a full review here when I’m finished, but I’m pretty far in and while I’m enjoying it, I’m kind of disappointed in how much more they’ve chosen to focus on combat. You’re constantly being swarmed with enemies, and while I’m not dying a lot, it’s just not a whole lot of fun to be in non-stop firefights. After BioShock 2, I’ll be picking up Mass Effect 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 … apparently it’s all about the sequels right now.

Reading

Sadly, given how many activities I have going on, I haven’t done much reading since Christmas, when I burned through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball in a week or so. I’ve got three novels and a short story collection all waiting for my attention, not to mention a non-fiction book on real estate investing that I really should finish

French

Mon francais n’est pas superb … but it’s getting better. I do a half an hour of studying per day almost every weekday, and Charlotte and I are beginning to try to speak to each other more in French. We’ve also found some French cultural events to go to around town, and I’m about to start in on French grammar in addition to speaking/listening. It’s still a halting, frustrating process — I don’t like being bad at things — but all these little steps should hopefully add up to me being able to hold something of a coherent conversation with her friends and family back in the homeland, sometime within the next couple of years. Hopefully!

Travel

Speaking of the homeland, Charlotte and I will be making another France trip in May. Her sister is getting married in the south of France, which gives us the opportunity to fly into Barcelona in Spain, and spent the next week driving to Toulouse (actually, the nearby town of Albi), where we’ll attend the wedding, hang out for another day or two, and then I’ll fly back while she goes to Paris to take her finals for the French Lit program she’s working on. We’ve also got a trip to Florida happening in March, to visit my parents and sister, and a trip to Syracuse happening … sometime. Then as summer rolls into fall, we’ve got a wedding in New York City and a wedding in New Hampshire (I think) to attend. Yeesh!

… So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone was wondering!

I am officially on the job market, so if anyone out there in cyber land has any leads, please send ‘em my way!

And it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. The site looks a lot better, and the underlying structure is a million, billion, billion, trillion times better than it was. I took the CSS file down from over 6000 lines to under 2000, reduced the size of the JavaScript, dramatically reduced the page weight in both graphics and HTML, and widgetized the living hell out of the site, so creating new pages with lots of dynamic chunks is super-easy.

I lost a lot of nights and weekends to this project (I’m typing this at the office, in fact), but thankfully my lovely wife has been super-supportive, taking care of the house and the cats, and even swinging by the office to provide moral support and/or Starbucks runs as necessary. She rocks. :)

So anyway, check out the site and let me know what you think. Or join our forums and let us know there. Either way, go go go!

Here now are some progress reports:

Lose 25 lbs. Project

Starting weight – 213.5

Current Weight – 213.5

Difference: 0 lbs. Son of a bitch!

Long Hair and Outrageous Muttonchops Project

Hair: Steadily growing out of control

Muttonchops: Mildly outrageous, as you can see!

• 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!

New CSS – As you may notice, the site is a lot less ugly than it was a day ago. :)

WordPress 2.6 – I upgraded my WordPress install, which gives me a bunch of new admin features but doesn’t seem to change the end-user experience in the slightest. So uh, yeah … enjoy that.

Résumé Button – I bet you can guess where this takes you.

Contact Button – I’m playing around with a contact form plugin. I don’t love it, and may write my own … we’ll see.

That’s about it!

Which, actually, would be kind of cool.

Anyway, it’s twenty bucks, so if you’ve got a DS and are looking for a surprisingly addictive game, even if you’re not particularly into golf. I’m certainly not, but I’m getting a big kick out of it.

PS – those CSS fixes really ARE coming very soon. When I said 24-48 hours, I wasn’t counting on pre-E3 work at Crispy taking over my entire life, including both Saturday and Sunday. I love games, but I hate E3 with the undying passion of a thousand burning suns.