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April 26, 2007
Author Boy Deeply Chuffed after Week's Work
I've been banging the flippers at the keyboard all week and today passed the magic 10,000-word mark. I've finished the first three chapters, and started on the fourth--and it's only Thursday! Tomorrow I'm hoping for another 1500 to finish the week in winning style.
This is all good, and certainly good for a writer who's spent a lot of time in recent months doubting himself (I've only had to delete 500 words so far, much less than I was expecting), but the thing I'm particularly chuffed about is this:
On April 19th the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, 7.04, code-named "Feisty Fawn", was released. I immediately began downloading said software via Bittorrent. Our broadband data allowance for the month had long expired, so were stuck with a speed of only 28.8kbps. Downloading the 700MB of 7.04 took just under a week. Ugh.
Then it was a simple matter of burning the resulting ISO file onto a CD-RW (and it really was dead easy), backing up my mail folder, my Firefox bookmarks, and everything else I wanted to hang onto (including the file for my book), and then I set about the installation process for the upgrade.
First, I wanted to go back to having the computer set up as a "dual-boot" machine, with half of the HD containing Windows XP, and the other half containing Ubuntu. This means installing WinXP from scratch, then partitioning the hard drive into two halves, and formatting the second half to accept Linux. This done, I bunged the 7.04 CD into the drive, and restarted the computer. It booted the "Live CD", which worked perfectly, and I started the installation.
Result: it's like I've got two computers: a Windows box when I need to do things there (mostly games), and a very cool Ubuntu box for everything else. Ubuntu also makes it dead easy (much easier than my previous Linux distro, Fedora Core) to install all the relevant codecs, drivers and other software you might want that don't come on the CD. The first thing I added to the install was the word processing package, Abiword, a simple, lean and mean program that goes like the clappers, has none of the dreadful clutter of MS Word (or even Open Office.org Writer, for that matter, which I had been using). And did I mention that Ubuntu, like all other Linux distributions or "flavours", is free? And contains everything you need, including an office suite and much else as well as the OS? Phwoar! :)
This all meant that I was able to continue working on the book while also updating my Linux installation, without having to take a day off for computer hassles. I was so chuffed! :)
Posted by adrian at 07:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 20, 2007
Do Yourself a Favour!
Go and read this story, by a certain Charlie Stuart, a top bloke who frequents this site, and is a fine friend and great supporter of my own work. This is Charlie's first published story, and it's a humdinger. Kind of a Twilight Zone sort of thing, with a very surprising twist. I enjoyed it very much, and I think you might, too.
Posted by adrian at 06:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
End of Week One: Get Me the "Bat Cave"!
This first week with the new book has gone surprisingly well. I've finished with 6300 words, more than 1000 more than I was aiming at. And finding surprisingly little to go back and rewrite or fix up later. It's a little spooky, actually, how well it's going. This time--as in this attempt to write a book--I'm planning to disregard the little nagging voice in the back of my head, the one that's always urging me to delete huge swathes of text (indeed, even the entire volume of what I've done), and just keep forging forwards. I know this voice will start clearing its nasty little throat soon enough, but until then I plan to blast on and see how it all goes.
So far my hero Aloysius "Spider" Webb, and his offsider Charlie Stuart, guys who fix time machines, are keeping pretty busy, but they've just picked up this one machine that's on the blink, and, worryingly, might explode in a pretty serious way if they don't tread very carefully indeed. This has necessitated a call to the government Department of Time and Space (which outsources a lot of time machine repairwork to the likes of Spider and Charlie) to bring out "the Bat Cave", a mysterious device intended to greatly assist the process of investigating the potential bomb.
I'm also planning on introducing a three-legged dog named Zonk, and a guy who says he's a vampire, named Jeff, who would love to be evil, but is in fact about as evil as a boiled egg. Oh, and Spider's receptionist is a very tall female temp named Malaria (she's furious with her parents).
Yes, I'm trying to have fun with this one, something that will be a nice change of pace for me.
Posted by adrian at 06:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 16, 2007
New Bedford Book Underway at Long Bloody Last
Hello--you remember me, right? Well, if not--and it has been a bloody long time between posts--I'm a science fiction writer living in Perth, Western Australia.
Last anybody heard from me I was having a pretty bleak time, what with chronic daily headaches, dreadful crippling depression, and a very bad case of thinking seriously about packing in the whole writing caper.
Things change. In the very considerable time since I last posted about these things, the depression has cleared off. Even better, the headaches have, if not actually stopped altogether, then substantially eased off in both frequency and intensity. What happened was I got fed up with taking painkiller drugs that didn't actually kill any pain, and which, if you take enough of them, actually cause pain through the rebound effect. Upshot: within days of quitting painkillers, the headaches dropped away to being only an occasional problem, rather than the chronic misery they had been. I've concluded from this that the headaches were due to the painkillers I was practically living on to treat the headaches. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that irony is the fifth fundamental force in the universe.
Anyway. Feeling MUCH better now. So much better, in fact, today I started my new book. It's called TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT. It's a near-future sf detective yarn about a guy who repairs busted time machines--and who one day finds a dead body inside one of those broken time machines. The background of the story is that time travel is as widely available and as popular as cars, etc. Everybody's got a time machine, and they're having a fabulous time bopping about all over the past and future. Story concerns a guy named "Spider" Webb, an ex-cop who's stuck fixing these machines because it's the only sort of job he could get. He absolutely hates time machines, and time travel generally.
I'm only 1500 words in so far, but it's a good start, and I hope to get more done in the coming days. Publisher Brian has told me I have to get it finished by the end of August, in order to fit a publication slot he's put aside for me in next year's EDGE lineup. With a bit of luck it should be available in time for next year's Worldcon in Denver, CO.
I plan to post more now that I've got a book to write and to write about, but we'll see. I am doing way better than last time you heard from me, though. Am reading lots of books, loving the world of Linux (currently very happily using Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" and looking forward to the release of the next version). Michelle and I have finally caught up with the DVDs for Firefly, too, which really was as good as everybody said. Amazing!
More soon.
Posted by adrian at 10:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack