Nov

29

likely appearing in a book thanks to Fuel My Blog

Filed Under me so g33ky, photos, tout le fromage | 4 Comments

Little ol’ regularjen has been a part of Fuel My Blog for awhile and some of you may remember my Blog of the Day achievements (one & two). Turns out, they’re doing a book for charity about bloggers and if I’m not too late for the submission deadline, I’ll likely be in it.

It’s a fun idea– The Human Behind the Avatar. Keep your eyes on the Fuel My Blog blog for when you can purchase a copy. The benefiting charity is Medicines Sans Frontier (Doctors Without Borders). You can also get a sneak peek at the blogger photos here.

Here’s the photo I’m submitting–
for_fmb.jpg

Now to write my copy on why I blog and what my blog is about. :D

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Nov

26

the battle wages on

Filed Under Writing, regular, tout le fromage | 2 Comments

Wow - how gorgeously vague, that title, and applicable to so many things!

Battle scenario A) My war against a low wordcount. Oh, that one is going to go on awhile longer…
Battle scenario B) My war against a draughty flat. Hung some lined curtains today. I am officially one-up on winter.
Battle scenario C) My war against the mutant strain of plague that has been sucking life from me — alternating between subtle and severe tactics — for weeks. Yup, I’m front line on that sonofabitch again.

Ah, illness. My old companion of misery, chum of listlessness, bringer of phlegm. How could I live without you. You gave me a glimmer of wellness and then snatched it away. Ye bastard.

My head hurts and I’ve taken all the pain killers I can without reaching moose tranquillising levels.

Argh. Grrr. Whimper.

The worst part of feeling ill for more than two weeks? I was secretly enrolled in NaNoWriMo. Some of you may have suspected, some of you knew, and many of you wouldn’t have known. I didn’t even tell Neil about it. Unfortunately, this cold has chopped my NaNoWriMo month down from the already difficult 30 days, to less than half that for me. I was going to complete my first novel in one month, but as it stands now I have 10,393 words done and four days of NaNoWriMo left. I work two of those, and with this cold rearing its ugly head again, will collapse into bed at the end of each day just to be able to get up again the next. Up until I woke this morning — with a cough and head pain flaring up again — I was hopeful that I would still pull 40,000 words out of the bag and claim victory. It wouldn’t be the first time I laugh in the face of an impossible deadline! Well, that optimism died this morning.

So what now?
I’m not giving up on the book. In fact, I kind of have a deal with myself: add two weeks more onto my own personal NaNoWriMo. Sure, I fail the ‘official’ target and don’t get to claim any NaNoWriMo glory through their site, but I’m going to finish this first draft of my novel in 30 “well” days. The illness has been beyond my control. I can’t beat myself up for that.

Perhaps a realistic goal would be to complete the novel by Christmas. Success– a gift to myself.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
And now you all are witnesses to the pledge. ;)

Technorati Tags: , ,

Nov

24

10000 words and a spreadsheet later

Filed Under Writing, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

The project. When I’m not working at the part-time job, ‘the project’ is my focus. But today, I find there’s trouble in my fiction-building paradise. I’ve made a big mistake– I may not be writing what I want, but rather writing what I think may work as a publishable book. I’m at the point where I’m bored with my own plot, and hell, if I don’t find it interesting, why would I expect anyone else to give it a read?

Where this leads me– I may be scrapping a great portion of the 10000 words of fiction I’ve written and starting again. I like certain elements of what I’ve done, but for the most part I’m not feeling it as a whole. This is a dreadful thing to realise. It’s the kind of thing you wish you’d seen coming at 500 words, rather than 10000 words. I need to make it clear that I’m not retreating because it’s become hard work, but rather intervening before I declare my pile of words stillborn.

I think there’s a really important lesson in this: write what you’d want to read. If that means it’s about normal, everyday sorts of people and problems — fine. But if it should be about mermaid cowboys shopping for sequinned trousers — better to write that and feel it, instead of churning out something you don’t believe in and would certainly pass over in a bookshop.

Coming to that conclusion is the first thing that’s felt right about this project all day.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Nov

23

Plotting fiction structure using a Numbers spreadsheet

Filed Under Writing, tout le fromage | 4 Comments

[Note: This post was written last night - or rather, this morning - but I was too tired to proof read it then.]

There once was an application called Power Structure.

Power Structure still exists, but hasn’t been updated for three years. That tells me that the developers have no further interest in continuing the product. Fair enough, software comes and goes, but I had a reason for looking at Power Structure: my plot. See, I’m working on a major fiction project and I’ve got a gaggle of characters to keep straight and each has his or her own rises and falls relating to their personal tension levels as reactions to real or perceived conflicts during the story. * exhale *

If that doesn’t make sense, I apologise, for I have been staring at a spreadsheet, a line chart, a smattering of index cards with scene briefs, and my ’story thus far’ synopsis in outline format for the better part of four hours. My analytical side is sharp but my ability to communicate in coherent sentences probably died a couple of hours ago. I am knackered.

So, what I’ve been up to is pretty cool but my needs are far less complicated than what Power Structure would want me to produce.
In brief, here’s what I’ve done:
I’ve got a table listing my characters and the related conflict to track on the left side (ie: Jane - John, Jane - Joe, Jane - World) and a range of scenes listed across the top. In each cell I assign a number representing the tension level of that conflict + scene on a 1 - 10 scale, 10 being most tense. These numbers then get plotted on a separate line chart of coloured zig-zaggy lines, each line representing a particular conflict from that column down the left side. In doing that, I have a visual representation of the personal journey of each character. Seeing this plotted in colour-coded glory is a real eye-opener and I’m finding it indispensable for keeping on top of all the twists, moods, and conflicts of the story.

It’s not a quick thing to create but it shouldn’t be. As I created the spreadsheet and chart I was forced to think things though much more thoroughly than I had before. I found plot holes and illogical character responses. I found that a whole chapter was a creating a column of whitespace in the chart (BIG RED FLAG MOMENT!), indicating that nothing moved forward or had conflict; it was a chapter of exposition that was far better off being chopped up and integrated into other scenes.

After I’m a bit further along, I’ll try to remember to post a screen shot of what this worksheet looks like. I’m using Apple’s Numbers application from the iWork suite, but I’m sure this can be accomplished in any number of other spreadsheet applications.

Damn. This writing career is starting to feel like work. ;)

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Nov

18

Peg

Filed Under photos, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

reIMG_5562.jpg
A lone clothes peg above our bath.

Technorati Tags:

Nov

17

The corporate survey

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

The antibiotics are doing their thing and I’m mostly well.
Hooray! The Plague is lifting! Rejoice!

And so I made it to work yesterday. (Boo…) The gold star reward for going in was the pleasure of filling out an anonymous corporate survey. (Hooray!*) It was a delightfully probing study into the minds of the drones that drive the massive online/high street/UK & EU established company where I devote 20+ hours per week. Kind of a “how’s my driving” big-rig bumper sticker stretched out into dozens of questions on the corporate intranet system.

You don’t KNOW how I love to fill these sorts of things out. No, really. I do.

Especially the bits you can get wordy with, such as the, “What do you value most regarding your involvement with Company XYZ?”
I filled out some honest (and likely expected) stuff like, ‘I enjoy knowing ___ and working with ___” etc. etc. but the last item I listed in my three or four line answer was “and most especially the annual nude employee canoe outings.”

We’ll see if we get a memo back on that one.

*almost like a pantomime, innit.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Nov

16

Might want to have an alternate train picture handy

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

Evidently there’s a strangler in the Maidenhead area, so I thought I’d go online and find out more from our local paper. Scrolling through the news archives I saw a story from last week about the “New train boss promises improvements” and this week there was the story “Death on train tracks.”

People in the UK jump in front of trains all the time — it’s a well known method of suicide in a country where guns are difficult to obtain — but what I found morbidly amusing was that the two articles use the same stock art photo of a train, thereby visually associating the two unrelated stories.

Trainpicclash
(click to enlarge)

Seems to me that “improvements” and “death” should be as hard to connect as possible, but maybe that’s just me. ;)

Technorati Tags: , ,

Nov

14

On word counts and head colds

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | Leave a Comment

I’m hot in the middle (or at the very least, a positive first quarter) of a new writing project. It’s ambitious and demanding and I’m at the point where I want to give up because it’s getting hard. That’s when I know it’s going right.
The serious bummer is that I’ve lost nearly two weeks of writing time to a serious cold– a cold that has kept me from work, sent me to the doctor, and has me taking antibiotics. And my physical suffering is directly affecting my word count. I have diverted all available energy into breathing and stuff. Sheesh. So much for multi-tasking.

I’m getting extra cranky about this since I’m now trying to stay awake for more hours than I sleep. I’ve been reading [just finished Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis] and making some plot notes for my project, but my mind is just not with it. It’s funny, I’m ill enough (and then some) to be off work and in a horizontal position for most of the day and night, but I’m not dying enough to forgive myself for not writing. I feel like I’m wasting time. I’ve let two weeks speed by in a blurry whoosh of naps, more naps, and the odd hour of consciousness being split between reruns of Scrubs or reading the above mentioned novel.

If I don’t type out 500 words between snoozes today I’ll, I’ll…
I’ll have to sulk and take a nap. I don’t even have the energy to punish myself.

I’m such a wuss.

UPDATE: 800 words. And now I must sleep. :)

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Next Page →