Adrian Faulkner's Blog, page 43
July 30, 2020
Longboi Watch – The Climb #524
I have just a few more days until I’m back at the day job. It’s always at this stage I start to look at my list of tasks and chastise myself for everything that didn’t get done.
However, I did actually manage to get quite a bit done on this staycation. The draft got finished and sent off for feedback. I glued a few more Shadows of Brimstone models. I played some Warcraft. I even mowed the garden.
But in these last few days, I’ve very much been chilling by playing som...
July 29, 2020
Chill Out – The Climb #523
There’s always this weird disconnect when you finish a project. It’s a bit like when you finish a book that stays with you or you move off a moving escalator. There’s a momentum that’s built up that wants you to carry on, yet there’s nothing to carry on.
Whilst I can work if there are tasks that need doing, if I’m leaving a world or a bunch of characters, I need a few days. I’ve heard some writers talk about this as a process of mourning, but for me it’s never anythin...
July 28, 2020
New Ventures – The Climb #522
A combination of having worked my ass off the last few weeks and still having a flare up of a medical condition meant yesterday was largely a lazy day.
Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair to myself.
One of the things I want to do is to set up Twitch. The problem when you say something like this is that people automatically think you want to be a game streamer. And yes, I might stream some World of Warcraft, but down the line, I might like to do some writing streams, or use th...
July 27, 2020
Project Completed – The Climb #521
So the novel has been sent off.
I only had a few chapters left to do, which I did this today with my setup of Kindle, sofa and mobile phone for notes. I actually like being away from the computer because it means I spend less time fretting and get down to the change that’s needed. I’ll be doing final readthroughs on kindle again.
The final part of the process is to export from Scrivener into word to create the RTF. I really need to spend some time with Scrivener’s compil...
July 26, 2020
Pokemon GoFest Day 2 – The Climb #520
Pokemon GoFest Day 2
Today was the second day of play-at-home GoFest.
As much as I miss the fun of being in a park with tens of thousands of other players, this event has been fun and the most fun I’ve had in Pokemon Go in a very long time.
Today was the rocket takeover event. It used to be that you had to travel to Pokestops to find and battle team rocket, but now with the advent of rocket balloons they come to you.
Today had been a secret and billed as something special...
July 25, 2020
Pokemon GoFest Day 1 – The Climb #519
Pokemon GoFest 2020 Day 1
A year ago, I flew to Germany with my friend to take part in GoFest
I’ll confess. I never was a huge fan of Pokemon when I was working in pop culture. It just never grabbed me the way some other IPs did. And when Pokemon Go was first released I played it for a month, thought it was fun and then stopped.
But more to get a friend out the house, than because I wanted to play it, I went out in the snow one March a few years back to hunt a snowy ca...
July 24, 2020
So Close – The Climb #518
Did I mention I hate readthroughs?
Today has been a frustrating day. I have Pokemon GoFest this weekend and most of my weekend will be spent hunting virtual creatures. I also need to prepare in the only way someone who takes this way too seriously, must, and work out which 500 pokemon I’m going to deleting in order to make room. Honestly, I swear Pokemon Go is 80% an inventory management game.
So I’d wanted to get the readthrough done for today. It’s a good, natural dea...
July 23, 2020
I Hate The Final Readthrough – The Climb #517
I’m not sure what it is but the final readthrough is one of my least favourite parts of the process.
I don’t know what exactly it is, but the intense focus whilst reading the draft one last time before it gets sent off always feels a bit like torture to me.
I learnt a while back that it’s not the story. Indeed I’ve actually been really enjoying both the story and the prose to the extent that I’ve had to remind myself that I wrote this. Everyone else might hate this book...
July 22, 2020
The Final Readthrough – The Climb #516
Today I managed to get the final tweaks done to the draft.
I finished by rewriting a conversation designed to impart a little of the lore without being an infodump. It also gave me chance to expand the racial diversity of my world a little. I always try and make those scenes very dialogue heavy with interesting characters so the reader is laughing along with the conversation rather than feeling they’re being lectured. I think it’s better than what was there.
And with ...
July 21, 2020
The Secret End Chapter – The Climb #515
Today wasn’t the most productive day. I’d intended to whip through all my final tweaks but a headache meant I wasn’t my most productive. I still managed to get through a number of the easier ones.
As I’ve previously mentioned, one of the things I’ve done to speed my editing / redrafting is to have an extra chapter at the end of my draft called ToDo.
Like many writers, as I write, I think of things I want to fix earlier in the novel. The gun on the mantlepiece might now ...
