Kreativ Blogger Award!

The other day, I noticed a new comment pop up on my last post on my writing blog here. When I checked it out, I discovered that my friend, reader and fellow writer, Rissa Watkins, had chosen me for an award.

The award is called the Kreativ Blogger Award, given by recipients to others they believe are worthy of such a title. Clearly whoever started this off is creative in the spelling department (enough to make my internal editor twitch and claw at the insides of my delete key), but it’s a lovely idea. It’s also an honour to be chosen.

Rissa has been a wonderful supporter of my writing since I started the Apocalypse Blog. I met her over on the Accentuate Writers Forum and haven’t looked back since; she’s one of the reasons that I keep going back there! Thank you, Rissa!

So I suppose I should get on with this whole award thing. How does it work? Right. Here’s what I cribbed off Rissa’s post:

1. Thank the person who awarded me the award, and link that person’s blog on my blog. (Check! Go me!)
2. Identify seven things about myself. (Ah, crap.)
3. Award seven bloggers with the “Kreativ Blogger Award,” post links to their blogs, and leave a comment on each of their blogs, to let them know of the honour. (Wow, seven? Well, okay then.)

Seven things about myself. Oh, I hate these. I could cheat and list things most of you already know, but I guess that’s not really the point of this. So let’s try something a little bit different:

• I’m still waiting to grow up. I’m <censored> years old, have my own (rented) place, would love to own my own house, pay all my own bills, and am sidling into management at work. I also dye my hair to hide all the white ones sneaking through. And still, I feel like a kid half the time, especially around people I respect, and have to remind myself that I am, in fact, an adult. It doesn’t help that I play video and computer games and make stories up every day.
• I’ve never truly punched someone. As in, totally lost it and smacked someone in the face. I know how – I’ve studied karate, sparred and even done competition fighting – but I’ve never done it in anger, or fear, or need. I am pretty sure that if it came to it, I would, though, and that scares me.
• I’m not as organised as I look. I make a lot of stuff up on the fly and am lucky enough that it usually works out just fine. I used to be concerned with being prepared for everything, planning and revising, and to an extent I still try to do that. But time and pressure have eroded away opportunity, and apparently, if you drop me in the deep end, I’ll do all right.
• I prefer driving a manual transmission to an automatic. I like the extra bit of control it gives me over the car, and I don’t like having a car think for me. I know what gear I want, thank you very much, and I’d like it now, not in a couple of seconds when you’ve had a chance to consider what my foot up your ass means. Never met an automatic car I liked to drive as much as any of my manuals. It’s perhaps ironic that I’m currently writing a story about a strangely sentient vehicle that doesn’t always do what it’s told.
• I have pretty good coordination. I pick up physical techniques easily, especially routines. It was very handy when learning karate and kata, and probably a holdover from the dancing I did when I was little. I still hope to one day put it to the test and learn to fly a helicopter.
• I like to fix things. I’m a problem solver and if someone brings me an issue, I’ll do what I can to fix it. I enjoy helping people, whatever that means at the time, though that doesn’t mean I’m a doormat. I once shared a house with a girl who didn’t believe that altruism existed in the world and not all the help I could give her was able to change her mind.
• I hate these ’say something about yourself’ memes. Same with self-promotion – it never feels quite ‘clean’. But apparently, if you say something nice about my writing, I’ll do it anyway and be unable to shut up. Luckily, I think this is number seven, so I’ll stop now.

That’s enough about me! More than enough, I think. So, moving swiftly on to the lucky recipients of my vote for the award. This has been hard to pull together, because I don’t read a lot of blogs in the five minutes a week of spare time I have. Here are my choices, in no particular order:

• My dear friend Clover, author of the Inventor blogfic. It’s a wonderful story she’s got going there, rich with details from the city she lives in. She does a great deal of personal exploration to get her authencity down and it shows.
• Tonya R Moore, writer of science fiction stories, both serials and short stories. She runs a  a web fiction directory on her website as well. She’s friendly and supportive, and always a pleasure to talk to. She doesn’t keep a writing blog, but do her serials count? Well, good enough for me.
• Becka Sutton, writer of fantasy fiction, mostly online serials. She also maintains a writing blog, on which she does frequent reviews of other online fiction. It’s always wonderful to see someone offering their opinion on others’ work, supporting other writers by doing reviews. She gives honest reviews as well, which is important, in my opinion and as a writer.
• Ann Somerville, author of gay romance stories, from short stories to epic novels. She offers many stories for free on her website, but also has many books for sale.  Her blog contains a wealth of information about writing, the communities she is active in, and self-promotion for authors. She’s honest, no-nonsense and doesn’t pull her punches, and it’s great to see someone telling it how she sees it.
• Gabriel Gadfly, poet and short-story writer. He offers his work for free on his website, and his blog contains lots of useful observations and insights into the web fiction world. I enjoy his poetry, and the advice he offers is well worth taking a look at.
• Naomi Kramer, short story writer, all offered for free online. She also keeps a personal blog, where she talks about lots of stuff, including her writing. She offered a promotion service for web fiction writers through Twitter and a Free Fiction Online blog, though sadly she hasn’t had time lately to run those.  Her website says she’s too busy with her writing – I hope that’s true, and I hope she finds time to come back soon too! Whether she’s active right now or not, I still think she deserves an award for her hard work.
• Zoe E Whitten, writer of ‘dark and weird stories’. She offers lots of work for free online, including e-books and serials. They’re a lot of fun to read, and her blog is well worth checking out, for fiction, news and reviews.

Congratulations to all of you, and thank you for your work. Your creativity shines on the rest of us. May you continue to do so!

Forward thinking

With the Apocalypse Blog running headlong towards its conclusion, I have been turning my brain to the brightening question: what next?

Some of you may know that I’ve had another blogfic knocking around in my brain for most of the year. As often happens when I dive into something new, ideas clamour for attention. When I was getting into the groove of AB and loving it, I asked myself ‘what else can I do with this format?’ And an answer came immediately to mind. I have held off doing anything with that idea, because I wanted to remain focussed on AB and get that done before something else distracted me.

More recently, I’ve had another couple of ideas crop up, one with a story attached and the other more of a character and concept. These are both blogfic-type ideas as well. They’re not very well-formed, but one might take shape soonish if I have the time.

There are some other things that I have been putting aside in order to focus on AB as well. The post-a-day schedule really hampered by ability to get any other writing done, and the novel I wrote last year has fallen by the wayside. I’d like to get back to it, edit and redraft it, and start to do something with it. I also have a short story that I stopped halfway through (I can’t remember why – I think I hit a snag with it), and I want to get that finished too.

And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I am not quite ready to say goodbye to AB forever once the new year rolls around.

So, things I have lined up for the next year:

• Novel – edit/redraft. Aim to submit.
• Apocalypse Blog -
  • Finishes 31st December 2009.
  • e-book it – need to look at how, where, etc. Also need to decide whether/how much I should edit it.
  • Shorts – short stories showcasing different cast members. Masterson, Jersey, Bree – I think I can do these without any problems. At some point, I might look at the Seekers’ future, too.
  • Merchandise – design and make available (?).
• Other blogfic -
  • Starwalker – a ship’s log, told by the ship. Site is halfway done, planning is partly done, needs some work to nail down cast and details. Posting 2-3 times per week (none of this every day craziness!).
  • A smite-happy angel in a Hawaiian shirt. Earth suddenly cut off from Heaven and Hell. Ahhh, handflappy. Yeah, that’s all I have right now. Tentative name: Earthwalker.
• Short stories – various. Finish that outstanding one! This one is definitely a maybe.
• Do more writing tips posts.

Hmm. It’s a lot, looking at it like that. I get tired just thinking about it all. The first thing I have to do is finish up AB. It’s a struggle at the moment – I still have over a week left to write, and it’s hard to find the time and energy with everything else going on right now.

In my original planning, I had hoped to be having a break right now. AB was supposed to have been finished off in November, leaving me a couple of weeks of December to myself as a break, and then a couple of weeks of planning for the next one. AB would post itself up until the end of the year, and by the time 1st January rolled around, I’d be ready to start posting the new blogfic. Perfect.

Yeah, that hasn’t happened. I’m still writing, editing and posting AB. I’m still rushed off my feet with everything. My head is reeling with everything I have to get done, and I am never going to get everything (anything?) prepared for the next blogfic before the beginning of 2010. Considering how painful it is to write and post with no kind of buffer, I don’t want to start the next one without at least a week or two’s posts in-hand. Preferably two weeks’ worth.

I’m the only one setting these schedules for myself. And you know what? I don’t need to punish myself with them. So I’m going to take January off. I’m going to take that month to do my planning, set up the site/s, build up a buffer of posts, and get myself ready to dive into the rest of the year. I need a chance to get my feet under me before I set off running again.

So that’s the plan. Get through the next week and a half, collapse, then catch my breath and start the craziness all over again. With slightly more planning and maybe a trace less crazy. Who knows?

You gotta try, right?

Picking up

I’m doing better. My last post was somewhat dire, but it needed to be said. I had been silent too long. I am immensely grateful to all of those who responded, publicly or otherwise.

At the moment, I’m in the process of disconnecting emotionally from all of that stuff. It’s not an instant thing – it’s a gradual separation, and I have to remind myself sometimes that this thing doesn’t matter, and that thing isn’t quite so important. I’m dealing with the fallout and attempting to reduce any further damage to myself or anything else I still care about, but I’m getting there. I’m like a buoy that has remembered how to float again.

I’m also sleeping better. The chest pains still come and go, particularly if I get wound up (they’re one of the more extreme and unpleasant symptoms of CFS, and only turn up when it’s particularly bad for me), but I’m starting to come back to a more even keel. It’s never great, but at least I’m not as shaky and emotionally strung-out as I was.

As I’ve said a couple of times over the past few days – I prefer my drama on the page rather than in my life. Let’s put it back where it belongs.

So, I’m picking up the Apocalypse Blog and slinging it in a new direction. Both the blog and I needed a change and a bit of rejuvenation.

I allowed a post to get a little bit romantic, after fighting to stop it from becoming sappy. I think I rearranged it about three times before I was happy. It was fun! It has been ages since I’ve had the chance to do something like that, mostly because I’ve been beating Faith down with very unromantic stuff. But it’s still there, bubbling under, and Faith deserves to have a bit of a break from being pounded on emotionally.

The other plot-stuff relating to Haven is also coming up towards a turning point. It has been a long climb, and it’s almost time to run down the other side. I just have another thread or two to get in place, and then we’ll see what the shape of it all looks like. Now that I have more mental energy to devote to it again, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes out.

I had two bits of bad news today. The first was from an old friend of mine, someone I haven’t spoken to in a while due to various life stuff on his end. I didn’t know how bad it was until he spoke to me this morning. I’m helping him out where I can, though it’s difficult when he’s on another continent. We worked something out, and hopefully he’ll be able to get himself and his fiancee in a more comfortable position now. I’m relieved that I was in a position to help him out.

I came across an inspirational quote earlier, which made me think of him: “Emotional security is just as important as financial security.” (P.K. Shaw) I think he’d agree with that.

It relates to the second bit of bad news I got today, too. It’s family-related and I don’t want to get into it right now, but it’s more saddening than stressful. I’m doing what I can to ease things, even if it’s just being an ear when it’s needed, and offering a spare bed. It’s not a problem I can solve but that doesn’t mean I can’t help the people I love.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another at the moment. But I’m okay. I’m healing. Things aren’t great, but they’re getting better.

If you want an image to take home with you: My heart is as big as a star and covered in bandaids. They’ll fall off when they’re ready.

Web Fiction Links & Resources

Over the past nine months, I have picked up a number of useful links for registering online fiction, communities, and other resources. Partly for my own sanity, here’s a list of them for reference – I know some of you out there are thinking about starting your own online fiction, if you haven’t already!

Directories

Web Fiction Guide – a great directory of web fiction, with good-quality reviews and a helpful community in the attached forums. Lots of good resources there.

Muse’s Success – again, focussed on web fiction and offers a rate and review function.

Web Fiction Directory – another directory focussed on web fiction. 

Free Fiction Online - blog listing all kinds of online fiction available for free. Also runs polls on fiction popularity. The lovely lady who runs it also has a Twitter account and tweets links and ads continuously. Worth getting on her list!

EpiGuide – web entertainment directory. Still getting to grips with this, but they do have some interesting features.

Technorati - blog directory, social networking thingy, uses ‘blogosphere’ a lot.

BlogCatalog – another blog directory. My entry is still awaiting approval, so I have no idea how good/not it is.

Communities

Accentuate Writers’ Forum – very friendly forum full of largely professional writers. Good advice and resources to be had, and very welcoming to newcomers. Competitions, freelance writing leads, and publication opportunities found here.

MobileRead Forums – forum for users of e-readers. Lots of good info about e-readers and full of readers of e-books. Not so great for an ongoing serial like mine, but they will help with making that available to e-readers, too. Friendly crowd!

Post Apocalyptic Media – forum and resources for anything post apocalyptic. Good for information and reaching out to an audience into this stuff.

Writing Resources

Blog Fiction – lots of advice and info for blogficcers. Also runs a widget that others can put on their sites that lists all the latest posts on active blogfics.

Writing Excuses – weekly podcasts by writers for writers. Solid advice, very encouraging, hilarious and only 15 minutes long. Love it (and am way behind, oops).

Advertising

Entrecard – free blog-linking advertising, requires a widget on your blog. Good for generating hits, but the quality of those hits is questionable – the Entrecard system encourages its users to visit sites to ‘drop cards’ and then move on again. Hard to say if it generates any actual readers (though it’s possible that advertising through it might).

Project Wonderful – get paid to host ads, and pay to place ads. If you do both, it should be self-sustaining. I haven’t actually tried this yet, but it is on my list of opportunities to look at. I have heard only good things about it so far. Payments are dependent on ad showing time, not clicks.

Google Adsense/Adwords – get paid to host ads. Payments are based on click-throughs, but only for ‘genuine’ clicks. I’ve heard that the classification of ‘genuine’ clicks is too narrow, which has made advertisers unhappy (and poorer). Won’t generate a lot of money. On the other side, I don’t know what kind of hit-rate you get by advertising through Adwords – I have a voucher somewhere that I should use. Again, haven’t used this one at all.

If anyone has any additions, suggestions or comments, let me know! Always happy to expand my list. :) If this winds up morphing into a big beastie, I’ll probably move it to its own page here on the blog.

Consider me kicked

I have just read a wonderful post about why writers should blog (or blog more, in my case). Lots of good points there!

It’s something that I know I need to work on more. I still have a list of Writing Tips posts that I need to write and put up. And there’s lots of other writing-related shenanigans that I could put in here, too.

As I mentioned in my last post, part of why I started this blog was to chronicle my adventures in writing the Apocalypse Blog. AB started out as an experiment for me, a challenge, and an exploration of lots of different facets of writing. It has grown to take over parts of my life, in ways that I can’t bring myself to mind. It’s fun, it has readers, and I can’t believe it’s still going after nine months.

Last week, it tripped over the 200,000 word mark. See, this is the kind of stuff that I should be putting in here! Also, holy crap. I haven’t ever written that much on one story before.

Also, a very kind person over on a new forum I tripped over last week has done me a cover for AB. As if it was a real book. How awesome is that? I’ll sort out posting it and stuff soon, to share it with you all. In the meantime, you can find it on the AB thread there (I think it’s on the last page).

So. Right. I’m going to make an effort to post more on here. There’s more I want to say about Dillon’s death, and other related musings. Keep an eye out, there will be more here soon!

Apologies, my commentators

I just found some of your lovely comments buried in my spam comment section. I didn’t put them in there, I promise! The blacklist looks like it’s a bit enthusiastic, so I have wiped it clean for now. You shouldn’t have any problems commenting from now on.

Big, huge apologies. Thanks for all your comments – I do love getting them, and I have (finally) replied to the ones I’ve found! I’m going through the spam section and will sort out any more I come across.

Okay, back to your normal service.

New look live!

That was surprisingly painless. Copy over the files from the test site, activate the template, and… that’s it!

I can’t see anything that is going BORK BORK on it, and even the Writing Tips entries didn’t need to be reformatted (they have the most structure/format applied of all my posts). Thank goodness for the test site – it seems to have ironed out all the issues!

That’s something good that’s happened today. Let me know if you spot any glitches! I’m gonna go play a game for a bit, kill things in a heroic fashion.

Best laid plans

My Creative Writing Group met on Friday night. Due to Easter and a general desire not to spam emails at the least provocation, I didn’t send out a reminder email the weekend before it. This is, apparently, a bad idea, as I only had a handful of people come to the meeting. I suspect the rest were either caught up in family stuff (it was the school holidays), or had simply forgotten. Oh well! I know better for next time.

On the plus side, I had a new member join the group, and we all had a lively and informative discussion. I had prepared all kinds of notes about dialogue, an issue that has cropped up a lot of late in various writing circles, and one that I find writers often ask about or struggle with. I’m planning to write all those notes up for my next Writing Tips post (probably the next several!), hopefully some time over the next week.

I had a lot I wanted to do this weekend, but I didn’t get to most of it. This was mostly due to the awful, short sleep I got on Saturday night, which led to a very lethargic and resting Sunday. Rather than force myself to write, I gave myself the day off to recuperate. By Monday morning, I was feeling much better, but I still wish I had got done some of what I had planned.

So my short story hasn’t been written yet, and I am not ahead on the Apocalypse Blog posts the way I want to be. I have been posting very hand-to-mouth over the weekend, and I think the posts are a bit rougher than usual because of that.

Exhaustion is making it difficult to write as well as I would like. I tried to do today’s post on the train this morning, and wound up closing the notebook after one sentence so that I could nap instead. I will have to be strict with myself to get as much done as possible over the next few days, as next week is looking like it will be something of a nightmare.

My parents are heading off to the UK for three weeks to visit my brother and the grandson they haven’t seen yet. So I now have the house to look after, three demanding cats, and a houseguest to cook for. The three hours I have when I get home from work will shrink alarmingly, I think. Thank goodness I already do the bulk of my writing on the train; here’s hoping that I am not too tired to accomplish that.

On the plus side, the blog is going well and still hitting 80+ visits per day. I’m constantly battling the plot pace, trying to keep myself from rushing things, but without dawdling either. I’m not sure I always hit it right. At least now they have the scooters, Faith and her friends will be zipping around a lot faster than before, though that presents its own problems. Luckily, I have some other obstacles to throw in their way to slow them down from time to time.

I managed to get around to updating the Chronology page the other day, so it’s up-to-date with the current goings-on. I want to expand the information on the Cast page a bit too – that’s a job for later in the week, I think. Sometimes, it’s nice to focus on the background stuff as a break from the posts, especially when my brain is feeling less creative.

I’m also thinking about throwing AB open for guest posts soon. Faith isn’t telling only her own story – she’s telling all of the stories she comes across. I need to give some thought to how that will work and then throw up an info page on the blog.

How do I always have such a long list of things to do? Oh well, best get to it!

It never goes smoothly

Yesterday was an exercise in frustration. I was overtired and restless, and couldn’t settle to anything.

I tried to write AB posts, and managed to get one down. But my brain didn’t want to focus on being creative, so I left it alone before I wrote something awful. I’m wrangling my way through a big and important encounter for Faith, and I don’t wany my restlessness to suck all of the emotion out of it. I managed to do most of the second part of the encounter this morning, before my laptop battery crapped out.

Which leads me to frustration number two. I’ve checked out a few utilities (thanks Ann for linkies), and they all tell me that the battery is not well. I tried to do a bit of manual reconditioning, but that requires being able to fully drain the battery, which I can’t do (the computer switches off when it hits about 72% charge remaining and won’t stay on until I plug it in). I reset the PMU a couple of times, but that made no difference. According to the stats I found, it hasn’t done the cycles that would be expected of this type of battery before replacement, but it’s over four years old now.

I think the only thing for it is a new battery. Which is perfect, because I really can’t afford it this month. I’m gonna have to just cope with about half an hour of frantic typing on the train before it switches itself off on me (I save very frequently, so I don’t tend to lose work). It’s not long enough to do a proper AB post, but better than attempting to do it longhand. I might see how I go with writing posts in the evenings as well, but that depends on how drained I am after work.

I also tried to set up my computer at home for VPN access to work. Got everything installed okay, but despite checking with the tech guys twice, I still didn’t have all the logins required to get into the system. I’ll have to try to get that out of them today so I can test it out tonight. Also, someone switched my machine off in the office, which meant that the VPN wouldn’t have worked anyway, as it has to be on for me to log into. Rrrrr.

On the plus side, I decided to ease my technical frustations by putting together a test-site for the next fictional blog I have percolating in the back of my head. Definitely not going to start writing it until AB is done (because my head will explode), but it’s nice to have the site all tidied up and sorted. Spent an evening fighting with CSS code, and came out mostly victorious. It doesn’t display completely right on Safari, but it looks fine on a Windows machine.

And now, here I am at work, using up some lunchtime to post. Haven’t had a very productive morning, but hopefully this afternoon will be better.

Brain – off switch?

I wish I had one. The thing with being creative regularly is that it makes you more creative. This was the point of starting the Apocalypse Blog! And it’s working! I’m learning, I’m enjoying my daily writing sessions, and I’m actually writing every day.

And now I’m starting to get ideas. For more fictional blogs. Other ways to use the medium, other stories that I can tell this way. Like a ship’s log, told by the ship.

It’s exciting and wonderful, but I so don’t have time for any more right now! I’m barely scraping AB into my schedule at the moment (laptop issues are not helping by cutting my writing time short every commute). I am writing the ideas down, though! They need a lot of work.

If AB doesn’t kill me this year, maybe I’ll do another one afterwards. The temptation is definitely there! Never mind that I’m a day or two behind schedule (in next week’s stuff, not this week’s). It’s still the best fun. :)