M. Caspian's Blog, page 17

No stalking. Just making.

I have decided Steven Universe animator Rebecca Sugar is speaking directly to me.

Which is apparently a symptom of erotomania? *frowns*

I promise not to stalk her. Just to make as much work as I can.

Ducklings

This is taken from inside my car as I tried to leave my driveway this morning.

Those tiny gray dots are ducklings. The wind was gusting so strong they were blown down the street. Just out of shot  on both sides is traffic at a standstill.  The mom headed right for me; she led all her babies (eventually) into the grounds of my condo. Residents aren’t allowed to own cats, so there are lots of ducks  – and pigeons, and tui, and doves – living in the gardens.

I had to turn my ignition off and get out of the car to make sure all the ducklings cleared the tires.

Here they are rounding the recycling bins and heading for the rose bushes, all together again. You can’t have a bad day when you start the morning with ducklings.

 

Free story online; “In Her Skin”

I have a new short story available to read online, as part of the the Goodreads BDSM group Kink in Ink event. It’s called In Her Skin.

It’s not an M. Caspian story. It’s under my m/f erotica pen name Cat Stewart. If heterosexuality is a flavor you enjoy you can read it here.

There’s an M. Caspian m/m story for the same event being posted Tuesday 25 October (US time). I’ll link to it when it’s released.

You do have to join the group to read them both, but if you don’t care to, never fear, I’m planning to do a kindle release of these two plus one other short story, in a single volume, in December

Kelp, by Jonathan Kriz on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence

Finned baby hammerhead sharks

When I walked along the beach on Monday I found a string of dead baby hammerhead sharks washed up on the sand. They’d been finned. The largest was 18 inches.

I believe this is a sphyrna zygaena, a smooth hammerhead: a vulnerable species, and the most common species in New Zealand waters. They’re on the CITES list: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. You need a CITES export permit to send catch overseas. You don’t need a permit if the catch will be consumed locally. Finning – as in, dumping the still-live finned shark at sea – is illegal in NZ. You have to land the catch with fins attached. You’re still allowed to kill the sharks and sell the fins, though. The rest often goes to cat food manufacturers. Clearly someone isn’t bothered too much about the fishing regulations.

Finning is deplorable. Shark fin soup is available in Auckland, and there’s not enough public outcry about it. A local chef, Kevin Blakeman, is trying to raise awareness and is encouraging diners to ask restaurants that offer shark fin soup to take it off the menu. Wynsome Wong of Hees Garden Seafood Restaurant in Mount Eden replied to his queries about shark fin soup on their menu:

Dear Kevin,

Shark fin soup has been on Chinese menu for hundreds of years.  Chinese believed that shark fin is very nutritious and make you live long.  People pay high prices for it.  Most shark fin in New Zealand is supplied locally.  In recent years, with environmental education, sale of shark-fin is diminishing. People only order it for special occasions.  We hardly sell any in our day to day trading.

Don’t make it too big an issue.  Shark-fin price has become so expensive. I don’t think there are many who can afford it. To my knowledge, most shark-fin sold in Chinese restaurants nowadays is  artificial (made from other sea products) and customers are aware of that.  I hope my answers are helpful to you.

Wynsome Wong

Demand for local supply – no matter if it’s only for special occasions – in a city of 1.4 million, is what gets you a dozen baby hammerhead sharks pecked at by gulls on the sand, dead for no good reason.

The sale of shark fins in New Zealand should be banned.

A pile of paper in disarray

I’m plotting out my current story. It’s an unholy mess. The paper outline, that is. The story makes more sense.

Did you notice the swoopy desk the paper is lying on? I love my swoopy desk.

I’m just finishing up the James Patterson Masterclass. And no, I wouldn’t recommend it. I was swayed by a review that said it was worth it for the section on outlining alone. The section on outlining comprises the following:

Outlining: Do it.

Soooo, yeah. I’ve gotten a lot more out of Take Off Your Pants or Outlining Your Novel. But Patterson did say he writes in-depth 6-page outlines, and this time I’m attempting to do the same.

This is self-preservation, really. Last year Char nearly killed me. I have 100,000 words of excisions stored in a file. I wrote the damn thing three times with three different endings and it’s still not right. There’s a reason it’s only available as a freebie read on the Goodreads M/M Romance Group’s website and not on Amazon or Smashwords.

This is the first time I’ve outlined a story in such detail. I get so excited about a story that I want to start. I have characters in my head nudging me with their bony elbows and giving me their lines of dialogue, and I need to put it down on paper before the recollection fades. I always know how a story will end. That’s the first thing I learn about a story. And I know how it starts. I know the plot. But I don’t always *coughevercough* have the fine detail nailed down. Like all the scenes. Or how they will link together. Or exactly how I get from the beginning to the climax. And I screwed up so bad with Char, I nearly quit writing. I still feel such despair about fucking up. I’m going to return to that eventually and fix it. I can’t live with myself if I don’t.

So this time I’m outlining every scene, pulling it all together, nailing down the tone, the emotion I want each scene to convey, trying to add more suspense, more excitement, more to hook the reader from one chapter to the next. It should be possible to read the outline through and have it flow like a complete – if abridged – story. It’s taking so much longer than I anticipated, but I’m assuming this will help me cut down considerably on composition? I hope?

And paper helps. I don’t know why. I have a bunch of digital tools I can use too; Scapple – which I adore – Scrivener of course, even just a herd of  Ant Notes clustered on my desktop helps sometimes. But there’s something about being able to see the whole thing laid out in front of me that achieves more than looking through a window onto a small section of a neatly arranged digital storyboard.

So far it’s working for me, although there’s no way of knowing for sure until I finish the story. Eventually, I guess, you guys will tell me if it worked. Wish me luck.

Cattle and homes

This field is on the way to my local burger place.

Photo by me. These guys all ran down to the fence to say Hi.

The family homes behind the cattle will cost you around one million NZ dollars. That’s USD$716,870 at today’s rate. They’re a couple of years old. The new builds are $1.25 million. You can still squeak into a 2-bedroom terrace apartment for $565K (USD$405K), though.

The median New Zealand income is $45,000 p.a.

I wonder what the cattle think.

When I was a kid this is what my neighborhood was like: a farm that had been carved up for housing. Except the houses cost $60,000 – about 3.5 year’s average salary.

On the other side of the main road stood open fields and horses. One kid rode his pony to school. A gully was left uncleared; too steep for cheap building. Of course that’s where we all played. It was an exotic wild jungle to us. The cutty grass sliced our palms, and we carried home triumphant toitoi.

By the time I finished high school the gully was gone too.

Toitoi, Mangawhai cliff walk, Northland. Photo by Thomas Sobek on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

I moved here two years ago. Back then when I went to get a burger it was along shiny new asphalt roads leading nowhere much. I had to drive cautiously to avoid a flock of geese. They’d spent their lives wandering open farmland, and suddenly a main thoroughfare cut through their patch.

The geese were still there in March. Now they’re gone – all but two. They haunt the shoulder of the highway onramp, bedraggled gray bundles of feathers, hissing at commuters starting their long morning drive into the city.

 

 

OK, washi tape manufacturers

I would like a 30mm washi tape with perpendicular lines and checkboxes, so you can run it down the side of any notebook page or sheet of paper and make an instant to-to list.

MT does this measuring tape washi. To-do list tape would be more useful, and simple to adapt from this design. Please make this a thing.

One Task October

A Tale of Two Storms by Derek Finch on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence

We’ve had a storm here for the last four days. It kind of matched my mood. For reasons, September was much less productive than it should have been. I don’t want to even tell you my word count, because it sucked. I got really stuck on one of the two short stories I wrote for the Goodreads BDSM Group’s Kink in Ink event. It shouldn’t have taken a month to write fewer than 7,000 words, and yet this is a thing that happened.

One of those reasons was having my left upper back molar give up the ghost against a vicious bacterial infection and make me feel like my face was being hit with a sledgehammer for a week. It’s dead now. The tooth, not my face. I ended up having to get a root canal. Whee! I totally could not afford that, but at least the drugs were good.

It was the first time I haven’t cried at the dentist, thanks to a traumatic childhood extraction of my four eye teeth with no anaesthetic. Photo by Andres Rueda on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

And at least both stories are finished now. One is m/m gun play, and the other is m/f. M/f , you say? I know, right?  All feedback will be appreciated, because it’s a newish thing for me. I have an m/f romance novella on Amazon too (not as M. Caspian), but no-one has reviewed it (barely anyone has read it). I’ll let you know when the stories are released. Initially you’d have to join the BDSM group to read them, but I’m going to put them both out on Amazon in December. I’m thinking of doing a book of short stories. I have the prequel to Arroyo in rough draft, so maybe that would be good motivation to polish it up.

So my goal for October is to be much more focused and productive. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has a great list of strategies to help with focus.The most important – at least, the one I need to work on the most – is:

Get going on your task. Do nothing but that one task. Don’t switch to another task.

I switch tasks a lot (hence why I have to write down the task I’m supposed to be doing at any one time.) If I don’t keep rigid focus I shake myself from an internet daze and discover I’m researching the history of Saint Benedict (this happened today and derailed me for an hour).

But getting sidetracked is nothing compared to my biggest flaw: listening to YouTube Let’s Plays while I work. As I write this I’m listening to Morphologis play Osiris: New Dawn (which, frankly, is the game No Man’s Sky should have been. Sandworms, people, sandworms! And giant arachnoids!)

So I’m making October “One Task October.” I have way more than one project underway, but I’m going to pay attention to my focus, and just work on one project at a time, and only work on that one project while I do it. And not listen to You Tube AT ALL (I’m allowed to finish listening to New Dawn first, though, right? Please?) And I’m committing to this in front of y’all so if I do not have new books out before the end of the year I need for you to chastise me.

Have you got any hints for keeping my flitting brain on task?

 

The definition of “freak accident”

A Kiwi university student was hospitalized with a fractured spine this week when he “[jumped] from a roof into a paddling pool with his hair on fire as a stunt . . . to join University of Canterbury Engineering Society.”

His friends – who were filming at the time – described it as a “freak accident.”

???

No.

A freak accident is when you are struck dead on your lunch break by a meteorite.

 

Chasing Ice

I only just got around to watching the documentary Chasing Ice.

Four year late is better than never, right? If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend it. I make light in my blog title about climate change, but it really is going to be a hell of a century. Chasing Ice is on Netflix in NZ, and Canada and the USA too, I believe. Or there’s this low-res version on YouTube.