I like it when I see a future idea I had being brought into some kind of reality.
No ideas are original, so the idea of a road generating power via solar panels is not ground-breaking in itself but still, it means I’m not a dribbling idiot…which is always nice to confirm.
I get ‘Popular Science’ magazine every month and this month there’s an article, ‘Environmental Visionaries: The Solar Roadrunner‘. About a company, Solar Roadways, who want to ‘cover all concrete and asphalt surfaces that are exposed to the sun with Solar Road Panels‘.
I’ve briefly mentioned this before, ‘Self-Sustainable and Carbon Neutral Car Travel‘, and this newer article doesn’t really say anything new just that the project is still going ahead with a few little targets to get it live and achieving a critical mass by starting out in McDonald car parks.
I think a better way of generating power AND being beneficial to the customers would be to install hamster wheels in a McDonalds car park and have them running round, powering the deep fat fryers.
I thought I’d put some of the chapter planning notes I make online. There’s no tips or advice because who the hell am I to do that, this is just to put it out there as I haven’t seen anyone else do this so thought it could be interesting.
Reading blogs and magazine articles featuring the writing process from many different authors, you get a wide range of advice about planning from ‘I totally wing it‘ to ‘I mercilessly plan and research every detail before I even crack open the laptop‘.
I’m kind of in the middle. I can’t start without a basic theme or a general direction I want to head into. After I got that, I research the theme and tentatively create characters and situations to convey some sort of central theme and direction. Once that’s done then I usually only plan a few chapters in advance. This is so I a) know the chapter I’m currently writing, b) know how the current chapter will lead into the next and c) leaving more advanced chapters unchallenged means the novel has the flexibility to go where the story dictates.
I’ve only completed one novel and about a fifth of the way through the second (5 chapters/11,500 words), but so far I find that their story arcs arrive in about 5 or 6 chapters chunks. I’m currently at the end of the first chunk of ‘Broken Branches’. I suppose this is the introductory chunk; introducing the main themes, the characters and their dilemma’s.
So what do the notes look like?
A momentous day! My first ever publication!
365 Tomorrows have published ‘Turning a Frontier into a Home’ which is more of a flash fiction story as it’s only about 350 words.
It was originally written for a competition by ‘New Scientist‘ who wanted flash stories ‘about the world 100 years from now‘.
So go check out 365 Tomorrows for a new sci-fi short story everyday.
Update 19th June: Great hearing the feedback on the 365 Tomorrow’s forum.
Here’s the third chapter of my novel, Railroaded, which means the first three chapters are now online, the requirement of most literary agents. So now you can read the opening to this novel, put yourself in an agent’s position…and send me a rejection.
I’m blaming the cover letter at the moment.
You can read the first chapter here.
The huge sprawling office complex of The Pharmara Corporation stretched across the entire 15 mile brow of the hills overlooking Wigthorn. Deemed an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ by The World Heritage Foundation in the past, the trees and hedgerows once lining this landscape had been replaced by pure white buildings sealed with black solar panels, no windows or doors faced the town of Wigthorn. This was the view a Wigthornian would see if he or she looked northwards, if one were to look south across the sea towards France then the horizon would be filled with the tops of wind turbines like rows of runaway wagon wheels careering through the English Channel out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Wigthorn was a town cannibalising its natural assets in order to survive, as all towns were.
The Pharmara Corporation headquarters up on the hills of Wigthorn were only on one floor and designed to have no right angles or curves, every corner was irregular and every surface flat like a stealth fighter plane. Each department has its own building, the biggest being ‘Statistical Acquirement and Analysis’, it tracks every single item leaving the factory floor; from products and packaging to pallets and people. Every item has its own CBID tag (Constant Broadcast Identification) transmitting, via satellites, its vital statistics 10 times every second. Temperature, location, speed, humidity, human DNA in vicinity, other items in vicinity, the speed, temperature, location of those nearby humans and other items…and so it went on, every statistic was vital.
I’ve finished the first chapter of my second novel and I’ve also got a title for it.
All this has happened in a couple of weeks and the first three chapter plan I had before starting has totally been thrown out of the window.
One of Elmore Leonard’s writing tips was ‘Do give the work a name as quickly as possible‘ and not having a title did feel a little weird.
I had a bunch of tentative titles which never really grabbed me and ‘Broken Branches’ may not stand up all the way to the finish but it’s doing the job of ticking off something on the novel writing to do list.
Holy crap! Hell must have frozen over, eskimo’s must be buying ice AND arabs must be buying sand plus other such impossibilities because one of my short stories is actually getting published.
Spikethecat had a competition called ‘The Last Laugh‘ so I submitted my story ‘The Lost Journeyman’. Recently I got an email saying it had been chosen to be published in ‘The Last Laugh’ anthology, along with 11 others.
In the top right of the site I’ve written ‘unpublished’, so I’ll cross that out as soon as I have a hard copy or ebook in my grubby little hands. One down, two to go.
So until then, let’s run some numbers.
All my writing has been rejected a total of 35 times, the 36th time this short story got accepted. So 1 in 36 times I’m successful, which, if my maths serves me right, means I’m batting 0.027, not major league.
It also means I’m accepted 2.7% of the time, which means I’m doing better than being rejected 99% of the time.
Thank you cold, hard maths for providing me with a warm embrace.
I’ll let you know when this anthology is available to buy.
Update 21st Sept. 2010: The anthology is now available, looky here.
Four months late but I finally cracked open the laptop and fired up Word, created a new file and wrote ‘Chapter 1′.
I don’t have a title which is annoying as the file is saved as ‘Novel 2 – 1st Draft’ but it’s better than no file at all.
I have a basic idea, plenty of notes to back me up incase I find myself down a dead-end, so now I just need to keep freestylin’ and moving forward, never pausing to rewrite, rethink or be repulsed.
The second draft is for rewriting, the first draft just has to be forced out in some kind of vaguely intelligible diatribe. Memories and thoughts of a painful, drug-free birthing process is not an attractive or inviting image to escort me down this road but hopefully it’ll all be worth it.
My aim at the beginning of the year was to start and finish the first draft this year, that’s still my goal even though I’m starting four months behind. We’ll see how that turns out in 8 months time.
I’ll keep posting updates and key events/dilemma’s as I go. A title sooner rather than later would be nice.
MYOWS is a fairly new site (still in beta at time of writing) where you can upload your original work and manage it’s copyright protection.
How does it do that?
By uploading a piece of work you are agreeing it is yours and giving it a creation date (the date you uploaded it). You then get an online certificate proving the work is yours which can be made accessible to anyone, eg. a court or someone that has violated your own copyrights.
I suppose it’s like sending your lawyer a date-stamped, recorded envelope with your original work to remain unopened until such times that proof is needed. However, this is free and a lot easier.
There’s a wave of graphic/information geeks out there who are making seemingly boring data look attractive via the medium of flow-charts, graphs, pie-charts, etc.
Information is Beautiful is the best known site featuring loads of ‘Infographics’.
Charting The Beatles is a great one charting the lyrics and songs of The Beatles.
GraphJam contains loads of funny and inane ‘infographs’.
So it was only a matter of time before the multitudes and reems of writing books could be condensed into one simple flow-chart poster. Anna Hurley has done all the hard work over at her blog, plus the full size poster is for sale so you can stick it above your laptop and get on with things.
This isn’t a guide on how to write a novel from scratch, but how to edit it so it’s ready for publication. The future of agent rejection letters and emails may simply feature a print out of this poster.
I’m now off to add a dinosaur into my novel.
My initial goal this year was to start writing my second novel on January 1st…well, 3 months down the line I still haven’t actually broken ground on it but I have been researching and note taking and thinking and sketching like a madman.
I’m very close to starting, I can feel it. I’m also realising that my researching is turning into procrastination which isn’t a good thing. I need to feel comfortable before I start and that means having an idea where I’m going, which means I need a vague idea of the end. It doesn’t matter if this changes as I go but I don’t feel mentally prepared if I set off with no idea of the character’s motivations, goals or the point of the book. Like going on a journey without knowing the destination, do I turn right or left as I leave the front door?
