My face hurts.

The author I enjoy the most, the one whose writing style I find the most appealing to me, is Stephen King. His book, On Writing, is an incredibly good read and proved to be something of an inspiration to my own work. His novel The Stand is a fantastic multi-character story dealing with large themes such as the actions of humanity when faced with oblivion, personal conflict opposed to the greater good and a renewed belief in faith. I have nothing but respect for the guy, a brilliant character writer who puts the words down honestly and tells stories which have impacted modern culture.

The author whose stories I enjoy the most is David Gemmell. His tales of flawed heroes standing in the face of overwhelming odds is one of the (many) reasons I wrote the book I did. The common aspects of his work - courage, loyalty and respect - run through plenty of his characters. My dad recommended him to me, passing me the book Legend to read. "Take a look at this," he said with more than a little enthusiasm. "There's loads of violence in it, with guys having their guts torn out and head cut off. You'll love it." I was about thirteen at the time. He was right. There's a lot of violence in it. I reckon he found the morals and lessons within the book just as enjoyable, of course, but he needed to sell it to me first. Decapitations worked, and Legend is one of the best books I've ever read.

Anyway, updates, updates.. I've spent the week with toothache while the missus swished her way over to Italy for a few days with her friend. I've been sitting here, in something of a pillow-and-blanket nest, on the couch of a brilliant little cabin on the shores of Norway. During that time I have been completely unproductive. I'll be honest, I haaaate toothache, and this one was an absolute belter. But it got me thinking; How long can I reasonably slack off from doing any work?

Then I remembered I'm meant to be writing full time at this point, so I'm essentially my own boss. So I have to kick my own arse when I'm being lazy. I'm curious to know if I'm going to be any good as a boss. I have an employee staff of one - me - and I know I can be incredibly good at avoiding doing anything at all if given the chance. I'll have to take steps to train me.

That was a bit confusing to write.

I read this article on what to do between the first and second draft of a story and found it quite useful. At least, it gave me something to think about. I'm still quite a way away from picking up the book and going through it, but I think about it often. I'm really looking forward to that first read through. It could be dreadful, of course, but I have an idea that I'll enjoy it either way, just as proof to myself that I am capable of writing a full novel. Once that's done, if the people I choose to be my first test readers dump all over it, then I can just go 'Ah well' and stick it in a flash drive somewhere and move on to something else. (I was going to write 'stick it in a drawer', but I don't have it on paper and I don't have any drawers on my desk. So that buggered that one.)

I'm going to write a short story for this competition and then review a Dungeons and Dragons campaign the missus wrote up - she'd sent a pitch in to D&D Magazine and recently received a mail back from the editor asking her to submit the full thing. I'm dead proud of her. It would be excellent if she got it published as a first time writer.

(bitch.)

I kid, I kid. Anyway, that's my workload for the week. I have to think of something I want to write about for 5,000 words. Hmm.