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The good morning, good night thread

Started by Ed, October 22, 2007, 03:49:05 AM

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desertwomble

Nicely done, Derek.

Have you ever watched the 3 seasons of Deadwood? Gives you a whole new perspective on the Wild West.

DW :cheesy:
http://chaucers-uncle.weebly.com/

www.paulfreeman.weebly.com
 
Read my most recent winning Global Short Story Competition entry:
http://www.inscribemedia.co.uk/assets/october-ebook.pdf

delboy

Hi Paul

Yes, I do have the Deadwood DVDs - great stuff! I'm still haunted by the street fight in one of the later episodes. It was a great series that, unfortunately, just seemed to stop mid idea. Maybe the money ran out?

Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

elay2433

QuoteJust had my contributor copies of my latest western. Always a nice moment. I'm also pleased to see the "Also by this author" page growing nicely. I recall when I were a lad and reading books by Alistair Maclean it seemed inconceivable that they wrote so many books, so it's nice to see my own list ticking along, albeit slowly. Still need to find a way of rearranging life to allow me to accelerate the process!

Pretty cool, Del. Congrats on adding another to your list.  :afro:

Ed

Congrats Del -- I remember you were worried that your new one might not make it through to publication because of staff or ownership changes at the publishers. I'm glad it worked out for you.

You owe it to your readers to keep writing. It's nice to have other books by the same author when you finish reading one you enjoyed. There's nothing worse than finishing one that you really enjoyed, only to find they haven't written another. It's cool to have a whole batch to look forward to. It's kinda unfair that it takes so long and so much effort to write something a reader can polish off in a day or two, though, isn't it?
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Ed

Quote from: delboy on June 20, 2016, 10:03:52 AM
Work has now moved from Coventry to Birmingham, result is 70 mile commute each way instead of a 66 mile one - but the concentration required is much more, it being all motorway. Especially so with all the rain we've been having. The other day I actually came home via Coventry on account of there was so much traffic (because of floods) you couldn't get near the M42. All that said, I've made a unilateral decision to only go up there when I have meetings so it's not as bad as it sounds. It is tiring, though. I think the weariness is accumulative, not just in a given week, but in all the months and years that precede a given week. Evenings and weekends I can just sleep forever.

Oh, tell me about it. I feel very weary with the cumulative effect of the past four or five years. It's been a real roller coaster ride. Went from being a two man band working locally to a twelve man outfit working nationally, with turnover growing to over £3m, then back down the slippery slope to just three of us turning over a fraction of that, but still carrying all those big overheads and commitments that come with a bigger business. Early in the process I was working all hours buoyed by the promise of things to come, and happy to do it, and now I'm on the flipside where I'm no longer happy to do it, but feel I have to keep limping on in the hope it will pick up again.

The upshot is that I'm still knackered with no spare time that I could devote to writing. The thought of returning to a keyboard in the evening after having been on one most of the day just leaves me cold. I tried to write a flash earlier, but stared at the blank page for a while with no spark of inspiration and then gave up. Hopefully my muse will return one day :afro:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

I've had a frustrating year waiting for publishers to acknowledge receipt let alone respond to my agent, and my submission of my historical fantasy novel, Xaghra's Revenge. I know the publishing industry is built on patience but that''s fine if you know you have decades in front of you. Not that I intend to push up daisies any time soon in spite of my angioplasty and my wobbly bike riding.
Anyway, I'm glad to be off soon to the Greek writers' retreat I visited in 2012. I'm mainly going to relax, scribble a short or two, even sketch the landscape, but mainly ride a hire bike up volcanoes and swim in a warm sea. I might outline a sequel to XR but not start writing it - advice to me from Charlie Stross: "Don't write a series until you sell the first book."

delboy

That sucks, Geoff. A year waiting for acknowledgement is plain rude. But I guess it's a buyer's market, and then some. There are probably millions of sellers, too!

Enjoy Greece. I'm enjoying a week off - just mowed the lawn and cleaned the kitchen floor, now having a coffee before going down the tip with some rubbish from the garage. Greece sounds lovely!
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

Geoff_N

Thanks Del, and good to see you on fb from time to time.
Another job to do at the writers' retreat is to note ideas for a talk I've foolishly agreed to do with U3A in Ruthin. Topic: Releasing that inner writer.

If any of you have some quips or ideas that might fit please whisper them to me.

Pharosian

Hello, everyone!

Just thought I'd pop in to see what's happening, and to give you a couple of updates. For those of you who remember the trauma my husband went through last year (it's now been 15 months since he regained consciousness post surgery), I wanted to let you know he's doing fairly well. The oxygen deprivation left some subtle damage in that he's far less able to handle stress these days, and he is more easily confused. But he went back to work about a year ago, and is hanging in there, dealing with customers and a variable workload. So not too bad overall.

My company was bought out by a larger competitor in May, and we've been going through the process of integrating our staff with theirs, and trying to adapt to their much more bureaucratic procedures. It's torture for me, who loves the flexibility of working for a small, agile company. Our new corporate overlords are nice people, but the increased security protocols are grating (for example, our laptops will be re-imaged to a corporate standard, and we won't be able to add programs unless we first get approval from some central group). I wasn't that happy in my job BEFORE the acquisition; now I have to force myself to come to work every day.  :(

So I'm making plans to launch my third (or is it fourth?) career as a freelance fiction editor. I'm calling my company Pharos Editing Services, and I've got a website at pharosediting.com. I've had a few paying customers for years, but I did all the editing in my free time. I'm looking forward to expanding my client base and quitting the day job in the near future!

Hope you all are well and continuing to write.


marc_chagall

Good to hear from you, Pharo! Great that your husband's doing so well after that awful time you both went through.

And yay, for self-employment! You don't make so much money, but the freedom is utter bliss. It's been about fifteen years since I was in salaried work, and I still wake up often and think, no paperwork! I can do what I like! I actually work infinitely longer hours, and rarely make any money at all, but my quality of life has shot up.

delboy

Nice one, Pharo. I recall from the old days that you were very good at the editing - I shall bookmark your page ready for when I write that story...

Lovely to hear from you!
Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

marc_chagall

Poll's up down in the flash challenge, and it's open till the end of the month to give you time to get down there and vote between womble's and my entries. This flash thingy does keep ticking over, which is nice. Takes a few weeks to get entries in sometimes, but at others there's quite a flurry, so it's definitely worth keeping it going.

desertwomble

Quote from: delph_ambi on September 26, 2016, 03:23:21 AM
Poll's up down in the flash challenge, and it's open till the end of the month to give you time to get down there and vote between womble's and my entries. This flash thingy does keep ticking over, which is nice. Takes a few weeks to get entries in sometimes, but at others there's quite a flurry, so it's definitely worth keeping it going.

Ditto Cathy's sentiment.

DW :cheesy:
http://chaucers-uncle.weebly.com/

www.paulfreeman.weebly.com
 
Read my most recent winning Global Short Story Competition entry:
http://www.inscribemedia.co.uk/assets/october-ebook.pdf

marc_chagall

Just me and womble in the flash challenge at the moment, so I'll leave it open for a few more days and hope that someone else will add something.

Ed

Hi guys, sorry -- I took my eye off the ball altogether and let the domain name lapse because the card changed from Mastercard to Visa. Same card, different details, so the payment didn't go though. It's sorted again for two years now.

How's everybody doing? It's great to see a few familiar names still popping in from time to time :smiley:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]