Friday, August 27, 2010

100 Days of Writing Halfway Update! “Houston we may have a problem…”

# “Past the old school on the avenue, I am running, I am running... and now, I'm halfway home…” #Nerina Pallot


It's about time I posted a long overdue update on how my "100 Days of Writing" has been going, since I've recently passed Day 50 of this epic struggle between writer and blank page... What the heck am I going on about? Well, back in June this year, I embarked on a long-held personal promise to attempt to complete work on a long-planned novella called "Moon Crater: Adventures - Simulacrum" and "Tweet" about the whole affair via my Twitter account...

From the beginning and "Day 1", I set up certain rules (and, of course, along the way learned to bend them a bit!), such as not writing at weekends, but treating the writing as I do my day job, working at it 5 days a week, on weekday evenings. And while the first half century of days have been successful in at least getting me to regularly commit a set time each day to looking at, thinking about and regularly scribbling (and typing) away at Simulacrum, it's also had it's less successful elements. As I've mentioned before on the blog, from Day 1 of this 100 Days of writing, I began this routine in the midst of upheaveal in my daily working routine as I was made redundant from my day job of 10 years... Now, thankfully, I've actually got a new job (still in the field of TV, which I continue to enjoy and draw creative energy from), but adjusting to new working hours and a different daily routine has meant that the 100 days have on occasion taken a hit (I also forgot that I'd be on holiday for at least two periods during the 100 Days, thus some slightly obvious gaps inbetween my Tweets!)...


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Thursday, August 05, 2010

On The Road To Publishville # 6 - "Course Corrections & New Headings"

# “I’m one of a million pieces fallen on the ground, it’s one of the reasons when we say goodbye, we’ll still come around…” # - Counting Crows


I actually couldn't remember when I last sat down and wrote a new piece in my "On The Road To Publishville" saga, so I thought it was about time I put finger to keyboard and provided an update on my efforts to get my first novel into print, following the route of finding a literary agent. With this latest entry into my occasional series of posts, I want to talk a little about what happens when life outside of writing takes over and "interrupts" your creative pursuits.

As well as rejections from agents, there’s all sorts of stumbling blocks that can get in the way of you sitting down and getting to the practical task of writing. For me, it's been the fact that I was suddenly made redundant from my full-time day job as a TV Subtitler at the end of May and (for around 2 months) suddenly had pressures from all sorts of areas that I just didn't have to worry about before, when I was sailing along, writing regularly in my leisure time. I've already talked here on the blog about how I planned to "fill the silence" with my writing pursuits, but despite my best efforts, and because of the anxiety and need to bring an income in from something other than a non-paying hobby, I found I didn't have as much free time as I thought I might have had going into this strange, other-worldly plane of existence called "redundancy"...


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