I’ll have a beta version of my novel’s outline done in 2-4 weeks and will be pitching it to various people for feedback. If he’s interested, have him email me (you can find my email address on facebook) and I’ll pitch it to him and see what his level of interest is.

Also, I was just in Bellingham a few months ago for my brother’s wedding! He lives in Lynden, and is a total nerd, loves sci-fi and fantasy, and games (board, pen and paper RPG), I guess I rubbed off on him. He went to Masters too.

OK so I started checking out your blog and stuff, and the overlap in our areas of interest is scarily extensive. I’m working as a network administrator for the Jesus Film Project, raising support to become a missionary to do church planting in Japan, and recently have been world building for a fantasy realm to use in a pen and paper RPG, Sci-Fi and Fantasy is basically the only fiction genre I read, and I’m starting to get sucked into synth-pop.

Also, my brother Jon, who went to Masters same time as us, has been my world-building teammate, and he’s starting to get into fiction writing, and tossing around the idea of using the fantasy world we’re building as the basis for a novell(a), so if you’re still looking for collaborators he might be interested.

I just bought it from the skillet store — apparently there’s no more of this particular shirt, though — but there are a few others: http://www.kotisdesign.com/estore/default.asp?estore=skillet&view=default

Writing is going well – though I have to admit I’m taking a one-month break (1.5 weeks left) to learn Sonar (I downloaded the incredibly frustrating and hard-to-use 30-day free trial) and use it to create a remix for a remix competition.

I’m finding that the writing is getting easier, the deeper I get. The story is roughly divided into three acts and I’ve got the scenes of the first act fairly set and have a rough idea of the scenes in the second act. Its a little weird, painstakingly nailing out an outline with 40-60 scenes when I know most of them will change once I put together a Story Team and we find lots of ways to make the story better, but it’s important to have a starting point.

Formally, Twilight doesn’t have a lot to do with my story (it’s in the teen romance and vampire genres and my story is really in neither of those). But informally, there are a lot of similarities. Both stories have a lot of action, yet are fully “character-oriented”. Both have a bit of a dark grunge/gothic mood to them, but it’s not overwhelming in either. Also, the Twilight script is, well, a movie script and thus reads fairly quickly — something my story will do also.

Mainly I was just impressed with how the script brought out the characters so vividly in so few words. This comes naturally when you’re condensing a couple-hundred-page novel, but to do it without writing the couple-hundred-page novel first is more challenging. One technique to do just that (which they used to do in the film industry) is what they call “full treatments” (if you’d like, I could post more about them from Rob McKee’s book “Story”).

Things are going real well with us. I’ve just finished translating Acts 1:1-14 (this time with the help/editing of our pastor, who’s a Greek pro) and am co-teaching on it at our church’s youth group tomorrow night. Jimmy’s almost 4 and Jessica just helped out a little at his preschool (at Christ Fellowship, Everson).