Excuses and Other Eighty-Sixed Updates

I really dislike missing deadlines and I’m not particularly fond of excuses.

Also, I don’t particularly appreciate being left in the dark about something I care about.

The fact that you’re subscribed to this risk-taking experiment shows that you care about it (I hope) and I’m very aware it’s been a couple of weeks since I sent you anything of substance, so perhaps you’re currently feeling in the dark, yourself.

I’m particularly aware of the recent sporadic release schedule of new chapters of my serialized novel, Eighty-Sixed.

Well, at the risk of being hypocritical, I have excuses for these missed deadlines and why I’ve kept you in the dark (though the latter was not intentional).

First off, January is always a sprint for me. For those of you unaware, my wife and I run a Catholic non-profit and we’re entering our 20th year of operation.

With that upcoming anniversary, we ran our most ambitious giving campaign right in the middle of Advent, Christmas, and my mother-in-law dying. On top of that, we started the new year by launching weekly video versions of our flagship podcast, requiring a whole new level of creative energy expenditures, and recorded almost 20 new PSAs that are now running on Catholic radio stations across the country.

In January, we released five hour-long videos on Rosary Army’s YouTube channel which you can find here if you’d like to check those out and subscribe to them.

Our new audio and video recording studio

There are several other excuses, including the fact that last weekend we decided to finally paint our bedroom after being in this house for four years.

I woke up on Friday morning fully expecting to edit the latest chapter of Eighty-Sixed when my wife (tired of builder’s grade white on the walls) said, “What if we just started painting?”

What if, indeed?

On top of that, for those of you following along with Eighty-Sixed, the last two chapters in Part I of the story have required significant rewrites, perhaps more than any other chapters.

The reason for this is that when I wrote the first draft in 2015, my thinking is that the time shift of the novel was approximately thirty years. Now that so many years have passed since writing that draft, I’ve had to do a lot of shifting of character details such as ages and plot points.

For this reason, the original draft of this next chapter isn’t just an edit but a complete and total rewrite and re-envisioning as it partially focuses on two characters (Mark and Rose - the twin children of David and Olivia for those of you reading) who in the original draft were not only NOT twins, but were approximately 5 and 7 years old. Now they’re twins getting ready for college dealing with something from a more mature perspective.

So…I don’t want to rush this chapter.

For the last several weeks, I’ve sat down on multiple occasions and re-read past chapters and outlined, outlined, outlined, all new character arcs. It’s coming together, and I think it will be quite good, but I just don’t want to rush parts of these.

So thanks for your patience on that.

In regard to occasional Wednesday essays, I’ve been working on that, too. In fact, I’ve been working on one, in particular, since late November. Of course, I ended up switching focus and writing a few essays about my in-laws, but I keep coming back to this one, which I think will be a companion piece to Unseen Frequencies from several months back.

I think these two essays may at some point be cobbled together into a longer memoir of sorts. Much of my past is being processed in this writing and it’s currently at 5,000 words and counting.

I think this one will be worth waiting and it, too, I don’t want to rush.

So those are the updates and excuses.

Again, thanks for your patience. There’s more I’d like to share but that’s enough for now.

With that, I’ll leave you with some photos of us trying to figure out which of my paintings to hang above our bed once we finally finished painting the bedroom.

We went with the last one.

Thanks for being here.

More coming soon…