This blog has been transferred to my new website, http://www.hennessywrites.com. Please go there for updates and information about myself and Queen of the World.
Thanks for reading!
-Ben-
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Mumble.
My current manuscript for the sequel to Queen of the World is at 51,000 words. I’ve been writing pretty much every day. I’m proud of the amount of work I’ve done – the writing began about four weeks ago – but I still sometimes wonder if I could do more. Being honest I probably could, but even now my brain is fried and my imagination comes in dribs and drabs. Writing is still fantastic, of course. There’s still that kick of falling into a scene and letting the words spill out. I guess as time goes on it’ll be easier and I’ll fall into a rhythm without as much effort. But that 51,000 seems like it should be another five figures on top. Which is nuts, really. I have some people on my Twitter page who are able to write ten thousand words a day. I managed that once. To finish the first draft of Queen of the World I wrote 12,000 words from 10am to 2am. When I’d finished I felt like I was drunk.
Stress is a factor for me, more than I perhaps realised early on. I’m trying to juggle various things in my life – I want to move back to Norway instead of sitting in my old bedroom in Essex, I want to get a job which allows me to live with my fiancée, I want to have a plan so that I can actually feel stable for once instead of living from a month-by-month basis – and it all impacts on my work. If I’m in a good mood I can hammer out four thousand words in an afternoon and then happily spend the rest of it watching films and playing games. Sometimes if I’m tired, or worrying about something, then it’s a crawl to even make a few hundred. It sounds a bit lame, like the struggling artist perception of needing to be in the zone, and I’m aware of that. If I was working as a plumber or in a warehouse I couldn’t phone in sick on the basis that I had things on my mind. I’d get laughed into unemployment. But since writing is technically a self-employed job, sometimes you have to kick your own arse and say ‘C’mon. Just get to work and stop being a dick.’
Thankfully, I find editing much easier. I received another section of revision from my editor, Sara, which I read in one sitting and applied the basics of into the Queen of the World draft. The comments and suggestions were just as helpful as before, and I’m starting to get a clear picture of my strengths and flaws as a fiction writer. One section involving a supporting character was absolutely mauled, but instead of upsetting me I actually got inspired and sat up in my chair thinking ‘Ok, so how can I fix this? Do I need to edit or rewrite? Is it even necessary?’
To my delight, when I sent out the final(ish) draft to some friends and peers, all of the critiques were very positive in their praise and any suggestions for change were pretty minor. Character names, uses of words, descriptions and the like. It was a hell of a morale boost and I did get a lot of useful information about the story, but I’d never experienced what it was like to having something directly pointed out as not being as good as it could be. So for my editor to pull out a part and say ‘This really isn’t as strong as the preceding chapters’ was like a jolt to the system, and one I really enjoyed. Getting my arse kicked is going to help much more than it’ll harm. (Though please don’t savage the rest of the book, Sara!)
That’s about it for now, really. I’m paying a visit to Norway on Friday which with a bit of luck will become permanent, so I’m passing the time with writing, drinking coffee and listening to Pearl Jam. I’ll update again in a few days with an article-thing I’ve been toying with.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
You Don't Need Dice: Pt.2
(Read 'Part One' here.)
Eventually I plucked up the courage to join in. I used the best typewriting I had, which mainly consisted of the correct capitalisation and an occasional comma. I made KurtCocaine walk over to one of the tougher looking characters and stare him right in the eye. And it had to be STARE HIM RIGHT IN THE EYE because, like my name, it made me sound cool and rebellious.
This other person, typing somewhere else in the world, wrote a brilliant descriptive paragraph about meeting Kurt’s gaze, giving a wry smirk and then punching him square in the face.
I wish I’d saved that paragraph somewhere because the effect it had on me was profound. To my credit, I typed back a hastily worded response about being punched in the face and falling over. I had enough sense to not try and make out I was all-powerful and untouchable. But I sat there dwelling over that response. This person, who’d never met me before and had no reason to acknowledge my ignorant intrusion on his game, had taken the time to respond to me. And it wasn’t just a ‘go away’ response. It was six or seven lines of good writing, crafted just for me to react to. I eventually sent the person a private message, asking a bunch of questions about the chat room I’d found myself in and thanking them for punching me in the face. The person responded by introducing himself as Frank, laughing about my excitement at being chinned and spent about thirty minutes explaining the general rules of the room. He also directed me to a forum which had been set up to support the game, introducing me to dozens more players.
The best part about the game was that there were very few rules at all. You couldn’t affect people without their permission, you couldn’t take the piss and create a character who was essentially God, and you couldn’t rip people off and imitate them. There was a combat system in place which did have quite a few stringent rules for the turn-based nature of it, but that was all. Anything else went. If you wanted a fire-breathing Jedi who rode a vampiric badger around, you could have one. If you wanted an undead mail-room clerk who occasionally ate a baby, you could have one. My imagination was limited so I initially made a barbarian-type character with a big sword and an even bigger beard. I remember typing the words rippling muscles a lot. I ran up that £300 pound phone bill I mentioned, but nobody ever questioned what I was doing with it.
I played and wrote in this game for about seven years.
Now think about that for a minute. Seven years. I reckon I accessed the rooms for around twenty hours a week from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, at which point I was allowed to bring the computer into my own room. Then my weekly access increased to about fifty hours. And also consider that everything was based in text. Character description. Narration. Dialogue. World building. Structure. The rules, the backgrounds and the accompanying prose. Every single thing about the game was written down and created through a keyboard. The players behind the characters became friends. Close friends. Two of them met up in real life, got married and had kids. I still know a few of the people from those days now, and have met several of them in real life. That was just in England; in America, where the majority of the players lived, people would travel hundreds of miles to meet up for lunch or hang out at each other’s places. I imagine quite a lot of us ‘roleplayed’ with each other for real... We were all teenagers, after all. I had two social lives, and I considered them equally important for a time. Those I went to school, worked and partied with – and those I knew solely through their writing.
It’s important to make a distinction there – this wasn’t a place to ‘escape reality’ or anything like that. I wrote about characters I enjoyed writing about in stories which interested me, but when I spoke to the other players I was still me. I was still Ben (Referred to as English Ben, since there were quite a few Bens involved). I purposely made sure I was truthful about what I was like in real life, so I didn’t make up a fake persona or present myself differently. I simply had to rely on my writing, which improved dramatically over those years.
So when it comes to ‘Read a lot and write a lot’, I used to believe I hadn’t written or read enough to qualify as an author. It held me back in attempting to write Queen of the World. I’d always written, but mainly in short stories or poems and the like. I’d always read, but within the genres I liked. I read fantasy by Gemmel, Eddings and Pratchett. I enjoyed horror by King, Herbert and Barker. I read a bit more here and there, but never ‘broadened my horizons’. I never read Chaucer, Austin or Hemmingway.
But then I realised that I had written and read HUGE amounts of text during those seven years. Maybe none of them were published or critically famous, but they were my age and they were of my level of competence at least. Many were better, especially in the beginning until I found my own style. Between twenty and fifty hours a week of writing for seven years to create worlds and stories with people from all across the world? I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands of words I put down. We created together, became better writers together and learned from each other’s strengths and faults. We saw what was good and slipped it into our own input. We saw what looked pretty terrible or what jarred us out of our little bubbles of immersion, and we cut it from our posts.
In a nutshell: I learnt to write through applying my imagination to the ideas of others. That sounds like some kind of tagline I want to try and put into quotes, but it is a good for any self-help enthusiasts who need something inspiring. I don’t reckon anyone will look to me to teach them how to write, and my work probably won’t win any awards for technical application of the English language. But I did learn to tell a story. The only difference is that with Queen of the World I told it by myself instead of with others to guide me, but without those brilliant writers who welcomed me into that online world of text – now sadly defunct, since Yahoo decided that everyone who uses internet chatrooms is either a child or a sexual predator and closed all user created content – then I don’t think it would have ever been written.
So to anyone who ever heard of Tenaria: Thanks.
And remember that reading and writing comes from a large number of different places. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be afraid to try something new.
Eventually I plucked up the courage to join in. I used the best typewriting I had, which mainly consisted of the correct capitalisation and an occasional comma. I made KurtCocaine walk over to one of the tougher looking characters and stare him right in the eye. And it had to be STARE HIM RIGHT IN THE EYE because, like my name, it made me sound cool and rebellious.
This other person, typing somewhere else in the world, wrote a brilliant descriptive paragraph about meeting Kurt’s gaze, giving a wry smirk and then punching him square in the face.
I wish I’d saved that paragraph somewhere because the effect it had on me was profound. To my credit, I typed back a hastily worded response about being punched in the face and falling over. I had enough sense to not try and make out I was all-powerful and untouchable. But I sat there dwelling over that response. This person, who’d never met me before and had no reason to acknowledge my ignorant intrusion on his game, had taken the time to respond to me. And it wasn’t just a ‘go away’ response. It was six or seven lines of good writing, crafted just for me to react to. I eventually sent the person a private message, asking a bunch of questions about the chat room I’d found myself in and thanking them for punching me in the face. The person responded by introducing himself as Frank, laughing about my excitement at being chinned and spent about thirty minutes explaining the general rules of the room. He also directed me to a forum which had been set up to support the game, introducing me to dozens more players.
The best part about the game was that there were very few rules at all. You couldn’t affect people without their permission, you couldn’t take the piss and create a character who was essentially God, and you couldn’t rip people off and imitate them. There was a combat system in place which did have quite a few stringent rules for the turn-based nature of it, but that was all. Anything else went. If you wanted a fire-breathing Jedi who rode a vampiric badger around, you could have one. If you wanted an undead mail-room clerk who occasionally ate a baby, you could have one. My imagination was limited so I initially made a barbarian-type character with a big sword and an even bigger beard. I remember typing the words rippling muscles a lot. I ran up that £300 pound phone bill I mentioned, but nobody ever questioned what I was doing with it.
I played and wrote in this game for about seven years.
Now think about that for a minute. Seven years. I reckon I accessed the rooms for around twenty hours a week from the ages of fourteen to sixteen, at which point I was allowed to bring the computer into my own room. Then my weekly access increased to about fifty hours. And also consider that everything was based in text. Character description. Narration. Dialogue. World building. Structure. The rules, the backgrounds and the accompanying prose. Every single thing about the game was written down and created through a keyboard. The players behind the characters became friends. Close friends. Two of them met up in real life, got married and had kids. I still know a few of the people from those days now, and have met several of them in real life. That was just in England; in America, where the majority of the players lived, people would travel hundreds of miles to meet up for lunch or hang out at each other’s places. I imagine quite a lot of us ‘roleplayed’ with each other for real... We were all teenagers, after all. I had two social lives, and I considered them equally important for a time. Those I went to school, worked and partied with – and those I knew solely through their writing.
It’s important to make a distinction there – this wasn’t a place to ‘escape reality’ or anything like that. I wrote about characters I enjoyed writing about in stories which interested me, but when I spoke to the other players I was still me. I was still Ben (Referred to as English Ben, since there were quite a few Bens involved). I purposely made sure I was truthful about what I was like in real life, so I didn’t make up a fake persona or present myself differently. I simply had to rely on my writing, which improved dramatically over those years.
So when it comes to ‘Read a lot and write a lot’, I used to believe I hadn’t written or read enough to qualify as an author. It held me back in attempting to write Queen of the World. I’d always written, but mainly in short stories or poems and the like. I’d always read, but within the genres I liked. I read fantasy by Gemmel, Eddings and Pratchett. I enjoyed horror by King, Herbert and Barker. I read a bit more here and there, but never ‘broadened my horizons’. I never read Chaucer, Austin or Hemmingway.
But then I realised that I had written and read HUGE amounts of text during those seven years. Maybe none of them were published or critically famous, but they were my age and they were of my level of competence at least. Many were better, especially in the beginning until I found my own style. Between twenty and fifty hours a week of writing for seven years to create worlds and stories with people from all across the world? I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands of words I put down. We created together, became better writers together and learned from each other’s strengths and faults. We saw what was good and slipped it into our own input. We saw what looked pretty terrible or what jarred us out of our little bubbles of immersion, and we cut it from our posts.
In a nutshell: I learnt to write through applying my imagination to the ideas of others. That sounds like some kind of tagline I want to try and put into quotes, but it is a good for any self-help enthusiasts who need something inspiring. I don’t reckon anyone will look to me to teach them how to write, and my work probably won’t win any awards for technical application of the English language. But I did learn to tell a story. The only difference is that with Queen of the World I told it by myself instead of with others to guide me, but without those brilliant writers who welcomed me into that online world of text – now sadly defunct, since Yahoo decided that everyone who uses internet chatrooms is either a child or a sexual predator and closed all user created content – then I don’t think it would have ever been written.
So to anyone who ever heard of Tenaria: Thanks.
And remember that reading and writing comes from a large number of different places. Don’t limit yourself, and don’t be afraid to try something new.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
You Don't Need Dice: Pt.1
Sometimes we take advice too literally.
(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).
One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’
This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?
Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.
But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?
How about games?
How about roleplaying games?
Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’
But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.
Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.
Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.
I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.
What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.
I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.
(Read 'Part Two' here.)
(I was going to put a ‘literally/literary’ pun in there. -sniggers-).
One of the most regularly repeated tips when it comes to writing is ‘Read a lot and write a lot.’
This is, of course, excellent advice to any writer regardless of experience, background and raw talent. If you don’t read plenty of authors who use a range of different styles then you won’t be exposed to what’s possible. If you don’t read something that takes your breath away then it’s difficult to know when your work could do the same to others; you’ll have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, if you don’t read something that just plain sucks, then how will you understand what to avoid in your own prose?
Same goes for writing. You need the tools to write. You need to practice, just like you need to practice drawing, playing an instrument or kicking a football. You need to write to find out your vocabulary level, your ability to use tenses and the best way to apply grammar. (For the record, I really suck at grammar terms. I know the rules and the application for the most part, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a Predicative Adjective or a Reciprocal Pronoun is precisely. Let’s just say I won’t be teaching creative writing at Oxford anytime soon.) You need to know if you can get the idea in your head down onto the page without losing any of the spark which got you excited in the first place. You must learn how much dialogue, description and introspection makes the best mix for you. All this comes from writing as much as you can.
But the endless supply of writing advice which is available on the internet and in magazines rarely specifies where you should practice these main two rules. Is it exclusively books? Fiction? How about websites? Do newspapers count? Blogs? Text messages?
How about games?
How about roleplaying games?
Ooh, got ya. See, here’s the bit where at least one person reading will say ‘Oh, Christ. This is where Ben confesses that his book is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and it’s going to be terrible.’
But it isn’t. Queen of the World is an original idea in a world I created. Some of the character ideas I’ve used through the years have been put through a grinder and find themselves sprinkled amongst the manuscript, though. Bear with me while I tell you a little story.
Years ago, maybe around 1997-ish, my family got its first home computer. It was a gift for me, under the pretence of ‘a good idea for doing schoolwork’ which is probably what every young teenager tells their parents before getting one. However, I wasn’t allowed to have it in my room, so it went into the landing and became the family computer. I shared it with two elder brothers. Mainly we played games on it. Commandos, Championship Manager and Half-Life are the games which stick in my mind. But the main novelty was having access to the internet. This was before the days of having broadband attached to your phone line – remember kids, you’re lucky these days – and we had to use a 56k dial up which made a buzzing sound as it typed in the phone number to connect every time you turned it on. It was also before pre-pay packages, so internet time was limited. There was no Facebook or Twitter. No Reddit or Imgur. Livejournal hadn’t exploded yet, and neither had MySpace. Mainly there was Hotmail, ICQ and chat rooms. One of the biggest ones was Yahoo Chat.
Now Yahoo Chat, like many other chat rooms in those early days of the mainstream internet explosion, gave users the ability to create their own rooms. These could be public or private, and weren’t policed very heavily. Some of the names were pretty grim. In the Teen section – and I was a fourteen year old boy so I qualified – there were a lot of rooms dedicated to sex. Now despite what a lot of my friends reading this will immediately presume, I never went into these sex rooms. Mainly because I was terrified it was somehow traceable, and my parents would get an email from the phone company about how I’d racked up a £300 pound phone bill in HOT TEEN SEX CHAT 16-19s, a room created by b1gd1ckst3ve.
I also wasn’t interested in rooms about Anime / Manga, Premier League Football or Take That. I couldn’t care less about rooms dedicated to people from California, Melbourne or Glasgow (Although when I did visit the Glasgow room one time to see if they typed in their accent, I was confronted with an incredible number of uses of the word ‘Fuck’). But what I was interested in was a few rooms dedicated to roleplaying. I clicked in and had a look, using the entirely roleplay appropriate name of ‘TheRealKurtCocaine’. Yeah, I was a Nirvana fan and I thought the surname pun made me sound cool and rebellious. Nevermind.
What I found was a room of about twenty people roleplaying. When I say that, I mean using an entirely text-based platform to create their game. Roleplaying existed on forums but it was too slow, having to wait for people to come on and post huge reams of description and exposition just to say ‘My character waves and leaves the room’ because they weren’t going to be able to get back online for a week. But in this chat room it was reactive. A group of people were creating a story on the fly depending on the actions of others. There was a loose ‘Type something then wait for others to have their turn’ but it wasn’t rigid. Some wrote several times while others hung back, waiting to contribute when the time was right.
I sat there and watched for about an hour, captivated. I sipped my can of Sprite and didn’t dare ruin it. I’d never taken part in anything like this before so I was worried there would be a huge set of rules I’d have to follow, and trying to join in would get me hounded out of there and banned for life. My brothers had dabbled with roleplaying – we had a couple of D&D books and a Call of Cthulhu game manual in our house, as well as some Warhammer miniature and a big foamy sword for LARPing as evidence – but I’d never taken part personally. Besides, the internet had only been filtering into people’s homes for the last year or two, discounting corporate, enthusiast or government use. This was new. This was for me.
(Read 'Part Two' here.)
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
National Novel Staring Month.
National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a love / hate relationship. Sometimes it inspires me to work harder than I usually would. Other times it hangs over me like a blanket of evil, whispering into my ear that I’m not going to make it.
Every year, thousands of people sign up for NaNoWriMo in an attempt to write a novel of fifty thousand words during November. This is my first year of taking part. I’ve been reading up on the forums of the website, trying to make a sense of it all. For some people it’s a breeze; fifty thousand words is obtained in a few weeks, and they assure everyone else that it is possible. All cheerleading and sabre rattling. Others find it a complete slog, shifting shit through a quicksand of ideas.
I’m currently in the second camp. I’m behind on my target and I’m finding it hard to catch up.
I think NaNoWriMo in itself is a great idea. The chance to bring people together through a mutual love of writing and to give them a goal is something I’m totally in favour of. I’m generally in favour of anything which brings people together through writing. So for that I commend it, and would advise anyone with more than a passing interest in the craft to take part next year (if you haven’t already had a pop).
On the other hand, my goodness is it a burden. Falling behind a couple of days is fine. You think to yourself ‘Sure, I’ll pick it up again next time. Easy.’ Nope. I’m so far behind I feel like I’m in a great big tunnel of fail. The light at the end is becoming dimmer by the day, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the end in time.
That’s a touch dramatic, but I hate missing deadlines. True, I’ve had enough distractions in the past couple of weeks to give a vaguely admissible excuse, but that doesn’t mean I’m losing. I want to win, God-damnit, and get my forum picture to prove it for next year.
I basically took part so that I could take some time off from Queen of the World. I’d been writing about that universe and the characters within it for nearly a year, and I needed the time to focus on something else. I’m going to finish the NaNoWriMo project before I move on regardless of if I finish it in November, so it’s simply a matter of how long it takes me.
Right now it feels like aaaaages.
In other news; well, nothing much happened this week. I’ve been writing, procrastinating, eating and sleeping. I actually have a bed in my room now. That might not sound like big news, but it’s been about four months since I was sleeping in a double bed with the missus. Norwegian sleeping arrangements are weird.
Oh, the second part of the Morocco trip is coming. It’s a bit of a writing-inspiration thing. You’ll see.
If any of you are taking part in NaNoWriMo this year then please add your comments on how it's going. Also, go and like my fan page if you haven't already. Ta!
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Game of Bastards.
Damn you, Game of Thrones.
So the missus and me watched the HBO series based on the Song of Fire and Ice series of books by George R R Martin. It's fantastic. Its high quality production, excellent cast and tale of political intrigue with a big dollop of fantasy tossed over it made it one of the best series I've seen in years. It's astounding. If you missed it, go and find it somewhere.
It's interested me in getting the books, which I will do as soon as I have my Kindle. Money is a bit tight at the moment, boo. But, judging by the Emmy nominations and rave reviews the show got, it also suggested that fantasy as a genre has a pretty big potential that hasn't been fully explored. Most times when it’s done seriously, it becomes huge. Look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films. That made around two billion for New Line Cinema in gross.
Robert Jordan, David Gemmel, David Eddings, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Terry Pratchett, Raymond Feist. Think of the movies and the series and the games that could be mined out of them all and more. Dragonlance film trilogy? Hells yes. Discworld MMO? Splendid.
I mean, remember The Beastmaster? That film was bad-ass.
Anyway, the reason I damn the Game of Thrones series is that I was so impressed I immediately went to work on the second draft of the book - hence the non-updates. I finished it up last night. Well, I finished up all the housekeeping work. Adjusting tense, fixing spelling mistakes and cutting out terribly long winded sentences when all the character is doing it picking something up. I made my notes and my to-do list and worked out what needs to be added to make it all a bit more coherent. I've come to terms with the fact that the book isn't going to be a literary Rambo. It's a slow burner and the events come with a gentle pace. I considered cutting out huge reams of text to make it snappier but I decided against it. There are enough books out there which hammer a hundred different explosions, deaths and titties into a single novel.
I like the book and I'm happy with it. With enough work I think it could be pretty good, and leave the option open for further books in the same world.
So I'm going to leave it for a couple of days and then start writing the additional scenes. I'm also considering removing some of the start, though I'm not sure what to remove. There's a fair bit which isn't directly related to the main plot but it does provide a sense of characterisation which I think is important. We'll see.
That's about it for now. Would just like to express my condolences to all the families of those lost to the Norway attacks yesterday. Was pretty unreal watching it all unfold on the TV and the developments just got steadily worse. All our thoughts are with you.
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