Secrets of the Tome
Being behind schedule was expected. I knew, eventually, I would run into something that would put me behind. In this case, it was a vacation that was longer than I had initially planned for (Yay for a vacay), but I also ripped out two scenes (that were boring) and replaced them with something that had a little more punch. It was the first scene, so I was worried about the impact the original scenes had. They just dragged.
Another problem that slowed me down was the fact that I had put a lot of scenes together, then changed something near the end which forced me to put notes to change stuff at the beginning. So, I spent some time this past three days fixing those issues to line everything up. That required me to re-read some scenes and fix some of the text. Could I still publish by the first week in July? Oh yeah. It’s possible I could catch up on words, or if the story is complete, it might top out at 100k instead of 120k. I’m good with that. I’m confident it’ll be at least 100k, and by the time I perform my editing, it might expand from there (I have some scenes that need details).
U.S.S. Midway
We drove to California this time (the last time we visited family, we flew). It’s an all-day drive from Utah to California. On Saturday, we were in San Diego and stopped at the U.S.S. Midway, which is now a museum. It was fun running through the ship and seeing radio central, combat, the bridge, berthing spaces, and other compartments that brought back memories of my stint in the Navy. The flight deck had a variety of aircraft and helicopters. Some of which people were allowed to walk into and look around.
I got to sit in the C.O.’s seat in the pilot’s ready room:
Everyone had kids that were playing on the consoles in combat:
I remember playing games on the consoles when our ship was in port and shut down. These consoles were playing the data from Desert Storm and all the buttons were disabled, but the kids didn’t care. They just flipped every switch they saw.
Unfortunately, the parking for the Midway had a 3-hour limit and the application prevented people from parking a vehicle with the same plate until the next day. So we left at the 3-hour mark. We’ll have to visit again if we expect to see the rest of the ship (because, oh man, there is so much to see and we didn’t even see below decks). It’s a lot of fun, so if you’re in the area and have kids you want to tire out for bedtime, this is the place to do it.
Well, back to my writing…