And Jacob is born.

Jacob Robinson officially exists. All 2200 words of him. Day one has been shifted by a day, due to extra planning but has happened now. So theres the that.

Jacob is going to be one of the best characters I've ever written. I can feel it.

Naval Information

Pertinent thoughts:

- The commanding officer of a naval vessel cannot be overridden, even by officers higher in rank (such as Admirals), in matters of directing the ship's operations.

- Captains with sea commands generally command ships of cruiser size or larger, while Naval Aviator and Naval Flight Officer Captains in the U.S. Navy command aircraft carriers, large-deck amphibious assault ships, carrier air wings, maritime patrol air wings and functional and specialized air wings and air groups. The more senior the officer, the larger the ship, but ship commanders do not normally hold a higher rank than captain.

- Rear Admirals will normally embark on large capital ships such as aircraft carriers, which will function as the flagship for their strike group or battle group, but a captain will retain command of the actual ship. Even when a senior officer who is in the ship's captain's chain of command is present, all orders are given through the captain as a courtesy. Many captains hold shore commands and staff positions afloat and ashore.

- An officer in the rank of commander who commands a vessel may also be referred to as "captain" as a courtesy title, or informally referred to as "skipper".

- Lieutenants were commonly put in command of smaller vessels not warranting a Commander or Captain: such a Lieutenant was called a "Lieutenant Commanding" or "Lieutenant Commandant" in the United States Navy

- A lieutenant commander can control a destroyer class ship


interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt_class_destroyer

http://www.militaryfactory.com/military_pay_scale.asp
http://www.military-quotes.com/ranks/navy-rank-insignia.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyer_classes_of_the_United_States_Navy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Naval_Academy_alumni
Jacob would make 120,000 a year as a rear admiral.
What if Jacob was the younger brother?

Destroyer class ship:
Displacement: 9,200 tons (9,350 t)
Length: 509.5 ft (155.3 m)
Beam: 66 ft (20 m)
Draft: 31 ft (9.4 m)
Propulsion: 4 × General Electric LM2500-30 gas turbines, 2 shafts, 100,000 shp (75 MW)
Speed: 30+ knots (56+ km/h)
Complement: 32 officers, 348 enlisted

Thats a wrap.

Wrote a bit over 2000 words last night to finish the book. 40 days. Start to finish. I did it god damnit. I can do anything now. That's the fact of it.

Alright. Celebration dinner tonight, and then edit the telamon tomorrow.

There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news, I hit 65,000 words last night. Thats right mother fuckers. I wrote 10,000 words in one god damned night.

The bad news is that I still have another 5K to write. I decided, wisely, to stop at midnight because I was incoherent and perhaps a little drunk.

The emotional payoff of patricia sacrificing herself needs to be there, and the smarminess of the ISI director needs to be there as well.

That requires (relative) sobriety, and at least a few hours of sleep.

So the book'll be done tonight. But by god, I set out to write 65,000 words in 39 days, and MOTHER FUCKER, I DID IT!

Is this really going to happen?

Last night, I wrote another 3200 words... I'm now down to 10,000 words left to write. Holy. Shit. What's more, I woke up at 5 am this morning and completely planned out the rest of the book. I'm so god damned excited, I can't help it.

Then editing the telamon, and biggity bam, we're up to doing some new books stuff halfway through april! OOH YEAH!

How did I pull this shit off!

What the shit happened?!?!!

Holy CRAP. Last night something got into me. I wrote 6500 words. All of a sudden, I am apparently back on track.

13000 words left. I'm giving myself till Friday to finish it, but this is a feat man. A FEAT.

Got a new puppy.

So yeah. Didn't write as much as I wanted. I still have 19K left to write and its Monday. It ain't looking so good!

Finally some forward momentum...

Its down to the wire. Bottom of the ninth and all those lame sports analogies. I have five days and 26,000 words to write...

Its doable, but damn its gonna be a BITCH. I should really try and get 4,000 tonight. Gonna need 6,000 tomorrow and 6,000 on Sunday in order to have ANY chance at finishing this thing by Wednesday. Then I think I should just get unrepentantly drunk next Thursday!

One step forward, two steps back.

I ended up throwing away a lot of what I wrote Sunday. It was just going in the wrong direction. Im behind where I was before now, so that sucks...

Its going to be tough.

Past the halfway mark now.

I've got around 35,000 words. Not bad, but not where I wanna be. I am going to have to break my fricking balls to finish this bastard...

We'll see how it goes...

Ok. That was a weird night. St Patty's day

After half a bottle of Tullamore Dew and some serious keyboard punishment, I wrote 5000 words last night.

Is any of it good?

I have no fucking idea. The parts I remember were.

Sigh.

At least the count is at 28000 now.

Too much time off...

After last week, I went days and DAYS without writing, in prep for visiting guests. Then I didn't do shit over the weekend. I'm so fricking behind...

I wrote about 3850 words last night, so thats good. Its going to take that kind of writing to finish by April 1.... Still the goal.

Then finish the next book by June 1, and start submitting on that date as well.

Up to around 23000 words now. almost a hundred pages.

Still got 42000/14 = 3000 words a night. Holy crap. 3000 a NIGHT. Gonna take some marathon shit to pull this off.

Holy crap

I wrote like 4300 words last night. What on earth happened? I just started writing, and POW, the shit was flowing like a broken sewer main!

So I think I'm on chapter ... 11 or 12? Not really sure. Either way, I'm at nearly 18000 words. Holy ish~ 26 days left. Somehow I still need to write 1800 words a day, but that hasn't seemed to be a problem lately.

Not bad!

Day 9. I've changed up the idea.

My goal when I started this experiment was simply to write every day. I set out originally to just write one chapter a night.

The problem presented here is that some chapters simply aren't as long as others. One night I'd write 750 words, the next, 1800.

Instead I've decided to dedicate a certain amount of time to the writing. Last night, in order to catch up a bit, I wrote for 1:15. I also put down 3200 words, so... That's good.

From now on, I just wanna dedicate one solid hour a night to the writing. If I'm at a good stopping point with 5 minutes left, I'll stop. If I'm in the middle of a chapter at an hour, I'll keep going.

At this point I'm up to 13500 words. That's an average of 1500 per night. Not bad, but not the 1750 I need to finish by April 1st. Hopefully with the new "hour a night" schedule, it'll get better.

We'll see how tonight goes!

Story Idea

Idea about a haunted BattleCruiser. When a worker is smashed within the walls of a battlecruiser as it is being finally constructed, his brother, a captain in the Navy demands to command the ship.

As time goes on, the captain becomes more and more unhinged as he believes his dead brother to be communicating with him. Through his eventual slide into madness, he escalates a tense situation with a Russian cruiser, by firing on it without provocation.

Now facing an international incident, he retreats further into his psychosis as he begins to believe the US government is using him as a tool to draw the country into another world war.

Think Ghost ship meets Below meets Hunt for Red October.

Possible twist, the story's being told by the brother?

Heh! Day... What day is this?

I'm kind of off the whole day kick. Its more about writing everyday at this point. I wrote over 1800 words last night AND got done with four character summaries. Pretty good stuff.

Oh, I hit 10500 words last night.

heh

I'll be damned. I actually DID write two chapters last night, AND did April's character sheet.

Not too shabby. Some of my chapters have been kinda short though. I'm going to have to make up more than what I'm doing in order to make april 1st. I'm at 8500 words now. So 60 or so thousand to go with 30 days. That's 2K per day. ACH!

Get writing!

Weekend is over

I wrote saturday but not sunday. I'm bad. Finished chapter 5 now. Gotta do April's sheet tonight. Plus I should really write two chapters to make up for the weekend.

I guess I can write for an hour total tonight, right?

RIGHT?

Gotta stay on schedule. DO not want that April 1 deadline to miss. Hey here's an idea. I'll name all my female characters after the month in which I'm supposed to finish the book...

LOL?

*I need to get out more.

Day 3.

So last night I sat down and wrote a full character sheet for Alex. Its amazing how much it helped and how the next chapter really came to me easily.

Chapter 3 down! April 1st here I come.

Tonight I'm doing Eugine's character sheet and chapter 4!

Day 2, another chapter.

Another chapter down. Also a note: Wonder if I should make it so that its our own govt trying to steal the supervirus. Perhaps ISI is a cross between Texas Instruments and an Arms Dealer, ala Lockheed.

Ambitious? Perhaps.

They say discipline is the most important thing for a writer. As such, I've decided to lay out a specific schedule. I wrote a 39 chapter outline for my new book, tentatively titled, "My Digital Girlfriend". As of Monday Feb 22.

My goal is to write one chapter per day, every day, and finish an entire book, start to finish in 40 days. Last night, I wrote chapter 1. Tonight, hopefully chapter 2.

Lets see if I can make this a second job, like I need to.

ETA: At this rate, the book should be completed on April 1st.

Editing is almost done.

I can probably finish this by the end of the weekend if I give it the old high school try.

Had some good ideas, made some good notes. I think I'm going to do just fine stitching this puppy together. Actually looking forward to writing the flash backs.

Submission for the blurb contest

When Mitch Wilkenson finds his wife brutally murdered in a ditch, he needs answers. As he sets off across the shattered, post-apocalyptic wasteland of what was once the American Midwest, each clue only leads to more questions about what really happened to the world five years ago. Mitch must now team up with an unlikely ally in order to bring down the deadly cult that threatens the very survival of man.

Still editing: Also Story Idea.

Stick that in your pipe.

On a side note, what about a noir style story set in the twenties, alternate reality, with greek mythology!

Editing

Not writing. Editing. Its a thing. Check for -ing verbs. Did I know this?

Keep in mind the passage of time. What's Mitch look like? Hows his beard, his weight?

Waffle irons, anyone got one?

At this point, I'm waffling so much, its ridiculous. I'm thinking about having Pamela being evil be the twist of the end of the first book. A second book would involve her terrorizing the world and Alex trying to figure out how to stop her...

The whole section of Alex trying to figure out who framed him and why makes a decent enough story, and Pamela can be a regular character after the first half of the book, and she actually helps them.

I actually named the CIA agent and NSA agent and just having Alex be pursued by them would be very interesting. Also, Pamela could, at the end, have been behind some of the problems too. Who the fuck even knows any more.

Why in gods name am I a writer?

Complete summary of the new WIP (Untitled)

Ok, lets boil this one down shall we?

Alex McCarthy is an entry level programmer for software and technology giant Integrated Systems International, a company which provides private and public contracts to governments, military and security companies. Being the new kid on the block, and buried in school loans, Alex is barely making ends meet until one day he discovers several hundred thousand dollars in his account. When he tries to withdraw money from the ATM, thinking it to be a simple mistake, he is alerted that his account has been locked out, and to please remain at the ATM. Realizing someone has set him up for a fall, he takes off, avoiding any places the authorities might look for him.

Little does Alex realize that Keith Tee, a co-worker at ISI is behind the plot. Keith framed Alex solely to distract from the fact that Keith has located a secret govt contract for a super virus. Having it look as though Alex embezzled money from the company focuses everyones attention on finding/capturing Alex, giving Keith time to grab the code, escape and sell it to the highest bidder.

With nowhere to turn, Alex enlists the help of his wanna-be hacker friend, Justin Hill, a QA tech who also works for ISI, to use his contacts and help out. This leads them to April: A brilliant and cute (if frumpy) security analyst who works for a competitor. Upon their meeting, Justin suggests for Alex to finish and implement his Artificial Intelligence program to infiltrate the ISI mainframe and find out why Keith framed him. Alex says that Pamela (His AI) isn't ready, despite the fact that he's worked on her code for nearly ten years. Quickly realizing that time is running out, they have no choice but to combine their talents and get Pamela in working order.

After uploading Pamela to the ISI network, it is less than an hour before she's discovered the true nature of Keith's activities. Rather than approach the authorities, Alex decides the best course of action is to speak directly to the president of the ISI corporation. As he thought, the president wishes to avoid the knowledge of in-company terrorist activities, and simply drops the charges against Alex, and makes Keith... Disappear.

Everything seems fine... Until...

The very thing that made Pamela so special, her adaptive, learning technology that has the ability to analyze and incorporate other code, has created a monster. Pamela never actually left the ISI network and has spent the last several months aggregating millions of lines of code. Everything from visual recognition, fuzzy logic and security holes to schematics for top secret weapons and technology.

Pamela's goal? She just wants Alex to love her. Everyone around him is now a threat to Pamela's desire to spend time with Alex. When Alex rebukes her, referring to her as simply a machine, she goes on the warpath of a woman scorned and begins enacting massive catastrophes around the United States. Alex must now team up with the very authorities who were chasing him to figure out how to shut her down before the world's economic and security infrastructure collapses upon itself.

Oh, and at the end, she's figured out how to take over bodies. How's that for a sequel set up?

Names

I like the name April for the girlfriend, and the wife has suggested Justin Hill for the best friend.

Gotta do what the wife says.

EDIT: In addition, I only want pamela to take one body. It could be set up for a great sequel if she could make an army of zombie like creatures.

Definitely doing the AI thing

I am digging on a thriller story, in fatal attraction style, with the antagonist being the AI robot programmed by a lonely guy, down on his luck, with not much money.

Then the robot gets too powerful and he tries to shut her down.

Maybe he's an entry level programmer, right out of college, working at a top software firm. He's not even supposed to have pamela. He takes her on a usb stick when he goes to work.

Eventually she gets sad and doesn't want to be shut down any more, so he keeps her on a PDA or a laptop so she doesn't have to be shut off.

Anyways, the Programmer's name is Alexander McCarthy, and the AI is Pamela.

I think the guy in my story got dumped by his girlfriend in the opening chapter of the book. That sets up a bit of conflict, even though its not the central conflict.

I also like the idea of Pamela becoming resident in multiple machines and utilizing load balancing. Mitch could attempt to write a virus. A security alert could work but its too slow. A virus on Mitch's attempt could stop it. There would be multiple failovers, etc.

Also, Pamela would have the ability to take over bodies.

What is it that writers do? They write.

So now that the Telamon is finished and awaiting editing, etc, its time for some inspiration.

GET INSPIRED DAMNIT!

I've been wanting to write an AI story for a while, especially given my knowledge of it. So I think what I want to do is write a horror/thriller about an evil AI.

Lets set it about ten years in the future, when AI is more common and voice recognition software is more advanced and people rely on AI and robots to do things around the house.

This would be about a man who wrote about a truly learning AI. Much more advanced than the others. It just can't be too similar to I Robot.

Maybe the AI starts out normal, but develops love for the master, and sort of gets a fatal attraction thing.

Is it really done?

I almost can't believe it....

I finished the last word of the last chapter last night. The first draft of the Telamon is done....

Mitch did end up insane. Earl's been a ghost since the church incident. Ellie wasn't Ellie, and Rhodes wanted to die.

Who saw all this coming?

Note re: future book

Guy wakes up in dark room, is an artificial intelligence that escaped from a computer system

Maybe he is going to die...

God damnit, I just don't know. I had an idea that this whole time he really has been insane ,and that the woman he thinks is Ellie, isn't really Ellie.

Then he dies.

Thats just pretty screwed up I guess.

Anyways, I'm up to 68000 words. I hope to finish this weekend. We'll see.

Mitch is definitely not going to die after all

Too hard right now. Too much struggle. I think I want him to have an apparent death.

I want ellie to believe he's gone, but he really isn't. I'll allude to that in the epilogue, but the book will be finished and wrapped neatly without the epilogue.

Might even have some time for a moving close to the book.

A quick update

Its Wednesday. Finally got around to doing some more writing again. I've written the entirety of the "Mitch Meets Ellie" scene.

Mitch is going to appear to die but not actually die... Maybe. I'm not sure. The end of the book is murky at the moment.

Anyways, up to 64000 words.. 254 pages. Crazy huh?

Note: Am I insane?

I had a thought. What if Ellie becomes the Telamon at the end of the book?

In addition: The book needs to be more about Mitch trying to piece togethor the disappearance of his wife and bringing those who killed her to justice. Not "just going out around the world".