Editing

Those of you swinging by now, expecting the podcast, I’m afraid I have to admit that I am still editing it.

I don’t mean textual editing – I finished that on time – but actually editing the audio file. This is taking a smidge longer than anticipated. I’ll post it, somewhere, as soon as I can.

Apologies. *shuffles away embarrassed*

 

Mad

Alright folks, as I said the other day I will be participating in NaNoWriMo this year.

It was a hard decision because my other projects haven’t run to time this year and so the story I was going to use, being an SF tale, is not ready to go. Mainly this is owing to the amount of research required to do the thing justice from a science and setting perspective.

I digress.

I didn’t really want to just try to do the month for its own sake because when I tried this in 2007 I woefully failed. I need extra heat to keep going. I’m also a bit of a tinkerer who is keen to try different methods of writing novels and it seemed to me that these two things weren’t incompatible.

Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Produce using (or attempting to use) a story design method, an urban fantasy of at least 50,000 words.
2. I must hit 50,000 words by November 30th and the whole story must be finished by 20th December.
3. It must be research light (based on current knowledge or my own world building).
4. I will have a tip jar of some description that will, during the month of November, go to a charity of my choosing. (NB – More to follow on this in subsequent posts).
5. Starting on Sunday 8th I will begin podcasting the story as I go.

Yes, you heard me right: I am going to podcast the draft as I go. Not the sound of me typing as I inadvertently made it sound like when explaining the concept to a friend, but me actually reading the story. Why?

I haven’t excluded the chance that I have actually lost it but that’s not the actual reason. There is a certain, screwy, kind of logic going on here:

1. I want to experiment with producing a more reader ready first draft by doing planning up front rather than producing a draft 0 as I have done in the past.
2. I am doing NaNoWriMo for fun rather than trying to advance my writing career and so I want a way to prevent myself endlessly tinkering. Broadcasting it provides a way of closing the door on the story.
3. Although I’m doing it for fun I do want people to experience the story and I’m not confident that I can proof and typeset this kind of volume at the frequency required to get it out in text (print or online) as I go. By reading it out loud I will pick up the errors as I go – in fact this is how I line edit; all I’m doing is recording it and editing out the mistakes.
4. I want to see what the results are of adopting a serialised approach to writing as novelists often did in the Victorian period and as comic writers frequently do today. How will the results differ when I can’t go back and add in things I think of half way through the draft? Is it freeing or constraining?
5. I enjoy reading out loud and don’t get a chance to do it very often.

Mainly I’m doing it for fun.

So that’s the plan. Beyond this I haven’t done a huge amount yet: I know it’s an urban fantasy, I know where the story is set, I have a faint idea of a plot, I have some twists planned and I have a small but growing menagerie of creatures.

From here on in I’ll be blogging as I go, albeit short posts, about where I’m at and I dare say my twitter feed will be an eye opener: http://www.twitter.com/neilbeynon

I hope you’ll listen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A great journey or a cul-de-sac…?

*waves at new visitors* Howdy, nice to see you here. Sorry you’ve wandered up a cul-de-sac because this site isn’t really about what you were looking for. Still, please do have a look round.

Just a quick note: the posts currently bringing some of you in here were lighthearted jokes at my expense not the very watchable Alice. Indeed, G generally finds it quite funny that I go a bit wibbly when a certain flame-haired doctor comes on the screen, then I tease her about Neil Oliver and so the circle is complete. I am perfectly aware that Alice is a very clever person with oodles of qualifications and a bloody good presenter.

WordPress SEO: a blessing and a curse.

Anyway, for the rest of you confused as to what the hell I’m talking about you should check out the really rather good Incredible Human Journey on BBC 2 tonight at 9.30, it charts human migration from Africa through genetics, geology, climate modelling and archaeology. It’s enthralling stuff even if it does suffer from that noughties’ TV trick of recapping a little too often.

Also, want lots of web traffic: do some telly. Sad but true, judging from the amount of traffic coming off Dr Alice Roberts’ name.

Oops. See what I did.

Now we are two

Today this here blog is two years old.

It’s strange because on the one hand it seems like I really haven’t been doing it that long and on the other when I look back at the things I’ve done it seems like absolutely ages.

Seems like an appropriate time to reflect on stats: previous best day is June 30th last year (thing have dropped off since I stopped Columbo Villain of the week); there are 79 pieces of free fiction available on the blog, of which Tinman is currently the highest trafficked; 1085 comments have been made off 507 posts and views currently sit at 244,940.

However, the more interesting thing for me is that I have done more on the writing front and the life front in the last two years than I did in the previous five. I’ve been published three times and have another story slated for later this year, I visited two continents and eight cities I’d never been to before, I attended a writing course and had a most unfortunate encounter with a pigeon.  Blogging really does change the way you think about your life, it adds a gentle nudge to do stuff and avoid putting things off. Whether it does this through committing, in public, to things (and so opening yourself up to humiliation) or simply by giving you a greater awareness of the passing of time I leave up to more talented and longer running bloggers to argue.

I’m still enjoying blogging and so I’m still doing it, everything else is gravy. I hope you enjoy reading it.

The kitchen has landed

Things have been quiet round here because we have been busy putting a new kitchen into our house. If DIY isn’t your thing you probably want to skip this post.

A quick recap, we had been making do with this:

The previous weekend we ripped it out and so Friday we started with this:

By Friday night (circa 22.30) our plumber had sorted out the pipework on the right and we had laid the majority of the new floor:

By Saturday evening things had moved on a pace and the first coat of paint and wallpaper had gone on; the washing machine, dishwasher, fridge and upper left hand units had all gone in. Meanwhile all the lefthand side units had been built. The cooker hood took a bit of fiddling to get right but that to went up:

By Sunday we were flagging and the four of us went for a well earned lunch. Yet we still managed to get to this point:

The cooker arrived Monday morning and with that work commenced on the left hand worktop, plumping in the sink, more door hanging, handle fixing, securing of left hand base units and some minor replastering on the left hand wall. In short we worked our arses off, conscious of only having one more day. For some reason we didn’t really get a picture of this part.

Tuesday, our plumber renewed the kitchen waste, the boiler got a shiny box in which to hide and the kitchen came to life as it became functional once more. There are still some finishing touches left to do: a final lick of paint, a splashback behind the cooker, some tiling, an upstand or two, the kickbacks and some trim. But we have a fully working kitchen for the first time in two and a half years. And right now it looks like this:

I realise you may not want to see it but I fully intend to post a picture when the final paint job and finishing touches are in because we all worked like the clappers to make this happen (bear in mind none of us had ever done a kitchen completely solo). That includes our friends M and L who kindly lent a hand (and valuable expertise): we genuinely couldn’t have done this without their help, thanks to you both.

And now I need some rest.