Unfaded Black

Slightly back on the blog horse, but only slightly

2009-07-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Hey look, a blog post.

Knocked down a few more chapters of the book since the last entry - though given that last entry was four months ago I'd have to have lost both hands for it to be justifiable not to have. Anyway I finally threw an actual proper plot development at the characters after all the meticulous buildup. Or so it felt to me, but then I did a page count and realised I wasn't quite on page 50. So possibly slightly less meticulous than the editing of a Michael Bay film.

Off on holiday in a week so, huh, maybe there won't be another post for a couple of weeks. Or shall I do some sort of exciting daily update on what happens on my holiday? I'm sure the internet would love to read that. There might be travelling mishaps, a meal or two; maybe there'd even be a trite observation about the local culture (the Welsh).

But I might update this thing every so often from now on.

Oh, and doesn't Transformers 2 look like the biggest pile of rectal ejecta?

Broke through a (smallish) wall

2009-02-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

I finished chapter 9 today, partly on the bus this morning and then the last bit this evening. That's not actually a great deal more text, as a chunk of it was there anyway. On the other hand, I basically planned the next couple of chapters as well.

I dithered for a while about whether to throw the characters a hugely complicating curveball, or whether it was too early in the story. In the end I decided to hold off on it, as a lot of things aren't properly established yet, so it seems premature to start smashing them to bits. In particular, I'm trying to achieve a sense of slow creeping dread, which you can't do if you keep delivering on the things that people are scared of. These things have to take on a significance, one that might actually be disproportionate to their severity, which you can only do if you keep subtly threatening to do them. Learned helplessness and all that.

I also started thinking about zombie films (no particular reason, other than that they rule) and the ways the central situation could be linked to them. Given that I'm already playing with vodou as a possible explanation for what's happening, I thought it'd be cool (and suitably sinister) to push that a bit further and hint at zombification. Before the Living Dead style of zombie film, they were originally people under the control of vodou witch doctors called bokors (the whole reanimated corpse feeding on the flesh of the living is a 60s thing). So that's going to be one of the ideas the characters come up with to explain what's happening to them.

Other than my morbid fascination with these things, there's another plus here: throwing out two ideas for what could be happening should focus people on trying to decide which one's right, hopefully blinding them to some of the other things happening in the background.

Hopefully I'll find time to write the next couple of chapters in the next few weeks...

Woot! Website is finished

2009-02-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

That was, on reflection, not a headline guaranteed to elicit a sense of mystery or curiosity in the reader.

Anyway, it's finished.

Also I got a few more pages of novel down yesterday, and am trying to think where to go next. I just hit one of those annoying bits where you realise you have to introduce a new character, and have no idea what the bugger should be like or what they should do.

I think she's going to be a source of trouble, as I think that could make some exciting complications that'll be a challenge to work out. Things were going a bit too smoothly for my characters, and I also wonder whether events so far are a little too linear and simple. So maybe throwing a curveball will force me to work harder.

Clearly I have grasped that film: it makes no sense

2009-01-30T14:39:00.000-08:00

Avoided death. But you knew that.

Mostly because I was determined not to let it beat me, I just watched Primer again. The first time I came out of it dazed, largely because it all made perfectly coherent sense until about 20 minutes from the end, then went bonkers.

This time I had basically the same response, but now I think that's about right. The permutations of the storyline are just completely insoluble - you just don't have enough information to know what's happened. You wind up just as confused and weirded out as the lead characters, which is all terribly artistically pure. It'd suck if the film was longer, but it's just the right amount of time spent being completely baffled, and then you're done.

I'm not sure whether being knackered from the 15-k cycle ride, plus slightly intellectually muffled from the beers earlier, prevented me from understanding that film properly, or just put me in the right frame of mind to not bother about the bits that are impossible to solve.

About to cycle home in London: If I should die...

2009-01-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Bit of an office party this evening to celebrate the magazine being redesigned. I for one like the new look, and everyone else seems to be pretty pleased with it.

So we all had a few beers, and there was discussion of the cultural merits of Buffy the Vampire Slayer vis a vis those dumb Twilight books (cannot believe there was even the suggestion that Stephenie Meyer's suckfest was even thought worthy of mention in the same sentence - there was me thinking that disliking vampire fiction disqualified you from writing it).

Now I must bestride my velocipede and brave the London streets. It's probably an in-joke too far to have named my bike V for Velocipede, but pretension should never stop anyone.

Assuming violent death beneath the wheels of a bendy bus fails to occur, the plan for the weekend is to do some writing (although tragically the needs of housework might intervene). Also one of the editors has come by a ripped DVD of the first episode of the 5th series of Battlestar Galactica, which he's very kindly bestowed upon me. Being bereft of Sky, I was going to wait until they came out, but frak it.

Getting properly underway now

2009-01-29T13:57:00.000-08:00

Right, I now have an actual hosting deal off of GoDaddy so I should be able to crack on with sorting out the website in all that spare time.

So, the blog is basically going to be my musings on the latest stuff in science, what's going on in the world, and, like, cultural stuff (which mostly means books, films and albums I come across), mixed up with updates on how my writing's going (so I'll be bookmarking the thesaurus at the "slowly" page for those posts).

I do appreciate that none of this constitutes anything remotely resembling a Unique Selling Point, so it'll just have to rely on my brilliant wit and keen, knowledgeable observation. Good.

Oh, and the blog header is from Nietzsche. Yes, I am that pretentious.

Kicking off

2009-01-28T17:29:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm launching all this in a blaze of energy after an evening spent playing poker, drinking beer and eating very nice chocolate biscuits. Pick one of those factors and blame it.

The plan is to get this blog over to www.mcmarshall.co.uk, which I just bought. And then hey, I might actually try and develop the fracker a bit. Who can say.