The Steampunk Excerpt
Yesterday, I said I would post the first scene from my Russian steampunk novel complete with my editorial notes. Alas the fickle finger of fate has intervened. Scrivener has crashed seven times on me since yesterday, which is more than it has crashed during the whole period since I started using it back in 2007. Since the only file that crashes is the one for this particular story, I am tempted to conclude that this might have something to do with Scapple importing. That might be jumping to conclusions prematurely though. Something else may have corrupted the file. The net Read more…
Day One, Scene One, Chapter One
So I started work on the first scene of the first chapter of my Russian steampunk novel. I got eight hundred words or so done. It was initially a disappointing read. It lacked the the richness, power and drama I thought it would contain when I conceived the scene. This is normal. For me, it’s how the transition from imagination to prose often works. In my mind, I had a picture of a landscape somewhere between Dore’s illustrations of 19th century London slums and Miyazaki’s villages from Laputa the Flying Island. Dark satanic factories belched forth smoke and flame. Things Read more…
RIP David Bowie
I was looking at Flipboard this morning and came across an article saying David Bowie was dead. Hoping it was one of those cruel internet hoaxes I paged through a couple of news sites. Turns out, sadly, that it wasn’t. I am stunned. Bowie’s music was part of the soundtrack of my teenage life, perhaps the largest part of it. I can remember lying on my bed in the council house in Fairhurst Rd listening to The Man Who Sold the World and Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs. Brilliant stuff; great rock, weirdly intelligent, with heavy SF undertones. It spoke Read more…
Scapple for Plotting
I am currently working on a murder mystery. I started with an interesting central character (a wizard detective),a setting that excites me (a magical steampunk version of nineteenth century Russia) and a strong idea (our hero has to investigate the murder of a rival he hated, one suspect being the woman he once loved). I was happily writing my outline until I came to the point where the body was discovered. At that point a red flag went up. I had no idea who committed the crime. This sort of thing happens to me a lot. I start with an Read more…
When You Need to Block Out the Internet Just Focus
Over the past few years I’ve used a program called Freedom to cut myself off from the internet when I’ve needed to be more productive. It works well but it’s a bit brute force– it blocks all access to the net. Recently the makers of Freedom have started moving towards a subscription model. This leads me to believe that the standalone app might not be long for this world. I like Freedom but I am not a big fan of the subscription model so I started looking around for alternatives. I had a half-price coupon for a program called Focus Read more…
Dungeon World +2 Bundle of Holding
Just a quick post this morning. I got an email from the good people at Bundle of Holding. They have a new Dungeon World Bundle available. There’s some extraordinarily good stuff. Not only Dungeon World itself but dark magical Grim World. (I backed the kickstarter). It does exactly what it says on the tin. There’s Iron Edda where the riders of mecha-ish magical machines fight against the coming of Ragnarok in a world of Norse-ish mythology. There’s the dying earth of Last Days of Anglekite. There’s steampunk adventure with The Green Scar and Inverse World. And there’s a whole lot Read more…
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