Archive for the ‘NitS’ Category

After a couple of days when I’ve been churning out words for my noir fairy tale with an enjoyable ease today things slowed down a bit. Still managed to get the 500 words down to push past the 60,000 point. Not bad for a story I didn’t expect to be more than 15,000. The pieces are falling in to place for the hero with the dark secret just being revealed that sits behind the plot. I think that may be why I’m struggling. There is a fair amount of exposition to work through and I’m trying to avoid it being too dry. It helps that the dark secret has a really nasty physical revelation at it’s heart and knowing a certain amount of what’s going to happen next helps too as I know I’ve got some juicy action to write.

This being Saturday I’ve also had to deal with all those everyday dull jobs. At least there was Doctor Who to enjoy. Good episode nicely put together. The trailer for the rest of the series is up with some interesting teasers. Given that Doctor Who won’t be on next week because of Eurovision I do wonder at the brains in BBC scheduling department. I’ve not spent years at scheduling school to learn that a special edition of the Weakest Link will get them a bigger audience for Eurovision than starting the evening with Doctor Who.

And some bright spark in ITV’s scheduling department clearly thinks you can get a bigger audience share by starting a show 10 minutes earlier than advertised. So I turn on Parkinson. David Tennant is finishing his segment. I switch TV off again. I wonder how many others did the same. I wonder how many potential eyes on adverts were lost because a published schedule is just something to easily abandon? Still I’m sure ITV is making enough money not to worry.

Anyway the new trailer for Doctor Who is good and worth watching again…

1. It was the last episode of Life on Mars this week. I think it made sense in the end. Sort of. And even though there isn’t going to be anymore it didn’t finish in a way that they couldn’t do any more of it if they changed their minds in a few years.
2. And surprise, surprise they are now starting to promote the Life on Mars spin off set in 1981 coming sometime in the future. So much for my thinking they were brave enough to make a succesful series and to finish it while it was doing well rather than running it on till it wasn’t any more.
3. My friend
   Kim’s new book Past Lies is out in PDF.
4. CSI on Tuesday was Gil-less and so a little odd. Or maybe that should be a little less odd.
5. The new character Keppler is an interesting addition and clearly he has some sort of secret to tease us with for awhile.
6. With all the fuss about phone quizzes has no one asked the question are some of them just to easy. So easy they really are lotteries rather than quizzes. The one on 5 at the end of CSI should be described as "if you paid a tiny bit of attention" and not the way they seem to make it sound difficult. I suppose if it was actually difficult they might not make a profit from running the phone lines.
7. There were only 298 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. 2 of the 300 were sent home sick before it started. Back in Sparta they were treated as "tremblers". One hung himself and the other fought at the battle of the next year at the battle of Battle of Plataea and the other, Aristodemus, regained his position in society.
8. I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with Google Analytics in the past week. Today I’ve learnt the importance of using regular expression matches for goal paths when the goal path isn’t quite as fixed as it at first appeared.
9. And just when I’m getting to grips with the finer detail of Analytics I noticed on the Analytics blog that they have launched another new toy Website Optimizer. One thing about working on the WWW is there is always something new to learn. Never a dull moment.
10. Ok it can be dull. The 1300 page specs for how PDFs go together was a dull moment in the last week but there are moments when it isn’t dull.
11. I saw a flock of green finches on my way to work on Tuesday. Far too small and fast to take a picture of with my phone though.
12. Persian ruler Cambyses was married to both his sisters and supported them by giving them all the taxes from one of the cities he conquered. One story about them has it they spent a lot of money on shoes although re-reading the part of Persian Fire that I mentioned that I can’t find the reference so I may have dreamt that.
13. I discovered that all Little Dragon, the hero, in my Fairy Tale Noir wants is a nice toasted cheese sandwich and he has been thinking about exactly how he wants it made far too much rather than solving the case he’s investigating.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

1. Susan Helene Gottfried
2. Ctina
3. PJ
4. Thomma Lyn
5. Joan
6. Christine
7. Amanda Young
8. Lulu
9. she
10. Michelle M Pillow
11. samulli
12. Sonja Foust
13. My Twenty Cents Keeps Moving
14. Presentstorm
15. Raggedy
16. Mama Duck
17. Lori
18. Mom of 3
19. Janet
20. delightfulduchess
21. Crystal Jordan
22. Wylie Kinson
23. Wacky Mommy
24. Gabriella Hewitt
25. Raven Vampire Nightclub
26. Tilly Greene
27. MissMeliss
28. Sword Girl
29. Amelia Elias
30. Nadine
31. Kim Rees
32. Jon Tillman
33. Robin
34. Fence

Pushed past the 50,000 word mark on my Noir Fairy Tale tonight. I’m starting to have a feeling I can see the end of the story is within reach. The next section will see the detective discover what’s going on so then it’s only a short way to trying to foil the plot and the ensuing confrontation. There’s going to be a fair amount to do when I get to the second draft. Lots of the descriptions are pretty light on detail at the moment and there are whole sections where I skip over dialogue that can shed light on the characters but that wasn’t needed to drive the plot forward. If I’d known this was going to turn out to be a novel and not a short story I’d probably never have started it.

The main character of my Noir Fairy Tale is given to contemplating the nature of the universe he’s experiencing and the impact of the plot on that reality. I’ve started wondering if he may be explaining a bit too much sometimes. I can see it’s going to be an interesting edit process deciding when it’s safe to cut down his thinking out loud and let the reader to fill in the details.

I cracked on past the 45k words of my Noir Fairy Tale last night. The hero had a chance encounter with a group of toga wearing, gun packing Greek Muses who had little sense of decorum. The nearest I can come to describing their attitude would be a fusion of a hen night with the wardens from an episode of Prisoner Cell Block H. I hope they make another appearance because they were fun to write.

Past the 40K word barrier on my Noir Fairy Tale last night and carried on past 41K for good measure. Day otherwise completely missable.

Just noticed this blog was a whole year old last week. So here’s a round up of projects started and progress so far.

Serious and Organised / Men of Action / The ABC System: system written needs play testing.

Arædan: Originally called Untitled Fantasy #1. In need of editing.

The Seer: About 50% written and waiting for me to go back to it.

Fairy Tale Noir: Heading on towards the 40,000 word mark with no sign of ending till it’s at least 50,000. A little longer than the 15,000 I was aiming for. May do a second draft to try to kick it up to 100,000+ and call it a novel.

impworks logo: Done and in use.

impworks website: Live since last year and growing. Recoded into Smarty templates almost as soon as I finished the first version. Some stuff (mostly pictures, scripts and tutorials to add when I find time).

Vue Python scripts: I’ve produced a growing list of free Vue Python scripts.

STEEPVM: Turned into a wednesday night post sequence instead of an article.

Characters on the Couch: Serialised here too.

Vue: Vue 6 is a huge leap forward in making my pictures look like I want them to. The new spectral sky model is worth the upgrade alone as far as I’m concerned.

Poser 7: Using it pretty much like Poser 5 and 6 at the moment need to dig into the enhancements.

Xfrog: Got a working copy again and now I’m back to exploring making abstracts with it.

Virtual Fashion: Starting to get good results from this especially when textured elsewhere.

Pepakura Designer: Need to find more time to play with this.

Blogs: This one is well established. The Vue News Blog is getting growing readership. I’ve a couple more in the pipe line too for specialist topics.

Underwater Secret Base: Redesigned to include obligatory volcano.

Finished off two pictures in Vue 6 that will hopefully make it into Rag 52. Quite pleased with the first one. It may be the best picture I’ve turned out of Vue. Also played round trying to get a better Vue grass displacement material for large areas and terrains. The one I posted last night is alright but I think it’s a bit too dense.

Also moved the Fairy Tale Noir on by about a thousand words. I’ve got a new character to play with whose been in the shadows and he’s a lot of fun to write.

Made a few little tweaks to my web site too. Added a new links page for Vue Python resources although it needs more links. I’ll add those over the next few days.

My Noir Fairy Tale past thirty thousand words after a sticky start thanks to a little advice from Raymond Chandler – "When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

This Follows on from: Characters on the Couch (Part 16). The first part can be found at: Characters on the Couch (Part 1).

Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961)

Born in 1875 Jung (pronounced young) was trained in medicine in Basel. His early years of practice were at the BurghÅ¡lzli Mental Hospital in Zurich. He was influenced by Freud’s writings on mental illness and dreams. From 1907 to 1913 they maintained close ties. In 1911 he became the first president of the Internationale Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (International Psychoanalytic Association). Theoretical disputes with Freud, chiefly concerned with the significance of sexuality led to the end of their relationship when in 1912 their differences became irreconcilable.

Jung went on to originate the concept of introverted and extroverted personalities. In his major work, Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), Jung described how the mind contained both individual experiences and common inherited cultural experiences buried in our "collective unconscious". He suggested that every human has a shared pool of memories, ideas and modes of thought from the life experiences of our ancestors and in effect the entire human race. In effect this acts as an immense store of ancient wisdom. Within the collective unconscious experiences archetypes, symbolic pictures or personifications represent these. They appear in our dreams and in literature, myths and fairy tales. He later went on to apply his theories to historical studies of religion and to dreams.

He also made valuable studies of mental disorder, including schizophrenia. His other works included Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961).