regaining focus

This blog has somewhat lost focus over the last couple of years. To be honest, I think this is a wider problem with the internet in general - blogs used to be the best-only place for people to air their random opinions and suchlike. Now, if I've got something I want to show to everyone, I'll shout about it informally on Twitter rather than type it all up as a blog post. I've noticed a few other blogs that I follow have had the same sort of issue.

But anyway, I'd like to keep this blog going as a central place for all my information (since I'm waaaaay too disorganised to run an actual factual website) so imma attempt something different. For a while, I'll post about all the things I've fallen in love with that week. Because the internet has plenty of my opinions already, but can always use more positivity.

BOOKS

This month I've been making headway on my Manx authors to-read list:

THE GOOD THIEF'S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM - Chris Ewan
Now, I've definitely read this before, which I'd forgotten until I was about halfway through and I remembered how it ended. Thanks, brain. Anyway, Chris Ewan is always a delight to read, and this novel (first in a series) is a slightly lighter and more easy-going book than some of his later, stand-alone books. Also it's only like 99p on kindle right now, and you can't even get an ice cream for that price.

ON MANNANAN'S ISLE - Usha Kishore
This small-but-perfectly-formed book of poetry has been sitting on my shelf for a while now, which makes me feel bad because when I finally settled down with it, I loved it. It's a charming look at the mix of Manx and Indian culture. Like most poetry collections, it's best consumed in small sections, one poem at a time, like Thornton's chocolates.

AN UNCONVENTIONAL OFFICER - Lynn Bryant
An epic wodge of historical military fiction with plenty of gory fighting and swooning romance. Not my usual reading fare, and I gave myself a headache from rolling my eyes at the womanising main character, but if you're a fan of this genre you'll have fun with this book.

And I'm looking forward to:

CALL OF THE CURLEW - Elizabeth Brooks
Oh my gosh. We are all super-proud of Elizabeth Brooks. She's been such a supporter of Manx Litfest, local writing groups, and our writing retreats. She's also (as it happens) an AMAZING writer, which everyone's going to find out when CALL OF THE CURLEW is released next month. I was lucky enough to read an advance copy (which I've had to give back to its rightful owner, boo), but I've got my own copy on pre-order. I predict this one will be a favourite of many, many reading groups.

GUILTY LITTLE SECRETS - Rona Halsall
Due for release in August 2018. Another Manx author, another wonderful supporter of Manx Litfest, another amazing writer. I'm rather in awe of the talent pool we've got on this island right now.

TV

Honestly, I don't watch much TV, so don't expect any revolutionary opinions here. Mostly I've been revisiting THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE-OFF because Netflix have added all the old episodes, and you can never binge-watch too much cake. BAKE OFF: THE PROFESSIONALS (which I'm sure used to be BAKE OFF: CRÈME DE LA CRÈME before it moved to Channel 4) has snuck back to stress-up my Sunday nights. Sugarwork structures? Soooo stressful.

And if you're not watching Season 10 of RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE then honestly what're you doing with your life. I'm currently living for Eureka and Kameron, although I swear they need to stop being up for elimination because my heart can't take it.

Podcasts and Music

I discovered The Lazy Genius some time last year but have just started trawling through the podcasts. Now, I'm not much for self-help and life-hacks, but these podcasts are wonderful in their gentle, reassuring, non-judgemental tone. I'm especially enjoying the episodes about how to clean your house without, y'know, stressing so much that you end up sobbing over the gangrenous state of your fridge. Yes, I know. Me, cleaning the house. That's how revolutionary this podcast has been for me. It's one-half practical, simple solutions, and one-half soft reassurance that you're doing absolutely great and you shouldn't be so hard on yourself. I'm a big fan.

It's been 20 years since the release of Therapy?'s LONELY, CRYIN' ONLY, my favourite ever song by my favourite ever band. Twenty years, man.

EVENTS

It's the first few days of TT Week here on the Isle of Man. Ride safe, citizens, and don't be this guy.

And things are gearing up for Litfest 2018 - so far we've confirmed Chris Riddell (squee!), Ben Haggarty (double-squee!), and the aforesaid Elizabeth Brooks (*passes out from over-squeement*).

2016 - end o year stats

So. What've we been up to in 2016?

However you look at it, it's been a heck of a year, but I'm going to ignore all the important stuff for now and go with my usual yearly round-up of how much I've written in the past 12 months, because that's something I feel relatively positive about and because I have some nice solid statistics to fall back on, rather than my own shouty opinions.

(I'm not posting all this to boast, btw. I just like stats, and I like being able to take stock of what I've done in a year. Also I hope it'll show that everyone's output is different, we all work at different speeds, we all have different definitions of what is a fair amount of work, and no one should ever make themselves (or anyone else) feel bad for doing more or less than the next guy.)

In total, I wrote 414,204 words, which equates to approximately 1131 words a day average. To compare, in 2015, I wrote 359,224 words (about 984 words a day average).

These totals include everything - first drafts, rewriting, editing, blog posts, competition entries... anything I can claim with a straight face as creative writing. I also included drawing as writing (using the vague definition that a finished picture is worth a thousand words).

Breaking this down into positives:

I wrote the first drafts of two new stories, one of which is now my favourite thing I've written.
I edited two other novels to close-enough-to-finished level.
I polished TERROR ISLAND and released it as an ebook.
I filled up two notebooks with notes, ideas, and random crap.
I wrote every day, even if it was just a couple of sentences (although there were a couple of close calls).
I read 91 books.

And into negatives:

I didn't get as much drawing done as I wanted. Maybe only two or three days included any drawing.
I didn't blog very much.
I didn't crit as many stories for other people as I should've. In fact, I still have three crits outstanding, which is very poor behaviour on my part.
I still don't reply to my emails in a timely fashion.

But in general, I'm happy with my output for the year. I feel like I've done okay. I really hope everyone else feels they've done okay too, despite this horrid year, and achieved something they can be content with.

I'm going to do a separate post about the books I've read, because I'm sure you're anxious to see my stats about those too. :)

Happy 2017, peeps. Stay safe out there.

It's 2015, Where's My Hoverboard?

Starting 2015 on an obvious and already well-worn question there, but never mind...

Anyways, how was your 2014? Did it feel kinda short? Like if you blinked too much you would've missed the whole damn year? Certainly did to me. Time is definitely speeding up, isn't it? I'm sure science has proved that.

Now here we are in 2015 and I still haven't found a cohesive and consistent format for this blog, so for the moment it will continue to be sporadically updated about nothing in particular. And for now, here's a run-down of what I think I achieved in 2014:

My main resolution was to write every day. Previously, I've set myself the target of one thousand words per day... which sometimes I hit and sometimes I didn't. The problem was, on days when I wasn't hitting my target then I'd feel bad, and there were conspicuous weeks when I didn't write anything at all.

So I set a new goal: write every day. Doesn't matter if it's a thousand words, two thousand, fifty, or just a few scrawled words in my notebook. On one day I wrote two hundred illegible scribbles (I may have been drinking). On another, the only thing I wrote down was, "he'd been dead so long that when they picked him up his face stayed on the carpet (true story)", which I found written in biro on my leg when I came home from a hard day at the pub.

I also kept a spreadsheet of my daily-weekly-monthly totals, because I'm sad like that. In 2014, I wrote a total of 295,670 words (not all new stuff - some was editing or rewriting, which got an approximate word-count assigned to it). My most productive month was November, unsurprisingly, when I clocked 54,562 words for NaNoWriMo. Least productive was February with 10,177. Most words in one day was 3,039. On average I wrote 24,639 words per month, 5,685 words per week, 810 words per day.

That last stat was a pleasant surprise. Apparently, once I gave up my determination to set down 1,000 words every day and instead concentrated on writing however much I felt like, I actually became more productive, and in the end didn't fall too far short of that arbitrary 1,000 wpd target.

I finished one novel in 2014 (a crime story I didn't really intend to write until I started), completed two-thirds of another (women's fiction, another genre I'm currently blundering into), I blogged and posted crits for my writer's group, I wrote synopses and outlines and a few poems, and scripted half a graphic novel about gangster-flowers. I also read 42 books (not as many as I'd hoped).

So there we go, a bit of bragging and a small ego-boost, and now at least I know where all those moments in 2014 went.

This year... well, this year I intend to keep trying to write every day, since it seems to be working for me. My new resolution is that drawing counts as writing, and any time I spend drawing can be given a word-count-equivalency, because I need to get back to drawing.

Happy 2015 to you all. :)

The Work-In-Progress Blog Tour

Late to the party as usual, but I've been invited to participate in a blog tour by the lovely and talented Elizabeth Brooks... I just hope all the other participants haven't gotten bored and gone home. :)

The rules of the WIP blog tour are as follows: provide the link back to the post by the person who nominated you, write a little about and give the first sentences of the first three chapters of your current WIP, then nominate four other writers to do the same. Piece o cake, right?

I hit a snag straight away, in that I'm not at all happy with any of the first lines of my initial chapters. In point of fact, I'm currently at that wondrous stage of the writing process where I'm unhappy with pretty much every damn line, and am two glasses of wine away from binning the whole thing.

But, since temper tantrums are only advisable and/or tolerated when you're a proper artist, here's some bumf about my current Work In Progress.

Okay, so, I love crime novels. Apart from Horror, Crime is my favourite genre to read in. I have a long and illustrious history of stalking crime authors and fan-girling at them until they sign something so I'll go away (in fact I did it just today with the fabulous Alan Bradley, who was launching his new book, The Dead In Their Vaulted Arches... but I digress).

So I figured I'd have a go at writing a crime novel. In typing that last sentence, btw, I can feel a thousand crime writers wince, because it must be infuriating for someone to blithely announce they're "having a go" at the thing you do for a living. ("Oh yes, I'm taking a swing at being a nurse, how hard can it really be?")

And I've also discovered, crime novels are flipping difficult. I'm not cut out for suspense. For a start, I have a lousy memory, so there's no real point in peppering chapters with carefully laid clues, because by halfway through I will have forgotten their existence, or at least their purpose. The second problem is, I get overexcited when I write (enthusiastic is the term I like) and am terrible at keeping secrets, so I keep trying to tell people who the murderer is every ten pages or so.

Then there's the issue that the first draft of my carefully plotted novel came in at 45,000 words, which even for me is a bit skimpy. So I had to go back and add a whole second strand, resulting in the story now being told partially in the present day, and partially in a (very extended) flashback.

The plot (tch, it says something about my writing that I've only got to the plot after four paragraphs, doesn't it?) concerns Daniel, who returns to his home village after a seven year absence. Naturally, when he left he did so under a cloud, and no one is happy to see him back, least of all his family. His timing is lousy as well - he arrives in the middle of the spring floods, when a major river has burst its banks and the whole village is washed out, so the only people remaining are the very determined or those with a substantial collection of sandbags.

Things get worse for Daniel because, on returning to the family home, he finds his brother murdered. Dun dun DUN. Concealed around the house, he also uncovers an unexplainably large amount of cash. He's anxious to find out what the hell happened, but finds himself implicated in the murder.

With the village cut off by the floods, there's no way for Daniel to escape from either his wrathful family or the true murderer... and no way for the police to come save him.

Okay, it sounds fairly passable when it's set out like that. :) The novel is called Fourth To The Devil, and these are the first lines of the first chapters:

CHAPTER ONE:
To return to Stonecrop, Daniel was forced to sprint across the closed road bridge while the police officer wasn't watching. In another few hours the bridge would be impassable even on foot. The river was still rising.

CHAPTER TWO:
The Crossed Swords public house benefited from its location at the junction between the high street and the road out to Westbridge Farm.  The land there was slightly higher than the rest of the town, and the pub now sat on a tiny island some fifty feet wide.

CHAPTER THREE:
Samual eyed the cup of coffee on the table.  His need for a warming drink was apparently less pressing than his wish to stay out of obligation to his younger brother, and he pushed the cup away untouched.

As I say, I am unhappy with these lines, and they will hopefully be prettified to some significant degree at some point. :) They do, however, hit on several important parts of the novel - floodwater, pubs, coffee, and the two main characters. So I guess it could be worse. :)

Ok, that's enough from me. I nominate:

Sonja Perrin
Matthew Baugh
Charles Phipps