Quickie

by | Apr 4, 2010 | Poker, Real Life, Travel, Writing

Not a ton of time before I’m off to Atlanta, but a whirlwind week here at Casa de Falstaff.

Hired a new sales guy at work. We didn’t really have a position open, but when a competitor closed their doors unexpectedly we hired their Sales Manager quick like bunny. He’s a sharp guy and I think he’ll add a lot to our team long-term, but now I have 13 people reporting to me when it was 5 a little more than a year ago. Still trying to strike the right balance between the Sales part of my job and the Manager part, but that’s going to be an eternal struggle I think. Currently leaning more on the manager bits with three new hires in the past few months, so my other salespeople are having to step up to carry the load. Good thing for me I’ve got good people. Still kinda shaking my head at the speed with which we created a position and got this guy hired – our company just doesn’t work that quickly. Ever. We tend to expand very slowly, so getting this deal done in eight days was huge.

Had a book signing at a bookstore in Salisbury yesterday, and sold two books. Pretty good for a glorious Easter weekend sunny day, where no one wanted to be indoors. I had forgotten about the signing until last week, so I didn’t do enough to promote it, but I’m still learning the ropes on this whole thing.

Got my first short story accepted into Connotation Press, which was exciting. It’s a story I wrote on a lark, but I think it’s pretty good. I’ll link it up here when it goes live. I also started another novel, which I mentioned here earlier in the week.

Booked my first winning session at poker of the year, and it only took me into the 2nd quarter to do it. Fortunately for me, it was a nice win and offset most, if not all of my year’s losses so far. And we all seemed to have a good time, too. It’s been nice the last couple of weeks to get the home game going again semi-regularly.

But there won’t be a game at my house this week, because my travel schedule is ridiculous (I know, what else is new?). I leave for Atlanta today, stay there ’til Wednesday. Head home on Wednesday, stopping in G-Vegas to meet with the new guy, who will be working from his home office there. Then Thursday morning I get up and head towards Manteo, in the Outer Banks, for a Friday morning meeting. North Carolina isn’t a very tall state, but going from Charlotte to the far northeastern tip is every bit of a seven-hour drive. Friday I have a meeting in Manteo that will likely take most of the day, so I figure I’ll only make it as far as Raleigh on my way home. Get up Saturday morning and drive home from Raleigh, collect the wife and head down to my parents’ place in SC for a belated Easter cookout in the afternoon. Bail on that around 7 and head back to Charlotte for a birthday party for two of our best friends. Really it’s just one buddy’s 30th, but his girlfriend’s Bday is a couple days before, and she’s a close friend too, so it’s like a twofer.

Then Sunday I’m sleeping for 17 hours.

I’ll try to catch up with y’all some time this week, and I’ll try to keep up with the Poem a Day thing for April. I wrote two yesterday while I was having the less-than-eventful signing, so that gives me a cushion for today, right? No. But it was a nice thought.

Happy Easter to those of you that celebrate such things, and Go Blue Devils!

Challenge, Day 2

by | Apr 2, 2010 | Writing

I wrote another one today, but I like it less than yesterday’s, and since I was informed that I was off to a weak start for yesterday’s poem (he was right, but I still thought it was mildly amusing), I decided not to put it up here.

No, really, I haven’t let one critical comment keep me from posting, the one I wrote today was some real shite.

And that’s not necessarily an uncommon occurrence. When I’m writing every day, I try to crank out at least one poem, preferable two, or at least 1,000 words on my new novel project. Yeah, I started another novel. This one’s tougher, because it’s a slower start, but I think I’m figuring out where I want it to go. The root problem I’m having is that I’m writing the beginning, but I’m currently much more interested in the middle, so I may break down and write the middle as a stand-alone story and come back to the beginning later. As if that made any sense.

Basically, the premise is that the big nuclear war has finally hit, but the majority of the damage to the world’s infrastructure was done by EMPs, not the actual nukes. Which makes a type of sense, if you think about it, an EMP would disable all the computers in the area, and if enough of them happened, the world. So that’s the concept, that computers, and anything that uses a computer chip anywhere in it, are cooked. So with the demise of technology, magic can make a return to the world, and does. So the limited survivors have to not only deal with a world that is completely different from anything they’ve ever thought about, but now they have to deal with people that can manipulate the laws of the natural world, too.

I have been known to read a fantasy or science fiction novel on occasion. Like all the time.

So that’s what I’m working on, and I’m only a couple thousand words into it, so I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m not likely to publish it here like I did Choices (which I think has a new working title of I Made the Devil Do It), but if you’re interested, email me and I’ll shoot you updates.

Oh yeah, and I have a reading tomorrow afternoon in Salisbury, so if you’re local come check it out!

Poem a Day Challenge

by | Apr 1, 2010 | Poems, Poetry, Writing

For National Poetry Month (yeah, I didn’t know either until I started reading poetry blogs, because apparently I’m a poet now, which while may sound gay as all get-out does not in and of itself mean that I will commence to smoking cloves and I am still far more likely to be found wearing a luchador mask than a beret. That is all) there’s a Poem a Day challenge at Poetic Asides, a Writer’s Digest blog written by Robert Lee Brewer. I’m going to try to keep track and write a poem each day, but let’s be reasonable here, I have a job and a wife and plenty of other bad habits to indulge, so it’s unlikely that I’ll manage one every day, but here’s the first one. Robert’s prompt was loneliness – this is what I got to.

Enforced Solitude

Sitting in the window
looking for you,
watching the birds
and dog run free
while I content myself
with clawing up the new toilet paper roll
and pooping in your new heels
again.
Mondays are the hardest day,
I think,
for cats.

I know, right?