Simplicity Cycle Review!

Chet Richards is one of the last surviving "Boyd Acolytes," and is the leading authority on the work of Col John Boyd. He is a regular contributor to "Defense and the National Interest,"and I had the amazing opportunity to hear him present an updated version of Col Boyd's famous "Patterns of Conflict" briefing a few years ago. He's amazing.

So, I was bowled-over to see that he wrote a glowing review of my Simplicity Cycle book for DNI. It's not just the kind of review I wouldn't dare dream of - it's a review I wouldn't have even imagined dreaming of. To be mentioned in the same breath as Sun Tzu, Jonathon Livingston Seagull and The Elements of Style - I can barely wrap my brain around it.

I really love how his review captures what I was trying to do with the book.

Dan Ward’s entertaining little primer on the subject won’t teach you anything about simplicity that you don’t already know, but it may remind you of some ideas you’ve forgotten. One of these, probably the most important, is that simplicity requires lots of hard work, conscious, ruthless, and creative work.

The last paragraph is my favorite:

Ward, in the manner of another system simplifier, Sun Tzu, doesn’t offer up a cookbook for creating systems. Instead, he proposes and, by using clever graphs, illustrates several themes that, if you ponder them, can set you on the path to designing emotionally rewarding systems. Like Sun Tzu or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or The Elements of Style, this is a little tome that you can keep in the center drawer of your desk and take out from time to time just to glance through. The book is obviously the product of its own advice: simple, functional, elegant.

Climax!

This morning, I wrote the first part of the climactic scene of The Boomer Sisters in the City (aka B3). The girls have solved the mystery, met some very interesting characters, and just when things seem to be resolving happily...

POW! BANG!

The twist! The bad guy shows up! He's more powerful than ever! He's taking over! Oh no - what will they do? What happens next? The reader won't see it coming.

Oh, it was fun to write. I got excited and could barely type fast enough to keep up with myself. I lost track of the time and was almost late for work.

Have I mentioned how much I love being a writer?

(graffiti image compliments of Atom Smasher's Graffiti Generator)

I Love Being A Writer

I love being a writer. Holy cow, I love being a writer.

I'm still not quite finished with the 3rd Boomer Sisters book, although it's coming along well (it's the "getting up early to write" part that's tricky). I just finished writing a scene that was never part of the original plan... but it fits perfectly with some other stuff that happens a chapter earlier (which was also not part of my original outline). I didn't realize how it fit until after I'd written it. It's completely unintentional foreshadowing, and it really works nicely. It looks like I planned it, but I didn't. It's just magic - a total surprise. I love being a writer.

I recently read an article titled How To Write Like Tom Robbins (the author of Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas, among other books). Apparently, he writes his books one sentence at a time. Yes, we all do that, but he really does it. As in, he doesn't have an outline, he doesn't have a plot in mind... he just writes an interesting sentence, then follows it with another interesting sentence, and so on, until the book is done. My experience with unintentional foreshadowing makes me believe that Tom Robbins' approach is possible (not that I'm likely to try it any time soon).

Also, as I already mentioned to several of you, I was recently interviewed on North Country Public Radio. The interview runs about 6 minutes (wow!), and the topic is my Boomer Sisters books. I mostly discussed the second one (The Boomer Sisters Meet Champy), but also mentioned B1 and B3. You can hear the interview here.

Did I mention I love being a writer?

B3 Update

Finished chapter 7 of The Boomer Sisters In The City this morning. I'm up to 11,000 words now.

I tried to find a good, short excerpt to post here this morning, but couldn't. Every scene I considered using was either too long, required too much explanation and setup, or didn't come to a snappy ending.

Is that a bad sign? Maybe it's alright. It is a novel, after all, not a collection of sound bites. The scenes aren't designed to stand alone - they are part of a larger whole. And I haven't gone back through to edit, polish, tweak and tighten the text yet. Maybe I'll find a good excerpt once I've done that. But I'll have plenty of time to do my editing once the first draft is complete - on 30 June!

B3 Update

I LOVE NaNoWriMo, and never would have even contemplated writing the Boomer Sisters novels if not for their encouragement, guidance, prodding, etc. But the one bummer about NaNoWriMo is it's in November. That makes it pretty difficult to be finished in time for Christmas, even though Lulu is amazingly fast.

As many of you know, I've been able to put the Boomer Sister books under the tree for the past two Christmases, but the illustrated (and fully-edited) versions weren't ready until a couple months later. That's one of the reasons I decided to do DaNoWriMo (Dan's Novel Writing Month) this June. Also, I had cool ideas for Boomer Sisters #3 and #4, and didn't want to wait.

So... DaNoWriMo is nearly half over. I finished Chapter 6 this morning, and plan to start Chapter 7 at lunchtime today. The story is taking on a life of it's own, as usual, and I'm having a blast watching it unfold. The early mornings are harder now than they were two weeks ago, and fatigue is starting to set in, but I'm pressing forward. I'm confident it'll be finished by 30 June.

Sleeping, Laughing, Not Writing

I apparently failed to turn my alarm clock on last night, and instead of getting up at 5 to write the next chapter of the Boomer Sisters, I unintentionally slept in until 6am. Darn!

The cool part is that I woke up laughing - how often does that happen? Steve Martin was in my dream, and he was holding some sort of sandwich that was a combination of food from KFC, a donut, maybe Subway, and a few other places. It was supposed to be the ultimate "food mashup" - a whole day's supply in one handy package, and it had a hilarious name (which I can no longer recall). Kim was still sleeping, of course, and I tried not to shake the bed too much with my laughing. What a cool way to wake up.

Fortunately, the book is already ahead of schedule, so I've got a little buffer for exactly this sort of situation. Maybe I'll be able to get some writing done over lunch...

So Many Books...

I've often bemoaned the unfortunate ratio between the number of books I want to read and the amount of time I have available for actually reading. At the moment, my list of "Want To Reads" includes (in no particular order):

The Illiad, by Homer
Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott
City of Gold & Lead and The Pool of Fire, both by John Christopher
The Box, by Marc Levinson
The Narnian, by Alan Jacob
Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff
Hero Tales, by Theodore Roosevelt

There are a few others I can't think of at the moment. They know who they are.

BUT - here's the twist. I am also currently bemoaning the unfortunate ratio between the books I want to WRITE and the amount of time I have available for writing. My list of "Books I'm Currently Writing / Working on" looks like this:

• The Simplicity Cycle - it's about 1/2 done. No projected completion date, but hopefully in the next few months. I'm working this one pretty aggressively. Top priority between now and June 1st.
• Boomer Sisters Book 3 (untitled at the moment... maybe The Boomer Sisters In The City) - Outline is 3/4 finished. I need to have the outline done by the end of this month, because my 30-day writing period begins on 1 June. That's right, June 2007 will be DaNoWriMo (Dan's Novel Writing Month). My objective is to write it in 30 days as usual, then get it illustrated and edited in time for Christmas.
• Boomer Sisters Book 4: The Boomer Sisters and the Pirates. I'll probably do this one in November (NaNoWriMo), if my school schedule allows. I've got the plot basically sketched out already.
• Joy - That's a working title for a series of (very) mini biographies of Christian thinkers, writers, etc, exploring what they had to say about Joy (& how they lived joyfully). Other possible titles are Standing Under Joy, and Joy-ographies (lame, I know). It's partially outlined, with a few chapters sort of started and a lot more research to be done. Timeline - who knows?
• Rogue Swords - a sword & sorcery adventure novel. I've sketched out the main characters and the general plot. This one would be a lot of fun to do, but it's at the bottom of my list because it's likely to be the least-widely read.

Oh, and some day I plan to do a sequel to The Desert, an illustrated version of the first Desert book, and a cyberpunk novel, and maybe a steampunk novel titled The Coal War.

How am I going to get this all done? I probably won't, but I'm sure going to give it my best shot, one word and one page at a time... and 3 books at a time, most likely.

A New Short Story

I just finished writing a (very) short story. It clocks in at 790 words - less than a page and a half. That puts it squarely in the "flash fiction" category. As for subject, it's a parody of a noir detective story - the title is "Death By Bullets."

It was a lot of fun to write, and i think it's pretty funny, but I'm not quite sure what to do with it. It would be perfect for Rogue Project Leader (RPL), if I was still doing that, but I don't have any plans to revitalize that webzine for the near future. RPL was cool, but writing books is so much more fun (and books last longer).

So - if you want to read my little flash-noir-satire, drop me an email (rpleditor -at- gmail.com) and I'll send it to you. I might post it somewhere, I might submit it to my usual magazine (Defense AT&L), or I might just offer it to people who read my blog.

(side note - since I'm not doing RPL anymore, my email address is sort of stupid now. I originally created that account just to keep track of RPL stuff, and it ended up being my primary address. Changing it now would be a drag, but let this be a lesson to you all. Pick an email address that will last you for a while!)

General Update

Had a great visit to NYC this weekend. Got to hang out at the Natural History Museum (where the Ben Stiller movie "A Night At The Museum" was set), and even bought some cool art from a couple painters in front of the art museum, just on the other side of Central Park.

I also got a lot of ideas for the next Boomer Sisters book (The Boomers Meet Manhattan??). It's really starting to come together... I found some great quotes from C.S. Lewis about art this morning, and the duties of an artist.

What I'm reading: The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Very interesting & enjoyable book. I'm also in the middle of the following books:

• Wikinomics
• Metaphors We Live By
• Ambient Findability
• The Narnian

It's going to be a busy/slow week. We've got a team of inspectors coming through our lab, and I'm sitting in the "ops center" monitoring their movements, inputs, observations, etc... Lucky me!

Radical Elements

Most of you probably know that my first book was titled The Radical Elements of Radical Success. It took me 5 years (and lots of early mornings) to write it, and I'm proud of how it turned out, for the most part. At the same time, I have to admit having some mixed feelings about it.

See, I'm not a big fan of the "success-lit" genre, as a genre. I think most of the books in that genre are pretty stupid, vacuous, pointless, selfish, etc. So, sometimes I feel a little funny about having contributed to that genre... a bit of guilt by association.

Of course, it helps that Gilbert magazine's book reviewer wrote "it counteracts so much of the nonsense in the genre." That was indeed the point. But even though I took conventional success-lit and stood it on it's head (the opening line is "There's something I should tell you before we begin: I don't know the secret to success. Frankly, I'm not sure such a thing exists, but if it does, you definitely won't find it here."), it still feels a bit weird. I think that's why I've moved on to children's novels and Christian short stories.