Troughs

Things sound quiet on the writing front because I am working on what I am now affectionately calling the-absolute-final-unless-someone-buys-it draft  of The Scarred God. I’m at the all too familiar middle point sag where motivation dips and self-doubt swings a low blow. I’ve been here before with this manuscript, I recognise the signs and have deployed counter measures.

Still.

I want to start something new. I’m about done with Anya’s story, this one at least and I have another, entirely different, story I want to write – one more ambitious than anything I’ve ever tried and I have a ton of reading to do before I can start it. I have a protagonist in my mind, a premise and a loose idea of the world(s). Much to my surprise it’s SF not fantasy.

Anyway, my plan was to be ready to go on Nov 1st and therefore be able to run in NaNoWriMo. I’m not sure I’m going to make that deadline now because I was supposed to finish TSG last weekend and then go into creative rest for two weeks while I read the research material. I’m behind on TSG but still making progress and I really want to finish properly. At this stage I have too much time invested to rush it and fumble the ending, again – the last act being the area that require most work as regards pacing and somewhat left field developments. I still think I’ll finish up before November but whether I’ll have enough time to recharge is anyone’s guess.

In other writing related updatery I finished a new piece of flash that read well with my test reader and so I think I may try and flog that for a change. It’s also SF.

And now: back to TSG.

Back

I have been away. I am now returned.

Thanks for all the comments on the last post and apologies for the delay in approving comments. I find myself increasingly unwilling to pay the ever inflated internet charges in international hotels and that goes in spades for 02 roaming charges for data (£3 per mb!).

Anyhow, nice to be back. Normal service resumes soon. etc.

Comfort food

As is customary on the first day of a holiday, for me anyway, I have been ill.

I spent most of Saturday on the sofa feeling sorry for myself and ploughing through a research book for the next project and then Gene Wilder’s autobiography. There are worse ways to spend your time.

G was out doing a shoot in the evening and so I took the opportunity to indulge myself with some comfort food. I hadn’t felt like much during the day and so when I started to feel better I went a bit mad. One of my favourite meals when I was a kid was burgers and mash. I totally indulged with some expensive burgers and some decent spuds. I followed this sophisticated meal with a tub of ice cream.

Funny, the way food can make you feel better or evoke memories. I still like tomato soup for the same reason.

What are your comfort foods?

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?

Weekend

I just got back after a weekend back in Wales.

My brother’s birthday was this weekend. It seems to be quite rare these days that family birthdays fall on days where I can actually be there and so I wanted to make the most of it. We had a lovely family lunch and seeing everyone – even my sister who is in Sydney courtesy of Skype – was really good. I can’t get over how much my niece has changed in eight weeks.

As we were only an hour(ish) away, we also popped over to Bristol for the appropriately entitled Bristolcon. It was a small but enjoyable event on the Saturday afternoon and evening with some interesting panels. It was good to catch up with friend, and fellow Friday Flash Fictioneer, Gareth L Powell and his wife, Becky; to chat again with Colin Harvey and Terry Martin; and to meet some new people. I particularly enjoyed Al Reynolds’ talk on hard SF and the need to make it weirder.

Now back to the graft, I have me own novel to finish.

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?

Cayenne

Last night I tried the Cayenne Pepper home remedy for sore throats.

The idea is pretty simple: boil some water, add a teaspoon of Cayenne pepper, gargle and repeat. Lots of people online claim this has worked, although I noted just before starting that all negative reports were dismissed as not having stuck with it for long enough – not a particularly scientific rebuttal.

The resulting broth is not the most inviting.

I gargled this for as long as I could stomach it and can report that mild tingling of the tongue is probably understating the effect of the Cayenne – if you don’t like spice don’t try this. Also: closing of eyes while gargling is pretty much essential as only a small amount in the eye produces a lot of discomfort. I speak from experience. It goes without saying the taste is vile.

After effects: aside from the eye not a great deal. As I stumbled through the kitchen, clutching my former optic nerves, it did occur to me that perhaps the cure involved a worse injury to distract from the soreness of the throat. The gargling helped remove the gunk from my throat but, to be honest, hot water on its own will do this – if gargled – and so I couldn’t say I noticed a difference. My chilli seemed to have more of an effect.

Anyway, I repeated the experiment this morning, just to be sure, and it just made me feel ill.

Tonight I will be trying Soy Sauce and Lime.

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.

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.

Overboiling

Hot isn’t it?

I spent most of the weekend seeking shade and working on a long-hand draft of a new short story.

I really enjoyed working on something new, even though I know that what I produced fell short of where I was at with short stories this time last year. In many ways that was the point of the exercise. You see in trying to avoid one trap (not finishing things) I fell foul of another trap: overdrafting.

When I last updated you on the writing I was redrafting (despite promising myself I wouldn’t) The Scarred God in an attempt to turn it into something of marketable length. I made good progress at first until, as it does sometimes, Life got in the way. When I returned to the work I found the new material poor and awkward, it felt wrong, it felt like the story was being overboiled and bending out of shape.

It was depressing as hell.

Meanwhile, in the real world Life was happening, things weren’t panning out as I’d hoped and I was feeling pretty fed up. I decided to write some flash to finish something, anything, new in the hope it would kick me out of my funk and let me get on with stuff. I couldn’t make it work. Hell, I couldn’t even think of a thing to write.

I was blocked.

I’m not impervious to writer’s block. I distrust it. I don’t really believe in it as a thing in itself but as a symptom of other issues.

When I thought about it I realised I hadn’t written anything substantial and new since autumn of last year. I’d produced a couple of first drafts before starting the aborted redraft of Forever and then shelved them as I laboured at that ill-fated draft for five months and then mucked about with The Scarred God for a couple of months. I needed a change.

Hence I have put The Scarred God to one side. I have decided to produce some new short stories to clean off the rust and then I plan a final line edit of The Scarred God (not worrying about length but just polishing the prose). I will decide what to do with it when I’m done but I imagine, to keep me tinkering, I will release it as a podcast or some such thing. Not, you understand, to self-publish but to move on. We’ll see.

I have also set myself a minimum amount of new fiction, novels and short stories, to produce (and submit) a year.

Lesson learned.