Happy birthday to my sweet woman, Cynthia

@Technomom, , however you want to call her. She is my sweet woman - the love of my life and the fire of my imagination. She is my lover, my partner, my playmate and I adore her completely. Every atom of her. Every muon.

Happy birthday, sweet goddess woman. Happy birthday, my partner along the road.

I am so glad you're with me.

A time for change; yes, we can!

I don't typically do political posts. But I wanted to say here, this:

Obama has my vote; it has been recorded and sent on. We may not change history here in Georgia tonight, but I am hopeful that all those who voted for him throughout the country will make their mark, cast their ballot and create an everlasting moment in the yielding sands of time.

No matter what other conflict, trouble, or difficulty I find myself in today, I know that I have done something today dedicated to lasting and sustainable change.

What Kris Johnson said…

This post here is absolutely right on point.

It's a post about two guys, Matt Selznick and JC Hutchins, who both bear consideration should you or your company be up to hiring ONE or TWO New Media Geniuses. It's not like New Media Geniuses are thick on the ground!

Take a look at KJ's post and see what I mean.

Podcast for Heart of the Hunter complete!

Well, after a delay of about two weeks from completion of writing to today, Heart of the Hunter as a podcast is complete.

I am planning on humbly submitting the completed work to http://podiobooks.com just as soon as I figure out their naming convention and fix one or two of my files.

In re-listening to my work, I think the story hangs together pretty well. I don't know of any loose ends or, at the very least, ends that are annoyingly loose. If you have any questions about the story, the characters, or anything - let me know. I would love to put up a "Q&A" show like some podcast novelists do.

The last half of the book...from about episode 14....is better than the first half. That's the way it is with first drafts. I am going to be going back and revising, editing, chopping off chunks here and there. For my "agent submission draft" I intend to make it as tight a story as I can.

But that is not now. I need some distance from the work to be able to go back to it and treat it like a stranger as I disembowel it and re-arrange it and make it as close to perfect as I can. Don't get me wrong: I am pleased and satisfied with the draft I've turned out. This is a complete story. And the audiobook format means people don't quite so bored with 120K words as they would if they were holding it in their hands. But I want it to be smaller - around 80K words - and tighter, more fast-paced. This may mean cutting some of my favorite scenes. That's OK, that's what editing is about.

I have already begun writing on the project I will call Eulalie. Eulalie is a code name for what I really want to call it, but I am holding off naming the project publicaly until I can afford a domain for it. That may be silly but that's what I want to do. Cynthia says that Eulalie is a very silly name - and I have to agree, but it definitely has a Southern belle feeling, which is what I really like about it.

Eulalie is radically different from Heart of the Hunter in that it is set in the modern day and it is more of a magic realism / urban fantasy / supernatural romance story. I don't want to talk about it too much, because writing about it peripherally diminishes the need to write the novel itself.

I am discovering characters right now who are quite talky and well-formed. A plot has yet to show itself, but that will come. I'm excited about the story and I'm looking forward to working on it. The best part is I have not yet once been tempted to hang White Wolf Storyteller game stats on these characters. This means, to me, that I have finally been far enough away from WW stuff to have my own cool urban fantasy story ideas. Yay!

After "Eulalie" is in first draft form, I intend to write another novel which will be set in the same world as, and have a similar timeline to the novel "Heart of the Hunter." Once you hear the name of the book, you'll start to pick up on a certain pattern. Once again, I want to wait until I have domain name in hand to announce that book. I have plenty of stories I can tell in the Cora-Ni Chronicles and all of them will be contiguous and share a milieu with "Heart of the Hunter."

So, go on over to http://heartofthehunter.com and subscribe, download all 27 episodes, and listen to them. I think you'll have a great time!

Anniversary!

Today is the 10th Anniversary of Cynthia and I having our first date.

What a great first date it was, too. We plan on celebrating after the 15th, when I get paid. I'm tinkin' the new French restaurant in town, but we'll what she wants.

This relationship literally represents my longest running one. And yet, I am just as enchanted with her today as I was 10 years ago.

Here's to you, love! Let's have 10 more! And 10 more! and 10 more after that....and after that, 10 more! (and so on!)

Post Dragon*Con 2008 and iTunes Reviews?

Dragon*Con time is over for another year.

I really enjoyed my time this year and here's why:

• David Moore from The Game Master Show podcast stayed with me, hung out with me, and defrayed the cost of getting to and from Dragon*Con and bought me some meals. Yay, David!
• Hope Evey came to visit unexpectedly, which is a delight past all imagining.
• I got to meet Jack and Theresa Jaffee from 12 Volt Theater. They are a wonderful couple we had a great time trolling the various huckster booths at Dragon*Con together.
• My time on staff at the Podcast Track was pleasant and not at all onerous. I probably would have spent the time there, anyway, so it was wonderful.
• I got to play Spirit of the Century with some cool new gaming friends, plus the aforementioned Jack and Theresa.
• My Second Life panel went well, though we had a griefer kid show up and proceed to heckle us from a prone position in a whiney voice. I guess you have to have the griefer experience to really understand Second Life, anyway.
• Thursday, I had dinner with PG Holyfield and his wife, Liza; Rick and Anne Stringer from the Variant Frequencies podcast, Thomas (cmdln) from The Command Line podcast, Kimi from the Tale Chasing podcast, and her partner Soulhuntre.
• Friday, I had a very loud dinner with Jack, Theresa, Kentucky John, Katsuhiro, and Leon Dale - it was at a diner with karaoke.
• I got to see my friend Gary, his wife and friends of his and another guy from my UGA days: Thom Luthman! Also my old White Wolf compatriots John and Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg!
• I ended up the 'con with a fantastic dinner with a whole bunch of really cool podcasters: JC Hutchins, Tee Morris, John Cmar and his wife Laura Burns, Chris the Fixed Kitty from the Adult Space Child Free Podcast (and her partner, Henry), along with Rick and Anne Stringer (who seemed to be bookending the Dragon*Con experience for me!) and Anna  from Washington fromVirginia. Then we got to play some Mad Scientist's University back at the Hilton before it was time for Katarina and I to go home.

And that's that. If I've forgotten someone, let me know and I'll be glad to update this post

A Simple Request

Reviews on iTunes help podcast rankings, which helps make a podcast findable by people who haven't heard them before. Some of my podcasts have reviews on iTunes, and some of them don't. If you've enjoyed them, I would like to ask you if you would please leave a review on iTunes.

It will help other people discover them, and it doesn't cost you anything but a few minutes of your time. I've left a few podcast reviews myself on my favorite podcasts, and it takes a little time for the iTunes staff to release the review postings, so don't expect to see them show up for a little while.

Here are some iTunes links for my podcasts, just to make it easy for you.

• The Bear's Grove
• Heart of the Hunter
• Dragonkin
• The Square One Podcast

James R. Chupp, RIP

My father died today. He was a child of the Depression, a scrapper, a tough guy. He worked hard for his family. He went to war and fought in places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa, with the Marines. He earned a Purple Heart. He came home and took a civil service job. He was a logistics master. He was there for me and my sister, and always made sure we had all of what we needed and some of what we wanted. He loved dogs, especially bulldogs. He liked Zane Grey westerns. He was by all accounts a rationalist. He's being cremated. He said he didn't want any funeral - he doesn't get a say in that, really.

This is my funeral for him, in part. This post.

I wish I could've given him a proper Viking funeral, with all the pomp and circumstance, and a 1,001 drunken warriors singing off-key at the top of their lungs, "The Devil's Mad and I am Glad, Glory Halleluah!" Which was one of the songs he used to sing to taunt us when we were ticked off at him.

I loved him. I didn't like him much, but I loved him as much as any little boy can love his Dad. And now I choose to remember all of the parts where we didn't conflict, where I respected him, where he amazed me with his abilities and his powers of fixing things, making things go.

And that which is remembered, lives.

Podcasts!

I've been doing a lot more listening than producing of podcasts in the last few weeks, although I have a few unreleased episodes of Bear's Grove to get out, and I have plenty left to record of Heart of the Hunter.

But I wanted to point out only a small sampling of the podcasts that I have really been enjoying:

Double Share by Nathan Lowell. Nathan's got me hooked something fierce. His stories bring a smile to my lips, makes me long for a time I've never had before. He's over on Podiobooks.com - and I am very sad for some of you who don't have the ability to sit and listen to your stories, because that's the only way you can get his work right now. He isn't about to release via Lulu or some other e-Publisher, he's waiting for a traditional publishing situation to happen. That's OK, but it just means that you can only get his stuff by listening to it.

Shadowdance Podcast with my friend Chris Miller and his good friend (and my acquaintance) Michelle Belanger is one of the most reasoned, rationalist podcast on psychic vampires and the occult that I've ever run into. I would enjoy listening to these two discuss their laundry, but when they talk about fascinating topics they're interested in, it makes for a very agreeable listen.

You'll always get a fairly balanced view that includes the skeptical and agnostic of us who aren't entirely sure there's anything magical going on at all.

Listening to Chris talk about his personal experience on the most recent Shadowdance, it just makes me like the man I know even more: he and I have have had many of the same magical experiences, many of the same conclusions have been drawn.

And, by the way, I am still a huge fan of The Sixty One. Finding musicians like Grace Buford (Cylindrian Rutabega) Nance Brody, Scooter Pietsch, and Hannah has been a sanity-restoring blessing.

Check out my imbedded little Sixty One widget in the sidebar for more info.

Until later, big hugs to those who want them!

Hello everybody!

Just moving into my new digs!