Halfway there and Writing a book
The bloody M key seems to be broken on my Laptop. Oh this doesn't remind me of "Misery" at all.
Like a few people out there I've tried to write my own novel at least two separate occasions, I can actually think of a few dozen ties I've tried to write somthing but the two major times revolve around the same book. I first had the idea for this story a long time ago back in 2007 maybe 2008, the idea of a guy that wins a gold medal without trying to. Probably dates back to Bradbury at the winter olympics whenever the hell that was. Anyway the idea, like all ideas I get, was floating around in my head for a long while when I suddenly found myself overseas doing my usual overseas thing of drinking a lot and writing in a journal. I found that I had a lot of free time out on the road by myself so I figured it would be as good a tie as any to start writing a book, I actually began writing a Vampire book thing, which looking at it might have been really profitable if I'd finished it back then and somehow published it during the whole Twilight crapfest.
I'd bought a bunch of notepads in Tacoma Washington, tiny little things, to replace this big notepad that I'd bought in Australia, anyway they were different colours and the coloured ones I used for Travel info, like accomodation, train schedules, itinerary and other important things like that, the Black one left over after I was done with that lot I decided to write down every story idea I had as it came to me. After six onths I had about 15-17 decent enough story ideas, not all of the where great but they were good enough for me. It was on a boat trip between Rostock and Helsinki that I decided to finally try to finish writing a new novel because the Vampire book had been unattended for a while because I was getting kind of tangled up in the story and other problems with tone and characters, so I went up to a girl working on the boat and asked her to pick a number between 1 and 18(I think I had 18 ideas at the time) she said 14 and thus I started writing Gold, the longest single thing I've ever worked on that isn't a joke about wanking.
Gold was started on that boat that afternoon, I remember when I sat down to start it, I figured I'd have the whole thing finished by the time I got back to Australia, I'd then mail it to my friend in Tacoma(now living in Portland) after a few minor edits and adjustments. Turns out that writing isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Despite the fact that I'm averaging about 1300 words a day on this Blogjune stuff it turns out that I'm not very verbose when it comes to fiction. I sat down and wrote and wrote every time I had some spare time, which wasn't often, and ended up writing about 15 pages of foolscap before I got home to Australia. The most I managed to get written was on the Transmongolian express where I think I wrote about eight of the pages over the five days I was stuck on the train without the internet or any TV.
Once I got to civilisation the thought of writing to keep me entertained vanished and I put the book(barely a short story) away and forgot about it for a while, I added a paragraph here and there for a while after getting back to Australia but for the most part the story was done and I was finished with it(not literally done more like I was done with writing it). But I never forgot that I'd started on it, every now and then I'd see something or someone around Brisbane and I'd think of the story and my characters and I'd wonder what they were doing at that time. I'd set the story in Brisbane as a way of remembering the city while I wasn't there. In 2010 I managed to somehow get a holiday to Cairnes, considering I was unemployed I'm still not sure how I managed to not only pay for a holiday but convince myself I needed it but nonetheless I went and did the holiday thing.
But I wanted to do my holiday as a real holiday. I swore I wouldn't go online, I wouldn't turn on my phone, I wouldn't watch the news and after finishing the books I had on me(Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World) I would sit down and at least try to finish my book. I had the little black notebook, one of my most prized posessions and I had the original manuscript. After a week trapped in Cairnes due to flooding in Central Queensland blocking the train tracks(trains were $20 home flying was $150) I'd finished up to page 56. I spent nearly every day I was in Cairnes drinking at night and writing in the Cairnes public library during the daylight hours. And it was great, I didn't realise how much I'd missed creating something and how little I'd missed the internet. Once I got home to Brisbane I once again shelved the book, now a proper length of a story, and resumed life, I enrolled in UNiversity, started bike riding a lot, enjoyed the Christmas time. Then the city flooded and I really had a great time during that whole thing(I think next week's theme days might be where was I when) but I never went back to the story. I can't write in Brisbane but it is my muse, it's what I write about when I'm not there. So next year I'm going to Spain, I've three weeks on the road with my dad walking some 800km pilgrimage across the countryside. I'm taking my copy of Gold with me and finishing it up. I know how much is left. About thirty pages maybe more if I stretch the story out(I know there is room to stretch because I turned a sentence in the outline in my notebook into almost fifteen pages last year).
It isn't really a story I'm proud of but it will be a book I'll be glad to have said I wrote.
I had a lot of fun in Cairnes, I met some cool people, but what I enjoyed the most was finding I could still write when I wanted to. Finishing page 50 was a great feeling but discovering that I can't write if there are anythings there to distract me was a bit depressing.
I carry the book around with me everywhere I go. Just in case I want to write again, so far no, but maybe one day.
So yes, today:
I had to wake up earlyish to help my mum with some computer bug she couldn't solve, turned out she needed help burning a CD, I ended up needing to burn her 4 DVDs which wasn't so hard but I did drive across town to get there so that was a bugger. I ended up catching up on my Canadian TV shows after I got there until about lunch time when I went out and got my mums new monitor, she has a new laptop and needed a big screen for her office desktop so I had to select one and install it because thats what sons do around here apparently. I also had to get her a Go-Card because she doesn't know how to go on public transport, she needs to take a bus into town tomorrow for work and is worried that it will all go wrong somehow.
After I got the monitor from Milton(Umart, where I buy all my computer stuff) I drove to Indro for my curry and GoCards but on the way people were really going nuts on the road, overtaking and undertaking and just in general being really unsafe. Was there something put in the water this week because people be loco right now.
Once I got home, I checked on the dogs, still alive somehow and then installed the monitor for my mum. She got home a little while later and was really chuffed at her new tech and couldn't understand why I was so underwhelmed(I've bought monitors before it isn't anything to get excited over), as I was headed out the door my dad got home and we got talking about Spain, I've not really committed yet, I need to look at my graduation times, exam schedules and other factors because I'm not missing my graduation for a free trip to Europe. I do think it would be a cool thing to do but the timing is going to suck for me so I'll have to see. I finally left for Matt's house. I got there, cooked Meatloaf and after two days of barely eating anything Matt ate the whole plate and a second plate of dinner, including a ton of beans which he rarely touches as a rule.
I had been getting worried because he'd not been eating lately and that's never a good sign. But he seems to be past whatever it was, which is nice. Less nice is the pains I've got in my chest and neck, I think from all the straining yesterday with that bloody filter. My wisdom tooth is also hurting a hell of a lot so I think that has to go.
So after dinner I went to the shops, missed the entire Origin game, I still don't know who won, and then fell asleep in front of the TV watching Angry boys, I set an alarm to wake me up at 1130 so I'd have some time to write this up, I wrote it up on Matts kitchen table instead of outside the library becuase it is really cold and I just don't have it in me to sit outside for 30 minutes writing tonight. Especially if the subject is writing which can always get a bit meta. So I started writing and will now rush on over to the library to sign on and submit, about 5 inutes late maybe, I'm not happy with that, but I needed my sleep and I'll have this whole thing done earlier tomorrow because I think tonight I'm actually going to get a decent nights sleep for once.
Twitter Feed of the day: @bergopolis a former leverage writer and now Eureka writer is the second person I've ever re-tweeted.
Like a few people out there I've tried to write my own novel at least two separate occasions, I can actually think of a few dozen ties I've tried to write somthing but the two major times revolve around the same book. I first had the idea for this story a long time ago back in 2007 maybe 2008, the idea of a guy that wins a gold medal without trying to. Probably dates back to Bradbury at the winter olympics whenever the hell that was. Anyway the idea, like all ideas I get, was floating around in my head for a long while when I suddenly found myself overseas doing my usual overseas thing of drinking a lot and writing in a journal. I found that I had a lot of free time out on the road by myself so I figured it would be as good a tie as any to start writing a book, I actually began writing a Vampire book thing, which looking at it might have been really profitable if I'd finished it back then and somehow published it during the whole Twilight crapfest.
I'd bought a bunch of notepads in Tacoma Washington, tiny little things, to replace this big notepad that I'd bought in Australia, anyway they were different colours and the coloured ones I used for Travel info, like accomodation, train schedules, itinerary and other important things like that, the Black one left over after I was done with that lot I decided to write down every story idea I had as it came to me. After six onths I had about 15-17 decent enough story ideas, not all of the where great but they were good enough for me. It was on a boat trip between Rostock and Helsinki that I decided to finally try to finish writing a new novel because the Vampire book had been unattended for a while because I was getting kind of tangled up in the story and other problems with tone and characters, so I went up to a girl working on the boat and asked her to pick a number between 1 and 18(I think I had 18 ideas at the time) she said 14 and thus I started writing Gold, the longest single thing I've ever worked on that isn't a joke about wanking.
Gold was started on that boat that afternoon, I remember when I sat down to start it, I figured I'd have the whole thing finished by the time I got back to Australia, I'd then mail it to my friend in Tacoma(now living in Portland) after a few minor edits and adjustments. Turns out that writing isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Despite the fact that I'm averaging about 1300 words a day on this Blogjune stuff it turns out that I'm not very verbose when it comes to fiction. I sat down and wrote and wrote every time I had some spare time, which wasn't often, and ended up writing about 15 pages of foolscap before I got home to Australia. The most I managed to get written was on the Transmongolian express where I think I wrote about eight of the pages over the five days I was stuck on the train without the internet or any TV.
Once I got to civilisation the thought of writing to keep me entertained vanished and I put the book(barely a short story) away and forgot about it for a while, I added a paragraph here and there for a while after getting back to Australia but for the most part the story was done and I was finished with it(not literally done more like I was done with writing it). But I never forgot that I'd started on it, every now and then I'd see something or someone around Brisbane and I'd think of the story and my characters and I'd wonder what they were doing at that time. I'd set the story in Brisbane as a way of remembering the city while I wasn't there. In 2010 I managed to somehow get a holiday to Cairnes, considering I was unemployed I'm still not sure how I managed to not only pay for a holiday but convince myself I needed it but nonetheless I went and did the holiday thing.
But I wanted to do my holiday as a real holiday. I swore I wouldn't go online, I wouldn't turn on my phone, I wouldn't watch the news and after finishing the books I had on me(Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World) I would sit down and at least try to finish my book. I had the little black notebook, one of my most prized posessions and I had the original manuscript. After a week trapped in Cairnes due to flooding in Central Queensland blocking the train tracks(trains were $20 home flying was $150) I'd finished up to page 56. I spent nearly every day I was in Cairnes drinking at night and writing in the Cairnes public library during the daylight hours. And it was great, I didn't realise how much I'd missed creating something and how little I'd missed the internet. Once I got home to Brisbane I once again shelved the book, now a proper length of a story, and resumed life, I enrolled in UNiversity, started bike riding a lot, enjoyed the Christmas time. Then the city flooded and I really had a great time during that whole thing(I think next week's theme days might be where was I when) but I never went back to the story. I can't write in Brisbane but it is my muse, it's what I write about when I'm not there. So next year I'm going to Spain, I've three weeks on the road with my dad walking some 800km pilgrimage across the countryside. I'm taking my copy of Gold with me and finishing it up. I know how much is left. About thirty pages maybe more if I stretch the story out(I know there is room to stretch because I turned a sentence in the outline in my notebook into almost fifteen pages last year).
It isn't really a story I'm proud of but it will be a book I'll be glad to have said I wrote.
I had a lot of fun in Cairnes, I met some cool people, but what I enjoyed the most was finding I could still write when I wanted to. Finishing page 50 was a great feeling but discovering that I can't write if there are anythings there to distract me was a bit depressing.
I carry the book around with me everywhere I go. Just in case I want to write again, so far no, but maybe one day.
So yes, today:
I had to wake up earlyish to help my mum with some computer bug she couldn't solve, turned out she needed help burning a CD, I ended up needing to burn her 4 DVDs which wasn't so hard but I did drive across town to get there so that was a bugger. I ended up catching up on my Canadian TV shows after I got there until about lunch time when I went out and got my mums new monitor, she has a new laptop and needed a big screen for her office desktop so I had to select one and install it because thats what sons do around here apparently. I also had to get her a Go-Card because she doesn't know how to go on public transport, she needs to take a bus into town tomorrow for work and is worried that it will all go wrong somehow.
After I got the monitor from Milton(Umart, where I buy all my computer stuff) I drove to Indro for my curry and GoCards but on the way people were really going nuts on the road, overtaking and undertaking and just in general being really unsafe. Was there something put in the water this week because people be loco right now.
Once I got home, I checked on the dogs, still alive somehow and then installed the monitor for my mum. She got home a little while later and was really chuffed at her new tech and couldn't understand why I was so underwhelmed(I've bought monitors before it isn't anything to get excited over), as I was headed out the door my dad got home and we got talking about Spain, I've not really committed yet, I need to look at my graduation times, exam schedules and other factors because I'm not missing my graduation for a free trip to Europe. I do think it would be a cool thing to do but the timing is going to suck for me so I'll have to see. I finally left for Matt's house. I got there, cooked Meatloaf and after two days of barely eating anything Matt ate the whole plate and a second plate of dinner, including a ton of beans which he rarely touches as a rule.
I had been getting worried because he'd not been eating lately and that's never a good sign. But he seems to be past whatever it was, which is nice. Less nice is the pains I've got in my chest and neck, I think from all the straining yesterday with that bloody filter. My wisdom tooth is also hurting a hell of a lot so I think that has to go.
So after dinner I went to the shops, missed the entire Origin game, I still don't know who won, and then fell asleep in front of the TV watching Angry boys, I set an alarm to wake me up at 1130 so I'd have some time to write this up, I wrote it up on Matts kitchen table instead of outside the library becuase it is really cold and I just don't have it in me to sit outside for 30 minutes writing tonight. Especially if the subject is writing which can always get a bit meta. So I started writing and will now rush on over to the library to sign on and submit, about 5 inutes late maybe, I'm not happy with that, but I needed my sleep and I'll have this whole thing done earlier tomorrow because I think tonight I'm actually going to get a decent nights sleep for once.
Twitter Feed of the day: @bergopolis a former leverage writer and now Eureka writer is the second person I've ever re-tweeted.