Angel Wedge

Today I think I burned out. Spent hours writing, and at the end I was struggling to focus. I would have given up if I had the choice, because I'm sure those words won't be good towards the end. But thankfully I have an official friend who gets paid to watch my mental health, and she said I should keep going.


Also spent an hour throwing together a pretty awful cover for my nanowrimo project.

Final result: 4511 words, of which 2967 on nanowrimo. The remainder on a new short story, for this month's contest on a forum.

Hi folks!

First day of nanowrimo, and I think I'm getting off to a good start, 3691 words written on Soul Trader, that's two and a half scenes. Also 321 words of other miscellany. Also burned an hour or two trying to find art assets I can use to make a cover for The Unusual Vacancy; but I suspect I'm going to have to find the money for a commission somehow, and it seems that none of my artist friends do commissions for commercial use.

Had no energy this morning, my walk only stretched to 8000 steps. But much to my surprise I managed to find the energy to go walk round the block at 10pm.

Dinner was good as well. Massaman curry, but decided to use tomato instead of coconut milk for the base. Mixed meat, something of an odd choice, but I didn't think the bacon would keep much longer. So we have a pound of chicken, and a pound of shredded bacon. The veg choice was a little lacking; carrots and sweetcorn (the curse of not being the one to go shopping), but I added a couple of onions, a couple of bell peppers, a can of white kidney beans, and some frozen sweet potato chunks, and I think it came out pretty well. Maybe I didn't add enough curry paste though, it did taste a little bland.

Let's hope tomorrow goes this smoothly :D

 Looked for nanowrimo communities on here... but I must be doing something wrong, because I haven't been able to find any active communities on this site for anything.

Ah well; 1851 words today, making 105k for October. And my KDP sales reporting just a few pennies under £50. Not a lot of money, but getting better. I'll try to do some more later, but I'm hoping to be sitting at the computer at midnight ready for a good start on my nano project.

Soul Trader: A world where magic is kept secret by warring megacorporations, who see world governments as largely irrelevant when they don't,even acknowledge the wizards within their borders. But there are some places where corporate agents can't investigate, because of politics and red tape. Then, just occasionally, they have need of a freelance troubleshooter. A man like John Peerless, with the gift of distilling the memories of ancestors into potions conveying their skills and experience. Now, the soul trader must divide his time between infiltrating the Pendragon College of the Unknown to investigate the murky world of college football corruption, and running the last independent magic shop in Britain.

 Hi folks! If anyone's reading.
Today was a pretty good day. I went for a (slightly) longer than usual walk, and snapped two of the pictures dad had challenged me to find. (He sometimes sends me pictures of the area from fcebook, cropped from streetview, or from old books … it can be interesting tracking down the locations to see if they've changed)

Photos and map here

I also did a little more writing, on both of my in-progress age regression stories. I'm hoping that if I share a few more, I'll either get a better idea what the audience wants, or find out that the sudden success of A Little Request was just a fluke. 3422 new words between them, which brings me up to 101 k for the month; so I guess I can say I met my October goal.

And finally got the Kindle and Paperback versions of Nightmare Season linked on Amazon, so they're easier to find. 5 orders so far, and hoping that's a good enough kickstart for a little Halloween popularity.

Today was an okay day, but without anything really exciting in it.

New plot bunny of the day: Pixies can grant wishes; but the power comes from human imagination. Make too many wishes, and it can stop you from growing up.
And yet again, my "Current music" is a quickly typed line of (probably) misheard lyrics from the radio. Can you guess the song from that?

Feeling a little drained today. Still, not an unproductive day. Started out with 2 hours editing, then a walk around town, and all the shopping I've been neglecting while feeling ill. Still alternating shivers and shakes, but I've getting over it. Lots of coffee today. Wrote some more words in the evening; a short story for nightmarefuelproject and more progress on The Big Little Bus. A total of 4458 new words for the day, which I think isn't that bad. I also posted the next chapter of Mr Hook's Big Black Box on G+ … trying to get anyone who's interested to follow me on Wattpad too, but seems to be little interest so far. I'll keep posting fist-draft instalments on G+ until it's gone; by which time the second-draft instalments on Wattpad should be almost up to the same point, and (hopefully) the book will be almost ready for release.

Think I'll be ready for nanowrimo by the end of the month? Maybe...

Good evening everyone!

I'm still trying to shake off the last traces of a cold. Everything aches and my nose is constantly dripping, but I'm managing to at least get things done.

Took me several hours this morning to post a new chapter of Mr Hook on Wattpad. I started serialising this story on G+ when I started writing it, and have posted a 1000-word-ish instalment each saturday for a little over 2 years; but going back to the start to post larger pieces on Wattpad (so it will have caught up by the time G+ ceases to exist) needs a lot of editing. This morning I realised that the next chapter seemed to have a detail that conflicts with the final chapter; and ended up reading (and editing) 7 chapters back from the end before I found the relevant numbers.

After that, I did some more editing on a story I'm tentatively renaming Lynn's Youth (could really use a better title), and found that it had two chapters missing from the middle, rather than one as I'd thought.
And after a few hours of that, I still hadn't written anything. So I went back to Hunter's Gift, and rewrote the largest part of chapter 4 (which completely contradicted the premise of the second book). Now I need a heavy rewrite of chapter 5, and to edit 7-10 properly. I hope that won't take too long.

I also got the paperback version of Nightmare Season published at last; after KDP twice rejected it for no obvious reason. That means it's out before the Kindle version (on pre-order until Tuesday), but I think that's better than being late.
Then, eventually, settled down to add another hour to the Big Little Bus; bringing my total words written for the day up to 3526; and just over 90k for the month so far.

Sales on A Little Request seem to have stopped now. So it was a neat little triangle, accounting for 13 readers. Still a pretty good number, and I wonder if I'll get some more if I release another book in the same genre.

All in all, a good day. How was yours?

Good evening folks. A little early today. I've not been feeling so well, so I might take an early night.

Sneezing since the weekend, didn't think much about it. Nose running all day yesterday, not a big deal. Today my head's pounding, I feel sick as soon as I woke up, and a three mile walk around town was all I could manage before I gave up, legs shaking. Hoping tomorrow will be better; probably just a 24-hour virus or something.

But, I've done something with the day. I've written 3537 new words, mostly on a silly story titled The Big Little Bus, which I have no idea if there's an audience for outside Wattpad. I also had one more look over Nightmare Season, with the second version of the printed proof in my hands. Design elements that are a hair off-centre, and more significant things like a typo in the back-cover blurb that I didn't notice until I had it in front of me; but I think they're all sorted. So the paperback version of that book (355 pages, a bit larger than I expected) will be available as soon as the nice folks at Amazon approve it; and the Kindle version is already up for pre-order.

Fingers crossed.

KDP still reports 3 pre-orders. But there's been another copy of my other new book, so it seems that might be a better place to invest my time.

I also invented myself a nutritious and easy dinner. Slices of parboiled potatoes ("German fries" or "home fries" in some parts of the world; "Instant bratkartoffeln" according to the packet); fried in a little butter with some ground beef, sweetcorn, and finely chopped onion. Black pepper, garlic, and whatever else looked good from the spice rack. I've done that before. But this time, it seemed there was more stuck to the bottom of the pan than in my bowl, so I splashed some cider vinegar on it, a tiny amount of honey, and boiling water. Just enough to cover the food remnants in the pan, then scraped and stirred until it dissolved. I expected something like a slightly meaty water, which would be okay with an otherwise quite dry dinner. But much to my surprise, it turned into this lovely country gravy; almost like a super cheap potato soup (I estimate it cost about a pound, all in)

I call that a win.

I almost went to the pub quiz, like I used to every week. But I decided it's better to save money, so there's some chance I'll be able to participate in social events during nanowrimo.

Somehow, I wrote a lot. 6497 words in total, which was a big surprise. All the stories I was working on just seemed to flow easily. I shared one of them to a contest, as well as posting a half-hour flashfic for the previous day's Nightmare Fuel. While I was writing, one more person bought my latest book. So the unexpected spurt of sales yesterday hasn't quite died away, but I probably can't expect it to last too long.



I went for a walk again, and somehow it struck me how lucky we are to have such nice landscapes close to home. Here's a couple of photos of the Fairfield Orchard, which my walk takes me through on most days. [link to Google Photos]. Weird to realise that in the panorama image, I'm looking towards home, on the far side of the city centre. But there's no sign of the city at all in the photo.

A good day, but pretty uneventful here. I think that's a positive overall.

Hello world!

Today was another day when I didn't do much writing. The first few hours of the day were taken up by editing; tweaking the formatting for the print version of Nightmare Season so it all looks right. The hardest part was the contents page, where some graphical elements weren't aligned correctly. That's submitted now, so now all I have to do is wait for release day, and see how many people buy it. I'd really like to see it in double figures; it would be great to have a horror-themed collection rated high at Halloween, where the previous books (the Kindle-only collections of a dozen stories) have always gained a couple of extra sales. If there's enough friends pre-ordering it, this one could be my most successful book yet :D

My writing for the day was almost entirely on yesterday's Nightmare Fuel prompt; which I finished writing in a neat 2 hours. I'm just off to share that story now. I find that I want to push my housemate to proofread it now, see if I can sneak it into the book before the final deadline… but I think that probably isn't such a great idea. I can save this one for next year, I think, and see if I have enough stories for another collection by then.

And I just noticed the "Current music" box down there ↓ … and rather than do the conventional thing, I thought I might transcribe some lyrics from my current playlist. A significant amount of my usual music has words that you can't be sure what they're saying unless you listen very closely (or look it up); so for some time I've been bugging people on chat with strings of misheard lyrics, to see if they can identify the song.
Here's a perfect excuse to drag someone new into the game. Can you recognise the song; or guess what some of the words might actually have been? I might well offer prizes, if I can think of anything.

 Trying to organise stories for my Nightmare Season collection, I've written a script which gives a nice visualisation for the stories. The width of the boxes indicates the length of the story, and the height marks the ones that my editor and I think are the most outstanding.

Do other authors do something similar? I feel like I'm missing out on a whole skillset here, not really knowing how to arrange these stories.

Here's the graph: mrangel.info/nightmareseason_stories.html