It's Not About the Money, Part One: They Speak Spanish in Paris? -- Episode 3

(For episode two of this series, go here.)

Oh, boy. Here we go...

My face at the RE-planning stage.

Hello, everybody. Sorry about the delay in this post. Celebrations for the Royal Wedding are underway here in London and everyone is enjoying the four-day weekend. Despite all this joy and excitement, however, it's time to tell you about the lowest point of our European adventure.

Train tickets.

It's Not About the Money, Part One: They Speak Spanish in Paris? -- Episode 1

Hello, and welcome to day one. For those of you who missed it and/or have no idea what's going on here, please find the introduction to this series here. To the rest of you, again I say welcome. Today I'll be talking about the start of our wacky adventures in Paris.

The first part of any proper vacation is the getting there. For our purposes, we chose EasyJet:

The flight itself was fine.
Actually reaching the plane... not so much.

Why did we choose EasyJet? It was cheap. Plain and simple.

Unfortunately, cheap travel isn't always the most convenient, and so our journey actually began several hours before we got onto the actual flight.

I Have Returned

Short post today.

Just wanted to say that I'm back from my Europe trip. It was crazy, fantastic, and filled with really, really, really old stuff (which is always a major plus for me). I didn't do any writing during the trip, as each day was so full and exhausting that I really didn't have any opportunity. Also, it was a vacation for crying out loud. I decided I deserved a break.

Which isn't to say that it wasn't productive. My subconscious never seems to give up on me, so I ended up making several impressive breakthroughs and developments on a variety of projects, most notably Runic. Does this mean I might start working on revising it again soon? Probably, but I want to finish the rough draft for Godchild before I start thinking about another project (again).

Getting back to the actual trip, I wanted to mention really quickly that Lauren and I are going to be working on a joint series of blog posts chronicling the most interesting parts of our adventure. We're going to alternate posting between our two blogs (you can find her's here) so that you can get a more balanced mix of perspectives on the trip. And also because it'll be fun.

I'm not sure when that series will start, but it could be as soon as later this evening/afternoon (depending on your time zone). We'll see, but I'll keep you posted on it.

For now, it's time to get back to work and see what good the time off did for me.

A Few General Updates

Hello,

It's been awhile since I mentioned anything concrete on the work I've been doing. So I thought I'd take a moment to deliver some updates in that regard and also talk a bit about what's coming up on the blog.

Layout


First things first, I hope everyone has had a chance to notice and appreciate the new features over on the right-hand column. If you haven't, please look over there now. Don't worry, I'll wait.

...

Okay, do you see it now? Good.

I have a progress bar! I'm really excited about this, as it means that I can share my progress with you each day/week as I update the bar, instead of making you wait for one of my infrequent updates hidden amidst my ramblings. In the future, if all you want to know is how I am along in one of my projects (or just my work overall), you can just stop in and glance at the progress bar. As i mentioned above I will be updating this thing regularly. Hopefully every day as I finish my writing sessions, but sometimes I'm a little slow. At the very least, I will update the progress bar every Monday, just to make sure it's up-to-date.

In addition, I have a "Currently Geeking" section. This is just a short list of the various items that I have either been interested in lately or that have consumed my time lately. I'll be updating this one a bit less frequently than the progress bar, but I hope to keep it changing regularly in order to let you all know what I'm wasting my time on and what I think other people should be wasting their time on as well.

(Plus, it's probably a good bet that if something shows up on the "Currently Geeking" thread, I'll likely be talking about it in the near future either here or over on The Vanishing Blog. Fair warning.)

Now, on to the actual updates.

If My Career Was a Chimera...

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term chimera, here's a definition from Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online:
1 a capitalized : a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail
   b an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts
2 : an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially : an unrealizable dream
3 : an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic construction

Now, I would imagine that many of you are familiar with the first definition -- the classic image of the tripartite creature in Greek mythology. What some of you might not realize is that the definition of the monstrous chimera has expanded to incorporate sub-point b up there, which includes all manner of conglomerated creatures resulting from the fusion of two otherwise normal animals. Fantasy gaming is full of these, ranging from the owlbear to the duckbunny. (Avatar: The Last Airbender is particularly fond of this, to the point where every animal in the entire series is either over-sized or cross-bred.)

The most interesting and applicable element of this definition, however (and the one that I didn't know about), is the second definition: "an unrealizable dream." That's fantastic, though I doubt I'm ever going to use it in conversation that way.

Now, getting back around to the title, if my writing career was a chimera (both in the sense of a thrown-together construction of many other parts and  in the sense of "an unrealizable dream"), I would like it to have...