Monday 23 June 2014

Writing Day 23/06/14

It looks like I'll be writing a post to update on my 'writing day', once per week. So how does this work?

I've been a full-time teacher for nearly 6 years, and after a couple of jobs that weren't as good as they could have been (mainly management issues), I decided that enough was enough. I'm now a part-time supply teacher, four days a week by choice, and the other day is my 'writing day'. It's a day for me to get things in order, do as much writing/editing as I can, hopefully get some stuff sent off and, by the looks of things, update my blog.

Today's a good example. I've got a piece that I'm submitting to Mocha Memoir's 'Avast Ye Airships!' anthology (some adult content on that page. NSFW warning). I've tightened it up and I'm getting ready to submit it. I can't post it here, but I can tell you that it's about airships and dragons. Clockwork dragons.

I've been working on a short sci-fi story that I submitted last week to Daily Science Fiction. It's quite retro, lots of the influences from old Asimov tales in there, but it's set in the Psy-Clones universe. If it doesn't find publication there, I'm at least generally pleased with it. It's called 'Diplomatic Immunity'.

I'm thinking about sending two of my stories to the Stuff You Should Know podcast. For a start, they always like to receive stuff and give a shout-out. Second, both bits I'm thinking of sending, 'Diplomatic Immunity' and 'Eve and the 10,000 Year Clock', were inspired by podcasts of theirs. It might be nice to close the loop and send those in.

I had my first brush with a client properly this week. I applied to do some freelance work writing articles on MMOs, of which I am an avid player. Unfortunately he wanted me to buy ingame currency, something that is explicitly against the Terms of Service, and then write reviews of the experience. I declined. Square Enix work hard to keep my game free of Real Money Trade and I'm not about to make their job more difficult.

Monday 16 June 2014

Lack of posting recently

I'm finding it a little hard to post some things on the blog since I'm now actively trying to get things published. I can't publish anything here that I want to see in print elsewhere, basically. So today is a good example; I've written a short sci-fi piece in the Psy-Clones world, but it's standalone and could totally see publication somewhere. So I can't put it here.

Instead, I'd like to talk briefly about what I'm reading at the moment. My wife and I are reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne as a kind of 'book at bedtime' thing. It's fairly long, so it's slow going, but enjoyable. There are some hilarious sections though; it's something I recognise about Verne's writing that he obviously had things he particularly enjoyed, or knew a lot about. The parts of the book where he can talk about those in great detail are terminology-heavy and slightly detract from what's actually going on. Three pages about the polyps in Captain Nemo's display case is plenty. Of course, nothing so far has beaten the description of weapons on board the ship, including a 'duck gun with exploding balls'. We're so mature.

After that, we really want to read Sabriel by Garth Nix (apparently soon to get a long-overdue Kindle edition). I read it a few years ago and really enjoyed it. I love the idea of old tech in the far future, or our tech viewed through post-apocalyptic eyes.

I've been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov's Robot short stories, mainly in Robot Visions and Robot Dreams. Some of the stories are simply brilliant, none of them entirely dated. Of course, some of the descriptive elements are dated, but the stories themselves are solid gold. This includes my all-time favourite Asimov short story, 'The Final Question' which is about entropy. I honestly can't say much because I'd ruin the ending, but I think that this, and stories like this, have a lot to do with my own writing.

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