Month: November 2009

A Little Respect

29th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

And if I should falter,
Would you open your arms out to me?
We can make love not war –
And live at peace in our hearts.
I’m so in love with you,
I’ll be forever blue.
What religion or reason
Could drive a man to forsake his lover?

I’ve written my foreword, I’ve produced a PDF of the (un-)finished article, and very shortly I’l be sending it off to the printers, for a very limited print run of two copies, much as I have for each of the three other completed NaNo Novels.

Tomorrow I get to kick back, relax, and most importantly, not write anything. It’ll be marvellous.

In case anyone is interested, while I’m not ready to release the text of Thinner than Water to anyone other than myself as yet, you can read the foreword, which I hope gives a clear indication of what I’m doing, here: https://www2.sleepawaytheafternoon.org.uk/foreword-to-thinner-than-water/

Another Universe

29th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in 1 Comment

It’s a strange way down from the cradle to the hearse,
Take me back, oh, put me in reverse.
‘Cos you’ll never be the last one and you’ll never be the first.
Maybe we’ll all meet again in another universe.

Yay! NaNoWriMo over for another year. Just got a foreword to write, explaining how my world was conceived and I’ll be chucking it in the direction of Lulu, to gather dust for 12 months or so until I decide if it’s worth doing something with. Of the previous three I’ve finished, I have one I want to clean up, one I never want to see again and one I’m not sure about.

This year I’ve been particularly annoyed by OpenOffice.org. What I’ve written this year has been particularly dialogue heavy, and there’s a bug in OOo’s wordcounter that counts opening quotation marks as words. So, having carefully planned my last 5,000 words, I wrote my ending paragraph, was over 50k and rejoiced. Then I copied and pasted the manuscript into the word count validator. 48,800. At that point I was ready to explode. How do 1,200 words disappear? Cue frantic skimming through the manuscript, find bits here and there that could be extended. Two hours later, it verifies as 50k. That two hours was the worst of any NaNo experience I’ve had to date, but at least it’s over now.

This was all complicated by the fact that what I’ve written was originally intended to be a prologue of about 5,000 words to a completely different story, so with regard to plotting it’s very tight and there isn’t a lot of space for adding waffle. In terms of setting up the next part, it’s all done very well, but I suspect that part 2 will never be written (I’ve tried sequels before; I become too attached to the characters and have trouble doing things like killing them off).

Ah well, I have 50,000 words of fiction, telling a story. It’s just not the story I originally intended to write.

Fresh Feeling

24th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

You don’t have a clue what it is like to be next to you.
I’m here to tell you that it is good, that it is true.

Birds singing a song, old paint is peeling,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.
Words can’t be that strong, my heart is real,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.

Ahh, bliss. As is traditional every November, I’m in the middle of a week off work ostensibly to catch up on my NaNoWriMo word count. This year, though, there isn’t much catching up to do. By the start of this week I was bang on target (and I’m now 500 words ahead, and will probably get some more down before the day is out). I’m satisfying my “primary” reason for this time off, but there’s an important secondary reason.

Since January 2nd this year, I’ve had two short breaks away from work and that’s it. A couple of long weekends away, a couple of odd Fridays (which were spent travelling up north for family reasons) and the strain is beginning to take its toll. So I have ten straight days without having to go to work and it’s bloody fantastic. There’s some stuff that I need to get done, but just doing bits and pieces as I get to them rather than trying to fit them around work and everything else that’s going on, it’s lovely just to do one at at time, no pressure, chilling the rest of the time.

So, yes. Rest is fantastic. A break from everything is just what I needed, and I’m enjoying myself immensely. May my newfound chilled-outness follow me back to work on the 1st.