I’m really finding it hard to believe that this is the last day of the decade. For those of you who are math challenged, it is indeed the end of the decade, when that number in the 10’s place in the year goes up, that means it’s a new decade. A decade is 10 years, tens number goes up, it’s not rocket science. OK, now that I’ve gotten that little pet peeve out of the way. This has been a crazy decade for me.

In 2000 I turned 24. I was working for the IRS and hating every minute of it. I didn’t take a lot of real vacations back then but I closed out the year by spending Christmas with my dad’s side of the family at Disney World. It was the first and only Christmas I really got to spend with my dad. I was dreaming about writing movies and spent a lot of time writing in my script notebooks.

We all know what happened in 2001 and I’m pretty sure we all remember where we were. That was a very sad day. In November of that year something happened in my life that sticks with me even more vividly. My dad died at the age of 49 of natural causes. I don’t think I’ve ever been more shocked at a phone call in my life. I remember every second of that moment to this very day. I won’t be labor it, but 2001 is not a year of good memories.

For me 2002 started out slow as well. I was still at the IRS, I was still writing, although I was focusing more on game design and the stories supporting that. I was spending a lot of free time playing MMO’s and I moved back in with my mom. I moved back in with my mom so I could quit my soul stealing job at the IRS and figure out what I was really going to do with my life. I was 26 and truly unemployed for the first time. When I left the IRS in October I thought I’d have a job within a month. It turned out to be almost 4.

In February of 2003 I finally found a job, it was what I had expected to find in 2002, a basic retail job, one that didn’t take much thought or effort. So of course I managed to turn an easy no stress job as a cashier into an extremely high stress job as an assistant sales manager in just over six months. By the end of the year I was spending 60 or so hours a week at work. Two big things happened in my personal life, I met Jeff who would become my best friend and writing partner and I met my future ex-wife. Jeff steered me towards writing first comic books and then back to writing novels.

2004 turned out to be another big year for me. I was spending a lot of time writing, my ex was living with me at my mom’s house and I was working my butt off. In May I got a call from my uncle asking me to move to Wichita and work for Diamond J, not long after that I found out Bethany was pregnant and I was going to be a father. In July we moved to Wichita and my life started to get really complicated. We got married in September.

January 10th 2005 my daughter Victoria was born. I can’t even begin to describe my feelings. My marriage was rocky at best but I chalked that up to both of us learning to be parents and a lack of money. 2006 was more of the same until July when I bought my house and got on meds for my type 2 bipolar disorder. By December when I found out my ex was pregnant with what would be our second daughter I was already feeling like my marriage was falling apart.

2007 was a very rough year for me, financial struggles, personal struggles. August 11th saw the birth of my second daughter Persephone. Things actually brightened up for a while. Still I already knew I would be divorced before the end of the next year.

2008 was a huge year for me, it started with a divorce. Which was rough on myself and the girls. In late May I met Joy online and we had our first date on June 11th. The next week I spent in San Francisco at a training seminar. I was 31 (almost 32) and it was the first time I’d been to another city by myself. In August Joy and I said I love you for the first time and I was feeling pretty sure she could be the one. Being the sentimental sap I am I started planning how I would propose to her. I also started back to school in August. In September we went to our first of many concerts together, Counting Crows. The end of the year saw the first time I’d been out for New Years in a very long time.

2009 has been a whirlwind of change and a whirlwind of firsts. Joy and I celebrated our first valentines day together, we celebrated the first anniversary of our first date, we went on our first real vacation together. The girls and I moved in with Joy in June and in October I proposed properly for the first time in my life. Of course I missed the date from my fantasy proposal but I did manage to make just about everything else work out like I had envisioned it for over a year. Right down to the shocked look on Joy’s face. My house was robbed, Joy met my family for the first time. All in all it was a whirlwind and awesome year.

2010 will bring a lot of challenges and a lot of fun and a wedding and hundreds of other things I can’t even begin to predict. I do know it will be quite a ride and I have high hopes and big plans. I’m excited to experience everything it has to offer, I just hope it brings as many positive changes to my life as the last two years have.

Why it’s a blog post of course. Yes it’s been a long time since I blogged. Honestly I’m not sure why it’s been so long, caught up in life I guess. Lots has happened since I last posted.

This first thing I really should have blogged about sooner I actually feel bad that I didn’t. As of October 10th I’m engaged to the most awesome woman in the world. I asked her to marry me at the Borders we met at, I managed to completely surprise her, she had no idea it was coming so quickly. She of course said yes. We won’t be getting married for about a year, nothing wrong with a long engagement though. She was completely unprepared to have her picture taken but here is a picture of the proposal. She may kill me for posting it.

Another thing I probably should have blogged about sooner was the fact that on September 8th I went over to my house to find the back door kicked. My refrigirator, washer, dryer, 1/12th scale Jabba the Hutt, saxophones and a lot of other things were missing. Luckily it was covered under insurance and only took about a month for me to get just about everything sorted out with the insurance company. Still, not a happy thing.

Beyond that just the usual crap. Working, reading, trying to write sometimes, taking care of my girls and trying not to go completely bat-shit crazy. This week Jeff and I will be recording a new Max Geek and this Sunday NaNoWriMo starts which both Jeff and I will be participating in. This Saturday however is Halloween. We’ve got an incredibly busy day planned, a trip to Neewollah in Independence KS. The girls loved it last year and I can only imagine they’ll like it even better this year now that they’re older.

Lots more coming up. I have a couple posts planned so look back here for info on what my NaNo project is and a few more updates.

For those of you who don’t know I have a fetish, it’s a vinyl fetish. No not that kind of vinyl fetish you freaks (although Trinity is definitely hot in vinyl in The Matrix). The kind of vinyl I mean is records. You know, like CD’s but much larger and not digital. I’ve loved records since I was a little kid. I used to listen to Michael Jackson and Kenny Rogers on my Michael Jackson record player when I was a kid. Well for my birthday my incredibly awesome girlfriend got me an incredibly awesome gift, a turntable. She didn’t just get me any turntable though. She searched around to find one that wasn’t just some plane Jane turntable, she went out and found me a retro turntable. Here’s a pic.

Now it’s not just retro, that isn’t all that big of a trick, it’s retro AND it has a USB out to rip the records. So it appeals to the vinyl geek and the computer geek inside me. She did an awesome job. The best part though, it’s got a handle and a lid which makes the basic design very much like my first Michael Jackson record player. Definitely one of the best birthday presents I’ve gotten, especially in my adult life. Here’s one last shot of it all closed up. Oh, the record on it is Guns n’ Roses Appetite for Destruction, a little trip back to 1987 for me, which is quite excellent.

Yes I posted a bit about this yesterday, but I wanted to expand on that.

I really like the idea of getting readers involved in the story. Not just the story itself, but the process. That’s what I’ve tried to do (when I’ve made the time) with various blogs over the years. I got to thinking I should be getting people more involved with the characters too. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I started putting up character bios for Atlantis (I’ll be reposting those here soon).  I started thinking though, what can I do to really pull the readers into the story and give them a unique glimpse of the character. Then I thought, what if the characters twittered?

Yesterday I started my story telling Twitter experiment. I’m using an established pulp character who people might recognize for my test, Doc Savage. Now he’s still a bit obscure, but I figured if I could reach out to a few fans of Doc Savage and get their impressions on what I’m doing with the concept I could see if it was worth pursuing for Atlantis. The concept is to have the character do regular Twitters as if they’re an everyday person. Sometimes they’ll be twittering from their adventure (which is what I’m having Doc Savage do from the start). Other times it will be some down time and we’ll see what they do behind the scenes. This concept particularly appeals to me for ongoing mediums, like the pulp stories I’m attempting to tell with Atlantis and comic books.

With Doc Savage I’m playing it off the cuff as it were. I’m skimming back through the Fortress of Solitude story and trying to pick interesting moments to tweet. The goal is to give the readers some insight into the story but give enough information to make people who haven’t read it curious about reading it.

Anyway, I think this could be a big thing, but it can be a bit time consuming. I doubt I could keep up very many characters and still have any sort of life. It might help if I scripted Twitters as I’m writing, keep them inline with the story. I would also really like to actually have the characters blog, it wouldn’t be a regular thing, probably just once a week. I think it could do a lot to keep readers coming back for ongoing stories and to flesh out the characters even more. I think it will build an attachment to the characters and make big moments, good and bad, have a bigger impact for those people.

To me this feels like a natural extension of story telling, We see more and more mediums giving us glimpses into characters and the creative process through special features and dircetors cuts (even comics have gotten into the game with directors cuts of comics including things like scripts and character sketches. I’m wondering what other writers and readers think of this as a story telling technique and if it’s going to have any bearing on wether or not you would read the story.

We all know I’m a fan of Doc Savage (well if you didn’t you do now). I’m not really sure how a comicbook fan can’t at least have a little interest in Doc Savage, but I digress. The bottom line is I’ve been a fan of him as long as I’ve been a fan of the Flash. I’m also a fan of writing and finding new ways to include social networks and such in my writing. To leverage the nature of things like Twitter and Facebook. So I had an idea.

I went and created a new Twitter account @themanofbronze. I put the name in as Doc Savage, made the profile sound like Doc and started Twittering as Doc Savage. I’m attempting to Twitter as though I’m Doc during the Fortress of Solitude story. The idea is to get people interested in who Doc Savage is and make him feel like a real person. For people who have read the story it should become quickly familiar, for those who haven’t it will give a summary of the story, the key is to not give too much away. I’m not doing this particular project as promotion, just as a fun way of testing out my concept, but eventually I think this would be a neat tie in to Atlantis as I relaunch it.

So follow @themanofbronze and if you’re already following him, then follow me @tibbarerew. Definitely drop one of us a line and let us know what you think. Don’t forget to tell your friends!!!

So I’ve been hinting at something coming, some continuation of an old project. Actually it’s more than that. This is a rebranding and restructuring of my Atlantis story.

Instead of the impossible to spell greek spelling of rising, I’m changing the title to Atlantis Rises. I’m also moving away from the serialized 5,000 to 6,000 word issues to a longer 20,000 word story that has an actual end and minimizes the cliff hanger aspect. This include a rewrite of several parts of the first 4 issues which are being combined into the first book. I’m also a little over halfway through the second book which would have been issues 5 through 8.

So if the edits go well I’ll put the revised version of Atlantis Rises up here for free later this week. I’ll also probably be publishing them on the Kindle and E-reader/Fictionwise at $0.99 a book. You know, in case someone wants to pay for them. Which I totally wouldn’t complain about. Heck you can even pay me directly

I also plan on publishing some companion material to Atlantis Rises as blog posts. Character bios and things like that. So look for those too.

There’s something I’m planning on putting up here soon, right now it’s going through a look over by my esteemed (well maybe not that esteemed) writing partner Jeff. Once I put the final edits on it will be put up here as a free download. Long time fans will be very happy to see what it is and to know there’s more coming. So keep an eye here over the next couple of days, as soon as it’s edited it’ll be up.

I had a really good father’s day. I picked up my girls around noon and they were very happy to see dad. Joy the girls and I went to lunch at Village Inn (I slept in and didn’t eat breakfast so breakfast for lunch sounded yummy). At breakfast they gave me an awesome Superman card that played a message they recorded AND the Superman Theme. Then they surprised me with a most awesome t-shirt. I saw this t-shirt at JC Penny’s months ago and I really wanted it. You see, when I was 11 the first album I ever really fell in love with was Abbey Road. I know I may not be in the majority when I say it is my favorite Beatles album but it is, hands down. Of course I’m not in the minority when I say I love the album cover. So this shirt seemed made for me, the problem was it only went up to XL not XXL.

After some searching my incredibly awesome girlfriend found it for me and not even online, here locally. So that was an excellent surprise. For dinner we went over to Joy’s parents and did BBQ. Pork, chicken, hotlinks and hotdogs. Very yummy and I had to do 0 cooking (which is unusual for me). So while the girls played in their inflatable elephant pool and Joy and her mom made dinner, Joys dad and I watched Gran Torino. Excellent movie, a must see. Overall a most awesome father’s day.

There’s actually a really long post I thought about making here, but I’ll keep it short (sort of). Father’s day means a lot of different things to me. My mom’s dad was very much like a father to me when I was very young, at a time when my own dad was not in a place to be a dad. I have a step dad who, though he’s done a lot of shitty things, helped me through one of the toughest times in my life when no one else could. Then of course there’s my actual father, who passed away 8 years ago, he wasn’t always the best dad but I always knew he loved me. For the last 4 years it’s had a new meaning since I’ve become a father. I think father’s day means something different to everyone out there, for me it’s a very mixed bag. It’s a day for remembering the past and thinking about the future. It’s a day of sadness as I remember and miss my own father and of happiness as I remember the father figures that are still in my life. Of course first and foremost it’s a day to spend with my daughters and remember how much they mean to me and be happy that I have two amazing little girls. To all the dad’s and father figures out there, Happy Father’s Day.

I’m inspired to do some writing. I’m polishing and finishing something that I think several of you out there will be interested in (and I know a few people have been waiting for for way too long). Also look for something interesting next week. I’m about to put my money where my mouth is and not just keep telling you guys I’m writer.