Writr

Okay again – 1k is a nice building block, and I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouse – but still not all that satisfactory. I’ve been self sabotaging a lot lately and relying on my late night sessions far more than I’d like I’d really like to have a nice full hour in the mornings in which to get some stuff done, but I’ve been overlseeping instead and getting up with precious little time in which to get ready for work.

Unfortunately, as I work in the service industry, I’m still having to give up Saturdays – so no session this morning due to oversleeping, and now I have to do some more tonight. Hopefully tomorrow morning will yield better results.

Tomorrow’s post will probably be a dual-update one. Hopefully, anyway.

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So I got a thousand words done on the morning of the 17th of December. An okay session – I’ve had some trouble with oversleeping lately however, and a side of me wonders if it might be a little self sabotage.

And another thousand down today. This is a little different, as I didn’t do a morning session – I didn’t have time due to overlseeping. Instead I wrote about three hundred words at 4pm and another seven hundred in the evening after 10pm – these seem to be my auxiliary prose writing times, which is interesting.

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Hooray! There was some brief downtime today when I tried to update this blog via Fantastico to WP 2.6.5. This was caused by the fact that I monkeyed around with it a while ago and moved all my blogs here there and everywhere (Daily Flash Fiction used to be on the root at this server, but then I moved this one here and all the databases are back to front). We appear to be functioning normally now, however. So yay.

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15th December 2008:

So yeah, I forgot to take pictures before closing the window the first time, and so lost my session progress. It was at a thousand words when I finished, though: look I have proof and everything!

That’s from a fresh chapter.

Unfortunately I forgot to make the blog post when I got home. But here’s a fresh one, up to date from this morning:

Except this time Scrivener actually crashed on me halfway through – I think it may be something to do with using the ‘Append selection to document’ command and then trying to expand binder items while the command’s still running. Oh well, thanks to Scivener’s handy-dandy autosave I only lost the appended text, not the original stuff I had written.

Anyway, I’d written about three hundred words and thirty before the crash, and I’ve edited the session target to account for this. It’s still not a great result though – about 600 words probably all told, which is well below my normal requirement. My daily wordcounts have been going down quite markedly of late, as has my self discipline – I think it has something to do with starting a project, especially since it’s a second draft, so I’m rewriting a lot of stuff I’ve already written (though with enough changes to warrant a rewrite instead of a straight copy-paste). Oh well.

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Actually, not really, since I started on this back on Friday. But this is the first decent full session I’ve had on the novel, so hooray!

Magocracy is a fantasy thriller. It will involve several explosions and lots of people running away from other, more shadowy looking people. I’ve already written a first draft, but I’m blogging the second draft progress. You should see updates on this blog every day. If you do not, kindly kick me in the balls in the comments.

Progress is below, via the absolutely wonderful Scrivener Targets window.

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I read Robert McKee’s book Story very recently, and have been playing around with the stuff he talks about. It’s a very mechanistic view of writing and the nature of story, and it’s primarily aimed at script writers, causing the prose novelist in me to scoff and say that’s fine for a screenplay because it’s a mechanistic art, versus the more artsy fartsy internal nature of prose.

Which of course is utter bollocks. But still, his view of the importance of outlining and setting up value charges in each scene robs the art of romance for me, so historically I’ve resisted it and gone for the method Stephen King outlines in On Writing – look at it as though you were a paleontologist unearthing a dinosaur, you dig in and find the spirit of the story. These two forces in my head battle constantly, my left brain wanting the clarity of an outline and my right brain wanting the spirit and romance of the more adventurous seat-of-the-pants approach.

So I’ve settled on more of a hybrid approach with the latest story. It’s to be a sequel to Kidnap over Dyra!, but this time I’ve written it straight as I did with Kidnap, before breaking the first draft down into scenes on 3×5 cards, throwing some scenes out and dropping others in, and eventually winding up with a full outline running to about a thousand words – the story itself will probably run at around four and a half thousand, and the thing will end up on Lulu just like Kidnap.

On Lulu, but not only there. I’m going to do a full rebrand of Daily Flash Fiction, primarily because it’s an awful name that sets up all kinds of false expectations in readers (specifically that it’ll be daily). I still don’t know what to call it, and the old domain will still go there, but instead it’ll be a base for serial fiction as well, sort of like Mike Stackpole’s serial fiction experiments. And the old Flash fiction will stay up there as well, possibly with an explanation.

On not-writingy-stuff news, I’m learning PHP in the hopes of being able to get a better day job, and I’ll probably play around with category-specific templates to separate the stuff in more of a clean manner.

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  Prince Philip Movement – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  The Yaohnanen believe that Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the consort to Queen Elizabeth II, is a divine being, the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit and brother of John Frum. According to ancient tales the son travelled over the seas to a distant land, married a powerful lady and would in time return.

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  (tags: religion cargocult cult vanuatu)

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  Behavioral Addiction Basics (Health: Addiction Behavior)

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  (tags: videojug addiction behaviour behavior behavioural+addiction treatment)

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  Fregoli delusion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  The Fregoli delusion or Fregoli syndrome is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.

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  (tags: brain delusion wikipedia superman superheroes secret+identities)

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  Capgras delusion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  The Capgras delusion (or Capgras syndrome) is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a spouse or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.

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  (tags: brain delusion wikipedia insanity bodysnatchers copy clones impostors)

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• How To Survive Jail – AskMen.com
  I've always been fascinated by survival stories, but mostly man vs nature stuff – a guy lost in the woods. This is more like how to survive if you're a guy lost in a hostile cultural environment, and is equally valuable.
  (tags: survival culture askmen prison)

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• Embracing icebergs sing eerie duets – earth – 09 July 2008 – New Scientist Environment
  Notice how in the video the announcer says Douglas MacAyeal produced some ‘eerie songs’ and then we hear what sounds an awful lot like an iceberg farting.
  (tags: science noise sound icebergs cool audio video youtube newscientist)

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