Yup, I actually went out into the world and DID STUFF today! Woo!
Just got back from a "Make and Take", where people get together, make stuff, and take the results back home. Only one guy brought parts, though, but he had almost enough bits for three of these things, and I had the rest, so I set him up right proper! Oh, I was the instructor.
And the topic, right, it was Hot Glue Gun Webbers. Neat stuff! He had five or six glue guns, the guy clearly was a maniac, but a nice fellow nonetheless. We discovered some new things, too, about hot-glue webbing in the process.
One is that zip ties make for a pretty shoddy machine; the air-feed tube slips around too much. Metal hose clamps are better, but we didn't have any of those on hand. I used duct tape and more zip ties to hold stuff kind of temporarily sort of stable.
Then we tried the various guns out in the the haunted houes (Mansion of Terror, I believe) that lent us the space for the gathering.
The 100 watt gun was not bad; the same as I have, but he got his for a fraction of normal cost off of eBay. Part of some carpet-glueing system.
He had a 225 watt gun that looked wimpy but heated up right quick and held temperature pretty good too is seemed.
The one that I liked was a 125 watt gun with a 410 degree temperature -- normal glue guns are about 385 I think. This made the glue more liquid, and even foamed it some if you let it heat enough, so the web was whiter and puffier, more cobwebby (but less stretchy, weaker). And it was continuous duty -- this kid webbed his dark little heart out there, and would have gone all night except he burned himself and decided he had enough.
Anyway, it was fun. I'm not working on a formal haunt this year, so it was nice to be in a construction zone, even if it wasn't my own.
My writing time, lately, has been absorbed with the business aspects of writing -- researching the magazines that might publish me, reading the writer's guide for short stories, web searches; printing out submission guidelines; and finally developing a spreadsheet of all that I had learned. I have forty-some magazines, now, in my list, four of which I could actually find in the bookstores. Heh.
Anyway, I'm just about to the point where I can submit stories... I need to decide which magazine or set thereof to send Eternity too, and now I can also finish editing the other seven stories. And start writing new ones! Yayy!
My goal is to get enough "brownie points" to get a proper membership in the Horror Writer's of America organization, and then an agent, and then do some novels and/or short story collections.
Fame and fortune here I come! Or at least, frustration and poverty, but heck, it should be interesting either way.