Last week, I finished Stag Heart Book Two. It is now off to my proof-reader, John, and once he finishes his thorough reading of it, I’ll take it in to be printed.  I’m currently working on Behind the Eight Ball.

Today I happened to be writing about a 30-year-old lady who fell in love with me when I was just 17. She ended up in the Regional Center over the whole affair, then escaped and stole a car one night in her desperate mission to come the church where I worked as a youth pastor, and marry me!

I just finished writing that part and took a break to check out my website. Ironically, I had a comment posted by Troubled Girlfriend! When I emailed my webmaster to ask him about it, he immediately deleted the file and emailed me back, saying it was Spam and contained a virus! Go figure!

After spending five nights of the Christmas vacation chatting with this kid and telling him gobs of old war stories about the days of my youth work, I ended up with 14 pages of notes. So I began working on the new book, which will be a fact-based book about my . . . life. Right now, I am up to chapter four and hopefully will breeze through the next several chapters without a hitch. So anyone interested to know how I got started youth work, will discover that in this particular book.

I think it will be called, Behind the Eight Ball, a fact-based book about the author. If anyone else has a better title, shoot it my way. I might consider it.

Well, Nick now has the Flip camera, so as soon as he feels comfortable using it, we’re planning on shooting the two scenes of the play. I hope to add a third scene to this, so we can show the whole thing at the Joyo in the spring. I’ll invite the Dodging Bullets back as we are using their music in the background of the tape, and then we’ll end that particular show with a live, one-kid monologue delivered by Alex.

Well, after receiving techno advice from a long-time librarian friend of mine, I went out and invested in a Flip HD camera. Before doing so, I spoke to Nick of Dodging Bullets, and he assured me that he could handle video-taping the play with this particular camera. He then gave me more confidence in our ability to produce a great film by explaining how he would work with the project from stage A to Z, editing, doing close-ups, fading still life photos, and then dubbing in background music. Connor has already sent me a permission slip giving me access to their music at Plan C studios. So we are set to start filming in the next two weeks.

In the meantime, I have already found an actor, Ben, to play Collin for a third scene of the play, which I hope to start rehearsing soon.  I’m still looking for some 14-16 kid to play Randy, the bully, who has a small part in this scene, but one that needs to be very convincing.  

What do I do in my spare time? Well, I’m working on 4 books at once! I’m just finishing up Stag Heart Book Two, Rivermoon, The Life of Reason Nelson, and a new book about a kid who contacted me one night on the Internet and got me to chatting  about my old war stories about the days of my youth work. Those chats continued for four nights, and by that time I realized I had enough material for another book!