Thursday, July 27, 2006

New beginnings or just returning to the start...


Welcome one and all to my writing blog site! This is the place where I'm recording "journal" entries alongside the writing of what I'm hoping will be my debut novel as a children's writer...
# "I've been flying high all night... So come pick me up, I've landed" # - Ben Folds
I've actually been keeping this blog for about three months now, so apologies to my regular readers but I wanted to put a big "Hear, ye! Hear, ye!" type of post here now because the link from my official website should be alive and kicking any time and it'll hopefully bring a new audience to my ramblings on this blog. So a big shout out to my old friends and a warm welcome to anyone that's found their way here via my "Missing Reel" site.
www.findthemissingreel.com is a website in progress. It is there to complement and work alongside the novel, but in a different way to this blog. Here, I'm recording my trials and tribulations of writing the novel, where as my official website will provide insights into just what Moon Crater is all about... There'll be puzzles and clues to follow on the main site (there'll also be a lot more hints and clues on this and my other blogs sites, by the way), as each of the items on the desk top homepage are unlocked over the course of the next year. So stick with me, if you have the energy and enthusiasm and hopefully I won't disappoint!
I am very much on a writer's journey, sharing my experiences of writing here, as well as e-publishing my early short stories and other writing. I mentioned above that I have other blog sites (these can be found by clicking on View My Complete Profile above) and they all contain the different types of writing that I've done and want to do in the future. In the Archives (below, left) on this my main blog site, you can go right back to the beginning of my posts in May of this year and see where it all started. I rant about many different aspects of writing here - my influences, what inspires me, what I find curious about the world, but they all have a relevance to the ongoing writing of my first novel.
So, just what is Moon Crater about and what kind of a writer do I want to be? Well, on my main website, there's an introduction page that will explain more about the novel itself, but as I've already said I see myself for now as a children's writer. I love adventure, mystery and "oddity" stories, but I always want my stories to have a grounding in reality. I'm not really a writer of wizard or witch books, or far-away hidden worlds. The type of writing I feel comfortable doing, that most excites me and interests me, is that which shows what's actually possible in our own real world today. That doesn't mean I wouldn't write historical fiction - I have every intention of it in the future, and I also dabble in science fiction from time to time. But for now I want to explore this strange world we all live in and think we know so well, and mainly through a child's eyes.
Anyway, I'll sign off for now, but I'd appreciate it you've found my words intriguing and want to bookmark this, my other blog sites and my main website and come back and visit soon. If you have kids, or know people with kids, in the 8-14 age group, they might find my main website entertaining once the puzzles begin to show up there, so, please, help me to spread the word by pointing them towards it too.
Thanks for taking the time to read my many scribbles and any feedback or comments are definitely always welcome and read if they come to me via my writing email address at: b_c_carden@yahoo.co.uk
Cheers, and once again, thanks for joining me for the ride...
CGAllan, 27th July, 2006.
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Friday, July 21, 2006

# "If you wrote me off, I'd understand it, cos I've been on some other planet" # - Ben Folds

While the busy penguins chisel and chip away at their final masterpiece over at my official website, I have a progress report/update type thingy in that the homepage is now in full colour! The veil of the "night-vision" look to the holding page has been lifted and now you can see how the final site will look when you first hit onto the page. There's even new wording on there too, which will lead into the "unlocking" of the first page at some point next week - an introduction by moi (me, for those of you who don't speak Ancient Bottaian or some other Orionate language). Anyway, I'm pleased with Twig's achievements so far, he's leading his team of tuxedoed bird friends well, and we're on schedule for an end of July launch of the site proper... (Go to www.findthemissingreel.com to see what I'm on about!)


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Friday, July 14, 2006

# "I remember when I found out about chemistry, it was a long, long way from here..." # - Dan Wilson (Semisonic)


It's been a longish week sorting out the first elements of the main home page for the website and also a busy week with our wedding preparations suddenly taking a new and energetic spirit. We've been engaged for two and a half years and planned everything for so long but suddenly with only two weeks to go, the last-minute things need to be done quite quickly... Still, it'll all come together in the end, I'm sure.

That's what I keep telling myself about www.findthemissingreel.com too - I've been considering what to actually put up as the first parts of what will be a "drip-feed" (in a good way!) /teasing site as the next year progresses that will with a bit of luck whet the appetite for what Moon Crater might bring... Anyway, the big unveiling will happen next week (date to be confirmed - check back here for breaking news!) and the main "desk top" page will have two or three clickable objects as well as some hidden links for visitors to the site to search for and find...


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Friday, July 07, 2006

# "It becomes important for me to get up and see their last second curves toward flight!" # - John McRea (Cake)

"Copy cat, copy cat, sitting on the door mat..." As a writer that old school playground rhyme sticks in my head because I get quite paranoid about people stealing my work. It's a stupid worry, really, because a radio writer I once heard in a lecture said, "Nobody can really ever steal your story - ideas can be taken but the way an individual puts their own stamp on a story is what makes it their own." But still I get anxious about what kind of copyright I have on my work when it's let loose in the "public domain", especially now that I've actually put my stories onto the net proper with my new blog sites...

I make sure I always put the "©" symbol with my name after anything I e-publish myself and of course do the old trick of posting all of my stories to myself and I recently found this useful page on the UK Patent Office site about what they call "Intellectual property" - http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/info/ideas.pdf So I think I've been going the right way about stuff - the gist of that web link is that once you write a notion or idea down, once you actually commit it to paper, it should be able to be credited back to you in the future as long as you make sure you date stamp it with your name!)


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Wednesday, July 05, 2006

# "Due to a construct in my mind that makes their falling and their flight symbolic of my entire existence..." # - John McRea (Cake)

Rolling ever onwards (and hopefully upwards) I've gone blogging mad since I set up my second blog to put some of my other children's stories onto the internet a few days ago.

I've now got four other blogs apart from this main "writers journal". This isn't out of any sort of narcissism (Oh, OK, maybe a tiny bit) but more so that I can actually take out those "early stories of CGAllan" from the bottom draw of my desk, shake the dust off them and at least get them read by as wide an audience as possible. And at the very least, if I'm lucky enough to get Moon Crater published in the near future, readers will be able to see where I'm coming from, and how my ideas and themes were formed when I first practised my art with these formative tales...


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Monday, July 03, 2006

# "Birds fall from the window ledge above mine, then they flap their wings at the last second..." # - John McRea (Cake)


I'm in the mood for trying new things this week... The weather has finally changed to a nice summery temperature and even though this morning I almost had a heart attack when my old laptop seemed to have wiped my memory stick and most of the up-to-date notes for Moon Crater I'm in a postive mood. (Incidentally, my old laptop lied to me - checking my stick on another PC all of the data is there - thankfully!)

I've got a four week deadline for a few things in my life at the moment - and they're all writing-related. I get married at the end of the month and so among the many preparations the two of us have, I have to write a speech - "Easy for a writer", you say? Well, I'm finiding it more difficult than it probably is, and I think it's because I've never had to write in that format before. But I'll get there in the end, I'm sure. The other is the big mound of Post-its and scraps of paper with ideas for Moon Crater which I did a post on last month - http://cgallan.blogspot.com/2006/06/can-you-tell-me-things-you-remember.html - is almost only an ant-hill now but I desperately want to get them all typed into my writing plan so that when we return from honeymoon, I can begin the proper task of finishing writing the remaining chapters of Moon Crater. I also need to arrange with Twig to put up the final design of what the homepage to my main writing website will finally look like (a clue is to think of the existing design in the complete opposite...) - all this in four weeks, so I'd better get my skates on...


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