Moving, shaking, writing

Wow, I haven’t posted here at all yet this month. It’s been a weird week and a half, and I’m sneaking this in on the sly.

I made a snap decision last week. It was because of a lot of things – which I won’t go into – but I think it’s the right decision. It’s time for me to get my own place.

At the moment, I’m sharing with my folks, mostly so that I can save enough money to buy a house. Now is the perfect time to buy, but I don’t have anywhere near enough money to do that. I look at the bills I’ll be facing, and unless I want to live in a shoebox at the arse-end of a grotty apartment building, it’s just too much. And I don’t want to live in a shoebox, or in an apartment building. I’d rather the place wasn’t grotty either, kthx.

Which leaves renting. By far the cheaper option, and it means I can afford a house of the type and size I want, in a reasonable location. It’ll give me much more time to save up for that eventual house that will belong to me. It’s a plan.

I was so wound up that I went a little bit nuts last week, and I got myself a list of places to look at on the weekend. Only one of them was remotely what I wanted – a bit smaller than I’d hoped, but clean and nice, and a little bit kooky. Turned my application in this week, and now I’m waiting for a response. Hopefully I’ll hear by the end of today (looking unlikely now), or tomorrow at the latest.

So I’m a bit caught up in the notion of moving to a new house, filling it with furniture, getting everything set up, and not going crazy in the process. I’m also running on the edges of exhaustion at the moment, which is not helping.

I meant to do some work on the novel on the weekend, but wound up procrastinating and gaming instead. It just seemed like Too Much at the time. Hopefully I’ll get to at least a little bit of it tonight – I’m determined not to let it slide any more. If this moving business takes over my life for the next few weeks, I’ll never get the damn thing done. And I want to get it done. It’s a good story! I think I could sell it, if I can only get it done already.

I am managing to keep up with the Apocalypse Blog posting – thank goodness for my train commute. I’m trying to get my head down this week to cover this weekend’s posts, so that I can go furniture-hunting. Moving shouldn’t interfere with the blogfic too much, as long as it doesn’t take too long to get the internet connection turned on. (I’ll have to wait for the bed before I can move in properly anyway.) I’m going to have to work extra-strictly in the meantime to build up some buffer, just in case.

In other news, I had an interesting meeting with my boss and team leader this afternoon. I can’t say what it was about yet (I have been sworn to secrecy), but it was good news (for me). Things are going to get interesting in some ways, and easier in others. If ever there was a time I needed some good news, now was it!

Also, my Creative Writing Group has its first Author Talk tomorrow. Marriane de Pierres is coming to chat with us! How cool is that? Maybe I should put together some probing questions for her. Or maybe I’ll just go along and make stuff up like I usually do. I’m looking forward to it – hopefully we’ll get a good turnout!

Wish me luck!

Flashing fiction

Back in February, I entered the Two Sentence Story competition. I didn’t get anywhere in it, but it was an interesting exercise and I’m glad that I entered. A two-sentence story is curious beast – how do you get a whole story across in just that amount of space, without cheating? (By cheating, I mean replacing what should be full stops with commas and having two huge, run-on, nightmare sentences).

The thing I found most challenging was to put plot in there and not just present a situation. For me, that’s the difference between a snapshot and a story. 

When I looked back over my entries for the competition, I thought that my third entry was closer to a situation than a true story:

Planting the Seed

Sitting awkwardly and gripping the tools, there is a moment of reverence before the act and a whispered prayer for fertility.

In an uncomfortable moment, she can’t help but wonder if people will be able to tell that the baby’s father was a turkey baster.

(I admit, I was going more for the humour in that.)

I think this one was closer to having a plot, though the middle is wide and gaping. It could be filled with many different things, but I think part of the punch is that it isn’t specific:

Casualties

Attention is a click of heels, perfect creases, heads lifted, jaws set, and chests filled proudly with the hope of doing something good and right.

Four months later, heels click again, heads lift and jaws set as we wait for the gun salute in much shorter lines.

My favourite is still the first one that I wrote for the competition. I can’t decide if it’s more situation than story; I have a story for it sneaking around in the back of my head, and it’s hard to say how much of that came through. It was one of those pieces that just gelled when I wrote it, and I always love when that happens.

Snow Love

I have the tears of a snowman at the kiss of your sun, welcoming your fire with a scarf slipping askew.

When you go, I will be the space left behind, warmed but empty.

When I took this to my writing group to do an exercise on writing stories this way, one of my writers asked me if the last phrase should be switched around – empty but warmed. I hadn’t even thought about it, but I think I like it the way it is; that downturn at the end feels right to me. There’s the notion that there is no love (s’no love! get it?) in this self-destructive relationship, and the narrator knows it.

I like this form – it’s fun to play with. Maybe I’ll do some more soon, practice with it a bit. Even just writing about it like this is giving me ideas. Maybe later, when my to-do list is a bit shorter.

Apocalypse Blog’s 200th Post!

The 200th post has just gone up on the Apocalypse Blog! How awesome is that?

Wow. It’s boggling when I think about it. If I had only done one a day, I’d be two-thirds to the finish line! As it is, I’m just less than halfway.

It feels like forever since I celebrated the 100th post. The posting has slowed down some since then, I’ve had pneumonia, but it seems to have settled down to a post a day now. The posts are gradually creeping longer and longer, but I’m trying to keep them to a reasonable length. Some days it’s easier than others!

Just because I haven’t done it in ages, here are some fun stats for the Apocalypse Blog:

There, wasn’t that entertaining? Whee!

Here’s to the next 100 posts. Lots more to come, faithful readers!

Apologies, my commentators

I just found some of your lovely comments buried in my spam comment section. I didn’t put them in there, I promise! The blacklist looks like it’s a bit enthusiastic, so I have wiped it clean for now. You shouldn’t have any problems commenting from now on.

Big, huge apologies. Thanks for all your comments – I do love getting them, and I have (finally) replied to the ones I’ve found! I’m going through the spam section and will sort out any more I come across.

Okay, back to your normal service.

Novel slews sideways

My novelling group met last night, and we had a really successful meeting. Lots of chatter about different aspects of writing, and I have a million links to email out to different members who asked me for resources. I will do that when I get home, guys!

They also gave me feedback on the opening of my novel, and we wound up talking about a load of other facets of it as well.

Let me back up a bit and mention that I haven’t worked on the novel since about February. I edited the stuffing out of the opening section and submitted it for a competition, and I haven’t touched it since. (I didn’t get shortlisted for the competition, so I can stop hoping about that and move on now).

Since then, I got very disheartened about the whole thing (since submitting it, not since knowing that I didn’t make the shortlist – really, it was a longshot anyway). It felt old and tired, and the story just didn’t seem to want to make the right shape. It stopped feeling like something I thought other people wanted to read; I write because I want to be published, so that makes a difference. If I just wrote for myself, I would have been happy to crank out the first draft and move on.

I have been pondering some fairly radical changes, and the discussions last night helped me make a couple of decisions. The first is that one of the subplots and main points of view has to go. I love my pair of cops, and they will still be in the book, but I think that giving them their own voice threatened to overwhelm the plot of the novel and slant it off-track. Trying to do them and their story justice took up bigger and bigger chunks of space, and I don’t think that was helping matters.

One of my group made a good point that brought it home to me – was there anything that they had to solve, in order to resolve the plot? The short answer is: no. Their presence has a purpose, but the mystery they’re solving doesn’t really impact the main plot. Which leads to the simple question: why give them so much real estate in the story, then?

I’ll miss Charlie’s voice (and I’ll probably bring him into another story anyway), but he’ll still show his head in the story; the police presence is still required. That, I think, will help to focus the story and will also help to sharpen their role in the main character’s plot thread. On the plus side, I have two characters that are fairly well fleshed-out to write in, which makes things easier for me.

The other big change I decided on was genre. I have always said that the novel is Crime (or Mystery) genre, mostly at a loss to pin it down anywhere else. I usually go for scifi or modern fantasy in my writing (like I have with AB), but the nature of this story didn’t require a different place, planet, time or metaphysical rules. It could pass as real-life, with a bit of ninja thrown in (I don’t intend to put in any ninja magic – at least, not in this story). So, because it is essentially a murder mystery, I filed it away under ‘Crime’.

I don’t think I ever felt quite comfortable with that. It’s probably because I know how hard it is for writers to cross genres, and the chances of me wanting to stay in straight crime were not good. (That’s once I’m published, of course, which… okay, it might be jumping the gun here, but a girl can hope.)

I don’t want to go down the magic route – ninja magic is cheesy and would detract from what is a very serious story. I like to twist cliches and stereotypes around into something new, but I think that I would feel that faint edge of the ridiculous if I tried to get that in there. So that rules out modern fantasy.

Which leaves scifi. The story doesn’t need a different time or place, but it can exist in one. Scifi gives me more freedom with the rules of the game that is being played around and with my main character, and I can use that to bring certain elements to the fore if I need to. The more I think about it, the more I like the notion of jumping the story ahead a few decades – less Law And Order, more Blade Runner.

So I have a bit of work to do. The good news is that it won’t be hard to set the story in the future; it doesn’t change any of the important points. If I can get a day this weekend, I will sit down and see if I can sort out the new structure. Then edit last night’s comments in the opening, and start on reworking chapter 2.

Wish me luck!

Blog Fiction

It’s curious how this blog fiction thing has taken over my life.

Honestly (and I know I’ve said this before), this started as a way to make sure that I wrote something approximately every day, and a vague attempt to get my writing Out There. I’m happy to say that it has achieved both of those ends.

I’m regretting the schedule. Of course, I only recently stumbled onto some handy advice about what to think about before starting a fictional blog, five months into this endeavour. One of those things to think about is, of course, how often you can feasibly manage to post.

A post a day is a lot, but I’m keeping up. Sometimes, that’s all I’m doing, but that’s okay – I am insanely proud that I haven’t missed a day yet, though it’s been close a couple of times. It’s an interesting learning experience. I know I could pull back and post less often, but I feel like I made a promise to my readers when I started this. I’m too stubborn to back down now anyway.

Also, the real-time aspect of the Apocalypse Blog is interesting to juggle. I couldn’t imagine catching up on a week’s worth of elapsed time in a single post – my posts are already hovering around 1,000 words each on a regular basis (I should update my spreadsheet and work out what my average is). I still struggle to keep my posts down to one a day sometimes – I don’t think posting less often is going to happen anytime soon, unless I get sick again.

The other mistake I think I made was not turning comments on. Honestly, I never thought of it as a problem (or a negative point) until I found Blog Fiction and read the post on comments. The thing is, the format and concept behind the blog makes it difficult to put comments on there – the blog isn’t technically posted online, so Faith can’t respond, and I thought it would be a bit weird to have out-of-character stuff on there.

Of course, in doing that, I cut off a route of feedback (readers can always comment here if they want to, but it’s not the same, I know). And I love feedback. Those of you who talk to me about AB know that I love hearing what people think, what they like and don’t like about it. I get ideas from you! It’s awesome!

Another thing that I see mentioned about blog fiction is internal links back to earlier content. I considered doing this at one point, but honestly I didn’t have time (there are a lot of posts to go through to find specific events). I feel bad because I could easily do it (and unlike comments and external links, it would be feasible within the world of AB for Faith to do that inside her own blog). Perhaps I should start doing that.

Well, part of why I started this whole thing was to learn stuff, and I’ve certainly done that. I’m filing all this information away for later, and for when I start my next blogfic. Yes, I do intend to do another one. I have the damn thing crawling around in my head already (and the test site for it has been up since February, damn), but I’m not going to start that until the new year.

• Target for the Apocalypse Blog: continue to the end of the year.
• Next year: shiny new blogfic

Might as well aim high, right?

New look live!

That was surprisingly painless. Copy over the files from the test site, activate the template, and… that’s it!

I can’t see anything that is going BORK BORK on it, and even the Writing Tips entries didn’t need to be reformatted (they have the most structure/format applied of all my posts). Thank goodness for the test site – it seems to have ironed out all the issues!

That’s something good that’s happened today. Let me know if you spot any glitches! I’m gonna go play a game for a bit, kill things in a heroic fashion.

A little consideration

…goes a long way. I’m feeling particularly ill-considered this weekend. And particularly ill.

I’ve been so busy lately. Juggling all the pieces I’ve had has been a precarious balancing act, one that I hoped would get easier once my parents were back from their holiday. In some ways, that’s true. I have been able to relinquish a few responsibilities – small things, but they make a difference.

I’ve been running low on energy this week, since being up until 1:30am getting the parents back from the airport on Tuesday night. CFS means that I can’t screw with my sleep schedule like that without paying for it, and I’ve been struggling to get back onto an even keel since then.

Yesterday morning, the last of our furniture arrived at about 6am. I never even heard the delivery guys. Then an hour or so later, Mum decided to assemble the dining table, right outside my room. At about 8:30am, I finally gave up on being able to sleep and stumbled out in my pajamas. She was like a kid at Christmas, finally able to get her house looking like a house, so I didn’t say anything, even when they made fun of me for being all bed-hair. I even helped them put the damn thing together.

I was useless for most of the day. Played a bit on an MMO, watched TV – I was so tired that that was all I was capable of. I had planned to get some chores done, do a bit of shopping so I can sort out my room and writing space, but those kinds of plans fall by the wayside when I get tired like that. 

The weekends are the only chance I get to catch up on my sleep, get rest, and do the stuff that I’m too tired to do during the week. They’re my chance to have something like a normal life with this damned CFS. Last weekend was the first time in ages that I truly took some time off everything, and even then I was doing chores for half of it.

This morning, Mum and my aunt thought it was a good idea to move furniture while I was asleep. Heavy wooden furniture + fridge + tiled floor + really good acoustics = I CAN HEAR YOU PERFECTLY. Right outside my room. At 8am on a Sunday morning. WTF. Who thought that was a good idea?

What kills me is that I’m usually up by 9am anyway. Is it too much to ask for them to just wait until I’m up? Don’t they know how precious those scraps of sleep are for me? 

Now, I’m over-emotional and shaky all over, and a hair away from oh-so-fun chest pains. My room is a tip, I won’t get out to try to find a new desk this weekend, and there is a list of stuff I wanted to do but just can’t face right now. 

Today, I wanted to get some feedback done for a couple of friends. I’ve been pissed off since I got up, and that’s really not the kind of mood I want to be in when critiquing writing. So, I’m sorry to you (you know who you are), but I’m gonna shelve that for now. I might get to it later if I’m feeling more even-headed and less RARR I RIP IT TO PIECES NOW.

There’s so much I want to do at the moment – my novel, the short story I’m partway through, stuff for my writing groups, stuff for this blog, saving for a house. I feel like I’m wasting so much time.  I feel like things are passing me by.

But I’m running on the ragged edge of energy and collapse. I’m scraping past the bare minimum – work, keeping the writing groups running, and ticking AB over – and that has to be enough sometimes. But not all the time.

Ugh. I don’t know what to do with myself right now. Maybe I’ll go beat up the CSS code some more – I could do with something meaningless to do.

New look coming soon!

I’ve grown tired of the light-on-black look on this blog, so I’ve been looking at alternatives. I am fond of the fiery, but it’s time for a change. Something brighter and more ‘professional’, I think. 

So, after some searching and code-wrangling, I have put together a shiny new thing on a test site. Any suggestions? Have I missed anything? Augh, help.

Week of the Cliffhanger

I’ve been having fun with the Apocalypse Blog this week! I knew that the meeting with the Pride would go on, but it’s really stretching out now. The posts kept reaching 1,500 words before I realised, so I’d go back and pick a good place to chop them off. And what’s a better place to end a post than a cliffhanger?

I don’t often have the chance to use them, and it makes a nice change. I didn’t want to overuse them, too – I’m not writing Alias, after all (though I love their cliffhangers – they made me burn through the DVDs at an alarming rate). But it’s been a while since things were tense in this kind of way, so I’m enjoying the chance to indulge. I have so far restrained the urge to put ‘dun-dun-DUN’ on the end of the posts, and I’ve only had one reader go ‘aaah! what’s next!’ at me (I love comments like that), so it’s all good.

I won’t string it out for much longer, though. I don’t want to overdo it and make the tension stretched thin and annoying. Today’s post should round up that awful encounter and start to bring the story back up to the present – one drawback of trying to keep the ficblog real-time is that I can’t go nuts over single encounters like this without blowing out my post lengths or skimming entire days of events. I’m trying to keep the post lengths down so they don’t get unwieldy and annoying for my readers. And I have to say – it’s not easy trying to keep track of which day you’re writing about and what has happened since the events in the post. Occasionally I squint and can feel my braincells dying under the strain.

It’s so good to get this stuff down, though. I’ve had most of it planned out for a while (meeting Bree again has been a notecard on my wall since December, complete with details of her situation), and it’s exciting to be able to flesh it out and rock it across the page. There’s so much temptation to rush towards my markers – the events that I know I want to cover – but I’m glad I haven’t. There’s so much more in there because of the space in between – I hadn’t planned for Ben to be sick during this encounter (though he was marked to get sick from the start, because I’m evil), but it worked out well. I think. And as for Sally… poor Sally. Today is her post, so I won’t talk about it yet.

Speaking of which, I need to rewrite it on the way home. I got most of it down this morning, but I need to rework it pretty heavily – sometimes my group of eight main characters feels very small, and other times they’re a lot of balls to keep in the air. Occasionally, I miss a catch.

That’s one reason – probably the main one – why I don’t like this hand-to-mouth posting. I miss the days when I had the current week’s posts all scheduled up and could work on next week’s at my leisure. While write-and-post might be Faith’s style, it’s not the way I like to work. I’m planning to spend a day doing nothing but ficblog writing this weekend, so that should be rectified soon. Fingers crossed!

I have managed to do some more admin this week too. The Cast and Chronology pages are updated, and I had a sad moment when I moved Sax from the Current Cast Members list to the Past Cast Members list. Poor zombie Sax. I wonder if he’ll turn up again.

I’m also gearing up to get going with the novel again. I’ve been having a hard time with it, but I’ll talk about that in another post. I’m going to concentrate on being happy that I am still engaged with and enjoying AB, and haven’t become bored or frustrated, even though it’ll be five months old in a few days. Each time I think about that, I am more sure that I’m going to make it all the way through to the end of the year.

I think this is enough chatter from me for now! Be well, my friends. Write happy.