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… 😉

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Prophets (Profits?) R Us

Sun! I wonder how many people are blogging about sun…

*checks*

A lot. Anyway, was nice to be able to write while topping up my geektastic monitor tan with proper sunlight 😀 The backyard here is a wicked sun trap, and also perfect for kicking back with a guitar and jamming out into the open sky.

Today I read about how Wikipedia have banned the Scientologists from editing the site. Heh. Well, good move probably; those nutters are spreading enough shit onto the field as it is.

[Religion-related section removed, as frankly it wasn’t funny enough to be worth the offense it might cause.]

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to build a church of Nocturn in the back yard. Thanks to the likes of Twilight, and other godawful excuses for vampire fiction, it’s a safe call that alot of the upcoming generation all wish they were vampires. Well – I’m going to set up a vampire church. And it’s going to take over the world, because I will offer all the fan legions real, proper honest-to-Lestat immortality. It is my humble opinion that some parts of religion stem from people playing on humanity’s innate fear of the unknown, and death, and if that is the case, then immortality will provide the best peace of mind of all! Also, it’s a well known FACT that being a vampire means you instantly become sexay, so that’s everyone’s worries about their eternal appearance covered!

And I’ll only charge £10 for the honour. For starters.

I would be rich. And sadly, I think if I did actually go out and do it, I reckon it might just work. Although it has just occured to me that having a ‘vampire’ church in a suntrap might be bad for the… um.. *thinks* … vampireness count of attending members. Not to worry then; I’ll bump membership up to £40 and give them a glass of water with ‘sunlight dampening’ properties.

You heard it here first. NOCTURN. The new world order starts here!

😉

(*Irony Disclaimer*)

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.

A.D.D. New Post

Can’t concentrate at all today. I’ve been bouncing from one project to another like a skin-covered pinball on hot coals, except I keep missing the triple-multipliers and  instead buffer myself into the chasm at the bottom of the table. Score 0, three balls left. Play Again?

The Chocalypse is coming along pretty well:

———

His was a face of chocolate oblivion. The eyes flashed zit outbreaks and ballooning hips. Each of the swollen, black hairs that hung from his sugar-specked scalp was a liquorice dipper without any sherbert to dip in. When his lips broke into a smile, every tooth was a caramel-centred slab of high-calorie menace, and Mazmin felt as if she had gained twenty pounds simply by looking at them. But where else could she turn her eyes? There was certainly no respite to be found in the rest of his figure.

“Let’s wrap this up,” he said in a booming rasp, and Mazmin felt flecks of nougat ping off her face as she stepped back in terror from his diet-raping grin.

“But I… I always brushed twice daily,” she stammered, feeling a drip of what certainly wasn’t icing trickle down the inside of her leg. “Once in the m-morning, and-”

The Horseman interrupted her by blowing through his gelatinous lips, their rubbery surfaces slapping together in a repulsive rattle.

“No concern of mine, meat-thing…”

———

But once I’d written 400 words I felt the tug of the manuscript, and my concentration gone, -KERCHUNK- , ball lost. Two left  – Play Again?

Pulling back hard on the spring-launch mechanism this time, I figure I’ll give the editing all I’ve got. A couple of pages get chalked up as successes, and I’m about to start on the third when I hit a paragraph that reminds me of the website. I never linked up the character pages, did I? It won’t take long…

One ball remaining. Play Again?

Full tilt. Time to play this sumbitch for maximum points.

So, I link those <a href=”x”>’s like they’ve never been linked before… and then – hm. Gotta practice a blues riff I was messing about with earlier…

THUNK.

0x multiplier. 0 plays remaining.

Dammit. Tea-time, and no motivation to return back to any of the previous tasks.

Still, tomorrow’s a new day, with hopefully record levels of focus… and a trip to see Star Trek, which can’t be too bad.

Also today in a spat of procrastination, reading Jaym Gates’ blog post on various things writerly, forum RPGerly and Firefly fan-filmerly, she brought up the subject of tags, which I’d not given much thought about as of yet, but in the interest of hooking folk and drawing them into the hazy digital metaphor (Welcome! :D) I must remember to stick some in!

Well,  time for one last shot at focussing my attention long enough to get some more words down before the day is done. Please do feel free to say hi if you’re dropping in by the way, always nice to hear from people!