What are you working on right now?

Scarfy said:
Woah! What film was that?!! Is your book and that film really that similar?! :eek:
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Passengers I think it's called. From the trailer it looks pretty close. Certainly the premise (though what premise is entirely unique these days, eh?). But im hoping that without all the Hollywood 'action and excitment' my draft will be different enough to not seem derivative.
 
Please excuse my butting in here: I’m not a writer but both the writing and dreaming processes interest me, and I thought the quotation below might be of interest. I appreciate that others may already be well aware of this way of working, so if this is the case I will just plead ordinary ignorance. If anyone is using or has used these techniques, I’d be very interested to hear about their experience.


This is taken from Charles Platt’s “Who writes Science Fiction?” (1980), also published as “Dream Makers” (1980). This is a series of interviews with well-known authors. I’m quoting from the interview with A.E. Van Vogt.


“Van Vogt goes on to describe how he realised his source for this inspiration:

“I didn’t notice, right away, what I was doing. In science fiction I was writing for only one cent a word, so because I work slowly I would wake up anxious, thinking, work out my story. I’d go back to sleep, wake up anxious, each time thinking about my story. Then in 1943 in Toronto I suddenly realised. It took me all that time to realise what I’d been doing all those years. Had I been Cyril Kornbluth (who died aged 35) I might never have found out how I wrote. It’s a good thing my life went past a certain point!

I took the family alarm clock and went into the spare bedroom that night, and set it for an hour and a half. And thereafter, when I was working on a story, I would waken myself every hour and a half, through the night – force myself to wake up, think of the story, try to solve it, and even as I was thinking about it I would fall back asleep. And in the morning, there would be a solution, for that particular story problem. Now, that’s penetrating the subconscious, in my opinion.””
 
Okay so I decided to actually work on something for the general public's consumption. I am at the moment writing some sections and working around a Dungeons and Dragons type of novel / literary role playing game.

Have been writing scenes and ideas as although this intends to be a gamebook I want the writing to be tight and have an idea sufficiently different from other stuff out there. This will be in collaboration with another board member on here so lets see how it plans out. :)

Anyway I have never worked on anything for the consumption of the public (with the exception of a short story I put up here that I wrote for one of the competitions) so it is very interesting for me.

I do a lot of technical writing for work (reports, guides, manuals etc) so the thing I am working on is an engineers technical guide for implementing MDM solutions in medium sized educational environments specifically taking into account apple deployment restrictions and the benefits of Apples Volume Purchasing Program. *Yawn* Very boring.
 
Sorta like the Fighting Fantasy books? That would be cool.

Anyway, got a nice little head of steam going on here with the edits.
 
I'm working on Chapter 16 of Final Frontier, Chapter 1 of Alliances (Book 1 of my 6-book Galactic Odyssey series), and outlining Draconia 4.
 
Serious chapter of serious things. About 4/5 of so into the final book of the trilogy and Dramatic Things have occurred.
 
I crossed 91,000 words today on THE DRAGON MISTRESS. I now have only the epilogue to write in this rough draft. I should have that done by Monday night, at the latest.

I'll be taking a break from the writing until the new year, now. I've put 170,000 words into two manuscripts in the past six months, which is a heck of a lot for me. I'll be glad for some time away from it.
 
Reading for a review, working on a new book of short stories, working on the outline for the second Darganau book, trying to keep myself from starting new projects from all these ideas crowding my head!!
 
HareBrain said:
I read that as "crossed out"!
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Heh! Only if the manuscript was already double that length..! But splitting into two books would be a better idea under such circumstances.

Anyway, wrote the epilogue today, so that's me done until January now! Yay! I don't expect the cat will care, though, and will still wake me at 6am, as usual ;)
 
Concluding the 1170s story. I had binned all but the first scene where teh MC approaches flaming gallows. Now this time period comes in at 10k instead of 30k. I was over-complicating things and being too discovery-y a writer, letting the story get away from me.

Now my new section is shorter, more relevant, and less set-up. Much more peril: skinned bodies, headless ghosts and a wolf-abbess; before, the biggest thing to happen was a bloke falling off his horse! :D

1170s - 10,803
Overall - 69,530

Hoping to start on the 1349 section after Saturnalia :)

PH
 
Phyrebrat said:
Concluding the 1170s story. I had binned all but the first scene where teh MC approaches flaming gallows. Now this time period comes in at 10k instead of 30k. I was over-complicating things and being too discovery-y a writer, letting the story get away from me.

Now my new section is shorter, more relevant, and less set-up. Much more peril: skinned bodies, headless ghosts and a wolf-abbess; before, the biggest thing to happen was a bloke falling off his horse! :D

1170s - 10,803
Overall - 69,530

Hoping to start on the 1349 section after Saturnalia :)

PH
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Sounds great!!
 
Just finished the opening story for my new collection. Probably the longest I've ever taken to write 7,000 words!!

Reading it now, though... I have to admit I'm glad I took my time with it!
 
Brain fade has stopped play and made a mess of Chapter 24, so tomorrow I will skip to Chapter 25 while mulling what to do with this tricky git.
 
I've managed 2,500 words in 4 nights after work this week (pretty good for me, especially of late) as I've tried to finish a novella that just kept growing. I was hoping to get it done in time for Christmas but it's looking unlikely now. Still, up to 43k now and quite pleased with it at the moment, even if it isn't technically a novella anymore. It's a story about an epic, painful journey, which to some extent is mirrored in the writing of the story (it's been a long time in the making!).

I was hoping to put up the story before this (same characters in both) for critique before Christmas (I think I mentioned this to a couple of people at social gatherings) but because this has all taken longer than expected I haven't tidied up the first one enough to post the opening yet. It won't be till after Christmas, I guess, but there'll be something for show-and-tell soon, I promise.

Right, time to sneak off-forum and see if I can finish this story before I have to start wrapping presents...:ninja:
 
Picking up my 1170s narrative strand where I left off before Christmas is a case of the Law of Inertia, having written 500 words today, but:

1170s - 12,391
Overall - 71,118

I have a feeling that the PS4 games I got for Xmas will be interfering with my productivity. Especially seeing as Assassin's Creed: Syndicate is one of them :eek:

pH
 
Phyrebrat said:
I have a feeling that the PS4 games I got for Xmas will be interfering with my productivity. Especially seeing as Assassin's Creed: Syndicate is one of them :eek:
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I got final fantasy 15 for Xmas, and I'm not allowed to play it until march :(

A self imposed rule, taking a lot of discipline, but I dropped more than halved my day job hours for a reason, so to make it all worth it I have to write instead.(y) ...:cautious: ...:unsure:
 
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