World go boom

So, the world is going to end today over on AB (approx. five hours and counting).  Whee!  Despite having written it a few days ago, I’m still kinda excited.  Seeing the posts pop up gives me a kick – I’m sure it’ll wear off eventually, but for now it’s still fun.

This whole ‘End’ part is hard work!  I have 14 posts scheduled to go up over the next 5 days, and I’m not even done yet.  Just a few more to write and polish up, and then I can put my feet up for the weekend.  And Christmas, of course.  With any luck, I’ll get the bulk of it done tonight.

I love this part of a project, when there are lots of ideas and it seems to almost write itself.  Must not let it distract me from everything else, but I don’t want to break this groove either.  Maybe I should start scheduling my time between projects, to make sure I don’t neglect anything.

In the meantime… yay boom. 😀

Crawling grey matter

Yesterday was not as productive as I had hoped it would be.  The exhaustion was really hitting me hard – I got up at one point to make toast, and it was all I  could do to stay upright long enough to do that.  Sitting was a must, and my brain’s ability to be creative petered out after a couple of hours.

I managed to get another day’s worth of entries for AB done, though.  I went back and reworked the end of it this morning on the train (an idea hit me after I got into bed last night, which is the perfect time, of course).  I’m almost a week ahead of myself now; if I can write on the way home, I should get up to New Year’s Eve, I think.

Productive me!

I’m feeling productive this weekend, despite being thoroughly kicked by the CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome).  I’m shaky and drained and dizzy from time to time, but luckily with it enough to be able to do writing stuff.  Sometimes it shuts my brain down so much I am reduced to watching TV, but the application of coffee appears to be staving that off.

I fought with pre-Christmas traffic yesterday to run some errands with Mum – finally got a Christmas tree and a few other seasonal essentials (including a Santa Claws hat for the cats – pictures pending 😀 ).  Finally managed to pick up some corkboards for my room – I have been wanting to get some of those for ages.

So now all of my little filecards for the novel are off the spare room floor and pinned onto corkboards.  It took two of them to get the whole scenelist up and in order.  And I have in no way managed to obsessive-compulsively colour-code all the pins.  Aw, at least it’s pretty.

For some reason, the corkboards are warping when I hang them up.  I’m happy just having them there – I’ll fix them when I can be bothered.  I’m just glad that I’m all organised there, and I’m ready to get stuck into editing this novel thing into some kind of order.

Have to sort out AB first, though.  I’ve just finished editing through the next set of posts.  I’m in the middle of posting up the start of the end of the world – it’s scheduled for this week.  Better get moving with that if I’m going to have time to do any actual writing today.  Have to get ahead of myself if I’m going to have time for novel-editing!

Apparently, I like a challenge.

What’s this all about, then?

So I have a new blog, or two.  One of them is fictional, one is not.  (For the curious, this is the non-fictional one.)  I intend to keep both of them active and shiny and fun, to the best of my abilities.  I don’t tend to keep blogs or journals or diaries, so this is something of a departure for me.

It’s about time I made a real attempt to do something public with my writing.  It’s about time I made a serious attempt to get published.  So this is sort of a first step.  Getting my writing out into the public domain, making an internet footprint for myself.

Writing AB is proving to be interesting, and harder than I thought.  I knew I couldn’t maintain a Bridget Jones / Diary of a Call Girl type of thing, and I do love being incredibly mean to my characters, so I threw a spanner into the lovely Faith’s works and blew up her world.  In so many ways.  I’m so mean, but it’s so much fun.

The aim at the moment is to write the fictional blog for at least six months, see if I can spin it out that long.  I’d really like to say that I’m aiming for a year, and in my heart that is what I’m doing, but I’m trying to be realistic in my goals.  And really, I have a lot of ground to cover.  I have story arcs planned out, I have half a notebook full of notes (when the ideas come, they tend to come thick and fast).  I’m still making a lot of stuff up as I go, but that’s part of the excitement of it as well.

I’m trying to stay ahead of schedule, too.  Ideally, I would have liked to have done at least the first couple of weeks before it went live, but the dates were too good and too close.  So I’m working about a week ahead instead, which is closer than I’d like, but mostly okay.  I’m writing on my hour-long commute to and from work (a habit that I picked up in this year’s NaNoWriMo), so hopefully I’ll build up some leeway there.

I’m currently writing the end of the world.  O. M. G. 😀

As for this blog… well, if I can write one for Faith, I should probably write one for me too.  And I want to chronicle this adventure I’m setting out on.  Not just AB, but the other writing-related stuff I’m doing.  The writing groups, the competitions submissions, the long road of novel editing and, eventually, submissions.

Like yesterday, when I wrote a particular part of the blog that turned out to be very upsetting.  I was sitting on the train with a lump in my throat because of this beautiful old man I had made up.  Reading it back, that part doesn’t kick me as hard as it did when I wrote it.  I have no idea if I caught the emotion in it right.  I hope I did.

I think I’m going to learn a lot through this.  I can’t wait.  Now, I think I’m going to go away and end the world some more.

Submission, go!

I sent off my first competition entry tonight.  Wheeee.  I haven’t done this in a long time, and I had forgotten how scary it is.  

At least this one was easy – just upload it through the website and off it goes.  Now all I need to do is wait until they contact me.  I don’t expect to win, but you never know unless you try, right?

Part of my new writing kick is to start submitting to competitions and magazines.  To get my writing Out There more.  I’ve been writing for a long time, but never really had anything published – at least, not since I left uni.  It’s about time I did.  It’s about time I grabbed hold of this dream of mine and made it happen.

Fingers crossed, wish me luck, here’s hoping that I don’t fall on my face.

I’m gonna need a lot of short stories if I’m going to be doing all this submitting.  I think I need more hours in the day.

Here we go

The Apocalypse Blog goes live today.  omg.

It has been a crazy two weeks, trying to pull together all the background stuff, getting the hosting and domain sorted out, wrangling WordPress and fiddling with code.  It’s been forever since I played with html.  But it looks the way I want it to, I got the first week written up and scheduled in plenty of time, and now all I have to do is wait for it to start.

I feel like there should be some kind of fanfare.  Instead, it’ll just post itself quietly while no-one looking.  Possibly with some nonchalant whistling.

I’m looking forward to getting on with it.  It’s a crazy thing to take on, between a full time job and a novel that I’m determined to edit and polish and get Out There.  Not to mention the writing groups.  When did I get so busy?

At the moment, it’s a good kind of busy.  And I’m excited about all of it.  All I need now is for the exhaustion to leave me alone so I can get on with it.  I can hope. 😉