A blast from the past

This evening I've done something that I haven't done for an age... I added some words to my novel!  This thing was started two, or more like three years ago while offline and sitting in a holiday cottage.  It's an all action WWII romp that I was inspired to start after reading "Contest" by Matthew Reilly.  Now there is an author who knows how to write action. Sure it's over-the-top, but it's simply fantastic fun that you can put down.

He inspired me, I wrote an outline and then started writing. Of course there have been a few breaks, such as forgetting about it for six months, writing short stories, the annotation projects, another few months break, the game book etc etc etc.

So on and off I've been hammering away at this thing for quite a while, but tonight I got back on the writing train and added another whopping 715 words!  Not many in the big scheme of things, yet it's brought the total up to 33315, which is not to be sniffed at.

With luck I'll stick with it and get this first draft done. Fingers crossed, eh?

Story telling game

I posted yesterday about how I had been "distracted" by the role playing game I'd started writing...well I finished the game off and pushed it up onto the biggest RPG web site on the web for sale today.

Next, I'll be converting the ODF file into an ePUB.  Once in that format I'll be able to push it onto Kindle via the "kindlegen" software, and onto the iBook Store/Nook Store via LuLu.

The ODF is only about 37 pages and the cover art is already done, had to do that for the PDF release mentioned above.

So this afternoon will be dedicated to using my favourite ePUB software, the free and excellent "Sigil".

P.S. Now ePUB'ed at LuLu

Sidetracked

I have only give about half a dozen entries in my game book written up, because in the last week I have been distracted by another writing project.

I decided to enter a "one page dungeon" competition hosted on the Role Playing Geek web site. During the creation process of a dungeon, I actually not only invented a dungeon but also the bare bones of a whole role playing game. That sounds like a lot of work, but wasn't really. The one page dungeon itself was knocked up within an evening...and so this wasn't really the distraction.

What the distraction was, is that the bare bones RPG I came up during that process deserved to be fleshed out into a real full length game. This is where I've been spending my writing time.

It's interesting to note that the one page dungeon competition is not a money making project, but that short diversion has set me off on this RPG project which will be a money maker.

Anything "Cthulhu" or "Lovecraft" is extremely popular at the moment so the RPG I'm writing is themed that way. A completely opposite direction from the original one page dungeon.

I think that this proves that taking the occasional diversion can really inspire the muse. As a bonus this project is shorter than the game book project so will be finished quickly.

A good weekend

It's been a good weekend for me.  My short story "Incursion" has sold three times on the Kindle.  I'm very happy with that, but surprised at the same time.  I put Incursion into the KDP select scheme on the Kindle store so that people could borrow it.  My hope was that people would like it and then go on to buy my other stories in the same line.  Turns out instead that three people have bought it!

I wonder if I've done something wrong during the sign up, or if the story is getting lost in amongst all of the other free stuff.  A quick look on the Amazon store seems to confirm that the story is free to borrow. Strange happenings indeed!

My other good news is the "Cthulhu and How I found Livingstone" book, which has sold 9 copies at DriveThruRPG.  This is because the book is currently on the "new in the store" page. Within a week or so, it will slip off that page into obscurity and the realm of zero sales (well, maybe one sale every few months).

All in all a good weekend.

It's started!

I have just completed the first two paragraphs of the game book, the first draft. Actually it's not paragraphs, I should say "entries". In the old Fighting Fantasy game books, most of the entries were paragraphs.  In my book most entries will be more than one paragraph, and indeed featuring a lot of dialogue, which will make the "paragraph" terminology redundant. So henceforth I will try and say Entries.

Word count on the document is at 3000, but at this early stage that is mostly a junk number. The majority of that is the headings for each entry and the "go to ..." that appears at the end of most entries. After this however the word count will allow me to see how much it's growing by. Yet, now I think about it, word count hardly matters in a game book. Progress is really measured in entries that have been completed.  So in those terms, 2 down and 119 to go.  Boy oh boy that sounds like a lot.

Progress, at last.

Tonight I completed my first editing pass over my AMRAT story (giant fighty robots).  I was horrified at how awful that first draft was.  Commas instead of full stops, missing capital letters, incomplete sentences "as" instead of "is" and any number of straight forward typos.

Still, that's twenty pages knocked into a legible state that I'm not embarrassed to pass onto my editor. It felt good to get that out of the way, it's cleared the decks for the next project.

On the small pile of outlined works is a Lovecraftian short story and pulp era detective game book. The Lovecraftian story is a "kind-of" sequel to my "Incursion" story which is currently locked into a six-month exclusivity agreement with Amazon, so I'll leave that to the side for the next few months.

That means the game book is the next project. I plan on following the same process as with the last game book, in that I will aim to write two or three entries every day. The current outline has 121 entries so that means I should have the first draft done in about 40 days.

"Things"

There are many reasons that a writer may not write. One of the most amusing situations appeared in the film "Throw Momma From the Train". The writer in that case couldn't find the perfect word for his opening sentence and this hung him up. Time and again he would try a word but it was never quite right.

A writer might be prevented because his is suffering from "writers block".  Where the muse has left them, they feel uninspired and simply unable to put the pen to the paper.

Practical things have a hand in this too.  The power goes out, or your last number 2 pencil snaps. Whatever.

Then, there are cats.

That's right. Cats.

The writing I had planned for this evening is wiped from this plane of existence because of a cat.

Why?  You ask, why?

Today my wife trapped the last of the wild cats that visit our garden. She's been trying to trap it for over a month. All the others have been trapped and neutered, one by one. Yet this one, this female has been so nervous and cagey that she just wouldn't enter the cage...until today.

So this late night trapping has caused phone calls, visits, socially engaging with the family, and all in the name of getting this one wild cat neutered.  Sure I'm still itching to get back to writing, but in the end getting that cat was worth it.

 That said, the night has still been productive to some extent. I uploaded "Cthulhu and How I Found Livingstone" to the kindle store where it should appear within a couple of days.