Tuesday, August 31, 2004
An Idea Blossoms
Blue skies and an autumnal breeze was the walking-to-work weather I experienced today. I wish I could have stopped somewhere and whipped out my notebook but alas, I had to go to the hellhole and pretend to look busy. I must also apologise for the mis-print in yesterday's Blog - the street's aren't quieter from a drop in tourists - it was a Bank Holiday. Are we the only country in the world that shuts down simply because the bankers need a break? And if so - why am I still required to work when all the sandwich places are closed.
Increasingly, I am finding that while I sit on the bus I take part-route to work, I get into some serious thinking. My mind goes into 'squelch mode' and comes up with nice wee phrases, characters and story ideas. Most of it evaporates from my mind as soon as I enter the office of course which is just as well I stop to scribble it down in the street, or use the recording function of my mobile phone to record my thoughts and pen them in later.
This morning's thought was a cracker! I reckon this is so good as to be a novel, or perhaps even a possible submission idea to Keep It Coming (KIC).
During the afternoon I expanded on this idea and got some notes down on paper. It's a good story, but also because KIC is a US based e-Zine, I think this may just appeal to that market of readers. I already subscribe to several KIC stories and so know what they are looking for, and as I have said before, I like the idea of writing a serial.
Had a bust-up with the people who host my webserver account. They won't allow me to re-route my colingalbraith.co.uk account to an area I set aside on the server under themagnificent7.co.uk domain. Despite doing this previously, and despite it being a common industry practice they have denied it can be done. Bollox to that - I did it previously prior to them burning down the original server and forcing em to re-upload over 100Meg of files. I complained and there response was tert and quoted their (unpublicised) policy on hidden domain forwarding. This all means I have a domain name with nowhere to put the code. I'm not a happy chappy. Unless I use a free hosting service, upload a single index file which only holds forwarding code and leave it at that.....hmmmmm.
Back home I transferred 3 pages from my daily notebook (2" by 3" page size) that I wrote while in St. Andrews, and it came out as 7 pages in my large notebook (4" by 6")! Also, using the method I have been talking about lately - simpler being better - I wrote a short story last night. The first draft came in at 2100 words, but the beauty of it is I didn't try to prove some kind of social point or turn it into a morality play. I just told a story, as it was, and you know what? The words just flowed, and it felt very satisfying. I really enjoyed writing it.
It is called Loaded, and it is based in Krakow so there is still some minor research I need to do to it before I post it up for critique at my forum. As far as short story writing goes, I at least feel like I am moving in the right direction.
Increasingly, I am finding that while I sit on the bus I take part-route to work, I get into some serious thinking. My mind goes into 'squelch mode' and comes up with nice wee phrases, characters and story ideas. Most of it evaporates from my mind as soon as I enter the office of course which is just as well I stop to scribble it down in the street, or use the recording function of my mobile phone to record my thoughts and pen them in later.
This morning's thought was a cracker! I reckon this is so good as to be a novel, or perhaps even a possible submission idea to Keep It Coming (KIC).
During the afternoon I expanded on this idea and got some notes down on paper. It's a good story, but also because KIC is a US based e-Zine, I think this may just appeal to that market of readers. I already subscribe to several KIC stories and so know what they are looking for, and as I have said before, I like the idea of writing a serial.
Had a bust-up with the people who host my webserver account. They won't allow me to re-route my colingalbraith.co.uk account to an area I set aside on the server under themagnificent7.co.uk domain. Despite doing this previously, and despite it being a common industry practice they have denied it can be done. Bollox to that - I did it previously prior to them burning down the original server and forcing em to re-upload over 100Meg of files. I complained and there response was tert and quoted their (unpublicised) policy on hidden domain forwarding. This all means I have a domain name with nowhere to put the code. I'm not a happy chappy. Unless I use a free hosting service, upload a single index file which only holds forwarding code and leave it at that.....hmmmmm.
Back home I transferred 3 pages from my daily notebook (2" by 3" page size) that I wrote while in St. Andrews, and it came out as 7 pages in my large notebook (4" by 6")! Also, using the method I have been talking about lately - simpler being better - I wrote a short story last night. The first draft came in at 2100 words, but the beauty of it is I didn't try to prove some kind of social point or turn it into a morality play. I just told a story, as it was, and you know what? The words just flowed, and it felt very satisfying. I really enjoyed writing it.
It is called Loaded, and it is based in Krakow so there is still some minor research I need to do to it before I post it up for critique at my forum. As far as short story writing goes, I at least feel like I am moving in the right direction.
Colin 10:56 am