Timeline

The timeline for the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia is coming along, slowly but steadily. I have about fifty scenes down so far. It’s surprisingly hard work. Each of the story elements in my rough outline gets broken down into a sequence of scenes in my head, and I start writing them in. But then there’s quite a bit of shuffling things around—deciding which character’s point of view is going to be shown for any given scene can be tough, and sometimes it’s easier to break a scene in two, so that part of the action is shown for a different character. And all the time I’ve got the side-plots buzzing in my head, and I have to think about how I’m going to slot those in. I’ve been at this for something like four hours, on and off, and to be honest I think I need to take a break and watch a movie, or something, and do a bit more later.

On the subject of movies, I had an urge to watch all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back. In the end I watched them in chunks of an hour or so at a time over the last few days. I reached the end of Return of the King last night (fast forwarding over that sappy part where Bilbo and Frodo leave with the elves—the only part of the trilogy that I find unbearably yawn-inducing). What next? I thought. And I already knew the answer: dig out the Oblivion DVD. So I hunted high and low through our DVD collection. Couldn’t find it. Which just made things worse—the more I couldn’t find it, the more I wanted to watch it. And I still want to watch it, so when I’m done with this post I’m going to search again. This time I’ll hunt low and high; maybe that’ll make a difference.

Since I’m here, a quick update on Gunn & Bohemia: I have to say I’m a bit disappointed on the review front. The reviews it’s had so far have been very good—One five-star, one four-star, and a couple of five-star ratings—but I’d expected to see a few more come in over the last few days, and there’s been nothing. I’m probably just being impatient. The book’s only been out a month. Calm down. Breathe.

I also found a local independent bookstore that will put a few print copies of the book on their shelves. It’s something they do for local authors only—northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, and that’s it. Next step on that front is to get some print copies (which I was hoping to have organised already, but, well, circumstances beyond my control and all that . . . I should have it sorted by around the middle of next week). They also do signing events for local authors (same constraints on the area) but they’re booked solid on that for something like the next three months, so I won’t be able to arrange anything until at least February. Oh, well.

[That’s weird, now that I think about it. A few months ago I’d have have been all knotted up inside at the prospect of being on display in a bookshop, and relieved at there being a delay. Now I’m actually disappointed that I can’t do it right now, damn it. Strange how things change.]

That’s enough for today. I really want to watch Oblivion. Time to go on the great DVD hunt. Until next time . . .