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?

Apocalypse Blog merchandise

I received an email this week about the possibility of producing AB merchandise, from an Australian-based online serial publisher. They’re setting up a merchandise store for their own web serials, and wanted to know if I would be interested in having AB stuff go on there, too. No set-up fees, no charges, nothing, but I can earn commission on all my merchandise.

It’s an interesting idea, and without seeing anything contractual, looks pretty good. (I need to check into the rights issues, I think.) I don’t mind so much about the money (though some extra is always good!), and I think I can probably get a design put together based on the awesome AB book cover that was done a few months ago.

I’ve been pondering this for a couple of days, and now I throw the question out to all of you: should I do it?

How many people would want (and buy!) an Apocalypse Blog t-shirt, or badge? (That’s what they’re offering to start with – t-shirts (black and white) and badges.) As a guide (I’ll need to check this when I get home), the shirts came out to about $25 and the badges to about $2 (Australian dollars, so cheaper in US dollars). Quality is roughly equivalent to Cafe Press and another store whose name I have forgotten.

Thoughts? Preferences? Considerations? Bite my hand off?

Milestone: Apocalypse Blog’s first birthday!

One year ago today, the first post on the Apocalypse Blog went up. In today’s post, Faith reflects on the intervening period, in the first of two, possibly three anniversary posts.

I keep getting to these milestones and sitting back, feeling stunned as I turn it over in my head. I’m so proud to have made it this far.

When I started out, in my heart, I wanted to run AB for a full year. That’s was my original goal. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, though – I’d never done anything like this before, I didn’t know if I could keep up the pace, and I had no idea if I had enough plot to keep it interesting for this long. I forced myself to take my time, to not rush from one pre-planned plot point to the next. I set a tentative goal of six months, to see how it went.

I think by the time I was about three months in, I knew I could spin it out for a whole year. Still, it’s more than a little amazing to think that AB has been a large part of my life for an entire year. My brain has trouble wrapping around that.

Two weeks to go. One week’s worth of posts left to write. Wow.

Today was the perfect time to go check on the e-Fiction Book Club, where I found that they have put up a review of AB. It made my day. I’m still grinning. It’s the sort of review that makes me bounce.

Thanks to the e-Fiction reviewer (Cassie) for taking the time to read the blog, and thanks to all my readers for sticking with me for so long. I adore you all.

Milestone: 400th post!

Today, the Apocalypse Blog’s 400th post went up! Huzzah! Everybody: dance!

It’s hard to believe there are that many posts, and that the average wordcount per post is still rising. I haven’t updated my little spreadsheet in ages (I really should do that), but they’re usually over 1,000 words these days!

I have about 10 days’ worth of posts left to write (having spent the weekend sorting out a gnarly plotting issue and editing up the next week’s posts). I’m really looking forward to getting my head down and getting those posts written out – there’s so much still to come! Hopefully I can fit it all into those 10 posts!

Fingers crossed, huh? Almost into the final run, my lovely readers. I’m so excited to be getting to the end, even though I know I’ll miss it when it’s done.

Do you want a sneak peak at the end? Here you go: “And then they ate us all.”

No, wait, I have a better one: “And then I woke up and realised I’d been in a coma for a year.”

You don’t want lame? Okay, I shall restrain the urge to give it an ending that will make you want to beat me with sticks. I shall endeavour to not suck! :)

Sluggish

It hasn’t been a great week.

There was that review, which knocked me sideways a bit. Then you lovely people pulled me up again – thank you for all your comments, support, and honesty.

I’ve since had another review on Web Fiction Guide, which raised similar concerns to the previous one but in a much less damning way. It felt more balanced (but maybe that’s just me).

On the plus side, I’ve been getting a load of hits through from it, and more feedback is great too. My overall rating is pretty good (looks like a 3.5?), and I’m happy with that. Happy enough for now, anyway.

On top of that, the CFS has been crawling up to smother me this week. I’ve been getting sleep (which is usually my toughest battle) but still waking up tired. Worse and worse each day, until yesterday my alarm pulled me out of the middle of a very vivid (and strange) dream. I am never dreaming at that time - I don’t remember the last time that happened. My body clock knows I get up at just after 6am, so I’m at least semi-awake by then.

Today, I got up feeling like lead. My glands feel like they’ve come up, and I’ve had cotton-head half of the day. I am currently subsisting on sugar and caffiene, and wondering just how little of tonight’s work Christmas party I can be there for before I can slip away. If the party wasn’t between the office and my house, I wouldn’t be going at all. Plus, I put a dress on today for the damn thing, so I might as well use it.

It hasn’t been a good week for writing. With those things tugging at me – in a downwards direction – it was really a bad time to tackle a post about a character in a dark place. The whole thing went sideways and ended in a position that I’m not sure I can recover from. I’m writing about ten days from the end of the blog, and there isn’t time to work with that. Luckily, I’m writing far enough ahead of the posts that I have time to fix it.

This morning, I abandoned the desire to surge ahead anyway, and went back to fix the post. Basically, I rewrote it with an additional element that I had originally intended to be in there, but had been unable to find room for the first time around. I started with the new element and made the rest fit in around it, and I think it’s going to wind up better for it. I’m itching to get it finished, but I’m so braindead that I can’t bring myself to review yet another technical ticket because it hurts too much.

Instead, I wound up procrastinating by registering the Apocalypse Blog on NetworkBlogs on Facebook. Another way to share the joy! I hear that it’s a good way to advertise, and while it may be a little late in AB’s case (as it’s ending soon), no harm in trying. Those of you on FB – follow, share, enjoy!

I’ve put off everything I had planned to do this weekend, except an evening out with a few friends. For the rest of the time, I will be resting and attempting to sort out the hash I’ve made of AB this week. Thank goodness for buffer. Oh, how I missed you, buffer.

Coming soon: AB’s next milestone, and news about the next blogfic on the horizon. It’s coming soon. Hopefully not too soon. In the meantime, wish me sanity and sleep.

Review blues

The Apocalypse Blog hasn’t had many reviews. I haven’t been pushing for them – the best way to get reviews is to review other web fiction, and knowing how little time I have, I don’t feel capable of putting in the kind of time it takes to do that. I felt bad asking for reviews, knowing that I couldn’t reciprocate. So it’s okay. I don’t mind. I get feedback from my readers and that’s fantastic. It’s more than I hoped to get.

Still, it’s always nice to be reviewed (especially when you haven’t asked for one). A couple of months ago, one of the editors over at Web Fiction Guide did a review on AB (I know I meant to link to it, but I can’t remember if I did or not). It was mostly positive but not entirely – which is to be expected, and, I felt, fair. I don’t expect my work to be flawless or suit everyone, and as I’ve said many times, I welcome feedback.

On noticing a spike of click-throughs from the WFG listing recently, I checked it out and discovered another review had been put up. This one was by the writer of the Blog Fiction blog, which is a great resource for blog fiction writers and readers. This review made me far less happy than the previous one did.

It has its positive points, all of which I am gratified to hear. The reviewer says my characters are realistic, the story is involving, the setting is engaging, and the site is “an example of how to put together a Blog Fiction site”. This is wonderful to read!

And then I got to the ‘cons’ section of the review. According to this reviewer, all of the above good points are let down by the writing. In summary: I tell more than I show, and it’s difficult for the reader to connect to the action or the characters.

I won’t lie – that hurt. The Apocalypse Blog has its flaws, but I had hoped that the writing itself wasn’t a huge one. I know I’m not perfect. I know posts have gone up when I’m less than happy with them. But still. It’s a knock to have it stripped down that way.

I’m not going to bitch and whine about it. This is what this particular reviewer felt when he read AB, and bad reviews (by which I mean ‘negative’) are part of this game. I can comfort myself by looking at the first review, which described the blog as “so well-written, so dark, disturbing, and emotional, that I had to stop reading”. But that doesn’t make this particular viewpoint go away.

So the question becomes: what do I do about it? This is one person’s opinion, which is valid (it’s his opinion and he is entitled to that) but not all-encompassing. I’m not going to beat myself up about it, or stop writing. I’ve had good feedback too. But it does make me nervous.

I could attempt to explain or excuse that the style the reviewer disliked: the blog format demands a certain amount of ’summary writing’, and there simply isn’t time or space to go into every event in detail. For some of the events in the story, I didn’t want to go into a lot of detail about, because while they happened, they simply weren’t important enough at the time.

But excuses and explanations don’t tackle the problem. This is one person’s opinion, but just how widely is this view held? (I am of the view that when three people read a piece and two give the same feedback, a writer should listen, even if the third person disagrees.)

Did the writing hurt the blog? Did I summarise too much? Did I gloss over things that I should have gone into detail about? Did I focus too tightly on some things and not give enough story-space to others?

I’m not looking for a pat on the back. (Some reassurance that it wasn’t as catastrophic as the review suggests would be nice, though!) I started the Apocalypse Blog to stretch my writers’ muscles, to explore new avenues in my writing, to expand and learn new things. If it’s flawed, I want to know. I want to improve.

So, what do you all think? Feel free to answer here or leave your own review on WFG. I value your honesty.

The Apocalypse Blog is currently being read by the e-Fiction Book Club for review. I’ll admit to being more than a little nervous about that, especially after reading this latest review. I have my fingers crossed and my heart in my mouth. The rest of me is in other people’s hands.

NaNoWriMo: Achieved!

It’s the 29th November, and I finally hit 50,000 words. Whoo-hoo!

It’s such a relief. I have been struggling all week, and my wordcount graph reflects that. Work has been nuts, with the new guy starting – I had to be in charge of inducting him and training him – and interviewing another candidate for the new vacancy we’ve been allowed to recruit for. And I had a deadline to meet on Friday, which involved much squinting at complicated spreadsheets and trying to work out if all the figures were correct.

On top of that, I’ve been out a lot and, of course, the CFS has been biting down hard. I wound up collapsing on Friday night and giving myself the night off, even though I had barely written anything the day before (due to an unplanned evening at the folks’ place, thanks to breaking trains and a dad who needed a lift home).

Luckily, the write-ins have been great for my productivity. I entered the weekend with 8k to go – not exactly ideal, but not horrific either – and wound up doing almost 4k at yesterday’s write-in. Today, I managed to get my head down and push through those last few posts to hit 50k just after 6pm.

Aaaaand, relax.

In all of my previous NaNo adventures, I have hit the target with a week or more to go. The first year, I petered out and coasted through the last week, ending on about 56k, just glad I got through it all. Last year, I was determined to get to the end of the story and powered on through to almost 70k. This year, I’m just glad I made it at all. This really is a lot closer to the bone than I like to cut things!

I guess it’s a symptom of how my year has been. More than once I’ve been up late, desperately trying to focus on an Apocalypse Blog post properly so that I can get it edited, and then post it before I fell into bed. Once, I had to backdate the time slightly to squeeze it into the previous day, as it was almost 1am when it was finally going up. (One lovely reader noticed! Despite my sneaky fiddling with the posting time. It’s so good to know people are paying attention!)

I wish I could take a break now. But not yet! NaNo might be finished, but AB isn’t, not quite.

I’m about halfway through December. Only a couple of weeks’ worth of posts, and then I’m finished. I have tomorrow off work, to rest and recover from everything, so I plan to spend that editing the first half of December. Then I can focus on getting the last half of the month written, polished up and posted.

Almost there. Almost done. I can’t wait. I want to see the whole story, hold it in my hands as a complete thing. I’m looking forward to telling everyone: I did it. I got to the end, I got through a whole year and a long, winding story.

For tonight, though, I’m going to put my feet up, feel good about myself, and look forward with hope. It has been hard work, but it’s all working out nicely. That makes it worth it.

Milestone: 300,000 words!

Today, the Apocalypse Blog reached 300,00 words! Whoo-hoo!

(For those of you following my NaNoWriMo adventures, this is 300k in total since AB began, not just during November!)

I never thought I’d ever reach a number like that. When I stop and think how much I have struggled to write novels (or to finish them, at least), the fact that I have sustained the AB story for so long, through so many adventures, and clocked up the kind of wordcount – well, it’s boggling. It’s true that you really can surprise yourself if you set your mind on something.

Wordcount wasn’t something I was aiming for when I started this last December. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect when I set out – my goal was a post a day (at least) and that was it. I figured there’d be smaller ones and larger ones… but it turns out that there are a lot more large ones than small! Well, that’s okay. I hope that there isn’t too much fat in there – while it hasn’t been as edited as I would have liked, it has been edited!

I guess we’ll find out next year when I look at rolling AB up into an e-book. Or, considering the size of it, possibly three e-books. Who knows?

300,00 words. I’d like to say that I’ll top that one day, but… well. I’m going to enjoy how this feels first and worry about breaking records another time!

NaNoWriMo: Into the last week

I had planned to update this every week during NaNo at least, but once again, time has run away from me. Good intentions and all of that. Bah!

NaNoWriMo is going better and worse than expected. The ML side of things is going fantastically – we have three to four events per week, and people turning up to all of them (!!!). It’s much better than last year, and I can’t say enough how grateful I am to have help this year. I couldn’t have done a lot of this stuff without my fellow MLs.

The best part is the the wrimos have noticed and are also grateful. I’ve had lots of comments about the write-ins and other stuff we’ve got going on, all of them positive. It gives me such a boost to hear stuff like that; it’s always nice to know that your work is appreciated and that you’re getting stuff right. We do all these events so that people come together, write, socialise and, most importantly, have fun. If that’s happening, I’m a happy ML.

I am, however, rushed off my feet. There were two write-ins this weekend, and I was due to be at both of them. I wound up pulling out of today’s, knowing that there would be other MLs present to pick up the stuff I usually do there. The Chronic Fatigue is biting pretty hard at the moment, which isn’t a surprise considering how much I’m running around at the moment. Also, I wanted to get my head down and do my own writing; it’s very easy to let all the ML duties distract me from NaNo itself and writing my own novel.

My writing isn’t going to plan. I’m getting plenty done on the weekends – especially since I started taking headphones to write-ins so I could zone out and write, rather than monitoring the meeting and joining in with every conversation (I’m a social butterfly, what can I say?). However, during the week, I’m not getting as much done.

The thing I was afraid of is happening. I’ve been in such a routine with my writing this year - writing a post a day, editing, and posting it up - that it’s hard to step up the pace and write more. I should be doing two posts per day if I’m going to hit my target of getting everything up until the end of December written. Couple that with a crazy work situation – the Team Leader stuff continues, quieter than before but still busy enough that it’s sucking up a lot of my mental energy – and it doesn’t leave me with much impetus to write more per day.

My attempts to make writing time have frequently been thwarted. I managed to get out of work a little early and hoped to get in a couple of hours’ writing when I got home, and I got to the train station to find that all of the signals in the city centre had broken. I waited nearly an hour for a train, and it crawled all the way home, stuffed to the gills with frustrated commuters. By the time I got home, I was so tired and hungry that I wound up just editing and posting, then cooked and zoned out in front of the TV.

I’d hoped to have a full day to write today too, but I was so tired after being out all day yesterday at a write-in that the morning was mostly pottering around in a daze. Plus I had to sort out all my weekly chores so that I have clean dishes and clothes and food and all those small, essential things that get missed when you’re out all the time.

I swear, I need a maid. A very cheap, invisible maid. …hmm, maybe that’s an idea to shelve for a future short story.

So, it’s been a struggle. I’ve been playing catchup half the time, which is a stressful situation I have managed to avoid in my previous NaNo ventures. However, it’s not all bad news.

I’m on track with my wordcount. Almost 39,000 words now, which puts me a day or so ahead of target. If I keep going as I am, I’ll make the required 50k, probably by the skin of my teeth.

I’m not doing so well with the post count. I should be halfway through December by now, but I’m only up to the 5th. I might wind up having to write post-NaNo to finish things up. That’s not a disaster, but it leaves me with less of a break before I start the next blogfic. Or possibly no break at all – it’s hard to say yet.

What this means is that the posts have swelled – as NaNo kicked in, I became more verbose, and it has been a struggle to keep the post lengths down to a reasonable level. I’ve had to split a few of them up into more manageable chunks, which isn’t ideal but it has helped fill in the posts. My rough average for a month’s posts is about 25,000 words, but November finished up at over 33,000. Whoops. Not exactly what I had intended to do!

Yesterday, I finally got to the end of November’s posts. That was such a good feeling – I could breathe again. I knew that once I started on December’s posts, I was on the downhill run – that was my own personal halfway mark. Today, I spent the afternoon writing out the first few posts for December, making a dent in the backlog. It still feels strange to finish a post and then move straight on to the next one; I keep wanting to pause and edit. While it is a good habit to write every day, it has its down-sides too!

This evening, I went over the posts for November that haven’t gone up yet. This is one bit of really good news: they are all edited and scheduled. I don’t need to do any of that over the next eight days. No more stopping to sort out the day’s post; I can concentrate on writing now. I can’t say how freeing that is (partly because I’ve only just finished and haven’t enjoyed an edit-free day yet) but I am looking forward to it! With luck, I can get my head down and make some decent progress through December’s posts between now and the end of NaNo.

Also, I think the plot is on-track to get where it needs to go. I have a good idea of where I need the group – and the story – to get to, and I know roughly what the last post will look like. So far, it’s lining up (allowing for the ridiculously long travel times that happen in the Apocalypse Blog). It’s hard to judge exactly how it’ll pan out, but I think I have given myself enough leeway to make it fit. Fingers crossed!

Right. I’m tired and have to be up early for work tomorrow. My brain is shutting down (it’s possible it did that before I started this post, but shhh, don’t tell anyone). Time to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything and hit the sack. Oh, and I have another milestone turning up soon – I must look up when that is. Whee!

Another crazy, event-heavy week coming up. Catch you all on the flipside. Wish me luck!

Week One: Survived

The first week of this year’s NaNoWriMo challenge is done. Wow. It feels like it has been so much longer than that already!

I usually take some time off work at the beginning of November to give myself a bit of a headstart. I love to dive in headfirst and just go for it, get that initial rush of creativity out without impediment.

This year has been different for a few reasons. Firstly, I had to use some of my week off work for family stuff before November. Secondly, we were all organised with the write-ins before NaNo started and kicked off with them as soon as November popped up on our calendars. So I went from family stuff straight into events and… haven’t stopped since.

I think out of a full week, I had one clear day to just sit and write. If you look at my pretty wordcount graph, you can guess which day that was (under NaNo Stats).

On Wednesday, I had a write-in at my house. Awesome turnout – I think we had about 15 people there at one point. I had borrowed an extra table and outdoor chairs from my folks, and wound up having to take my dining tables and more chairs outside too. My gazebo is fantastic and everyone had a good time – I had lots of bouncy responses on the NaNo forum about it.

On Thursday, I went back to work. I was so tired. Got some bad news there (those of you who follow me on Facebook probably heard about it – I won’t go into it here) and spent the day catching up and trying to sort out fallout.

On top of all that, I have spent the last few days struggling over a particularly gnarly plot convergence on the Apocalypse Blog. Finally, the threads I’ve been spinning out for the past few weeks are coming together and Stuff is happening. It’s been a struggle – there was a lot to get in there, so many pieces to fit together and balance. A single event has taken 4 posts to get through, and I still haven’t got to the end of it. Almost!

Not exactly the most conducive way to start NaNo – I like to get myself ahead of the game in the first week, so I can breathe a bit easier for the rest of the month. Gnarly plot wrangling means writing slower, which means I’m not as far ahead as I’d like. Last year, I was up to 20,000 words by the end of the first two days. This year, I’m at 15,000 words after the first week. Still ahead of target, just not as much as I’d like.

I shouldn’t forget that I have some additional challenges this year as well. All up, I’m doing good!

I am on track with posts. I’m aiming for two a day (so I can get through November and December’s posts in NaNo), and I just finished next Saturday’s posts. I have a buffer again. Wow that feels nice! It’s been so long that I had forgotten what it was like!

Another big write-in tomorrow. I’m past the really tricky plot stuff now, so hopefully the posts will flow a bit easier now. With luck, I’ll be able to hit some kind of groove in the coming week.

In the meantime, I have to return the table and chairs to my folks. Then edit and post today’s fun-filled AB instalment. The fun never stops here!