Just a short update, to let my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Ealing) know that I’m very close to starting writing—yes, actual writing—on GB2. (Just joking about the title; other than GB2 it doesn’t even have a working title at this moment.)
Tag: gb2
Kindle, or No?
I thought I was being so clever, having an Android tablet. After all, why buy a Nook AND and a Kindle, when you can buy one device and download the Nook and Kindle apps (and Kobo, and Diesel, and a bunch of others) for free?
Well, in hindsight it really wasn’t that great an idea. Your mileage may vary on this, but for me it turned out that every time I felt like reading (to be more accurate, whenever I got time to read, which hasn’t been that often recently), I would pick up the tablet only to find that the battery was flat. Even just sitting there not being used, the battery only lasts a couple of days—and actually using it to read, you get a few hours at most before having to plug in the charger. Hardly what you’d call convenient.
And so a couple of weeks ago I went down to the basement and dusted off my Nook Simple Touch. It had been sitting there for months, and yet still had enough charge in the battery to be able to use it. It’s back in daily use, and I’d forgotten just how great it is to be able to read every day and not have to worry about charging it more often than once a fortnight.
In any case, how many different e-readers accounts do I really need? I have Nook and Kindle accounts; I also set up a Kobo account, but I never used it. At this moment I don’t need more. So right now I have the Nook, and I have the tablet I can use for Kindle books (unfortunately there are quite a few books available for Nook that you can’t get for Kindle, and vice-versa, hence the need for both). And the tablet’s battery is dead again, so I can’t read Kindle books until the tablet’s charged, which takes a couple of hours.
So, the question: should I buy a Kindle to solve that problem? I see the basic model is down to about $70, which isn’t bad at all. So I’ll definitely be giving that some thought.
On the Writing front . . .
Some status on the various projects:
- The Voyage of Valerie McGrath: This went for final approval a couple of weeks ago. No word back on any changes, and the anthology will be on shelves fairly soon now. I imagine I and the other short story authors will receive an ARC for final proofing before it goes to press, and that’ll give us all a chance to check each other’s work for last-minute mistakes (and it’ll be fun to read their stories, too—I’m looking forward to that).
- Gunn & Bohemia II: Great news to report here—I finished the timeline and sent it off to my content editor a few days ago. Subject to her comments and requests for changes, that means I should be able to start actually writing the first draft within the next few days, or a couple of weeks at most. Which means, if all goes well, I could have a completed ‘script before September. Don’t hold me to that, though—I’ll be writing and editing at the same time, and that’s not something I’ve done before. I don’t know how it’s going to work switching back and forth. Still, it means the first draft will need less work to get into publishable shape (Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia took months, because the draft I submitted needed a lot of editing work).
- Top Secret Writing Project #1: Well, it’s not really that much of a secret now. I have a full-length first draft I wrote the year before last, and I’ve been editing it as a background project. Two chapters done, twenty-eight to go. It’s a sort of gothic/sci-fi/steampunk mix inspired by ideas from Gormenghast and Dark City and one or two other things. Fellow author Craig Hallam got a sneak preview of the first chapter way back and was kind enough to critique it.
- Top Secret Writing Project #2: Another story that’s been sitting in the pile for a while. This one is another steampunk story but with a twist (don’t ask; I don’t want to spoil the surprise). I have half a first draft, and the plan is to edit what I have so far then continue on through the existing storyboard and get it finished. But that is most definitely at the bottom of the stack, and won’t see any work done on it until I’m done with TSWP#1.
Enough for now. Time to settle down for some telly, I think. Until next time . . .
Worries I Can’t Mention
I didn’t get around to writing a post last weekend, because something happened the Thursday before that really had my wife and I worried, and kept us worried right through the weekend and into the early part of last week. And while I know you’re dying to know what that was, I can’t say. Not yet. Expect a post dedicated to that story sometime in the future. All will be revealed.
For now, though, I am able to report that things on the day-job front have settled down significantly in the last week. The Inherited Project From Hell is up and running in a production environment, and should soon be completely live (if you’re into river boating in the north-western states, you might even brush up against it indirectly). The other projects seem to be well under control.
What of writing work? Well, GB2 has had little progress made (last week’s worries meant I wasn’t able to focus on writing work at all—I spent much of the time playing computer games to take my mind off things). The plan is to get a couple of hours in on that over this weekend. The Voyage of Valerie McGrath has cleared line editing and gone to final approval. And the Top Secret Writing Project has had nothing done to it at all.
And so the plans for today: get some tea, and spend a little while on the GB2 timeline. Time to get to it. Until next time . . .
Feeling Better, Thanks
I’m just about over the worst cold I can remember having in quite a while. Normally I don’t get sick—or to be more accurate, I don’t get knocked flat by the symptoms as badly as most people do—but this one has been a doozy. It hit me Thursday, got worse Friday (which was also my and Kate’s wedding anniversary, so my plans to go out for a nice dinner went sideways), then pretty much laid me out Saturday—I spent most of the day in bed. Does a cold cause fever? I didn’t think so, but my temperature hit 102°F at one point; maybe it wasn’t just a cold.
This morning I’m feeling a lot better. A little shivery, and occasional dizzy spells if I stand up too quick, and I feel tired despite sleeping well—but no more sneezy, drippy stuff. A few people on Twitter sent me some get-well wishes, and I appreciate it; thank you to all.
One more rest day and I should be fine. And that’s good, because tomorrow I’m going to need my strength. The inherited project from hell, even though it now appears to be working adequately, still needs more work. But enough of that for now; I don’t want to even think about it today.
What I do want to think about, and actually make some progress on, is project codename GB2, the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. My content editor sent through some more comment markups on the timeline, but thanks to the day-job overload and then the bout of illness I haven’t had a chance to take more than a little look. In a little bit I’m going to get busy reviewing those. And so without further ado, it’s time to grab a coffee and get geared up. Until next time . . .
Downtime
. . . and about time, too. The last few weeks have been far too busy, and to be honest I can use a break. We lost another developer last week—one who’d taken on one of the projects I’d worked on for a while—which means I got that project back on my plate. Lucky for me, it only has about four problems that need fixing, and three of those should be pretty easy to deal with. The bigger, more messy project (the one I mentioned in the previous post) seems to be coming together at last, in that it looks like the worst of the mess is cleaned up, and the thing seems to be working a lot more reliably.
Which means I’ve had a bit more time to work on writing projects, and I haven’t been quite so whacked by the time I get home that I haven’t had the energy to do something useful. And that’s meant that, at last, I was able to finish a major editing pass on The Voyage of Valerie McGrath this week (even though it took far longer than it should have). No bad thing, considering the deadline for content editing is less than a week away. (Stop press: email from editor telling me it’s gone off to line editing. Phew!)
The plan for this coming week, then: top priority, deal with any more editing on McGrath that comes back from my line editor as and when. Next priority, back to working on the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. My editor on that one came back with a herd of comments on the timeline, so I’ll be addressing those first, and I expect that to take all of this week at the very least.
And from experience, I’ll refrain from making any plans beyond that. Plans have a habit of getting changed or thrown out completely, in many cases before they’ve even been set in motion properly. Sometimes it’s better to just take it one day at a time.
It Is What It Is
My regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Brentford) will know that last week at work, I was finishing up some major bug fixing. Well, things didn’t go quite as easily as I’d hoped. As things worked out, more problems were found, and it all ended up with me working through Friday (which was supposed to be a day off). I’d like to be able to say that everything works now—but that would probably be the kiss of death. I’m not making any such assumptions. Tomorrow is Presidents’ Day (aka George Washington’s birthday) which is a government holiday, so I do at least get one well-earned extra day before I have to get back to it. Tuesday, then, I’ll have a better idea of where things stand.
What of things on the writing front?
GB2
As I mentioned a while back, work on the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia has been put to one side for a little while. I made some notes about a couple of ideas for how to wrap things up at the end, and that’s about it. I’ll be getting back to that after doing what needs to be done on . . .
The Voyage of Valerie McGrath
This is the short story for Xchyler Publishing’s Around The World In 80 Days anthology, which will be out in the spring. (By the way, that was just the name and theme of the anthology contest itself; the real title hasn’t been decided yet.) I got notes back from my editor on a few points needing some work, and I’ll be getting into that shortly (when I’ve finished this post and got some coffee in front of me).
Last but not least . . .
The Top Secret Writing Project
Or rather, it was a secret, but no longer. In 2012 I finished the first draft of a novel, and it’s been sitting in the shadows since then. A couple of weeks ago I decided I’d really like to knock it into publishable shape and get it submitted, so I dusted it off ready to get started into it. This is going to be very much a background task—the first priority right now is Valerie McGrath, then GB2 will be the focus. Reading it back through, though, there’s some pretty good stuff in there. The ending is flat and needs work, and there are quite a few scenes in there that will need to be rewritten, but on the whole it’s a good start. I’ll be working on this when I have spare minutes and there’s nothing pressing on the higher-priority jobs.
And so . . . time for that coffee I mentioned, and then I’ll be editing Valerie McGrath. Until next time . . .
Bad, Bad Week
I just got through one of the heaviest work weeks I can remember in quite some time. One of our developers is leaving, so his projects are being transitioned over to other people, and I’m one of the lucky ones. But as it turned out, this guy’s work is, to put it mildly, appallingly bad. Having worked on this project for more than six months, the thing still wasn’t working—and it was supposed to have been rolled out to production the week before last.
So I was drafted in to try to get it into shape. And after four very tough days, including late night finishes, we’re almost there. One last bug to be nailed (which will probably be dealt with Monday morning) and it can go for final testing.
All of which has meant that there’s been no time for anything else. Work on GB2 has got no further than it was this time last week. The Voyage of Valerie McGrath (the short story that’s going into Xchyler Publishing’s Around The World In 80 Days anthology) is still to be edited (but I’ve had no word from my editor on that, so there’s little I could have done anyway). I’ve had no time even to relax with a bit of gaming.
Today, then, is going to be all about relaxation. I want to spend an hour working on the GB2 timeline (I have some ideas to get that ending sorted out), and I think I could do worse than have a read through McGrath to spot any mistakes I missed earlier. And I do want to have a little game time. (World of Warcraft? Diablo III? Not sure yet.)
And so, it’s time to get moving on that. Tea, then get on with it. Until next time, gentle reader . . .
Eleven Hour Shift
Yesterday was horrible. Not the working-at-home-because-of-snow part—I have no problems staying focussed on the day job, it’s quieter than working at the office, and coffee and snacks are close to hand. In fact, it was all just fine until knocking-off time. I had an errand to run as soon as the work day was over, and I was clearing half a foot of snow off the car when my phone rang. It turned out that a new release of a web application, that had been installed at 3pm, was having problems. It turned out to be some weirdness in the database server, and somewhere along the line it cleared itself and everything started working. But by that time I’d been working for eleven hours pretty much straight. I missed a Facebook release party (too busy arranging some dinner) and then slept heavy for something like ten hours. It’s mid-day and I still feel like I’m barely awake.
Anyway, on to the important stuff. The sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia (which in future I’ll refer to here as GB2) is coming along quite nicely. The first draft of the timeline was sent to my editor last week. The ending still isn’t set in stone—there’s a section that describes where all the characters are and what needs to be resolved, and I have a couple of ideas on how to wrap things up. And my editor will no doubt spot many scenes that need work.
But that’s on hold for a little while. I think I mentioned, a few posts back, that a steampunk short story I wrote for Xchyler Publishing‘s Around The World In 80 Days anthology contest made the cut; it’s scheduled for release at the end of May, I think, but the deadline for copy editing is just a few short weeks away. I should be getting something from my editor in a couple of days, and as soon as that happens I’ll be getting busy with getting that story into shape.
For now, I’ve decided to take a weekend off writing. I finally broke down and went back to playing World of Warcraft, after an absence of, I think, well over a year. At that time I gave up on it for a number of reasons: that I don’t like doing dungeons with people I don’t know (because, to be honest, even with a group as small as five players, you can guarantee at least one will be some twit who forgets that it’s a game and takes it way too seriously—it’s supposed to be fun, guys, not a chore); that even creating new characters, exploring the same areas and going through the same quests was getting somewhat old; that they seemed to be dumbing the game down; and that the Mists Of Pandaria expansion appeared to pander (har!) to kids, paving the way for a Hello Kitty Island Adventure expansion. But the thing is, it’s still by far the best MMORPG I’m aware of, and after such a long time away from it I’m seeing some things afresh. It’s still loads of fun.
So, I’m going to grab a cup of coffee and go play for a little while, then maybe park myself with a book for a bit. If you’re a WoW player and you happen to be on the Shu’halo realm, and you see a level 19 Alliance Pandaran hunter running around Redridge Mountains or Duskwood with a pet fox, just /yell the magic word “Gunn”. If I yell back “Bohemia”, you found me <grin>.
Until next time, gentle reader . . .
I have ten minutes . . .
. . . while I wait for dinner at the fast food joint. I’m posting from my phone, so this will be short.
The time line for the Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia sequel is coming along. I expect to have the first pass done tomorrow.
Now, I know I said I’d quit playing World of Warcraft a long time back. Well, I couldn’t resist—I bought the latest expansion pack the other day, and started playing last night. Not playing when I should be writing takes self-discipline but so far hasn’t been an issue.
Right, food should be ready in a minute or two. Posting.
[Update: that entry was something of an experiment, to test publishing a post from my phone. Not too successful; the formatting was off and even the title got screwed up somehow. I probably won’t do that again.]
Storytime
It’s been a while since I posted, and since that last one—despite what I said about getting properly back to work on the Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia sequel—I haven’t been able to find as much time as I’d hoped. Until today, that is. Today I was able to spend several hours tweaking the timeline and putting in some changes that I’d made notes about. I’m very pleased that I’ve been able to make some real progress at last.
(Now, a small confession: I’ve been watching Breaking Bad some of the time when I could, and should, have been working on the story. I can’t help it that the show is addictive. But we watched the last episode of the final season yesterday, so that won’t be happening again.)
There’s good news, though. The timeline is in fact mostly complete, in that all of the major story elements are in place. (And for some of this I give thanks to my editor, who scanned an early snapshot of the timeline when I got stalled, and asked some questions that highlighted places that needed work, and so helped me get moving again.)
Most of what I was doing today involved working out when each scene takes place and making sure that things fit, and making corrections when they didn’t (for example, I found one scene with two secondary characters going to the theatre when everyone else would have been eating breakfast). I’m a little bit short of halfway through that process, and I expect to get finished tomorrow. After that comes another pass of the story to make sure everything makes sense and that questions raised in early scenes get answered by the end. And I know that the ending scenes need some work—what’s there now seems rushed, with too much happening in just a couple of scenes. Those need to be broken up and spread out a little so that it doesn’t all come across as too abrupt.
So although progress is slow, the pace is picking up and I really think I’ll have a good draft of the timeline fairly soon. At that point I’ll share it with my editor, and then I can polish it until we agree it’s time to begin the actual writing.
Meanwhile, some small news about Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia. I already mentioned that Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins, CO was stocking print copies of the book on their shelves. To that I can now add that Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver has copies at all three of their locations. I’m planning on running by Old Firehouse, and Tattered Cover’s Colfax Avenue store, some time next week. With a camera. Pictures of the book on the shelf will be posted online. There will be rejoicing.
And talking of pictures, I’m giving serious thought to adding a Readers’ Gallery to this blog, rather like the one Craig Hallam set up on his blog. Have you read Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia? If so, and you’re up for sending me a selfie, use the Contact form (the link’s at the top of this page) to let me know. If there’s enough interest, I’ll set that up and get back to you.
Now, a parting note on the subject of the title of this post. Storytime is an apt title for an author’s blog post—but in this case it also has a special meaning, in that it’s the name of a song by Finnish symphonic rock band Nightwish. The song is on YouTube, and it’s really rock-yer-socks-off stuff. I’ve been listening to more of their songs while working, and I’m most impressed.
And on that musical note, I’m off to do a little more work on the timeline. Until next time, gentle reader . . .
Pete Ford 