jakegrey

Yet more research. What would a bunch of hip, socially and sexually liberated teens and young adults keep in the fridge in their youth club when they're living in a post-apocalyptic survivalist commune? I've spent this afternoon reading up on everything from growing lemons in a rather cold and wet climate (achievable on a small scale if you have a greenhouse, by the way) to recipes for Victorian soft drinks...

This is going to be another one of those minor background details that gets added because the idea amuses me. I have a bit of a weakness for old-school ginger beer, cream soda etc. Not the stuff you get in a can from Barr or Schweppes, but the real deal, brewed the old-fashioned way with yeast to get the carbonation and no artificial anything. The result probably isn't much healthier for you than a regular soft drink, all-natural organic sugar is still sugar as far as your metabolism is concerned, but I guarantee it tastes better!

If you want to know how to write compelling, convincing and relateable female characters and a believable and healthy romance arc, you can learn a lot about what not to do from going to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and reading the negative reviews. You can learn a lot from the positive reviews as well, but the negative ones are much funnier.

Things I've done instead of writing today: Update my Smashwords profile. Yes, that really is me in the picture; I think it adds to the "mysterious reclusive artist" image I'm trying to cultivate. Besides, no less than three attractive women said it looked good.

Music plays a big part in my writing, and indeed my life in general; silence has a way of messing with my head, so I have some sort of music on at all times, even when I'm in bed.

Generally speaking I'll either stream one of a few radio stations I like or just have my massive, sprawling library of MP3s that I've been collecting for over a decade playing in a shuffle in the background, but of late I've been making a bit of an effort to pick out something appropriate to what I'm working on.

For the project I started this blog to promote, that's involved a somewhat eclectic but enjoyable mix of folk and prog rock, vaguely hippyish Seventies pop songs and even quite a lot of ambient nature noise. You could probably infer a lot about the story from the playlist.

In fact, here's a not even close to comprehensive list of the stuff I listen to while writing. Listen to some of it on YouTube and tell me what sort of themes you think the story will contain!

Artists: Ballycotton, Blackmore's Night, Varttina, Beltaine, Jefferson Starship (particularly "Blows Against The Empire"), Yes, Electric Light Orchestra

Stations: Radio Rivendell, Radio North Sea International, BBC Radio 3, assorted ambient nature noise longplays on YouTube

I figured I might just as well start a blog to collect all my ramblings about my ongoing project in one place (and stop annoying my Facebook friends with it) so this is that blog.

So, what ongoing project would that be?

Extended Vacation, a science fiction novel. I haven't actually thought up a good blurb as yet, but here's the best I can do so far:

"When it comes to getting away from it all, it's hard to do it more thoroughly than going all the way to another planet...

"That's what a small family from the overcrowded, polluted and unpleasantly damp planet of Arawath decided to do, and luckily for them they're in one of the few solar systems in the Known Worlds with two habitable planets in it. In comparison to Arawath, the planet of Pasteur is positively... well, pastoral, in spite of the unfortunate nuclear holocaust it suffered a couple of hundred years ago. Two weeks of camping, hiking and enjoying the natural world... what could be better?

"Unfortunately, thanks to a passing freighter choosing to jettison its trash at exactly the wrong moment, they find themselves making a rather abrupt landing in a remote area. The good news is there's a small town nearby, where they find refuge. The bad news is, they're a very long way from the nearest spaceport and winter is closing in, making a road-trip a dicey proposition. This vacation might be a bit longer than they'd intended.

"But as they get to know the close-knit but welcoming community they've landed amidst, with a drastically different way of life, the question they're all going to have to ask themselves is whether they want to go back at all."

Sounds interesting. Can I see?

A preview chapter will be made available shortly.

Great... Hey, wait a sec. If this is your first entry, what are all those back-dated ones?


Well, remember how I mentioned rambling about the story on Facebook? I'm cross-posting them to here so they're all collected in one place.

162 words of exposition whose sole purpose is to stick a not very subtle middle finger up at a certain author who casually inserted a bit of rather ugly BS "race realism" into an otherwise forgettable military SF work.

I'm not sorry.

In the course of writing a science-fiction novel, I have spent the past five days reading up on the theory and practice of organic farming as part of my background research.

I'm pretty sure that is not a sentence anyone has had reason to say since at least the Seventies.

More writing stuff: The settlement where most of the action takes place was originally founded on anarchist principles, but after a while they noticed that one or two particular individuals seemed to talk the most sense, so after a while everyone expected them to know what to do whenever there was a problem. At some point they decided that if this did not constitute a mandate from the people then they didn't know what else did, and so the town acquired a mayor and a Justice of the Peace.

Not everyone was happy about this, but at least it meant things got done.

So, having arbitrarily decided that the characters in my novel who hail from the rainy, overcrowded city-planet all sound like they're upper-class Londoners, I need to decide what the characters from the planet that nuked itself to buggery a few hundred years back should sound like. I'm currently torn between generic Northerner and wherever the hell the cast of The Archers are supposed to sound like they're from.

(If Doctor Who can do it, so can I.)