Playing the Tuba in the Bathtub

I have been otherwise occupied over the past few weeks. It seems the universe conspires to keep me busy and away from writing. There have been regrettable but unfortunate family tragedies and several trips across the not-that-small island that is the basis of George Arrrr! Arrrr! Martin’s Westeros (I even got to take a photo of the only place I could think of that would be the perfect Casterly Rock!). Heck, I even had a chance to be present and bear witness to Spider Man receiving a medical award for his research on mutations!

At work, a new line manager has meant now there is loads of work to do, and this past week I have been transported to the magical world of Agresso financial software, as I have been engaging in non-stop invoice registration and posting! The excitement is akin to taking flight on a griffin for the first time.

Yup.

A Griffin.

You don’t catch the sarcasm?

Then I am either a rubbish writer or you love financial transactions.

Which is worse?

;-P  

Thing is, though, that maybe I should just shut my yap and get on with it.

It is all well and good to talk a good novel, but what matters is that the blasted thing is written, and at some 60 odd pages, it hardly classifies as anything more than a disjointed novella.

In that respect, I have been trying very hard to at least release The Space Between the Stars here on the blog sooner rather than later. It has been a short story in the making this summer which essentially gives the very beginning of the Fantasy World of Niwent. I have passed it on to my editor (yup, K), for a final draft read, but she has been a little busy at the moment, which means as soon as she gives me the feedback I can go ahead and post it here!

Speaking of feedback (uh-oh!), if you have already read The Cicada and the Deep, Deep Dark feel free to let me know what your thoughts on it are.

It has received three reviews on Amazon (one is on the US site, two on the UK site), but the more the merrier, as they say.

I Need to Clean my Keyboard

I tend to eat at my desk a lot. It’s convenient; it’s where my computer is.

Not that I dislike the outdoors in any way. Take today for example. While slightly hazy, it is quite a pleasant, dry, warm day to sit outside and take some much needed vitamin D, and just sit and vegetate.

But no, not I. I prefer to sit in front of the PC trawling through ridiculous amounts of completely useless information on Wikipedia, while listening to the likes of Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’ and Enrique Iglesias’s (ssss) 'Bailando'. Who would have thought that voice would come out of a skinny, white Australian lass? (No, not Enrique’s. Iggy).

The world is truly full of surprises.

As to why someone who used to work cleaning rooms for a living would want to ‘trash the hotel’ is beyond me. But to each his own, I guess.

 Right, back to the issue of the desk meals. (MS Word, you are getting on my nerves with all these ‘Reflexive. Consider Changing’ notifications. Stick to simple spelling mistakes, please!) Eating at the desk means inevitably I will find bread crumbs on my keyboard, which is quite a vexing thing. Yes, they are MY crumbs, but nonetheless it is annoying because my keyboard soon resembles my toaster.

But in the moments of quiet, contemplating solitude in front of the screen that I am not finding out about the City of Batman, Turkey (Yes, there is a City called BATMAN! How incredibly awesome is that? I do hope you are not lying, Wikipedia.), I am trying to write something. Be it a blog, a rant, or a short story, or trying to work up the energy to get into the groove to get the novel back on course.

Small steps and small victories, I tell myself.

To that end, I am close to finishing (I hope), a short story, which I hope to publish here on the Niwent blog soon. I have possibly mentioned it on previous blog posts. It is the Genesis story of the Niwent, which is something which I was quite keen to put down in writing early on. So I hope when it does come out it will be read by more than myself and Kirsty.

Guess that’s all for the moment…

I shall either clean this keyboard, or get back to writing something.

I love slow days at the office. ;-) 

Aflutter…a-flutter…a flutter?!

I had someone tell me yesterday that there was another mistake in CDDD. 

The first one was discovered last weekend by my father-in-law, who found a tiny but nonetheless unacceptable error in one line, where the word ‘as’ had been accidentally written as ‘at’. It was more than likely the product of my brain reading ahead of itself and filling in the letters of words before my eyes scanned the word for spelling issues. It is a common problem for people who go over the same piece of writing twenty or thirty times.

But it was that K missed it which was more kerfuffling (spellchecker does not accept the gerund of kerfuffle. Go figure). I can understand that she would be personally a tad miffed at this, because she takes great pride in her title as Guarantor of the Goodness of Grammar. She is a sharp cookie (where does that phrase come from? Did someone bake a cookie with glass or razor blades to give it an edge?) who takes great pride in knowing her prefixes from suffixes.

So to be told that there was a SECOND mistake was, well, a whole miffing kerfuffle of hubbubing proportions.

I may be embellishing this a tad.

The proportions were not ‘hubbubing.’

But the kerfuffle was definitely miffing.

In any case, it all had boiled down to the proper usage of the word ‘aflutter.’

Those of you expecting me to put the pages of text in question better go accidentally defrost a Baked Alaska.

Or better yet, purchase a copy of The Cicada and the Deep,Deep Dark written by yours truly and illustrated by the lovely Colette Lilley from your favourite Amazon website. Or if you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you can borrow a copy.

See, always looking to enthusiastically promote my book to the three people who read this blog (and one of them is K, so that makes it two readers…possibly).

Back to the flutter.

The reader in question, Alisha*

‘Who is Alisha?!’ asked K with a hint of indignation only slightly less noticeable than lavender essence on meringue. (How many Great British Bake-off references can I cram into one blog entry?)

She is a gaming cognoscenti-in-training and friend who attends board game sessions at the Scythe and Teacup on some evenings.

A girl?!

In a geeky gaming café?!

Was she blind?!

I am again, perhaps going a bit over the top.

While they are not as prominent as the delightful teenage lads who yell YU-GI-OOOOOOH! From the top of their lungs, there is a small but fiercely dedicated cadre of gaming ladies at the Scythe.

And thank goodness for that.

But I digress.

I seem to have gone somewhat off tangent there.

It may have had something to do with the fact that one of my co-workers is wearing what I can only describe as a ‘see through chain mail styled shirt’. I don’t know why, for the sake of me, a grown adult would wear something like that in the northern latitudes (or to work in a library, as opposed to, say, clubbing). If he thinks it looks macho, um, well, it kind of looks like he is trying very hard to imitate Vernon Wells in Commando or Weird Science

…but not quiet cutting the 1980's bad guy grade. Lets just say I am thankful there are two large computer screens separating my view from his desk.

And that is why I do not wear see through shirts. ;-P

At least my co-worker is thankfully not wearing Vernon's 'Arse-less Chaps' from Mad Max 2:

Goodness me!

Anyways, back to the issue of the flutter…for the second time.

The Online Dictionary defines Aflutter as such:

Clearly there is room for interpretation, but the first definition is the one I am holding firmly by. So I shall stick to my literary guns and say it is not a misuse of the word. ;-)

It is ridiculously warm in the office right now. I so dislike the fact that the English do not believe in Air Conditioning.

Perhaps Global Warming may provide the incentive to install these beauties in offices so they do not feel like saunas…

Right, off to edit the work K and I talked about early in the week while listening to the Billboard Top 30 for last month!         

Jam Sessions

So I had a Jam Session with my editor yesterday afternoon.

For those of you who have not read this blog, do so.

There are only half a dozen small entries. It’s not exactly War and Peace or something written by George R.R. Martin.

My editor is, now that you have caught up and read the rest of the blog (you have, haven’t you?) mi wife, K. I call her that because she is a firm believer in proper grammar, syntax and punctuation. She is paragon of orthography; the Praetorian guard of Lords and Ladies of Spelling.

You sort of get the idea.

More than that, though, she is the first person I sought to talk to in depth about Niwent (which wasn’t called that at the time) the first story arc, and the history and mythology of it.

K was notoriously difficult to convince about the whole thing.

She is a voracious, cultured reader.

But fantasy fiction is not her Baked Alaska (see how I incorporate topical social media trending issues?).

She has read pretty much all of the works of Terry Pratchett and is an avid Neil Gaiman fan. But high fantasy is not really something she is highly familiar with.

For that matter, neither am I.

But I shall talk about my writing origins story at a later date.

K took a great amount of convincing from the day I first started the story arcs and the development of the themes within Niwent.

A great amount of convincing.

But it all clicked one night over a dinner about a year and a bit ago. We got into a discussion (alright, I pretty much started it and pressed on) over a large glass of wine about the story in my head and it just seemed to turn into a marvelous exchange of ideas to and fro where she questioned some of the things I was proposing, forcing me to elucidate on vague notions to flesh them out and see what worked and what didn't.

I loved her enthusiasm. It was intoxicating to have someone want to engage at that level, to challenge you and push you to not merely defend a notion, but to develop it.

And I loved having to present the story to someone and getting them to become interested and invested in it.

I know writers don’t write for anyone but themselves. There is a story buried deep within your head and you do everything you can to dig it out, dust it, clean it and commit it to vellum…or eVellum as the case might be nowadays.

It is a personal accomplishment more than scripting something for the acceptance of others.

I like the ideas in my head.

I love them.

I think they are fantastic and fabulous.

Fantabolous.

And K gives me something which any and all writers would be immeasurably grateful to have: a focal point.

No. Better still.

K reigns me in when she sees that in my hyperactivity I may be writing myself into a corner, or worse yet, writing some awful cliché about ‘no one writes baby into a corner.’

So having Jam Sessions with her is a wonderful thing.

She isn’t afraid of bringing the proverbial hammer down.

She absolutely will not pull punches.

If it’s rubbish, then she will say so.

If she really likes it, she will say so (and usually I react like an overactive fat Italian cook going ‘SHE LIKE-A DA SAUCE, LUIGI! SHE LIKE-A DA SAUCE!’

And before you get your knickers in a twist, I am half Italian.

I can get away with making fun of my own people’s stereotypes.

:-P

So, on to yesterday’s Jam Session:

It was incredibly short for a jam session, lasting a train journey of about 20 minutes. But it was fun. She was re-reading the equivalent of the Genesis of the Niwent: my world’s story of creation. It has become the one story I dare say she has invested in, given the amount of criticism she gives me about it. We perused through some of the old printouts of the story (yes, I still print my stuff out), looking at some of the previous formats. She liked the earlier drafts where I made the story straight prose as opposed to my more favoured series of spaced out sentences. And I have to agree it reads better as prose. I tend to use single sentences as a means of providing emphasis on a particular statement, but if I do it for EVERY sentence, then all I am doing is being annoying.

She was only able to read the first tree pages of the story before we had to alight, but still, it was three pages of sheer enjoyment where a childish grin just could not leave my face.

I later spent the night going and re-drawing the group of Islands where the Children of the Star Forest are from, and I was much more pleased with the result. I won’t give much more away until I am completely happy with the results, but at the moment I can say I am about 95% happy. What I will say is that when you do see it, the main island of the chain will be more or less some (having only JUST now worked out the scales) some 750 miles by 536 miles.

Plenty of space to develop a fantasy story or two.

;-)

Meh!

I guess that sums up my mood at the moment. Not because there has been a lack of activity, mind you. Work (that humdrum 9-5 desk jockey routine thing 90% of people in the developed world put up with as a means of giving an economic meaning to their lives) has picked up considerably in the last two weeks, thanks largely to the tail end of the ‘settling in’ period of my new line manager (well, my line manager’s manager), a woman concerned first and foremost with the bottom line for our department. What can our department do to save time and money (besides replacing all of us by nice automated units, though that has not gone undiscussed)?

You would think it was the high stakes world of corporate finance, but it is just a library.

You know, books, old ladies shushing people, studious little nerds and geeks seeking sanctuary in the hallowed grounds of the bibliotheke amidst dusty old tomes of forgotten knowledge.

And oak wood paneling everywhere.

Except libraries nowadays are not supposed to be that anymore.

Nope.

No Sir!

Libraries are all singing, all dancing, all prancing spectacles of social media interaction and multi-layer mobility.

The new age librarian is all about the constant tweeting of short, banal, often overused phrases or quips they saw on someone else’s twitter account without cross checking; or about face booking with people who ‘like’ the library page because the FB page is so much more interesting than the actual process of LEARNING; or  ‘instagraming’ photos and selfies of themselves at the library, attempting to convert it into a hip, happening place where trendy bearded hipsters with sleeve tats, early 20^th century hairstyles (NOT haircuts, NEVER haircuts!) and tight jeans can sit whilst sipping a decaf soya latte in a 100% made from recycled cardboard cup  and using their iPads to look at the latest trending issues.

You can guess by the writing I’m a bit of an old fashioned, bitter gentleman who likes his libraries happy yet quiet and filled with heavy yet surprisingly non-flammable books (yes, traditional libraries are notoriously difficult to set fire to. The paper is stacked up so tightly in the books and shelves that oxygen, one of the three ingredients for a fire, cannot get in between to promote combustion. Yay for science!)

But I digress.

My new boss’s boss has had us doing assignments to gauge the effectiveness of the electronic service delivery platform (fancy and elitist way of saying: electronic catalogue). Said service, it should be said, is rubbish.

We knew it before the tests.

But we need to collate, quantify and analyse copious amounts of data from various different groups in order to present an accurate representation of the bugs inherent in the system.

Basically we are testing it until it breaks.

Not a difficult thing.

The side effect of this and having another line manager (parallel to my team but not directly ours) suddenly start handing us his overspill to complete has meant that my writing has ground to a standstill.

And it is annoying the granola out of me.

While I was working on The Cicada and the Deep, Deep Dark, and while I was working on the overarching storyline that CDDD originates from I was happy.

Yes, I do not say that word often when I refer to work.

I was happy.

Not just content.

There was a feeling of progression. A sense of purpose and action coursing through me that fueled me and built a gentle yet constant momentum.

A very happy feeling.

I appreciated me.

Sounds vain and egotistical, I know.

But it is an immensely invigorating and rejuvenating feeling to have, self-appreciation.

Not to mention quite humbling.

Anyways, I am once again ranting.

I drew a map about two weeks ago, just as the whole circus of the free promotion was about to start.

It was a lovely little map of the island where the Children of the Star Forest come from.

I even coloured it and tried to make it look like one of those fancy fantasy maps.

Only it looked like a 5 year old drew it.

But I did not mind.

The map made something magical happen.

It gave the story a sense of location. Maps are special in that way. They give us something concrete to envision.

Mind you within an hour or so of drawing it, inking it and colouring it I had changed my mind with regards to about half a dozen things regarding topography, elevations and locations.

Ah, well. Such is life.

It’s still a very nice little map.

I think I shall go have another look at it and start drawing those changes. 

I might even share it here later.

:-)