Today we painted the tile kitchen floor. Of course first we sanded it, with 40 grit sandpaper under our booted feet, skating around without a care in the world. Yesterday I bought a belt sander, a fairly serious bit of equipment, and had a go at sanding off the glaze on the tiles with that- necessary because with the glaze, paint won’t stick to the tiles. It bit a bit of glaze off each time, then almost immediately the grit was stripped off and the belt was just heating up the tiles, burning the glaze a splotchy black. They weren’t … Read More
Flower ordering service?
A full, knackering day today of decorating, shopping, exercise, sanding down tiles (photos soon), using polyfilla for holes, and tidying up, that was kicked off with this long and tortuous exchange- re: our broadband is down. Broadband fiasco (9-10am) I called to our broadband provider and try to arrange an engineer visit to fix the fault on the line. End up trapped in an automatic voice recognition computer loop for 30 minutes, asking me if I want to book Monday or Tuesday (only- which I couldn’t do) despite calling and recalling multiple times trying to lie my way to a … Read More
Cover design day
Today I spent many many hours working on the typography for the new Mr. Ruins cover. Hours hunting for good free fonts, then hours more tinkering with colors, font combos, spacing and placement, as well as making mini changes to the image itself. It’s amazing how long it can take to do such little things that nobody will really notice. The image is fantastic. It’s so vampiric! But also- I believe- it has the sci-fi tone. It definitely doesn’t look like vampire romance, which I believe is the dominant part of the genre. Nothing wrong with vam-ro, of course, but … Read More
Toilet philosophy
Today during a training day at work, I came across this piece of wisdom scrawled on a toilet cubicle wall: It gave me real pause. Fascinating, and so pithy. This completely sums up my philosophy on writing and self-publishing, on blogging, on just about anything. Lots of thoughts went through my mind- with regard to blogging- that until I started this blog up, I was certain I had nothing interesting to say on a daily basis. So I censored myself in advance. I wanted to put something out there in blog format- but I was stricken with doubt. Making it … Read More
Break-even!! Not only digging anymore…
Today is the day I have finally broken out of the red in my writing career, through the glass break-even ceiling, and into the black! Wow, the air up here is rarefied. It’s balmy. I can just swim in these waters all day. Amazon release the payouts for the previous month (August) on the 15th of the next month (now, September), and tallying it all up in my Excel file, I spotted that I had finally crossed that most daunting of rubicons- I’m no longer an indentured author, paying off the debt of my past indisgressions! Previously every bit of … Read More
Really moving in and on.
Today we finished painting the dining room in cream and orange, which basically completes downstairs bar doing something with the kitchen floor, and it leaves me with a funny feeling of melancholy. It hit hardest when I was flattening a few boxes- very sturdy boxes from a Korean courier service, which carried all our stuff from Japan over a year ago. Emptying them and now flattening them (I felt like keeping them in storage in the attic, for the next time we might need them) really felt like closing that door to the past. It’s unexpected, as we’ve been in … Read More
First 3k words + surreal art
I have written the first chapter of Zombie Ocean 3! Or TL3, as I call it (as each book’s title is The L….). It is very different from what I expected. Will it hook people? Who knows. I thought the exact same thing about TL1 and TL2. I was uncertain earlier about the start I’d made, but I just pushed through and it came good and conflict-y. I worry I know nothing about this field (inner city gangs!) but then whatever, that rule to only ‘Write What You Know’ is not one I agree with. Cerulean has a heckuva past, … Read More
New desk!
Its a mini pedestal desk with 7 drawers and two writing-ey bits that pop out above drawers at left and right to afford more writing surface. It is where I will do most of my writing hereon in. Just behind the chair is my weights bench. Did weights tonight. Corbyn won the Labour leadership election. People say it’s huge, but the next election is not til 2020, so I’m not convinced it means all that much. Plus I can’t say I’m anti-austerity. Increase tax on rich people, yes, I’m for that, but pure socialism just seems so mushy to … Read More
Story arc in Zombie Ocean 3
Today I thought a lot about what Cerulean’s story arc is. I think knowing that will make the writing flow. With Amo and Anna it was easy- they were both a kind of love story. Boy/girl, parent/daughter. The arc from beginning to end is straightforward- have someone, lose them, get them back again. That’s not Cerulean’s arc though. If anything, his is about heroism, and straining towards an ideal. So in the start- he loses sight of that ideal. Then he dpends the rest of the story trying to get it back. I’ve been tinkering with the blurb, and thinking … Read More
Pre-story ‘set-up’ writing?
I had some time today for writing, and I set to it with slogging perseverance. It was not especially fun, more like wrestling with a slippery goat in a vat of cold spaghetti bolognese. There were certainly mini-highs, as I stumbled upon a bit that seemed fun or pointing in the right direction, but there were quite a lot of fumbles and potential missteps. Ah, writing beginnings. They have to do so much work- . And recently, I keep on setting myself challenges to ‘set up’ the story with a pre-story, because I want to ‘situate’ the crazy changes to … Read More