A good week (yes, that’s the best I can come up with) (Patreon)

Let’s start with an update on last week’s update. This week, I drove 4 days, and exercised 6. That is, even morning I woke up in my truck, I exercised. This seems to indicate that I should be able to stick with a regular, daily exercise regimen.  The only times I won’t do it is if I’m not in the truck, or the machine breaks. Which will happen here and there, which is why I need to get the parts needed to fix it.

As the title says, this week was good. I had a long weekend at my friend’s place, and spent Tuesday in my truck, waiting for my pickup time on Wednesday. Then it was full on driving toward Laredo, where I will be tomorrow morning. I didn’t have to drive through bad snow fall in the north, but I did have to deal with the result of it, snow covered roads. I really don’t understand why states like Montana and Wyoming can’t keep their roads clear. It snows there often enough they should know how to handle it. So I was careful, which stretched my days slightly, but not so much I couldn’t handle it.

Movie talk

This morning, I watched ‘Skip Trace;’ a buddy movie starring Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville. I bought it because of Jackie Chan, and it was on discount. I have no idea who Johnny Knoxville is. The story centers on the pair, Jackie is a Cop, on the trace of a gang lord called ‘The Matador’ for killing his partner. Johnny is a conman who accidentally ends up in possession of a McGuffin after swindling the casino belonging to one of the Matador’s underling. Like all buddy stories, one of hyper serious, loyal, obeys the law and all that stuff (Jackie) and the other is carefree only thinks about himself and has no regards for the law (Johnny) and of course, in the course of the movie, each learns something from the other.

This being a Jackie Chan movie, the fights are the reason why I watched it. The story is predictable, and not overly clever. The fights are fun to watch, but Jackie is getting on in age and it’s starting to show. Also, at this point, we’ve seen pretty much all of his tricks. What I’d like to see him next is a serious American drama, with only a little fighting in it.

In the end, I don’t think the movie is worth more than the discount bin I found it in.

The Writer’s perspective

So, what can I take away from this movie; know who your audience is. Jackie knows who watches his movies and gives them exactly that. Fun, light movies with impressive fight scene. The comedy and the story always take a back seat to that. And people keep coming back for more. So know who your readers are, what do they expect? Can you give them that? Can you play on those expectations without alienating them? It can be good to study the market you’re planning to write in and find out ahead of time what is expected.

Writing time

The writing went fairly well this week. I worked on Chapter 13 to 15 of ‘A Familiar death.’ In those chapters Marlot and Trembor continue their investigation in the death of Na’ego, the town medic and someone Marlot knew. They also deal with incompetence form the local enforcers, are outed as being gay, and lovers, and Marlot does something drastic about it. Chapters 14 and 15 were two I was really looking forward to writing, and while not perfect, I think they came out pretty good.

I also worked on 2626, a story in the Orr Family world taking place about 30 years after 2593. This story will be something of a spy story(thriller?) that I will write slowly, probably on weekends when I don’t feel like working on the main stories. It Follows Theodore Paso, and agent for the Independents, who live outside the corporate structures. I structure the first chapter as its own standalone adventure, showing us who Theo is, and what he’s capable of. (I stole the idea from The James Bond movies.) Chapter one tops at 6600 words, and I’m quite happy with it.

On the editing front, I am slowly putting Finding the Line through Grammarly.

And that’s it for this week. See you on the next one.