Posts – check!

Just finished scheduling up the next week of Apocalypse Blog posts. It seems like my regular Saturday activity! 

I’m trying to do things a little bit differently this week. Not hugely different! Don’t fret. But as the posts are getting longer, I felt that something needed to be done.

Now, I don’t want to start cutting back on the content. I don’t go off on many tangents (not half as often as I’d like), but there’s a lot happening right now. Tensions within the group, characters causing friction – and explaining that friction takes time (and text). But they have more to worry about than being annoyed with each other, and I don’t want to lose sight of that. The last thing I want is for this to turn into a soap opera. So I have to throw in external issues as well, to give the whole thing some perspective (and excitement – let’s not forget about that).

Rather than cut back on the content, I’m breaking it down into smaller chunks. That means more posts on the same topic, but that’s okay. (Because WordPress handles the actual posting through schedules, it’s no more effort for me. It’s not like I have to remember to go do it every day.) 

I have had it suggested that I should spread the posts out over days, so that there’s only one a day (this kind of post-count is my goal). In some cases, I do do that, though it’s difficult because it stretches out all the travelling time for the group. It’s hard to keep that within reasonable bounds and cover everything I need to at the same time.

However, that tactic is going to have to wait. This week, I have a particular date that I’m working towards, and certain things that I need to get done in preparation for that. (No, I’m not going to tell you what those things are. 😉 ) So I couldn’t spread the content out much at all. 

The result is that I have 12 posts going up over the next 7 days. Oh dear. I’m not doing well at the post-a-day thing. Oh well! I fail to care too much. Better that than lose some fun content.

There’s also another actiony scene in there (which always leads to the spammy). I’ve tried a slightly different approach on this one, compared to the fight scene that gave me a headache a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure if it works, but it’s a different kind of scene. I’d love to know what people think of it! Keep an eye out for it on the 12th Feb.

Right. Just have next Saturday’s posts to sort out, which I might do tomorrow when my brain’s had a bit of a rest from all things apocalyptic. Hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it!

Brain – off switch?

I wish I had one. The thing with being creative regularly is that it makes you more creative. This was the point of starting the Apocalypse Blog! And it’s working! I’m learning, I’m enjoying my daily writing sessions, and I’m actually writing every day.

And now I’m starting to get ideas. For more fictional blogs. Other ways to use the medium, other stories that I can tell this way. Like a ship’s log, told by the ship.

It’s exciting and wonderful, but I so don’t have time for any more right now! I’m barely scraping AB into my schedule at the moment (laptop issues are not helping by cutting my writing time short every commute). I am writing the ideas down, though! They need a lot of work.

If AB doesn’t kill me this year, maybe I’ll do another one afterwards. The temptation is definitely there! Never mind that I’m a day or two behind schedule (in next week’s stuff, not this week’s). It’s still the best fun. 🙂

Technical issues

My laptop appears to be creaking at the seams. The battery is not doing very well and I suspect it needs to be replaced. It likes to switch off the laptop when it gets within sniffing distance of 50% of juice left.

And the keychain just got corrupted, which means that I lost all my passwords for everything. Argh. It has taken me half an hour to fix the damn thing and dig up all my passwords.

My poor little iBook is about 5 years old now, so I can’t really blame it. It’s been a good machine until now. Of course, it picks the month that I’m really strapped for cash and can’t afford to buy a new battery. It picks the time that I’m wound up in writing every day in a place where I can’t plug it in (namely, on a train).

Oh well. The corruption is fixed and I will just have to cope with the battery issues until I can get a new one. Wish me luck!

Novelled out

Today, I have been over and over and over the prologue and first chapter of my novel-in-progress. I had over 500 words to strip out of it, and lots of comments from the novelling group session last Tuesday to take into account.

It’s been weird – I had to restructure the whole opening of the first chapter – but good. I’m learning to pick up on my writing habits, some of which are good, some of which aren’t. I managed to bring it under the wordcount limit for the Debut Dagger submission, though, and I’m happy with how it’s coming out. I think it’s stronger now.

Then I had to go through the synopsis and get that into shape. That was harder, and I wound up rewriting the whole thing (as in, retyping it from start to finish). It’s very stripped down now, but that’s the point, so that’s okay. It’s still missing a subplot or two, but there’s only so much that I can do in 1,000 words. Luckily, they’re not expecting it to be accurate. 😉 If I remind myself that it’s a selling tool and not a true representation of the story, then I can make peace with my obsessive need for accuracy.

It’s tempting to submit it now – I’ve got it all formatted correctly and set up. But no, I think I’ll let it rest for a day or so, read it over for those last-minute OMG typos, and then submit it. 

I don’t know if I have a hope in hell in this competition, but I might as well try. I’ve learned lots in the process already, and hopefully that’ll put me in a good position for completing the second draft. And it feels good to kick off the submission ball, even if I am going to be waiting for it to hit me in the head on the rebound.

Whee!

The Apocalypse Blog broke 100 visits for the first time yesterday! I just checked the stats, and there were 103 visitors. How awesome is that? 😀

I’m gonna go have an over-caffeinated dance now. Thanks to all my readers for giving me happy-making graphs. It pleases me beyond belief to know that people are checking AB out.

Boing. 😀

Posts achieved!

Today I managed to rework the AB posts I wrote over the past week, fill in a gap or two, and schedule them up for the forthcoming week. Phew. It’s a hell of a week – I could probably have spaced the big encounters out a bit more, but I’m trying not to string out the travelling time too much.

I only got as far as the 6th Feb today – my goal was the 7th. Considering that I was only halfway through the 4th when I started this morning, and there are 9 posts over the next 6 days, that’s not too bad. I decided to stop now rather than push on too long and either burn out or write complete crap.

I’ll come back to it fresh after I take a break from it – I have novel-editing to do tomorrow! On the plus side, the big encounters that happen this week should give me plenty of material to chew on over the following posts. Nope, definitely not going to run out of material any time soon.

The scary part is that we haven’t hit any of the plot landmarks on my pinboard yet. I think the first one will be on the 14th Feb, at this rate. My goal of keeping this going for a year? Actually looking pretty good right now.

Falling behind

I’m struggling a bit with the Apocalypse Blog this week. First of all, Monday was a public holiday (happy Australia Day!), and I spent it chilling with a very good friend. It was lovely to kick back and have a relaxed day.

However, it did mean that I was missing two hours of AB-writing time, because I had no commute that day. So I was down a couple of posts by the time that Tuesday started. 

I didn’t sleep well at all last weekend, so I was fighting against the fatigue most of the week. Tired brain means slow writing (and I make no promises about the quality). So I didn’t get as much as I would have liked done in the time I had this week.

On top of that, the posts are getting longer. There are a few issues that Faith is coming up against within the group, and that leads to lengthy encounters. They’re the kind of thing that I don’t want to gloss over (this is where it sucks to be a completist), and the blog’s timeline means that some of these posts have to occur on the same day.  I’m way too pernickety about this kind of thing to just skip days and hope people won’t notice. 😉

So, as of tonight, I have five posts that fit over four days written. Argh.  On the other hand, they are long posts. I have an extra three days to write up, and then all seven days to edit and schedule up.  Somehow, I have to squeeze all of that into one day this weekend.

I’m supposed to be trying to build up more of a buffer, not lose it!  It’s so frustrating. Script Frenzy is in two months’ time, and I want at least most of that month completely free of AB posting so I can get my head down for script-wrangling. But it’s far too early to be worrying about that just yet. For now, I just have to get my head down – first to sleep (very soon) and then to work.

So much to do this weekend. Wish me luck!

Nightowls gathering

This week has been a bit crazy all over the place – I meant to post about this a couple of days ago.

The first meeting of my new writing group was on Tuesday night – the novelling group that a few of us from NaNo decided to get together.  We’re hoping to keep up at least some of NaNo’s momentum, to encourage each other to keep writing, to get to the end of the story, to edit and polish, and to submit.  I don’t know if we’re all aiming to submit these novels, but we all want to work on these works of ours, and we all want to improve on what we’re doing.

As first meetings go, it went all right.  Floundered somewhat to start with – I haven’t run a meeting like this before and it showed.  The fact that we all ordered dinner kinda got in the way, too, but that’s okay.  It was nice to eat and chat, and I didn’t mind that at all.  We were all catching up after the Christmas/New Year break, too.

I threw in the first few chapters of my novel to see what they made of it, and got lots of useful feedback.  I need to cut about 550 words out of the prologue and first chapter for the Debut Dagger competition, and the feedback I got will help me do that, I think.  I’ve looked at that particular part of the novel so much (and rewritten it from scratch about twice, including one change of tense) that it desperately needed fresh eyes.

So I have a lot of work to do this weekend (as the Dagger’s deadline is in about a week).  Which is good!  I’ll get that done and submitted, and then can relax a little bit in that regard.  But not completely – I am determined to keep plugging away at it.  I have lots I want to do with and to it, so I won’t be short of work there.

After the session, I put together a post for the forum about writing synopses – I did some research prior to the meeting and might as well share!  I’m hoping to get more things like that put together and posted up for people.  Should I put that sort of stuff on here too?  Might be good to have all my writing ramblings together in one place.

I’m trying not to add another thing to my list here – I really have enough to do at the moment, and I’m already riding the raggedy edge of my energy.  I need a list of ‘when I have time’ things.  In the meantime, there’s some novel-ripping in my immediate future.  Where’d my red pen go?

Compulsive = yay

January’s posts for AB are all up!  Not live yet, of course, but they are edited and scheduled.  The blogmonster will spit them out at the correct times.

I haven’t really kept any kind of log of the posts (I’ve got all the posts saved, of course).  So I decided to put together a spreadsheet to track it all – number of posts, wordcounts, averages, totals, all that jazz.

It’s all very compulsive.  But here are some fun stats of the Apocalypse Blog, up to the end of January (luckily, stats aren’t spoilers!):

(December isn’t a full month, as the blog started on the 17th.)

I’m getting spammier!  But also getting better at only doing one post per day.  I think it’s going well.  Now I just need to build myself up a buffer of posts so I can take a break every now and then, and I’ll be golden.

Fight hard

This week, I’ve been struggling with a particular AB post.  It’s not a huge spoiler if I let slip that Faith’s group winds up in a fight in the next week – and damn, I had forgotten how hard it is to write fight scenes.  Or to write them well, anyway.

I’ve written lots of fight scenes before – the online RP gave me plenty of practice in that, but that was quite different.  That was a blow-by-blow, much slower, and pretty much worked itself out as we went along.  This is different.  For starters, it’s first-person, and that took me a while to get my head around and to be able to fit myself in behind Faith’s eyes.  She’s a lot of things, but an experienced fighter isn’t one of them.  I know that being in that situation for the first time is surprising and strange, but it’s hard to draw on that and make it sound convincing at the same time.

I rewrote the scene three times – as in, went back to the beginning and started all over again – before I was at all happy with how it came out.  I started off with dialogue between the two groups, and that just went on and on way too much, so I wound up cutting it out.  Once I had decided to lean on the rush and emotion of it rather than the actual ‘and then he did this and she did that’, it came much easier.  

When I was reworking it for the third time, I thought to myself, ‘Y’know, sex(y) scenes are way easier to write than violence.’  Pondering that again, it’s probably because I don’t write biological porn – cut out the mechanical parts and stick to the atmosphere of the scene, and it’s much easier for everyone involved.  Or easier to get the ‘feel’ and authenticity of the scene.  I guess it’s the same with violence.  I just needed to get my head around into the right place before I could even start it.

I haven’t looked at that scene in a couple of days, but today is my time to sit down and edit/schedule up the next week of posts.  So I’m about to go through and see how it looks again.  Hopefully I won’t have to rewrite the damn thing again – if nothing else, I really don’t have the time.  I’m not sure how it’s going to come out, or if it works properly.

The good news is that AB is still teaching me things.  Things are going to be violent at times in this broken world of Faith’s, so with any luck I’ll get better at handling these kinds of scenes.  Maybe I should experiment with different methods, though that’s hard to do without spoiling her voice.  Something worth thinking about, though.  The point of the blog is to stretch my writing and explore things.

Also, I need to look up details on scurvy.  Hmm.  I’m so mean.