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Showing posts from July, 2006

New beginnings or just returning to the start...

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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 tribulat

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

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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!)

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

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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 t

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

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"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 S

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

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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...

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

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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 las