Archive for the ‘NitS’ Category

… But if I had and it had been to get a shift on with Night in the Sidhe I’d be doing well so far. Admittedly tidying up the current draft last night actually cut it down by several thousand words. I’ve move note and fragments of story without a home in the current structure off into a separate file. Other fragments have now been slotted in to what looks to be the final form. The inner story, which take the form of a first person narrative by a character being interviewed by the police, is almost written. The outer story of the investigation surrounding the character being interviewed is a lot less complete. I know its shape but I need to finalise where it breaks up the inner narrative.

With this first draft heading towards completion I’m hitting the point where I need to do supporting research and fact checking. I used to do this when I developed the plot for a story but somehow that always took the life out of the exercise and the story didn’t end up being finished. So I’ve been switching things around and skipping any none essential research or anything that will need more than a quick flick through a book or a bit of a Google. After the first draft I come back, read it all and figure out what I need to research. So the second draft is not only a first polish and a fill in the gaps exercise but also a factually more accurate work.

Last night was positive for NitS in other ways too. I caught the end of a piece on the BBC local news about an exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. It wasn’t the exhibition that really caught my interest but a new collection they have of pictures of Liverpool’s Chinese community in the 1940s. After looking at their web site I spotted the Bert Hardy credit and a bit more searching on Google and at Getty Images found a variety of pictures from Liverpool during the 40s and 50s that will help me refine the mood and the imagery in the upcoming editing process.

Not so much of a big bang of progress over the last few days but anoter 1000 words or so have tied together some fragments of plot. I’ve managed to inflict a bit of rewritting on myself that I’ll have to do to make an innocuous object appear earlier in the story but thats what second drafts are for isn’t it?

Yeh! another thousand words of Night in the Sidhe bit the dust yesterday as I found a way from the bit of dialogue to the climactic fight sequence. I then immediately found I didn’t have a good idea for the fight but didn’t let that stop me so I just pushed on past it and I’ll fix it in editing.

I also had had an idea for some stuff that I wanted to happen early on in the story so I went back and added two paragraphs in one section and one to another. Now most books on writing I’ve read say not to do that till you’ve finished the first draft. I’ve come to the conclusion that writing a novel is a messier process than writing books suggest so this was a metaphorical gesture of a rude nature to them. It also saved my file of notes on things I need to do during editing from getting any bigger. I was starting to get a bit nervous that it would end up as long as the story…

Tonight I didn’t feel the urge to write but I did start to draw a couple of maps of the setting I want for continuity checking the story during editing. Just because it’s a fantasy city doesn’t mean I don’t want it to have a certain believable quality.

It’s taken nearly two months but Night and the Sidhe finally crept past the 80K word mark thanks to two nights when the police helicopter woke me up this week. Each time I had a random fragment of the story in my head. Not the next bit which I’ve been stuck on which I really need to write before I can move on but useful bits. I scribled them down on paper and typed them up tonight. Not the best way to find inspiration as I’d rather sleep through uninterupted but sometimes you just have to take the words where you find them.

After a seven week break trying to formulate how I’d get through the climatic scene of the inner story I threw a couple of thousand words for Night in the Sidhe on to the virtual page tonight. 79,500 words are now on the page. 80,000 would have been a nice point to finish on tonight but I’m running out of steam.

Last day of my week off today. I’ve done a lot this past week although as is normally the case with a week off not as much as I wanted to. I started the day with a trip into the city centre with plans to get some photographs for Wordless Wednesdays and to do a few bits of shopping. I got about twenty pictures with very dramatic clouds before the heavens opened and I was driven to abandon the idea of taking any more photographs.

After doing some other mundane household stuff I’ve managed to crack on with making some pictures John wanted for the next issue of Ragnarok and a thousand words on Night in the Sidhe. The writing required some serious DVD watching from 1970s childrens animation and will require the watching of a film by Terry Gilliam before I can finish the scene.

The reaction to yesterdays Vue tutorial has been really positive too. I’d like to thank everyone whos said nice things about it.

Really early on in writing my Noir Fairy Tail I decided to make the main character a former soldier. For a bit of colour in his background I decided on the unit he served with and a couple of operations he had been involved in. I’ve just finished reading Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (a good story but not as good as The Big Sleep) and strangely three of the characters served in pretty much the same unit and one of the same actions. A strange coincidence but one I think I can work in to the story.

After the usual Saturday yesterday of shopping and housework I had planned to split my time between wxPython in Action and writing. Well I did open the book at about eight PM and after getting wx running again and working through a few other bits and pieces it got shut. I do think that with a book to help I’ll make more in roads into learning wx though.

On the flip side of that failure I did make another big dent in my Noir Fairy Story. The hero has tracked down the bad guys and is watching them. He’s got some unusual help with that which I had some fun writing. I also broke one of my rules of writing by going back to work on an earlier section. I wanted to include a card game between two of the characters. I couldn’t make up what game they should be playing. I’d considered poker and some others, even snap. I was watching an episode of Mission Impossible that came in the same Amazon order as the wx book. A game of Baccarat was at the stories heart. Very much as it would have been in a 1960s Bond. There is something about baccarat that just fits the kind of scene I wanted to write in a way that poker wouldn’t. It was also a lot easier to work out the mechanics of the game which I’m not going to object to. There’s enough dialogue, flirtation, structural engineering (and I mean that in a construction industry sense) and political science going on in the scene without the card game taking over.

1. Thieves steal 250,000 Flake bars: The police are looking for a gang of attractive, long haired women moving in slow motion. The gang were heard chanting about the quality of the chocolate at the scene. A senual, warm rain shower followed the gang as they made their escape until they passed under a waterfall where the trail goes cold. Police refuse to confirm all CCTV footage of the crime has been affected by a technical fault so it is in soft focus. A dead lizard was found at the scene.
2. wxPython in Action: Arrived from Amazon on Wednesday. Swishier interfaces on my python scripts as soon as I’ve digested it.
3. Blogging: When I should be doing something more useful instead.
4. Marrion Raven’s music: Here set as support at Meat Loaf at the MEN on Saturday night was great.
5. Nottingham Forest: Will they get promotion in the play off this year or spend another year in the first division?
6. Guardian Great speeches:
   I picked a few of these up in the paper but missed most of them so being able to read them online is great.
7. Darwin’s Letters: Not just evolution but his correspondence from the age of 12.
8. TT and WW: Need I say more?
9. Ms Mira Muffet: Who suddenly turned out to have an interesting story all of her own in my Fairy Tale Noir. She was supposed to be a bit player in the story. Bo Peep, the Pied Piper, the Spider, a refuge ginger bread maker and Jo, a taxi driver, all tried to make a bid for fame but Ms Muffet is the one with the real drive.
10. gatineau rumours: Microsoft planning Google Analytics competitor
11. TV: CSI, New Tricks, ER, Hustle, Doctor Who and Great British Menu.
12. Vue: Sometime I just get an idea and want to try it out to see what kind of picture I create.
13. Raymond Chandler: I’m enjoying The Long Goodbye at the moment.

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While I was working on Little Dragon getting the last of the big pieces of the puzzle that reveals the threat my Noir Fairy Tale has been building to I was rendering a little visulisation of the threat. More of a concept than a fully worked image.

Made using Apophysis and Vue 6 Infinite.