Thaddeus Nowak's Blog: Thoughts and Observations, page 4

Bound – Coming Soon!

Bound is a series I started working on a year and a half ago, but other things got in the way and the story landed on my shelf. At the end of last year, I picked Kyrie’s story up and dedicated myself to getting the first book done and out before Planet Comicon 2020. I am proud to say with a lot of hard work, Bound is nearing the finish line and will be ready in time!

What the story is about

Hunted, Kyrie’s parents gave up their lives and fled to an isolated mountain valley in Colorado before she turned one. They raise her in isolation, keeping her from the outside world to conceal her growing powers and to protect her from those who wanted to take her.

When both of her parents die before she turns seventeen, Kyrie disobeys their standing order to run and hide and instead tries to save her mother. That decision draws her into a modern world she does not understand, forces her to move to Kansas, and places her under the guardianship of an aunt she never knew existed.

Uncertain of her powers and who can control her, she finds herself drawn into a small group of friends through the love of art and playing Dungeons & Dragons. When sword wielding men try to kill her, these new friends rally around her as she embarks on a campaign of discovery to learn who hunts her, what her parents did to her as an infant, and where her powers come from.

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Website Updates

With the new year, I have updates to my website. The old theme lacked some of the responsiveness needed for mobile devices and it had not seen any major changes for a good seven years.

I have the core pages updated, but the pages based on posts still need a little work. Basically, I have to go back and edit all of my old posts to update them to work with the new theme. Until then, they might look a little odd. I will prioritize the posts based on age and where they fall on the website.

Hopefully, everyone will like the new look and feel. Let me know if there are things you might like changed or things you might like to see on my website.

Back to trying to ignore the falling snow as I work.

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Welcome to 2020!

Happy New Year!

And happy new decade (I start counting with 0, so to me this is a new decade). I will say the teens were an interesting 10 years. There were ups and there were downs. A lot changed around me and a lot changed within me. This post will share some of those highlights.

The Ups of the last decade



One of the biggest high points of the decade is my writing: I finished writing 6 books (the first book of a new series went to my editor just before the end of the year)Adopted 2 cats (or destructo-matic 2000s) named Pip and SaffieGot back into photographyGot back into artSold our house and movedDid a lot of hikingWent on three cruisesAttended my first ComiconChanged day jobs onceRegained confidence in myself



The Downs



Lost our horse: Dollar ‘The Scholar’ had been with us for 21 years and we still miss himAllowed myself to get sidetracked and lost focus Allowed myself to lose confidence in my abilitiesAllowed myself to get out of shape



(more…)

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Making Models

Models

I have always wanted to create models of architectural items. Usually, this desire is around castles and medieval scenes. I’ve carved small castles out of plaster and even soap back in high school. Typically, my plans are on the grand scale and so I really don’t get started working on them.

This time, I not only started, but I actually finished a model. It is not a grand castle, but it is a 2’x4′ model (in two parts) that feature a small body of water, a couple of steep hills, and a set of standing stones. The purpose of the model is to support a D&D encounter for the group I am DM’ing on Wednesday nights. The group is playing inside the world I created for the novels (the rules of the campaign).

Prep and Construction

I build the model from foam insulation. I picked up two 2’x2′ sheets that are 1″ thick from the hardware store and a big 4’x8′ sheet that was 1.5″ thick. Using a hot knife, I cut out the raised area for the standing stones and the hill beside it. Only burned myself once, so that was good.

The second sheet, I used cardboard and more of the 1.5″ foam to create the pool and the larger hill. Hot glue put it all together. After I cut the foam, I used Mod Podge to glue down some batting so I could achieve a dirt-like surface.

The ground for this model is flat to make it easier for minis to stand level and not fall over. Therefore, the batting needed to be fairly thin and firm. A generous coating of brown latex paint (color: Sassafras Tea) gave me the undercoat color.

After that dried, I added on grass, gravel, foliage, rocks I created from plaster, the trees, and the standing stones, also created from plaster.

The smaller rocks were from a mold I had for dozens of years. The standing stones were just big pours of plaster I separated with some cardboard to make separating everything easier. The coloring was courtesy of Copic Markers and the airgun I have for the marks. (I got video of a lot of what I did, I just need to process into a big timelapse).

I have some white push-pins, or map-pins, on order that should arrive tomorrow. Which means I will have these ready for Wednesday, just-in-time for the encounter to occur.

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Planet Comicon 2019

Yesterday I loaded into Planet Comicon for their 20th Anniversary. Last year I did not do that many events and I had forgotten the thrill and excitement that a big event can bring. Seeing the floor, still in a mad rush to get tables set and merchandise in place, brought back so many fond memories of past shows and people. The feeling of being behind the scenes and part of the action called up thoughts of Ren Fest and the years I worked out there…Which all means I need to schedule more events for 2019.

At Planet Comicon, I will be at table 416, near the cosplay area at the north end of Bartle Hall. The show runs:

Friday: 1pm to 8pmSaturday: 10am to 7pmSunday: 10am to 5pm

I hope to see everyone there!

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Changes over the week – 2018-10-14

Changes

I am looking out my window at the rain coming down. The cold droplets are kicking up a cloud of yellow leaves as they are knocked from their precarious perches in the trees that once gave them life. It is a vision of changes.

This week has seen a few changes for me as well. I enrolled in an online art class with one of the living masters: Glenn Vilppu. It is through his Vilppu Academy.

I am looking forward to the class, even if it does not start until January. I have always been creative, and along with writing, art is a way I have enjoyed expressing myself. I hope to not only get a lot of good information from the course, but it will also force me to spend more time drawing.

Ren Faire

We also made it to the KC Ren Fest yesterday. It is the last weekend for this year and so many things had kept us from making it out earlier in the season. As it turned out, this was a fortunate weekend for us to get there. John and Trena of Dwarf Mountain Knives had just finished a sword and I fell in love the moment I saw it.

It is a 15th-century thrusting sword with a fishtail pommel and a Swiss guard. The weight is really nice and the work excellent as always. (I have several blades from John and Trena.) Now I just have to wait for them to sharpen it.

We also picked up some art from artists we had not seen before and a new wool cloak for me. The cloak is one of T’ger’s and it helped keep me warm on the brisk (and very muddy day). I keep wanting to put it on, but the cats will cover it in hair the moment I do.

Aside from the shopping, we stopped by and saw a number of old friends. It was good to catch up with them for a few minutes (it was a busy weekend). We also noticed a lot of things had changed. I guess that is kind of a theme for today’s post.

In all, it was a great day at Faire and I am glad we went yesterday.

Writing

My current WIP has been a bit more of a bear than I had anticipated. The trouble is that while I have a good idea of the overall series story arch and planned where each book should end, I have not outlined each book as much as I normally do. The result is that what I thought would fit into the first book if running longer than I want. This means I am now going back and doing more of what I should have done before I started the writing. I am looking at what parts I need to scale back and change to keep the story within a reasonable word count.

The struggle is me wanting to make sure the motivations and behaviors of the characters align with the amount of time they would have to process, learn, and adjust to things. I have things that must occur in certain places to set up things in the subsequent books, but getting them to occur without being rushed or crowbarred into place is what I am working to avoid. Perhaps the series just needs another book beyond what I had originally envisioned. Time will tell.

And it is time that has been hindering me. With other things going on, I have had less consistent writing time and some of what I wrote is months old. So, to make sure I have the flow I want, I am re-reading the 25 chapters I have finished to make sure the flow and attitude of the characters have remained true. That for me is the most important part of the story: making sure the characters have agency and are true to themselves.

Well, I’ve got The Sounds playing in a loop in the background and I should get back to the reading.

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What was I thinking…New Computer

A lapse in reason

Have I lost my mind? It is something I have been asking myself over the last couple of weeks. However, that questioning did not stop the inevitable decision to build myself a new computer.

The old rig I have is eight years old and showing a few issues. It started life as a windows 7 build and a couple years ago, lost the usb drivers. I tried a lot of things, but the only way to get it working was to upgrade to windows 10. I did an in-place upgrade (to avoid having to reinstall all my software) and while it mostly fixed things, Microsoft immediately prompted me to do a full wipe/reinstall. Which resulted in me giving my computer screen a few hand gestures. (I bought the upgrade to avoid the reinstall.  They sold me the upgrade as not having to reinstall everything, and only after I pay and do it, they tell me I should wipe it! Total crap.)

Anyway, fast forward a couple years, and my old rig has been showing more and more problems with windows 10 that truly indicate I should wipe and reinstall. Oh, the pain of reinstalling all that software on a computer, some of which I can’t reinstall because the software is old and the company won’t allow me to activate without an upgrade. This is the pain and expense I have tried to avoid for so long.

What have I done now?

Well, with the house sold, and the vehicles paid for, and no other pressing expenses, I got it into my head that if I am going to have to wipe and reinstall everything, it would be a heck of a lot easier to just build a new machine and have both up and running for a while until I got everything working. So … as you can guess, that is what I have started doing.

The old machine is still quite viable (it was a powerful build) but doesn’t have all of the latest and greatest things that modern computers have. It has some usb 3 ports, but they were original usb 3.0, not the latest versions.  The video card was high-end, at the time, but now video editing software tells me it may not perform. The root drive was undersized. I had an early ssd drive, that I had replaced twice over going from 128gb, to 256gb, to eventually 512gb (there are utilities to just transfer contents without reinstalling anything). Now, 1tb drives are less than I paid for the 128gb one.

The new rig I am building out has all the modern goodies, but because I cannot keep the os as it is, I am now in the living hell of installing this and that and configuring this and that and why the F can’t windows just let me set up my interface the way I want without hacking things. The hardware assembly took only a couple hours, the software setup will take me a couple of weeks. Yes, it is definitely a first world problem, but it takes so much time to get it all set up; time I would rather spend doing other things. And that is why I avoided this for so long.

When it is all said and done, I will definitely enjoy the new computer. I just have to get to the point where I have 80% of the things I need back in place.

 

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Recharging

Recharging

Recharging is something we do all the time for our devices; almost constantly it might seem. My phone is always in need of more juice, and my laptop will want a sip from the cord, even when I am not using it. However, we don’t always recharge ourselves. I am still catching up from the events of the last 13 months, but I will say my vacation to Colorado near the end of August did help.

All of us recharge our minds and bodies in different ways. For some, it might be watching television or going to a sports game. For me, I need solitude (the bane of extroverts and the joy of introverts). Reading a good book will work, but what works best is being outdoors. I love getting away to a place where most people do not tread. The idea that I may have traveled over lands that only a few thousand people in the history of the world may have passed through is invigorating. And while the exclusivity of some of our hikes is wonderful, the fact that we can physically be somewhere isolated enough that we might not see another person at all allows me to put my life into perspective. It is that isolation and solitude (or in my case, traveling with my wife) that fixes what is wrong with me.

When I am out on the trail, much of my day to day life just evaporates and I can clear my thoughts. It really helps with regard to writing. If I need time to work out a plot device or get to know one of my characters a little better, a few hours in the woods gives me the chance to think without distractions. It is my method of recharging and generating inspiration. It is the mental writing I have to do before sitting down in front of the computer.

Even when things don’t go the way I want, being out in nature is where I prefer to be. The picture above is of Parika Lake in the Never Summer Wilderness, and while it may not be obvious, it was sleeting on us when we reached the lake. At 11,400 feet, exposed hands quickly got wet and cold in the icy rain. However, I would do it again without hesitation. We never saw the peeks that surround the lake due to the clouds, but the rolling moisture created an even more interesting environment.

Hopefully, everyone finds their own recharging station and can do things that bring inner peace. I know it is not always easy to do. The day to day eats away at us sometimes, and too often there is not enough time for ourselves. It is one of the things I intend to continue to keep in focus going forward.

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Changes

Changes

This last year has seen a lot of changes. Some good, some bad, some just different. It has brought me growth and at the same time held me back.

So with that rather vague introduction, let me break down some of what has been going on in my life for the last 13 months.

Catalysts

At the end of Jul 2017, we experienced devastating changes: we lost Dollar, our quarter horse. We had “The Big Guy” for more than two decades. He was part of our family through the good and bad. However, a sudden and unexpected colic quickly escalated and we had to say goodbye. He was 28 years old and had a good life, but it was one of the hardest days of our lives.

That last paragraph was actually very hard to write. Even more than a year later, I don’t want to go through old photos because it brings back a lot of emotions. We loved him and were happy to have had him as part of our life, but that phone call informing us Dollar was unwell sparked a series of changes that are still being played out today.

Dollar had been a significant reason we kept living where we were. He had some health issues (but never colic before that day) that kept us from wanting to subject him to a move. Plus he had a number of friends there (horses are quite social).  So we stayed put for longer than we had originally intended.

After we took care of all the things you have to deal with after a loss, we began divesting ourselves of even more things. As I have blogged about before, we had already been working to minimize our lives, this simply accelerated that process.

We also resumed working in earnest on fixing up our house to sell it. We had started scraping ceilings and refinishing kitchen cabints, but still had a lot to do. As a result, evenings and weekends were poured into home improvements. This also meant that I was spending far less time on writing or artwork. I just didn’t have the free time or energy. The lack of writing weighed heavily on me and just added to everything else that was going on.

The work moved slowly. Too slowly. We found that trying to do the home improvements around furniture and while living in the space was taking a toll. We also thought that trying to sell the house with two cats in residence would be difficult, so we made a plans for more changes. With a goal of having the house listed before the end of March, we immediately started looking for an apartment.

The hunt for a new place to live had excitement as well.  My wife, having seen the 590 square foot home in IKEA, thought we could really downsize. I was less certain (quite uncertain in fact that we could go that small). This led to a compromise on a place that was 1031 square feet (plus we knew we would need a storage unit). Queue up a sleet and snow storm and we found the perfect February day for us to move out of our four bedroom, two-story house (with full walkout basement) into a second floor, two bedroom apartment.

Local moves are the worst

We paid someone to move all of our heavy and bulky items while we moved the small things. (I tipped them well for the work done in the bad weather.)

Since we were just over 30 miles away, and we were going to the house every evening and weekend to do work, we just slowly moved all of our things out of the house and into the apartment. This is actually a terrible way to do it because you always have boxes and things scattered around and you can never find anything and you make 8 million trips. I put 5k miles on the truck in just a couple of months.

During this time, or actually, just before the move, I also did Planet Comicon. The 2018 year was a bit more stressful for me than it should have been. I was paying a mortgage and rent and really wanted to get the house done, but we had to spend the weekend selling books and maps. I don’t regret doing the show, but I wish I had mentally been able to enjoy it more. A big thank you to anyone who bought books from me at Planet!

Estimates are wrong

One never really knows just how much effort something will take. I am pretty handy with things, but we found many of the changes we were making singled threaded through me. Even with taking a week off work to work on the house, the weeks slipped by and we missed our target a couple of times.

The work was hard as well. We rent scaffolding, we painted (oh, we painted), he had tile and carpet word done (by someone else) and we painted. And we cleaned. And we fixed drywall. Did I mention painting the ceilings after we flattened them? In all, it took us until the end of April before we were done and ready to have the place listed.

In the middle of that, we had more changes. The people in the apartment below us were smoking inside and that smoke was coming up into our apartment. Unfortunately, proving it is harder than it should be and this led us to do another move. In June we moved into a townhouse in the same complex (instead of months to move, we had three days to haul all of our things a couple hundred yards). We used the same movers as before, but they had to move a more this time because we didn’t have weeks to carry things.

Today

Today, our house is sold (we had an offer within days of the listing, but closing took a couple of months). We have finally settled down and have a good routine and even managed to get in a relaxing vacation in Colorado. It had been a few years, but we spent a week in Estes Park and did some hiking in RMNP. Only 36 miles this go, but we had not been training for the distance so it was a respectable effort in my book (I would have liked to do 50+ miles, but we averaged more than 9 miles on each of the 4 days we hiked).

Even more important, I am back to having time to write. I am again working on the new series, set in the same world that Stephenie lives in, but with other characters in the northeast. The main character’s name is Kadia. She’s living in an occupied country and has to figure out what she wants to do about that. I’m not promising any completion dates at this point because I don’t want something to come along and derail me.

Future changes

What does the future bring? Well, that is always hard to predict. I am doing Planet again next year and hope to have more maps to sell. The table will be bigger than in years past.

I am trying to do more art in general. It was another passion I had growing up and it is another creative outlet. We’ll have to see if I can find the time to hone that skill a little more in the coming months. Maybe I’ll have something besides books and maps to sell at Planet…maybe not.

I also plan to get back to the blog posts. The changes above really derailed me for much of the last year, but now I back and ready to charge forth and conquer.

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Campaign Log: 1.27-32 – My death has been greatly exaggerated

Campaign Log

I am not dead. Not yet. Or perhaps I have come back from death and I am a zombie. The last several weeks have felt like that

I have been working on renovating my house and that has really consumed most evenings and weekends. Flattening ceilings, painting ceilings, painting walls, preparing for someone to put in tile and replace the carpets… I spent ten evenings (and weekends) 12′ up on scaffolding—as it turns out, I am not all that afraid of heights. However, trying to raise and lower a safety cage that weights a good 40 or 50 pounds over the edge of a 3’x6′ platform 12′ from the hard floor is interesting work.

During that time, I have had five sessions at Pawn & Pint that did not get blogged. I have also missed four sessions over those weeks to maximize my time with the scaffolding and due to other activities. Over those five sessions, people have died and we even had a beach adventure. I am told what happens on the beach stays on the beach.

The latest casualty was Quai. We can say that alcoholism got him in the end as it was his pursuit of a cold drink that caused his death. We will see if the next session brings any more death. I think they may be facing an overpowered elemental. Shhh, don’t tell them.

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