More secret project goodness

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Musings, Secret Project of Secretness

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,


My dropbox has just flashed up with a notification telling me that a new file has been uploaded into it. This is not an unusual occurence. I have several people who share dropbox folders with me and who routinely upload different files to them at all times of the day and night. However, this file was a special one. It was an image file of artwork for the secret project I am working on and it looks wonderfully cool.

Unfortunately, I can’t share this artwork with you because I haven’t got explicit permission from the artist to do so. Once I properly announce the secret project and get that permission (maybe by the end of this month) then maybe I will be able to show you some of the art. After all, what is the point of having a secret project if you go and tell everyone about it 🙂

In the meantime, I am posting to find out if any of you have ever had the same sense of squee on seeing art work based on your writing. Did you find it to be as great a feeling as I have at the moment? Feel free to tell us all about it in the comments…

A glass half empty year?

01 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Musings

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,


I’ve been looking through several reviews of the year from a number of people, mostly friends, and the overwhelming opinion seems to be that 2011 was a bad year for many. A lot of people seemed very happy to see it go, with a number of references to ‘staking it through the heart’ as though it were an evil vampire year that will never die.

I suppose many have good reason to dislike the past year. It seemed to be the year that the recession hit particularly hard in many industries – the public sector cuts hit hard and the retail sector is creating unemployment at a fantastic rate not to mention all the riots and protests that happened. So, there are arguments for it having been a bad year. However, I have seen people declare it a bad year when some really good things seem to have happened to them. Which leads me to wonder, has 2011 simply been the ‘glass half empty’ year? Have people been declaring it a bad year despite evidence to the contrary?

From my point of view, I prefer not to try to rate years in any generalised or specific manner. I don’t like to say it was good or bad, it just was. 2011 was no different. If I were to assess it any way, I would see it as a score draw. The number of good things that happened have been balanced by bad things.

In the past year I have:

 – Made a mark on the publishing world. OK, the mark in question is like a very small scratch on a large thing made out of very smooth stone, but the mark is there nontheless. As a result of my two publications (one out, the other pending still) I have also gained more opportunities which have served to increase my exposure. I’ve done guest blogs, interviews and have started doing reviews on another site as well as a rather juicy work for hire job which should prove interesting once it makes it out into the world. In all, I consider this past year to have been a success in terms of publishing. A small success but one which is building. In comparison with other years, this is a massive improvement.

 – Of course, I also started this blog which has been a strange experience. Previous blogs of mine have been more personal and intended for friends only whereas this one is intended for strangers. Sometimes the challenge in that is remembering that strangers are less interested in your day to day boring life than friends may be. Speaking which (and apologies for the next comments…)

 – I moved house. This was a massive undertaking which took almost half a year to achieve (and most of the stress and work fell onto my wife…). We relocated from Birmingham to the outskirts of Manchester and have gained much in social life as a result. Therefore this also counts as a success, despite…

 – Job situaiton. Moving house did not help my job situation. On the plus side, lots of time for writing. On the negative side, no money. While the start of 2011 had promise with a long term role in a college in Solihull and a chance to clear a lot of debt, the second half of the year has been less promising. Hoping for better job prospects in 2012.

So, as I say, overall a draw and a lot of promise for the future.

So, what is to come in the next year? Well, Transitions is due out as an ebook sometime in the first half of the year (each ebook in the Shades of Love series will come out once a month, starting from this month, until June when the collected anthology will be released in print). There is also the secret project I am working on at the moment which is due to be released soon after January 31st, assuming I can get everything done before the deadline. There is also a Mystery Antholgy I am contributing too which may come out sometime in 2012 (it is still being written). After these are out of the way, I really need to look into getting more writing out there in the big, wide old world. Several of my stories are currently doing the rounds of publishers and maybe one of them will be picked up soon…

In closing, I would therefore like to say Happy New Year to each and every one of you and hope for a 2012 which, if not better than 2011, at leasts seems to be in hindsight at the end of the year. Let us pledge on this day to make 2012 a glass half full year. In fact, sod it, let’s all complain to the management that the glass we want is a bigger glass and we damned well want it full or so help us we’ll protest or riot or throw a strop or something!

Special Offer on Pirates and Swashbucklers!

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Musings, Publicity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,


A January sale special from Pulp Empires sees reductions in some of their books, including Pirates and Swashbucklers.

Of course, I know that everyone who reads this blog went out and bought copies of this for all their friends and family for Christmas. However, in case you didn’t (or you really need another copy, say to hold up a wobbly table or for toilet paper or kindling) then you can get one from Createspace at a 25% discount. Simply use product code:62QUSQGC to get your discount…

More news here: https://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Pulp-Empire/115516358460093

Direct link here: https://www.createspace.com/3681893

Unfortunately, this code only applies to createspace so it is really only convenient to those of you who live in the US. If you order from out of the US, I think the postage costs eat up any discount. However, it may still be worthwhile.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

25 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in Musings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,


Because I know for a fact that I could never persuade Eddie to wear a Santa hat without him ripping it to shreds as an affront to his dignity and masculinity, here is a sort of similar dog (well, same species and genus at least and vaguely similar colouring but a shorter nose) who is better at posing for the camera in a reasonably dignified manner.

I post this photo by way of saying:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

and a

HAPPY NEW YEAR

To each and every one of you out there…

I hope that you are all having a wonderful and relaxing day.

The Hobbit

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Film

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Today it seems as if the internet has been infected with a fairly bad case of ‘Tolkienitis’ as the trailer for the Peter Jackson version of the Hobbit has hit it quite hard and is spreading all over the place. We even have a release date of the 14th of December 2012! Which is annoyingly almost a whole year away…

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here is the trailer:

I have to say that there is a special place in my heart for Tolkien. The Hobbit was the first ‘proper’ fantasy book I bought and read. In fact, I bought it with a gift voucher I got from school for ‘being good at History’ which was annoying because I wanted it for ‘being good at Biology’ but someone else got that. Luckily, I did get the Chemistry prize in a later year so my scientific credentials were confirmed (though I cannot for the life of me remember which book I bought with that…). The only reason I remember getting the Hobbit with the History voucher (because you know, my memory is terrible…) is because I still have the actual book on the shelf behind me, still with the bookplate from the voucher stuck into it.

I also, bizarrely enough, also have a copy of it in German. Despite not being able to read German all that well or ever having been to Germany. You can find some weird things when browsing charity shops in University towns and I have a love of seeing books I have read in English in foreign languages (I also have a copy of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Death: The High Cost of Living’ in French from when I visited Paris a while back).

Anyway, because of my love of the original source and the fact that Peter Jackson has proven himself worthy by doing such a great job with Lord of the Rings, I am quite looking forward to this release. Not only because it will relive a classic story but because, from the buzz I have heard in and around the internet, they are planning to add extra material to the story – padding it out to two films. Some may say this is a bad thing – tampering with a classic, daring to assume something about Tolkien’s great vision! However, I am of the other opinion. While I enjoyed the Hobbit as a child, I remember thinking about the bit where Gandalf buggers off midway through the book.* It seemed to me to be a bit of a cop out, especially when he reappears and talks about ‘fighting the Necromancer’ with his other wizard chums. I was thinking ‘What? WE missed that! I want to see Gandalf and a bunch of other wizards fighting a Necromancer!’. While Bilbo wandering around in Mirkwood and finding the Ring and tricking dragons was interesting, I still felt cheated that we never got to see Gandalf’s encounter with the being we now know was Sauron. Jackson is promising to give us that scene and a lot of extra stuff to boot.

There are other misgivings out there in fanland. News that Orlando Bloom was back to play Legolas had some up in arms. Legolas does not appear in the Hobbit! Was the cry that went up. To be honest, the cry could probably be translated as ‘we don’t like Orlando Bloom!’ because there are actually good reasons for why Legolas could be in The Hobbit. He is, after all, the son of Thranduil, the King of Mirkwood, and there is nothing to say that he is not present among the numerous, nameless elves. Ok, he didn’t *do* anything in the book but I personally have nothing against him being there and I like the idea of riffing around the concept rather than word for word repeating a story from a novel. I’d have more of a problem with John Rhys Davies playing Gloin (which could have happened, his character Gimli in LOTR was the son of Gloin and there’s a chance of a family resemblance) because that is just a tad too cheesy for my liking. Overall, I am actually quite hyped about the cast list because it has some very nice actors in there – including Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug and the Necromancer, Being Human’s Aidan Turner as Kili and Doctor Who’s Sylvester McCoy as Radaghast the Brown.

So, suffice it to say I am quite enthused by this trailer and feeling confident that this will be as good a film, if not better, than any of the Lord of the Rings films…

*The roleplayer in me, even then, put this down to the fact that Gandalf was a high level PC and Bilbo and the Dwarves were only low level and the challenges ahead were clearly for a lower level party so Gandalf had to go otherwise he would munchkin the hell out of all the spiders and wood elves and thereby remove all conflict and tension….

Guest blog blues…

20 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Guest posts, Musings

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


A while back I was asked to do a guest blog for the amwriting community. I put together an article comparing being a published writer for the first time to being a teacher for the first time. I enjoyed writing it, I assume some people enjoyed reading it (the comments were all good anyway) and it was clearly so successful that they asked me to come back and do another one… I agreed and was given a date when it was due to be posted.

Then I realised I did not have a blind thing I wanted to talk about.

Oh, I have ideas. A reasonable number of ideas. Every now and again I think of something and part of my brain pops up with a little note saying ‘You could do a blog post about that’. Recently, I have had thoughts about British Urban fantasy and what it means, the Christmas Number one phenomenon and how it seems to have turned into a battle between the X factor winner and whatever alternative and inappropriate tune we can think of (currently seems to be Nine Inch Nail’s Hurt), things I have noticed about Dr Who plots, things I have noticed about education and the teaching of history*, and many other subjects. Trouble is, the more I think about some of these ideas, the less interesting and novel they seem. I get less and less motivation to actually sit down and write about them.

So, yes, this is the ultimate irony – a blog post about how I cannot seem to write blog posts 🙂

Part of it is some form of quality control system in my brain which seems to be at work. Any idea is faced with a barrage of questions along the lines of ‘is this worthwhile?’ ‘Has anyone else ever written about this before?’ ‘Will anyone care enough to read?’ Now, for my own blog here these questions are often soon silenced. It’s my blog, I write what the hell I want, and if there are issues I am sure readers will let me know… However, when it is a guest blog for someone else, I often get greater angst about it. It is not my domain I am befouling with my stench, it is the domain of someone else. This adds a whole new level of concern about the relevance of what you are saying. The result is often me chickening out and posting another photo of a cute dog.

So, while I am still pondering the dilemma of what to write for #amwriting I would ask you, the readers of this, to answer me some questions:

– What subjects do you think I should talk about on this blog? Which posts have you liked the most?

– What current issues do you think face writers and/or readers which may be blog worthy for the #amwriting blog?

– If I were to post my PGCE essay on why History is an essential subject, would anyone bother to read it?

Answers on a comment form below, please 🙂

 

*That was one I had today, there was an article on Radio 4 about it and I once wrote an essay about how important History is as a subject. I may still blog about this one at some point… I may also still do a post on Nine Inch Nails and the Christmas number one at some point soon…

Christmas Update

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Musings

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


Apparently the Lake District currently looks like this (photo taken Christmas Day 2010)

In a previous post about ‘going home for the holidays’ I posted about how we like to go to the Lake District for Christmas and one of the reasons was because it is more likely to snow. Well, on BBC Breakfast this morning there was an article discussing safe walking on the hills in the winter. It had a lot of sensible advice like ‘don’t do it’ and, ‘if you do do it don’t for god’s sake use your car sat nav, buy a bloody map!’ As well as adding my own support for this advice (having, as I already mentioned in the above post, suffered from bad weather on a walk in the past) I would like to point out that the video footage of the lakes on this piece definitely showed snow covered hills. Therefore all I can say is: SNOW!!!!!!!!! 🙂

In other news, yesterday was my last day of ‘proper’ work until after Christmas. This means that I am now officially on Christmas holidays (unless I get called up for any emergency supply in the next two days…). Therefore, it is now time for this picture to be displayed:

I imagine that this is a sentiment shared by many at the moment. In between periods of hibernating, I do intend to wake up occasionally and do some writing. Assuming I find time. After all, Friday is International Gluhwein Day! Which may make things difficult from a being organised and productive point of view…

Secret Project and productivity update

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Musings, Productivity, Secret Project of Secretness

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,


This picture is here for no good reason. Nothing to do with the post at all, honest...

I just got an awesome bit of feedback about a piece I wrote for the secret project I am working on. Apparently they liked it 🙂 I suppose it is one of the advantages of a set up like Dropbox and shared folders. Everytime I update a file in the Dropbox folder, the person I am writing this for gets an instant notification that there is something there for him to read.

Of course, the disadvantage of this is that everytime I update a file, he gets a notification that there is something for him to read…

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the secret project is going wonderfully and at some point over the next month or so I may even be in a position to tell you all what exactly it is. Assuming I manage to make the deadlines, which is where the next bit of this post comes in. Productivity…

This photo is also here for no reason. Enjoy.

My productivity plan is going great with one exception. I have been useless at remembering to post the word counts to Twitter every day. I have been managing to write 200 words a day minimum, every day except weekends and ‘official holidays’ (defined as days where my wife has a day off or days that everyone else in the country considers a holiday such as Bank Holidays). On most days I have more than exceeded that target (today’s, for example, is well over a thousand and today is a Sunday so I was officially ‘off duty’). I am therefore still declaring this method as a success because it has got me writing every day, avoided the ‘no productivity doldrums’ and generally increased my output. Now, the flaw to this is that only doing 200 a day is not likely to see a novel completed in any short time scale but as I said, I only see this as a minimum target, not a maximum. On average I am between 200 and 1000 words a day with the 200s only really coming out on days I am working fulltime. This contrasts with previous efforts to improve productivity by setting a high target of 1000 – 2000 words a day when I soon gave up because there were days where this was not possible.

Therefore, in conclusion, I heartily recommend this method if you find the more traditional ones not to your taste.