The Ultimate Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything: 42
Howdy! How have things been? I know. I’ve been out of pocket for a while now. I don’t think I ever willingly intended to allow this little blog of mine to go this long without any new posts, but isn’t that life all over? Sometimes we start projects with the best of intentions and then circumstances arise that change everything. I promise, this blog did exactly what it was designed to do for me. I know it may not seem like it, but it absolutely did. In a way, not posting is a hallmark of huge success. Now wait a moment, I’m probably just confusing everyone at this point. It’s been a while. Allow me to dust myself off and explain myself…
The purpose of this blog was always to keep me writing, creating, and engaging that portion of my mind that likes to make believe. I have been up front about that from the giddy-up. A side goal was to hopefully have a group of dedicated readers discover Nerfed Llamas and if they liked it, come back for more content as I kept writing. At one point, I was hoping to maybe add some more incentives for returning to the mix (live streaming, web comics, a community forum, and more), but I just didn’t have the ability to fit it all in with a full time job and trying to write on this blog and on massive novel projects at the same time. I dabbled in some of the ideas, and I hope to get back to trying to implement them at a later date, but for the immediate future they just simply aren’t feasible. As I was saying, this blog was always meant as a tool for me to keep writing. Therein lies the major problem in regards to this blog: I’ve been writing so much outside of this blog that I actually finished two novel projects that I had been working on for years, wrote the first draft a third, and started a new screenplay on top of all of that.
TL;DR – I’ve been writing, a lot actually, just not for this blog…
If you’re curious at all about my novel projects, here’s a nice little rundown of all three:
Manuscript 1: Once In A Lifetime – New Adult/Sci-Fi/Slice of Life – 140,000 words
Elevator Pitch: It’s Quantum Leap meets the Truman Show with a bit of the Thirteenth Floor in a story that feels like everyday life being spun about chaotically in a virtual world blender.
Detailed Pitch: Maverick McCormick is a man caught in a loop between three alternate lives that switch out in seemingly random intervals. Trapped in this unique paradox, he must find a way to exist in each of these wildly diverse ever-changing realities.
In one life, he is a motivated retail manager chasing a fantastic promotion and supporting his girlfriend’s blossoming painting career. All seems to be smooth sailing in his first life until Maverick slowly starts to realize that there’s more than he bargained for going on in regards to both his career and his love life. In the second life, Maverick is a woman and running a prestigious advertising firm that could land its first national contract, so long as she can keep it together during a tumultuous mid-life crisis. With a failing marriage, a romance challenged teen daughter, mounting questions about her own sexuality, and a multi-million dollar business to run, Maverick’s second life is nothing but challenges. In the third reality, he is an indecisive young black college student trying to carve a path towards his future in these uncertain political and economic times. The world in this life could be Maverick’s oyster if he could just manage to stop juggling multiple romantic relationships and narrow down the focus of his studies in time to embrace his adulthood.
At first, Maverick views switching between the different lives as a fascinating and unique opportunity. However, as events start to unfold in each reality, it becomes painfully clear to Maverick that they are unraveling in dramatic ways that are often chaotic, unpredictable and exhausting. This problem is exacerbated by Maverick’s uncontrollable ability to shift between the three realities at the most inopportune moments. With an endless supply of awkward situations, bizarre surprises, and unexpected romantic relationships, Maverick has a difficult time keeping all of the disparate events in each reality straight. This issue is complicated even more so by a recurring cast of characters shared amongst all three realities. Though their names all remain the same, each person looks and acts in a distinctly different manner from their multiverse counterparts.
The complexities start to pile on quickly for Maverick, who struggles to keep up with each individual life while discovering that nothing is as it seems and there may be far more at stake across all known realities than he ever imagined.
Manuscript 2: The Erudite Gentlemen’s Society – New Adult/Mystery – 83,000 words
Elevator Pitch: It’s Jessica Jones meets Brick plus a dash of The Invisible War in a detective story about going to extremes and pushing past the pain.
Detailed Pitch: A year after her honorable discharge from the United States Army due to a severe injury sustained in the line of duty, Gwendolyn Parker finds herself a twenty-eight year old African-American woman trapped in the public sector. After multiple failed attempts to assimilate into everyday civilian life and even more trips to the local bar, Gwendolyn chooses instead to rely on her training from the Army Criminal Investigation Division to start her own business: The Web of Truth – Detective Agency. Taking on a litany of cases primarily dealing with infidelity and mild white-collar crime, Gwendolyn’s dance card stays full, but unfortunately with the predictable tedium of her cases so does her boredom.
All of this changes when Gwendolyn takes on a seemingly open and shut infidelity case involving a prominent Law Professor at Yale University, Javier Velazquez. Befriending a young ivy league student named Elizabeth along the way, Gwendolyn discovers that Professor Velazquez has far more secrets than merely a simple affair, he is also running a secret society comprised of small group of fellow Professors. Together, they run a private and highly exclusive bi-weekly party off campus where students from wealthy families are invited and then trapped into a compromising blackmail scheme involving illegal drugs and indecent acts. Elizabeth is already ensnared by Professor Velazquez’s machinations and is at risk of not only losing her full-ride scholarship to Yale but also potentially being expelled if she does not comply with his every whim.
Determined to help Elizabeth and solve the case at the same time, Gwendolyn blends into Yale campus culture in order to get recruited into the secret party as a bartender. Once inside, Gwendolyn’s investigation puts her on a maddeningly seductive trail of booze, gambling, illegal drugs, sex, and murder all being controlled by the powerful members of the Erudite Gentlemen’s Society.
Manuscript 3: Project Lucidity: Deus, Somnium – New Adult/Sci-Fi/Fantasy – 81,000 words so far…
Elevator Pitch: It’s Inception meets The Magicians with a touch of Lawnmower Man in a tale about a group of students in a college sleep study that can join other people’s dreams lucidly dreams.
Detailed Pitch: (I finished the first draft of this manuscript literally this week, so this detailed pitch is a super rough first draft as well. Just sayin’, don’t judge it too harshly. It’s a pitch in progress!) Felix is a film student with a particularly strange gift, he receives psychic impressions from anyone he makes contact with them. It would be a handy gift if he had any control over it whatsoever. Unfortunately, it happens every time he touches someone, and it overloads his mind with a swirl of sounds, sights, and out of context memories that he hardly has the capacity to parse. Depressed, shunned by his parents, and afraid to touch anyone, He attends classes at the University of Texas at Austin and keeps to himself.
The only thing that Felix genuinely enjoys is dreaming. He has been able to stay lucid in his own dreams since he was fourteen years old, and in these dreams, he’s able to live the life he never could in the real world. He meets Lucinda in one of his dreams and she convinces him that she’s actually a real person visiting his dream. Upon meeting her in person, Lucinda opens up his mind to the possibility that Felix isn’t the only psychic on campus. She introduces Felix to Professor Claypool, the foremost scientific mind in the study of dreams, and he trains the film student through a sleep study to expand the scope of his psychic prowess to include projecting himself into other people’s dreams.
The Professor runs a small team of psychics. Hinata, a fastidious transfer student from Japan, has telepathy. Lucinda, a bisexual Latina with an attitude, can read auras. Brantly, a Jamaican-American who loves weed and women, is a master of the astral plane. Raelyn, a shy girl who loves to write fan fiction, can remote view nearly anywhere near her. Samaira, a wildcard Indian woman with a free-spirited attitude, has a devilishly good control of her psychokinesis. Together, they explore the dreams of those on campus to help further the understanding of why we dream and to work toward unlocking the hidden potential that lies dormant within the unused portions of the human brain.
Unfortunately, the psychic members of the sleep study are not alone in the dream realms they explore. A mysterious presence that can change form at a whim, Janus, has been visiting unsuspecting dreamers and collecting their consciousnesses at night. The horrifying result of the collection is that the dreamer never wakes up. They instead fall into a coma that no one has ever come back from. None of the Dream Team understands why Janus is collecting individuals, but all evidence points toward Tendonysoft INC, a successful business on the forefront of personal technology that produces smartphones, watches, tablets, and speaker assistants. Someone deep within the ranks of Tendonysoft INC is using advanced technology from the R&D department to enter dreams for their own agenda.
The Dream Team, led by Professor Claypool must sharpen their focus, get over their internal drama, and work as a team if they ever hope to discover the truth behind who Janus truly is, why they are collecting people, and stop them from harming anyone else.
Bottom line: my writing has been so prolific this year that I haven’t had much time for my blog as I’ve been too busy writing, revising, editing, redrafting, reading, and then doing it all over again as I try to refine each manuscript into a marketable product that is entertaining, engaging, memorable, and hopefully something that a literary agent will represent and a publisher will pay money for.
On the getting paid front, I’m working on it. Querying your manuscript to Literary Agents is a grind and it comes with a lot of rejection. With the rejection, comes revising your pitch, honing it, and trying to find the Goldilocks zone that tells your story eloquently and keeps the agent wanting to know more. And trust me, I’ve seen my fair share of rejection letters from agencies, and yet, at the same time, I have been revising me queries and I have one out right now with an amazing agent that might bear fruit. They’ve asked for additional content and seem genuinely interested in reading more of my written work. If I can get signed and published, then all of the work that I started with a silly little blog oddly named Nerfed Llamas would have paid off in a huge way. In the meantime, I keep sending out revised query letters and asking the age old question…
On top of all of this, I started writing an original spec screenplay for the first time in a good long while. It’s titled “Definitions Of Love” and it’s not quite ready to be shared with anyone just yet, but it shaping up to be something special. What started out as a coming of age tale about a man with Asperger’s falling in love with flighty existentialist searching for the meaning of their life, turned into a bizarre dramedy musical with vignettes of other people’s lives used as explanation for the layers of love, compassion, and humanity that we all share all over the world. It started as a small project and became something massive, sprawling, and whimsical. It’s sitting pretty at 90 pages (in the screenwriting world 1 page roughly equals 1 minute of screen time) but I have enough left to write that I think it will hit somewhere between 110 -120 pages once it is complete. I’m hoping to finish it in early 2019. Fingers crossed.
…and that’s about it.
That’s what I’ve been up to. It’s been a hectic twelve months for me that included starting a new job, getting in a major car collision, dealing with my teenage children, and somehow finding a way to magically squeeze blood from a turnip on a regular basis so that my family can afford life from check to check. But that’s just the day to day. We’re here, believe it or not, to talk about something else entirely:
The number 42.
All of the above is all well and good, but the real reason I am back on my blog today is to tell myself, happy birthday!
That’s right. It’s Packy O’clock! Today, I turned 42 years young, which is the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything according to Douglas Adams’ classic “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” series. This is the age in which I will make something good happen with all of the creativity that I have been fostering during my 41st year alive. I can feel it. I don’t know if I feel it in my bones, or if it’s something in the air, or maybe just the universe shifting into alignment for me, but I definitely can feel it and it’s giving me chills. They’re multiplying. And I’m losing control (you know the rest). I will get signed. I will get published. I will finally get to be what I’ve always dreamed I could be: a professional author. This is what 42 means to me. This is what I will accomplish in this next year of zooming around the zodiac once more. I’ve worked hard for this and now it’s time to prove that I’ve earned my reward. I can do this. I will do this. I can’t wait to share the good news with all of you when it happens.
For today, I’m gonna take a break and celebrate with my family. It’ll be nice to relax and unburden myself from work, writing, and trying to figure all the things out that I have to figure out on a daily basis. Today is just about being chill. Tomorrow, I’ll be back on my grind of going to work, writing up a storm, making good things happen, and taking huge strides toward the goal of getting representation and ultimately published. Wish me luck!
I’ll end this the only way I know how… with a song: “Happy Birthday To Me” by Cracker.
