Relaxing

I’m not a religious person being a card carrying atheist.

I still enjoy this time of year though: guaranteed time off, seeing family (what I’m doing at present) and some time to reflect on the year…or indeed the decade in this winter’s case*.

I’m also taking advantage of the time to clear down my reading list. I talked recently about taking on too much and, as an example, my reading is a pretty good case where, somehow, going into this week I had four books on the go at once. I can generally keep two in my head at a time, depending on how much I’m writing, three at a push, four is too much – clearly I was not doing any of them justice. Amazing what some free time can do: finished all of them inside of 36 hours. Now I can look at the newer books I’ve not had any time to read including one about theoretical time travel (yes: I am wild).

I haven’t forgotten to post the obligatory Look What We Did pictures of the rooms we decorated in the house but we’ve still got some snagging to do and I’d like to show off the finished rooms. I appreciate this will mainly be of interest to my family but that was the original purpose of the blog. Speaking of which: I am trying to devise a more skillful way of arranging the content on here so that people can easily find what they want and, should they wish, filter out the stuff they’re not interested in. More news on this in the coming weeks.

Oh dear, I really have wandered all over the shop on this post.

Anyway, the main point of this post was to point out I’m still alive, that I’m relaxing and enjoying the holiday.

What are you up to over Christmas?

* On the reflection note: I suspect there will be the obligatory round up posts percolating out here over the next week or so.

Painful

Sometimes lessons can be painful.

I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking when I decided to engage in NaNoWriMo under the ballsy criteria I set myself in late October. I suspect that the growing dissatisfaction with how things had gone this year, and my realisation that my current approach has not proven effective on any level, culminated in the desire to do something huge. I didn’t really think about logistics. Project management is for techies not for creatives.

Yeah, right.

What I should have done is calculate my average word speed ( a maximum of 2k per normal working day rising to 3k at the weekend if I have nothing else on) and the average time to edit a thirty minute piece of audio (around four hours). I should then have divided that by the number of days and factored in the already scheduled Other Things I had to do in November. Roll in all the other tasks such as marketing the podcast etc. and it…well:

It was never going to work.

In many ways this is a really hard blog to write because I don’t like admitting failure and without wanting to sound melodramatic this has taken a great deal of reflection. I’m at about 25,000 words of Eleutheria and I really like the story concept and some of what I’ve written and I’m pretty sure its got legs – if done properly. However, the podcasting is extremely time consuming, I have done little to push it and so very few people have listened. In the last week I’ve found myself increasingly padding the story in order to hit word count and more often not enjoying the process. This is not why I write.

In short I am ending the experiment early.

I am very sorry to anyone who has listened to the podcast and is waiting for subsequent parts. If you contact me via the blog I will be happy to share the complete story with you at some point next year, when I finish it. In terms of the charity, I will make up the rest of the target amount as a means of reminding myself in the future about not thinking things through properly and assuaging my guilt.

What now?

I usually wait until year end to reflect but, in truth, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with where I’ve got to and think most of the blame for that rests squarely with yours truly. I’m going to be a bit quiet for a week or so while I work through some of this stuff and come up with a more systematic plan to get where I want to be. If you really want some Neil written prose, please do check out Ballista and my story Crunch. In the meantime, I hope you will bear with me.

Have fun and see you in a couple of weeks.

Where am I?

Presently, I am in Dorking on day job stuff.

It is unlikely – between a fairly intense few days, peppered with occasional wordcount – that I will have a huge amount of time to post.

Trying to remind myself that not everyone gets my snarky sense of humour. Not entirely succeeding.

What personality pitfalls do you try to avoid?

Updatery

Thought I’d best pop in and say hello.

I’ve been a bit snowed under of late. Since the return from the holiday I’ve been trialing an improved way of working that consolidates some of the experiments from the first half of the year and puts the writing over and above certain things like the blog. It doesn’t mean the blog won’t be updated but that it might be a little less frequent than it has been at points in the past. I hope to get up to three posts a week minimum at some point but this does relay on me having enough weekend time to write the posts up front rather than as I go.

On the writing front I’m pleased to report things are going well. I have been – touch wood – writing regularly again for a month and this is evidenced by the fact I am sixty percent of the way through the final draft of The Scarred God. I also have a couple of short stories now going through the draft progress. I will let you know about the changes I made to get back on track once I’m sure they’ve stuck. I really don’t want to jinx it at this point.

On the submissions front I have been woefully slack. I have one story still under consideration but most of the rest of my inventory is lying forlorn on my hard drive. I need to get on this. They are doing no one any good where they are at the moment. I shall be getting on this very soon.

Other than that life is fairly mundane. After the first part of the year, I’m fine with that.

How are you?

Holiday Reading ‘09

It’s been quiet because I’ve been on holiday and the Internet connection I thought the hotel had was knackered. I don’t think it did me any harm. There won’t be any travelogue style blogs after this trip because it was largely about having a rest and so I rarely went further than the pool or the gym.

For me that means reading. I got through these books:

- Why does E=MC²? By Brian Cox & Jeff Forsham
- The Reader By Bernhard Schlink and translated by Carol Brown Janeway
- Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales by H.P.Lovecraft (Ed. S.T.Joshi)
- Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough

And I’m currently chowing down on Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.

Reviews will percolate out over the next week or so.

What’s your summer reading?

Don’t try this at home…

I still have a lingering head cold/sore throat.

No, it’s not swine flu: I have no fever and nothing aches except my throat. However I am finding it all rather tiresome now and with my holiday fast approaching I don’t really want to go to spend my week off feeling like some one is ice skating down my throat.

And so, for your delectation and amusement, I shall be trying a natural remedy each day until this thing goes and report the results here.

First up, in a few hours, the Cayenne pepper gargle.

I will probably regret this.

Sunny afternoon

Long time no blog.

It all got a little bit frantic around chez Beynon. What have I been up to?

Well, last weekend was spent in Wales with family. I’ve been trying to get back fairly regularly since my niece came along as it’s nice to see how they’re getting along and to get to be the cool mad uncle for a bit. My sister in Sydney can’t manage trips back regularly but does something similar via Skype; it is the height of cuteness to see my niece waving at the computer saying hiya. I digress. We were home for a garden party with my aunt and I am relieved to say the weather gods smiled on us with the traditional Welsh rain (none of your crappy London drizzle) clearing for the afternoon. It was good to see everyone.

Writing wise, things have begun to improve. Realising that I had got myself into a terrible funk, rather than concentrating on any large projects I just picked one of my short story ideas off my ideas list and started writing. I’ve been plugging away at that short story for the last couple of weeks, refusing to beat myself up for not doing enough as long as I did a little, until – this afternoon – I finished an editable draft. It was good to do something new, it was fun to not worry too much about the end result or hitting a word target and was a useful distraction from the day job.

A wise Irishman once told me, when I bemoaned how difficult I found it to write at volume when I was working, that you only have so much room in your head to think about things. The point being you need to allow yourself enough downtime to create or it won’t happen. It’s been a painful lesson but it’s true and, probably, reflects why posting here has been at a much lower volume.

I’m just glad I’m writing again.

Reading wise I am, as expected, working my way through Bleak House. I’m enjoying the structural departure from the other Dickens’ pieces I have read (not as many as I should) but I think perhaps I should have opted for a paperback rather than an e-book. It’s not that the experience is poor but there are little problems like eyestrain and sunlight which make it a less enjoyable experience. I’m also picking through some more of Future Bristol which I have been dipping into for some time starting with writers I know and working my way through to others. It’s all solid work and great to see a city other than London being used as a backdrop.

I have a short holiday planned soon and so blogging is likely to be infrequent for a few weeks before ramping up again come September. That said you can be sure not to miss anything by signing up to the RSS feed, if you wish. And my more frivolous, and frequent, observations can be followed via Twitter.

Hope you’re enjoying this afternoon’s sun as much as I am.

Sunday Naps

I do like a lazy Sunday when I don’t have to be anywhere and today’s afternoon nap has done me some good.

I’ve managed a solid pace over the last seven days racking up some wordage each day. This is a marked improvement on where I’ve been for the last few months but the fact I can’t reach into four figures (save weekends) remains a little bit frustrating given my natural tendency as a writer (and a reader) to binge. However, at the moment the day job simply doesn’t allow enough downtime to think long enough to produce more. Learning my head only has so much capacity has been a tough one.

G’s mum is visiting at the moment. We hung out down by the river in Greenwich, had some ice cream, wandered round the market and the bookshop, saw a film and generally had a nice time. Today, well I needed a rest. Reading wise I am having a bit of fantasy binge at the moment but I plan to move onto some non-fiction titles I’ve been hankering for and, for no explanable reason, Bleak House.

Nothing else to report at the moment.

Bodleian

Not an awful lot to report.

I spent last weekend in Oxford and, after a somewhat unfortunate incident with the hotel room, had lovely time seeing old friends.

It was my first time in the city. It’s a strange place full of contradictions: we passed a mock tudor McDonalds on the way into the city by car and then, walking through the centre, we saw an actual historical building that had a Pret shoehorned into it. The city is a layer cake of architecture ranging from the Anglo-Saxon to the present, from the well preserved to the careworn and heaving with tourists at this time of year.

We were lucky enough to have access to some of the university as we were attending a wedding reception on site. I wasn’t immediately familiar with where we were until G and I wandered round one of the courtyards. It was a strange somewhat dislocated sensation as I realised I was standing in an area I’d seen in any number of television programmes and films – Morse and Harry Potter being two of the more obvious. But for me, of course, it was all about Tolkien because we were by Bodleian library, where the Red Book of Hergest is kept and some of Tolkein’s own manuscripts now live.

As regards my own writing I am still focussing on short stories while I sort out the current backlog of longer ideas. Reading wise I have been on something of fantasy binge and so, once I have finished Looking for Jake and other stories, I think I’ll be tackling something out of my comfort zone. I am also compiling the all important Holiday Reading list on which I shall spend most of my backage allowance. Happy days.

Yes, erm, long time no see…

There are various reasons I haven’t been around and I don’t intend to get into them here.

It seems like I’ve been saying that a lot for which I apologise. I anticipate a more normal service resuming tomorrow with either some flash fiction or a review. Beyond that I think there will be a writing update very soon and perhaps some updates about what I am doing with this here blog.

Tonight I am writing The Plan (an actual plan or the plan to be precise about it, as opposed to a story).

May be back later with some friendly plugs for folks that you should check out.

Bye for now.