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Hi all, It’s the end of week three of National Novel Writing Month and I am feeling tired and of need of a break from writing. In the last two days in particular I have felt like just lying on the bed and dozing. Anyway, I forced myself to write past distractions until the writing eventually became easier. Here is how I went: Day fifteen: Must have been an easy day’s writing because I can’t remember any issues. I finished chapter thirteen, or so I thought. I wrote 1837 words for a total of 27641 . Day sixteen: I was tired. I changed the ending of chapter thirteen and then wrote chapter fourteen which ended up feeling a bit like a fill in chapter. It might not survive an edit. But I need something to break chapter thirteen from chapter fifteen. I wrote 1947 words for the day. Total 29588 . Day seventee n: I realised that for consistency I better start making a plan of the interior of the spaceship much of the story is set on, which I did. Wrote 1839 words. Total ...

Hi all, It’s been a busy week of writing and frustrations about writing and technology. I have wondered if technology would intervene in my attempt to get to 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Although I have had no computer mal-functions so far, trying to solve problems with my email (Bravenet) have taken time away from writing. My email has probably been doing the worse thing it could possibly do: telling me it has sent messages when they haven’t been. I was debating edits to an article I had written for Divine, and suddenly he stopped receiving my emails. He ended up ringing me to find out if I still wanted the article published. I did. I have contacted Bravenet to see if they care enough to actually fix the problem. They took months to fix a previous problem where my word attachments were being turned into a mess of symbols at the receiver’s end. Needless to say, once I have time, I will be moving my website and email hosting somewhere else. ...

Hi all, I have just finished the first week of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. This is how I faired: Day one : I started a brand new novel. The ideas for the novel had only been pulled together over the previous few days. I was not sure whether I would get anywhere near the 1667 words required on average per day. The first chapter was to introduce the main character, his predicament and his somewhat drastic reaction. I wrote this chapter in first person. I finished the chapter and then thought about stopping for the day as my word count was at 1630, just below the average of 1667. But I was reminded by a friend that it’s easier to begin writing the next day if you have a scene set and started, so I wrote the first 70 words of chapter two. I wrote 1700 words for the first day. Day two : When walking back from the pool, I thought up a better way to open chapter two, so I scrapped the start and...

National Novel Writing Month. Last week I finished and submitted my next article for DiVine magazine. The article is about weight loss for people with disabilities. I then finished re-writing a short story. Before I had time to think about what to do next I saw a post about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and decided to give it a go. For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in November. About 300,000 people worldwide usually attempt NaNoWriMo. Those who have read this blog would know about my miniscule word output, so me deciding to write 50,000 words in a month is a bit like someone who just occasionally jogs around the block deciding they are going to run a marathon on every day of November. Once I committed myself to the idea of NaNoWriMo, I had to come up with a scenario to push me onto the starting line. I considered using a 2000 word excerpt of a young adult novel I had written for my masters as a starting point. ...

Hi all, Amazon’s Latest Publishing Exploits. In the past couple of weeks two articles about Amazon’s publishing ambitions have backed up my thoughts that they will soon dominate the publishing industry. The first article in Publisher’s Weekly was about the launch of Amazon’s new publishing imprint called 47North. This imprint will publish Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. 47North had signed 15 titles when it launched and included a series by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. All titles will be available in print, Kindle and audio formats. The article also mentions an author who signed up to Amazon publishing because of their better ebook royalty rate. Traditional publishers, it would seem, are going to have to raise their 25% ebook royalty to compete with Amazon. The second article appeared in the NY Times . It starts by announcing that “Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and ebook form.” “Publishers say Amazon is aggr...

Hi all, If I Had Written Terra Nova… I am still watching the American made in Australia science-fiction dinosaur series Terra Nova . The last couple of episodes have shown promise, but have only just passed being mediocre. In the last episode a virus caused memory lose and the scientists trying to stop it forget what they were doing. This is not exactly an original plot for science-fiction. I quickly worked out that the main character’s cold virus would kill the amnesia virus, but unfortunately it took the supposedly brilliant doctor a lot longer. I still don’t like the main characters. They are too selfish. The main family has no hesitation putting their comforts ahead of the survival of the settlement; they are a bit like apprentice Doctor Smiths from Lost in Space . Terra Nova’s real problem is it is trying to be a family drama set in a world of dinosaurs, rather than a science-fiction series. If I had written Terra Nova , I would have started with the mai...

Hi from slightly agitated Graham, Yahoo’s brainless menu system . I don’t have the patience for inane and illogical website navigation systems. I never liked Yahoo’s busy look and cumbersome navigation system, and only use Yahoo when I need to access an online writing group to download a file. I was trying to access that group today, but Yahoo told me I had to create a profile first. WTF: I already had a profile. I closed the box and tried again, but it repeated its demand, so I clicked on create a new profile. A new box opened, telling me to add a new email address. Why, so Yahoo could spam me twice? I added a new email address. It then wanted me to add a new alias for using yahoo groups. When fuckyouyahoo was rejected, I tried grahamclements. It said someone already used that, probably me, and I should choose another alias between 2 and 16 letters. I typed gjc, but it said choose a longer alias, it seems their system can’t count.   I eventually found an appropri...