Well, sort of.
It has to be said that I have not been busier than I have been in the last couple of weeks for a long while. The up side of this is that I am feeling really positive about the work that I am doing. The down side is that no one is, as yet, paying me for my work. But then it has only been about a week that I've engaged in such activity so early days yet.
I guess this does leave me with something of a quandary. I will need some income eventually, after all. The thing is I am finding that I have more energy and do more useful work when I'm not actually, you know, going to work.
I'm finding the removal of the salary safety net has had, paradoxically, the opposite effect than one would expect on my mood and outlook. I just hope that someone would like to retain my services before I have to return to the haven of being someone else's employee.
The other thing that's been really good is that I have met lots of other self-employed people who do a staggering number of different things and meeting these people is far more interesting than going into a work place and meeting people who are employed by the same employer as you. People, on the whole, are usually interesting for one reason or another, but people who are pulling their own weight and going their own way in life are just more interesting in and of themselves, or maybe it's just novelty.
Before I go I should draw your attention to the new link on the top right to my new freelance services page. I hope to expand this with case studies and examples shortly but it is there and available, that is the main thing.
(By the way, hope everyone is getting along with the new look. Let me know.)
Showing posts with label Positivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Positivity. Show all posts
5 November 2014
20 September 2012
Getting Things Done
The last couple of days have been particularly productive. CS1: The Silent Majority has come out of editing and is awaiting my typographical and artistic skills to put together a beta package for my ever-so-kind beta readers.
I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.
I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.
That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.
I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.
I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.
I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.
That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.
I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.
2 December 2010
The Happy Writer
Way back in the mists of time (2006 actually) I wrote a pithy series of writing tutorials aimed at getting a chunk of writing just... you know... done. Hang the quality, hang the need for editing, hang everything, just get it done.
The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.
The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.
The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.
Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.
Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:
The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.
The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.
The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.
Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.
Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:
- Absence of illusions. I'm not doing what I'm doing to woo big publishers or to make the Times Bestseller List. I'm doing it because it's what I do.
- Sense of fun. Because I have no illusions the business of writing stories and story games has become a fun hobby, I know of no other hobbyist writers, all writers I have ever encountered are limbering up for an encounter with the big leagues that likely will never come.
- Lack of social pressure or cultural targets. Because I am purely in this to have a bit of fun I am not constrained to squash novels into a commercially viable length, or to worry about whether the thing I'm writing fits under a generic banner in a massive bookstore. I don't need to think about whether there's too much emotional content in an action story, or too much action in a love story. I tell the story the way I think it should be told and hang everyone else's opinion.
To summarise, I just don't actually care about the concerns others may have about whether my stuff "works". Hell if I could, should I put my mind to it, breeze through over half a million words in a year and still live a completely other life that has nothing to do with writing then it's not really much of a loss if something doesn't come off the way I planned. This year alone I've written two role playing systems and a novel.
One of the role playing systems is typeset and ready to roll Monday of next week in time for Christmas. The potential number of productions I could roll out next year is mind-boggling. I am creatively fecund, prolific and master of my own destiny thanks to POD services.
From a typesetting point of view, production of the role playing systems has proven so challenging that the idea of publishing a novel now seems like something I would undertake in a weekend. For me personally, the act of writing and producing works of fiction this way has been so immensely rewarding and personally satisfying I can't imagine having done things any other way.
If I have one complaint it is the common one that the world has not, thus far, seen fit to shower me with sufficient personal largesse for my efforts to dedicate my life to these projects full time. On the other hand, how many people discover the same things through the bitterly frustrating and unfair process of the traditional publishing markets? How many people are left twisted and broken in the ruins of their dreams and ambitions because they can't just let it go? Hey I haven't gained a bank balance that could buy me my own personal island, but I don't hate the thought of warming up the word processor (or notepad) and bashing out a couple of thousand words either.
If you are a writer, look at what you do and ask. Am I having fun? Is this really what I wanted? Am I pleasing myself or some impossible commercial dream state? What do I really want to get out of writing? How many people need to engage with my work before I am happy?
You may find that the answers to those questions lead you down a different path to the one you imagined. One with far fewer riches and launch parties but one with a great deal of personal achievement and a pleasant feeling of stability unattainable by many other methods.
29 September 2010
You turn your back for...
...well, roundabout two and a half years, but still.
Re reading some of my really old blogs from '06 and thereabouts made me misty eyed for the days of impotent rage directed at the bad boys of publishing and the inert populace who sheep-like bought from them leaving hearty POD fare to be picked over by carrion crows. Well I decided to swiftly Google the state of play. What search term? There could be none other than "slush pile".
Within one page of results and minimal ferreting about I discover not one but three writing communities that offer an ostensibly fairer method of separating the pearls from the swine. So I'm going to stop mixing or indeed mangling metaphors and head off to ponder this new state of affairs.
Re reading some of my really old blogs from '06 and thereabouts made me misty eyed for the days of impotent rage directed at the bad boys of publishing and the inert populace who sheep-like bought from them leaving hearty POD fare to be picked over by carrion crows. Well I decided to swiftly Google the state of play. What search term? There could be none other than "slush pile".
Within one page of results and minimal ferreting about I discover not one but three writing communities that offer an ostensibly fairer method of separating the pearls from the swine. So I'm going to stop mixing or indeed mangling metaphors and head off to ponder this new state of affairs.
7 January 2010
Britain Thinks: Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rules?
Have just decided to show some practical support for new internet site Britain Thinks which looks like it could be jolly good fun. At the moment the interface is a bit sparse, I imagine it's intended to be a sort of social networking site with an agenda of debate. Well, we have loads of social networking opportunities, but debates not so much. So they've opened the site with a number of debating tools.
Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.
So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.
Initial thoughts?
Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.
I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:
I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.
I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.
If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...
Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.
So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.
Initial thoughts?
Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.
I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:
- I am a user, but I have no acces to edit my account profile! Oh noes!
- There are other users but they have no visible public profiles.
- The debate pages are designed cleanly from a graphic design POV but this masks an underlying incoherence in conceptual structure. Is this op ed Twitter where statements of length are to be frowned upon?
- I think I would like to be able to aggregate debates and even run them from within the personal profile I don't yet have. This would help enormously with, my final point...
- The content is grouped by topic and videos are star-rated but the arguments are not streamed like an essay, you just get assaulted by a little bit about this and then a little bit about that. The topics are huge and being banged around in an opinion pinball machine is weird. If topics had administrators who applied some sort of taxonomy to the issues this would help a bunch. For example in a debate about education comments could be labelled "teachers", "exams", "government", "parents", "students", "curriculum" so that you could watch streams of comments about one sub-topic.
I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.
I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.
If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...
4 December 2009
Relentlessly Upbeat Friday Post
As promised today I will be relentlessly upbeat, despite the fact that there's really not all that much to be relentlessly upbeat about in the outside world at large. I think that's the way of the world. Everything in the wider world looks grim but personally people might be having quite a nice time.
For example, tonight I have pizza for tea and a small Montecristo cigarello to enjoy. Tomorrow is Monster Magnet at Rock City. Christmas is three weeks today.
Not everybody likes Christmas, the Mrs claims to hate it for example, but I always find it to be a pleasing punctuation mark on the year. Maybe I won't be so delighted by the festive season this year as I've decided to forego the usual extra long holiday from Christmas Eve through to the dawn of the New Year but as someone who likes the quiet I think it'll all be okay...
Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.
Of course one of the small pleasures of the weekend is The X Factor, which I refuse to term a guilty pleasure. It just is what it is. Also it's nice that of the final four there are no donkeys.
If I was going to be having a punt at who thegeneralpublic will be voting out this week I'd have to say I reckon it'll be Mr. Murs, or possibly, if travesty after travesty continues to occur on the weirdest X Factor I've ever seen then it might be Daniel.
Suffice to say I think that Stacey (Penguin Girl) and Oliver (That chap from South Shields who's so boring I can't even remember his name) are safe this week but if there was any justice in the world we would be saying goodbye to Oliver, he's the most tedious entrant this year by far. What makes the whole thing extra sad is that he seems not to have been to stage school but you wouldn't know it from the way he mugs through every song like he's about to hit the jazz hands with a side of spirit fingers for all it's worth.
Well, time, and Sunday evening shall tell.
Have a good weekend all!
For example, tonight I have pizza for tea and a small Montecristo cigarello to enjoy. Tomorrow is Monster Magnet at Rock City. Christmas is three weeks today.
Not everybody likes Christmas, the Mrs claims to hate it for example, but I always find it to be a pleasing punctuation mark on the year. Maybe I won't be so delighted by the festive season this year as I've decided to forego the usual extra long holiday from Christmas Eve through to the dawn of the New Year but as someone who likes the quiet I think it'll all be okay...
Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.
Of course one of the small pleasures of the weekend is The X Factor, which I refuse to term a guilty pleasure. It just is what it is. Also it's nice that of the final four there are no donkeys.
If I was going to be having a punt at who thegeneralpublic will be voting out this week I'd have to say I reckon it'll be Mr. Murs, or possibly, if travesty after travesty continues to occur on the weirdest X Factor I've ever seen then it might be Daniel.
Suffice to say I think that Stacey (Penguin Girl) and Oliver (That chap from South Shields who's so boring I can't even remember his name) are safe this week but if there was any justice in the world we would be saying goodbye to Oliver, he's the most tedious entrant this year by far. What makes the whole thing extra sad is that he seems not to have been to stage school but you wouldn't know it from the way he mugs through every song like he's about to hit the jazz hands with a side of spirit fingers for all it's worth.
Well, time, and Sunday evening shall tell.
Have a good weekend all!
23 April 2009
Fan Mail!
Not just for me, of course but for the whole No Dice team. We received the mail yesterday afternoon from an early fan of the system. Apart from the obvious joy at having a fan at all we were all absolutely made up to have it be a fan of a type we had always intended this system for. A long time gamer, his wife and son are all champing at the bit to try a bit of No Dice, apparently.
This just about covers all the bases as far as we're concerned. We were trying to put a few ideas into RP which would encourage older gamers, gamers with less time, and also younger gamers. The latest podcast sees us all gush on somewhat about how great this all is and how fantastic everybody's being before we have one droplet of finished ink to show them.
I'm not quite sure how to conclude a piece of good news... oh. Like this.
This just about covers all the bases as far as we're concerned. We were trying to put a few ideas into RP which would encourage older gamers, gamers with less time, and also younger gamers. The latest podcast sees us all gush on somewhat about how great this all is and how fantastic everybody's being before we have one droplet of finished ink to show them.
I'm not quite sure how to conclude a piece of good news... oh. Like this.
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