It started a week ago, and my friend Lena was in town. We were talking about my current situation fairly in-depth, and she mentioned my ex, Nicole. She asked what Nicole was doing now, and if I’d tried to contact her. The answer was I don’t know, and no. While that relationship had inspired “Inside,” it was just a bit of personal history so far removed from my current situation, I wasn’t sure I even participated in it in the first place.

Well, the week went by, and my mood got worse and worse. There was a point during the relationship where I knew it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and now as I look back I agree with that in some ways. The pain that came out of the end (and it wasn’t just the relationship ending that caused pain at the time, there was much more going on at the same moment the relationship ended), brought a lot of growth and inspiration to my writing. As my friend Michael described Inside, it is my first book with very deep and real characters with rich emotional content. For this reason, the relationship probably was the best thing that happened to me.

But now I’m here five tumultuous years later, and I have to reconnect with the material, and things have not settled at all. The difficulties I have faced over the last five years have warn me down and changed who I am. I’d rather not be who I am right now, and I’d like to go back to where I was.

Inside is an intense book, a lot of hate and pain is coming to its pages, a lot of difficult choices and a lot of suffering, but there’s a lot of joy in this opening hundred pages or so, and that joy also came of the relationship with Nicole.

I thought I had to reconnect with the pain, which is the future of the book. Well, everything I tried didn’t reconnect me, so I searched her out. If I saw her, I knew what I’d feel, and I did. I did feel the pain. I hadn’t looked for her in all the time since we split, I absolutely had not, but she was a good painter, and an amazing person. I knew she’d be onto some amazing work these days. I had no intention of contacting her.

But I forgot something. There is joy before the pain, just as there was in this relationship.

But there hasn’t been joy in mine for a long time, I’ve practically forgotten what it feels like, and I think that was what I’d been having trouble connecting with, the joy.

And when I found her, I thought, what the hell? So I sent her a comment on her business on Facebook. Maybe I’ll send her an email, and it will probably be ignored. I told her I always knew she’d do something amazing, and she is. Truly. I miss what we had for that brief time greatly, but I got a little more written in the book, and that was the point of it.

Now if I could reconnect with joy a little bit in my real life, maybe I wouldn’t be such a moody bastard.

That means I get to move on to other writing. I dreamt of pitching the Walter script, and it was completely fresh in my mind, but the details were somewhat daunting to talk about in a two-minute succinct pitch. This means I’m certainly ready to write it, and I anticipate these difficulties in pitching anything as odd and complex as Walter is. I also get to go back to Inside, which is a fetishy dark fantasy about love, hate, and faith. A friend accidentally described it as “sweet” today. It was an odd descriptor.

Also on the Horizon is the diner book that I’ve told some of you about. It isn’t on the “In Development” pages yet because it is so new of an idea. I use the “in Development” pages as a checklist, so some of those might be a couple years from now in terms of completion, but I intend to complete all of them.

Don’t forget to check out gearsecure.net and if you can, give a few dollars to help me get it started. That’s what the donate buttons on all of my sites are for.

First, my own sites. As I’ve discussed, I’ve decided to post all my work on my site to give more exposure more quickly to the work than I can get by the magazine submissions process. Every time I post a new article or story, I can see the effects immediately. My days double or triple in traffic. To break it down, I get more unique visitors, and usually there are two to three page views per visitor, which means that people are looking at more than one page apiece. I also get more feed reads.

I can also tell where people are coming from. Each time I post a story, I see the tags that bring people in, and so I know that those search terms are helping my traffic in general. That makes it tempting to do reviews of podiobooks and books in general just to get the traffic from the tags, but I’ve already got enough on my plate. I do wonder however, how many people who are out looking for new UFO data are disappointed to find my “First Responder” short story on that search term, or is the UFO community enough of a sci-fi buff to read a short story, and in turn, how many of these people decide to follow my site, or sign up for the rss feed. What is disappointing is how few people leave comments. Comments are bread and butter, and can significantly influence what I focus on writing next.

I can also see on occasion an email read as an incoming referrer, so I know that a few people are sending my links out.

Twitter has been a revelation to many of us. The quick response and feedback of twitter, plus the amount of personality that is shown in a short message really succeeds as the quickest way to develop a network of dedicated fans, followers, and friends. I’m a fairly shy person, and so I question whether I should make random comments to people, but most times I do, I get a quick and kind response. It’s really helped to break shy little me out of my shell. Whenever I post a link, I get hits. Sometimes straight from twitter, but almost in an equal amount from twiturls.com and other similar sites. These simply list links that are posted on twitter.

The community of sites developed around twitter is great and unique. The money woes of twitter have led to a significant number of other startups and tools, tinyurl.com, twiturls.com, etc. Some of which are useful, and some of which are frankly stupid. I stumbled across one person who Gives you a ranking on twitter based on how many characters of your 140 you use on average. I can’t think of a possible use of this statistic. Sometimes, a single word is more effective and indicative of a person than 140 characters.

There are some issues with twitter. How many people can I follow at any one time and still build some sort of relationship? I started a new project, gearsecure.net, and started following musicians as I found them, and really searched them out, and found I couldn’t follow as quickly as I’d like, and I lost track of conversations friends were having, and just didn’t like following more than like 250 people. I made a new twitter account for gearsecure.net, and I can follow both much better. What I’d really like is to have different timelines for groups of people. I could assign a person to a group, and follow the conversations of the writers, the musicians, the celebs, the social media types, the kinksters, and the right-wing freaks that I keep an eye on to stay a step ahead of the news (I really enjoy it when they decide to follow me, too). I know tweetdeck does this, but for some reason, it doesn’t pick up all of the people I follow, and it is a computer resources hog. For some reason, my recording software uses less system resources than this program.

Twitter also hasn’t gotten over some of its growing pains. There’s a lot of people who are just beginning to figure out how to spam on twitter. I got five spams tonight. There was the worm that went around last week. The sorting of people would seem like an obvious thing, but sometimes the obvious is not so much when you’re busy in a start-up. Another couple points of irk with twitter is that my bio can only be 140 characters, I can only input one website for public display. Maybe a field of 140 characters for a description and one of 500 for more info would be good. All in all though, it is mostly the best promotion tool, and I’ll tell you why: I have to be there. There is no silent salesman on this one. The more you put in, the more you get out. You get nothing out of it if you’re just collecting friends, and that’s what the spammers haven’t figured out yet.

Speaking of collecting friends, let’s talk about myspace. Myspace was the darling of the social media scene. Friendster (does that even exist anymore?) may have been the first, but Myspace improved the model. I used myspace to connect with friends I already had mostly, and avoided the popularity contest. I was one of the first music manufacturing companies on myspace with Jones MFG. Then I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, and now that I’m back, I can see that nothing has changed but the b.s. factor. When I came back, I found that I had a lot of hits on my blog, and I figured I might be able to capitalize on that. As I started to add content, my page views, subscribers, and friends didn’t change. Now, I could increase the amount of messaging, comments, and other “contacts” I make, but I just get this feeling of the high school popularity contest for me. If I decide to keep up with myspace, it might be a very passive thing. I’ll let you find me. The real reason for this is that I enjoy interaction, and I get that from twitter much better than anything else. Myspace has stopped working for me.

That brings me to facebook. Compared to myspace, facebook is slick. It gives me a lot of updates in a quick amount of time, and is really somewhere between myspace and twitter in terms of what it does. It is passive, in that the information comes to you and sits, but active in that it comes to you in a timeline like twitter. It just isn’t as dense. I really like this interface, but the downside is that I feel like I need a manual to learn it. I wanted to join a network for my school, and it required a school email. Not my regular email, my school one. I haven’t been to that school in ten years, and so I can’t join the network.

I don’t have an email from there. I can’t look at someone’s profile by casual browsing. I’m kind of a shy person, and don’t add people that aren’t pro or at least trying to be, but it is hard to identify who that might be from browsing, even if I’m browsing a group. I wanted to set up a page for gearsecure, but I can’t set up a page for a company. I set up a fan page, or should I have set up a group? Or both? Or is that too much work? I set up a fan page for myself, only to find that I already had seven fans for a photographer named Bryan Peterson. I use the Lee to distinguish myself from other Bryan Petersons, but now I can’t change the name on the fan page. It’s little things like this that just piss me off about facebook.

I think that the way social networking is redefining the word “friend” needs to be addressed. There was the guy who made news because he invited all of his facebook friends to a party, and only one showed up. We need to remember that unless we really have regular meaningful interaction, the person is a contact at best.

Goodreads is a new social networking site, and it connects people via books. This is somewhat interesting being an author, and I can upload material there, but I’m not very interested, or more to the point, encouraged to find “friends” there, and I can’t tell if people are reading my uploads. There’s no hit counter. Most of the authors I have friended started with their own books, and that’s all well and good, but then when it came to adding things that they have read, well, they haven’t been all that quick at adding those, and what has been loaded is either disappointing or they just aren’t reading widely. This was kind of a disappointment. I looked a little too closely at people I was looking up to. Ah, maybe they’ll get around to listing all of the great works of literature they’ve been reading in their free time eventually. We won’t think bad of you if you read outside your genre.

I am in dire need of a good comic artist for a project, so I have signed up for Deviantart. The problem with Deviant art is that it is too much like myspace for artists. It’s complete amateur hour. It is very hard to find a good artist, and most people up there aren’t very smart at marketing themselves. Anybody with a pen can put “art” up there, and the communication is very much on the myspace level. Thanks for the add. Thanks for the favorite. Okay. Buh-Bye. Nobody really reads the fiction, and nobody reads my site. Maybe if I favorite your art, I might be interested in a collaboration as I’ve put into my descriptions. I’ll eventually put more time into finding people up there, and communicating, but right now, the dividends are slight. One of the nice things about Deviant art is that talent can’t be faked. You can tell in an instant if somebody is holding a pencil for the first time, or if they have some skills. Talent, unlike myspace popularity, can’t be faked.

I found Scribd and made it part of my plan to market myself. I have a Scale manual for electric bass that is on Lulu.com. I haven’t pushed it much, and so I haven’t sold a single copy, and I can’t tell how many people are even looking at it, which is an issue. I put it on scribd, and in less than a month, with no effort have over 1,200 looks. It made it to the editor’s picks list twice. It’s now on the hotlist. So I added a short story, The Oral history of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. In a week it had 400 hits. It also made the editor’s picks and the hot list. Out of over a million documents, they put eight on their front page, and for one Saturday, two of them were mine. So I’ve been putting just about everything up there. It isn’t as social of a community, and I don’t see too much going there in terms of networking, but in terms of passive exposure Scribd is good. Literary stuff doesn’t get as much attention as other things, especially original literary things, but they are getting read. I’ve had a handful of comments on some short stories. I’ve gotten comments on my scale book. I admit that many of the hits on my first story up there are probably people looking for a copy of Hamlet, but who’s to say that somebody looking for Hamlet doesn’t stick around and read a short story involving Hamlet?

A new one I’ve found is Authonomy.com. This is a site Harper Collins uses to scout new talent, and uses writers and editors to give feedback and rank you. I don’t know if there’s a way to punk the system, and push yourself up popularity contest style, and there’s no guarantee that will lead to a deal. This could become a great site for workshopping, if it doesn’t attract too many amateurs in high school (the deviantart problem). It’s still in public beta, and I’m glad to be there. One of the nice things is that you can’t make a document public unless there is over 10,000 words of it. That should keep the kiddies at bay.

Blogcatalog is something of a myspace for bloggers. I get hits here and there, but of the 60 some odd friends I have, only one has really proven to be a real “friend”. That would be Shaun Duke, and you should check out his blog and twitter. This one has some potential, but I’m kind of over it in the same way as myspace. I think the benefits are somewhat limited, but it is the best community I have found so far for bloggers, and I don’t know what I’d change to improve it.

The last one I want to cover is We op-ed. This is strictly for political bloggers, and as such, is a vocal community. It is small, a very niche market, but I value it as much as any of the others. The feedback is real and challenging, the community is supportive even when the viewpoints are different, and so far I haven’t caused a flame war (even though I’m trying with one guy). I hope this one keeps going, and other pick up on this niche community thing.

There’s a couple forums I post on occasionally, boingboing, jref, tor.com, and a few others, but those don’t usually lead to hits or network, and I have very little time after everything else to spend there.

So that’s it, a what’s working, and what’s not. Bottom line is involvement will build your community, and I think twitter and facebook are going to be the most beneficial in the least amount of effort, but participation is the most important aspect of any of them. The strategy is to put that effort where it will get the most response. My focus is on twitter and facebook right now.

Today I uploaded a new story as an experiment into whether it is better to post work or submit to magazines. I had a total of 274 hits. My previous largest day was 190 hits. The story itself has had 23 hits. Now, remember that I have only begun to promote this site, and much of the work I’ve done has been prep work. I have tried a lot of sites for promotions, but not dug too far into them yet. I’m sure I’m only getting 10% of what I could from them if I were really on the ball with things. The same story on scribd.com has received 48 hits in 11 hours. I have 1 friend on scribd, 5 documents total. This is the first short story I have put on scribd. The other 4 pertain to my bass scale manual. Both the short story and the scale manual got selected as a featured document today. Out of eight featured documents for the whole community, two of them were mine. Because of this, I got 200 more hits on my scale manual, making 538 hits on that in total, when this morning I was just above 300. Myspace got 12 hits. That doesn’t surprise me. I know myspace sucks for this kind of thing, and I don’t spend too much time working on it for this reason. This is a lot of positive reinforcement. Going to upload “Tev” tomorrow. Maybe another.

Next on the agenda, I have to do a mix-down of “Tev” for the Horror Addicts podcast (thanks to PC Haring for the fast voice recording). I have some essays to upload and record, and I’m finishing up re-writes on The Hidden. Then I move onto Inside, The Singualrity, The End of the World Times, and Walter.

Right now, I’m looking around, and seeing an industry in decline. Publishers are hurting, magazines are declining, and for a writer like me who is trying to break in, it’s looking more and more difficult. I’m going to spend some time thinking about this, but I want to market things a little differently. I would rather get my short stories out to as many people as possible than have them in a submissions queue for months or years. Isn’t that really the point? I’d rather have community than scant dollars, and I’d feel far closer to my audience. Nobody makes a living at short stories anymore, magazines are cutting back on how many they publish, how many issues they are publishing, some sci-fi outlets don’t even publish fiction at all anymore.I have to call out Escape Pod and Pseudopod a little on this one. They have probably the largest following of any of the new media magazines out there, and put out a new story every week, sometimes more, and they seem to do more reprint material than any first-run material. I often hear that a piece was first printed in a magazine in 2002, for instance. That’s a six year old story. In science fiction, genres have come and gone since then. On Pseudopod, I heard a story last week that was plot point for plot point, a throw away excercise from Stephen King’s “On Writing”. Is this really advancing us anywhere? Is this building a new market? Taking the place of the old?

Maybe I need to start a magazine site. Maybe I need to get my stuff up here, and at goodreads.com, and other places just to get my name and work out there. Isn’t that a more direct route to people, a more direct route to following? The down side is that I’m just some other putz putting things up on a site, and I have no professional editors selecting me for their publications. Maybe I should just submit to on-line magazines, with their ability to turn around a story faster, and have no printing costs. That would certainly shorten the times spent in submissions hell.

Maybe I should look at Michael Mennega’s model of offering things for download in e-book form for a slight fee. I need to eat, and my day job sure isn’t paying well enough right now.

What’s my goal? to sell short stories? I don’t really think so. To sell the novel? Closer. To get an agent? That is probably the best thing I could do. In the time frame I’d like to do it in, I won’t even have my first round of submissions back from a print magazine. But if I could say that my stories are up in so many places, being read by so many people, I can demonstrate that I’m very actively promoting myself, which is really probably more important than a couple sales, assuming my novels are good enough to be picked up by an agent, at least more important than having a couple of credits to my name.

This I have to consider. It isn’t the traditional proffesional route, I know, but what would be more effective right now? I’ve never succeeded in doing things the traditional way, and I seem to be doing really well with social media. Maybe that’s just my track. As I consider this, if you could leave in comments some good on-line venues, both public and magazine type venues, I’d appreciate it. I know of goodreads and scribd (my scale book is getting a lot of attention there). Know there’s a couple of good mags that are SF on line, but I don’t know of any horror or fantasy specific magazines. Haven’t done any looking.

As far as the future of here, I’m planning more diary types of entries, and more fiction will come up here soon. I’ll keep you posted on everything else.

In 2008, life was about making decisions on directions, and acting on them. I set some pretty big goals for myself, and made about 80% of them, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. A great deal of this work was preparation, and I have a lot of work to release right now. Here’s a quick run-down of what I’ve accomplished:

Fiction:
Completed The Hidden: Urban Decay (more or less)
Completed Forbidden Shakespeare Story
Have a lot of ideas in the hopper, and am completing them rapidly.

Blogs:
The Mind of Bryan
The Hidden urban Decay
The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group
I Hope You’re Happy
Instructions, Lists and Notes

Podcasts:
The Hidden: Urban Decay
I Hope You’re Happy
The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group

Non-fiction:
Scales in One and Two Octaves for Bass

So here’s what I have slated for 2009 (in no particular order):
May have a new job lined up
Music project
Inside
Disgruntled
Database
Walter
The Honey Wars
Untitled Barnum Biopic
The Singularity Diner
The End of the World Times
Many short stories
Possibly another Hidden Novel, or two.
Johnny Live
String to Speaker: Getting the sound you Want
String to Speaker Blog
String to Speaker Podcast
Japanese
German
Hidden Badger Productions

I’ll have more on these as this blog continues and I give updates. For now, Happy New Year, drink safely. See you all in 2009, which is 2-1/2 hours from now.

Have some work accomplished towards the database. Have a night or so’s worth of work for the promo, and then I get moving on finishing up The Hidden writing, and a new Johnny essay. Will try to have the compulsive writer’s support group podcast ep 2 recorded this week.

Have some new twitterpals, and I feel like I could almost start relaxing just a little bit. Maybe I’ll zone out for ten minutes a week.

I have been playing a lot of guitar this week, and getting my chops back up. Will be back and playing with Chuck and Bryan soon. These are all major parts of the plan that I had enacted middle of the year, and it’s falling right into place. I’m not saying it was easy. There was a lot of hard work and sacrifice in there by a lot of people.

I can’t express how all of this links up in my head enough that it will make sense to everybody, but everything plays into every other thing.

So here’s my plan for the next few months:
Getting Tev recorded for the Horror Addicts Podcast
Starting hunting for an Agent in mid-January
Writing for the End of the World Times.
Writing Walter Screenplay
Writing Barnum story treatment
Re-establishing much of the network I had
Database dollars and design
Getting back to work on Inside
Sending out stories
Mind of Bryan Podcast
Taking care of My car–it needs work and a good detailing.
New job?

I’m thinking this should be done by end of March-ish.

I feel ecstatic about the way my plan has gone so far. It proves that when I set my mind to it, I can move worlds. I’ll be reaching out for more support soon. I’ve been doing this mostly on my own to get my work to a point where others could have something to hold onto, and now I have lots of products at or near completion.

Whereas this amount of work might make some people exhausted, I’m only picking up energy.

I will talk to you all soon,
I promise.

Over the summer, I’ve accomplished a good deal of my goals, and this is due in no small part to Kirin making plans to allow me to work alone in a way that I haven’t been able to in years. I’ve been writing myself out of a corner. Not being able to write has been a large burden on me, and is not healthy mentally. I now have a novel completed, and I’ve brought back Johnny No One. I have already started promoting these projects, and next month begin the podcasts to support them, and further build community. This is very important to the larger picture of my plans. I now have three websites up: www.mindofbryan.com, www.ihopeyourehappy.com and instructionslistsandnotes.com. I have put links down at the bottom of each article to allow peopel to Digg it, stumble on it and etc. Clicking those would certainly help quite a bit.

I have products on zazzle.com, and will soon have some at cafepress.com as well. I am the top ranked blog at weoped.com. In fact, my op-eds had a perfect rating for quite a while there. My bass scale book is finished and up at lulu.com awaiting promotion. My next music book is over a hundred pages already, and covers set-up of gear and construction of sound. It needs perhaps another 30 pages of writing and graphics. I could very easily follow this up with a video. My next novel already has over 100 pages written ( though this is 10% of the whole story). And to continue the Hidden, I already have 600 pages of other storylines mostly written out.

I have been working with Michael Kuhl on other projects, and we have made a good deal of progress. He has revamped mkuhl.com and comicgrail.com. Together, he and I are working on the database project, and three film scripts, with several other projects in the background.

I have three good solid stories finished. One has been accepted to a podcast, but I’d like to have some other things going so that I can use the following of this podcast to plug projects, and increase my exposure. I’ll be sending the next off to a print magazine this weekend. It is a longer story, and so is not suited to podcast. It is probably twice the desired length of a podcast. All in all, I have probably written over 150,000 finished words since May, which in a book would probably be 300 or more pages.
I think I’m standing on a precipice right now, the work has paid off, and all of the elements that I’ve been working towards are in place with the right timing. I have finished my novel, have a good deal of it recorded and ready for a podcast. I have a lot of social network in place via Facebook, Twitter, and the blogs that will allow me to generate a good following. If I can manage to get up into the podosphere in the likes of some of the other writers doing this, I could in a few months have 5,000 plus listeners. There are three other podcasts planned right now, and their audiences are not at all the same, which should generate a large amount of following.

Much of this social media work is laying the ground work for a new funding model for the database project. Many of you know about the database. The time for it is now. Michael and I have the hosting set up. We can get it up and start it off with a little help. Kirin, I need you to get me in touch with Dirk. No more talking about it, we just need to do it. We also need a web designer who can handle the database integration. I was hoping to have money for this, and I might be able to raise some, but somewhere in our network we may have people interested in being involved in this project. There really is no reason why we can’t have this up even though we have little funding and no promotion. I would rather bring in some ground floor people and get it going on hope than languish waiting for funding when we don’t even have the money to file the paperwork to become legal. I’m sure that we can look into the business structure and file the paperwork ourselves at minimal cost. The promotion will come on promos on podcasts, and other social media ventures, my own contacts, and other ideas that I am prepared to move on. I want to use the social media to seek more funding as well, but it is much easier to promote something that is already up.

Michael and I are spending too much of our lives in crappy jobs while circumstances seem stacked against us making it out of this position. For those of you who know Kirin and my situation, Michael and his wife have been in that same position for some time, and it only just resolved for them. We both work the same job. The work we do is physically demanding, mentally draining, and carries no stimulation for us. Our naysayers wonder what we’re still doing there, but only the people who live with us know how much these jobs and the other elements of our recent history take out of us. They consume us, burn us out, and eat all of our productive time that could be spent pursuing goals or other jobs.

This job is not without its merit for us. It keeps us in a good position to pursue the database, it provides the right network to implement it, but we need to be able to exploit it, and in order to exploit it, we need the site functioning in at least it’s most basic design. With an email, we could have an ad go to 10,000 people in the company. That, along with all of the podcast network would be a nice beginning to advertising our project and getting it widely used.

The situation with Kirin has just significantly changed. We know Kirin needs one more surgery to get her hip back into health. The insurance company just used its trump card, and sent us to a schill who said she was fine, and didn’t need the surgery after a five minute examination. This ended the rehab phase of the case, and we are now into the endgame of it all. This has its benefits, in that Kirin can now seek work and it will not affect the case. We’re going to have to find a way to get that surgery. We are considering options for the future in terms of this case, but our lawyer tells us we should see money in February. I’m not holding my breath. I’m still looking to my projects and my future.

To this end, Kirin is looking at jobs, though the market is hardly friendly right now, and she is still disabled, but is also taking another look at her steel business. You can all email her to find out more about that.

Something came up this week in terms of a new job that is very interesting, and I am pursuing it. I’ll keep all of you posted, but can’t say what it is yet.

In terms of fundraising for the database, I am now looking to make a share price $10, and so investing is in anybody’s range. The business plan is mostly ready for public consumption. I figure if I can get 100 people to invest $100, that’s ten grand. That’s probably available in our network right now, but with 5,000-10,000 followers of the book and podcasts, I might be able to get 1,000 of them to invest. That’s money enough. This is what I’ve been working towards all this time. I feel like all the pieces are in the right place for checkmate in three moves, so to speak.

In terms of writing, I really need comments from first readers, I need people to look into their networks and find the other authors, agents, publishers, and people with fandom connections to communicate with. When Instructionslistsandnotes.com is up, I’ll need promotion and material to kick it off. I have about 10,000 words to write and maybe a little drafting before I can set this book in stone and move on to the big one. 10,000 words, with the right prep can be a weekend, so it isn’t far off. Then I get to the big book. I have writing projects scheduled through the end of the year, then doubled up for the back half of winter, and spring. I can’t really describe all of these right now, but some are books, and some are network building exercises. They are fun and exciting. I promise I will give details when strategically I am able. Michael and I have a few film scripts in the works, and I’ve got a very good idea on how to market these scripts. Some of the connections come through my uncle, some through social media.

Chuck and Bryan, I am very anxious to get playing again. I needed this time to turn things around, but I’m not giving up on music. I have the mic pre we need to record drums properly, I have some projects clear from my head, it is a lot less crowded now.

For my friends and family, you know this has been a hard time for us. I’ve been making myself scarce so that I could pursue these goals, and I think the effort has been successful. I also can’t tell you how much I’ve been hurting. I’ve pushed well beyond my limits for the past few years while simply grinning and bearing it, but that time is over. My family doesn’t understand where we are, and has a hard time listening to our explanation of the situation, because they aren’t in the meetings with Kirin’s lawyers, they don’t know what is going on with my projects, and don’t look at anything we do objectively anymore. There’s a lot of stress on those relationships, and at times they have been downright abusive. It hasn’t helped me, hasn’t helped my overall mood at all. It has fed my drive, and helped me get to this point, but has been an overall detriment to health and happiness. It’s time to make forward progress in life and everything else. I’m pretty dug in, I’ve reached my last fall back point, I make my stand here, and I’m sure there’s a lot of other clichés I can throw out along this line. The way things have gone for the last few years have been harder on me than I let on, and I’m tired of feeling this way.

I’m asking for a little support, and a little effort to bring all of this together. This can take the form of telling friends about the blogs, giving reviews on itunes and other forums when they are up, and promoting other projects so that I can develop a following, or provide the other bits of support I’m looking for in terms of the database. It could be financial investment in getting it going, or helping find the missing skills we need to make it feasible. Or it could be just a few kind words. Those have been in short supply of late.