Tag Archive for 'Writing'

Trying Google Docs

Published on May 18, 2010 in Internet. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

After one too many costly crashes with Microsoft Word I’ve been trying out Google Docs as an alternative. The first thing that I’ve realised that I’ve become a surprisingly lazy typist. The constant intervention of Word’s auto-correct feature means that I rarely have to worry about the precise spelling of commonly mistyped words. Google Docs lacks this feature which has meant that, for the moment at least, I’ve found myself lunging for the backspace key more than I’m used to. I can’t blame Google Docs for that as I shouldn’t be making such mistakes in the first place.

The primary selling point (can I say selling point if it’s free?) of Google Docs is of course the use of the mystical Computing Cloud to store documents. Unless you choose to save a local copy everything is kept remotely in Google’s vast data-centre network with all the redundancy and computing power that entails. I would go so far as to say, barring a planet-wide meltdown, your data will probably remain safely ensconced long after you’ve turned to dust.  Even better than that though you can also access and work on your documents from anywhere in the world so long as you’ve got a web browser and an internet connection.

Best of all, and the feature I love the most, is auto save function which saves everything that you’re working on at regular intervals. These saves are of course locked away in the cloud where even a mangled hard disk or house far at your end won’t bother them in the slightest.

I’m seriously tempted to give Microsoft Word the heave-ho altogether, but as an internet luddite I still don’t entirely trust this cloud computing stuff. I’ll keep testing google docs though and see if it grows on me.

Writing Musings 14/05/2010

Published on May 14, 2010 in Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’ve begin to wonder if trying to write at a computer screen is the root of my wandering attention. It’s just too easy to find yourself wandering away from what you’re doing and onto Wikipedia by fooling yourself that you’re doing research. That’s OK if you’re actually doing research, but nine times out of ten I find myself suddenly reading about topics that are four and five times removed from the original subject I looked up.

Not that expanding your horizons, and learning, is necessarily a bad thing, but the instant gratification of trawling through the hallowed halls of Wikipedian knowledge quickly eats up time that could be better spent on other things. Last night for example I was trying to research early airships, and their related works of fiction, for a piece of writing that I’m planning. From there I quickly branched out into such loosely related topics as HG Wells and his book The War in the Air, Jules Verne and his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, Gas Giants, Jupiter, the Canadian province of Manitoba, Lord Nelson Class Battleships and their unusual descendants the Nelson Class Battleships and somehow, eventually, I found myself reading about nerve nets in Cnidaria.

Now granted I’ve learned an awful lot about a diverse range I’m not sure how all these things fit together, and if they have any relevance to the piece I’m working on. To my objective eye they appear to be nothing but a randomly connected set of articles that I’ve read to fill the time between dinner and bed. Time that could be better spent doing something more productive.

The Writer’s Trial

Published on April 8, 2010 in Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

It’s been some considerable time since I last posted anything about writing, and the reason is fairly simple: I haven’t done much. My last post was optimistic, and I really felt that I was starting to get somewhere with my infamous Spaceship Script, but that was 69 days ago and I’m not really any further forward. The last line of the post is indicative of the reasons that I don’t ever seem to get any closer to completing the script.

Now if I can just stop playing Empire: Total War I might be able to get some of them finished.

I’m sad to say that over the last few months I’ve allowed myself to become distracted by other things. If I believed in such things I would blame Writers Block, the old standby, for my inability to write things, but that’s neither true nor fair. The real reason is my own lack of self-discipline. I allow myself to spend entire evenings looking at nothing in particular on the internet, playing endless computer games or even just staring idly into space. I have almost unlimited excuses for not writing, and even when I start I find that I can’t keep my attention on the process for more than four or five minutes without wandering onto the internet to do “research”.

Lolcats and Digg don’t have anything at all to do with anything I’m trying to write either.

People who don’t write have a common misconception that writing is easy. That it’s just a case of sitting down in front of a computer screen, or with a pencil and paper, and then “magic happens”. Sadly nothing could be further from the truth. Writing isn’t magical, it may be an art, but it isn’t a magical process. It takes time, effort and commitment as well as . If it could be compared to anything I suppose you might look at it like a second job, and that analogy is often where my problem starts.

Once you start to think of a hobby as though it was work the rot sets in. You find that you start dealing with it as though it IS work. It stops being a pleasurable diversion and quickly becomes a task that you will do anything, and I mean anything to justify.Instead of writing away diligently, and enjoying the creative process, it quickly becomes very easy to start goldbricking and shirking until you finally give in and do something else that requires much less thought and or commitment.

I tried to address the logically, as you’ve seen in previous blog posts, but it hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped.  I’ve even tried taking holidays to give myself plenty of time to write without worrying about having to get up to go to work etc., but that failed because it gave me more time to say to myself, “I’ll do it later.”

I’m not sure how to cure these problems, or even if there is a cure, but they say the first stage of fixing a problem is to know that there is a problem.

Oddly I’ve noticed that much of what I’ve written about being unable to keep to a writing schedule can also be applied to people who are attempting to lose weight. You simply replace procrastination with cake and you can see the same mechanisms at work.

Screenplay Musings 29/01/2010

Published on January 29, 2010 in Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Lately I’ve really gotten back into the habit of writing things and I think my resurgence owes a lot to my decision to start planning my writing instead of trying to bash out a finished product from the start. This seems to be particularly true of my screen-writing where I’ve managed to knock together quite a substantial amount of writing on treatments for three separate ideas. Admittedly none of them are finished, but they’re started whcih is a lot more than I’ve managed with them previously. The simple process of sitting down to write  and squeezing  the ideas and images out of my head and onto the page is a big leap forward from where I was this time last year.

Now if I can jsut stop playing Empire: Total War I might be able to get some of them finished.

Screenplay Musings 06/01/2010

Published on January 6, 2010 in Screenwriting and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well we’re seven days into 2010 already, and despite my deadly cold over the last three or four days I’ve actually made some headway on my screenplay. It’s nearly a month already since I made that post detailing my plans to actually write a plan this time round, and I’ve finally made a decent start on it. I’ve got a few pages of scrap paper with some hashed out major events on them, and some interesting images and bits of dialogue that popped into my head while thinking them though.

Admittedly all I’ve managed to do so far is get the first act down in treatment form, but it’s further than I’ve got in a long time. The story remains essentially unchanged, Glasgow slackers find spaceship and adventure ensues, but I’ve changed a few aspects that ultimately I wasn’t happy with. The treatment itself is looking to be about twelve of fifteen pages long, maybe about five or six thousand words I guess, and there’s currently no dialogue or anything but the briefest of descriptions. So far I’m sticking fairly rigidly to the idea of what a treatment should or shouldn’t be.

I’ve taken the plunge and opted for a short, and hopefully humorous cold opening which will at least partly explain what the spaceship is on Earth. Admittedly this was easier to come up with after I had written a short story about where the spaceship came from in the first place. I’ve also changed, at least slightly, the introduction to the characters. In the original version that I started to write straight into screenplay format it was good, but it was also long winded and eventually ran out of steam. The main characters were too busy interacting when they should have been acting. It’s important to remember that film is a visual medium. Unlike a stage play or a radio drama it’s meant to be watched and not listened to.

Now all I have to do is keep plugging away and finish off the entire treatment.

PC Gamer Freelance Search

Published on January 5, 2010 in Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I just spotted that PC Gamer magazine are looking for freelance writers.There’s a small snippet giving details in the latest issue (209 Pg.13):

Do you know a lot about games? Do you also know a lot about sentence construction? Can you be entertaining with these fancy word things?

Then you could write for the market leading, world dominating PC Gamer. We want freelancers: people who can write bits of the magazine in exchange for nutritious cash. If that sounds like you, send a 300 word review of a recent PC game, written to PC Gamer’s standards and style, to tim.edwards@futurenet.com, with the subject line: “I am a freelance writer”. It’s worth running a spell check before you send it in.

Seems fairly straightforward, and three hundred words is half an hour’s work at best. Hell this  post is already about two hundred words and it’s mostly waffle as it is.  The real difficulty is getting the style and tone correct. If they’re looking for something that is similar to the magazine’s general writing style that needs a little more effort than banging out a short review.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Zhura.com

Published on January 1, 2010 in Screenwriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Up till recently I’ve done a lot of my script writing with Microsoft Word. As word processorrs go MS Word is just about the defacto standard nowadays, but it’s far from perfect for something so specialised as screen writing. I admit that I’m not a superstar Word expert, so it’s a slow and cumbersome process for me to get everything properly formatted. I’ve downloaded and used a few different screen-writing macros and templates that automatically format scene headings, dialogue and character names, but it’s far from ideal. It also has a bad habit of formatting the entire document at one time if you’re not careful with what text you have selected which then requires a lengthy spell of  editing to correct. It’s very easy to get scunnered with the thing and throw drafts out of the window because of the mess they’ve gotten into.

I’ve been looking around for some kind of alternative to Word, at least for the sake of writing scripts. The trouble is that screen-writing is such a specialised kind of writing there aren’t that many pieces of software available to cater to its odd format requirements.

The primary industry standard software is called Final Draft which is currently in its eighth incarnation. I’ve tried out the demo version and it does the job extremely well. It has many useful features to aid in writing from an index card view that allow you to view and rearrange scenes to an automated assistance that fills in scene headings and character names without you having to type them over and over again manually. It also, thankfully, imports and exports from many otehr formats and can intelligently reformat them to meet the screenplay formatting requirements.

There is a problem though, and it’s a problem common to all specialised pieces of software: It costs almost two hundred  quid.  That’s a lot of money for something that is only going to be used in the terminal stages of writing the script, and can’t really be used for anything else. As I don’t currently have two hundred quid to drop on Final Draft I’ve opted to have a test drive of some of the free screen-writing software packages out there.

So far I’m working my way through the Wikipedia list of screen-writing programs in the hope that one of them will be as user friendly as Final Draft, but obviously without the large price tag. I’ve had a play with Zhura.com which offers a decent online editing package as well as an extensive community aspect. You can keep your ideas and scripts private, or choose to share them with the larger community for comment and criticism. Naturally, like all web applications, you run the risk of your stuff disappearing if Zhura should suddenly close its doors one day so a web app system probably isn’t ideal for the paranoid amongst us. Still it does much of what Final Draft does, and some things even better.

I think I’m going to see if I can try Adobe’s Story next to see how that works.

Boredom Is A Terrible Thing

Published on December 30, 2009 in Whiiiit!?. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Wance upon a evening dreary,
I heard a noise, a clamour eerie,
Aneath ma windaes oan the road,
The jabberin o some human toads,
That set ma mighty ears a flappin’,
Those adolescent lips a slappin’

Tae the curtains wie a start,
And pulled them back wie dreading heart
Ma heid ah a poked oot tae see,
Aside the barren willow trees,
A frichtful gang o neds aw mucky,
Rollin’ roon and roon wie buckie,

Ah shouted oot tae them at wance,
They best begone fae ma bus stance,
Get it up ye they rejoined,
Giggling wie the phrase they coined,
Ma face turned rid and ma teeth bared,
And Wie aw ma latent rage ah stared,
At thur plooky neds and hackitt sengas,
Lying aboot like human jenga.

Who dae ye bams think ye ur,
Tae act like such a bunch a curs?
Govan Young Team big man,
Giuzz peace tae drink oor can,
Nay! Ya bams I cried wie rage,
Begone or ah’ll lock ye in a cage,
Wie tigers, bears and deadly snakes,
Tae turn ye intae human steaks.

Now aff they went wie fearful clatter,
Wie terror that their blood tae splatter,
Doon the Govan Road et rocket speeds,
Terrors black in their wee heids,
Whit demon threatened their very souls,
Wie burying in forgotten holes,
Awa’ they cry, and don’t be slack
Less thur big man’s et our back.

Tae ma TV ah returned,
Shamed that nae ned had burned,
And switched it oan, masel tae see,
Oan the frichtfull BeeBeeCee.
Ma rage ye see had been captured,
By the Security Camera enraptured,
And intae Beadle wan two thee,
Tae show oan the accursed TeeVee.

Writing Musings

Published on December 27, 2009 in Pen and Paper RPGS and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve just found an old, almost prehistoric notebook of mine from the mid-nineties. What’s unusual about this particular book is that it contains quite a sizeable chunk of a role-playing game that I had put quite a lot of work on, but that I had completely forgotten about until now.

The game idea, from what I can make out of my faded teenage writing, appears to be based around a Gothic Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, Earth.It certainly seems to be set sometime in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the setting is fairly indistinct. I could argue that that was deliberate to avoid having to prescribe too much to potential players, but I think that it’s far more likely that I didn’t know enough about the period in question to write a comprehensive background section. In an age just before the emergence of the World Wide Web information like that took time and effort to research and the history section of the school library wasn’t exactly overflowing with information.

I think, from what I’ve read and what I remember, it was partly inspired by the Ravenloft setting for Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe by some of the HP Lovecraft books that one of my friend’s had. I also sense a slight hint of maybe White Wolf and their World of Darkness edging in, but the. Strangely it also bears some resemblance to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing and several similar “action/horror” movies that came out in the early to mid 2000s.

The setting and tone are very rough around the edges, and I’ve returned the thing to its hiding place lest it be purged during one of my folk’s regular top-to-bottom clear-outs, but it has intrigued me. Imagine it, a gothic horror version of London, or maybe even Glasgow. A city trapped on the cusp of a new century, but being held back by the demons and ghosts of the past. A metropolis trapped in curling, endless fog and long cold nights. Strict class divisions, strange artefacts from foreign lands that stand as horrible sentinels  in monolithic museum. Maybe an ancient evil stirs in the filth alleys and dingy workhouses. Then a lone crusader, a saintly hero or a dark anti-hero, strides out into the night to do battle with it. The fate of the British Empire, civilization and the world!

Screenplay Musings 24/12/2009

Published on December 24, 2009 in Screenwriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Well it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m reliably informed that it’s currently -6°C outside so I’m locked away from the family working hard on my screenplay. Not that I’m antisocial, but I’d rather avoid the inevitable deluge of Christmas compilation shows that the TV companies plaster our screens with at this time of year. When I was younger a good film, or TV show would stimulate my imagination and get me racing away to write something, but as I’ve grown older I’ve found that crap TV has an equal, but decidedly opposite effect. I guess it’s true what they say, “TV does rot your brain.”

As I said in an earlier post I’m currently working hard to complete a treatment for my idea based around the two twenty something glasgow slackers discovering an abandoned alien spaceship. Well that’s the plan at least. So far I’ve only managed to squeeze three and a bit pages from imagination to typed page. “Grey Kodiak you slacker,” I hear you say, that’s not exactly a good start to your vaunted change in work ethic is it?”

Well no, no it isn’t, but I have a reason for the detour honest. You see I’ve come across a problem in my premise, one that I had tried to address unsuccessfully in several draft attempts, and eventually tried to ignore entirely. That probably wasn’t the smarts way to deal with it either now that I think about it. The problem can be summed up by the gut reaction of one person I told the current log line summary to:

Two Glasgow slackers discover an abandoned alien spacecraft and through it manage to bring meaning and worth to their otherwise dreary lives.

“Sounds cool,” he said, “but how did the spaceship get there in the first place?”

“Damned if I know,” I said.

“Bit shit that,” he said…

After describing the basic idea ofthe story to a few folk I’ve gotten a similar reaction from about half of them. The rest seem to be split into thinking that it doesn’t matter how the ship got there, or that that it’s better if it remains a mystery to add some dramatic tension to the story.

Naturally, to my own annoyance, I’ve found myself sidetracked by the question of how the ship got to where the two main characters discover it. I’ve hummed and hawed about writing a cold open that shows the origins of the ship, but this seems to take crucial initial screen time away from the main characters. It also seems a bit incongruous to go from what would be, by necessity, a CGI laden spaceship section straight to a regular boring old Saturday night in the lives of the characters. To do that, and have it impact properly I would have to substantially rethink their goals, motivations and perhaps the entire story idea which I’m unwilling to do until this first treatment is written.

At the moment I’ve taken a slightly perverse decision to write a short story, for my own reference, that details the origins of the spaceship in question. It will, of course, delay production on my treatment for the actual script, but it might add some necessary colour and detail into my script that might otherwise be missing.

If you children are very nice I might even post it up at some point.