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May 25, 2006
UMBRA: So Close to Done You Can Smell it
Today, with only a tiny handful of pages left before the ending, I wrote a new scene, 2400 words of stuff between Our Synthetic Hero and (one of) his nemeses, in which much is revealed, and more is learned. At the current rate of progress, this new version of the book should be done by early next week at the very latest. And, once it is done, I plan to re-read it through again, make sure all the new and changed material fits well with the existing text, and then it'll be time to post it all off to Publisher Brian, to see what he makes of it.
One thing I can say: I feel vastly better about the book now that it's had all this surgery than I did before. When there's something wrong with a manuscript you get a weird feeling not that dissimilar to a sort of itchy feeling that you just can't shake. Whenever you think about the manuscript, it bugs you, and you spend altogether too much time brooding about it, wondering what the hell might be wrong, without in any way coming up with anything like a solution. The only thing that helps is going back to the text and having a look at it. Something is wrong with it; you just have to figure out what it is. [In a weird bit of meta-ness, I had the same feeling about the original version of this post, and here I am a day later fixing it up.] Now the book is nearly done, and I feel much better--more at peace--with it than I did before. To use a different, perhaps more vivid analogy, it's a bit like when you notice a really bad smell coming from your fridge, and you have to pull everything out in order to find the source.
[edited 26/5 to fix various bits]
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Meanwhile, I've just been watching the Australian Socceroos playing the Greek national soccer/football team here at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). 103,000 people turned up to watch the match, which is incredible, the sort of numbers you'd expect to see at an AFL Grand Final (for Australian Rules football).
Oh, and the Socceroos won, 1-0! From here they proceed to the Netherlands for a match against the Dutch, seen as a curtain-raiser for the World Cup in June. I can't wait!
Posted by adrian at 07:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 19, 2006
If You Can Help...
If you've been reading this site since ye olden times, like when I was still publishing this through Blogger, you will remember reading a lot me working with Edge Editor Cheyenne Grewe as we did the (quite extensive) rewrites on ORBITAL BURN. In the course of all that work, Cheyenne and I became good friends, and we still talk, even though she's left Edge and moved on to running her own manuscript editing service.
I'm writing tonight because Cheyenne's got a serious problem, and is trying to raise some money. She's living in a house that needs extensive repairs to its roof (from the sound of it, and from the photos on her site, it looks actually like she needs a whole new roof), and she's trying to raise money to cover the costs. Already Cheyenne has eked and shivered her way through one Calgary winter (-40 degrees C, anyone?), and I hate the thought of her having to endure another one without a decent roof over her head.
She's asked if I can provide a link to her site, where she's selling off prints of her artwork. Cheyenne's a talented artist, and this is an excellent cause. She needs $3300 Canadian, and is most of the way there, and just needs a little help to get the rest of the way to a decent roof. You can buy fabulous prints from her online gallery of artwork for the low, low price of only $CA10 per print. Do yourselves a favour--and do Cheyenne a favour. She once, memorably, put in an unbelievable above-and-beyond-the-call effort to save ORBITAL BURN, and my career. I'd like sometime to return the favour. I hope it helps.
Posted by adrian at 09:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 13, 2006
Little Known Author on Dragon Page Call-In Show
Tonight, or rather very early tomorrow (Sunday) morning, at 1:30am Perth time (that's 10:30am Saturday morning Pacific Time), I'm being interviewed for the Dragon Page's Cover to Cover feature. As well, two other Edge authors, Rebecca Rowe and Lynda Williams, will be talking about their work. The general theme for the discussion is the way each of us uses the themes of genetic modification or nanotechnology in our work. The show is inviting folks to call in to ask probing and hard-hitting questions of us author types, too.
Go to the Dragon Page website and scroll down a bit, for full details of how to listen in. There's a live listening link, and even an IRC channel.
If you can't hear the show live (and for Australian listeners it means sitting up into the wee small hours, particularly if you're in the eastern states), it looks like there will be podcasts, etc.
Posted by adrian at 05:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 09, 2006
Sodding Comment Spam
UPDATE 11/5: Today I got an email from Charlie Stuart, as stalwart a fan and supporter as a writer could ask for, and a good mate besides. Charlie informed me that he's left a number of comments here, but has not seen them published on the site. I have just now been trawling through my Movable Type "Junk" folder, which is sort of like a diner's grease trap, only with more pornography, sex, and drug ads, and found several comments, not only from Charlie, but also from the fabulous River Selkie, and even from luminous Gimmy! You guys should be able to find your comments posted where they should be. If not, let me know. I waded quite a way back through the grease trap (feeling not unlike Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, wading through the swamp, dragging the boat, up to his eyes in leeches and similar disgusting stuff), and found nothing but, well, leeches. I had no idea the spam filters in the MT software had been doing such an enthusiastic job all this time.
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I'm currently experiencing a continuing tide of comment spam, all from one outfit, using a Russian hosting company. Exotic! While none of the offending comments are getting published, moderating them is a pain in the arse. I've just been tinkering with the tools Movable Type provides for tackling these problems. One adjustment is that commenters may, unless they're already "trusted" by the system, need to sign in to TypeKey to get in here. I realise this is a giant hassle. If you can't get TypeKey to work for you (and I know folks have had trouble with it in the past), please don't hesitate to send me your comment in an email addressed adrian dot bedford at gmail dot com.
One thing I'm thinking about is a feature in Movable Type in which you can have the system send out notification emails to people on the list so that folks know when there's a new post. I'm aware that I don't exactly post every day (mostly because either I'm not well in some way or I can't think of a damn thing to say), but for those times when there is a fresh post you could be notified as soon as it goes up. If you're interested, let me know, either in the comments, or in an email to the address I mentioned in the previous para.
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One thing today: sent off my latest application to the Australia Council's Literature Board for a "New Work" grant. It's going Express Post, so should arrive in NSW no later than Thursday. The only difficult part of filling in these applications is coming up with a project you propose to work on with the assistance of the money, and then to provide a detailed outline of the whole thing, and how you propose to go about it. This always presents tricky thoughts: how do I propose to write a novel? Well, I sit down one day (after a lot of thought), open a new OpenOffice.org Writer document, type the title in the top line, then type the byline, then put the number "1" on a new line, and start the actual text on the line under that. And keep going, page after page, chapter after chapter, until the whole thing is done. There's not a lot to it (though frequently it feels bloody mysterious and even mystical). Just sit down and get on with it. It's hard to explain that to the Literature Board, which, you figure, must be after something altogether more involved than that. Anyway, I provided an outline for THE FAR UPTIME, saying I want to do a second draft of the book. Tricky thing about the outline: up until I wrote said outline, I had no idea how the (new version of the) story might go. Now I do. Amazing what a little pressure can do for your thinking processes.
I'm down to the final 35 pages, and yea verily, it is finally sucking, and needs a lot of work. Just at the moment, though, I'm baffled about how to fix it. Yes, I have some vague ideas, but putting the plot points together so that they lead to a good ending (not necessarily a "happy" ending) is presenting a bit of a poser.
And, in other news: headache. Crap.
Posted by adrian at 06:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 03, 2006
24 Freaking Chapters In--UMBRA Still Not Sucking. Hmm...
I've been busy reading through UMBRA since you last heard from me. So far, so good. Here and there it is requiring a fair bit of heavy lifting, but at other points it merely requires minor copy-editing-type fixes. This is all coming as a great relief, but I'm also wondering (naturally) if I'm somehow not noticing just how sucky it truly and really is. Am I still too close to the elephant, as it were? Hmm.
Meanwhile, About Those Headaches
I had a bad headache sometime last week. For one day, it hammered away at my bonce and made itself at home, mooching out of the fridge, using our cutlery and plates and then not washing them. You know how it is. But, as I say, this was just one day. Since that day, I've not had anything resembling the same kind of serious headache. We must be talking a week or ten days by now. You can't imagine how suspicious I'm feeling about this. The very slightest twinge or sense of "iffiness" in my head, and I think, "uh-oh, here it comes at last," but then nothing. Nothing at all.
It's weird. Imagine if you've spent years of your life hearing this one really annoying sound almost all day, almost every day. And then, silence. Days and days of silence. You'd be thinking, "hmm, it's too quiet. What gives?" Instead of lying back, celebrating the new quiet, making the most of it, you're sitting there, waiting, listening. The immensely complex and subtle scientific instruments set up to search for evidence of gravity waves aren't as sensitive as the ears you would have by this point for the slightest sign of that sound coming back. And so it is with the headache thing: it's too quiet. Something's wrong. It's toying with me. The bastard!
Posted by adrian at 06:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack