Madness! Madness!

Well, yesterday at work was hectic from start to finish. We're running surveys of our web pages/ tutorials and potential induction videos and I hit the ground running and didn't grind to a halt until I got home. We had three laptops running three different surveys simultaneously - one of the laptops was very slow. We got a replacement and couldn't log in, so had to wait for the laptop's main user to come and log in (our system is migrating so the network has a dicky fit every now and again); then, we could only run one survey per machine so I had to run back to the office and alter the survey settings so that multiple surveys could be submitted from the same laptop. This brought me to 11:45 am!
For the rest of the day, nothing went wrong but there was more running around.

I am very tired today and in about 25 minutes I'm giong to have to do it all over again (although hopefully without anything actually going wrong!)

Update on Alt.Fiction to follow when I've got another moment.

Mood: Tired
Music: The show must go on - Freddie Mercury

Linky linky

Bit delayed, but finally got round to reading The Big Idea: Kate Elliot on John Scalzi's blog. Very funny story, very interesting.
I haven't read any of her books yet, although my Dad's read them all (and he's picky - but loved them) so I shall be adding her to the, dangerously overloaded, TBR pile. Actually, it's not really a pile, it's more of a mountain. With dust.

Progress XXXI

Good, but also not good.

Good: have typed up over 12K of 3's Company. Based on the original first draft total I'm 49% in, so only 51% to go, right? Wrong!

Bad: I've added just over 5K of new words so far, which means I'm not 49% through the hand-written version. On the 5K alone I'm over the 30K maximum and I imagine I'll be adding more new words as I'm editing as I go. There will be cuts, my pretties, oh yes!

Also, yesterday (when I should have been writing, gorammit) I caught up on all of the feeds (and oh, God do I mean all) in my feed-reader and ended up looking at editorrent's Redlines articles (go to the site, scroll down to labels and click on the redlines link). There is some good stuff there and in the other articles, on things to look out for in your writing and so on.

However, what I should have done was saved the entries and then looked at them after the type-up, during second edits. Why? Because I found that immediately after having read some of the more pertinent posts (pertinent to my own writing) I began to self-correct what I was transcribing/ editing. Not a bad thing necessarily, but I do need to get this transcribed onto screen (which will make editing easier) so speed is important in the first instance.

The articles are very good and interesting though--as are the comments--and I'd recommend people have a look at least!

News: I have bought a book on punctuation. Why? I have 'comma diarrhea' ::mopes:: 'S true. And embarrassing.

Mood: Full. Nice sarnie. Nom nom nom

Music: Snow White Queen - Evanescence

Alt.Fiction

Okay. I've booked to go to Alt.Fiction in Derby on Saturday. The schedule looks interesting, in fact the whole experience should be interesting because I've never gone to anything like this before, for any genre. Hmm. Perhaps I shouldn't have admitted that out loud?

The only question is, do I drive and park in the secure car park which is expensive but very secure or, do I go by train-which is ok in the going, but in the coming back may be intermittent as regards stopping at my station and will then involve either (a) it costs how much to get a taxi to my house? or, (b) please come and pick me up. pleeeeese or, (c) it costs how much to park at the station and then retrieve my car? ::choices, choices::

Sven Update

Okay. 24 days to go so quick update on progress overall.

Sven total is skewed because now that I'm typing up draft one and editing as I go I'm adding new words but I won't be able to work out the difference until it's finished. But it's going well even if I can't quantify it.

Contraband has been started three times now and I hope that this time the story's going where it should. The irritating thing is that I now know where it should start, which means ditching the first 800 words or so. But, it will make it a better story so I won't complain about that.

A third piece has been planned and a basic outline has been done. Chapter outline to follow and then I'll get started on that (and this time I will be typing direct!) Lesson learned there.

Mood: Tired. Took the dogs on a long walk yesterday round a dam. Flat surface (i.e. not really rough terrain) and my hips were aching this morning so I must have been plodding hard at one point. Obviously I need to work on the incredible lightness of footsteps!

Progress XXX

Up to 31% typed up on 3's Company! I'll do more this evening and try to get it up to 40% at least. As far as wordcount overall & Sweating with Sven goes, then it's not looking good. Although, if I can get this typed up and start on the shifter novella then I may get closer to 60K by the end of Sven than I thought I would a week ago.
What I don't want is to fall into the trap of writing it out longhand and having to go through this whole typing it up malarkey again. Which will mean sitting at my desk during lunch to write and coping with interruptions. ::sigh::


Mood: Good
Music: Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

Progress XXIX

Type-up on 3's Company has begun again! Joy to the world and peas on earth. ::big_grin::

Wrote some more on Contraband at the weekend, but haven't totted it up yet as it was longhand.

Saw some absolutely gorgeous 'on the move' laptops on Saturday. One was a Dell and the other an Acer - both have Vista, which is a downer, but you can apparently put XP on top and just select it from the BIOS as your operating system of choice. The problem with that, is that you can't get rid of Vista, so it will still take up 10GB on your hard drive - doing nothing. And then XP is about another 5GB - so, big hard disk. Also, apparently, there may be a new OS in a year or so anyway. Do we stay or do we go? ::ponders::

Progress good.
Temp: 19 degrees C (brrrr)
Music: At Wit's End - PotC3

Progress XXVIII

Slow progress on Contraband, practically (totally) stopped on the type-up of 3's Company, so that's something that will be taking up most of my time in the near future. Not quantitative progress as in 'x' no. of new words, but it will be progress all the same.

Musn't go off the boil! Especially as I have plans for 5 other pieces, of varying lengths, between now and December to satisfy specific calls for submissions. Then, of course, there are those pieces already paused and languishing in a flash drive dungeon, waiting for me to release them and have at them once more.
I have a chart to give me an idea of what should be started and when, as well as to highlight which pieces of work will need to be written at the same time as something else. It's actually been quite useful, so I shall certainly do something similar next year.

Nothing But Red is now available...

On the 7th of April 2007, Du'a Khalil was stoned & beaten to death in an honour killing precipitated by her relationship with a young shopkeeper. Some of her relatives were among those who participated in the killing, and the event was filmed on people's mobile phones resulting in world wide coverage of, and commentary on, her death.

Joss Whedon wrote an impassioned essay about this, and misogony in general, a month later. You can read it here

As a result, a group of volunteers decided that they would put together an anthology responding to Joss' essay and Du'a Khalil's death, with the proceeds for this going to the charity Equality Now. They called for contributions and got a significant response from people, myself included. (My piece is titled 'My Sister's Bones')
The anthology is called Nothing But Red, and it's available as an e-book or as a print book through Lulu as of today.

Links
NBR website here
Lulu link here
Equality Now link here
Times article about Du'a here
IWPR report about Du'a here