My Writing Efforts in March.



 

Novel Writing.  


In March I added 5848 words to Branded, a science-fiction, young adult novel. So I improved on February’s 4841 words. I averaged 188 words per day in March compared to 173 words per day for February and 155 words per day in January.

The novel is now just under 70,000 words. It has five parts and I am probably just over halfway into the forth part. It looks like the novel will be about 100,000 words, the first draft at least.

I am still very much enjoying writing it. The dysfunctional group of characters are barely getting on at the moment, but one of the causes is about to be removed. 

Non-Fiction Writing. 

 

I wrote one article for Divine in March. It was about a lack of actors with disabilities playing characters with disabilities, especially in Australian movies and television. I contacted a few people in the industry for the article and about half of them got back to me. I learnt a lot about the issue from those who did, like Australian actress Kate Hood. She has the unique perspective of being an in demand actress before she developed a disability and she is involved in an Actor’s Equity disability committee.

A lot has been written about actors without disabilities “cripping up” to play characters with disabilities. My article is an attempt to provide some factual information from people and organisations directly involved in the industry like actors, casting agencies and unions (note the producers and directors did not get back to me).

The article, Actors with Disabilities, was put up on Divine last Thursday.

I also started research on my next article on disability parking. It is about people who don’t have disabilities who feel they are entitled to park in disability parking spots. 

Blog Writing. 


Four posts for the month. I missed a week while researching a post on ebook piracy, which I found it to be very common. Every author I checked had pirate versions of their ebooks available on the web. 

Reading.  


I read two books for the month and enjoyed them both. No Limits, by Australian/New Zealander Holly Childs, is a hip novella, full of hip people doing hip things while they worry about the world ending.  And The Method, by Juli Zeh, is a dystopian science-fiction thriller in the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World. 

Critiquing. 


I still have not critiqued anything this year.

So far this year I have written on every day.

Health permitting, I hope to greatly improve on my novel writing efforts and critique something, anything, in April.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more