The New Blog...

I've set up a new blog on WordPress.com: http://petefordwriter.wordpress.com/

Happenings

A few things to report this week.

First, I'll be setting up a new website as a showcase for my writing. I might even buy a domain name later (we'll see), and it'll include a blog page—so this blog will be pretty much discontinued. I'm hoping to get this all set up in the next few days, so there might be one more post here, which is likely to be not much more than a link to the new site. Watch this space.

The big news, though, is that I now have a pretty firm release date for Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, the steampunk action/adventure that I've been working on for the last few months. Woohoo! Xchyler Publishing will be putting it out to the world on...

November 15, 2013

Put it on your calendar, gentle reader!

Between now and then, I have a lot of work to do. There are deadlines to be met with the editing, to get the typescript all ship-shape and Bristol fashion. Those deadlines are realistic, but I don't have time to slack. I did a bit of figuring of dates and times, and barring major problems I should have everything wrapped up with at least a couple of weeks to spare. But this is not a time to get complacent, so I’m going to be pretty busy for a few more weeks.

In other news, I finally heard back from Harper Voyager about those two rejected ‘scripts. It turns out that The Artemisia Chronicle was the script that was rejected in January, and Pavonis was the one that they kept hold of for seven months. That’s a surprise; Pavonis was my very first full-length work, and I know it wasn't great. I always thought Artemisia was the stronger and better-executed work. On the other hand, I don’t really know what criteria Harper were judging against. Pavonis is steampunk/SF, and Artemisia is more like gothic/SF. Maybe that’s the key.

I mentioned in the last post, that once Gunn & Bohemia is done I was planning on reworking Artemisia, applying all the lessons learned from my wonderful editing team at Xchyler. Since then I've thought a bit about that, and changed my mind. I really, really want to get back to Smoke & Mirrors and finish that first. It was left on the shelf in a half-done state—that is, I’d written about half of the first draft before shelving it to work on G&B. The plan now is to take it back a couple of steps and rework it, starting at the storyboard. Smoke is a steampunker—but it has a twist that, as far as I've been able to tell, will make it unique. And no, I’m saying no more at this time.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably go back and rework those older ‘scripts, possibly starting with Pavonis. But who knows?

But also... before I even begin that, I’m probably going to take some downtime and kick back with some gaming, and catch up with my reading. I’ll still be writing—I’m too addicted to writing now, and if I stopped for any length of time I’d probably have some kind of meltdown—but that writing is likely to be a short story or two, with a mind to getting them into anthologies (Xchyler publishes several anthologies every year; click here for details. The most recent one, Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology, has had great reviews). It's been a long time since I wrote a shortie, and it'd be good to get something going in that direction.

That’s about it, I think. Until next time...

Cleaning The Rust Off

It's been almost two months since I posted on this blog, which is pretty awful considering that I was doing weekly posts at one time and intended to keep that up. I'm going to try to get back to that schedule. No promises, though.

So, what's been keeping me away, I hear no-one ask. As my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Ealing) will know, things were hotting up on several writing fronts. In the last post I mentioned that I was in the middle of some heavy prep work, getting ready to start editing Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, and that I still had the first draft of Smoke & Mirrors on the back burner waiting for me to get back to it.

Much has happened since then. The Gunn & Bohemia prep work came to an end three or four weeks ago, and since then the real editing has been going on, and it's taken up just about every free moment I have. At the same time, things on the day job front got very busy, which meant that I didn't have so many of those free moments. Nevertheless Gunn & Bohemia has been coming along very nicely, thank you. Thanks to my Copy Editor, and my Editor-in-Chief, at Xchyler Publishing, the story after editing will be way, way better than it was at when I submitted it last year.

At this moment half of the book has gone through the first and heaviest round of editing and into proper copy-editing, and about half of that has gone through to line editing. There's still a lot of work to be done, but the light at the end of that particular tunnel is definitely getting brighter.

And while I'm on the subject of Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, it's currently slated for release sometime around November. I'll update that as we get closer to the time.

As for Smoke & Mirrors, that's still on the back burner and likely to stay there a while longer. The reason for that goes back to last October, when I submitted two typescripts to Harper Voyager during their open submission period. One of those 'scripts was rejected in February, if I remember right—but Harper didn't say which one. And then this week, I got a rejection email for the other one, whichever that was.

(No, I'm not bothered by the rejections; HV received over 4,500 submissions in that two-week period last year and we all knew only a tiny fraction would be accepted by the end. Still, I'd like to know which of the two I sent in was good enough for them to hold on to for 7½ months.)

So, when all the heavy lifting on Gunn & Bohemia has been done, that's going to leave me in a place where I have two complete 'scripts (Pavonis and The Artemisia Chronicle) and one half-written first draft (Smoke & Mirrors) that are, I think, very good stories but that could benefit from a good edit and rework in line with what I've learned from my above-mentioned editors at Xchyler.

So that's what's going to happen. At this moment I'm thinking that The Artemisia Chronicle will be the first to get the treatment. After that it's a toss-up between the other two. This all means that right now my schedule is full for the better part of the next twelve months, possibly more.

(Those titles aren't fixed, by the way. Pavonis is currently available through Smashwords and others but I'll be taking that down very soon, and after rewriting it'll have a new title that's a better fit for the story. The Artemisia Chronicle will also probably have a more fitting title before I submit it for publication anywhere; and Smoke & Mirrors is a definite no-no because there are too many other works out there with that title.)

I see that it's 9:30pm and I have a 5:15am start in the morning so it's time to close this. As I said, I'll try to get back to the weekly posting schedule, day-job and writing permitting. And so, until next time...

Writer's Life is ALWAYS Intense

It's been a busy, busy week. At the day job we had a new version of a web application to be installed Tuesday, then Wednesday a small problem that slipped through testing showed up and had to be fixed pronto. Then I was taken off one project that I'd been working on part-time, and given a new project to take up the slack for a colleague who decided to move on to another job. That work's been taking up most of my time. Things were actually going pretty well until yesterday morning, when an SSL certificate on one of the production servers expired—not usually too much of a problem to fix, but (being a Friday, I suppose) I managed to miss a step and ended up having to do the job twice.

At the same time on the writing front I've been working up a timeline for the scenes in Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia in preparation for a major round of editing. And to be honest it's painful work because I have to switch between the timeline, the chapter outline and the chapter text for each and every scene, and after a while of doing that I have to take a break to rest the eyes. Thanks to the day-job work I wasn't even able to start on the timeline until Thursday, and up until last night I'd only covered two chapters.

Today I've been back on the timeline, and made good progress. Six hours of work, and six more chapters covered. Four more to go (and the last one is less than half the length of the others so it's not quite even that). I was thinking about doing one more today but, quite frankly, I'm sick of the sight of it. It can wait until tomorrow.

I'm really hoping that this will be the last of the prep work, though. I haven't actually written anything for what seems like weeks and I'm itching to get back to it. I want to get this major edit done, because I'm looking forward to seeing how the 'script reads with all the improvements in place. And of course I still have the first draft of Smoke & Mirrors waiting patiently for me to get back and finish it. It's intense.

The life of a writer is always intense.*

It's 5pm Saturday and time to unwind, I think. I've got Castle season 4 in the DVD player, so I'm off to grab a coffee, stretch out and forget about writing for a bit. (Oh... by watching Mr. Fillion playing the part of a writer. That's really going to work. I love the show too much to let that stop me, though.)

* If you haven't seen Repo Man, you probably don't get this.

How To Write In The Midst Of Other Things

I'm working on preparation for editing Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, and I have a list of places that need various changes—essentially a list of questions for myself in the general form, "This scene needs to achieve X; how can I shape the scene to do that?" Most of these questions have been answered. I'm down to the last two or three.

Problem: How to make useful progress in a day filled with other (family-related) things.

Answer: Pick one of those last questions. Roll it around in head. Get a feel for it. Let it ferment while family things are going on.

So far this works. I can still focus on family things but the question pops its head above the trench whenever I have a few minutes, and often I've had an insight that's given me a part of the answer.

Essential equipment: notepad and pencil is vital. I'd hate to have the perfect answer pop into my head only to lose it because I didn't scribble down so much as a single keyword to remind me later.

Enough said for today. Back to family affairs.

(postscript: it worked again. The answer to the problem I was thinking about came to me while I was in Walmart looking for a birthday card.)

Do not disturb unless the Earth catches fire

I've been bad about keeping this blog up for the last few weeks, in part because I've been very busy at the day job; I usually have a few minutes here and there during the day to write a few words or a couple of sentences, but that hasn't been so for the last few weeks.

Also I've been working on the non-day job—writing—and on that front I've been on two works-in-progress. Some of the time I've been writing the first draft of Smoke & Mirrors (that's the working title, anyway), the steampunk-themed sci-fi novel that I've been pounding at for the last three or four months. That one's gone on the back burner for the time being, though, as I'm working on editing Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, a steampunk action/adventure tale that's set to be published by Xchyler Publishing later this year.

As part of the editing I've been thinking about how to beef up some of the characters. I've pretty much got that wrapped up for the major characters but there are a couple of secondary characters who need a touch of the same treatment. Today I've been concentrating on one specific character, who's the editor-in-chief of a London newspaper. In the first draft there were two words that described this man perfectly: "wishy", and "washy". (It was intentional at the time, but reading it back it didn't come across as very realistic for a person in that position.)

So here I have a character who has no force to him, no real presence, and I've been bouncing ideas around about how to make him more believable. Then it occurred to me that I need a model. And the instant I thought that, I knew precisely who that model would be. In fact there was only one possible choice.

One of my favourite sci-fi movies of all time is The Day The Earth Caught Fire, which was made in 1961 in techni-black-and-white and stars Edward Judd, Leo McKern and Janet Munro. If you get a chance to watch this movie, do, and don't worry about the cack science. Instead watch the characters work—Judd's hard-drinking journalist is just plain marvellous, and McKern is as great as he ever was. This movie should be on every aspiring fiction writer's must-watch list; it's an object lesson in character. Despite its age it's available on DVD (or at least, I had no problem finding it and the last time I looked it was still for sale).

But back to my point, and here's another character to watch: Jeff Jefferson, editor of the Daily Express, played by Arthur Christiansen. He's brilliant, and here's why: Christiansen wasn't really acting. He really was the editor of the Daily Express up until a couple of years before this movie was made. Who better to model a newspaper editor on than someone who did the job for real and showcased how it's done in a movie?

I just dug my copy of the movie out and I'm about to put in my portable DVD player. I'll be watching Christiansen carefully, and taking notes. Don't disturb me for anything less than the Earth catching fire.

(p.s. If you do get a chance to see the movie, watch for Michael Caine in an uncredited bit part as a London bobby.)

A General Update

Smoke & Mirrors: It's coming along little by little. Things have been slow because recently I just don't seem to have been able to find more than a few minutes here and there, so it's just not possible to build up any kind of momentum. Right now the typescript is at about 43,500 words, so it's going to be a while before I get the first draft completed. I'm also thinking about a better—or at least different—title, since there are a number of other books around by that name including one by Neil Gaiman (who is one of my writing heroes, by the way).

An idea: If you follow me on Twitter you might have seen me mention that I had a new story idea that came from something I read on a can of beans. In case you're interested, gentle reader, it was a can of Bush's Original Baked Beans and the label said "Secret Family Recipe". The can was turned so that from where I was standing I could only see the part that said "Secret Family", and it struck me as intriguing. At this stage it's no more than an idea; I've scribbled it in the notebook I keep handy for ideas, and I may explore it further when the time comes. It just goes to show, as many people have said, that sometimes ideas come from the most unlikely places.

The day job: Things are very heavy at the moment. I pretty much finished my work for the quarter on the main project I'm involved in, so I was asked to take on some work from another couple of projects. No real sweat there—but since then we've had a number of problems on the public-facing web servers that it's my job to watch, and troubleshooting the problems means that those other two side projects have had to take a back seat. That means that they're beginning to slip behind. (And in case you're wondering, I write these posts a bit at a time as I get a minute here and there, then usually post them in my lunch break.)

Social stuff: I've been using Twitter for a while now (something like sixteen months, I think) and haven't really had the urge (or time, to be honest) to use anything else, although I did create an author page on Goodreads. Recently I was persuaded to set up on Facebook and Google+, and also to make some proper use of the Goodreads author page that I'd hardly used. So I have. None of them is very active just yet—most of the Facebook stuff comes from my tweets, I haven't really done anything with Google+, and my Goodreads updates are limited to saying how far I've got reading this or that book. Also, I'm probably not going to accept many friend requests over and above the ones I already have but still, if you're interested by all means look me up and follow me if you like.

That's all I have time for today, except to say Happy Valentine's Day! to all my readers but especially to my wife Kate (kiss, kiss).