David Gilchrist's Blog, page 4

Inspiration comes in many guises

Isn’t Scotland a wonderful country for inspirational places?  Today I visited Crookston Castle with the eldest mini-G.  Unfortunately, it was all locked up and we couldn’t in, but we wandered around the outside and read the various info boards that were put up around the place.


 


There was only us and a couple of wee neds at the place.  The neds had obviously read the bit about the siege in the 1400s and were re-enacting it just for me and the lad.


 


That aside, you could see where the castle had been rebuilt again and again, standing for century’s whilst the city of Glasgow grew around it and swallowed it.


 


Now there has to be a story in there somewhere – even if it is the tale of how the 1000 year old building repelled the advances of a group of teenagers from Pollok.

Pulling teeth

Some chapters seem to write themselves. Got over 2k done in the last 3 days. It’s more of struggle stopping than starting. Compare that to dec where I was lucky if I wrote that all month.

It’s not even to do with planning. I think it’s more to do with the subject matter catching my imagination. That or just sheer exhaustion. Either way when it’s going well you just gotta go with it, cause you know the next chapter might be like pulling teeth

Confessions of a Vinylist.

orangerevels

Tomorrow will see the end of Avalanche Records as a presence on the streets of Edinburgh. The reasons are many fold and can be read in depth at http://www.avalancherecords.co.uk/ Now, I’m not going to wax lyrical about the sadness that this brings to my heart, or how this will herald the end of an era. I did however feel that I wanted to go and see the shop and it’s proprietor for one last time though, so today I did.

I have, over the years, been an intermittent vinyl collector. The first piece of vinyl I owned was a Xmas present from my uncle Gordon in 1978. He is 9 years my senior and at the time he and a couple of his friends run an underage disco in the local parish hall. I was 8 years old and would marvel at his record collection as well as the wooden…

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Book Review: The White Plague

Finished listening to The White Plague by Frank Herbert.  Yes, another Frank Herbert book.  This one ain’t part of the Dune cannon this time, just a stand alone job.

Rough plot synopsis: An IRA bomb kills the wife and children of a brilliant bio scientist. He suffers a psychological episode due to this and decides to design a plague.  He decides to target this genetically engineered disease to affect only females.  Then he unleashes the virus in three places: Ireland, Libya and the USA.

Once released, the plague kills most of the woman on the planet, spreading beyond the limits of the original scheme.

The book follows the decent of the protagonist ( John ) as he flicks between the personalities he has created.

All in all, it’s a strange book.  There’s enough technical detail in the genetics to please fans of hard sci-fi (but what else would you expect from the man who wrote Dune). There’s a hint of horror too, almost reminiscent of his namesake James Herbert.  And there’s a good slice of psychological thriller to it, with all the political shenanigans of the cold war era in which it was set played out in all its gory details.

So why, with all this going for it, does it leave me so dissatisfied?

Maybe it’s because its a little of all these things that it doesn’t hit the mark with any of them.  Some of the technical stuff now comes across as a bit preposterous ( he uses a new fangled computer at one point, whatever that is). The horror of the plague never fully comes across (compare this with, for example some of James Herbert early works, The Rats or The Dark).

Its not a book I’ll go back and read, but I’m glad I gave it a shot. There’s some very good writing and the story has resonance with the present day.

(Don’t) Panic!

It’s at this stage of writing I generally enter the blind panic stage.  With about a quarter of the first draft done its about now when I start to wonder if I’ve gone either a bit off track, or if I’ve ran away down an endless, pointless trail that leads precisely nowhere.

So, I’m busy trawling through what I’ve written, making a series of scribbles in my wee notebook.  The more I write, the more the panic starts to abate.

Then I can get back to letting my imagination  ( and characters) run wild.

Book reviews – Prelude to Dune series:

Despite saying that I was pretty fed-up after finishing the original Dune series ( Dune – Chapterhouse Dune), I ended up listening to the prelude series (all 3 books) in the past month.

To be honest they were quite a pleasant surprise.  Co-written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J Anderson, they detail the events in the run up to the original novel.

All in all they are a fairly decent, well-written sci-fi novels.  I can understand why fans of the original Dune novels might find them disappointing.  Where the original develops a new world, new ideas and explores its boundaries, a prelude is by its very nature, tied into those same the predefined limits.

The good thing about that is that the story is freed up from the burden of world-building (although it must make some effort to break new ground).  The bad news is that it can leave the story feeling a little superficial – less epic in scope.

I guess they could be read on their own, but I wouldn’t miss out on the original novel.

That put to one side, the story of the rise and fall of the great houses in the Imperium makes for a very entertaining read.

Chapter names

How do you go about coming up with chapter names?  Do you go for something obvious (a quick summary of the events), something that hints about what will happen or something more obtuse.

For my current WIP (and the other books in the series) I’ve gone for song titles.  They’ve either had titles that fit the chapter well, or the mood of the song works well with the subject matter.  It started off because of one of the inspirations for the series was a singer who shot himself through the heart.  His band (Sparkleshorse)’s song Heart of Darkness worked really well for one of the chapters in Tapasya (bit.ly/Tapasya) so I just went with it.

Here the chapter names for what I’ve written so far for Prasad

1 Lost

2 Dark Ages

3 Wandering Star

4 Not To Touch The Earth

5 Ghost

6 Corona Radiata

7 Infinite Dreams

8 The Crystal Ship

9 Punishment Through Time

10 Beneath Black Skies

(Bonus points if you can name the bands!

Chapter 9 done.

That’s chapter 9 of Prasad written.  37k words so far.  Averaging about 300 words a day. At this rate I’ll be done by Autumn.

:)

Leap frog, Leap year

The 29th Feb.  The day we thought babyg2 was going to arrive.  Like his siblings though he never turned up ’til much later.  Anyway, what did you do with your extra day (yes I know its not really an extra day, but let’s pretend for now)?

I, like most people, went to work.  But I also managed to squeeze in a little bit of writing.  My WIP Prasad (The Redemption of Wist, book 3)  is now at 36k words.  According to the wee app I use, I’m still hitting about 250 words / day.

Anyway would love to hear from other authors about how they manage to squeeze writing in around work / family / etc .

 

Enough for now elflings

Writing Update

Had a little bit of a break from writing for the past week. I’m pretty pleased with my progress so far (around 34k out of a projected 120k). More importantly I know where I’m going with it.

I’ve managed to keep up a rate of about 250 words/day and I find that writing a little everyday helps keep the momentum going.  The problem is when you take a few days off and it turns into a week. Getting started again takes a bit of effort.

Also I’ve ordered a print copy of what I’ve written of Prasad so far. Bizarrely it’s cheaper to do so via Createspace than it is to send the file to a local printer!

Any that’s enough for now elflings,

David