So…

Sofas safely and successfully sequestered in storage, my stay in Leicester has ceased, and the city sinks slowly beneath the skyline as I set sail (so to speak) to sunny York…

A quick update on what I’m doing with my writing at the moment, in the spare time that I’ve got –  my immediate aim is to finish off the three short stories that I have kicking around in various stages of completion:

Hamlet… In Purgatory – Is the closest to completion. Now on its third draft, I want to add a bit more narrative and tune up the characters a little, and then it’ll be done.

Chocalypse – Next up; the sugar-coated destruction of mankind. What I have at the moment is a bunch of scenes running from the beginning to the end of the story which need tying together. I also need to write a few paragraphs to give the feel that the world really is coming to a sticky end.

The Director’s Vampire – My third story, first of all, probably needs a better title. It has three chapters written and finished, and I want to find a way to wrap the story up over another three chapters or so.

When these are out of the way, the path to Nocturn will be clear and I’ll throw myself into the city of blood and stone once again, going through editing and rewrites, and tying things together more thoroughly in the story. I honestly can’t wait. It’s been too, too long.

Nocturn Update

Today, I felt like I wanted to throw all subtlety to the wind and just pile a load of wild, fantastical ideas into Nocturn. That’s what comes from jumping ahead to less linear settings I suppose, as I did last week, writing a whole load from a story that leads on from the events in the Nocturn books. See, while the city and forest are – in my humble opinion of course – very rich environments in themselves, they are, by necessity in plot and theme, inwardly focussed and constricting. The story is about what happens to them – any ‘outside world’ is not explored. Which means that I’m always getting interesting, cool ideas that I can’t use because they don’t fit the setting yet.

While I feel like using them right away, I force myself to write them down in a seperate document, and put them aside. Their years will come!

The Nocturn editing’s still coming along, although it’s taking a lot longer than I thought – underestimated the amount of stuff that needed changing and polishing. The ending is still an incomprehensible mess, and I’m having difficulty decided exactly where to stop the novel; how much snuggling to do after the climax, if you will…

My aim was to have it ready to send to people to read by the beginning of August, and it’s looking less and less likely that it will happen. Not to worry though, it’s all necessary polish!

Also, I knocked up an abstract-y picture of Srin and the city that’s got a few meaningful strokes to it. What kinds of meanings? Well… that would be telling!

Times like this I wish I had a Wacom tablet for digital drawing, all I’ve got is me trusty mouse, which makes for pretty shaky pics. One day, when Nocturn has made me a wealthy man… 😉

iTunes Blues and Website News

It’s a special kind of horror opening iTunes to find your music and playlists aren’t there anymore. Especially when you have 87 gigs worth of choons, and playlists crafted lovingly over a number of years…

Fortunately, while all the iTunes data has vanished into the ether, the actual music’s still on the hardrive so all I’ve lost are the playlists. Still, that’s fairly crappy, as I was proud of my playlists – they’re the scaffolding that gives the monolith its structure, the roads criss-crossing a massive desert of data, etc. etc. 😛  Ah well, time for a new start it seems, though I wonder if I can extract them from my iPod somehow… where there’s an internet, there’s usually a way!

Speaking of which,

the NOCTURN website is finished (for now anyway, aside from a couple of character art pieces which I’m sure will be well worth the wait), and running about as well as I could have hoped 😀 Let me know what you think!

http://www.nocturnonline.com

A Red Letter Day

I felt like I’d scaled the heights of the city itself, and I couldn’t quite believe it for a few moments, but today the website went online for the very… second time. Ahem.

See, yesterday evening I found a highly effective way of overcoming all those problems I was having with getting it online – by deleting the entire root folder that was hosting the site online in a misguided attempt at fixing what turned out to be my uploading everything into the wrong directory. Fortunately, Mr Kiser was on hand to help sort through the vacant aftermath and do a stellar job at getting me back on the right path, for which he gets a hearty ripple of applause, and something in the book that he’ll have to wait and discover for himself 😉 Thanks again mate.

So it was Take Two this morning, and as it turned out I hadn’t commited total digital genocide, so was able to get things up and running through the time and tested ‘let’s click this and see what happens’ method. So yes – the site is now online! 😀

However it’s not quite ready yet, so the next couple of days will be spent tweaking out all the little code gremlins and tightening extracts, lining up stubborn headers, etc etc, and then Friday will be the grand launch!

And by grand launch, I mean I’ll tell people about it, and some of them might visit, hehe. But hell, I’m quite excited! A lot of blood, stone and coding’s gone into the site, and it’s my first real attempt at building one, so it’s nice to see all those stray lines of html finally coming together 🙂

Oh, I didn’t make the final cut of the ‘Can you fantasize…’ competition, so my creative skills don’t get any supper for the next week. And home before nine! >_<

For anyone who’s interested, the Fifthwind posse’s entries can be seen here.