Still incarcerated So, the progress?
Hiya sickboy. Hope the novel writing is going well.
By Anonymous, at
8:57 PM
Have you actually made it onto the Continent proper yet? I keep hearing all this stuff from England and Wales and Scotland and you see where I'm going with this, right?
It's coming! Don't be so impatient.
By Anonymous, at
6:00 PM
P.S. Does anyone think a Segway tour of Paris might be the way to go?
By Anonymous, at
6:05 PM
No. I'm pretty sure nobody does.
Y'know, you say that, but apparently the wishes of the Parissiennes are insufficient for the all conquering force that is Segway - to whit: http://www.parissegwaytours.com/
By Anonymous, at
4:47 AM
Oooh! Romantic comedy! Sounds nice. I like the Swashbuckling style of 'Bard Wars', but it really only has one character, and that is the fatally flawed and really icky one of Fellport itself. I wrote an introduction for the 2050-something edition of 'Bard Wars' from an Islamofascist perspective for Androoo's Introductionary back in April, but he never put it up. :( Anyway, congratulations! You have written enough of the novel so that my Introduction (which relied on the interpretation of later chapters I made up myself) is no longer relevant. Hurrah!
True that Fellport is the only character into which I've put any real effort (although I think Nana and Jedlow and occasionally Casimir have marginally more than a single dimension - hmm, can you have fractions of dimensions, or does that cause quantum anomolies?)
Ahh.. romance.. but wait, don't females normally write romance novels. I would normally expect the genre written from a male to be more like ... sexy comedy.
Fractional dimensions are very eighties; remember the Mandelbrot set? It is even perfectly acceptable to have characters with less than one dimension, if they exist only as a disconnected series of vignettes.
I didn't post the Introductionary thing because I clean forgot it, and can't find it now. Still, you've just posted it up so I'll put it in some time today.
By Andrew Shellshear, at
12:12 PM
Marco, it probably won't be much like any romantic comedy anyone who reads or likes romantic comedies would have read or liked before...
Aw, no worries, Androoo! Cheerful real estate news tonight, we have apparently sold our house in Devil Bunny City- though I won't believe it until the five days cooling-off period is over...
Hurrah! Ours, of course, remains on the market, unloved and un-offered-for...
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
I had actually intended to go to work today. Really. Apart from a croaky voice I felt fine when I woke up. Bit of stiffness in the joints, but nothing you wouldn't get after a spot of exercise the previous afternoon. No problems. All that hale and hearty fitness went away the second I started sneezing. Then I made the mistake of getting out of bed.
Now I'm wrapped up in about nine layers of wool products with the heater going full blast to counteract the insidious wintry exertions of the outside world. And consuming tissues, throat lollies and tea in enormous quantities (not to mention counteracting their intended effects with milky coffee and M&M's, because I am sick and therefore have clear license to consume garbage in any proportions I choose).
And, I hope, writing the odd bit of my novel instead of stalling with redundant health reports on my blog.
As reported last night, 12 chapters are now completed for a total word count of an improbably round 86,400 (with an average chapter length of 7200, because I am distracting myself with all manner of unnecessary statistics-keeping). I am now looking at Chapter 13 being the final chapter of this draft of the story, though there's a likelihood I'll need to wrap some things up with a (wossname) denouement-y, epilogue-y thingy. We'll see who's still standing after the ball.
My plan after this, and I'm not sure how much I've talked about it, is to completely rewrite the thing almost from first principles, employing heretofore unprecedented tools of literature like plans and an outline. Hopefully they may help me access that previously-untapped wellspring from which spring plausible characters and adequate description, fundamentals I feel are somewhat noticeable in their absence from this draft.
But that might have to wait for a bit. I've decided to try my hand at something completely different next, inspired pretty much as a direct reaction to the somewhat miserable tone of 'Bard Wars' themes of deception, betrayal and generally being horrible to one another. To which end, I'm probably going to write a romantic comedy.
Bear in mind, though, it's still me writing it...
14 Comments:
To put things in perspective, I found out that after 6 days of travelling with a tour guide around Ireland, she fell sick with chicken pox on the day after the tour finished. Obviously I'm not overly concerned, having had chicken pox a few years ago, but I'd imagine there are a few people on the bus who might be a little worried.
Incidentally, Ireland is gorgeous.
Das Simonster.
If the British Isles weren't so damn pretty, I might be over there by now.
Certainly nobody French does.
I'm dying to see the Canberra version 8^)
I've been thinking a little bit about how to flesh Fellport out a bit more in the rewrite; one goal is to make its corruption and general ickiness more specific, more entrenched, more structured and in greater contrast to its idealistic revolutionary origins.
I've never read the critique, dammit. After I've finished the draft, do you want to send it to me? A bit of slanted historical revisionism might be just the perspective I need (if only to react against...)
I just mention this because Kylie is planning to write a romance novel.
...
Sorry about that.
