Tag: Challenge

Past conversations with my cat – 60

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This is Chester.  Once again we have a standoff.

This time it’s over the scratching post, and, I guess, where I’ve put it.  Silly me, I didn’t think it mattered where I put it.

But, you’d think he would be grateful I spent nearly a whole day building it for him.

And many more hours trawling the pet shops trying to find a replacement that was better than the last one.  It’s amazing just how much these people want to charge for something that I could make for a lot less.

So I did.

Is it possible that Chester wants me to spend a fortune on a new scratching extravaganza?  it’s not as if he knows anything about money, and costs, and effort.

Or does he?

I’m beginning to think this cat is a lot smarter than he looks.

Still, once again I pick him up, get the low growl because he knows where I’m taking him, and then put him on the top level.

Perhaps it’s the smell of the new carpet.  It certainly makes my nose wrinkle and doesn’t do much for allergy sufferers, but it is new, even if it is an offcut.  Surely he couldn’t be offended at that, could he?

Perhaps I’ve won.  He’s sitting there looking at me.

Now, if only I could read his mind!

 

 

 

Conversations with my cat – 98

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This is Chester.  He’s now over having the grandchildren staying with us.

As part of the COVIS 19 restrictions in place, the grandchildren cannot go to school.

However, because their parents are both working (which is very fortunate as so many others are not) they have asked us to look after them.

So, they arrive Sunday night, stay the whole week, and go back home on Friday.  It means they are homeschooling, so the internet is taking a beating, I have to feed them, morning tea, lunch. After school snack at three and then dinner.

Chicken nuggets, pies, and shoestring chips can only go so far, and, no, he does not like scraps from their plates.

And having to cater for four rather than two means a gentle shift in logistics.  More shopping for food, having to do the washing every day, tormenting the cat.

OK, that last part is where Chester comes in, or, rather, he stays hidden away.

Remember that phobia he has when the grandchildren are around?

Now they’re here semi-permanently, he’s in hiding, and coming out only for food and water.

And to let me know just how displeased he is.

He wants his domain back.

Pity I haven’t told him yet they’re going to be back next week.

 

What’s it like from the other side of the desk?

I’ve been sitting at the desk staring at the screen thinking of what to write that might interest other people.

It seems I’m not too good at it.

So, I moved seats, sitting opposite the writer’s chair, and took a good long hard look at the person, the so-called writer, conjuring up in my mind, as if I was representing someone just dragged in off the street, what would I ask?

Would I bother?

I mean most of the people who walk down the street are mostly trying to avoid everyone else and anything bad that might happen.

But I’m here now, so for a free cup of tea and a Doubletree cookie, I consider myself bribed.

Question 1:  Why on earth would you want to write when there are a billion other books out there?  It seems a complete waste of time, time that you could be doing something more productive.

[Answer] Good point, most days when I get out of bed or rather stare at the ceiling from under the covers, I wonder why I would want to get up, but, then, that’s winter, and no one can be bothered getting out of a nice warm bed.

In summer, I have to get up to turn on the airconditioning.

OK, just joking, because it sounds like a borderline manic depressive speaking.  The reality might be because of extreme tiredness, and partially from a mild hangover after leaning on that single malt to ease those last 1,000 words for the day onto the page.

Question 2: Say you’re saying you can write better when there’s a glass in your hand?  Has there been a situation where there’s been too much greasing the wheels?

This person has found me out in two questions.

[Answer] No, a little Scotch helps but generally isn’t necessary.

Question 3:  What do you do for inspiration?

[Answer] Thinking up new and novel ways of killing off people I drag in off the street to ask me questions about myself.  No, sorry, didn’t mean that.  I haven’t a mean bone in my body.  Inspiration you say?

Look around, I say.

The inquisitor does.  There are seven floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of my favorite authors, about 4,000 or so books, aside from the reference library that is mostly in e-book format which runs to about 10,000 books.  That’s only for days when I don’t go out.

Out in the wider world, there are endless things that can be used, even the most mundane.

Question 4:  Have you read all of those books?

[Picks up a copy of ‘Kill Me If You Can’ by James Patterson]  This one, for instance?

I nod yes.  I have read most of them.  I tell him writers must read.  Someone told me that a long time ago.  Not only thrillers and crime, but the classics.  I found War and Peace heavy going, but not so much as Madame Bovary, or Vanity Fair.

You can ask one more question.

Question 5:  Can I borrow this book [James Patterson]

As always the answer is yes.  I encourage people to read.  It doesn’t have to be my work. It would be nice but I’m realistic enough to know there are a billion other books out there I have to compete with.

Maybe tomorrow.

Past conversations with my cat – 57

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This is Chester.  We have a major discussion coming up.

He knows I’m not happy.  We had a discussion about claws and furniture a while back where it was clearly understood that the scratching post was where he worked on his anger management issues.

And for quite some time I thought it was working.

More fool me.

The trouble is, there are certain parts of a room you don’t venture very often, and one of them is that small space behind the chairs in the lounge.  We have a cleaning lady so we don’t venture there very often.

But it’s where we keep our DVD collection, not that we look at DVDs any more, but someone else was looking for one.  That’s where I noticed the damage.  Near the scratching post, on the corner of the lounge chair, clear evidence of the cat’s work.

He thought if he did it out of sight we wouldn’t notice.  He would be right, except for exceptional circumstances.

Now I’m looking for him.  He knows.  Perhaps that was the reason for the fearsome attitude the other day.  Where’s the tiger now?

I can wait.  He has to come out eventually.

The Camp NaNoWriMo Award

Finally figured out how to produce the Award.

New Award - 1

I managed to finish 77,145 words for the completed first draft.

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Let’s hope that it will not take until the next Camp NaNoWriMo to get a second draft completed.

But, the good thing about these camps us that it forces you to get on with the job and complete it within the specified month.

Perhaps I should set aside July to artificially create another Camp for myself and work within the parameters on my own.

 

We are taught not to be selfish, but…

Today I decided to take some time out and read a few blogs, to see what the rest of the world is doing post-CampNaNoWriMo, and sometimes read some news that’s usually a few days old, not that I’m complaining.

And still working on the James Bondish piece that set my mind on fire.  Last I heard, he hasalmost completed a successful, almost suicide, mission.  There’s just a small matter of a rebel helicopter with air to air missiles trying to shoot down the escape plane.

I try to keep away from the news if it’s possible, but it comes at you from everywhere.  My browser somehow decided to allow notifications and every few minutes a little popout slides out from the bottom right corner and tells me what’s gone wrong.

Never any good news by the way.

And yes, I have Windows 10, but I can’t be bothered reading the manual to find out how to stop them.  Maybe, subconsciously, I don’t.

I never thought one man could generate so many headlines.  We had one, given the nickname, the human headline, but Trump, he is in a class of his own.

I used to like watching him on The Apprentice, believe it or not.

But again I digress…

I saw the word selfish popup in a number of posts, and it reminded me that, at times writers have to be.  There are only so many hours in a day, and after emails, blogs, reading, news, life, there’s very little time left to write.

So, we need to be selfish at those times.  I am because when I sit down to write, there shouldn’t be any distractions.  As a writer, I’m not seeking popularity, maybe one day that will come, but I’m in this writing thing because I have stories to tell and I want to get them down.  Nobody may ever read them, I may never rise above mediocrity, but I am doing something I love, and very few of us out there can say that unequivocally.

Most of us have a day job or something else that consumes a great deal of our time.

Oh to be a successful author like James Patterson?  But how does he do it?  I guess it comes down to hard work, and a little bit of luck.

And maybe, one day, if I work hard enough, some of it might come my way.

Past conversations with my cat – 56

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This is Chester.  It’s going to be an interesting morning.

When I finally make it out to the writing room, I find him sitting on my desk, next to the keyboard, with a rather benign expression.

Remembering that cats can’t have expressive expressions, it worried me that he’s working overtime to make me think he has one.

I can feel his eyes boring into me, following me around the room, watching and waiting.

Waiting for what I wonder.

I also remember that cats are hunters and killers.  If he was a lion or a tiger I’d be in a great deal of trouble now.  He’d pounce, and that would be the end.

Is this we hat he’d be doing if I let him outside?

Is he sending me a warning?

I finish what I’m doing on the other side of the room and come over to the seat.

Are you done giving me the death stare? I ask him.

A slight shake of the head, and if I wanted to write anything into it, that would be a no.

A few seconds pass, then he jumps down to the floor and walks off.

Job done, I suspect he’s thinking.

Back to his least favourite dinner tonight, I’m thinking.

Short story writing, don’t try this at home (5)

This is not meant to be a treatise on short story writing.  Far be it for me to advise anyone on the subject.  I prefer to say how it is that I do it so you can learn all of the pitfalls in one go.

Now, there’s this thing called continuity, but it covers a whole range of writing sins, most of which I eventually get caught out.  Films sometimes miss a few items, like back in the roman days, there are plane trails in the sky, in a 1920’s period piece, there’s a mobile phone sitting on a desk.

Like one minute the hero has a gun, and the next he’s fighting for his life with a knife, and, hey presto, there’s that gun again.  The error might not be that big but you can’t pull out a weapon you don’t have or wasn’t there in the first place.

Similarly, the hero pulls out a mobile phone, but there’s only one problem, it’s 1980, and there are no mobile phones.  Our problem might be that we are so used to doing and using certain things that we might forget, for a minute or two, that were not available in the past.

The same goes for the fashion of the day.

And my all-time favourite, getting the right make and model of car.

Oh, and just for good measure, back in the old days they used acoustic couplers to attach to phones via a serial port to dial-up not a server, but a BBS, Bulletin Board Service, at a rate of 300 baud, or a little while later, 1,200 baud.

There was no internet in general use.  If you wanted to call the office when out, use a telephone box.  Or carrier pigeon.

And the use of language, there’s a lot of stuff relevant today that was not used back then, and there was a lot of stuff back then that isn’t tolerated now.  Some of it might be hard to get your head around.  It isn’t for me, because I can remember the 1970s and 1980s, but I’m not too sure about allowing some of what happened then to creep into my work.

So, you get the picture.  Try to use the past as the past, or leave it in the past.

Unless it’s a book about time travel, then all bets are off.

Short Story Writing, don’t try this at home (4)

This is not meant to be a treatise on short story writing.  Far be it for me to advise anyone on the subject.  I prefer to say how it is that I do it so you can learn all of the pitfalls in one go.

I find inspiration in the most unlikely places.

Shopping malls are great, there is so many things going on, so many different types of people, there’s often enough to fill a journal.

Driving on the roads, you get to see some of the most amazing stunt driving, and it’s not even being filmed, it’s just playing out before your very eyes.

Waiting in hospitals, waiting for doctors, accountants, dentists, friends, hanging around coffee shops, cafes, bistros, restaurants, the list is endless.

But the best source, newspapers, and the more obscure the headline the better, and then just let your imagination run free, like:

Four deaths, four mysteries, all homeless.

This poses a few interesting scenarios, such as, were they homeless or were they made to look like they’re homeless.  Are they connected in any way?

The point is, far from the original story that simply covers four seemingly random murders, a writer can turn this into a thriller very easily.

It could follow a similar headline in another country where three headlines could be found, say, in London, where a man is found dead in an abandoned building, a week after he died, with no obvious signs of how he died.

A woman is killed in what seems from the outset an accident involving two cars, where, after three days, the driver of the second vehicle just simply disappears.

A man is reported missing after not reporting for work when he was supposed to return from a vacation in Germany.

Where an obscure piece says that a man was found at the bottom of a mountain, presumed to have fallen in a climbing accident.

It’s all in the joining of the dots.

 

It’s that time again, the end of the month

This month had been unusually busy, with the NaNoWriMo revision exercise and the A to Z challenge.

The NaNoWriMo has been particularly challenging because I have had to pull together all the work done in writing a novel titled “The Will”. Like a lot of my writing projects this had been one that I wrote about half of it, then put it aside, either having written myself into a proverbial corner, or there was another project that needed completing.

Then in succeeding weeks I would go back and write another chapter, perhaps having had a brainstorm.  This would happen off and on with a number of other stories as ideas for them came to me.

Then I noticed the April version of NaNoWriMo and decided this was an opportunity to pull it all together, and over the 30 days, this novel has turned into a manuscript of 360 pages and 48 chapters.  Gaps have been filled, prior writing has had an edit, and continuity has been checked.

I now have another novel that will be sent to the editor for a first reading.

The other exercise, the A to Z Challenge, this year, is about a phrase, like You’ve got to be kidding, and turning it into a story, where, somewhere within it, the phase is used.

I had hoped that the stories would be short, and easily fitted in with everything else.  Well, you know how that goes.  Stories write themselves, and some have been 6 to 8 pages long.

Talk about making a rod for my own back.

Aside from those two exercises, there has been some time devoted to my episodic stores, and one in particular, the Treasure Hunt.  I have managed to write several more episodes which will appear in the coming weeks.

Any chance of getting a break next month will be impossible.

The episodic stories need more episodes, and three new books are just about at the stage where I can send them to the editor, two for final approval, so hopefully, these can be published in June.

But, as always, there is no rest for the wicked.