Meanwhile, in the town of -UNDISCLOSED-

Reading Books:

The squeal to "John Dies at the End" by David Wong, is a book full of spiders.

"This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It" is a less rough-around-the-edges tale centering around two beloved slackers living in a fictitious Midwestern town. Part of the popularity to the first book was due to it's following on the Internet, as a serialized blog of sorts. Reading the first book you could tell that -though coherent and complete- it felt somewhat disjointed. There were several stories rolled into one overarching main story that tied itself together in a somewhat chaotic way. The chaotic nature of the story and it's characters, that off-the-cuff writing style made the story work.

The squeal is much more polished. The story is tight. There are several subplots but they tie together in a way that complements the story as a whole. The tie-ins are clean.

I think the 1st book is better only because that chaos was what set the book apart, made it unique. It's not that it wasn't present in the squeal, but it was lacking.

Writing Books:

I had to look back to my last entry to see what the hell I had last talked about.

Ok, Part 1 IS done.

I need to sit down and edit it but finding the time to do that has been tough. It's the end of the fiscal year and the library I work at has a lot of extra money they want to give me. So my meager 6 hour a week shift has grown to 19 hours, just for this remaining month. So I'm working a lot.

I've reached the conclusion that in the same way writing with pen and paper is more effective than typing it out, editing in the same way is equally beneficial. But the tech-geek in me wants to desperately bridge this gap. I tried using a stylus with my iPad, Pages, and a copy of Part 1. Didn't work. Actually it sucked ass. And to be blunt, as one who owns several Apple devices and doesn't pass up a trip to the Apple Store whenever I'm in a mall, I can honestly say that the iPad is a nightmare for serious writing. It's a toy. It really is. Don't get me wrong, I like my shiny expensive toy, but I've given up on trying to use it to get any real work done. 

I've been eyeing the new Surface Pro 3, which isn't even out yet. No, I'm not being endorsed by Micro$oft. I'm merely seeing something I could actually use to get the pen and paper experience on an electronic device.

So I've been wasting a lot of time on tech I don't have instead of reading Part 1. 

Meanwhile, I'm stumbling through Part 2. I'm still trying to get a clear picture of how events play out. I mean, it's all been written in Draft 1, but I'm still discovering new things, new quirks about characters, new places to explore.

Having no time doesn't help either. I'm not in the groove, not in the world of the story.

Reading Part 1 will help.

Perhaps in July.