Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides

I'm back home (have been for ten hours, in fact), and I kinda sorta know now how zombies must feel. Still, I managed to not fall asleep yet, so maybe I have a chance of getting my internal clock back on track quickly.

And now I must read a book I couldn't get into last year in order to come up with a good pitch. Wish me luck!

(Oh, and my Shore Leave report with a handful of pictures will follow sometime this week.)

Well, almost. Another eight hours, and I'll be on the train that takes me to Munich Airport. Once again, I'll make a nuisance of myself for the family of steve_mollmann, until we set off for Baltimore and some sort of weekend party that takes place there.

See you all there! Or not.

This is my first post in 2008, and indeed my first post in over half a year. The reasons for that are numerous, but let's just say that I don't find blogging about personal stuff as appealing as I did before. Coupled with some other changes in my life that include selling my Trek DVDs, this made me reconsider the purpose of this journal. From now on, this will be for all intents and purposes a blog about my writing endeavours. I won't rule out that there may be the occasional post about private or at least not writing-related matters, but the majority of posts will be about writing. I'm also making an attempt to be as regular about this as possible, meaning that, if I write something, you can expect to find out what it is (at least in rough terms), how much I wrote, and how I feel about it. :)

Most of my LJ friends are writers, and some of them post almost daily updates. Of them all, I find nightwolfwriter's particularly encouraging (and, at times, envy-inducing).

Some time ago, jaylake wrote in his journal about his story-a-week program. I'm now trying to do something similar, except that I'm also working on something else with my Secret Writing Partner which we send back and forth. My plan is: whenever I send something off to Steve, I keep on writing, ideally on a new story, with a daily minimum of 500 words during the week, and 2,000 on holidays and weekends. That would yield me a weekly word count of 6,500 at least, which isn't so bad. Enough for a short story, certainly.

I know I can do that. In fact, I've been doing this for the past three weeks. I finished a story, which is now in the good hands of my SWP, and continued with the other thing that he sent back to me last week. I had a good day on Thursday, writing 3,500 in total.

Done for today. My goal at the start was 2,000 words, but once I passed the absolute minimum (1,667), I had got to what seemed a good starting point for tomorrow, so I stopped.

Anyway, here's my progressometer.

I love it when a story starts coming together. There's an outline I'm working on right now (not NaNo), and up until yesterday, I had serious trouble turning a collection of rather random ideas into a coherent narrative. Late last night, however, I had a sudden insight that brought me not only the story's antagonist(s), but also a clever twist, if I say so myself.

I'm almost done with the first draft, my Secret Writing Partner will be glad to learn.

Me am happy writer.

I've updated the Scotland gallery with photos taken in St. Andrews and Arbroath. More still to come ... *evil laugh*

There's been a slight change of plans regarding my NaNo project for this year, surprisingly. I'm not abandoning my Hapsburg novel, but I've realised that this isn't something I can knock out in a couple of months (what a revelation!), so I'm taking the slow approach there. This will also involve trips to libraries in Innsbruck, something that is now much easier because I finally own a car.

More news as events warrant.

I keep meaning to post an update, but somehow I always find a way to delay it. I bet there's some deep psychological reason for it, but my personal explanation is laziness.

Anyhow. The next few photographs in my Scotland gallery include four taken in and around Edinburgh Castle, which we visited on the third day of our trip. There's one other picture taken at night - the National Gallery of Scotland, which we only saw from the outside. In hindsight, I wish we'd gone and taken a look inside, but Thomas (the colleague I was on the trip with) isn't such a fan of museums, so we decided to do something else instead.

The last five photos of this update were taken at Stirling Castle, which is my favourite of all the ones we visited. It should really be on everybody's list of things to see, much more so than bloody Loch Ness. I was most impressed by the renovated and partially rebuilt Great Hall. Sadly, the pictures don't do it justice at all.

Sadly, I didn't manage to eat one while I was there.

Anyhow. Here are the first five pictures from Scotland - or, to be precise, Edinburgh. The first one's for Allyn, especially.

[Note that I upgraded to a Plus account to be able to use the gallery feature. The lengths you have to go to to get what you want ...]

We went to the Palace of Holyroodhouse on Sunday, our first full day in Scotland. The weather wasn't exactly good, but it wasn't bad either. Inside the palace, we had a look at a lot of rooms, including the ones that Mary Queen of Scots lived in for a few years. The ruins outside are those of Holyrood Abbey, and they're marvellous to look at - I took far more pictures than a reasonable man would have taken (but then, I'm not reasonable, and I love ruins).

Edinburgh Castle followed on the second day. I'll post pictures later.

Those of you who want a report about my trip to Scotland, have patience. I'm planning an update for the weekend, complete with selected pictures, so you can stop gnashing your teeth.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about this year's NaNo project, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I'll write it in German. But not only that - it'll be a historical tale, perhaps with some mystery aspects, perhaps not. I've got to do an awful lot of research, but if I do it right, it'll pay off in the end.

Preliminary setting for the tale is 1890's Austria, with the potential to include plotlines in other countries as well (I'm thinking Mexico and some parts of Africa, mostly). I don't have a plot yet, but I trust the research will help there. Speaking of which: I'm not only reading history books, but also old German novels and other literary works of the 19th century, to get used to the way people used the language back then, because my goal is to write a novel that might feasibly have been published at the time it's set.

My work is currently on hold, though. Today I got the latest from Terry Pratchett, Making Money, which I have to read immediately before I can concentrate on other things.

Another NaNoWriMo is imminent, so I need to find a project for it. This time I guess I'll do something different and not continue to try to write that particular original novel I started last year (which I still haven't finished, by the way).

I have no idea what I'll do, but I'll be damned if it's going to be Urban Fantasy. SF, maybe. New Weird, also a possibility. Or maybe something entirely new for me: mainstream fiction without any SF or Fantasy elements whatsoever. At this point, everything's possible - even writing the entire thing in German, and for me, that's saying something.

Hm ...

I'm leaving in half an hour, so don't except to hear from me for two weeks. First, there's a train ride, then a flight on a plane, then a bus ride, then - perhaps - a taxi ride, and then we'll be at our B&B in Edinburgh. I'll try not to enjoy myself too much ...

Behave yourselves while I'm gone.

There's a British publisher that puts out a number of shared-universe series, and they're looking for writers to work on a new series they're starting. steve_mollmann and I will be pitching to them, so wish us luck.

From what we can tell so far (without reading more than the world bible we got) it looks like it's pretty standard high fantasy stuff, but there's always room to make it something special, isn't there? In any case, their series bible includes references to Lovecraft, GRRM and Fritz Leiber, so it seems there's room to maneuver.

We have less than a month to come up with a handful of good ideas, because then I'll be leaving for the green hills of Scotland. Already today I wrote up five basic plot summaries (they want the pitches to be no longer than 600 words or so), and that's after reading the bible twice and sitting down for a couple of hours. Who knows what we can accomplish in another three weeks?

I'm about to start reading Life in a Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Gies, a book that nightwolfwriter recommended many moons ago. It certainly looks like valuable research material, since the setting of that fantasy series is similar to early medieval times.

I booked the flight (just now, actually) and secured accomodation for the first three nights that we'll spend in Edinburgh. Anything after that will be left to chance, since we're going to rent a car over there and travel where our whims take us.

Ach, lads and lasses, 'tis still six weeks to go! How shall I pass the time?

Before I forget: steve_mollmann, anything you can recommend in Edinburgh? Sights, restaurants, public toilets?

Recently I started watching NYPD Blue for the first time. It's amazing how dated it looks - the clothes, mostly. Yet if you take away the dreadful fashion errors of that time and the equally dreadful Mike Post synthesizer score, something really good remains. Even David Caruso is watchable, though I can't wait to get to season two with Jimmy Smits.

Favourite character (how can it be otherwise?): Andy Sipowicz.

( my first embedded video, though not from YouTube )

I found this music video by accident, as part of the latest entry in somebody's blog. Well done and funny! It also introduced me to the music of Harvey Danger, who I hadn't heard about before. Kind of like Carbon Leaf, who until a few months ago were completely unknown to me (and who I discovered because somebody posted a link to a YouTube tribute video to Doctor Who, using their song "What About Everything"). Now I own four of their albums, so go figure ...

In reading news, I'm currently enjoying (muchly, at that) Greg Bear's Moving Mars. It gripped me almost right from the start and so far hasn't let go.

Purloined from half my f-list.

When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your LJ.

"Carrot juice. Carrot juice. Carrot juice."

2,102 / 5,000 (42.0%)

Not so bad, methinks.

I don't blog much these days, I know. Recently, however, things have happened that warrant being written down.

I'll be a car owner in about two weeks' time, it appears. I'll be getting a barely-used car at a very good price, by way of my family's super-seekrit connections to the auto industry. My, that does sound good, but in reality it's just another example of knowing the right people and asking the right questions at the right time.

I'll work in a different department of the bank starting next Monday. Until now I was a teller, but on Monday I'll become a member of the loan department. I guess this counts as a kind of promotion ... I wonder if I'll see an increase in pay, but I somehow doubt it.

As mentioned before, I got back a nice rejection from a magazine recently. Well, I sent the story back out there, to a mag that boasts a 2-4 week response time. We'll see. Meanwhile, I've finally begun work on a story that I'll plan to submit to Interzone for their special Mundane SF issue. That means no aliens, no time travel, no telepathy, no FTL, etc. Sounds difficult? It isn't, not at all. I simply had a hard time finding the right way to start the story and ended up moving the start forward at least three times, each time taking it closer to the meat of the action. I think it works the way I have it now. Today I wrote over 1000 words, and I think it needs another 5000, but I won't limit myself to that figure. If it needs to be longer, then so be it.

Galleys for the TNG frame that Steve and I wrote have arrived. They look spiffy, despite the inevitable misspelling of Steve's name in the page header. I'll need to read through the story again and see what glaring errors we missed last time.

That's it for now. I'm off to read Alastair Reynolds' Absolution Gap, so don't disturb me.

So I come home from work and check my emails. I discover a message from the fiction editor at the magazine I'd submitted a fantasy story to, oh, ages ago. The magazine had enountered some trouble shortly after its start, necessitating a switch from print to online (PDF), and I imagine they simply had no way to clear their backlog earlier.

Anyway, I got a rejection but it was one of those that make you feel almost as good as if you'd sold the story. My fantasy tale was deemed "suitable for publication but not for the magazine". Yay me! :D

Which means, of course, that I'll have to resubmit it ASAP.

Oh, and I need to write more stories that I can submit. I'm a lazy bum, though ...

Oh, how wrong you'd be!

Just now I discovered an alternative to Amazon, with even lower prices: libri.de. Bugger!

Now excuse me while I ... um ... read the news, or something. [pause] Yeah, that sounds about right.