Tag Archives: PC

I was away for the weekend and fairly busy on Friday getting ready to go away so didn’t have time to do a post. I did manage to do some writing, however. So here’s a quick summary:

Friday, 23rd August – 420 words on the start of a SF short story called Trial by Dream. I have a vague idea where this is going, the title is a clue, but otherwise I’m writing into the dark pretty much. But it’s fun!

Saturday, 24th August – nothing! We were out for most of the day, so simply didn’t have time

Sunday, 25th August – this was a travel day so actually did quite a bit of writing – nearly all of it in the car. I did a puny 55 words on Trial by Dream and 574 words on a new writing in the dark project called Dragons Above. The idea behind this one is that it will be a fantasy war themed short novel. The intro of the novel features a dwarf on Anti-Dragon Artillery duty. Loving writing this and looking forward to doing some more.

In total 629 words on Sunday, so a good day for me.

Monday, 26 August – still on holiday so things were fairly busy, but I still managed to get in 177 words – all on Trial by Dream. That’s the problem with writing two things at once – one project can slide a bit. I think I’m going to finish off Trial by Dream first (its going to be a fairly short short story) and then get into Dragons Above a bit more.

Tuesday, 27th August – another travel day, but less opportunity to write. This time did 279 fairly fun words on Trial by Dream – its interesting to see how the setting and the story is developing. I also did a bit of work on tinkering with prices and blurbs on some of my titles on Amazon and other platforms – Lulu, Smashwords and Kobo.

Should be more regular posts for the foreseeable future now!

Mark Lord’s Writing

Todays Plan: 15th December. Finish Easy River?

December 15, 2008 Mark Leave a comment

I didn’t do an update yesterday, but I did manage a bit of planning – again regarding the cult of Arax. This was all on paper, so didn’t even turn the PC on to do. Sometimes this works better, and I don’t even feel the need to commit it to an electronic document.

This morning I started into fleshing out the detailed synopsis for the last scene. It worked quite well and I’m about half way through. So I should finish it today. Also I need to check whether my other stories are all with markets and what the status of these are. I have a strong suspicion that there are some gaps!

Mark Lord’s Writing

Todays Plan: 1st December 2008

November 30, 2008 Mark Leave a comment

Great a Monday! I’m up early to do some writing. In the shower I remembered that I actually have a short story that is not working a market – i.e. I have had a rejection for it, but I haven’t sent it out anywhere yet. I had some very good and detailed feedback on it from Stephen Theaker at Dark Horizons, so I really should act on the feedback, see if I can make some edits and send it out. That will by my first priority today.

I also need to work on the development of the characters for my “War Veteran” story (this is the working title at the moment). I now have the historical background traced out enough for me to get into the meat of the story. I am sure I’ll need to go back and work out some elements further, but I have enough to be going on for now. First up I think I need to give names to all the main characters. I find that if I don’t do this I will end up writing some notes on the main character and have to refer to other characters he interacts with as person X, or The Wife, which although this is perfectly helpful, does dispel the aura of the story somewhat. As the writer, even I need to suspend disbelief, so filling in some of these details early really helps.

I have also synchronised files across my home PC and laptop.

I’m hoping to do a bit more now before work and then continue at lunchtime and then maybe this evening. Time is always a problem!

Mark Lord’s Writing

Wiki for Writers: Caution

October 1, 2008 Mark Leave a comment

This is a follow-up to my previous post on using a Wiki to organize writing work. I’m personally not sure it’s going to work for me. The Tiddly Wiki mentioned last time only allows for editing on screen and not adding other documents, so although it looked nice I decided to look at some of the other Wikis out there. I have found that you basically need to pay a corporate style subscription fee if you want to post any reasonable amount of content – i.e. over a GB.

Having had a mess around with one of the Wiki platforms I actually doubt that it will add anything over having an organized file system on PC and making sure I back up important documents.

So looks like this was just a big red herring to prevent me getting on with the actual writing!

Mark Lord’s Writing, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers

Wiki tools for Writers

September 28, 2008 Mark Leave a comment

I came across a blog for writers that I hadn’t seen before – called Writer Unboxed. At present it’s featuring an interview with Joe Abercrombie on the craft of writing. I haven’t had the chance to read this yet, but it looks interesting.

I noticed that they had a section on the site about Research and here I found an interesting post about using Wikis to organise the writing a novel. It’s quite an obvious thing really and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Currently I store all my files in a folder on my PC and then back up the most important either on a file sharing site (but don’t share the files) or a USB card. However, a Wiki is something that you can customise to use as you wish and the great thing is that you have a more user-friendly web browser means of seeing your work and navigating to different things rather than using a Windows file manager system.

I’m going to give it a go and see. Will probably start off with PB Wiki though as the tiddlyWiki suggested on Writer Unboxed doesn’t seem to allow for posting actual files – you have to do all your writing in the web browser, which won’t work for me.