The Second Time is never the same

Blog No. 142

I am a big fan of the book Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I wouldn’t call it my favourite, but I do like it enough to have given it two reviews on this blog in the past. It’s a fun ride that swerves sharply down memory lane. Highly praised and being adapted into a Stephen Spielberg film, I don’t really need to go into too much detail about it. The second offering from the author is called Armada. It has been out for a couple of weeks and even before it was finished, the movie rights were snatched up. Excitement has been rising since the book’s announcement shortly after the publication of Ready Player One. Everything was pointing to Armada being another fun, reference laden sci-fi story. I expected to love it, ordered it as a hard cover, and waited eagerly for it to arrive.

The Third Zine and Feeling under the Weather

Blog No. 122

Issue number three of the Zine is done, printed, and will be distributed into the wild over the next few days. In that time, it’ll be up on Adventure Worlds too. For this, the first quarter of the year, we have a cover by local artist Alex Morneau, and Finders was drawn by Nikita Why (the man who drew the cover last time. I have to apologize again, last time I misspelled his last lame. How could someone possibly do that? In my infinite ability to mess up, I managed it somehow. So Nikita, I’m very sorry, thanks for sticking around and doing a bang-up job on Finders. He did that son-of-a-gun by hand. When you take a look you’ll see why that’s amazing. I don’t think I misspelled anything this time, but e had a little trouble with the printing. When we first started to look into making the first Zine, we looked around for a local printer in our price range without much luck. Unfortunately we went with one of the big box stores (we do pay for it out of pocket) and the first couple of times that was fine. This time around we started to see the determent of cheeping out (or at least not going to people who are passionate about the stuff.

Second Draft

Blog No. 116

I feel like I’m still fairly new to writing. I suppose that’s all relative. Lately I’ve been spending more time with writers who have more experience than I do. It seems, compared to them, I am but a spring chicken. I have been working on writing for a while, and I have gleaned some insights. I’m not one to write a lot of how-to or writing guides on this blog, but I’m in the middle of the second draft of the collection and some thoughts have come to mind, specifically about second drafts. Strangely, I feel that my place in writing (as in the skill and act) is sort of like a second draft. I started by just writing. I had ideas for stories and I sat down and wrote them in a way that made sense to me (and seemed fairly entertaining). Later, through perseverance and growth (and by steeling the knowledge of others) I started to find the faults in my writing. Since then I’ve been working to eliminate them, at the cost of my voice. It’s an important step, though a bland one.

Blogy, Blog, Blog.

Blog No. 114

It’s been three weeks into the new year and I’m finding that old habits die hard. For some things, like this blog, that’s good. I don’t have a ton to write about, but here I am writing it. For working on the second draft of the edits, and restarting the novel, that’s bad. I can say that I have gotten some done, but it’s at the iffy level of writing how I ended the year. Really, that’s not too bad. A chunk of my time (both then and now) gets eaten up with editing, posting, correspondences, facebook, twitter, ello, and other social media promotion, Zine layout, meetings with other groups, physical social attendances, and so on. It can get busy, and it does get in the way, but without that stuff, I’d be writing in a vacuum with no growth, feedback, or clear method for publication. Though, last year at this time, I was in the thick of it (it being writing). I was going out to cafes in the cold evenings after work, writing for a few hours, then going home to get to the logistical stuff. It didn’t last, but it started.

Crash!

Blog No. 93

A few nights ago, Christian and I were diligently working on some writing and editing. Admittedly we did spend an hour or so chatting, discussing, and planning, as we are wont to do. It’s a regular routine that we manage a few days a week. Sometimes we manage more writing and less talking, sometimes we slip into an entire wasted evening of conversation. (Not that all our discussions are wasted. Our topics are usually writing, Adventure Worlds, and our upcoming books. Sometimes it’s just superheroes and cinema though). The evening in question, we had just finished a lively discussion about the future of our website and how we want to progress before realizing we had wasted a whole hour of talking. With so much work to do (all the time, it never ends) we refocused and got started. At the end of the evening (we usually wrap up around nine) I went to check a couple of words in an online dictionary before saving and poof!