Plot Apocalypse

I had something of a revelation on Tuesday evening in the pub. I could feel that light beaming out of the sky illuminating me.

Instead of getting stuck writing two WWII based stories with weird shit going on, why not combine them?! Suddenly all the issues I was having melted away, and now, a few days later, I'm close to a very rough outline. (Xxx meets Yyy. No, really! I know who they are, just was on a roll so couldn't be bothered stopping to look up the names.)

In so doing, it's like all the other issues I've had to contend with this year dissipated too. I even had a call about a job. Not an interview as such, but a step in the right direction.

So now we have witches, wizards, WWII, werewolves, mecha-Nazis, Kabbalah Prime bombs and Dr John Dee. Annoyingly, I can find to legitimate reason to include ninjas. Warrior-monks, no problemo. Ninjas, not yet.

There goes another rubber tree

I heard back from an agent yesterday and they decided they didn't wish to represent Enoch's Vault. So two down on this draft and er however many it is in total now. Obviously, I could be happier and wonder if I should devote myself more to the next one than worry about selling the last one. But that little flicker of hope still burns.

I may have been rejected again, but both of these recent rejections have not been 'sorry, your work stinks' more 'sorry, I don't think _I_ can promote this' and in the sense that the agent personally doesn't feel right for the book. You can't complain about that and you can't change your style or subject without writing a new book or developing naturally.

So I don't know. At least I have closure on the year, no loose ends. At that means a nice clean start to next year, which can only be better than this one was. Still I did finish a novel, twice. Was able to be a professional (if unpublished) writer at WorldCon and gave readings of work to audiences in LA and Edinburgh.

So chin up and have a good holiday. Hope you get what you need next year.

Softly Spoken

I think this year's Writer's Bloc/GSFWC 'Write Off' went rather well. I was second last and so the last from the west coast to do a reading. 'Search Engine' will be up on the site soon, the tale of a quadriplegic finding a friend on the Internet. It remains the only thing I consider to be truly SF that I've written since I was 15. Revised since the submission to Nova Scotia, it came across funnier than intended, but the audience is primed for laughs by the end, and hell people laughed at 23rd Nail last year!

Now do we wait a whole year to host it again, or do we strike out boldly on our own?

Hmm. Upgrades!

I've revamped the site(s) (www.khaibit.com and www.khaibit.com/vault.hmtl) using lovely CSS tools and just have to make sure the 'Vault' pdfs are up to date as I wrote a considerably better (and longer) synopsis (thanks Robert for the advice).

Please have a look and let me know if they work okay on your machine (Opera and IE6 over broadband is all very well but that's not everything/one covered.)

Have rejigged one of my stories for the reading event. The other needs too much attention. I used to be able to do plot - I don't know what happened. All those years in the Cam? The Buffy effect, where each years Big Bad has to be bigger and badder to present a challenge to the point where it gets silly? I dunno. Maybe its not so much I can't do plot, more I've just got shy of it.

Reminds me of one of the funniest Thrud the Barbarian strips from White Dwarf. Thrud sits under a tree for a few cells then some dwarf pops up asking where the plot for this month's strip is. Thrud hits him with his axe making a Plot! noise. I guess you had to be there. (Maybe one day it will appear here: http://www.thrudthebarbarian.com/archiveindex.html

Once More Unto The Breach

Well I find myself with a lot of time on my hands again. So just need to get back into the swing of things.

First up is a crit tonight of a couple of stories I hope to read at this year's showdown between the GSFWC and Writer's Bloc. On the 15th December in the Canon's Gait over in Edinburgh.

Finally started making progress with Herne's Brigade and have begun to etch out the outline. Then there is still novel 2. Incidentally got a knock back on the newsest version of Enoch's Vault. Right now it is still out there with one agent. I don't know what to do if they're not interested. Meeting a wall of self doubt at the moment.