running out of stuff to do

I had a very weird mindset last night.

After the weekend where I got so much done I had this weird nagging sensation that I was going to run out of stuff to do. I mean this patently is just not the case - I've tonnes of stuff still to do. And besides, even if I was to finish doing those things, by the time I was finished a load of new stuff would come along to fill its place.

Still, I couldn't shake that nagging sensation - even when I looked over at the shelves groaning under the weight of unwatched DVDs and unread books.

Weird.

And speaking of weird stuff in my head I've been having a strange time with the old writing just recently. I've kinda ground to a halt with actually sitting down and typing, and yet my head is crammed full of ideas. I just keep coming up with new ideas, but for some reason I'm lackign the motivation to actually set them down on paper.

I'm not sure it helps that some of them are of a... er... more salacious flavour shall we say?

I've been taking a look at "How to Read Death Note". It's kinda like a 'making of' for the Death Note series and is a bit hit and miss. The majority of the book is taken up with analysing the plot and stuff like that, which is pretty dull. But there also interviews with the writer and artist. Plus there's the pilot manga at the back - that should be interesting.

animu challenge

Well I finished gatekeepers.

I've got to say I'm mildly impressed. I don't think it's the greatest anime ever made, but it's a long way from the worst as well. There are a few niggley points I had - especially with the main bad guy - but expect a basically positive review some time in the future over on trismugistus.com.

The animu challenge of actually sitting down and watching DVDs has got off to a reasonable start then. I guess I averaged 2 disks a night (gatekeepers was 24 eps across 8 disks) so about 6 episodes-ish a night. That's not at all bad given all the stuff I have to do.

Now to watch the sequel - gatekeepers 21. Only, I've actually already seen it. I know, that's a bit odd, isn't it? But I kinda ended up buying without realising it was a sequel. I'm guessing now, having seen the original show it will make more sense, though :).

All this anime watching does sorta mean I lost a bit of momentum on the script I was writing. This kinda opened a slot for me to do one of the more frustrating things I do. Rather than finish the script and then think about redrafts I got suckered into reading some "how to" sites.

One is written by a very successful screenwriter so he knows what he's talking about.

The slightly odd thing is that I kinda managed to tick lots of boxes without having really read these before. However, the annoying this is I've now started to pick my work apart and find flaws with it before I've even finished it. Clearly this is bad because to be a writer, first you must write, and you can only say you've written if you finish.

Ah well, I'm sure I'll crack this one day.

I'll possibly get my hair cut this weekend. I'm also planning to have a crack at making soem carrot and pineapple muffins.

I've been on something of a cooking spree lately. I'm not sure what's inspired it, but I've been making stuff like spaghetti bolognese, liver and bacon, toad in the hole - this is rather than relying on buying pre-made / microwave meals type stuff.

It's been pretty successful, actually, so this weekend I though I might tackle some muffin recipe. I've found muffins to be tricky in the past. Cakes are pretty easy - all cake recipes rely on using a fixed 1:1:1 ratio of eggs, S.R. flour and sugar. Muffins replace the eggs with things like vegetable oil and you use plain flour but with bicarbonate of soda instead of S.R. flour. They're more complicated, in other words, so fingers crossed.

abandoned ideas 4

Given that I've been religiously watching Gatekeepers in the evenings I've not really been up to much. And also since I can't be arsed discussing it at the mo, I thought I'd do what is probably the last of these abandoned ideas:

charlotte

This ides was abandoned for a very specific reason - it was almost plagiarism.

Not sure if you know what Chobits is - it's a manga originally by Clamp and there's an anime adaptation to. Now, I'm not actually a big fan of Chobits as it's a bit sick in the head in my opinion.

But anyway, the story wasn't really a rip-off of Chobits as much as that whole sort of area.

The main character was a scientist working for some weapons manufacturer in their R&D department. He has no real life, as such.

Anyway, one day he goes home (it's pouring with rain) and sees the police searching for something. As he gets into his apartment he sees something but then dismisses it.

He then goes home and I wasn't sure - he gets knocked out, maybe? Essentially he needed to meet a robot girl (she's a weapon, natch) that's escaped from his facility and is hiding in his apartment. He'd end up unconscious or go to sleep or something and then there would be the classic "it was just a dream" wake up sequence followed by a "omg, she's real".

The android would then continue to hide/live in his apartment and try to be his wife/girlfriend... or something like that. Basically, although he didn't work on her specifically she'd seen him do some act of kindness and fallen in love.

Which was kinda where I stopped as it was basically just ripping off about a dozen anime :/.

erm

Bit of a non-weekend to be honest.

Saturday I got swamped with stuff I had to do - shopping, cleaning, fill the car up with petrol, loads of ironing, etc.

I'm also trying to close down my aol account. I kept the dial-up "just in case" but never used it. Unfortunately I've had a dickens of a time changing e-mails on a lot of sites. They're often ones I only visit occasionally, if rarely, but are important.

The trouble is you forget your passwords or usernames or whatever and you need to get them sent to your old e-mail. That means you can't get rid of it just yet otherwise you'll never get the e-mail changed or access to it again :/.

The other problem was I was knackered, so most of these jobs took longer than they should as I just couldn't be arsed.

I was knackered for a very specific reason - last week I was working on a movie script. What I was trying to do was see how far I could get, see how much I could do. The answer was the best part of half of it.

The problem was it totally drained me. By the end of the week I was basically a dribbling moron with no thoughts left in my head. This wasn't good for work, let alone keeping going with the script. I may deliberately avoid working on it this week to try to get the juices refreshed.

Which feeds into my other plan. The amount of unwatched anime I've got stacking up is silly - my shelves are literally overflowing. I've therefore decided I'm going to force myself to sit down and watch loads of anime DVDs.

This probably means at the cost of watching normal telly. As I mentioned on Friday there's quite a bit I'm watching at the moment, so really I'm creating some problems for myself down the line. But really the key point is that I can't flog stuff on telly on e-bay, whereas I need to do that with the anime DVDs.

Sunday was then a non-event. I was still knackered and just watched some recorded telly and finished off the Wintersmith.

I'm really loving my new monitor, btw. Sometimes I catch myself just looking at the desktop - a good wall on a big widescreen monitor is a thing of wonder.

the wee free men

I finished the wee free men over the weekend. It's pretty damn good I have to say. I've started on Wintersmith, which is the third of this set of books and it seems pretty good too.

I've always liked the Discworld's take on Witches. I think it's one of the things I miss the most from the earlier books. A lot of the earlier books involved both the witches and the wizards and while I wouldn't want to put down the later books simply because the witches aren't in them, I wish they'd pop up more often.

The wizards make a few appearances, but then Unseen University is on the outskirts of Ankh Morpork, so it's not much of a stretch. The witches seem mainly to live in the rural areas and most of the recent books have been set in Ankh Morpork so it's less easy to have them pop up, I guess.

Hopefully I can also keep up a decent head of steam with book reading and plough into my unread book pile some. If I'm honest it's the pile that I'm most regretful about not tackling. Reading is kinda my lifeblood - sort of like entertainment in its purest form for me.

The next most regretful pile is the games I think. This is mainly because I know the amount of time it would take to play them all through properly makes it the most difficult pile to tackle properly. Plus of course I've got a really powerful machine "for gaming" that just sort of sits there doing nothing most of the time :(.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I've been trying to write scripts recently, rather than a novel. It's been going pretty well and I'm kinda enjoying the process more than I do writing prose.

I started off with doing Man-in-the-Loop, which has generally been my most consistent project, though it's a bit complex and twisty at times for me to get my head around. Plus I realised I wanted the murders in it to be more realistic and I think I need to let it gestate a bit more before I continue properly.

I have started adapting another plot idea I had into a film script, though. It's going pretty well, but then it was always one of those ideas that I had quite well mapped out in my mind but never got properly started on actually writing.

Oh, and I forgot to mention yesterday, but that order cock-up I mentioned last week got all sorted so that was good, and I want' out of pocket. Plus now I finally get to watch Code Geass ! Yay!

abandoned ideas 3

Third one of these as I'm just not in the mood to type out a proper blog entry, I'm afraid.

It's weird - yesterday I was totally "up" and full of energy. Today I feel like I've come "down" off of the high and feel a bit listless :/.

box

This was one where I got so lost in my own ideas I confused the crap out of myself.

Basically, the idea was sort of a riff on Hellraiser. If you're not familiar with Hellraiser, basically there's a puzzle box in it that, if you solve it it opens a doorway to hell. However, being Clive Barker, it's a bit more twisted, but I won't spoiler it.

Anyway, my box wasn't a puzzle box or anything, it was essentially just a symbolic thing. This was partly where I managed to confuse myself. It was partly that people just had a desire to possess the box (a la the ring in the Lord of the Rings, I guess) but also it kinda granted wishes.

But I wasn't sure if you had to gain the box in order to have your wish granted or if you got the box having had your wish granted. But either way possession of the box then brought disaster via the granted wish. So a bit like the classic Monkey's Paw story - granted wishes are bad, in essence.

Anyway, the structure was also a horrible minefield. The idea was it was effectively going to be a series of short stories. One was set back in medieval sword and sorcery type times. It was about a knight who was delivering a warning message or something - basically he had to get to a castle.

His wish revolved around being in love with the Queen and killing the King. It never really got much further than that.

The second story was about a detective with a death-wish. It was something to do with a bunch of drug dealers who had the box. Quite what his wish was and that side of it never really coalesced as I didn't get that far.

Lastly was something to do with an "average Jo" type. See there was basically going to be some witch or demon or something that, I dunno, tempted people or she was the one granting their wishes or something.

The end was that she got her comeuppance - Jo resisted the temptation of having his wish fulfilled and instead killed or something.

I dunno. As you can see it got a bit complicated and I realised I just didn't really know what I was doing. Even the basic idea of what the box did never really solidified into anything.

civ3 adventures

Well, as I predicted/feared I spent almost all of the weekend playing Civ3.

To be entirely fair this wasn't all my fault. Saturday morning I went out to check on how the weather situation was and the basic headline was "extremely cold". This meant that the slush and snow that was left on the road that connects us to the estate had frozen solid and was therefore as slippery as fuck.

That meant I was pretty much trapped indoors. The sun did come out on both Saturday and Sunday and even though it never really warmed up, the sun tends to melt the snow despite that.

Now the honest thing of me to do would have been to do something practical or useful. There were lots of options

I could have watched some anime. I'm on the verge of finishing both Trigun and Blassreiter, for example. This would also have been a good thing because I need to realise some capital - heating my place doesn't come cheap and sellig a few anime bits on e-bay would go a lone way to help.

I could also have watched some fansubs while scanning the new megami. This would have put me ahead of the game, as it were - never a bad thing.

Another option would have been to watch some normal box sets or DVDs - I've loads of them kicking about too. Or I could have done some walling - I'm literally on the very cusp of finishing several walls. And for that matter I could have worked on some future website updates - hardly exciting but it needs to be done as I'm catching up with my backlog a bit. I could even have done some writing - the chaos of the last week hasn't helped me concentrate much on that.

But no, instead I just played Civ3. Again. Like I didn't spend several weeks moaning about how it was killing all my spare time a few months ago. Idiot.

The only thing I did manage to stay on top of was TV. Although I start with good intentions every week I find that I get quite a large stack of TV I've recorded when I get to the weekend. I managed to keep on top of that at least.

I also watched a movie I recorded over Christmas. Mainly this was thanks to the fact that my next rental DVD is delayed. The snow has really poxed up the mail - I've loads of stuff that I know has been sent to me but that I've not got yet.

But I'm an idiot wasting all my time like that. The only good thing is that I've got much more of an impetus to the game I'm currently playing, as I've run up against a bug. Basically, if I launch my spaceship then it tries to play a cut-scene and this causes the game to crash. I therefore can't win in that way, but it also means I need to get on and hammer the other races so that they can't launch their spaceships and beat me either.

Usually I play until the time limit games, but the problem with them is I've clearly won by two-thirds of the way through, so I get bored. This time at least I've got a definite goal - not that it's an easy one to achieve in a short time period, so I could still be playing for some time!

abandoned ideas 2

This ended up being more "occasional" than I initially thought it was, but I've had a slow week and so here's the second lot of abandoned story ideas. 2 today:

Devotion of Purpose

This got very close to being completed. It was quite a long short story.

The basic plot was that it's about a terrorist who is being tortured to reveal the identity of his fellow terrorists. There were three strands to it.

The present day was the main plot and involved the terrorist being tortured in a variety of ways - some psychological, some physical. It was quite brutal and this was the part I pretty much wrote all of.

The second strand was the terrorist act that had got him caught. Essentially it was an assassination attempt on the leader of the country. It never quite got finished as I couldn't really decide what was what.

Questions I ended up with included how did they get "on the inside" (it kinda involved an inside job)? Did all of his fellow terrorists die so the torture was pointless)? Did civilians die and did the terrorist regret that? Or had he gone over the edge or something?

The third strand was why it never got finished. The basic idea was that the terrorist was recruited by a woman he fell in love with. I had this strong idea about a small china cat decoration - how they met and what he thought of before he died, maybe.

Problem was I couldn't get the link of how he actually became a terrorist. I'd kinda made it so that his woman was killed with the other terrorists in their attack, and that's why he wasn't talking - he wanted to die. But how did he actually switch to being an actual terrorist who kills innocent civilians? Especially given he's meant to start normal.

I couldn't really think of anything, especially since the way I'd intended the structure to go I didn't have a lot of space. It had to be something fairly quick, but I just couldn't think of anything significant enough.

Hanger 12

This idea was on a course to non-completion from the very beginning.

Basically, I had this idea of a big passenger jet exploding on the tarmac. It was a future plane with multiple decks so the deaths were huge.

And that was it - I tried to build a story around it and just kinda failed. I seem to recall I managed to get myself tied up in knots with all sorts of conspiracy ideas, though.

I can't remember all of them, but it was like there was somebody trying to stop the explosion and it wasn't clearly going to be terrorists blowing it up or the terrorists were really government people, or... I dunno, I remember it got really messy :/.

bimble

Well the whole writing thing has held up a bit. Admittedly at the moment I'm kind converting stuff I've already written into scenes. This seems a little too easy in some regards, but in others it almost confirms my suspicion that this is what I should have been doing from the beginning.

I've always tend to think quite visually and it's easy for me to plot stuff out in my head as if I was watching it on-screen. The struggling has always come in converting that into interesting prose.

But the thing about scripts I've read is you don't really seem to need interesting prose - in fact just the opposite, it needs to be basic and clear what the action should be. You need interesting dialogue and I think I'm okay at that. Certainly whenever people have commented on my stuff over at urbis if they've mentioned my dialogue it's generally been complimentary.

Not sure if that's anything to go by, though.

Also, for the first time in a while I had something of an idea. Well it's more of a concept than a fully-fledged idea, but I think it's good that the juices seem to be flowing a bit again.

I finished off some scanning this week and I've also been watching some animu in general.

Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo - Youkoso Tsugumi Ryouhe was okay. This is actually an older show - well it's not that old, but it was before I started religiously dl'ing and sampling everything. I'd have probably liked it more if the animation wasn't so bad - it was really poor. The show itself seemed quite harem-like, but it seemed to be more about characters than tits-and-arse.

I've also been continuing with Blassreiter. I have to admit it's getting better, but mainly because of a particular storyline concerning a kid who's being bullied. The main plot seems very generic, but that part of it has been quite well done, I think. Not sure it's enough to boost my overall rating - especially the animation is shocking - but it suggests there's some hope.

And I started watching real-world animu DVD-age too (blimey!). I think partly it's because I've cleared so much stuff on my big to-do lists. Anyway, the show I've been watching is Trigun. Gotta say I'm relatively unimpressed so far. I've read some of the manga, and I dropped that as it was very badly written. There were a lot of great ideas, it's just the writing was quite poor - lots that didn't make sense or that contradicted itself.

The anime is better on that front, but the main character, Vash, seems to have become an annoyingly loud, idiot. I know there's deeper stuff to come, but lets' just say if I was watching this on fansub I'd have dropped it by now.

weekend of super-cleaning

I'm going to do loads of cleaning this weekend.

The main one to do is the car - it's been months seen I cleaned my car. It needs a total going over - inside and out. The problem has been the weather - you can't really clean your car when the temperature is constantly sub-zero.

When it's not been sub-zero it's been raining, which is actually the big risk this weekend - the forecasts don't seem to be able to decide on if it's going to rain or not. The only thing they seem to have been agreeing on is that it won't be sub-zero temperatures (those return later next week :(), so that's all I'm banking on.

I've sort-of started writing again. I don't want to curse it, but I've started on a script. Well, also generally I’ve got my juices flowing a bit, but mainly I’ve started a script for my most-developed idea, Man in the Loop.

It actually occurred to me that what I've always wanted to try to write is TV stuff. Now the slight thing that makes me worry a bit here is that I've been reading "Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale" (which is awesome - I'll go into more detail when I finish it) and I'm worried I'm doing this simply because I like the book.

However, the other side to it is that when I started writing I did actually want to write telly, but sort of got distracted, I guess, into trying to do novels.

Dunno, we'll have to see if I don't just flake out again.

I've been doing a bit of scanning over the week, trying to get back up to date. The shows I've watched are:

• Tentai Senshi Sunred (Astro Fighter Sunred) was quite good. I didn't have a clue what to expect going into it, but it turned out to be a parody comedy type show. The parody is quite wide-ranging, but the most humorous aspect is that the hero is actually a bit of a jerk, whereas the evil villains are actually quite nice. The animation is a little crude, but deliberately so - think inspired by South Park.
• Tales of the Abyss was just about bearable. It's a fantasy job and it's adapted from an RPG. It was quite pretty and nicely animated, but the problem was in the story-telling - it was crammed full of info dumps and expositional speeches which were totally dull. I'm guessing it livens up later, but the poor story telling (and the general generic nature of the show) annoyed me so much I can't be arsed to even think about finding out.

That basically means I'm now almost up-to-date with the new January shows. There are some odds and sods left, about the only major ones being the Gonzo shows that were made available legally via Crunchyroll and Bost and I've started one of those – Blassreiter.

Speaking of Bost, it looks like it's died a death, without any new shows added in, well, years. Which is a real shame as I liked the Bost service. It's certainly way, way better than Crunchyroll, which I've decided is an abomination of a site.

abandoned ideas 1

I was looking at my folder where I keep my stories. Mostly, if I'm generous, I can say that they're all work in progress. The reality is more that many of them have been, if not abandoned, then moth-balled indefinitely.

I though I might do some posts covering some of these ideas, just for the hell of it.

Mall Games

The idea of this was it was a mall where, in order to buy thing, you had to go on raids and shoot your way through to the item and then to the checkout. So if you wanted to buy some toilet rolls you'd have to blast your way through to aisle 15 or whatever and then get to the checkout where you would pay and go.

I still like the idea - it has some potential as either a comedic thing or an ironic thing, or even as a satire. The problem is that the framework for it seemed never to come together.

At one point it was a virtual thing. In order to go shopping you logged in and the combat was virtual. But then, how would that work? If it's virtual it's like so what? There's no real danger - are you playing the game to get discount coupons or something? And why go to all that trouble just for a pack of toilet rolls? Plus it's compulsory or what? And what's the underlying story - what are the character arcs?

The other way is it was real, but again what's the framework? And what's with the checkouts? You have to kill your way through just to buy toilet rolls? And there are checkout staff to let you buy your toilet rolls you just killed 5 people to buy?

It kinda didn't make any real sense.

I did come up with a couple of possible other ideas to it, though. If it was virtual there could have been a conspiracy that actually you were controlling real people and they got killed where you were safe. This seemed a little impractical - where do all the bodies go? And where do they come from? It's also a bit "running man".

The other idea was that it was following a young kid and maybe it was some sort of tournament. Maybe a lethal version of Supermarket Sweep? This was the closest to coalescing into a story, but again there were things that didn't quite make sense.

quality

I've mentioned before that I'm a member of a site called Urbis . It's a site for writers and the basic idea is that you post your work there and people review it.

Now there are quite a few sites that are supposed to be about the same sort of thing, but what makes Urbis clever is that you're participating in a give-and-take system. Your work will only be reviewed if you do reviews of other people.

How they do that is with a credit system. So, you earn credits by doing reviews and it costs you credits to unlock your reviews. That way you have no choice but to do work in order to get the benefits.

Of course, it's all open to abuse, as all systems are, but there are some mechanisms to try to counter that. For example, you can ask for refunds if you think a review is pure drivel. The other system is that you can rate reviews as being either good or bad 'quality'.

Now, and I don't want to boast about it, but so far I have maintained a review quality above 90%. I don't want to boast about that because it's slightly unrepresentative - it's not just the author that gets to vote, for example, and a good chunk of my good votes have come via that.

Plus I've done something like 150 reviews, but only got about 50 votes (many, as I say, not from the author). Also, of those 150 a good proportion (maybe a quarter?) haven't even been unlocked, so nobody can rate them good or bad.

And of course there's always people who wouldn't know a good review if it slapped them in the face, but anyway, the point of this blog is that I like to think I've got my relatively high number because I write good reviews.

I do this by trying to focus on what really matters. In my opinion things like spelling ad grammar are not as important as the mechanisms of the story telling, for example. Also, I don't tend to worry too much about things like point-of-view unless it really badly poxes up a story.

Which isn't to say these things aren't important, it's just that if something is unreadably dull because it's all just boring telling when it could be shown in exciting and dramatic scenes, then that's what matters most.

Polishing up your spelling and POV slips can come after you make the thing interesting to read.

The other main thing I do is to offer suggestions. I think it's one thing to just rag on a piece, telling them in finite detail why it's rubbish, it's quite another to say "here's some ideas for making it better."

Now the difficulty with my approach is occasionally I run up against people who clearly think they're the next Shakespeare (or insert any appropriate well known and widely recognised writer you like). So then my review and suggestions come across rather differently - they're not seen in the light they're intended.

That's when I get a negative quality, I think. Even though I've clearly spent a lot more time thinking about my review than the people who've just spunked "zomg I r likings your drivel" below me.

It can be quite demoralising.

But the worst ones are when I point out something that's clearly just plain wrong, or doesn't work, or is illogical. For example, I might point out that some "science" they've used is bullshit, or point out that some trick they're pulling is just that - a trick and therefore a con.

Sometimes this is taken well, but a lot of the time it's taken as you might expect. If you're on a flying carpet, you don't want someone pointing out that there are strings holding it up (or, worse, pointing out it's impossible and hence causing the illusion to collapse), so you're not going to be pleased with the person that does.

making breakthrough

Watched me some more Gurren Lagann last night. The show just gets better and better is about all I can really say. Where I thought Godannar was like mecha anime given a massive dose of viagra, Gurren Lagann is like mecha anime given a massive does of testosterone.

Since I decided a while ago to tweak how my novel, MitL, is structured, I've been doing some work on it. What I've decided is to have the more traditional sci-fi elements regarding the "brain in the box" be contained in a prologue and epilogue. The main story then will be the two strands and the prologue and epilogue act to give those stories the other level.

That all sounds more complicated than it is, but basically I've been working on the prologue and it's all proving a bit of a 'mare. I've been trying to "workshop" the piece to some degree using urbis. I've been putting it up, getting crit and then reworking it.

The problem is that what I was really aiming at when I started was a stark, narrative style to the piece. Also, I wanted it to be quite short and to the point--the idea is that it's a mysterious little taster that is only really made clear in the prologue. The problem is that that's not really how you're supposed to write fiction nowadays.

What you're supposed to do is "show don't tell". Which is to say instead of having "He lost his brother at an early age--cancer, the big C. It coloured the rest of his formative years." You instead have proper scenes showing these things.

But it's a novel--if you expand everything up into scenes, you get an immense tome that documents every minutiae of your character lives. So there has to be compromise. If the brother's death is important to the story (and it sounds like it is) then it should be expanded on. If not, then telling is more okay, though obviously still not great.

This is especially true for sci-fi, where you get lots of "accoutrements". If I simply want there to be something that has anti-gravity capability jerry-rigged to it in my story then do I need to have an entire set of scenes devoted to its construction? Or do I just tell you that the something has "jerry-rigged small anti-gravity pods strapped to the sides"?

Well, unless it's key to the story, it's the latter, obviously--because really the above is more like description for sci-fi. It's more like me describing the surroundings than it is me 'telling' you the story. It's not really violating show don't tell.

the mother of all tweaks

For a while now I've been working on and off on my first proper novel, Man in the Loop (MitL).

The central core of the novel is sort of about existentialism. The basic idea is that the main character is actually a "brain in a jar" who's plugged into a computer world.

He doesn't know he's a brain in a jar (well, maybe at the end) but the real thing he doesn't know is that actually when he was a proper human he was a serial killer. The idea was that in order to have this man in the loop system, the government has to use psychos because their brains work differently.

The MitL system was designed as essentially an Unmanned Vehicle (in this case planes) with an operator 'in the loop' but not actually on-board. But normal people couldn't operate it properly so they end up using serial killers who have been executed by the state.

So it's also about morality - you've got the US government who are supposedly all "democracy and freedom" using people against their will who they've actually put to death. The US is embroiled in a huge war in the middle east that covers the entire region and represents an escalation of the 'war on terror', but is also really a resource grab. They've had to use things like MitL to 'get the job done', as it were.

To juxtapose this, I had a female terrorist whose entire family had been killed when the Americans had mistakenly bombed her village. The idea was she would be responsible for bombing the MitL facility.

The idea also was to tell her story in reverse, where the other story would be forwards. So at the beginning she seems to be the bad guy, he the good, whereas by the end you realise it's more the other way around.

I've been working away on this for ages now and have loads of it written, but I've been struggling a bit and skirting around some of the difficult bits (meaning dodgy story elements) and I've kinda realised that there's a much better way for me to tell the story.

Essentially I can instead contrast the MitL guy's story against his original capture. In other words, it can be a detective story 'with a twist'. I could have the MitL man seeing what seems to be another person but is actually himself as a serial killer "leaking" into his own computer world. At the same time, the other thread could be the detectives tracking him down.

The problem is that it means totally abandoning at least two thirds of what I've written. It's a lot stronger and simpler way of doing things, though, and won't involve quite so many dodgy stuff.

A lot of what I've written is kinda comic-booky. I mean some of the characters almost have moments where they go "Muhahahaha" in a maniacal laugh stylee :/. But it was the only way I could think of bridging between the plot strands. Plus the terrorst is kinda cheesey.

I guess I need to bite the bullet.

thinking in moments

Part of the problem I have with the way my imagination seems to work when I'm writing is that it operates in snatched, often very visual moments.

Take for instance this piece. It's currently the third part of a longer piece. But it didn't start that way.

It started as a random cool thing that I thought up and wrote down. I then wove it into the story--indeed, the story almost developed around that piece. The part went through about 5 revisions, but that opening line--servos stuttering into life--never really changed.

This is really a mixed bag. It can be really frustrating having only a "cool bit" and not being able to properly weave anything else around it.

It can also be annoying. Sometimes by the time I've thought of the plot some other cool bit will be in my imagination which has absolutely no relevance the the previous cool bit.

But on the other hand, it can be exciting not knowing quite what's going to pop out of my head next.

those little tubes of cancer

I could be a smoker.

I mean, I am a smoker, I guess, but not a proper smoker. Currently I get through an average of around 5 cigarettes a week - so basically a pack of 20 lasts me a month. I used to smoke as a 'social smoker,' which basically means I smoked when I drank, but--partly due to the ban on smoking in public spaces--I don't really do that any more.

However, something I've found is that one of the most enjoyable things in the world is smoking while writing.

It's difficult to explain quite why it is, but for some reason the two activities just seem to go well together. While you're thinking of the next bit, you can take a draw on the cancer tube - it just seems to work.

So perhaps it's a good thing that I'm such a flake when it comes to getting things done - otherwise I might be on 20 a day!

Uhhh - not again

I'm a member of a site called Urbis.

Urbis is a writer's forum, but not in the sense of normal internet forums (though it does have one of those) but more along the lines of a writer's group like you might get as part of a teaching course. The jist is that you post up pieces of your work, and then other writers offer critique.

Now, there are quite a few of these types of site on the intarwebs, but what sets Urbis apart is their use of a credit system. This works like money - for every review you write you get credits, which you then have to spend to unlock the reviews people do of your own work.

It's quite simple, but very clever (as are all the best ideas) because what it means is that everybody is forced to contribute in order to get what they want - critique of their own work. Normally on writer's sites, everybody posts their stuff, but nobody bothers reading or reviewing it. And if they do review it, then they simply give you slap on the back and tell you you're great - even if you're not.

At Urbis, because you have to pay for reviews and the system is finely balanced so that, very roughly speaking, one review you write unlocks one review of your own work, if someone gives you a rubbish review, you can ask for a refund and then spend the points getting at reviews that actually help you improve your work. Also, things are done anonymously, so you can't really be prejudiced when writing reviews.

However, and this isn't really a complaint about the system, I do seem to find myself making exactly the same points over and over again.

There's a book called "Techniques of the Selling Writer" by Dwight Swain, and what this book does is to lay out all the fundamentals of modern fiction writing. One of the points made in the book is actually that there's no such thing as a set of hard-and-fast rules, but as far as these things go, that's what he gives you - a set of basic rules, the mastery of which will set you in good stead.

Some of the absolute basic ones are:

• Show, don't tell;
• Nothing happens at the same time - only sequentially; and of course
• Review your work several times before you show it to anyone (for both spelling/grammar and sense).

And I seem to have to keep making those same points about things I read on Urbis over and over again.

But the worst part is that I was the same when I started - someone on Urbis told me about the book. So in many ways I feel honour bound to pass this information on and tell them about the book, but it doesn't half get depressing when within the first 5 sentences of a 5,000 word piece someone has done all three of the above :(.

Separate blogs

I've been wondering whether I shouldn't start a separate blog and put some of my writing up on it. I read somewhere that publishers like to read blogs and if someone whose manuscript they've read and liked has a blog with stuff on that they can read then that isn't a bad thing.

Of course that sort of presupposes I'm going to be a bit more dedicated with writing stuff - I couldn't start a blog like that, post one or two things and then abandon it as I think that would have the opposite effect.

I guess I could sample some stuff from my more dormant projects, plus put my older short stories on there.

Hmm, something to give some thought.

I've been struggling with my back again just recently. It's my own fault - all those hours sat in the same position playing Civ3 at home have clearly not gone well with my back.

I first did my back quite a few years ago now and have had a few minor twinges since then, but this is the first really proper hurts-like-a-bugger type relapse I've had.

The problem is actually a trapped nerve, and I'm told that were it hurts isn't actually were the nerve is trapped. The nerve is trapped somewhere in the spine, but because of where/how the pressure is on it, it actually feels like it's in my lower back. This means that the pain is slightly counter-intuitive. The positions you'd imagine would hurt don't but moves you'd think would be fine are agony.

Guess I need to lay off the Civ3 for a bit, but looking on the bright side it means I have a legitimate excuse for not doing any scanning - sitting in my computer chair for hours on end was what caused the problem, so I can't do that until it's right and that's where I do the scanning.

The end of the world as we know it

There was a program on Channel 4 the other day that looked at what would happen if we humans suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Really it was all fairly obvious - nature would simply reclaim the space - but it was interesting to hear how quickly it would happen, and there was some great stuff from Chernobyl.

I'd love to go to Chernobyl. Unless you're close to the reactor core, it's actually pretty safe now (if it wasn't the wildlife wouldn't have come back).

But then I've always loved the whole post-apocalyptic future stuff. I even had a go at writing a sort of one called Infection. You can give it a read by clicking here if you really like.

In fact it was actually writing Infection that kinda made me think I'd like to have a go at actually writing properly. Before that I'd written a few short stories, but Infection had more of an arc.

Since then I've struggled to actually realise that goal. What you don't realise is that writing is hard work.

I mean, you kinda know that - an average novel is about 80,000 to 120,00 words so it obviously isn't 'easy' - but what you don't realise is how draining coming up with those words can be. I don't mean like as in writer's block, but simply the act of generating stuff and laying it down in a sensible and coherent way is draining.

I mean, you can write quite a lot in a day, but then what you find is that the next day you feel like the life has been sucked out of you, and the next day too. So you end up writing in splurges and it feels disjointed and a little incoherent.

Or the other way is to write a little bit each day and deliberately hold yourself back, but then it feels like you're getting nowhere - you check how many words you've done all the time, think about all the stuff still to do and it seems never-ending.

In the beginning you sort of wonder how writing can be a full time job. After a while it becomes clear.