Well, it’s been a busy week with work and home stuff.  Loads to do in the office with the audited accounts coming in and at home I’ve been doing more prep for the arrival of baby.  All very excited for that.

The computer desk has been jettisoned (today, thanks to Edgy) and the pc has been set up in the front room on Ruthy’s old work desk, with a new Acer 22inch widescreen TFT monitor replacing the 19″ CRT monstrosity that took up most of the space on the old desk.  And now that part of the shifting of stuff seems to have settled, I have time to dedicate to bashing more words into the various stories I have on the go.

Which nicely brings me to the point : yWriter is back on the PC!

For those who don’t know yWriter is a very nifty piece of software that helps you organise your work, by chapter and scene if neccessary, and it helped me organise things enough to get though the joys of last years NaNoWriMo.  And it’s back in time for this year.  Quality.

One thing to note though, I tried running it on Linux through Mono but it’s nowhere near as good as it is in Windoze.  Fortunately I have Xp set up in VirtualBox and it’s working very nice there, thank you very much.

Which reminds me, more work to do.  The pub beckons soon but there’s easily an hours worth of writing to get done.

- Alistair

Although this shouldn’t come as any great surprise…

Well, what’s new (since the last post way back on the 13th of June)?

To be true, there’s good and bad.

On the bad side, I’ve been really struggling with stress and depression recently and it seems like my hermit impression has (again)  spread as far as my blog.  Boo to that, I say.  But things have been improving in my personal and work lives, so it’s up, up, up from here.

On the good side, drum roll please, I’m going to be a Dad!  And that far outweighs anything that’s on the “bad” side.

Right, it’s late and that’s enough of a post to start back with.

There IS some writing news to share, nothing big and exciting, but I’ve been back in the saddle as my mood has improved.  But I’ll update that part of the game tomorrow.

- Alistair

…Voices return!

Yesterday concerned about the struggle, didn’t get to see The Edgemeister last night, spent some quiet time while Ruthy was out at her art class and had the sudden and exciting idea of what happens next in The Bandstand.

I love it when that happens.

However, the bummer is that I’m at work and itching to get the writing underway.  Gah!

We’ll be having dinner with mrBen and mrsHevs so I’ll have to decide whether to pull a late night or get up super early.  Ah, the agony of choice.

(Of course, it doesn’t matter if I pull a late night or not, there’s no chance of me getting up reasonably early on a Saturday…)

- Alistair

It’s not really a new look or a new blog, just an attempt to do the site differently.

(How differently is a whole other thing in itself.  It might just be the way I’m feeling today, in which case it’s back to the two posts a month schedule as before…)

(…but then, it might end up being a new look and/or a new blog in which case the title is very correct and the first line of the post is very not…)

I’ve realised that I’ve been drifting away from Desert Of Zin and JediMoose over the last year, possibly longer to be honest, and while I ‘like’ having a website, and have had one for a long time in various guises, what to do with it can be a bother.  A good friend of mine stopped blogging a while ago and while I agree with his sentiments there’s part of me that wants to keep things going.

And there are creative things afoot, which is terribly exciting, with chances for me to really get a few things on their way.

Of course, I’m keeping relatively shtum on the details as I’ve spent many a post saying what I’m going to be doing over the next wee while but letting “the real world” get in the way and spoil everything.

As with many things, we’ll see how it goes…

- Alistair

Hiya, it’s been a while…

Sine the last post, way back on the 6th of March, I bounced abound saying how great it was that I passed the 50k mark with Desert Of Zin.

Whoo.

The problem is that shortly after I hit the mother of all walls and eventually felt that i’d like nothing more than to let the characters die.

That’s not good if you’re already written the sequel and you’re realtively sure that some of them are in it and alive…

So I took some time away from writing, didn’t check the blog, didn’t go to the writing group and generally retreated back into my shell for a while.  And somewhere along the way it seems to have done the trick.

Now, I’m not working on DoZ again, and won’t be for a wee while.  An extended break is definately needed from that.  But last week I found myself writing some stuff that’s set after an idea I had AGES ago.

Something called The Bandstand.

It was a story I started a few years ago and, after the first scene, edited it until I didn’t care about the rest of the story.  Looks like I’m starting to care again.

I finished the first chapter (with the original scene) last night and Ruth gave it an edit.

Tonight I’ve made a handful of changes and after a quick second pass tomorrow I’ll be looking at releasing it by the end of the weekend.

(The good thing is that I’ve got the second chapter under way and with any luck it’ll be finished for edit in good time.)

The reason I’m so hyped about this is simple.  For a good few years now I’ve bored anyone that’ll sit still long enough about how I write stories and I want to be an author and on and on…  It’s about time I actually stop talking about it and release some bloomin’ content.