I'm posting this to remind all you good people about FreakAngels, a weekly web comic written by King Ellis and drawn by Paul Duffield. It's updated every Friday at noon UK time (UTC +1, if you need to know). This week's episode is #15.
That'll be all. Go back to your existences.
In a recent blog post, Neil Gaiman discusses the topic of second drafts:
The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.
The whole post is interesting (and he says more than the above snippet on the subject of second drafts). Also, it includes dancing bees; never a bad thing.
I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a contract to release
Playing For Keeps with Swarm Press! Swarm is an imprint of Permuted,
the small horror press, and is launching this summer with three
superhero titles, PFK being one. (For podcast fans, Matthew Wayne
Selznick’s Brave Men Run is another title coming out from Swarm.)
This is fantastic news for Mur and for everyone that’s followed PFK
via I Should Be Writing since its
inception.
Congratulations Mur! I’d raise a glass of gin in your honour, except I
can’t stand the stuff, frankly. Oh well. There’s a bottle of single malt
somewhere that’ll do as a substitute.
Slightly behind the times, I thought I should spread the word of the News from Poughkeepsie, a new project from the Mighty Mur Lafferty.
To quote the Murster herself:
I’m going to blog an idea a day for 1 year. It will usually be in the form of a blog post, but it may be in the form of an audio or video podcast, delivered to you if you’re subscribed to the Murverse feed.
You can find said feed through the Murverse site. Go, read, enjoy, make use of (the ideas are under a Creative Commons attribution license). They've already got my idea cogs turning. Now all I need to do is find the time to put them to use (and also to stop my developer mind from using the brainjuice first; that bit's a real battle).
Back from a pleasant if wind-blown weekend in Edinburgh. Much to catch up on, including eight days worth of Three Hundred and Sixty-odd Days posts (narrowly avoiding FAIL there, I think), not to mention the scribbling that I haven't been doing.
Still, some things are looking up. The break has recharged my writing brain juices at least.
I've just noticed that the photography category on this blog has 105 entries and the writing category has 130 (including this post). For a blog that's supposed to be primarily about writing that's not so good. I'll have to do more writing to make sure that photography doesn't take over.
That means that I can't use photography as a means of procrastination. Hmm…
From BBC News:
British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90…
Sir Arthur's vivid – and detailed – descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world.
He was the author of more than 100 fiction and non-fiction books, and his writings are credited by many observers with giving science fiction – a genre often accused of veering towards the fantastical – a human and practical face.
I think there are few writers that I could name who have been more influential on my own worldview than Arthur C. Clarke. Although his writing has never really influenced mine – I tend to write in a different strand of his genre if at all – it did instil into me some basic rigours of the rule of writing: Be truthful, within your own universe; once you've set the rules for yourself, don't break them and, most importantly of all, Science Fiction is about the people, not the science. The science is incidental.
I remember a line from his book of essays, Greetings, Carbon-based Bipeds!, specifically from his epitaph to Isaac Asimov. It went something like this:
I once introduced Isaac to a dinner by saying "Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one Isaac Asimov." Well now there is no Isaac Asimov and the world is a poorer place for it.
I think that you could pretty much use his own words to describe how a lot of science fiction readers and writers feel right now.
And so one of the greats of our age passes into history. But, as always, his legacy remains.
Wow.
Once again, I'm late in getting on a particular train of thought. That's not unusual, true, but I should have been slightly quicker about it this time round because a) it's something in which I'm really, really interested and b) one of my friends, whose blog I read, posted about it and I didn't actually pay that much attention until a lot of other people had jumped up and down, commenting on how fantastic this particular thing is.
So, in case you've been living under a particular sort of rock (i.e. the one that stops you finding out about new OSS projects, assuming you're interested in that ) here's the not-exactly-a-scoop.
You may have heard of a project called WriteRoom, a full-screen text editor for the Mac which costs, currently, $24.95. Now, I've been using a cross-platform WriteRoom clone, JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and is pretty much closed-source AFAICT, for quite a while. JDarkRoom has issues – beyond the two fairly major ones of being written in Java and been free as in beer but not as in speech (though that's not a reason not to use it). On Ubuntu it's pretty clunky, slow, and doesn't work at all unless you go and install the Sun JRE rather than using the one that ships with Ubuntu by default.
Anyway, as has been pointed out pretty much the OSS world over by now, there's now a Python (always dear to my heart) clone of WriteRoom, PyRoom. It seems to have found a lot of traction over the last week or so, because although it didn't work terribly well the first time that I tried it it's now perfectly useable – more so than JDarkRoom by far (I can't speak for WriteRoom, of course). It even does multi-buffer editing, which means that I can have this blog entry, and another one that I've been writing since Friday, open at the same time and happily switch between the two (this may sound like a really obvious feature, but you'd be surprised how much more efficient it makes me).
Now, don't get me wrong, I still love my vim, and there's no way in hell that I'll be using PyRoom for much besides blogging and writing for the forseeable future – why would I want to? But in terms of allowing me to actually concentrate on writing and stopping me from procrastinating it's fantastic, and it doesn't bug me in the same undefinable way as JDarkRoom does.
So give it a shot, if you're into that sort of thing. You can grab it from Launchpad http://launchpad.net/pyroom. I think you'll find it well worth it.
In other bloody annoying news, my Flickr import script appears to keep breaking my site somehow, to the point where I have to restart Apache to fix it. This is decidedly irksome.
Graham Binns posted a photo:
Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 15
I was out of inspiration tonight, photographically speaking. Luckily, the brainjuice was flowing in the direction of prose (though you’ll note that I took long enough out of it to get this shot, with a rather precariously balanced camera).
That’s the ultimate in procrastination: photographing yourself pretending to do the thing you should be doing and telling yourself that really, it’s okay, because it’s still creative.
Graham Binns posted a photo:
Three-hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 11
Note the lack of a sunset. Weather happened. This is north west England: weather often happens.
So I left the camera and tripod pretty much alone and picked up the pen and paper for the first time in about two and-a-half months. It felt okay. Scary, but okay.