On Writing… A Lot

I said to myself when I planned the Insane Summer Holiday Project, I had visions of working as a writer. Doing eight hour days, being strict on myself about lunch breaks, not procrastinating on 9gag or i09 (what is it about websites with 9s in their addresses – full of distracting goodies) or just generally frittering the time away. I envisioned writing 10,000 words a day. That’s a novella in three days.

It kinda hasn’t worked out that way so far… The Boyfriend has decided now would be a great time to strip all the paint off the stairs – which to be fair, it really is, as we’re going to have that area of the house decorated shortly, so better to make the mess now – and I’m trying to do a lot of it, as he’s been working hard digging up the back garden. Then there’s visiting my family, trying to make the most of the good weather (although the weather gods do seem to have taken care of that distraction for me) and generally trying to have a holiday between all the other stuff.

However, I have been writing. A lot. Since last tuesday I have written over 20,000 words, and most of that in the last three days. On a good day, I’m clocking up about 6000 words. Not quite 10,000, but a pretty good effort. And they’re not all dreadful words, either, which pleases me. Though no doubt when I come to the editing stage of this project, I will realise I’m currently viewing them with very rosy glasses.

I’ve just finished book 2 in the series. It’s a bit short of the 30,000 word target at 26,400. I need to go back and add a couple of scenes, flesh out a few more. There’s a revelation at the end that I had planned for book three, but decided to move forward, and that comes out of the blue a bit because I only decided to do it when I was on chapter eight of ten. So that will need weaving into the earlier chapters so it’s more of an ‘Of course’ than a ‘WTF?’

All this will help add those words, but in the interest of keeping up momentum, I’m not going to be doing it now. I’m leaving it for a day, I will then read through for obvious mistakes and continuity errors (and try to synonymise (not a word, I know, shut up) a few of the ‘I wonders’) before printing it off and packing it up in one of the three colourful boxes I bought today and passing it on to a sibling or friend to read.

I will then be pressing on with book three. I’m already full of ideas for scenes. The whole thing may be planned out, but so far both books have strayed from plan to include some exciting new elements that I’ve loved. I’m looking forwards to making some new discoveries about my characters and the world they live in, and developing the relationship between them further.

I’m like a furnace of creative energy at the moment. I only hope I can keep it up and steaming paint off the stairs doesn’t sweat it all out of me!

Music and Writing

I’ve talked before about how I like to listen to music when I’m writing. I swing between two styles of music. Sometimes I like only instrumental music playing in the background, not distracting, not influencing, not really anything. Just noise to keep me company in the often lonely business of sitting down to write for a few hours. Something I have my specially built playlists, songs that bear some relevance to plot and characters. The theoretical soundtrack to the movie of the story in my head.

Lately I’ve been listening to television show playlists on spotify while writing – House, three seasons of The Vampire Diaries – specifically to listen for new artists to build up a library on spotify to listen through to. The songs bear no connection to what I’m writing most of the time, as they are related to House and Vampire Diaries, not my little novella. There is some crossover, and I’ve already started building up a ‘Writing Playlist’ on spotify to help me get through the Insane Summer Holiday Project.

But the other day I was listening through some albums on my Spotify Library, specifically to a very nice album by Christel Alsos, who is a female singer songwriter type. Very pretty, very chilled. Not very fight scene, which I happened to be writing.

I was really struggling to write it too, adding about a sentence every ten minutes. It just wasn’t flowing. Normally I love writing fight scenes, and it goes really quickly. But I was just not feeling it that morning. I was about to give up and go play a fight game on the playstation, with a view to awakening the relevant parts of my brain, when I had the idea to change the music to something a bit more shouty.

Unfortunately, my music taste is quite sedate. I like female singer songwriter types. I like Adele, I like Coldplay, I like Lady Antebellum. It’s not really fight music.

Trawling through my library, I found a couple of Linkin Park albums. I’d added them to my library because I love… Leave Out All the Rest. Probably the most tame Linkin Park song there is. But I had two albums worth, so I stuck them on. The minute the drum and rap and scream of Papercut started playing, it was like the proverbial floodgates opened. Words rushed onto the page. I went from about 300 words to 1000 in a couple of songs.

Funny how the brain works sometimes. Next time I’ve got a big climactic battle to write, I’ll definitely be turning back to Linkin Park. And I might have to invest in a bit more angry music for my collection!

 

365 Project, Week 24

This week has involved a lot of time spent with my siblings, as Mum and the Step-Dad are away with the two littlies.

We spent one evening taking advantage of the sunshine by having an outdoor movie party with Mr T’s family. It involved a lot of sweets and Charlie and I fighting over a blanket. We watched The Muppets (which was rubbish) and This Means Way (which was also rubbish, but in an acceptable, explosion filled, entertaining sort of way).

Unfortunately, I came home from Movie Night to the world’s most giant, evil moth. Complete with red-eye. The Boyfriend being the total wuss that he is, made me get rid of it before he would even get in the house, so I had to throw it out of a window myself. Gross.

Later in the week we had a barbecue and Mr T bought a 3D puzzle Millennium Falcon, which we totally failed to make before our dinner was ready. It was really, really hard – all the pieces looked the same and there were hundreds of them. We did manage to put everything together by the end of the week, but even constructing the damn thing was difficult, and I never got a ‘finished product’ picture.

And when they did get home, the little brother treated us all by making dinner. You may think that’s cute, but I actually caught him chewing on a plastic carrot later.

Not many pictures this week, as the rest of the time I’ve been sat where I am now – writing. I won’t bore you with more pictures of my desk. But hopefully soon I will be ready with some updates on the Insane Summer Holiday Project. It’s going well so far!

Insane Summer Holiday Project Master List

The Insane Summer Holiday Project

1. Write book one
2. Write book two
3. Write book three
4. Write book four
5. Write book five
6. Write book six
7. Write book seven
8. Write book eight
9. Write book nine
10. Proof read and edit all books
11. Write script for promotional video one
12. Write script for promotional video two
13. Compose, transcribe and record theme music for videos
14. Turn spare room into green screen (this is entirely dependent on the Boyfriend’s permission. He changes his mind about the idea every week)
15. Shoot promotional videos
16. Coordinate with photographer friend (of Taylor’s) to take front cover photos
17. Design outfits and props for the front cover photos
18. Photoshop front cover photos to final designs
19. Write and create written promotional materials (extras etc.)
20. Research self-publication
21. Put all ingredients together to create self-published books and promotional materials
22. Blog all about it!

Book Covers

I LOVE this book cover for Lilith Saintcrow’s Iron Wyrm Affair.

Part of my Insane Summer Holiday Project is to design and make the front covers for my novellas. This is the sort of thing I’m going to be going for – the two central characters posing on the front against a backdrop of city streets, suitably blurred and backgroundy. A few embellishments for detail and general prettiness to finish off.

Of course, I probably won’t be able to achieve something even close to as professional at this, and I need some photos to work with before I can even start thinking about putting them together. But we shall see. I’ll be posting my progress here, so keep an eye on the site! Hopefully I won’t be making total train wrecks when this particular part of the project finally comes around.

The Insane Summer Holiday Project

With several weeks holiday stretching out in front of me like a glorious stretch of open road, I’m casting my mind back to this time last year and trying to remember what I got up to.

Apparently, not a lot. I can’t really remember anything. I played a few gigs. I slept a lot.

I’ve already mentioned how I don’t want this to be the case again this year, and a few weeks ago I came up with a plan. A mad, crazy, entirely too ambitious plan. But it’s like the saying goes – shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll land among the stars. In theory.

Over the holidays, when the Boyfriend is at work, whatever his shift might be, I am going to be living as a full time writer – writing for eight hours a day. No internet distractions, no procrastinating. Just solid writing, with rest breaks for lunch and refreshment. I am going to go running every morning to figure out what I’m going to write, then I’m going to get on with it.

I’m writing a series of novellas that I hope to make into e-books, to be available to download on Amazon. I’ve planned a series of nine. Nine 30,000 word novellas. In word count terms, that’s a regular trilogy’s worth. I have been trying to get the first finished, and, at time of writing this, I have 8000 words left. I’m hoping over the weekend I will be able to finish it. I know what’s happening, it’s the final, climactic moments. It should be achievable.

Whether the rest of the project is achievable, I don’t know. But I’m going to give it my best shot.

Here is the list of things I need to do. I will keep tabs on my progress here. Cheer me on?

The Insane Summer Holiday Project

1. Write book one
2. Write book two
3. Write book three (sensing pattern here?)
4. Write book four
5. Write book five
6. Write book six
7. Write book seven
8. Write book eight
9. Write book nine
10. Proof read and edit all books
11. Write script for promotional video one
12. Write script for promotional video two
13. Compose, transcribe and record theme music for videos
14. Turn spare room into green screen (this is entirely dependent on the Boyfriend’s permission. He changes his mind about the idea every week)
15. Shoot promotional videos
16. Coordinate with photographer friend (of Taylor’s) to take front cover photos
17. Design outfits and props for the front cover photos
18. Photoshop front cover photos to final designs
19. Write and create written promotional materials (extras etc.)
20. Research self-publication
21. Put all ingredients together to create self-published books and promotional materials
22. Blog all about it!

As you can see, this is a somewhat mammoth undertaking, and needs to happen at the same time as all the other stuff I’ve got going on, like house things, visiting friends and family, and just generally living and sleeping. I have no illusions that it will all miraculously get done, but I figure if I work hard, I might manage to achieve about two thirds of the list. Some are time sensitive, like the photos and others impact on each other, like designing the props, so it may be that I get a lot of the background stuff done, and need to hold off on the writing. But whatever way I do it, I’m going to give it my best shot.

And maybe by September, I’ll be almost ready to start thinking about putting some of my writing out into the world.

A big maybe.

365 Project, Week 23

So we’ve had some fun this week.

A pipe in our living room has been leaking slowly for a while now. So slowly that in all the general sogginess around at the moment, we hadn’t even noticed. But the leak got quite a lot worse, to the point of floods in our living room. Fortunately the Step-Dad was able to fix it, and the tissues in the above picture are meant to detect any recurring leaks.

We used a lot of towels to keep things from flooding though. This is just a small collection… fortunately we have a lot lying about from the decorating we’ve been doing, so we didn’t have to use our bath towels!

Fortunately, it does seem to have stopped mostly now. I suspect the remaining damp is more the water being drawn out of the wall by the dehumidifier. It’s certainly not wet enough for it to be from a regular drip.

On a more cheerful note, Ivy graduated this week. Taylor made these delicious graduation cakes.

I bought a new pair of sandals. They gave me a nasty blister on my toe when I tried to walk them in today, but they are great because…

Tada! Blue skies. Over England. After two weeks of solid rain, this is very welcome. And I’m very pink. It’s lovely.

How Astrid is Going to Help Me be Superwoman This Summer

With the long summer holidays stretching out before me, I’m feeling at once blissful and apprehensive. The delight of long holidays is that you have time to really get into things that you otherwise don’t have time to do. The downside is that time has a way of slipping right through your fingers if you don’t grip hard enough.

Last year, in a haze of tiredness, relief and laziness, I frittered away my holidays without achieving half of what I wanted to. This year, I am determined not to do that. I have big plans to be a productivity machine, starting with more regular blog posts, as you may have noticed!

I have a crazy summer plan which I will talk about here more later, which is going to take dedication, commitment and superhuman organisation to get even close to achieving. But it’s also about general lifestyle changes that I have been trying with limited success to make for years.

Like most people, I need a bit of help to stay motivated. I’ve been doing a lot of things with other people to try and keep up my commitment levels – exercising with my mum and sister so when I don’t do it, I”m letting down them as well as myself. I’ve joined a writing club and formed an unofficial one with my sisters and Carole to keep the momentum up. Writing this blog and posting reading lists has helped keep me focused in the past. Committing to do things publicly or with someone else is my number one motivator.

So the Astrid Social Productivity App, available free on all smartphones I believe, is perfect to help me keep track of what I need to achieve.

It’s a basic to-do list app, but unlike other’s I’ve had, you can share lists with friends and help to keep track of each other, making use of that ‘don’t let anyone down’ guilt that motivates me so well. It sends you reminders if you set a task for a specific time, and you can set weekly, monthly or daily tasks.

Already I feel like I’ve made better use of my time since having it, and sitting down at the beginning of the day for five minutes to decide what I want to do is helping me to focus. I’ve set up a cleaning rota to help me keep on top of the housework, I’ve put in a reading list for the holiday, I’ve put down my writing goals. I’ve set it to remind me at half nine every night to put cream on my eczema, which I have never remembered to do with any consistency before.

So this summer, I intend to make best use of the Astrid app, and its friendly motivational octopus to help me achieve my goals, or at least make good headway on them. I want to go back to work in September feeling like the holidays have been full of memories, events and achievements, not like they were over in a flash because I slept through them.

Representation of Women

As part of my current drive to streamline my life, I’ve been trying to finish the backlog of games I’ve generated in the years I’ve owned my PS3. I buy them, I play them for a while, I usually never complete them. When I realised I didn’t have the space on the machine to load up any new games, I decided it was time to revisit a few of the older ones and finish them once and for all. Games like Assassin’s Creed 2, Tomb Raider Underworld, and Unchartered: Drake’s Fortune, which embarrassingly, I got with the Playstation, and have never bothered to finish it.

I was doing well until I completed all the aforementioned games. After that I ran headlong into my collection of Sandboxes – Oblivion, Fallout 3, Rage – and the momentum went out of me. It’s difficult to get motivated to finish a game when you have no bloody clue whether the end is in sight or not.

But all this gaming got me thinking about something that’s very present in the media at the moment – the representation of women. Within the genres that I enjoy reading, and in comic books, I’ve seen a lot on the internet about the appearance of women on front covers, and throughout the comic books. Exaggerated poses that are physically impossible to accentuate the ‘sexy’ have got a lot of people riled up. It’s not something that’s ever really bothered me, to be honest, but Lara’s ample bust and tiny waist did prompt me to start thinking about why.

The thing about the Tomb Raider franchise is it’s fantasy, like most things I like to read/watch/play. And Lara with her giant breasts is part of that fantasy. To me, the fantasy of Lara is actually less to do with her physical appearance and more to do with her physical abilities. Never mind her large breasts, that woman can pull herself up over ledges by performing an elegant handstand, practically bending herself in half. Boobs would be nice, as I have next to none, but I’d rather have that strength and flexibility any day. And her ability to grab tiny ledges from a flying leap and not miss and fall to her death (at least, most of the times when I’m in control!) She is impossible in more ways than just waist and bust size.

And that’s okay, because it’s fantasy. If we always had accurate representations of the average woman, then a lot of fiction and films would be really really boring. For instance, I am the biggest coward in the world. I’m literally scared of everything. An adventure film involving me would be about 10 minutes long, because at the first sign of an obstacle that involved possible death I would say: ‘Screw this, I’m going home.’

In my own reading I want characters that are relatable, yes, but I also want them to be interesting. I want them to do the things that I would never do, and take me on that journey with them so I can experience what it’s like to be brave, to fight and win, to keep pushing on far past the point I would have curled up and died. It’s why I enjoy reading so much, why I enjoy films. But I also understand that the things I enjoy have to appeal to much more than just me – and if a big pair of boobs is what it takes to make Lara popular so I can enjoy playing Tomb Raider, then I’m really not bothered.

Because the thing is, it goes both ways as well. Take Unchartered: Drake’s Fortune – the other game I’ve been completing recently. It’s very similar to Tomb Raider – climbing, puzzles, ancient tombs, only with a little more  focus on gunfights and a male lead instead of a woman.

I thought Drake would be very much a lad’s game, but look at this guy. That is clearly not pandering to any male fantasies about attractiveness. He has a soft femininity about him, rough enough to be believable as an explorer and to add an edge of mystery to his allure, but his jokey personality, sexy voice and the way he interacts with his female co-explorer show a softer, sensitive, boyfriend material side that is clearly meant to get the ladies feeling a little hot under the collar.

I can understand why people argue that representing people in films and books in an idealised way can be damaging. Certain cultural attitudes towards women I do find offensive, and I wouldn’t want to see Twilight attitudes like ‘you have to have a boyfriend or you should go jump off a cliff’ perpetuated any more than they already have been, but accentuating appearances? Really not bothered. At the end of the day, it’s fantasy. And if we can’t enjoy unrealistically attractive, cool and capable men and women in fantasy, then where’s the fun in that?

365 Project, Weeks 21+22

It’s been raining pretty much non-stop for the past two weeks. Our garden, already a mess, is taking on all the qualities of a quagmire, and the skip that’s meant to be full of the excess mud and broken slabs of concrete has just been slowly filling with water instead. The Boyfriend’s summer project is turning into a bit of a mission, but at least our desire to have a garden for the summer isn’t going to affect things – so far there’s been no sign of a summer anywhere.

But there’s nothing like a nice creamy hot chocolate to dispel your wet weather woes. Although it’s more of a winter thing, really, I always like going to Costa’s for a nice hot drink after the rain – it reminds me of my very first date with the Boyfriend.

We spent the weekend on our H date, enjoying a relax. The rain didn’t really matter when you were sat in a nice hot spa complex, feeling thoroughly relaxed.

With pressures at work considerably eased in the run up to the holidays, I’ve had some spare time to get on with some things I’ve been wanting to do for ages. I went to the Writer’s club in my town, and deciding it wasn’t enough to only go to once monthly meetings, Carole, Taylor, Ivy and I decided to have weekly meetings on all the weeks in between. I’m embarking on a totally mad summer project, and I need all the motivation I can get. Part of the project involved a bit of musical composition, and I’ve made a good start on that.

We haven’t been shopping properly for ages, which resulted in some interesting attempts at cooking this week. This Quorn mince had clearly seen better days, but it was quite amusing.

And no week would be complete without your little brother dressing up as a parrot…

…or a mushroom shaped like a bum…

The grim weather was out in full force on saturday, just as I needed to walk to the shops. I can practically read the opening hours of the local supermarket from my front door but I was still completely soaked through from walking there and back.

I needed another one of those Costa hot chocolates, but had to make do with a glass of smoothie. Here’s to next week being a bit sunnier. Just a bit… please?