I’ve gone up in the world as far as podcasting is concerned; I’ve made my own recording studio. It’s not much, but it didn’t cost me much either. Most importantly, the quality of the recordings I’ve made has gone up, to the point where I’m wondering if I want to re-record the last couple of poor-quality episodes.
Read MoreI have snow to thank for the fact that I’m aspiring to be a writer at all. In my second year of teaching, we lived opposite a Starbucks that was never very busy at the best of times. It was a great place to go and write; quiet conversation, background music, first-name-terms with the manager and the benefits of having a ‘regular’ drink. (Venti hazelnut latte, extra shot – not my favourite any more, sadly!)
Read MoreI've been doing a lot of editing recently. Noctis Point, the book I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo, is finished; I wrote the last chapter in the first week or so of January. I didn't want to shelve this for forever before I started editing, partly because I need to justify not working full-time right now, but mainly because I want to see Noctis Point published.
Read MoreI've been quite enjoying writing the CYAO but it's starting to sprawl - by design. I'm starting to see why Mass Effect couldn't have been totally open-ended!
Here's a sample of the decision tree for my CYAO:
Read MoreIt's ok as long as you kept your thumb in the page, right?
I remember whiling away the hours reading through the Ian Livingstone/Steve JacksonFighting Fantasy books. They had green borders, wonderful cover illustrations, and the ending was almost always at paragraph 300. But I don't remember ever actually 'playing' one of them. Just reading through and assuming I'd won the fights, because it was fun to seek out all of the terrible deaths.
I was able to snag a Humble Bundle book deal a little while ago (actually, it was Sue that spotted it!) and downloaded it to my Kindle before going to Sweden. I'm a big fan of the Kindle, by the bye, and I've found that it makes such a difference to packing weight.
I read a couple of books while I was out there. On the flight out, I read the entirety ofArcanum 101: Welcome New Students, by Rosemary Edghill and Mercedes Lackey which is a fun book set in the present day, but one where magic, elves and arcane happenings occur. It was brief but interesting; most of the books in the humble bundle were on this sort of topic, and there are lots of shared ideas, or common points from which they draw. I think it was a quirk of the formatting on my Kindle that the shift from the first character's point of view to the second's was something I had to read over twice, to pinpoint exactly when it happened.
I've just come back from a holiday in Sweden with John Aggs, Nana Li and my wife Sue. We went to Visby, Gotland, and it is beautiful! We were blessed with the weather as well, only one day of rain and it was the day we'd 'planned' for there to be bad weather. All it meant was umbrellas, a museum and some writing/drawing at home!
And believe me, there was a fair amount of drawing, writing, or talking about either going on. We must have talked for hours each about our projects, picking out potential plot points, filling in plot holes, renaming the entire thing in my case, and generally being creative. Sue quite rightly said that it felt like a week-long brainstorm.
I was writing part of Psy-Clones yesterday (oh! I'm doing Camp NaNoWriMo this July! And then hopefully straight-up NaNoWriMo in November!) and I wrote about hyposprays. I wanted something that was futuristic, needles being already a thing of the last century and surely soon to be replaced. It didn't even occur to me that this was a problem until I read that chapter to Sue.
"That's from Star Trek," she said. "I'm not sure you can use it."
She's right; this Wikipedia entry about hyposprays specifically lists it as being a Star Trek invention, developed because NBC would not allow them to show needles being used to inject substances. That's fair enough. It seems I'm not alone in automatically using the term 'hypospray' to refer to this device; these three articles, among others, also do. Apparently the term we should all be using is 'jet injector' which is slightly clumsy to me.
I'm finding it a little hard to post some things on the blog since I'm now actively trying to get things published. I can't publish anything here that I want to see in print elsewhere, basically. So today is a good example; I've written a short sci-fi piece in the Psy-Clones world, but it's standalone and could totally see publication somewhere. So I can't put it here.
Instead, I'd like to talk briefly about what I'm reading at the moment. My wife and I are reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne as a kind of 'book at bedtime' thing. It's fairly long, so it's slow going, but enjoyable. There are some hilarious sections though; it's something I recognise about Verne's writing that he obviously had things he particularly enjoyed, or knew a lot about. The parts of the book where he can talk about those in great detail are terminology-heavy and slightly detract from what's actually going on. Three pages about the polyps in Captain Nemo's display case is plenty. Of course, nothing so far has beaten the description of weapons on board the ship, including a 'duck gun with exploding balls'. We're so mature.
Inspiration for this timeline came from a variety of sources. I've been reading a lot of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke recently; several nationalist parties enjoyed success in the recent European Parliament Elections; I read an essay on what the state of government might be in the near future; finally, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is awesome.
Mars Base 3, known as MB3 to all, became a hotbed of psychic training and research. Within ten years, the first psychs had developed into a society based around research. They developed cloning technology that worked, and used it to improve the calibre of their trainees. The facility was run by a dumb-AI that was incapable of attaining sentience. It was in charge of all mechanical aspects of MB3, the cloning, food production, weather control… everything. It was also live-storing everyone’s psyche in case of death, which was a realistic threat in psych training.
Read MoreAgain it was to be a scientist that provided the next step in the chain. Frederic Rawlins, an American by birth, finally succeeded in 2078 in doing what humans had been dreaming about for decades, creating the Halflight Drive. Designed to travel at half the speed of light, it suddenly made space travel en masse a possibility again. Terraforming robots were created, algae was redesigned and ships were constructed in space. The newly-completely space elevator, linking the defunct International Space Station to a small island in the Atlantic meant that materials could be taken up with increasing regularity. Within a year, with public fervour behind it, the first major mission to Mars left. Half an hour later, it arrived...
Read MoreI've split the timeline into three parts because it became quite long and winding.
Starting from within the next ten years, this is a timeline for Noctis Point.
By 2045, most factories only had a small human contingent of engineers as robot workforces took over. Even the factories that made the robots had automated assembly lines. More than that, robots were used in mining operations, undersea oil drilling and farming. One of the major robot-creating countries was Russia, beginning by using cheap human workforces and then switching as soon as possible. Unemployment, steadily rising in all countries over the previous decades, hit an all-time high. With it came mass homelessness.
Read MoreI do a lot of writing that never sees the light of day to the big wide world. It's consumed on an almost weekly basis by five people instead. I DM a group for a Fourth Edition D&D game, set in the world of Poisonroot but borrowing a lot of things from proper D&D (like races, dragons, magic, gods, planes...) We've been playing for over a year now, coming up on 18 months on and off. We can't meet every week; it's staggering that six busy professionals can get together anything like regularly, really. But we get together enough to see a story.
Read MoreI recently discovered something that both annoyed me and made me feel slightly stupid.
The word ‘segue’ is not pronounced ‘seeg’. It is, instead, pronounced ‘segway’.
Now at this point, I really really hope that a few of you are thinking ‘the Segway; isn’t that just the wheeled alternative to walking around that debuted in the early noughties?’ Well, sadly, no. It turns out that segway is the correct pronunciation of the word segue, which means to move seamlessly from one topic to another.
Read MoreSo, here's a few funny things.
I write a lot. I don't post ANY of it up on here though! The problem? I spend a lot of time planning for my job (primary school teachers write a lot more than you'd think); I spend time making resources; and, the main place my writing goes, I plan, write and resource a weekly Dungeons and Dragons episode. I can't think of a better way of describing it; something punchy, hopefully ending on a cliffhanger or twist of some sort, and something that doesn't keep my players up until all hours.
I go through phases of writing and not writing. I like to call these 'terms'. I have yet to find a way to properly integrate my work life (primary school teacher) with that of being a writer, and it bugs me. I need to make more effort.
What DOES keep me going week to week is writing D&D adventures for the party to tackle. Last time (about three weeks ago unfortunately) was a real doozy for them; someone in their party, an NPC, turned out to be in the employ of a bad guy and also lying to them the whole time; the actual bad guy is in jail; then, zombies. Lots of zombies. It was like 'zoooooooooooombiiiiiiiiiies' for a while.
Things have been quite interesting here at home, which is primarily why I haven't been posting.
For those of you not in the know I am a primary school teacher. We had the school inspectors in last week, and this is normally a stressful event for any school worker. I'm not pretending that my stress levels were more than anyone else's, but there's a little bit of background to this one.
In the last five years of teaching, I have missed Ofsted three times. The first time I was on a week-long residential trip with my class. The second time I left the school about a week before they were visited. The third time I was essentially pigeonholed away from Ofsted for reasons not worth going in to.
Bit quiet on the writing front; I'm editing Poisonroot when I can, but there's not been a lot going on.
Except...
I moved house. Again!
Anyway, the cat woke me up at 7.30 this morning (Sunday) and I decided to use the time wisely. My D&D group are journeying into Zar, and Trip's next story will take him there as well.
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